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This is my first encounter of this term in the wild, and I have no clear idea of its boundaries. The obvious features of this specific example seem to be a photo-negative of the ubiquitous "church lady" slur: ignorance, irrationality, and superstition, combined with a supreme self-confidence and self-satisfaction and an aggressively judgmental moralizing attitude toward others. This archetype, it seems to me, deserves criticism; I have no idea how "theater kids" label got attached, but just from Glee alone it seems reasonably appropriate. Is there a better one available?
Is the hostility aimed at artistically/creatively-oriented people as such, or is it aimed at the existing artistic/creative establishment? I would argue the latter. Is there a way to be less hostile, given that this establishment loathes Reds and has dedicated itself to their destruction? I would argue no. Past a certain level of hostility, it's you or them. We're well-past that level with the given establishment. I guess my question is, what do you expect a counter-cultural revolution to look like? Did the Beats and the Hippies and the Dadaists and the Postmodernists and so on politely ask for permission before they burned down what came before?
I don't think so, no. We can readily observe that art overwhelmingly served right-wing goals of values-homogenization, individual edification and social cohesion in previous eras. We can observe that the modern left-wing focus on revolution and hostility to tradition, structure and stability is in fact modern, that it has specific, easily-identifiable beginnings, and like most social transformations of the modern era, matches well to a theory of cause and effect flowing downward from the Enlightenment.
...Your thesis seems to be that creativity, intelligence, and cunning are innate markers of Blue identity, that people blessed with these traits always have been and always will tend toward Blueness. I don't see things this way at all. Blues aren't blue because of their immutable characteristics, but because they're captured by a dominant ideology, in the same way that relatively smart, creative people were overwhelmingly doctrinaire Jaguar-Cultists in 1000s Central America, doctrinaire Catholics in 1400s Spain and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists in 1930s Russia. Given sufficient enforcement, social conformity is the smart, cunning, creative thing to do, so smart, cunning, creative people conform. The question is simply who is in a position to enforce their standard.
Homer was in no meaningful sense a "shitlib"; the Iliad and the Odyssey are not revolutionary texts aiming to undermine the structure, norms and values of Homer's contemporary society in pursuit of a questionably-achievable utopian ideal. Neither are the great Cathedrals, Dante's Inferno, or Beethoven's 9th, nor the works of Shakespeare or Dahl or Rostand. You're mistaking the results of an obvious, pervasive, overwhelming social enforcement mechanism for the product of bedrock human nature, in the face, it seems to me, of overwhelming contrary evidence of both the past and present. Cunning, creativity and intelligence are not the distinguishing markers of Blueness, but rather a specific form of humanistic utopianism and a fundamentalist faith in "progress" based on a highly specific and idiosyncratic set of values and philosophical axioms.
I am quite confident that Blueness is not an innate, immutable feature of human nature, but rather the product of a very specific set of historical circumstances that have now largely concluded. One way or another, I think Blueness is going to go away, likely relatively soon, and once it is gone it will not be coming back for the foreseeable future. Creative, intelligent, cunning people will go back to using their gifts to the benefit of themselves and/or their society, as they always have, not in service to the peculiar aims and goals of Blue ideology.
Odysseus is certainly a trickster, but what of Achilles and Hector? Where do they fit into this model? The Norse have Loki, but they also have Thor... and with both Loki and Odysseus, it seems to me that their trickery is not portrayed as an unalloyed advantage. Do you find other examples of the pattern you perceive?
Just politics? Take Freud or Jung or BF Skinner, Ford, Dewey, Sanger, Duranty, Mead, heck, Rousseau... The list of luminaries and fields dominated are comprehensive. The Enlightenment was a scam from the very start, and it has remained a scam in every iteration since: a mask of science and rationality worn by the unscientific and irrational to bypass the defenses of the unwary. It was a novel exploit, and a highly successful one, but it works less and less well each year, as the woke themselves demonstrate. Soon it will not work at all, and the structures we've built upon it will inevitably fall.
Point being, this isn't new, and it isn't escapable.
Do you think future outcomes can continue to be determined by who can craft the most aesthetically-compelling narrative indefinitely, or will Reality, at some point, intrude? If you believe that, for entirely contingent reasons, Evil currently has a commanding advantage in crafting aesthetically-compelling narratives, should you try to beat that advantage, or invest your hopes in a reality-check? Sure, the former would be cleaner and more elegant, but is it actually possible? ...Is it, and its objections to alternate strategies, Red, or just more Blue Carny bluster?
Leaving aside all the questions of if and why this should be so and taking this statement as a given, why should we care?
You could argue that art is useful because it is persuasive, but it does not seem to me that Blue dominance is derived from the quality or persuasiveness of their art. It seems to me that the dominance of central institutions came first, on the strength of pure ideology, and the bright colors and whiz-bang presentation came later. Elite consensus, force of law, then media propaganda to the masses. And note that such propaganda, while effective in many ways, clearly has limits. Abortion, guns, and racial segregation are three areas where the propaganda has pretty clearly failed on its own terms. Trans issues seems to be following that pattern, and gives me some hope that the Pride movement itself ought to be reversible. All this is to say that while art is useful, it is not infinitely useful, nor infinitely valuable. It would be nice to have Red art. It would be nicer to have Red social dominance of existing institutions, not least because right-wing art would then follow.
To the exact degree that Reds actually resemble the mocking caricatures Blues make of them. That is to say, considerably less than the degree to which even the imperfect victories of Blue culture already resemble this cartoon. We already have the humorless scolds, the censorship, the fanatical puritanism, the callouts, the gossip, the unreflective, narrow-minded bigotry, the fear of anything unusual or out of the ordinary, the purging of image and language, the constant, industrial-scale injection of moralizing sermons into every medium of communication, the purity spirals, the policing of one's neighbors, the constriction of speech and thought within the coils of smothering, irrational dogma. Why worry about the potential arrival of an evil already present?
...All the above amounts to an argument over definitions, unfortunately. What makes a Blue, a Progressive, a Leftist, whatever we want to call the type? Is it an innate expression of human nature? Or is it something more limited than that, an artifact of our present time rather than something core to human nature? What defines its nature, its boundaries? That's the question that underpins a lot of these questions, isn't it?
I suppose it needn't take that form, but I imagine many revolutions and counter-revolutions can be headed off at the pass by granting lesser concessions until the heat dies down--that is, any movement will first demand changes that the Establishment could possibly implement, before thoughts turn to revolution. Sure, you can't pacify every revolutionary this way, but you'll take enough momentum out of movements to make it no longer a problem.
Just to pick on an issue I care about, I feel like copyright in the First World is slowly becoming a target for burn-it-all-down thinking. If copyright law was rolled back to a 50-70-year maximum, then the idea that it's all bullshit might be inconceivable to begin with.
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