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Notes -
This bizarre drama is the party politics version of a Thucydides Trap. The right currently has two broad factions: one that wants to return to the 90s, and another that thinks that the 90s naturally led to 2020, so a reconfiguration of American politics, ideology, and society is needed. The first faction is larger but is seemingly losing the argument. People like Lindsay or Joel Berry, noticing this, are attempting to Gossip-Shame-Rally-Moralize the MacIntyre-adjacent right while they're still an obvious minority.
Usually, cancellers in this situation would draw the racist/fascist card. But ironically this accusation, despite being fairly plausible here, is so overdone and the right is so inured to it that everyone would ignore it. Thus the bizarre accusation that the target is "communist".
One is reminded of the unhinged factional battles in the French revolution, where the guy who ended the French monarchy was executed for being a crypto-royalist.
It's not that they didn't try, there was some hand-wringing over "kinism" a while back. So far none of these attacks seem to have landed, but it's annoying. Everyone's acting like the Trump victory means Mission Accomplished and we can descend into infighting now, as if the first Trump term never happened.
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