site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I wanted to write something about this, but old dickie Hanania beat me to it.

Conservatives are losing the "don't be weirdos” contest

I can’t resist commenting on how the ongoing freakout over the Kansas City Chiefs making the Super Bowl perfectly encapsulates everything that has gone wrong. Taylor Swift may have endorsed Biden in 2020, but as Max Meyer pointed out after attending one of her concerts, everything about her aesthetic and place in the culture is implicitly conservative. Her fans want to be attractive and meet men. They’re not interested in changing their sex or cheering for urban mobs looting the local supermarket. If you simply give them some semblance of normalcy, they’ll be on your side and vote in opposition to the left and what it has become. But instead of that, they get conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl being rigged so Swift can then endorse Biden.

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it, not racist but not feeling particularly guilty about the sins of their country, and who will naturally gravitate towards whichever political coalition comes across as the most normal, willing to let them go about their lives watching football or buying makeup from Sephora. People like this used to be natural conservatives, and especially given the Great Awokening, they still should today. They’re not, mostly because Republicans were able to overturn Roe and went out and created a cult of personality around perhaps the least normal politician the country has ever had.

There’s something deeply poetic about this freakout centering around football, the sport that has always served as a symbol of wholesome American normalcy. The old mantra of “the personal is political” always reflected a major electoral weakness of the left. It revealed an inability to have any thoughts or passions that aren’t part of an ideological agenda. Most people don’t care about politics all that much, and feel more positively inclined towards whichever tribe doesn’t try to make them feel guilty about that fact. If you’re watching the AFC Championship game and try to steer the conversation to which players are vaxxed, most sports fans aren’t going to want to talk to you anymore. For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.

As a Republican, I’m amused and horrified. One common reaction was summed up by a tweet reading simply “We don’t deserve to win.” Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.

Vivek, so recently a Republican candidate for President widely taken seriously, added to this genre tweeting out:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.

Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!

The problem is that even if you believe that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are artificially propped up, that Taylor is the result of media coverage and that the whole NFL is WWE with end zones, saying it doesn’t actually help you capture the millions of people who are fans of them. “Media Influence” is nearly always a Russell Conjugation: other people’s tastes are the result of media bias, my tastes are pure and formed entirely individually. People will almost never change their tastes as a result of being informed that they were “influenced” by the media, they will get angry. People will easily be convinced that other people are sheeple, they will almost never be convinced that they are. “Pop singers” Swifties will react angrily to this accusation, as will Chiefs fans. Neither will react kindly to the insinuation that their favorite thing is bullshit.

I can’t go through a week without hearing about Kelce from my mother or Swift from my wife. My wife is deep into the swiftie Gaylor conspiracy universe and asks my opinion on them when we’re stoned. My mother listens to every episode of the Kelce Brothers’ podcast, and gives me the highlights. Both are wealthy married white women, who own homes and cars, who value family and capitalism. My mother is not going to be convinced that she likes Travis Kelce because of the deep state and not because he is really good at getting open and he’s funny on mic. My wife is not going to be convinced that she doesn’t really like singing along to I Can See You. It’s a losing strategy to try to convince them that it’s all fake: most people start from the emotional opinion that everything is fake, they aren’t rationally convinced. Just as most atheists turn against the church for personal reasons and then become aware of all the rational arguments and contradictions involved.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic. Even when the inevitable Swift endorsement comes, it will feel hollow. Swift will be put in an uncomfortable position, weakened by being forced to deny being a white supremacist. Her fans will be offended by being called racists for liking the music they like, and start to turn against those calling them racists.

Of course, this isn’t happening because I doubt that Trump is declaring “Holy War” on Swift. That’s just a little unsourced TDS tidbit the liberal media couldn’t resist. This is just various hustling influencers seizing on a big name. But if you want to be an insurgent party, discipline is key, and this isn’t it.

