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The Republican Party is doomed.
I don't mean they'll lose every election moving forward. My case, rather, is this: they know exactly what they want someone to do, but in an increasing number of institutions, there is no one left to do it. Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation. The near-term future is already written.
The demands of a two-party system mean each party will typically adjust over time to capture, if not 50% of the electorate, at least enough to remain meaningfully competitive. There is no reason to expect that to change. Republicans are electorally competitive and will likely remain so, particularly given their advantage in rural areas with greater Senate representation. People zero in on that, but electoral politics is a small part of governance writ large.
I am one of the most conservative students at my law school. More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals. Bloomberg documents how donations skew progressive in virtually every field.
People want to say young and educated people have always leaned left, but that simply is not true. Not like this. The leftward skew is a recent, and accelerating, phenomenon. Democrats have gained more and more ground among young and educated people alike, and the rightward shift people are used to seeing just isn't happening as it did before. Among young, educated professionals, the salient political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, but between liberals and various stripes of socialists. The New York Times and Financial Times document the way long-standing patterns have shifted.
What's the conservative coalition? Truckers, farmers, business owners, construction workers. Don't get me wrong: these are useful, socially valuable, necessary professions. But they have nothing to do with the day-to-day of governance on the ground. About the only governance-related profession they remain influential in is the police force, which tells you all you need to know about the current reputation of the police force among educated, young professionals.
This means that, for the medium-term future, Republicans are dealing with a coalition of the high and low against the middle when it comes to politics. They authentically represent, to one degree or another, somewhere near half of the country. They have representation at the highest levels of government, controlling the Supreme Court, maintaining razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, and remaining competitive within Presidential races. But because their voters are increasingly old, rural, and less educated, they lack all but the slightest foothold in the great majority of institutions run by and filled with young, educated professionals: that is to say, the great bulk of institutions involved in the day to day of governance.
The field of education provides a good case study as to how this plays out. Educators are overwhelmingly progressive in their inclinations. Left to their own devices, they will take a policy and curricular stance broadly in line with progressive sensibilities. Teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party. Conservatives like to emphasize school choice, pointing to charter and private schools as potential alternatives, but even there, the great bulk of educators are politically liberal. Eva Moskowitz, founder of high-achieving charter school system Success Academy, champion of school choice advocacy, and a model of what conservatives point to as an ideal in education, is a registered Democrat.
The most successful recent conservative education advocacy movement, Moms for Liberty, tells you all you need to know in its name: it is a movement not of educators or of students, but of parents looking from the outside at a system that broadly opposes their values. Florida politicians have spent enormous political capital to pull a single, tiny liberal arts college towards a conservative ethos.
Here's the problem: by the time you're trying to legislate every one of your preferences, resisted at every level by the people put in place to enact those preferences, you've already lost. Republicans want people who want to enact their values. What they've got is equal representation in the part of the government that can swing a big stick around trying desperately to corral a group where even the educators supported by their policies are likely to want nothing to do with them.
What of the rising stars in each political party? For the Democrats, you have Pete Buttigieg: working within the institutions at every step, from Ivy League to consulting to military to local governance and smoothly into high-level tasks within his own party, focused on technocratic proposals dependent on high state capacity. For the Republicans, there's Vivek Ramaswamy: downplaying his past within those same institutions, rising to incredible wealth via private enterprise, smashing into the scene of his own party as an outsider obviously loathed by those who have spent their lifetimes within it, focused on a libertarian "burn it down" ethos. To be a popular Republican in the Trump era, you almost need to be an outsider promising to tear the government to pieces. Image
Conservatives right now are desperate for public intellectuals who reflect their values. As soon as a conservative-coded intellectual shows a modicum of talent or originality, they skyrocket into prominence. Jordan Peterson spent a career in obscurity in academia before a fight over pronouns launched him into an enormous platform with millions of followers. Chris Rufo became one of the leaders of the conservative movement in moments after speaking cogently about critical race theory. Richard Hanania, despite constantly telling conservatives how stupid and ineffectual he thinks they are, has gained a massive conservative fanbase by virtue of being able to argue coherently for some of their values.
