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What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.
Or siccing anti-trust on tech when the government was unified during the early Trump administration, would have been another target rich environment.
The other side does it to energy whenever they get power. It should be an obvious action.
Because the red tribe has had no functional fight with its leadership, and developed no ways to pressure them to actually implement policies which favour them when the corporate donor class would rather not.
Its incredibly assymetric. The new deal and civil rights act have created decades worth of administrative and academic muscle to grab corporations and institutions by the throat and make them enforce left wing social norms.
ESG scores are backed through blackrock and co by the full force of the feeral reserve. You creditworthiness and stock value will drop by billions if you are insufficiently woke.
And right wingers are just now developing influencers networks and intellectuals to even notice this is happening because these tactics were so effective they killed even right wingers ability to organize for 50 years outside deep state approved National Review channels, so now everyone has to rediscover shit the John Birch society understood back in the 50s and the old right was actually organized to fight against in the 30s before FDR declared himself god empreror (actually he got SCOTUS to back down to him by threatening to just pack the courts, and made sure voters couldn't hold him accountable through aggressive FCC strongarming of any who spoke against him)
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Conservatism is a mistake.
By the time the conservative movement happened there was nothing left to conserve, the 50s were just the dying embers of the pre-new deal world the FDR had already killed. Ya you respected proffessors in the 50s, they had gotten their degrees in the 20s and 30s when actually would just be straight denied entry if you didn't know Latin. Not that you'd be failed if you didn't learn Latin, you were expected to show up at 18 practically fluent, and then start work harder than most modern professors don't even rise to doing, and you'd do that on day 1.
Of course all that had to go in 45 with the GI Bill, you can't enforce standards on uneducated war heroes...just make em read an English translation.
Every institution was degraded in this way. The modern university has the IQ required to graduate that a high school did in the early 40s.
Bank managers used to personally know everyone in town or the neighborhood, and be esteemed on par with the Doctors or Lawyers, and issue loans off his expert knowledge not only personal finance but the trustworthiness of the guy across from him... Imagine how conductive that is to building hightrust communities, and getting good actors established... fucking gone.
Everything the right valued: Community, high trust institutions, standards of excellence, opportunity matched with responsibility and consequences...
All these things had been attacked and killed or were just clinging onto life by the 50s...
A war was waged on the constitution, civilization and the idea of community itself... and "conservatives" are still sentimental that instead of fighting that war for basic decency itself, Americans went to die in France and adopted the exact same economic system as the fascists to do it.
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The Republican Party would need to do this, and it is not a unified, populist party. And the Democrats would be of little help; Al Franken paid back his Hollywood donors by co-sponsoring SOPA/PIPA (I forget which, specifically).
Ron and Rand Paul aren’t particularly influential with the rest of the party when they (or at least Ron did?) speak Austrian about how intellectual property laws are the state asserting ownership over your private, real, physical property. The MAGA wing don’t hold any strong opinion on IP for its own sake.
A culture warrior like DeSantis would have to take this on not at a state level, where in Florida he’s benefited from political migration surrounding COVID and tax policy, but at a national level where both parties get donations from large corporations as the latter seek to prevent/influence/shape regulation that impacts them.
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In part because red tribe is predisposed to be against government meddling. Look at how many got upset when DeSantis introduced anti masking rules despite the upset people being anti masking?
They believe effectively an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But what they don’t argue well against is that often these rules are necessiti restore the status quo ante that existed prior to state intervention (in this case the CDC).
I do think republicans if they take power should remove tax exempt status for NGOs and actually tax them heavier than corporations. At the very least, most red tribe could get behind taxing NGOs similar to corporations which will make Left Inc. use more resources to push their policies (thereby decreasing their reach).
What’s the difference between NGOs, nonprofits, charities, and 501(c)(3) churches in your plan?
It is a hard line to draw. One way to get 50% of the way there is make college endowments taxable.
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Our institutions weren't polarized like this when George W. Bush was in power, and the only Republican president who has taken office since then was Donald Trump.
So basically another way of phrasing your question is: Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.
I think it's a bit of a mistake to blame Donald Trump for this. The capture of institutions by woke ideology took pace under Obama's reign. Trump took advantage of a party that had already lost support among the intellectual and creative classes. In addition, the shift of college-educated professionals to the left has occurred in most western countries, not just the United States.
The President does have significant executive authority, and it can be used to advance an agenda even in opposition to the legions of bureaucratic lifers in DC. DeSantis does this in Florida on the regular; it can be done, but it's hard, and Trump didn't do it.
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More like why isn't congress passing copyright reform and daring a Democratic president to veto it instead of passing the 74th repeal of the ACA only to not pass one when there was a president who would repeal it.
Copyright reform seems like it would be pretty popular and mostly harms industries that are heavily aligned with the other party. It should be on the chopping block whenever the GOP gets power, both as direct you oppose us and as a threat to all the other industries out there.
If you're arguing that they should do copyright reform because it "hurts people on the other side more", then you're arguing for copyright reform as not being a terminal goal for whoever is doing this, and they'll always lose to people for whom it is. Namely, the corporations who, without any reference to politics, will pay large amounts of money to persuade politicians against this idea.
Most people don't give a fuck about copyright reform. Go on Youtube and you can easily find clips of movies floating around that the channel uploader most certainly does not have permission to upload, but they do it anyways. Twitch streamers steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyrighted content and no one has gone after them, even when they do it to mainstream TV shows like Master Chef.
There are better ways of fighting the Democrats and their supporters than trying to do copyright reform.
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Hey, I'm with you. Thirty years ago I was complaining online about the Copyright Term Extension Act and was devastated by the result in Eldridge v. Ashcroft.
But you need a strong and charismatic GOP leader to reorient the coalition in that way. The issue hasn't been polarized. The GOP electorate needs to be persuaded to support a term restriction.
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Shouldn't Trumps competence be judged controlling for the much higher level of polarisation, and the media and cultural headwinds against him?
Why should it? He doesn't seem like the kind of person to take anything seriously in the first place.
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The good news is they're learning how to do this- Desantis and Hegar are starting to figure out how to disincentivize wokeness.
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DeSantis seems to be one of the few who's shown even a basic understanding of how the game is played.
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The red public ethos is a grounded and comprehensive peace, not radicalism, extremism, punishment, or other forms of veiled civil war.
Which is the party of "tough on crime"?
If I were to blame the Right's ideology for this I think the better scapegoat is the right wing's predilection to be more pro-business and anti-regulation.
Wokeness is, after all, a regulatory regime.
When was that? Everyone was in the 1970s
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Crime is the exception which proves the rule. Red culture decries direct punishment of people who’ve committed no illegal actions to achieve their objectives, and criminals walked straight toward their punishment.
You’ve made my point for me: business is sacred, regulation is bad, arbitrary regulation as punishment doubly so.
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It is an action but likely to be an unsuccessful one. Trump could have done more but was heavily constrained by time and having other priorities, like immigration, Covid, tax cuts and fending off the FBI.
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