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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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That’s not really an answer to my question. My point wasn’t that gun owners haven’t successfully kept their right to own arms. My point was that none of the other tyrannies of the federal government have been reversed by the threat posed by firearms owners.

Unless you count abuse of cattle rancher’s grazing rights in eastern Oregon.

Apologies, I thought you were referring to gun-related rules specifically, and in fact, gun-related rules have indeed been rolled back, and others have been prevented.

If the question is about federal tyranny as a whole, it seems pretty clear to me that the last two decades have seen significant erosion of federal capacity, and the gun culture has been a crucial vanguard in that erosion. Social cohesion is decaying at a significant and accelerating rate, and with it the capacity of the federal government and blue tribe generally to impose its edicts on society as a whole. We are now seeing open, organized defiance to federal edicts from state governments, and the federals backed down. We are seeing a complete collapse in trust for the media, for the federal bureaucracy, for the federal courts, a deadlocked congress, collapsing trust in elections. The military is facing a severe recruiting crisis, serious readiness and procurement issues, most notably in the Navy, and a deep-rooted toward any foreign mission among its historical core source demographic.

You claim that gun owners are too fat and lazy to mount a rebellion. I counter that the federal government is so sclerotic, deficient and mismanaged that actual enforcement of actual laws against anything other that the fat, lazy and supremely comfortable is completely beyond them. They can, sometimes, make examples of unfortunate individuals, but even this capacity is increasingly failing, and each "example" they attempt generates significantly more defiance than it does compliance.

It is common for moderate Blues to opine that the tribes need each other, that the Conservative commitments to order and stability are a necessary counterbalance to the Progressive commitments to change and innovation. This makes sense if you believe that the old order was a good thing that should be preserved. But then, that same order is the tyranny that you're asking for examples of Gun Culture resistance from, isn't it? To the extent that Conservatives have done what moderate Blues claim to want them to do, you would be correct in accusing them of failure to impede tyranny. Only, those commitments have largely been eroded, haven't they? Red Tribe has in fact embraced Trumpism, abandoned fiscal conservativism, largely turned against foreign interventionism and the maintenance of the international order, become deeply critical and skeptical of the "free market" and of corporations, and is increasingly hostile to the concept of law and order generally. We are pretty clearly done being a moderating counterbalance, cleaning up your messes and paying the bills in an unreciprocated pursuit of an entirely theoretical "we". It is evident now that there is no "we", and likely will never be a "we" in the foreseeable future.

All this, over a period of relative peace and prosperity. It was often claimed that what we needed was a good external threat to pull people back together; we saw how that went with Covid, and now that claim seems to have been quietly retired. The stability and the unity are gone, and they are not coming back. Likewise the state capacity, and the orderly, instinctual rule-following it was built upon. What follows is an escalating conflict terminating in separation of one kind or another. There is far better hope for meaningful freedom in that breakdown than there ever could be in a federal government cementing unitary power over a population of pacified subjects.

They've been reversed by using the other three boxes, which is...vastly preferable.