Perhaps most telling is the example of Aaron Sibarium, recently profiled for Politico: perhaps the most prominent conservative investigative reporter today, a secular Jew who voted for Clinton and Biden but, because he opposes social justice progressivism, has sauntered into the wide-open niche of investigative journalism from a conservative point of view. Why is he filling that role so effectively? Simple: there was nobody else to do so.
On a smaller scale, even a few tweets that capture the conservative zeitgeist can shoot someone into the public eye overnight, as Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade) discovered when an articulate defense of the 'stolen election' feeling took him from 7000 Twitter followers one day to 55000 three days later, or our own @KulakRevolt found as he went from no public presence to being the rising voice of the burn-it-down ethos in a matter of a few months of well-written diatribes. Costin Alamariu launched an obscure work of academic philosophy to the top of the Amazon charts off the strength of an absurdist right-wing pseudonymous persona. Ask any of them what they think of the institutional Republican Party sometime.
Conservatives are so desperate for a shred of cultural influence that they turn people like Oliver Anthony (“Rich Men North of Richmond”) into overnight sensations, only to learn that they, too, have nothing but scorn for the Republican Party.
Put simply: right now, at the nuts and bolts of governance, the Republican Party has a much shorter bench of talent than the Democratic Party. Even conservative intellectuals are trained in overwhelmingly progressive institutions. This affects every level of politics, but since it doesn't necessarily harm them electorally, there's no incentive to course-correct at the level of electoral politics. Quite the opposite, in fact: every single Republican politician, and every single conservative influencer, benefits individually from their coalition’s weakness among young, educated professionals. In many ways, they’re living the dream: massive audiences hungry for competence with little competition fighting to provide that competence in any given field.
Some want to frame it as institutional capture, a battle against the ruling elite, that could be corrected if the right people are in charge. Is there some of that? Sure. But at most institutions, it's a simple function of the politics of the people seeking those institutions out. My law school is not overwhelmingly progressive because the Powers That Be want it to be progressive. It's overwhelmingly progressive because progressives showed up. You can only stretch the word "elite" so far, and by the time you get down to schoolteachers, you've stretched it past the breaking point.
Conservatives, to be clear, aren't going anywhere, nor is the growing dissident right movement. But even when Republicans win electoral power, they lack the human capital at all levels of governance to accomplish what they really want with it. Under Republican rule, half of top government officials work to enact the approximate will of slightly less than half of Americans while virtually every educated, young professional anywhere near politics resists any way they can. Only a few have even the vision of changing this by re-entering those institutions, with most seeing no recourse beyond slowly fading or burning every institution to the ground.
The Republican Party will remain visible. It may even continue to win elections. But at the basic tasks of governance and defining culture at all levels, its death warrant has already been signed. The Republican Party is doomed.
(Also posted to Substack)
While I prepared this post for a general audience, I have a few more Motte-specific thoughts. At this point, I think the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that, whatever else this space is and has been, it is one of vanishingly few incubators for intellectually rigorous thinkers with sympathy towards one shade or another of conservatism. Kulak is one of the most prominent examples, but far from the only one who has an impact far beyond these quiet circles.
After I Tweeted out an initial version of this post, a high-level Republican official contacted me about it, broadly agreeing with the thesis while pointing out that parties are composed, broadly speaking, of those who show up. In his words, a political party is an entity that exists solely to conduct elections, and things can change in a hurry depending on who shows up. Speaking in general terms, he's part of the Thiel-adjacent set. He made the case that there is a lot of room, given the short bench, for people outside the traditional, highly polished, consultant-safe pathways to have a real impact on things, which in some ways can be turned to the good.
I don't have any sort of call to action here, for myself or others, but I think it's worth having a clear-eyed view of the political dynamics in play.
