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You need a counterconditioning counter-culture. Progressivism is extremely attractive from a basic conditioning point-of-view. It has a monopoly on women who look like French models and heartthrob interests in Hollywood romantic comedies (not Hallmark), it has an excellent propagandistic visual culture that is way superior to conservative visual culture (outside of groyper edits), it has a neat good-vs-bad storyline, it has aversive atrocities it can use to support its positions that every kid learns in school, it has the all good music, and it has a cadre of loyalists who will work for free because they treat their ideology like a quasi-religion with totalizing importance. If you’re a normal urbanite who has unmet needs and isn’t autistic or self-sacrificial, everything is much better with progressives: it’s fun, it’s beautiful, and the women are hot in a particularly fashionable way.
You can’t fight this unless you have your own loyalists and artists; you get loyalists from making your ideology exciting with a clear battle of Urgent Good vs evil; you get artists by seeding communities; when you have the art and the excitement, the hot women will come.
The closest thing to a viable 21st century defense against progressivism was, I think, the Redscare Podcast niche culture. It actually managed to get art hoes in cities to become conservative. It attached itself to Catholicism because that’s the storage facility of great conservative art and it presents an exciting alternative conservative worldview.
You can’t rally people around “people should be able to be billionaires”, because that’s intuitively disagreeable. You can rally people around “my benevolent Renaissance-like patron is superior at promoting the common good than state bureaucracy, though”. That’s a good start IMO.
There is phenomenally popular conservative art, though. Like yeah, pop country is never going to attract the appreciation of classical music snobs- but it's the most popular genre in the US, and has been for years. The normies do not have refined tastes.
You’re right. But still, if you’re an activist type, your emotions are too strong and sensitive to be satisfied with pop country. Pop country listeners are domesticated, not really in the arena of changing or caring about anything.
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