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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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It’s more that it’s fragmented. DeSantis, Vance and many others on the populist (rather than Chamber of Commerce / Wall St / Mormon / Evangelical) wing of the party went to Yale/Harvard/Stanford, served in the military, have elite resumes. But they’re all outliers. The Dems pump out thousands of elite grads each year who get parachuted into the D.C. / media / staffer / NGO / think tank / civil service sphere. Young right wing men who graduate elite universities go into finance or tech almost to the man. A few who truly ‘believe’ (often religious Christian conservatives, who have their differences with Trumpism) become lawyers, clerk for conservative justices and then still mostly go into big law for the money.

The irony is that socialism would be the best thing to happen to the US right because it might make finance and tech less lucrative, thus allowing for some brainpower to be redeployed to politics.

One silver lining for Republicans, according to that model, is that they're at least well funded by donations from smart right-wingers who make it big in the fields you mentioned (at least in finance and business).

It's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of government money laundered through NGOs and contracts back to the DNC.

The problem is threefold -

1.) Money hits a saturation point - ask any resident of Pennsylvania, Georgia, etc.

2.) ActBlue does a better fundraising job at times for Democrat's and is a better gauge on enthusiasm than 14 rich people.

3.) Those rich right-wing donors get Republicans to support unpopular things like continue tax cuts, abortion bans, or allow unpopular candidates to win primaries because they manage to find a political sugar daddy.

Ironically, the GOP would be better off under European-style campaigning, assuming no other changes, where there are no primaries, campaigns are limited, and actually financially restrained.