I've been skeptical for a while, but to expand the reasoning:
At the trivial level, it's worth spelling out why that is. Conservatives are a minority among the sort of identification you're talking about. But even when 'yuppie' leaned conservative, this dizzing advantage for progressive organizations still existed (it dates back to at least the Eisenhower era!), and the lean of organizations and visible political speakers today is far greater than that of their underlying demographics.
Conservatives and conservative organizations are not just uncommon but destroyed in a wide variety of professional fields, and that's a result of enemy action. Maybe that's well-intended, sometimes, but more often the good intentions or serious objections are a pretext. More often, it's not even that. Simple discrimination is common enough that it doesn't even have to pretend to hide. Demands to fire anyone to the right of the last Democratic President are common, regularly backed up by violent protest. And that persists outside of academia: state bar selections of continuing education credits have gotten hilarious recently, and one of the single most effective members of the SCOTUS bar got booted from his practice, with the threat leveled during and about an appeal. I can go into further detail if @Amadan wants to do the "you are not oppressed" deal, but it's a long list spanning decades, and I don't think you need me drop thirty examples. You have your recent tweet on Sanderson; you don't need me to spell out how suicidal trying to be a mainstream conservative culturati gets.
That doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it does change any potential solution. A conservative -- or even anything people want to call conservative, with all that implies -- working within the system is inviting a cheesegrater to their tender bits, hopefully figuratively. Any conservative organization trying to work within the system at minimum is subject to being shut down at a moment's notice, if not subject to being hollowed out and worn like a skin suit; any effective capability itself becoming justification for such an attack.
What does change the conclusion is that Doom bit. There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.
The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.
That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.
More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.
But the resulting answer is going to look very different than Kulak, or than Theilites, for better and for worse.
I expect that pillarization eventually fixes this. Emphasis on eventually, but I do expect, basically, parallel societies. Yes, there will be right wing cranks in prominent positions just like left wing cranks are in prominent positions right now, but a major source of creation scientists is petroleum geologists who retired early because they were sufficiently good at their jobs- most prominent cranks have motivated beliefs that enable them to do the thing they wanted to do anyways, they aren't just stupid and incompetent.
Yes, it'll be harder to go to Harvard as a conservative, but among a big chunk of society Christendom College will have the same effect. Harvard may deliver a good education, but it's not unique in doing so; its value comes from the name.
How? Pillarization requires a relatively neutral central power that allows multiple parallel institutions to keep existing.
How so — assuming said school even remains open and accredited? One gives you a whole bunch of employment options and elite connections, the other is a useless piece of paper no employer will respect (for fear of getting sued, if nothing else).
If I may be so bold, because they will be forced to by hard power. There need only be a small minority of the nation to do so, so long as they are geographically concentrated.
By balancing those scales? That is the idea proposed.
What "hard power"? And how would it be used, exactly, to force a hostile central power to tolerate "parallel institutions" by people they hate, rather than crushing them?
And how, exactly, do you propose to do that? Because I don't see any means of doing so.
Because just like with sanctuary cities in the West Coast, the federal government relies on state and local police to enforce their edicts and those partners can just say no. It is how we got around the fugitive slave act.
States run state colleges and hire college graduates. Conservatives own businesses. A lot of people here hire for tech companies let alone run them. Some random subreddit this ain't man.
I think "sanctuary cities" are overrated, and only exist because the Feds are mostly on their side. If DC really wanted to shut them down, they could, just by actually enforcing and using laws on the books. Specifically, the laws targeting employers. Start rigorously enforcing those on some large businesses, throw on asset forfeiture, maybe even accessory to human trafficking via RICO charges. Go after some rich couples for their illegal housekeepers and nannies. "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey," as the Chinese say. Set an example by sending a few hundred-millionaires to Federal prison (and not the cushy minimum-security kind) after seizing every penny they own, and quickly, nobody in those cities will want to employ illegal immigrants; and then, what good is that "sanctuary"?
