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naraburns  nihil supernum  1mo ago (text post)   27170 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Didn't quite a few people here lament that the libs had won the US culture war a couple years ago?

And now they've lost it? What happened?

They haven't lost the war. They've lost a battle. With that said, they've lost a bunch of battles in the past couple of years, so an explanation is still warranted.

The look of things is that the inroads the right has made into the tech world (most notably Elon Musk buying Twitter, but to some degree also alt-tech getting its act together with places like Substack) were critical; it seems that SJ's clean sweep of "first-tier" social media platform censorship was actually at least somewhat load-bearing in keeping the youth loyal (to come back to the US election - the swing among 18-29s was 15% for men and 7% for women, and this despite Jan 6). Apparently, Elon Musk spending ~$100,000,000,000 spearing his white whale ($44b buying Twitter, the rest in losses from Biden's "Fair Game" order) actually hit a vital organ.

SJ is not dead. They still have the education system and a good chunk of company bureaucracies in their pocket, and while Musk may have outlasted Biden, SJ might yet manage to pull off replacing Twitter. They're definitely on the back foot, though; SJ had at first the advantage of surprise and then an aura of inevitability, but they have neither now. And, of course, one must always factor in that most tail risks hit SJ much harder than its adversaries.

When I went into work this morning, the credit team that negotiates with the banks for funding to keep day-to-day operations going had to prove, to Larry Fink's satisfaction, that we were on track to meet DEI goals. That these DEI goals are in blatant violation of laws protecting investors from their wealth managers absconding with their investments in order to further their own political policy objectives, even when this is to the blatant detriment of the investors, is somehow completely irrelevant.

Presumably, sometime after taking the Oath of Office, President Trump will once again - he did this in 2017, remember? - issue an Executive Order clarifying that taking your investor's funds to give sweetheart loans to companies that are adequately woke is, in fact, a violation of investor protection laws designed specifically to stop such actions. And presumably, the Department of Justice will once again laugh this off and and advise the President that "the Executive has passed his Executive Order. Now let us see him enforce it" just as they did back then, until such time as a friendlier administration can take power and issue an Executive Order mandating that such behavior be done.

he did this in 2017, remember? -

Indeed but it was in 2020, so he delayed by N days

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-09-28/pdf/2020-21534.pdf

I have germ of a post thats been percolating since this exchange here about how it's dumb to indulge in doomerism that I ought to flesh out along these lines.

But to answer your question about "what happened", the answer is that the fight isnt over until everyone agrees on who won. Reaganism was supposed to have been done-in by the end of the Cold War and the rise of "Progress" and Globalization but, to all appearances, its back baby.

Qui uincit non est uictor nisi uictus fatetur.

I donno. Virtually every organ of culture I used to enjoy has been fully captured and is pushing far left talking points. I don't expect this to change. The best I see in opposition is a few video games being accidentally based by either taking an agnostic stance on modern day political issues, or apparently having feminine women? Actually Talos Principle II just had a normal heteronormative nuclear (robot) family, which was depicted as something wholesome and meaningful, as opposed to a source of existential horror and suffering. But I see no full throated condemnations of globalism, or odes to nationalism. Few works with any awareness of the human condition, or why conserving tradition might actually be wise and prudent. And these are silly things to expect in games granted, but I'm weighing it against the vast bulk of games with pronouns, and body type A/B, and bizarre anachronistic Orange Man Bad monologues or trans rights activist spiels. And I don't see this changing hardly at all. The best a game made by a conservative can pull off is to keep the creators politics a secret, lest the franchise be torn from their grasp and they get ejected from the fandom of their own creation. Like Notch or Scott Cawthon.

Will this change? Uuuuuuuuh. I mean never say never, but I see no signs of it. It's an absolute crushing culture war victory for the left. Pretty much all anyone can hope for is that the industry completely crashes because of all the brain rot and detachment from what audiences really want.

Actually Talos Principle II just had a normal heteronormative nuclear (robot) family, which was depicted as something wholesome and meaningful, as opposed to a source of existential horror and suffering.

Don't forget that the robots were sexless and chose their genders themselves. It was only a 50% chance that the family would be heteronormative.

What if political partisanship and DEI is banned, at risk of being fired and losing all funding or special legal status. It worked somewhat for De Santis with Disney and with the Supreme Court with Universities. This could work in a few ways: DEI for political views, or maybe making journalists be sued for lying, or maybe you can have courts audit internal chats of journalists.

Most organisations would bend the knee if funding/firing is at stake (and it should be). It should also apply to all grant, university, NGO, contracts, etc.

Wasn't this actually a thing during at least part of the Trump administration for government contracts (which Biden reversed, naturally)? I would hope it makes a return.

They have not lost it. But they did spend a ton of social capital on the failed cause of stopping orange man, which I think was a foolish move.

Didn't quite a few people here lament that the libs had won the US culture war a couple years ago?

And now they've lost it? What happened?

