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I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.
As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:
Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!
The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.
I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.
The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.
Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.
AND YET
I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.
So when Richard says:
He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.
*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.
There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.
it's not so much that her fans will become allies, but the right's hardline position on abortion and alleged conspiratorial thinking turns off potential normies, which can make a difference for close elections.
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Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.
The "or is at least perceived to be" is the critical part. That "center-right is dead" is the narrative that both the woke left and dissident right want to push because what power and credibility they have absolutely depends on convincing enough people that this is the case.
Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?
I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.
Dude was/is a vaguely right-leaning Democrat. His political positions and persona hasn't actually changed all that much since the 90s and early 00s. That what used to be the centrist/moderate position of both parties less than 20 years ago is now considered "far right" by the media and academia shows just how far they've shifted to the left.
The Wokies hate Trump because he's an unironic "'Murica Fuck Ya" sort of guy. Meanwhile the DR hate him because his popularity is effectively a big old middle-finger to everything they believe.
I agree that the vast majority of Trump's policy positions are comfortably inside the Republican Overton window, and if a Democrat had run for President in the nineties under this exact package of policy positions, no one would have batted an eyelid. What keeps me from calling him centre-right is his pronounced tendency towards conspiratorialism and his increasingly obvious authoritarian streak. "The election is rigged, this goes all the way to the top - as soon as I seize power I'm going to keep it forever, drain the swamp and get revenge on my enemies" is not the kind of thing a normie Republican says. One might say he doesn't really believe this and it's just smack talk to rally his base, but again, I don't think a normie Republican would present this kind of narrative of the US even as insincere smack talk.
I don't consider Trump far-right by any stretch, but the "centre-right" label doesn't sit well with me. Maybe some kind of synthesis of bog-standard centrist Republican policy proposals with the "paranoid style"? I think this is probably what people are getting at when they describe him as a "populist".
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I guess it was a "gotcha" insofar as it was extremely predictable that you'd say Trump despite the absurdity of that claim. "Tear the rotten edifice down" is not and cannot in any meaningful sense be a center-right ethos because the core principle of the center-right is that the status quo are basically fine. Trumpists are shouting that things are emphatically not fine - that the Federal government is hopelessly corrupt, the Democrats are stealing elections, the Mexicans are invading, the trans are corrupting the youth, globalists are stealing our jobs, etc... and that radical action is needed to fix it.
I it really "absurd" though? That's what I am questioning
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“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”
That's not center right.
I can't believe I'm asking this years after the fact - but did Trump actually say "They are rapists"? Because in that sequence of words, it's obvious to me it's possessive 'their'. As in 'their drugs, their crime, their rapists'. But everybody up to a VP candidate in the debates just so conveniently interprets it as him calling Mexicans rapists or whatever. And now it's one of those things that "Everbody knows he said" like the fine people smear job, the koi fish smear, and 'Tim Apple'.
I hope you understand that this is one of the many reasons people who aren't already persuaded by this hackery place low value in your assessment of what constitutes moderate or far-right.
video: https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2015/06/25/29292957/
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And even if it was "they're" rather than "their", I would interpret it as "the subset of Mexicans illegally migrating to the US are rapists" not "all Mexicans are rapists". Radically different in meaning to how it was presented.
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It's not "center right" according to whom?
Like I said, that what was the moderate/centrist position in the 90s is now considered "far right" should be an indication of just how far off the reservation the media has drifted in the last 20 years.
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Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency. Taylor is an icon the most shallow of feminisms, the kind that can easily be co-opted by the right. Women have lead right wing parties across the west at different times.
Here's the question at the core of the article, for me: if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?
No, no they are not.
Such were the wages of the Clinton years. The Democrats cut ties with their labour roots and now "the Left" is wholly a Hi-Low alliance of wealthy capitalists and urban lumpenproles against the working class and petite-bourgeoisie.
Meanwhile it remains the petite-bourgeoisie who are (and always have been) the right's natural constituency.
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Nobody. The left has won.
Edit: OK, you all don't like short answers to rhetorical questions, there's a longer version. The longer version is given by others here but not in so many words. The schools, entertainment media, and most news media have been for generations now pumping out the message "Left is good, right is bad". The counterculture message has been "left is good, right is bad". At some point the message "anyone who says right is not bad is bad, don't listen to them" got put in too ("Faux news"). And this has never stopped. The exceptions in entertainment (a few right-wing action stars) are gone. So why would you expect anyone to be attracted to the right any more?
Someone reported this as:
Which is funny but also, man, maybe he has a point?
I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.
But is he wrong though?
Being right doesn't mean you aren't being an annoying one-note piano.
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Yes. Frequently. Regularly, even.
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Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative. I've argued here before that conservatism, to appeal to its natural constituency, has to try to preserve the world as it exists today and as I grew up in it, not try to tear that world down. Chesterton's Fence and Chesterton's Ruins denominate the proper area of conservatism.
That world was probably as degenerate if not more so compared to today. Drug usage was rampant, as was smoking and drinking. Instead of computer porn, it was done at home. And lots of brothels and adult film theatres. Except for LGBT+ going mainstream, America was in many ways as deviant.
I wonder if listening to a bunch of Cole Porter songs might help. The sound is unmistakably early 20th century and there is plenty of sex and drugs involved - he references cocaine, morphine, cannabis and drinking to excess, all as if they are totally normal elements of life.
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It seems to me that the problem with this analysis is that a lot of actual conservatives aren't on board with that idea, do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.
...More generally, would it be fair to say that Hanania is taking a Blue stereotype of Conservatism, and complaining that Reds aren't conforming to it? Is Hanania a Red or a Blue? If, as seems likely, he's a Blue, why is any of this surprising at all? Ingroup member confused and horrified that the outgroup doesn't act like the ingroup, news at 11.
Almost positive he's a Red. He unabashedly endorses HBD, he's an outspoken critic of wokeness, wants to repeal the civil rights act of 1964, he recently published an article arguing that average female intelligence is lower than average male intelligence, has little sympathy for the Palestinian cause and thinks Israel should crush any hope of Palestinian independence, was outed as having routinely used ethnic slurs before writing under his own name etc.
On the other hand he's anti-Christian, anti-populist and pro-euthanasia.
(His dismissal of the Palestinian cause stems from lacking any bleeding heart Abrahamic universalism.)
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But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be trying to conserve it. They would be trying to destroy it, to uproot the world as we know it and create a new one, a progressive or reactionary utopia. I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built. But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.
As a general rule, the answer is "because the people tearing it down didn't care about/didn't know about X thing, and if X wasn't a concern the fence would be obviously insane".
Haidt made the point in The Righteous Mind that conservatives understand progressives much better than the other way around, because it's easier to hypothetically take things out of your moral compass than to correctly conceptualise and hypothetically insert things into it.
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That's not exactly hard. We've been swimming in propaganda for why fences must be torn down. Some of us are even old enough to have seen a fence or two being torn down, and all the promises of what would and would not happen after it's gone.
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That is not a definition of Conservative that seems useful. It's conservatism as a tendency, an unreflective inclination, a mood.
Chesterton's Fence does not preclude Chesterton from believing that he does, in fact, understand exactly why a fence was built, and why tearing it down is vitally nescessary.
Yes. Hanania's problem is that, increasingly, the general class of people he is complaining about are confident that they can do this, for what seem to me to be good reasons. It seems to me that this portion is growing fairly rapidly, and its presence is starting to have serious real-world consequences. When it gets large enough, which fences are up and which ruins are down will change.
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