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Unlike Republicans of course, who have never once changed their opinion on supporting Ukraine, or the efficacy of the free market, or the efficacy of free trade, or how small government should be, or if state owned enterprises are good, or anything else in the last ~9 months.
There's still discussion among the Republicans on Ukraine. Some think we should do more, some think we should do less. It had been like that before the election, it had been after the election, it is now, it will be in the future. It's not like today all Republicans put up Ukrainian flags on Twitter, and tomorrow every single one forgets about it and puts up Hamas flags or whatever instead. There's also disagreement between libertarian wing - which supports free trade - and populist wing - which is more skeptical about it. I don't think there's a lot of disagreement about cutting the government, though again populist wing wants much more government intervention than the libertarian wing. So yes, there are different wings among the Republicans, and I am sure some Republicans may, on occasion, change their minds and move from one wing to a different one. That's normal too. What's appears to me less normal is when almost the whole party starts in unison (sometimes literally using the same words, there were many examples) discussing the same topic in the same way, only to drop it and switch to another one immediately. Nobody cared for any renovations in the White House ever, and suddenly starting a couple of days ago it's a sacred symbol of the nation where one can't move a nail without being literally Hitler. And in a month nobody would remember it, moving on to the next current thing. It works like that.
You could literally just take your comment, replace "Republican" with "Democrat", and it would be true
You say the Republicans don't literally all move as one, sure. Neither do the Democrats. You'll always find exceptions, congratulations. You can find them for Dems too.
https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/dramatic-rise-republican-support-ukraine
This article shows 20%+ swings in opinion in a very small timeframe, which satisfies the "significant percentage of their base is trained to embrace the current thing immediately on declaration" that I quoted.
I don't even disagree, the Dems also do this bullshit. I hate both groups, you're fucking morons, please pull your collective heads out of your collective asses and wake up to the fact that China is eating your fucking lunch and western society has become so sclerotic and myopic it can barely meet the needs of its people.
I miss when Western society was the pinnacle of human civilization, and not an ouroboros of rent seekers cannibalizing itself for short term returns at the cost of long term prosperity.
I can agree Republicans have the same streaks - its human streaks after all - but I don't agree it's the same. I mean, if we look back to 70s-80s, we can find all kinds of moral panics on the right, all this satanism panics, censorship in movie and music industry, and a lot of other vile bullshit. But none of it rose to the degree of comprehensiveness and insanity that the woke cancel culture had achieved. You can scoff at people who claim we must never see a work "fuck" in writing, lest Satan takes over, but only until you see people who claim if you don't cut off child's genitals at the first sign of them asking "should I wear pants or a dress" then you are literally Nazi and must be shot dead.
We had "old boys clubs" and cliques in cultural institutions and academia since forever, but we have never achieved 95+% ideological purity that we have now. There are literally whole academic faculties and probably institutions not having a single staff member anywhere right of center. I don't think we have reached this level of conformity anytime before. Sure, we had groups declaring Harry Potter a Satanic book, but they never left the fringes. Now, ironically, if you dare to say a kind word about the author of Harry Potter, you'd be declared a Nazi by a lot of people, including very famous and influential people, and if your friends do not cut off any contact with you they'd be Nazis too. I realize it may be the observer bias - the things I can see are always more vivid that the things I only read about in history books - but I can say I've been around for a while already, including living in the actual Soviet Union (albeit the very late, dissolving one), and I have never seen anything like that. Not to this degree.
One thing the left in America had always upheld had been free speech. I mean, ACLU literally defended the rights of actual Nazis, not imaginary ones, actually people who adored Hitler and wanted to get rid of the Jews (and didn't wear keffiyeh, to avoid any confusion with modern events) for free speech, and were proud of it. Now they not only have no use for free speech and vigorously enforce conformity in their own ranks - a lot of them are completely fine with actually murdering people for speech they don't like, and almost all of them are fine with suppressing such speech. That's a huge change too. And yes, as I mentioned before, the Right did it too. But not to such a degree. I am not saying obsessing about seeing the word "fuck" in writing and demanding any book mentioning gays to be locked into a vault requiring personal Presidential permission to read (OK, I am exaggerating here obviously but you get what I mean) are good things. Those are stupid. But widespread campaigns suppressing certain viewpoints - and actual governmental censorship, which encounters zero pushback from any leftist cultural institution at all - is not something that I witnessed anytime before.
So no, I don't think this is "we condemn both sides" case. We do have one side that is currently leading.
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