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Directly related to one of the top line comments from last week is an opinion piece by David French - non-paywalled link.
Half of it is snark. The title and lede are designed to get the pearls clutched. A paragraph later, French gives up the sarcasm and goes on at length about how "akshually, Men can be real meanies!"
The complete dodge of any real intellectual engagement with the original Helen Andrews piece is, sadly, totally on brand for what passes as journalistic "editorials" these days. Sohrab Amari previously called out French for being a conserva-cuck. His conclusions remain unchallenged.
And that's the culture war angle I'm actually interested in. The latest battles in the Gender War were pretty well covered in the thread from last week (linked above). Any new insights are welcome on that front, however, my focus is on what I see as an intra-male conflict between boomer conservatives and the Young Right. Now that I think about it, this also links to the "Nasty Republican Group Chat" thread. I am too lazy, now, to link to it.
David French, and many boomer conservatives like him, despised Trump all the way back in 2016 and haven't changed their tune one bit. They do hold some bedrock right/conservative views; taxes shouldn't be so high, gun rights (to an extent), free speech even if it makes people feel icky, pro defense in a broad yet milquetoast sort of way. I suppose they are, at their most "extreme", still committed neo-cons of the Bush 2 era.
And they're all still living in The Matrix. They all believe that we can go back to that perfect little period when ole Ronny was in the White House and everyone was getting rich and you could come home to a steak dinner with the little lady - who, of course, had a degree from Radcliffe and was totally smart and independent but just so happened to truly want to be a stay at home mom. The insane conceit of the BoomerCons is that their worldview rests on a stone foundation of traditionalism establish, through blood, but the Greatest Generation. Where the BoomerCon looks at women in the military without too much worry - well, maybe not in the infantry - the Greatest Generation Grandpa laughs, saying, "I can't imagine a broad landing in Normandy". Where the BoomerCon rolls his eyes at political correctness yet makes sure to use the appropriate terminology ("Dude, Chinaman is not the appropriate nomenclature"), the Greatest Generation Grandpa, that one Thanksgiving, "couldn't believe the number of Spaniards at the grocery store!". Where the BoomerCon pinched his nose during the 2008 bank bailouts - "It's a systemic issue, we have to act!", the Greatest Generation Grandpa laughs "Oh, The Bank lost all your money?! Yeah, I remember the 30s!"
The Young Right is a kind of double-bounced mirror image if the Greatest Generation in terms of their hard-bitten suspicion of the world. Coming of age in the late 2000s, they saw a financial collapse in the middle of an expeditionary war of questionable strategic import. The young men, especially, then had their place in society not changed but neutered starting in about 2013 (the first "cultural appropriation" fracas at Yale). On a larger scale, any economically aware young person sees how the Boomers have systematically rigged the system against them; social security, Medicare/aid, and the home mortgage ponzi scheme. It's intergenerational theft plain and simple.
But the David French's of the world want to, you know, guys, c'mon, pump the breaks. Turn down the temperature. Feminization of American is totally fine...actually, let me tell you about the summer of 1969, oh man, I was at this Grateful Dead show and....
But there is no going back to that. The damage is done and now it's a rebuilding effort in the middle of a hot (culture) war.
LOL, this period didn't exist. The Reagan era was also the era of latchkey kids (so called because they came home from school and let themselves in, because both parents were working). Politically, Reagan was hated by the good people of the media almost as much as Trump is.
(BTW, if you mean the former Harvard-associated women's college, it's Radcliffe. Ratcliffe is the CIA director and doesn't give degrees, at least not degrees you're allowed to talk about)
But while French is all the c-words anyone ever called him, the reaction French has is shared across wide swathes of the political spectrum. If you suggest a problem might be caused by women, or something about women, or that the solution may involve restricting women in some way or even allowing them less power over men, it's just automatically rejected. Problems where something like that is the actual solution simply cannot be solved because of this.
Thanks. Fixed.
Exactly! But there is a weird BoomerCon rose-colored-glasses rembrance of the 1980s nonetheless.
I mean, compared to the 1970s, the post-1982 period was pretty damned good. Not just economically, but no major wars either. But a tradcon paradise it was not.
The eighties were the last period when tradcons believed that our ways could take over society again in the near future. We happened to be wrong, but that's why we look back on it nostalgically.
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