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Notes -
I don’t know that it’s a transformation of values. Political parties are alliances, and you are trying to take the government or some other institution by force, and you can’t do that without numbers. As such, you’ll take anyone you can get who will sign onto as many of your values as you can. At this juncture, the conservatives don’t control the means of cultural production (they have conservative media and explicitly Christian media, but this is fairly niche and doesn’t really set the cultural tone), don’t control any of education, nor do they control the deep state.
This is obviously a problem, and it’s going to take a pretty big alliance to move the needle here. Purity tests only make sense after the victory, not before. It’s actually the biggest tell that a group is a hegemon — it has the luxury of purging itself of those who do not agree with them. If you can maintain control without heresy, you’re in firm control of the cultural battlefield. Conservatives cannot make this mistake— if they start purging heresy before they get control over culture, education, and the government (and not just the elected government, the deep state is probably more important here) they’ll slide back into irrelevance and the left will go right back to preaching socialism and LGBT stuff and enforcing their agenda.
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