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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Yup, there's always these polls that show "x of professors used to be Republicans in y year, but now..." when I can guarantee you that most professors who were still registered as Republican in say, 1980, hadn't voted for a Republican since maybe, Nixon, the first time, and were only registered Republican's because of weird ethnic coalitional politics where they grew up, or being in one of the weird places where the GOP were the more left-leaning party (like say, the South, and that's even kind of questionable).

Put it this way, the amount of Reagan-voting professors in 1980 is probably similar to the amount of Trump-voting professors in 2022.

Also, as noted, there are a lot of moderate professors who'd vote for a center-right European party that was liberal socially, but I suppose most of the people upset about woke professors wouldn't be too happy about that either.

Finally, the culture war, as far as "cancel culture" or "trans issues" go are low salience issues, even for GOP voters, as seen in midterm exist polls. In reality, it's the bugaboo of general right-wing social reactionaries, and centrists stuck in D+50 urban areas. Yes, if you're a standard-issue centrist Dem who works at a college or in media, you're probably annoyed by what the woke kids want to do. But, be like Matt Yglesias or Jonathan Chait, and complain enough online about them that they get annoyed by you, while also writing a lot about how Ron DeSantis voted a lot to cut Social Security & Medicare, and that Republican's still want to ban abortion, as opposed to spending all your time on the woke thing of the moment.

Even CRT/school closures as an issue, is kind of sketchy - people point to 2021 and Virginia, but if you really look into things, voting patterns show the standard drop in voting for everybody as is standard for off-year VA Governor elections, except for 70+ voters, which tells me the CRT thing was a bugaboo to older conservative voters, and that's about it. Even DeSantis and his massive win, is more accurately connected to general shifts in Florida's population (big increase in Venezuelan refugees + more older conservatives from midwes states moving in + COVID "refugees) + DeSantis doing non-conservative things (like using ARP money to raise teacher salaries + broadly supported environmental protections + not f'ng up post-hurricane) + as a bonus, the anti-woke stuff + a massive drop in turnout among Democratic voters. I forget the exact numbers, but only 80% of Democrat's turned out in 2022 compared to 2018, while 107% of Republican's did, and that's not all changes in voting registration.

Now, personally, as a leftie, I'm actually kind of OK w/ Florida becoming a Republican vote sink. Yes, all right-leaning people, upset about your woke swing state, move to Tampa. Upset Michigan has a Democratic trifecta, hit the road to West Palm Beach. Pennsylvania not banning abortion got you down? Panama Beach is looking lovely.

Even CRT/school closures as an issue, is kind of sketchy - people point to 2021 and Virginia, but if you really look into things, voting patterns show the standard drop in voting for everybody as is standard for off-year VA Governor elections, except for 70+ voters, which tells me the CRT thing was a bugaboo to older conservative voters, and that's about it.

The 2021 VA Gubernatorial election was decidedly high turnout for a Virginia off-year election.

'Whose turnout drops less' is honestly something that makes perfect sense to be driven, at least in part, by what are live issues. After all, the 2021 Virginia Democratic candidate actually got over 100,000 more votes than the 2017 Virginia Democratic candidate. It's just that the Republican increased his vote total even more.

This whole line of reasoning reads like cope. DeSantis got 500,000+ more votes in 2022 than he did in 2018. You're free to believe what you want, but you're not really bringing evidence for it. It's probably a strategic mistake

It’s worth noting that republicans everywhere want to raise teacher pay. The challenge is in actually doing that, because if you just give money to schools it’ll get embezzled by administrators who then proceed to cry about the poor underpaid teachers(which they’ll helpfully blame republicans for), no matter how thoroughly it’s earmarked for teacher pay.

Eh, teachers make fine money. My wife is a teacher, and her salary alone is easily enough to pay for a middle-class lifestyle. The issue isn't the money but rather all of the obstacles put in the way of their jobs. I'd guess more than half of the average teacher's time is spent on paperwork and regulation compliance rather than teaching.

Sure, teachers aren't from any objective measure underpaid, the point was it's a bipartisan consensus that teachers should be paid more.

Fair

This isn't what happens - it's just even the increased teacher pay lags behind other white collar professions, so teachers feel underpaid. There are plenty of ways that a person could be upset with education spending, but administrators aren't stealing teachers' raises.

But yeah, many Republican's used the money for states in the American Rescue Plan to raise teacher's pay in many states (fully legally - not saying it was untoward that way), which is why in retrospect, as a partisan Democrat, the Democrat's should've not given largely Republican governors such a giant slush fund so they could look good to low-info swing voters (again, not a shot at low info voters, just a statement of fact), but instead maybe added a 2nd year of the expanded child tax credit, or something else along those lines. But, unfortunately, we overlearned the lessons of the 2009 recession where states and localities really did hit a massive funding crunch, which really didn't happen under COVID, something many people thought would happn.

Pennsylvania not banning abortion got you down? Panama Beach is looking lovely.

Yes indeed, how dare people who belong to a place have opinions about matters in that place! Don't they know that only certain people deserve to live there, and only certain opinions are correct? This place belongs to the right side of history and you don't get to stay here unless you fall in line. "Don't like it, move away" - hang on now, wasn't that supposed to be a racist slogan back in the day?

The statement you're responding to is explicitly declared to be at the partisan level. Responding with this level of vitriol is uncalled for when it's not someone trying to sneak in partisan rhetoric as dispassionate analysis.

I think the vitriol is borne from exasperation. A partisan saying things their tribe would have crucified people for saying 10 years ago, totally unbothered by the contradiction, is frustrating no matter what level it's declared at. Particularly if the conclusion they arrive at - if you don't like it you can leave - was one their tribe mocked mercilessly in their media for decades.

And if that were all the comment said, I would not have said anything. But if you give your argument without fighting the culture war, then throw in a "also, I personally like that this is happening", I would argue that this is not something someone else should get upset over.

Say what? It's just fighting the culture war with one element abstracted to the next level. It's not like they gave a completely non partisan and objective account of the situation and then said they were in favour of it, they gave a left wing assessment of the situation and then said they hope every republican moves to Florida. How do you come to the conclusion they weren't fighting the culture war?

Also it was specifically the last bit that upset me. Before that I thought they were just another moderate buying everything the msm sells, which is depressing, but not upsetting. Learning the op is both a proud leftist and on board with shipping people to Florida for political reasons is what aggravated me.

It doesn't need to be completely non-partisan, only reasonably so. The line in this place is that if you make a general effort to not come off as smuggling your opinions as facts, you don't get called out as a culture warrior. I think that post is reasonably non-partisan. Having a perspective isn't the same thing as being partisan, else we're down to maybe 10 people on this whole website who are allowed to post at all.

My larger point was that's the whole Florida advertisement right now - don't like the wokes ruining your state? Come to Florida!

I was just pointing out, it may be actually a bad thing for the GOP long-term if this continues to happen.

This is low effort and boo-outgroup. Bad combo. Do less of this.