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Haven't basic bitch normie-friendly Republicans been trying to do exactly this at least since the appearance of the Tea Party, over and over, appealing to supposedly present normie sentiments of civic nationalism and economic liberty?
Yes, but progressivism is able to pivot constantly between "that's not happening" and "that's good, actually" and get away with it, thanks to their control of "normie" institutions. If they do overreach, they just cool it down for a while and everyone forgets.
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It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness, in the sense of the nascent leviathan of the media-academic-activist IDpol-complex. I remember already by 2014 there was a growing unease among classically liberal academics at the massive and comparatively new cultural revolution that was being impressed on young people, but very few people on the American right recognised the threat until comparatively recently; and of course, even when they did, it was usually pretty cringey (think Jordan Peterson/Elon Musk interview).
I love how over the course of this forum's lifetime we went from criticizing conservatives for freaking out over "just a couple crazy kids on college campuses" to "being late to discover wokeness".
???
Peterson was screaming about this since 2017 or so, and was pretty wildly hip with young people to the point the entire mainstream media complex was having waking nightmares about him?
I think it's fairer to say that it took them this long to come up with any theory of the case or solution besides pointing and yelling about campuses being woke.
Everyone knew but conservative activists today like Rufo tend to take a very different tack than just complaining and hoping to win the cultural battle the way they perceived the wokes to have won it . Or appealing to "classical liberal" values and expecting the dam to hold.
That's now being done by left-wingers closer to the center like Haidt and Yascha Mounk. With a similar rate of success.
Haidt was on it pretty early on too, from what I remember, but yeah the classical liberalism thing is a bit of dead end, so I don't think he'll get anywhere.
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So what would a non-cringey but anti-woke moderate Republican narrative look like in your estimation?
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They weren't "late to discover wokeness" - they've been complaining about it - or its forebearers - since before I was born. They just were completely incapable of stopping it, for a variety of reasons that would probably take several large books to adequately address and provide supporting sources for. The TL;DR is that the circumstances of post-War America - chiefly, increasing technological and organization scale, along the mass suburbanization of America - meant that the Right largely couldn't articulate a real, workable answer to the rise of IdPol, because they believed in the conditions that would inevitably lead to its rise, and they didn't even know it. To paraphrase The Last Psychiatrist, the Right wanted to debate the conclusions ("schools should teach family values! the government should support traditional marriage!" etc.) but accepted all the premises, and the entire form of the argument (that we should have mass society that encourages hyperindividualism, that accepts it as given that kids are supposed to go to college far away and then have their own lives, etc.)
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The allegations that the Republican party is anti-intellectual are essentially correct, and one of the consequences of this is that they have a very limited perspective of expert institutions. Namely, an exterior view which tends to write off the whole edifice as a wretched hive of degenerate commies. The result is that the right is virtually always late to the party intellectually and their efforts to participate in the discourse are often pretty unimpressive (in this case, their constant efforts to equate the post-liberal bent of 'wokeness' with any sort of social liberalism mostly just delegitimized center-left left critics of the far left).
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