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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.
The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.
I don't see any confusion. The left is going leftward, as it historically has done. Conservatives are in the strongest position in a long time. So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout, successful buycotts of brands, plagiarism scandals, SCOTUS, etc. . Biden's approval numbers are among the lowest ever for an incumbent. They right just needs to step back and let the left hang itself by its petard. Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.
They retaliated first by cutting off Twitter's ad money, then by taking all of Elon's compensation ($55B in options) for being CEO of Tesla away from him. Looks like they're still ahead on that one -- if the pattern continues there will be no Twitter and Musk will lose his fortune, unless he gets with the program.
No, every "win" you've mentioned is part of a weak counter-response.
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Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.
No doubt, parts of the system are being updated in ways that will decrease the amount by which they are preferentially enriched, which is a net loss in real terms for them personally. And no doubt they can and will get extremely mad about that.
But they are still enriched by the system in both absolute and relative terms, and therefore cannot be too enthusiastic about burning it to the ground. A reshuffling would not be likely to benefit them by chance, unlike the more typical style of counter-culture member who is relatively disadvantaged by the system and might benefit from seeing it overturned.
No point, just an observation: They are also, in most places, the people who contribute the most to the system.
Enh, I'll just submit my mistrust and dissatisfaction with every metric and framing that would lead to that conclusion, while admitting that it is true if you accept those very common metrics and framings.
That's a pretty huge conversation that I'm not an expert on and probably don't have time for today anyway.
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Can you expand on this? Who are these conservatives that are being enriched?
When I look around at my incredibly rich and favored city, all I see are far left progressives.
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Define "incompetent" because in my experience conservative protests/rallies (especially the pro-life and pro-gun ones) are typically larger in terms of attendance, and better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc... than progressive protests. They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
My take on this is essentially the same as @ArjinFerman's
Seems to me that your complaint against conservatives is that they are too conservative and need to become less so if they want to be taken seriously. Forgive me for finding such arguments unconvincing and suspecting ulterior motives.
I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member. They're too uncomfortable with disorder and nonconformity. The types that do suffer from being intolerably crankish - the type of person who thinks a pop star dating a football player is a Pentagon (?) op.
Except we've seen what happens when anyone to the right of the establishment does do effective counterculture - deplatforming, shadowbanning, algorithmic throttling, selective giving in to heckler's veto.
I get it, Western societies base their legitimacy on the consent of the governed, so we all have to act like anything that happens is a bottom-up organic event. The illusion looks convincing as long most people trust their elites, but the moment they start doubting them, it turns out the consent of the governed is no more real than the divine right of kings, or any other myth. This is how we go from the establishment fighting for the free speech rights of actual Nazis to them declaring parents who don't want racism taught to their children being declared Nazis.
...arrest and conviction on novel felony charges, disqualification from office. Thanks to January 6 we know what happens when the right protests like the left; the right is punished severely and further suppressed as a result.
He did say "counter culture", so I was thinking more memes than protests.
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I'd like to remind you that the media turned a conservative teenager standing and smiling into a national (maybe even international) scandal. Something that couldn't possibly get more docile was somehow portrayed as too aggressive. If you think there's a way out of this bind, and can actually deliver results, I'm sure lots of conservatives would love to pay you to be a protest organizer.
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If you were a right-wing protestor, how would you protest in order to get positive media coverage?
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That's like saying a business is run amazingly well, but can't make any sales. A friendly relationship with the media (or at least positive coverage in a wide-reaching format) is an essential part of many protests. If you can't do that, then your protest is failing at one of its core goals.
Are you saying that we are not discussing "competence" per se so much as "conforming to liberal preferences"?
More "
rationalitycompetence is systematized winning".If a protest's goal is to get people to show up and raise the profile of an issue, then your comment only focused on the participants and not on what effect they have on the wider world. I'm not fully convinced that conservatives are worse at effective outreach given the loss of prestige of the mainstream media, but those (alleged) failures can't be dismissed by pointing to the challenges they face.
Which brings us back to @Lewis' point.
You can argue that conservative protests are typically "unsuccessful" but that's a very different charge from being "incompetent".
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The enemy gets a vote, and sometimes the enemy simply has overwhelming force. The best possible protest a conservative organization could run (say, the March for Life) might not get any traction because of the efforts of the media to minimize it. That's not a competence problem; it's a power problem.
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But that just goes back to institutional capture. What you’re essentially saying is that the protests are irrelevant and impotent, which, while quite possibly true, is a different problem from them being incompetently held.
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