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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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My suspicion as to why Liberalism was weak to wokeness was twofold.

  1. The average person believes that society was wrong about homosexuality. As such, when a new movement that professes to be like the gay movement arises, they're very eager to show they wouldn't have made the same mistakes as their predecessors. (There's a major difference between someone who is gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and someone who is queer/LGBTQ+ - I'm referring to the former group on terms of what the average person would accept).
  2. The right wing still carries a lot of baggage from some specific forms of christians. A very common life path is someone who is raised in a religious environment, then goes to university. People who are less intelligent who follow rules tend to enforce them without understanding the purpose behind them (for example, at work you could have a procedure to set the printer page delay to 15 seconds because the color ink doesn't dry quickly - someone intelligent would know a black and white print could have no delay, while someone less intelligent would do it every time). As a result, the kids who go to university feel that there are no redeeming factors to christianity, and feel it represents the right.

I think that if wokeness suffers a hearts and minds defeat, as opposed to what Trump is doing, it actually would be possible to go back to liberalism. We'd have in our cultural milieu a reference to leftism going insane, which would produce antibodies against the empathy spirals that the current left uses.

That being said, I don't think that we are currently on that trajectory - I think that Trump (like Biden and Obama) is projecting a culture change top down, and that we have too much of a bifurcation in beliefs to return to it yet. I honestly think that a very major country (like, G7) has to fall specifically from wokeness (similar to the fall of the Soviet Union) before we can see the potential for it to return.