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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I don't want a single day in my kid's school wasted on trans ideology!

Problem is, you want social liberalisation (access to abortion in case you knocked up that temporary girlfriend; gay marriage for your uncles) and that doesn't just stop at the step of the ladder you are on. The next step up is the trans ideology, just as the step below that was the gay rights, and the step below that was the contraception and abortion access.

Fiscally conservative, socially liberal gives you the guy who conserved the state you grew up in, but his party is the one waving the Pride flags (some out of convenience, some out of conviction) and by the time your kid grows up, then "trans ideology in school" will be "conserving the state I grew up in".

Sure, but I think we're (including my learned friend @Syo above) going afield from the original argument in OP and my response to it.

OP states that Americans are not voting conservative as they get older. A number of other commenters made the point that young people aren't achieving the kinds of lifetime milestones that they'd want to conserve; I'm making the point that even among the subset of 30-40 year olds in America that have achieved those milestones, the Republican party is failing to field candidates or a platform that wish to conserve the world that helped them achieve those milestones.

If the traditional mechanism is young poor 20 year old liberal becomes fat happy married rich homeowner and thus conservative because he wants to preserve the things that made them happy for their (biological or constructive) children; well I'm 31 and I'm a fat, happy, rich, married, homeowner and in my most recent gubernatorial election the Republican party failed to field a candidate that wanted to protect the way I grew up, the things that made me fat, happy, rich, married.

You can argue that the way I grew up was fundamentally disordered and unsustainable, but that's a very different argument, and it's not an argument to conserve it's an argument for change. It's not protecting the real, it is advocating for the hypothetical. That might be the future of the Republican party or the Right more broadly, but that means tactics will need to change: you cannot count on the Coalition of the Comfortable if your plan is to make everyone who likes the world as it is deeply uncomfortable.