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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.

Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head, it seems almost inevitable to me that we will see Biden vs Trump once again in 2024. I try not to be ageist but American politics is really becoming a gerontocracy. The refusal of Dianne Feinstein to step down is par for the course.

That said, while I believe the author is right about the primal nature of Trump's appeal, it's probably a mistake to ascribe his popularity entirely to it. I suspect many in the media still haven't understood that he rose as a consequence of structural changes that will outlast him. Seeing the GOP as the more anti-war party would never have crossed my mind during the Bush era when accusations of insufficient liberal patriotism was rife. Now it appears to me that the veneration of the CIA, Pentagon and FBI are all highly liberal-coded.

You know things are bad when even liberals are despairing at DeSantis' poor performance. I think her analysis is mostly correct. Voters don't really care about issues so much as who is the strong candidate. Trump is funny but also strong. DeSantis is neither - despite being the actual principled conservative by comparison.

DeSantis has the advantage of not having any obvious weaknesses and following the same formula/playbook as Bush and Reagan, by getting a huge evangelical turnout and conveying populist culture war appeal.

Perhaps, but evangelical turnout isn't the same as it was in the eighties or nineties. During Trump, a portion of the "moral majority" or whatever we're calling religious voters these days, went "NeverTrump" and got run through the BLM, Covid and Trans splits. Not certain they'd come back for DeSantis.

The moral majority is dead, but there seems to have been an upwell for the trads lately.

Perhaps. Time will tell, but I'm not staking any bets on them shifting the next national election.