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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I think they’ll ultimately win. It’s just that really they’re still in the foundation stage of the movement. Almost any real political upheaval is a generations-long process of first creating a philosophy and ethos and then unify around that philosophy and work to implement it. But if you’d have judged the communist movement by what it was in 1870 when it was first taking shape, you wouldn’t have predicted the Russian revolution. The tumultuous nature of the current generation of reactionaries doesn’t mean much because I believe it will eventually settle on an ethos that will be United enough to win real power.

It seems to me that it's the fraction of angry young men you have on your side that matters more than the absolute number. If your side has all the kids, then you will have disproportionate power regardless of how many octogenarians hate your guts.

Is there really? Old men don't fight wars, the octogenarian legions might look mighty in a democracy, but if you're angry enough all the old people yelling doesn't matter if you're holding the gun.

Indeed. Also, the armies, police forces and militias that successfully put down rebellions of angry young men in the past were themselves recruited from huge pools of young men living in fecund societies. And also, fecund but stable societies in the past drew their stability from masses of married or at least paired-up young men having an investment in the future stability of that society. In demographically imploding atomized societies, there won't be many of them around either, so the two factors cancel each other out.

I doubt that failed anti-government rebellions were ever normally put down by men in the 50-60 or 40-60 age bracket.