But those colleges are still beholden to the accrediting organizations, and without accreditation by those bodies, the degrees they issue effectively become toilet paper, state-run college or not.
Which can be subjected to lawsuits and EEOC investigations, wherein their practices of hiring "unqualified" candidates with "fake degrees" from unaccredited "diploma mills" will become quite relevant to the outcome. Once you establish a few precedents that while hiring people with degrees from regime-approved institutions provides some measure of protection, hiring people with degrees from "parallel institutions" will get you sued into oblivion, just how long will those "parallel institutions" last?
Then throw Federal student aid on top of that. There's a reason Hillsdale depends on wealthy donors, and is pretty much one-of-a-kind.
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Years later, you are still beefing about this, seriously?
It is his nature.
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I am nothing if not petty, but you invited me.
If you want me to stop, tell me to stop, and I'll stop.
What I would like is for you to stop jousting with old posts. I've already expressed to @FCfromSSC that I regret having taken the tone I did in that post you're still beefing about. If you're genuinely wondering (as opposed to just seeing if you can bait me) whether I still stand by something I said years ago, ask me directly (and be clear what it is you think I believe since your interpretation of what I believe is often inaccurate).
But I am not going to tell you to stop being petty and trying to dredge up old fights. That's your prerogative.
My objection has never been your tone. And while I'll object to individual factual claims, they're things that can be discussed. My objection has long been that your oppressed means nothing and everything. So let's be very explicit:
Do you think this is the claim? Do you think that is what motivates people like FCfromSSC, or what motivates my concerns?
Like, last time I tried this you accused me of gish-galloping, so this is more for everybody else, but just to be clear exactly what the scope we're talking about:
No, I can't. Trivially, we're here because the last forum started shutting down random posters, and the place before that our presence was so severe that it got someone's name in the New York Times (to everyone's surprise as a smear piece) and they had a mental breakdown. Just as trivially, Damore predated your post. FCFromSSC has mentioned getting canceled by a friend over good faith disagreements, I've talked about how I've made significant sacrifices in my career and social and romantic life to reduce the threat and still am subject to it.
My go to example right now is the guy who built Modded Minecraft's very foundations in Forge getting canceled so hard that, when he resisted, his fellow project leads had their employers invoked as part of the ultimatum. Actually true statements of law get pulled from major social media, when offered by randos with tiny followings. Rittenhouse couldn't use GoFundMe, and when people did use a different vendor to donate, that company got hacked, and some of them got fired for <30 USD donations -- the organization that doxxed them is affiliated with Harvard and no one cares. VCDL has e-mail providers and YouTube dropping them without explanation or even reference to a broken rule, ARFCOM got blammed off GoDaddy without notice, so on.
But there's not snipers waiting to make my head Just Do That should I say the wrong words, nor am I required by law to strap on a voice-activated bomb collar before going outdoors; sometimes people even resist these attacks successfully (or at least the sort of 'success' that throws away their futures in exchange for symbolic victories and the grifter circuits). Hell, it's not even as bad as that other country declaring
martial lawemergency powers, confiscating property, which you were "not sure I agree it's "oppression" but it's fucked."Those DEI sessions I mentioned last time in that post you didn't find impressive? They're back! Or more accurately never really went away. And state attempts to block them have been blocked in turn. "Diversity statements" are de jour in academia. Gallup considers it a failure than 'only' 41% of managers and 42% of employees have received DEI/racial justice training. While I'm too old for it to be a concern personally, schools have not only formalized official support for protesting ("no official repercussions" if the students don't play along, just an official assignment asking them to explain why they complied).
Do you need more examples? Because it's kinda awkward to dance around the ones I've experienced directly outside of these domains without doxing myself, but I can continue.
yyyyaaaaayyy.
The closest thing we've had to a slowdown here is Newsom vetoing a rule requiring judges to consider it for custody hearings; it's still policy. Demkovich was overturned, but the dissent pointed out that the 9th Circuit had case law going the other direction, and it's not like it's a one-off.