AND YET

I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world. The captured version of the NFL that we watch every week, with “STOP RACISM” written on helmets and in the end zones, with required interviews for minority coaching candidates*, with the mildly absurd farce of wildly-celebrated female coaches in minor functionary roles buried on the staff, with every ad break featuring female athletes (and especially the hypothetical female high school football player featured over and over). Equally, I saw the Eras Tour movie with my wife, and friends of ours went to the concert. It was clear that comparing what was on camera to the crowd at the actual concerts, they went out of their way to make it seem less white than it was. Prominent romantic roles were given to Black Male dancers on stage, despite Taylor herself dating only white men historically, prominent roles were given to flamboyantly gay and trans dancers. Taylor put in the effort in advance to make it a comfortable experience for liberals.

So when Richard says:

For a while, liberals were “that guy,” and many of their activists still have this flaw, but conservatives have increasingly neutralized what should be a natural advantage for them, and the way right-wing media is covering the NFL playoffs indicates that if anything the left can now win the contest over who’s more able to just sit back and watch a football game.

He’s ignoring the context. Liberals were “that guy” for years, and they were loudly whiny, and they succeeded. The NFL and pop culture and ordinary speech changed to accommodate liberals. And it seems to be working, with ratings rebounding from 2016 downtrends. But Hanania is praising liberals for being able to watch a football game telecast that has been designed to soothe them, while blaming Conservatives for being unable to watch a telecast that has been designed to soothe their enemies. It’s a trap Conservatives have fallen into, and they should be shamed for it! But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.

*The Rooney Rule originally struck me as fairly decent, fairly fair: teams must interview one minority candidate for coaching positions. No requirement to hire, but you have to interview. The results have become increasingly absurd. The Eagles had black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators who had a terrible embarrassing end to the season, but had done well before. Both got a few token Head Coach interviews, to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and as a result the Eagles did not fire them, hanging onto them for way longer than anyone believed the Eagles would bring them back. Because if you get a black coach hired away, you get a compensatory draft pick for it. It was a silly spectacle to watch.

The real question is why people think the NFL has a left-wing bias. Yeah, they have the End Hate messages and whatever, but that seems more like a sop to their predominantly black employee base in the wake of the Kaepernick scandal and 2020 protests than a serious political statement. If you look at the political leanings of the actual owners, you have:

  • Arizona Cardinals: Bidwell — Republican, but supports Sinema, so probably moderate

  • Atlanta Falcons: Arthur Blank — Democrat

  • Baltimore Ravens: Stephen Biscotti — Inconclusive, but a pretty big Catholic, for whatever that's worth

  • Buffalo Bills: Pegula — Moderate, made his money from fracking (I personally worked on the sale that raised the capital for him to buy the team)

  • Carolina Panthers: David Tepper — Republican, but pro gay rights

  • Chicago Bears: McCaskey (Halas) — Inconclusive, but George openly feuded with Trump during the national anthem controversy

  • Cincinnati Bengals: Brown — Republican

  • Cleveland Browns: Jimmy Haslam — Republican

  • Dallas Cowboys: Jerry Jones — Republican, Trump supporter

  • Denver Broncos: Joe Ellis — Republican

  • Detroit Lions: Ford — Democrat

  • Green Bay Packers: n/a — Inconclusive. Held by stock, but the team president leans left

  • Houston Texans: McNair — Republican

  • Indianapolis Colts: Irsay — Republican

  • Jacksonville Jaguars: Shahid Khan — probably more interested in British politics, but sided with the players during the anthem controversy

  • Kansas City Chiefs: Hunt — Republican

  • Las Vegas Raiders: Davis — Inconclusive, Mark doesn't talk about politics, but the old man seemed pretty liberal

  • Los Angeles Chargers: Dean Spanos — Republican

  • Los Angeles Rams: Kroenke — Definite Republican lean, Trump included, but also supports some Democrats

  • Miami Dolphins: Stephen M. Ross — Republican, Trump supporter

  • Minnesota Vikings: Zygi Wilf — Democrat

  • New England Patriots: Robert Kraft — Probably a Democrat, but an open Trump supporter

  • New Orleans Saints: Benson — Republican

  • New York Giants: Mara/Tisch — Democrat

  • New York Jets: Woody Johnson — Republican, Trump Diplomatic Appointee

  • Philadelphia Eagles: Lurie — Democrat

  • Pittsburgh Steelers: Rooney — Democrat, Dan was an Obama Diplomatic Appointee

  • San Francisco 49ers: DeBartolo — Inconclusive. Denise is a Democrat, but Trump pardoned Eddie. It should be noted that Eddie was forced to give his sister control of the team after he was convicted of public corruption.

