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.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 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).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link