It's not room temperature, fair.
Modulo Matthew Dolloff, sure. And there's some rough spots for people who tried and failed: we still don't even know what happened to Grosskruetz's concealed carry permit, and obviously he's never been and never going to be tried for either the unlawful carry nor threatening a teenager, in contrast to Dominick Black. And then there's the places where the shooters or the shot are a little more complicated to discuss.
But it's not that many people getting shot! Sometimes they have to post bail! Hell, Finicum wouldn't even be that sympathetic, were it not for the hilariously bad behavior of federal law enforcement and the long toleration of many occupations efforts. So it's not Oppression.
... this one didn't even make sense contemporaneously. Yes, and? That the progressive tribe neither can fix these problems, and benefits from motioning around them, is one of FCFromSSC's positions.
And for bonus points:
A combination of the teacher's union and local collaborators called in the FBI over school board meetings. Individual people have called in the EEOC over a hat. The DoJ's OCR is investigating a college for using gendered bathrooms and abolishing a diversity program, feds and fed courts for mask mandates, so on. One group of teachers alleged did not report bullies to local administrators, nor punish them themselves, so that they could use the 'ignored' bad actions as part of a DoE complaint to bring the feds down harder on violations of leftist norms.
The ATF is in the middle of an aggressive crackdown on FFLs and home gunsmithing, the EPA fights over drainage ditches, the ADA has brought a small army of 'testers' that will happily demand the rebuild of services they never intend to buy, people are regularly asking the feds to treat GOP governors offering bus or plane rides to undocumented immigrants like kidnapping. And these are just the serious ones, where there's investigations and publicity and lawsuits and media coverage. It's worse in Blue Tribe areas, but you couldn't run from this stuff a decade ago (literally, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop).
Which, hey, these are just policy disagreements! Sometimes ones that the Blue Tribe doesn't even immediately win! No one's getting shot in the face, it's not jazzhands oppression, at least by the pre-Civil War slavery one, if less so by the modern Harvard one.
But are these things happening? Can you imagine why people might think of them as something more than just "laws I don't like sometimes get passed"? Can you imagine why, when you say:
it's an absolute non sequitor from the post you were responding to, and absolutely nonsensical as a position that everyone must wait for before they are allowed to respond or complain or recognize a pattern?
... how did that post start again?
Emphasis added.
You could meaningfully argue if some of these things aren't true. I'd love to hear it! As I frequently point out at the end of these rants, I'm not an accelerationist, I'd love to hear how they're wrong, and part of my frustration here is that FCFromSSC (or Hradzka on twitter) have given far better version of that than you have. You can point out that it's not as bad as prebellum era slavery or the 1940s South (correctly!), or the treatment of gay men in the 1900s, or (much more arguably) of communists in the McCarthy era.
You can not correctly argue, short of disproving them, that these are "(hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)".
What do you want from me, to go through your list item by item and say whether I agree or disagree with it? There seem to be two claims here:
I was always very clear that I was arguing against #2, while you seem to be accusing me of arguing against #1.
To most of your bullet points, I'd nod and say "I agree, that's bad." I feel like I'm saying "Yes, I agree, leftist/DEI/woke censorship is bad" and you're screaming at me "But you said they're not literally herding us into concentration camps, therefore you don't really think it's bad!" (And no, I do not think it would have to reach herding-into-concentration-camps levels for me to come around to right wingers being institutionally oppressed.)
The thread I was responding to, three years ago, was an argument about whether or not accelerationism and a second US Civil War is desirable and/or inevitable. If you just wanted me to say "It really sucks that leftists control so much of the culture war front," well, I'm here, aren't I? If you think I am too mushy and moderate and failing to see the existential threat to human liberty represented by DEI departments, okay, fine. Yes, I do indeed still cynically see your hysteria as essentially the same as the people who confidently assert that Trump is Literally Hitler, now threatening to become Zombie Hitler Returning From Hell. You all have legitimate cause for concern wrapped in hyperbole, and this leads to this kind of attack on the unconvinced (like me) as Refusing To See The Problem.
