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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/

Pull quotes:

The fact that Trump is doing considerably better among Republican voters of color than White Republicans flies in the face of the fact that many Americans view Trump as racist. I noted in 2019 that more Americans described Trump as racist than the percentage of Americans who said that about segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.

This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.

Indeed, the Republican Party as a whole has been improving among voters of color. The party’s 38-point loss among that bloc for the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms was a 5-point improvement from 2020. Its margin among White voters stayed the same in exit poll data.

This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

No, for the same reason the torries failed, the mainstream right parties are the parties of corrupt oligarchs who signal to the working class by making fun of woke people. The democrats are portrayed as the elite party among online right wingers, but the republicans are to a great extent the party of Boeing, Raytheon, or Exon mobile. Boris Johnsson could be funny, but in the end his brexit ended with replacing polish workers with Pakistani cheap labour, since his donor class voters want open borders. The working people who supported brexit weren't specifically hating eastern Europeans, they didn't want immigration. The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.

Most left voters are not online twitter mobs. Most of them want cheaper health care, they dislike extreme wealth disparity, and they want to protect the environment. Instead of having an honest discussion surrounding the grievances of most democrat voters, the online right fights bipolar 21-year-olds having a meltdown on a college campus, ignoring that 29950 out of 30000 students on that campus were not protesting some event.

The mainstream right has tanked all over the western world. In the anglosphere the right as a whole has tanked because of the first past the post voting system. In the rest of the west, newer right wing parties have picked up the slack.

Boeing, Raytheon and Exxon all contribute fairly equally to Dems and Repubs. All favored Biden over Trump.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/raytheon-technologies/summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000072615&toprecipcycle=2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/boeing-co/summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=d000000100&toprecipcycle=2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs//summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000000129&toprecipcycle=2020

The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.

It is true that the left and their allies in the military industrial empire did prevent Trump from ending existing wars and conspired to mislead the American people about him (ze russkies!!!). Wall St has been solidly part of the left for 20 years.

You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.

That's people who work for those companies, not the companies themselves.

Yes, the links I provided also explain that.

An HR manager at Exxon or an accountant at Boeing sending a couple of hundred bucks to Biden, Hillary, or Bernie does not equal the tons of SuperPAC spending in favor of Republican candidates that all three of those companies have backed for decades. Especially Exxon. Rayheon and Boeing are slightly more split, due to home state concerns and making sure congresspeople in military base districts keep the pork coming, but the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now, because they don't fully buy into the fever dreams of the right-wing fringe of the country is frankly, kind of silly.

It seems in your world a group is part of the "left" if they accept non-white, LGBT, and women exist, and thus, can be important parts of a capitalist economy. Which is all Wall Street really does.

The reality is your talk about how Trump was "stopped" from ending the wars (weird how "ending the wars" turned into heavily expanding dronee warfare) just shows how non-existent the populist right actually is, and how few actual populist right voters there are, at least in the way you're talking about. Because even if I disagreed with him, a true right-wing populist who truly cared about ending wars, instead of getting distracted by 89 different issues would've had a speech on TV every day about ending the war, fired members of the Joint Chiefs until he got who he wanted, and actually compromised on other issues to say, get left-wing people who wanted out of Afghanistan behind him.

Instead, he failed, and the true dove Joe Biden, got us out of Afghanistan, basically ended the drone war, and is currently beating down another power, without a drop of American blood, all with basically the equipment we've had sitting in the back of the DOD's garage for a decade.

the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now,

Is a straw man you invented, along with the rest of your comment.

and is currently beating down another power

Ukraine is not another power. Just because Biden Jr and Sr both have a history there does not mean the Ukrainian people have to die over it.

Oh and he ended Roe v Wade too! Praise to Biden!