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I've been watching this in real time with my own family, and both of your points are true. America has become polarized by gender and education, and progressives show up more. Richard Hanania has beat you to it:
The gender and class wars: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
My extended family is now clearly divided between the educated and the working class. This wasn't the case, but 2014, the year that broke the internet, was when it started. On the college-educated side, all the women are loud progressives, and the men mostly smile and nod (some are true believers, some are agreeable normies that are instinctively fitting in with their society, but a good fraction are actually quite based, and keeping it secret for professional and romantic survival). On the working class side, the men have become Q-anon adjacent, and it's the women who smile and nod (with about the same proportions of quiet dissent as the men)
Thanksgiving and Christmas have begun to fissure. People now go to the gathering of the grandparents/in-laws that are more close to them. We stop in briefly with my parents, but mostly go to my in-laws. I make a point of spending extra time with my dad during the holidays, but my mom has become difficult to be around.
Liberals show up more: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal
The two bubble charts are all you need. The liberal end of my family donates. They volunteer. They organize. Left-wing organizations are drowning in money, and they don't even need it because they are also drowning in young people who are willing to take sub-par salaries.
The conservative end of my family grills.
I'm a member of a few organizations, one with a notably right-wing membership. The leadership of that organization is full of lefties, because they keep showing up, volunteering, and promoting each other.
Grilling is not an option:
I was a griller. I wanted to stay a griller. If you're a griller in a sane, free society, you get a good job, you spend time with your family, you debate the Texas Crutch. There's no reason to get involved when you've got your own life to see to.
All social systems are fundamentally biased towards sociopaths, and thus progressivism.
Progressive politics appeals to busybodies. If you enjoy petty (and not-so-petty) tyranny, if you enjoy controlling others, if seeking status and validation from others is meaningful to you, you'll take the low paying job that gives you more status and control. You'll volunteer in organizations that suck your time. You'll respond to other sociopaths and donate money to them. You will conform, and force others to conform.
The humorless Karenocracy wins because the grillers are fun people with better things to do.
The solution: the fifth box of democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
There's a fifth box, and it's the box that best suits the individualist: The U-Haul box. In the last decade, tens of millions of Americans have moved, and of those, perhaps ten million are people moving from blue states to red ones as political refugees. Thirty years ago Texas and Florida had Democratic governors, and you couldn't carry a gun in either one.
I'm not going to out-organize, out-volunteer, or out-donate the progressives. I'm not going to out-social-pressure them or give up a life of comfort for the joy of interfering in other's lives, like they do.
Even if I did, it would be a lose-lose - either let them take the grill from my life, or give up my grilling time to fight them.
I am better at earning a good living, managing and keeping my money, and moving on though. I used to live in a blue state, now I live in a red one. I used to pay for things, now I pirate them. I used to be a member of organizations, now I encourage people to undermine them. I used to live in a democracy. Now I practice Irish Democracy.
The problem with the U-Haul box is twofold. One is the progressives have Federal control; as goes California, so goes the US. Can't grill if the Department of Energy sets energy efficiency standards limiting grills to one candlepower. The other is the normies on the left don't like the results of progressivism either, but they don't connect their votes to those results. Instead they move away from the areas they Californicated, and then vote for those same policies in the new place.
Californians are actually making many places more conservative. Native Texas are actually slightly +D, it's the California transplants that keep it red. Idaho became red because of California transplants.
As of now, I'm winning bigly huge. I can carry a firearm without a permit, I pay some of the lowest taxes in the developed world, and my governor is attacking Woko Haram on all fronts in the universities. In many ways I am actually more free than in years before.
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I think you vastly overestimate the value of federal control, and even state control, see Kern County vs the State of California at the height of the pandemic.
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I have a simple solution to get things started quickly. Make donations to college sports non-tax deductible.
Rich left wingers fund left wing organizations. Rich right wingers fund college football.
Republicans need to start football shaming the wealthy.
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Sorry, but I don’t resonate with this at all. I think I used to, but it seems like you’re just giving up. It’s sad to hear that your family is so polarized, but there are plenty of things that can bring family together for the holidays without getting mired in politics. I don’t agree at all politically, spiritually, culturally with certain close members of my family, but we have Thanksgiving and/or Christmas together every year and do things to enjoy each other’s company. We never discuss politics. We don’t have to!
The reason conservatives like to grill is because conservatives won on almost everything of consequence in the 20th century. Income tax rates have never been lower. Obamacare was effectively a subsidy for large health insurance corporations—far from single payer that progressives really want. Has Biden even uttered the phrase ‘Medicare for All’ this decade? Maybe he’s too busy crushing union strikes in Michigan to notice? Unrestricted immigration continues to depress low-skilled wages. It is basically impossible to criticize military spending in Congress, aside from gadflies on the populist right. The hourly federal minimum wage remains at $7.25. We have had basically no financial regulatory overhauls since 2010. The federal student loan payment moratorium is over. The ghost of Ronald Reagan reigns supreme in both the Republican and Democratic parties. There is no economic ‘Left’ in America anymore. What progressives seem to care most about is whether enough transgender minorities serve on the Boards at Citigroup or ExxonMobil. Progressives are totally defanged in the United States. What would Huey Long or Teddy Roosevelt think if they were transported in time and looked on at the progressive movement as it exists today?
So boomers will continue to grill, because tax rates are low, real estate prices are high, and their retirement portfolio continues to rise in value. Only once their personal comfort is threatened might they get activated. But as a merchant, commercial nation, the US has so much more left to fall before the pendulum shifts back to conservatism. It’s incredible how much wealthier and more economically prosperous the US is compared to the rest of the world, for a country of its size. People will put up with any godless cultural abomination if they are fat and entertained!
You want an institution that isn’t dominated by progressives? Try your local evangelical, non-denominational church. By all means, move out of the godforsaken downtown area of your city. But moving to another state won’t stop the rot, because the rot will follow you eventually. Join a church, tithe, volunteer, and put your faith not in a political party or economic system but in God, who restores all things.
The purpose of the "left", as it has ever been, is increasing the power of the PMC. When the ownership class was the greatest threat, the Left pretended to help the working class. Now that the ownership class has been subsumed, the working class is the greatest threat to the PMC, and they have adjusted their politics as necessary.
I've been to church, and they have the exact same problems as the progressives. The label on the package may change, but church ladies and SJWs behave in the exact same smarmy, status-seeking, busybody fashion.
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This is not true. It's true that they have been higher.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/original_optimized/public/book_images/3.1.5.2.png?itok=P1wdtomc
Obamacare is one of your examples of conservatives winning, because it was a subsidy?
Mass immigration is an example of conservatives winning?
You also deftly avoided social issues, where - apart from recently on abortion - conservatives have had a long, long rout. They can't even vote to get rid of gay marriage any more, while DEI is the official ideology of one institution after another. For all the culture war's early focus on higher education, you have to provide a DEI statement to even apply to teach at most US colleges.
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With progressives around? No, there are not. They WILL get onto politics, even in a neutral space, even when you've agreed "no politics", because not only do they believe their politics aren't politics, they're just politeness, they also believe you should never ever be free of their politics.
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