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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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How many people in the year 2000 would have supported any of the woke stuff today? Even mass immigration is unpopular and has continuously been so. The left has done an incredible job at pushing the overtone window. They take positions that are unpopular and they fight and fight and fight until they are the status quo. Once things are the status quo people accept them and don't debate them much.

The right is stuck worried about polls and continuously compromises while never launching its own campaigns. The right needs to find new battle grounds, take positions that are impopular and fight to make them status quo. Gay marriage was not popular. Gay marriage lost and lost and lost. The left pushed and pushed and pushed.

The right needs to do the same and find newer more radical positions outside the mainstream and make them the mainstream.

Critical race theory dates back to the early 80s, and the wildly oversimplified explanation of that is that it took feminist critical theory and replaced "patriarchy" with "systemic racism".

Gay marriage was imposed by judicial fiat, but it didn't matter because its opposition was mostly shallow and gays, as it turns out, don't really marry that much so it changed little. No-fault divorce was a much bigger deal.

With abortion, the problem is that a huge number of women consider it their right and a large number have themselves had abortions. There's probably more social stigma to euthanizing unwanted kittens than having an abortion.

The right has been relatively successful with gun rights, though there's work to be done with the right to self defense and they're in danger of losing there. There's little point in owning a weapon if exercising self-defense lands you in prison.

Otherwise, the modern right has been stuck waiting for the left to screw up because its actual policy stances are mostly unpopular. Immigration? The right never actually delivers there, because a big chunk of its leadership are pro-immigration libertarians, and the optics of actually enforcing immigration law are generally bad. Crime is unpopular, but so is enforcing the law and imprisoning criminals. Fiscal conservatism (another thing the right seldom actually delivers on) is deadly unpopular.

The right's problem is that outside of the gun rights issue they have no cultural power and therefore no ability to move public opinion.

There's little point in owning a weapon if exercising self-defense lands you in prison.

I vehemently disagree, furthermore I find this sentiment illustrative of one of the more profound gulfs between the thinking of the left/alt-right and that of the classical right.

If the Secular Liberal gospel is "I am my own" the Conservative's uncharitable straw-man of the Liberal's gospel is "what's in it for me". The liberal asks "what's the point of defending yourself (or others) if it lands you in prison?" and the conservative replies "to defend yourself". It really is that simple.