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Notes -
I’ve got a couple of interesting(to me at least) observations about this general phenomenon-
ultra progressive positions are much, much less popular than you think they are. Defunding the police is probably less popular than sodomy laws or Texas style abortion bans. Most of the trans agenda polls at like 70-30 against. These positions are held by much smaller fractions of the population you think holds them than commonly believed.
I have a pet theory that wealthy educated people are simply more extreme most of the time. Your automechanic in Jacksonville statistically votes straight (R) in every election he shows up for, but he probably doesn’t support a six week abortion ban or permitless carry. And likewise shaniqua working at the McDonald’s he takes his lunch break at has far more political similarities with him than with the politicians she votes for. On the other hand college educated and high income Americans largely agree with the agendas of the parties they vote for. Both fundamentalist Christianity and ultra progressive spaces are mostly made up of high income people with college degrees, and realistically that indicates some impressive partisan polarization among wealthy degree holders.
Most progressives do not follow progressive beliefs in their personal lives- your median teacher is probably in a heterosexual marriage, seriously expects her children to abstain from promiscuity and not have sex at all until adulthood, goes to church every Sunday, and spent a few years out of the workforce to do childcare in spite of holding to progressive orthodoxy on political questions. Indeed, my own mother hit all the points above- I recall her both saying it was unfortunate that the state of Texas didn’t pass out condoms to high schoolers, and that I would be kicked out if I so much as kissed a girl(or boy, which she was clear she was fine with ‘but it would break your dad’s heart’) in the same conversation when I was beginning high school. In a real sense the far right are just rich college educated people who preach the values they live and the far left are just rich college educated people who live the values they preach(well ish, see below). This is partly because living progressive values is an impressively dumb decision that takes real and quasi-religious commitment, but still.
People who actually live far left woke lifestyles are a lot less functional and much poorer than people who don’t. Can’t remember the source, but LGBT people are actually really poor when you adjust for geography(functionally all of them live in cities) and trans people in particular are basically minimum wage slaves. Drug use, promiscuity, disability- all the things that wokes celebrate- all of them are associated with being poor and dysfunctional. Being non-binary and well educated seems mostly associated with having a heck of a lot of debt and probably some mental problems. And that’s without getting into things that have race as a confounder.
When I was growing up (c. 2010, middle-class Northeastern suburb), it was considered unusual but admirable to choose not to date in high school. The median parent understood that teenagers got horny and had sex, but wanted their children to know about the potential consequences. It produced a lot of rather deliberate teenagers. One friend sat down with a sheet of paper talking about the pros and cons of having sex, discussed at length potential contraceptives and failure rates, and considered getting an IUD. She was a senior in high school.
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I've seen commentary around this that the face of LGBT movement in the gay marriage activism was white guys, but the reality was that most LGBT people are POC, poor(er), and often involved in sex work. The two middle-class guys with a lot of disposable income and the gayby engendered via surrogacy were not the majority or the reality (hence, I suppose, why Pete and Chasten got pilloried as not being 'real' gays).
Wait, I thought it was well known that gay men tend to be economically ahead of straight men?
Gay men are behind straight married men, and to the extent that they’re ahead of men in general it’s because almost all of them live in cities which have higher wages but also higher prices.
Compared to urban straight men they’re behind.
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I'm confused... do you mean to say they don't live the values they preach, i.e. they preach leftism, but live like conservatives?
The claim is that most liberals preach leftism, but live like conservatives, while extreme leftists actually practice what they preach and suffer the consequences.
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I think he is saying that yes. It is basically the thesis of Charles Murray's book Coming Apart
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Eugenics was also a progressive belief. We don’t remember progressive failures because progressives manage to relabel them as “right wing”.
Who cares who stopped it and how if it still eventually failed?
Of course, probably the biggest "progressive ideology that was widely predicted to inevitably win but then failed" was not eugenics but Marxism-Leninism.
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I was talking with a friend about this recently. He mentioned that John F. Kennedy would be considered a conservative now. And that's true, if he was time-warped here with the same beliefs. But give him a couple weeks to grok the new reality, and (I bet) he would pretty quickly throw his old political compass out the window and buy into whatever the new hotness is.
Progressivism isn't a scalar, it's a vector. It's an arrow pointing left that will always point left no matter how far left we go.
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Not sure how you define fundamentalist Christian but unless you mean Mormon, Orthodox, and probably Society of St Pius X Catholics, most fundamentalist Christian denominations have historically tended to be below average in college degrees, (note AG, all the baptists, Church of Christ at the bottom) which fits with my experience. Lots of business owners but they're mostly business that don't require a degree landscaping, junk removal, tradesmen, real estate, and similar businesses and tons of NCOs and retired NCOs.
Even within the SSPX there will be people whose grandparents or great-grandparents decided during Vatican II that their families were going to pursue a moral traditionalist interpretation of Catholicism and just went with it (and who now merely see it as their family’s church) and the more zealous converts who regularly read First Things and go on tradcath forums and decide to deliberately pursue membership of their local SSPX congregation for pure ideological reasons in the 21st century.
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