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Anyone following the new South park season? You can get a sneak peak here.
https://youtube.com/@southpark/videos
Unsurprisingly they are going after Trump's administration and hard. So far the first episode was offensive incoherent mess, the second is offensive coherent mess. I hope the rise in quality will improve. They are obviously trying to bite Trump administration into retaliating and seems to be succeeding - seem to have the uncanny ability to find the snowflakes - starting with the snowflake in chief. Vance is playing it cool, so I suppose his mocking will diminish.
I am confused what is better for USA now - Trump to die now and Vance to take reigns now and only have 2 mandates or to die after the midterms and have two and 1/2.
I laughed at both episodes quite a bit, even as a twice-voter for Trump. This guy summed up a lot of my internal thoughts though. For a show that famously "goes after everybody", they were suspiciously hands off the low-hanging fruit that was the Biden administration.
I really hope they don't make the entire season about Trump. It's already way overdone and feels beneath them.
I've never understood Parker and Stone when it comes to their politics, or at least not over the last 13 years since they moved on from their early episode libertarian leanings. Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness (note: I haven't consistently watched the last few seasons of South Park, so I may be wrong about recent years. But I remember them soft balling progressives from 2013 through 2017ish), and repeatedly claim that Trump is the worst person ever, then turn around and awkwardly claim they're Republicans. And most of the episodes I've seen of South Park over the last 5 years just seem so random and incoherent. I almost feel like they don't really have any convictions, don't really understand the current issues, and are just randomly throwing whatever elements they feel like together in episodes, while trying to pass it off as relevant political commentary.
I mean, they already had Cartman as their mouthpiece literally saying as such. The low-hanging political commentary is dead- how could it not be, when it's been 10 years since left and right changed places? It's all very confusing. Add the fact that pop culture took a 5 year sick day, and now, what's left? Even the Tegridy arc was more coherent than this, which is probably why they went in that direction in the first place.
The problem for them, much as it is for everyone else, is that traditional/what is popularly referred to as right-wing thought definitively died in late 2016. Nobody knows what to call themselves any more; partially because we're fighting over the labels (and partially because, as the woke showed, the way you win a [culture] war is not by dying for your
countrylabel, but by making the other poor bastard die for theirs- it is not in either faction's interest to relabel at this time, which is why you see a lot of extremely conservative/fortifying legislation from 'liberal' parties in countries that are not the US).You see, the 2010s were a cutover point: the people born in the 1930s were the last generation to come of age before the Civil Rights Era- I call these people "traditionalists" instead of "conservatives", and most people use "conservative" as shorthand for people who are [either these people directly, or those who uncritically align themselves with them]. And in 2015 they were all dead.
Now, what's the actual definition of conservatism? Preserving power structures that worked in your youth and expanding them. They made you rich, after all. What were the power structures that worked for Boomers? Academics and education above all else, anti-racism, feminism, sexual liberation, and environmentalism- things that labelled themselves as left-wing, since they were in opposition to what the right-wing was at that time.
But the problem is that, as always, age and establishment power perverts. "Go to college" became "feed your youth to the system", "anti-racism and feminism" became "axiomatically, black > white and woman > man", "sexual liberation" became "castrate your children", and "environmentalism" became "degrowth".
It didn't help that '50s conservatism did have a bit of a resurgence in the '80s and '90s (generation in power turned 20 in the 1930s-1940s, so WW2 vets), since most of what those who call themselves left-wing today also tack that on even though the two really didn't have much to do with each other.
So how's any of that relevant to South Park? Well, South Park is fundamentally a 90s show, and thrives under a healthy/competitive political environment, and a healthy media ecosystem, so you had both lots of material and both sides could reasonably be mocked for its excess. Now, the problems are (and we know now, as hindsight is 2020) 100% factually caused by one side- the side that calls itself "left"- and the media ecosystem is no longer healthy for other reasons.
What's left to mock?
Most of the people watching South Park don't think this.
MAGA. I think South Park is overcorrecting after 4-5 years of mocking "woke", but mainstream conservatism as expressed through MAGA is content rich when it comes to parody.
Why does mocking ICE work? Because the average illegal immigrant isn't a gangbanger or a rapist; it's some poor guy with a family mowing a lawn or scrubbing a hotel toilet after Cartman takes a massive shit. The Trump administration implicitly understands this and it's why they have to continuously emphasize ICE is deporting the "worst of the worst" or whatever.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't deport every single illegal. I don't watch South Park to form my political opinions but I can acknowledge that the substance of their critique is correct.
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You can see a similar paradox in the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union. The coup plotters wanted to overthrow Gorbachev to instate a more hard-line interpretation of Marxist-Leninism than what Gorbachev had in mind. So that would make them left-wing revolutionaries right? But at the same time, the reason the coup plotters wanted to do that is because hardline Marxist-Leninism was the old, established order and they were old established figures that had a large stake in the old order. So in a lot of ways Gorbachev is the young left-liberal reformer and the coup plotters that want more Marxism are the reactionary conservatives.
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