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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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So... No elected Republicans, nobody who is part of mainstream conservative politics. Just to be clear.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"? OP included "right-wing influencers". Those people are overwhelmingly discussing self-improvement. Politicians? Nobody is running on lifting weights and eating clean but there is absolutely a culture of "personal responsibility" and individual freedom. Whats's fair? Donald Trump isn't talking about it, but there are plenty of things that fairly characterize "the left" that Democratic politicians aren't running on either.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"?

The core message of the Right could be defined as the message that is important to a majority (or perhaps a large fraction) of Americans who identify as Right of center or who vote for Right of Center politicians or support Right of center causes. Those people are the actual physical Right in real life. When describing what the Right is, rather than what we might like it to be, the description has to reflect the actual people who support the thing.

BAP, whose work I enjoy more than most here, has 143,800 twitter followers. Sean Hannity has 6,500,000. Tucker has 12,600,000. And it's fair to say that Twitter is a much more important playform to BAP than it is to Hannity or to Tucker! (For reference, Taylor Swift has some 95,000,000 and Lebron has 52,800,000) Ben Shapiro, who you brush aside casually, has 6,600,000. To point to a tiny portion of the Right as representative is like using /r/swoletariat (30k subs) as your standard for the left.

The Marxist left has its delusional fantasy of the movement as a vehicle for the proletariat, the working class straining against Capital; it can't cope with the reality that the socialist left in America is mostly a vehicle for stoned college students and those who never really graduated. The Right has its own fantasy of itself as the noble, bootstrapping, individualist heroes; and can't cope with the real life coalition that puts right wing politicians in power.

Here in Ohio, we elected J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy guy, to the Senate.