I mean, short version, Trump's a lib--at least by the standards of the US culture war circa 1990. He's "meh" on abortion, broadly pro-marijuana, unfaithful to his wives, venal, vain, irreligious, vulgar... the Republican coalition circa William F. Buckley, Jr. was capitalists, anti-communists, and the religious right. Today it's more like "lib-right" capitalists, anti-Wokists, and the working class. Religious conservatives are a bit like black democrats, now: faithful to the party, but insufficient to deliver victories and so never given more than lip service. (Of course, this has resulted in some "blaxit" political defections, just as religious organizations are importing Wokism.)

Buckley's expressed view was that the role of the conservative was to stand athwart history yelling "stop!" But new people are born. Old ones die. Each new generation must decide for itself what received wisdom it will preserve, and what it will discard. But "decide" may be putting it too strongly; each new generation will preserve some wisdom, and discard other, and often very little effort will be put into consciously deciding which will be which. Memes, like genes, get passed along in a variety of ways, and may persist for a variety of reasons.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s-1970s, itself an outgrowth of the liberal progressivism of the early 20th century, made substantial memetic inroads by casting tradition to the wayside. This has historically been a ruinous approach, but thanks to the march of science and technological advancement, "old lore" is not the asset it has been. George W. Bush was probably Buckley's Last Stand. Obama's defeat of Romney (not incidentally, a religious capitalist whose prophecies Obama mocked in his infamous "the 1980s are now calling" comment) was the end of Buckley Republicanism as a going concern. (The rest of that obviously scripted line accuses Romney of trying to bring back the global policies of the 1980s, the social policies of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s. And Obama manages to make it sound like a bad idea!)

But memes, like genes, don't simply give up. They respond to selection pressure. Much of Buckley Republicanism was salvageable, particularly those bits well-suited to anti-Wokism (through Wokism's own Communist heritage). But the vulnerabilities--like religious devotion--had to be discarded, or at least relegated to vestigial status. Identity politics dominated the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in Obama's primary defeat of the perpetual political bridesmaid, Hillary Clinton. So Republicans adopted identity politics. The white working class had joined Reagan's Republicans in response to increased competition from racial minorities; Trump turned this into a race-blind "big tent" populism. Straight-laced, uptight, moralizing religious busybodies couldn't really survive the onslaught of Internet irreverence, so they were replaced with earthy, vulgar, but masculine men. And so on and so forth.

Like bacteria swapping DNA, the major American political movements clashed, and each was changed by the other. Much of the "lib" agenda circa 1990 is now just... American culture. But much of the "conservative" agenda circa 1990 is, too! So now there are different humans with different tastes and different political priorities, and the pendulum continues its incessant swing. By the time you get the new coalitions really, truly figured out... it'll be time for you to retire and let someone else try the next one.

Religious conservatives are a bit like black democrats, now: faithful to the party, but insufficient to deliver victories and so never given more than lip service.

Religious conservatives do get things out of our partnership with the GOP- notably, protection from cultural progressives, but we get at least half a loaf on abortion, and in red states we often get benefits about schools(based charters, for example).

They haven't lost it. They still control the same institutions as before, except for the actual presidency.

Can't Trump just utter his old catchphrase "you're fired" ?

To answer my own question: not so easily, but they have a plan https://goodauthority.org/news/why-the-president-cant-just-fire-bureaucrats/

Project 2025 actually has a well thought out section on the levels Trump has https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-03.pdf

Wokeness — I refuse to use scarequotes as if it's not a real and easily definable ideology — took over all the real institutions of power over the last 30 years, and in a sudden rush in 2020. Major companies without DEI goals, universities that don't act as seminaries for wokeness, and media and information sources that don't assume wokeness as a foundational premise are as rare as hen teeth.

2024 Republicans (who include several anti-woke ideologies under their tent) have seized the political organs. This is because public office is the only part of the American power structure that takes input from the dalit and shudra castes, or to some extent even the vaisyas.

Whether political power will translate to real institutional change is yet to be seen. I predict that unless Trump is willing to be a Red Caesar, that is, to step out of the bounds of his legal constitutional authority and dare anyone to stop him, it will not.

There’s no real end to the culture war. Battles and skirmishes can be won, but war….war never changes.

Those who say the lefts has won are mostly right wingers who spend a lot of time among cultural elites and other high status places and feel totally out of place and like a small minority. It’s easy to feel like you’ve lost when you see so little right wing influence anywhere

No. They’ve still won it. Reports of a pendulum swing are greatly exaggerated.

I don’t think most people voted for Trump as an explicit anti-woke vote. My impression is that the modal voter was voting mainly on the economy, with maybe a smattering of other more “procedural” considerations in play (the assassination attempts, the lawfare, etc). I don’t think wokeness was really on the radar this election cycle for most people.

voting mainly on the economy

AKA people who will either vote D or just go back into their holes next election when Trump fails to do any of the impossible things to the economy that he has promised them. If the Dems learn anything this election its that the key to dealing with rubes isn't to talk down to them or try to convince them of anything but to simply tell lies right to their face.

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