  • Seattle Seahawks: Allen — Inconclusive. Paul was a Republican, but he's dead and team ownership is held in trust. Jody controls the team and she's pretty bipartisan.

  • Tampa Bay Bucs: Glazer — Moderate, Eddie's a confirmed Trump supporter.

  • Tennessee Titans: Adams — Republican

  • Washington Commanders: Josh Harris — Republican

  • Commissioner: Roger Goodell — Republican

By my final tally, there are 16 confirmed Republicans, or over half the league, plus the Commish, plus Kraft, who may not be a Republican but likes Trump. Of the remainder, I'll count 10 confirmed Democrats or left-leaners. That leaves five who are inconclusive. At best, you might be able to argue that half the league wants to fix the country's biggest sporting event to get a political endorsement that may or may not have any impact on the election. The team that would be the beneficiary of this would be at odds with the politics of the whole thing, since the Hunt family have been big Texas Republicans for a long time. On the other side, Denise DeBartolo York has donated to Democrats in Ohio. She's also from Youngstown, and the Democratic Party there is a lot more conservative than in the country at large; it's mostly Trump country these days. It also has corrupt politics, so I wouldn't put taking a dive past her if they sweetened the pot enough. Steve was already busted for political corruption (and he lost a lot of money financing the Jacksons Victory Tour in 1984 because he didn't know what he was doing). I'd say it's unlikely that there's enough motivation among ownership and the commissioner to do something like this, and there's certainly enough conservative owners that even if the league did try it you'd have quite a few screaming about it publicly.

I think the problem is that people have a tendency to think of "The NFL" as this faceless behemoth that has whatever characteristics they want it to have depending on how they're feeling that day. They don't stop to consider that this is an organization run by real people with real personalities and real opinions, and that the only thing they really agree on is that they all want to make as much money as possible. I don't see how the NFL, viewed in that light, would have any reason to fix a championship for political reasons.

Do I have to beat my usual drum again? Fine.

I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world.

I agree. He's just buying into it in a deeper way than you even imagine. A terminally online way, where people arguing about niche topics supposedly disrupts normalcy and is therefore maximally uncool. But is this actually relevant? If you want maximal normalcy, should you follow Hanania's advice?

When it comes to attacks on normalcy and normal life, forget Republicans arguing about sports and Democrats arguing about Trans people. Forget that an orange man and a dementia man are competing to be president. The amount of time either matters for anyone's normal, daily routine is <1% of their life. You know what did matter for seriously disrupting normal life?

Covid restrictions.

Every other policy or political event is a rounding error for your life in comparison. And for these restrictions, Democrats consistently sided against normalcy. Whether it be demanding that people wear weird clothing, sit in weird arrangements, attend or not attend certain places at certain times with certain people etc etc, and none of it was normal. The majority of political decisions affect very few people. Arguments about drug law only affects drug users, arguments about violent crime affects only the criminals and the victims. But masks? Business closures? School closures? Vaccine mandates? Each of these is broadsiding a huge swath of the population with anti-normalcy. And a few rants about WWE or NFL or Taylor Swift is never going to be equivalent to that.

Is this MAGA/Taylor conflict even real or just a media ploy to worsen Trump's chances by creating conflicts out of nothing?

I have no doubt that there are some Trump people who really dislike Taylor and have come up with conspiracy theories. Trump supporters and conspiracy theories go together like peas in a pod. Is this specifically a significant or representative thing worthy of global coverage on its merits? It even filtered through to Australian newspapers.

There was a Simpson's episode where Bart manipulated the Principal and teachers into a strike over pay, whispering in their ear that the other side was about to crack, or telling the teachers that Skinner thought they would chicken out. After Haley got run over by the Trump train, the plotters wouldn't have gone idle, they'd have searched for some new method to attack Trump.

I suspect that the direct Trump stuff is bullshit. It's too good to be true for the worst people in the world.