You are very good at collecting links and building legal cases. I can't write a brief like you can. But nothing happening today looks to me wildly different from previous eras in US history; the factions change, the dominant groups in the culture war and those being "oppressed" have different labels, and there have been people deprived of their livelihoods, jailed, even killed, before. I don't say this is good or there is "nothing to see here." I only observe that I don't think it's unique or particularly bad relative to the rest of our history (or the world). You will also notice I have not repeated the "You are not oppressed" rebuttal in years, so give it a fucking rest. If you have such a burning need to come at me at any opportunity, at least address things I have said in a current thread.
No, my point is that you've consistently and commonly argued #2, against people who clearly aren't bringing that position. I can provide past examples, either ones I've already linked to here and more generally, but if you want me to focus on current threads :
I have not, at any point, compared what conservatives today are encountering with concentration camps, even in the figurative sense. At no point in this thread have I gotten anywhere near that. Neither has the_nybbler nor fcfromssc since the move. Nor did anyone in that three-year-old subthread. Maybe TopHattington on a COVID rant? But that's somewhat complicated by Lyman Stone et all advocating the Korematsu solution to COVID (and not discriminating politically in doing so). Like, I won't swear no one ever did, because there are some amazingly dim-witted weakmen out there. There was probably some on the motte subreddit, and maybe even one that wasn't a SneerClub troll.
And I'm absolutely sure I haven't 'screamed' at someone for refusing to agree with that hyperbole.
(Nor have I been comparing anyone to "Zombie Hitler Returning From Hell".)
You do realize that anyone watching can notice that you're endlessly retreating from specific ground points presented by the people you're talking with, to this? Which is probably why you consistently mix "defection and civil war" in response to defection, or to come back to 'current threads', you follow up the earlier quote in this post with :
Nevermind the awkward question of what those levels are, or why your word games should matter to anyone else, and whether those new levels will stay set or be permissible to reference for another three years. Whatever that point is, it's something vastly different from the excluded third claim that:
Nevermind that each of those times, we built entire new rules under the express pretense of making sure it 'never happened again', with the best you can say is that some cases didn't involve that much gunpowder or blood. The objection today is not that Bad Things Happen To
ConservativeGoodPeople. The objection is that specific things are happening, and the response is thisI mean, I can show people opposed to FCFromSSC's position swinging back to how "the ability to push for this kind of visible social conformity" is novel and only been available for anyone to exploit for such a short time we can't tell how the Red Tribe might have done so. I can point to the OP of this very subthread claiming that conservatives no longer exist as a group in federal administrative infrastructure, in a way that will prevent them from achieving their goals (or, implicitly, seriously slowing the goals of their opponents), in a way that lacks parallels since the end of the South as a racial institution (coincidentally, a time where this meant far less). I can provide a dozen significant tactical or strategic differences, some wildly different, in powers that the progressive movement is actively using today, if they matter.
Do they?
No, it is not clear to me that people are not bringing that position. You just (re)quoted FCfromSSC and yourself providing a long list of how conservatives are being persecuted and deprived of their rights. If all you're claiming is #1, then what are we disagreeing about?
You may not literally have invoked concentration camps, but the whole point of @FCfromSSC's accelerationism has been, as I understand it, that he sees peaceful coexistence becoming impossible in the near future. Actual concentration camps? Maybe not, but if we can't even share a country and accord each other civil rights, that seems pretty damn concentration camp-adjacent to me. And the @The_Nybbler's entire schtick is whining that the Left has won, laws and democracy are fake and gay, and the boot is already stomping on his face forever and ever.
No, I do not realize this. I think this is a claim you keep repeating because you're playing to the crowd. What specific ground points do you think I am retreating from?
I honestly can't tell if you genuinely believe you're scoring gotchas, or if you've just (correctly) deduced that accusing me of lying annoys me, so you keep doing it for the lulz. I can entertain the possibility that I am misunderstanding you, that I missed the point, hell, maybe even that I'm just too dim to understand your argument. But I don't lie or argue in bad faith or play "word games."
