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Notes -
I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”. I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all. This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s. A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter. The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that. Essentially they won. Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time. So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses. And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream. Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.
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