But the Taylor stuff is coming organically from Fox News and Vivek and co tweeting it out. There's somebody out there who organically believes this, or thinks it's a good MAGA play for whatever reason.

While publicly obsessing about Taylor Swift is a bit nutty, actual democrat policies like releasing criminal suspects without bail, gender "trasitions" for minors and refusing to enforce the border are way crazier and have a real life impact. Hanania just wants craziness with a luxury belief flavor.

He's opposed to all of those?

I think he's talking more about how publically unhinged you are being, vs how crazy your policies are, because the former is more closely tied to public opinion, even if the latter is objectively more important.

Hanania is not opposed to lax border enforcement. He thinks Americans should embrace lax border enforcement and cultivate a servant class of Mesoamerican dwarfs similar to the domestic workers of Asia and Africa, and that failure to do so is self-sabotaging racism that stops us from living like feudal lords.

Craziness that causes real life harm is attractive because it shows strength. Conservative craziness is cringe because it's impotent and doesn't harm anybody.

I'm not too interested in this topic at all to be honest, but I think it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."

One of the things I hate about celebrity culture is how managed all of a celebrity's opinions and stances seem. There's always 'leaks' about things months ahead, or this sort of manufactured controversy that ends up being true. For once I'd like to see a big celebrity just shake things up and show some actual humanity and agency.

Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.

Isn’t that person Kanye?

Edit Should’ve kept reading…others mentioned it and actually added context

Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.

Tell that to Nikki Minaj.

Why do you think they just sicced Roc-Nation affiliated Meg Thee Stallion on her?

Who's Jay Z's best buddy? Democratic potentate Obama

Think about it! ( Huh, I see the appeal now. Conspiracy stuff is fun)

She endorsed Biden the last time and endorsed democrats running in Tennessee. Since Trump is likely to be the Republican candidate she's going to endorse the democrat again.

I'd want to see Taylor decide to release an artsy jazz-fusion concept double album. Think of the collaborators she could bring in! Every Jazz virtuoso living would happily work with her on an album guaranteed to go number one despite being relentlessly weird.

it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."

Or as Freddie puts it, The World Needs Taylor Swift Goblin Mode.

That kind of person exists, his name is Kanye West and it was hilarious until it started being sad as it became harder and harder to ignore that his outbursts, his inability to read social cues (to play armchair psychiatrist, I think he is likely a savant autist), were not only selecting him out of super-stardom but alienating him from friends and family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West

Kanye West openly is bipolar and been on a variety of medications. His anti-semitisn was not a result of him vile racism or careful research to uncover the truth, it was a result of ill paranoia making him believe conspiracy theories. Regardless of whether you believe the jews are the most persecuted minority in history or you're part of the Dark Enlightenment who thinks the Jews are very suspicious, it should be obvious Kanye believed what he did because of mental illness not because he's also part of the dark enlightenment.

I've found Kanye to be a good illustration of how politically captured large swathes of my field (medicine) are.

Everyone hates Kanye. A lot. Even if you point out that it's clearly mental illness. Even to psychiatrists. In fact you may end up a pariah just for reminding everyone that Kanye has mental illness and that this informs his behavior.

It makes me feel gross.

That was not his only outburst though, his first big moment in the spotlight (outside of his niche) in pop culture was the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" incident, something he probably believed outside of mental illness paranoia (it was commonly believed in liberal circles), but it was just indelicate to say in a charity marathon.

Or the "imma let you finish" incident, which had nothing to do with politics or paranoia but everything to do with misunderstanding what's appropriate.

Up until he touched the third rail his outbursts were just that of someone telling his mind the way you're not supposed to, doubly so when you have a public persona to maintain. I'm not convinced if his touching the third rail is meaningfully different except in the severity of the pushback he got.

Outbursts are one thing. Those are just lact of tack. I am saying what led him to believe Hitler made going points was the paranoia. Without mental illness, maybe he would've still said "fuck Biden" or "fuck Trump". But without mental illness, he'd have never said

“Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone, and Jewish people are not going to tell me, ‘You can love us and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography.’ But this guy that invented highways and invented the very microphone I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good and I’m done with that. I’m done with the classifications.”

