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The Culture War Singularity is already here
I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.
Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"
Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.
I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.
Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.
Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.
I still know a fair amount of people that I'd almost describe as "squeamish conservatives;" people who are not liberal, but who were nevertheless put off by Donald Trump's personality and style. I think they'd have been happy if history had simply stopped during George W. Bush's time as president. The same people, while ostensibly conservative, are unwilling to grapple with the consequences of modern progressivism: institutional capture, demographic change, longhousing, etc., preferring, in my experience, to put their heads in the sand on these matters.
I don't really disagree with your framing, but at the same time this population is pretty large and doesn't fit readily into the model.
Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence. I don't think NeverTrump Republicans' main objection is that Trump is uncouth. In this cycle, most non-lefties who are NeverTrump would say that "he did January 6th" is the strongest argument for opposing him that isn't about policy.
NeverTrumpers like the Bulwark guys were vehemently opposed to him long before Jan 6th. Their hostility feels much more in line with the old adage that the worst thing that can happen to a socialist is for socialists to come to power who are not his friends.
This is an incoherent stand to take for anyone who voted for Biden and Harris. It would be like MAGA insisting they despise '28 cadidate AOC because she lacks gravitas and decorum.
What are you talking about? If every single corruption allegation against Biden and Harris were true, they still would have been collecting multiple orders of magnitude fewer dollars off of their political power and been involved in orders of magnitude fewer corruption scandals. Or, well, not sure "scandal" is the appropriate word for Trump's corruption as the media has pretty much given up on highlighting it as "Trump pardoned yet another person in exchange for $X million dollars." or "Trump openly took $X00 million from some country for a trade deal." is just not front-page news anymore.
Trump seems to believe the point of being president is personal corruption and doesn't get why he would even try to hide it.
There were three clauses in that quote. I'll accept your admission for the first and last.
For the second... yes, you can make a strong argument for Trump's personal corruption, as porkpiehat said, though in Biden's case it wasn't for lack of trying. Also as PPH said, the institutional corruption Biden/Harris facilitated is unprecedented, on the level of "civilizational ruin".
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Trump is certainly more corrupt than Biden in certain petty ways. In those petty ways, like his crypto scheme, he's possibly the most corrupt President ever. It's all a bit puzzling since Trump is already rich and he'll be dead before long.
Nevertheless, the scale of the corruption is quite small.
Biden's corruption was categorically different. He didn't benefit financially. But the scale of his corruption was much larger - trillions not billions. Build Back Better was ] one big grift. It's just that the beneficiaries of that corruption were Democratic party clients, not the President personally.
Trump doesn't want to loot the state like Biden (or more accurately his handlers) wanted to.
This is not a defense of Trump's corruption which is indefensible. Only to say that Biden's was even worse, but perceived as acceptable by many because the gibs were spread around to all the important members of the coalition.
He has kids. One of the things I'll give him (insofar as it's a compliment: a pseudo-aristocratic clannish mindset is perhaps not ideal for a POTUS? not that Biden was better on that front) is that the guy seems to genuinely care about the wealth and welfare of his family, not just about his own.
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Runs into credibility problems thanks to the sheer number of people who claim that position, and coincidentally also thought he was the worst politician ever in 2017, and have turned to oppose other Republicans who had no relationship to J6. I'm sure the genuine category exists, but the people wearing it as a mask outnumber it by large counts.
IME most of these people vote Republican in other races.
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The whole Van Jones "character matters" critique of uncouthness is validated by Trump's later actions.
It's not like the man lied. He was quite adamant about refusing to even contemplate losing, or being transparent about certain things. Some people saw that as a game, while others argued that such a basic failure of character would show itself.
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