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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   28440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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I am not a big fan of Trump. I think he is a narcissistic dilettante whose political success is largely attributable to the establishment closing doors to any opponent with better manners.

Now. On any other platform, this throat clearing would be a foolish attempt to buy me enough good boy points for the but that is about to follow. Here, in this den of contrarians, it is a brave and bold declaration of my independence and proof that I am better and more beautiful than you. But I digress.

But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side.

This is yet another establishment-aligned progressive insisting that you adopt his frame and meet him at 90% of the way all the while he calls you a fascist. We're approaching Tordenskjold-levels of audacity here. Imagine a Trumpist asking progressives to publicly admit that DEI is a scam designed to unfairly siphon away resources from white and Asian men but that they just like the Democrat's plan for health care a little bit more. The only way I can make sense of this sense of entitlement is that the field of public discourse has been so skewed for so long, those favoured by this state of affairs have accepted it as normal.

Imagine a Trumpist asking progressives to publicly admit that DEI is a scam designed to unfairly siphon away resources from white and Asian men but that they just like the Democrat's plan for health care a little bit more

Perhaps they don't use precisely those terms, but this sort of thing gets said by Democrats/progressives way more than Trumpists would ever criticise Jan 6. The whole post-election period has seen quite a lot of hand-wringing over perceived excesses of wokeness costing Democrats, from many people firmly within the progressive/Democratic/left-center-left coalition, far more at any rate than Trumpists are willing to say 'I think Trump behaved poorly in re Jan 6 but my agreements with him elsewhere overcome that objection'.

If Trump had lost the election we would definitely see major self criticism from within republican ranks of trumpism

For both parties it seemed like it should have been an easy win

The whole post-election period has seen quite a lot of hand-wringing over perceived excesses of wokeness costing Democrats

The only thing I have seen that vaguely resembles this is some lament about how we need to be better at explaining to men that feminism helps them, too. Which is certainly a take.

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