That's just not something someone, especially a black musician who used to be liberal, would ever believe without mental illness.

Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter. That said there is a niceness to his name in this discussion because Taylor Swift is also--in a real but not total measure--popular for being popular

It's not her music. It's not bad, I don't call music bad, but I can name individual songs in her discography I like. There are artists with categorically superior lyricism and vocals and production who don't have her success. Unappreciated or especially fan-asserted "underrated" acts are the nature of music but where artists might have solid radio play, single and album sales, merch and ticket sales, it's not the music that results in an Instagram with close to 300 million followers. Swift is a saint next to Whore of Babylon Kylie Jenner who sells makeup, filters and utterly disastrous self-concern and narcissism to her 400 million followers. It's because winners win. The perception of being popular makes a thing more popular. Swift has been on the literal side of "highly newsworthy" this year, and that attention brings more attention, young people, especially women, seeing her popularity become interested if not before and/or more interested in her for that popularity. Her endorsement will produce votes, I don't think many, but any is bad. Those not at consequence for their politics should not be listened to about politics. You gotta have skin in the game or your ideas will become informed by privilege and what ought to be rather than what is.

My only skin in this game is living in Chiefs country, Missouri. I know a lot of people who I saw wearing Chiefs gear 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who were hoping for the success they now enjoy. I'm happy for them, I don't give a shit about the Chiefs but there's always a bit of a pleasant feeling with the local team winning the big game. I also know people who never said a thing about the Chiefs, not after two Super Bowl wins, not until Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift became a thing. I've seen them gleefully posting "I wouldn't care about the Chiefs otherwise but go Taylor Swift's team." Same sans Swift, I was rooting hard for Tom Brady to get his 7th when the Bucs thrashed KC in 2021.

So what I've been thinking about for the last week or two, what's missed by Hanania (no surprise) and also commenters here, is the timeline:

  1. Swift and Kelce couple; stories come out of Swift at Chiefs games

  2. The season goes on, more and more Swift at Chiefs games; Mahomes has the worst season of his career (still ending in a Super Bowl lol); some memeing about the Swift Effect

  3. At this point the only grousing I've heard from Chiefs fans is "please just let us watch football"

  4. Chiefs in the playoffs, they keep winning

  5. ~3 weeks ago stories start rolling out about Swift's presidential endorsement and how she's "Biden's best hope"

  6. I hear political grousing from some Chiefs fans / Swift, once again a political target, is attacked by twitter righties

Swift is being attacked by righties because of politicization from lefties. The animus was preexisting sure but it only emerged because of the "Swift-Biden endorsement" articles. Assuming her guaranteed endorsement of whoever's going against Trump in November, there are people who will vote, and shouldn't be allowed to, because Swift told them to. Attacking her is a reasonable move for the right, but I agree head-on is a bad angle: 4chan-style trolling I've begun to see of /pol/tard Tay is a better angle, though still maybe not the smart one.

Such Texas Sharpshooter energy. I predict that the team that won last year’s Super Bowl will win this year’s super bowl, and that Taylor Swift will endorse the same person she endorsed in 2020 in the same race. But if the obvious happens, it’s a CONSPIRACY!

Mahomes is superb and as long as he maintains form KC will compete, but football is a terrifically easy game to rig. One no-call or flag can be the game. It's exactly what happened in Super Bowl LVI. 4th quarter, under 2 minutes, 3rd & Goal, Rams down by 4. Holding: Half distance to goal, automatic 1st down. On the same play, the Rams had a false start (5 yard penalty) that went uncalled. At the critical moment a bad flag gave LA a touchdown and the Super Bowl.

Hanania is known for being known. Known, quoted, known more. His writing is bad and his reasoning is worse. His best piece wouldn't get an AAQC, or wouldn't deserve if it I missed his time mostly lurking here ahead of just lifting ideas from his intellectual betters--a descriptor that applies to every regular Motte commenter.

Pretty strongly disagree. Bryan Caplan's characterized him as maybe the greatest essayist alive. I don't know that I'd go that far, but he seems fairly consistently innovative and insightful.