I don't know, it depends on what you want me to do with these examples. Agree that they happened? Agree that they are bad? Or agree that they constitute the Right being oppressed? To what level do you want me to agree that the Right is being oppressed? Apparently invoking Orwell and disenfranchisement is too far, but just agreeing that the Right is losing the Culture War at the moment is not enough. What do you want? (Besides to goad me, so, mission accomplished I guess.)
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If Gattsuru won't ask you directly, I will. Were you wrong? Were your confident predictions not an honest appraisal that you planned to stick by, but just a tool to win an argument and shut people up?
So far, I do not think I was wrong. However, I have slightly adjusted my predictions towards more censorship and authoritarianism (not just against "conservatives), and while I still think the accelerationist "National Divorce" is unlikely, I don't think it's quite as unlikely as I once did.
For what it's worth, I had that conversation open in a tab for much of the last year. Not from a feeling of "Ha Ha, look how wrong this person was!" but more because it was an example of what I guess I'd call a pivotal conversation: an exchange that distills the fundamental nature of people's respective positions and disagreements. I find such moments very useful in building an understanding of how other people think, and a lot of the conversations I have here are aiming to generate more of them. The tone, to me, was entirely irrelevant, but the actual content seems evergreen.
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I don't know about 20 years from the time that Amadan wrote https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4epli2/.
However, it has now been 3 years since Amadan wrote it, and so far at least, he is right. Trump is polling well. Religion and social conservatism are still around. There's still plenty of free speech. Leftists are not murdering their political opponents whenever they feel like it.
No there isn't. Being fired, banned from social media, or even debanked is now completely normalized to the point no one here even bothers talking about it when it happens to someone. I am not able to proclaim my views in public, and, in fact have to be careful not to say too much or too little when I'm not around people I trust.
The original post was about "comfortable existence" and being murdered with impunity was just one, extreme, example in a long list of things he said will not happen (several of which had already happened at the time he wrote his post, and several more have happened since).
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I think you’re arguing a little past Tracing’s point. I think he’d agree that there were extensive, deliberate bad faith efforts to destroy conservative organizations, to make their advocacy harder, to use every trick in the book against them, like lobbying law firms to try to pull the smartest lawyers off 2nd Amendment cases.
But consider that case in more detail. Why is it that the partners who run one of America’s most elite law firms offered star lawyers who had just won in front of the Supreme Court the choice between dropping their clients and being fired? Well, you say, because countless Fortune 500 corporate law clients who spend a lot of money with them threatened not to hire the firm if they didn’t do so. This is likely. But why did they fold?
Why did even Elon Musk fold, as seen by his ridiculous apology tour this week after he annoyed advertisers too much (the tour has gone wrong, we might say, but it was an attempt)? Why did he bend the knee? Because ultimately he cares more about money than about politics.
Yeah, yeah, you say, the center-left isn’t willing to die for their beliefs either. But they are willing to accept a lifetime of earning a mediocre living for them. That’s Tracing’s point. Kirkland’s most senior partners (who presumably were okay with the firm representing the NRA until the backlash, so weren’t strongly ideological on those lines) folded when their huge compensation was put on the line (even though most, given senior partner pay, would likely already be more than rich enough to retire comfortably). That’s why they bent the knee.
Ultimately, the option is a Morton's Fork between the dead and the forsworn. "Why" they bent the knee at that level isn't particularly interesting: Clement as the office and officer of one of the most prestigious BigLaw firms would be gone either way.
((Indeed, Clement did take the option of earning a
mediocrenot gold-plated living.))But that's not very interesting; the number of political groups who can't be bought at any price is pretty low, and they're not exactly the most effective or most palatable ones. Step back one point to see why these groups could bring this credible and this serious of a threat, and you notice that it's something far broader and longer-lasting driving things.
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