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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I have to wonder...

My stereotype of a cancelled person is a heterodox liberal in a blue state or sphere. Your James Damores, JK Rowlings or whatever. But your average policy maker is usually someone who has spent their whole life being surrounded by people who think just like them. In that sense, DJT is very unusual, he's right wing but spent much of his life surrounded by New York Democrats. That's why he comes off as so defensive, instead of the complacency (a common defect among conservative politicians) of Utah raised Romney.

That's why I suspect that we might get the opposite - law that for example, makes it easier to fire public sector employees for their comments on social media. Your average red state legislator is going to be less interested in the travails of SF programmers or Chicago academics, and more interested in putting the fear of God in the public school teachers in his state.

But, for the object level discussion, I think it's natural that it's going to be tough for conservatives to embrace cancel culture. Knowledge producing conservatives, meaning journalists, academics, whatever, still exist and operate in blue controlled regions and spheres. They are highly motivated to try and lower the temperature, not raise it. And liberals still have the share of institutional power in the US, even if the right has clawed a little bit back. I agree with the other post here that the historical reason that conservatives have gotten the brunt of cancellation is not because of how principled they were (a joke, to be sure), but because they lost institutional power.

I also don't know if this even works as a sell. Can you sell "end cancel culture" to America even as you freely engage in it? Probably not.