Yes, he's often obnoxious, and frequently says things I disagree with. But there's a lot to be gleaned.

Meh, its a thing with football itself. A decent portion of the game clock time is spent not playing the game. Not even counting how often it is paused, or that there are long breaks like half time. Whats the camera gonna do during all that break time? Gotta do something, might as well look at the most famous people at the game. As someone who doesn't really care about football or find it super interesting, this has always been a plus for me. I can go to a party where people care about football and still interact with the people that like football for about half the time, and then be on my phone the other half the time.

I was watching the last Chiefs vs Ravens game with someone that was actively annoyed at Taylor Swift coming on screen. They are a political junkie. They work at a think thank. They've been involved with politics for many years. They could probably come up with a multitude of reasons why this is a political annoyance. Wasn't my impression though. They were eager to see the actual game, and any of the interruptions were annoying to them. There are basically only two outcomes for things between football plays: immediately ignoring the thing, or immediately hating it.

The smart ad money should ironically be on the people that don't care about the games at all.

Think about it. You have a football fanatic that is definitely going to watch the game. The TV will be on in a semi public setting. The non-football fanatics will have lost interest in the game very quickly.

The game stop (like it does every thirty seconds). The football fanatic is on the edge of their seat waiting for more action (which usually happens). Everyone else is bored on their phones. The football fanatic is denied their fix (a commercial, or a cut to some celebrity in the stands). The football fanatic exclaims in anger or frustration built up from watching the game. Everyone else is temporarily jerked out of their phones. Boom! Play the ad, get two audiences instead of just one.

One of my favorite ads in recent football memory is for Tide. A laundry detergent. They basically did an aggressive campaign of being a part of every commercial break, and tricking you into thinking it was an ad for a different product. But Tide isn't really a great product to advertise for men watching football. However, its the perfect product to advertise to wives, mothers, and girlfriends who have men watching football.

That is my pet theory for the Taylor Swift ad spots.

The smart ad money should ironically be on the people that don't care about the games at all.

You are right if course, but I'm pretty sure this philosophy is why sports broadcasting have been haemorrhaging money in recent years. Scratch that, why every form of entertainment has gone to shit in recent years. Everyone is so eager to disrupt and get that new audience that we've turned everything into focus grouped bullshit.

I enjoy video games, stand up comedy, podcasts, and youtube videos. Low barriers to entry hasn't stopped enshitification, but new entrants in the art just take over.

I don't understand, what does that mean for sports media?

You are right if course, but I'm pretty sure this philosophy is why sports broadcasting have been haemorrhaging money in recent years. Scratch that, why every form of entertainment has gone to shit in recent years.

Emphasis added by me. If you'd left it at the first sentence I would say I don't disagree or have much of an opinion (since I don't watch sports). I just disagree with the stronger claim that all entertainment has gone to shit.

I would not be surprised if sports is extra shitty, partly because they intentionally put up barriers to entry in order to squeeze every penny they can out of the broadcast rights.

What are you conservative about? Why are you a Republican?

Taylor Swift is an attractive, unmarried, childless white woman who 'puts in efforts to make a comfortable experience for liberals'. Should conservative white parents see her as a model for their daughters?

We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it

The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.

The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.

This goes too far. I decry stigma against women with 4+ children, but having kids(probably two, possibly three but definitely not more than that) remains the cultural ideal and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies doesn’t actually change that.

and a handful of weirdos in the progressive coalition ranting about how white women shouldn’t have babies

That's the far end of the curve. The more important messaging is education/career uber alles or Chelsea Handler-esque "kids are a distraction from all the cool shit you could be doing (if you're a rich white lady)" (see also , for a less absurd example)

I am honestly trying to recall recent major progressive-themed media where having three kids was presented as any such cultural ideal, particularly without one of the kids being cast as a negative influence (i.e. mentally divergent / physically impaired / morally lacking).

Wouldn’t Modern Family fit this bill? I only watched the first few seasons, but unless something changed significantly, Claire and Phil are portrayed as an admirable white family with a normal family structure and three loving children who, though flawed in ways conducive to humorous sitcom hijinks, are fundamentally blessings in the lives of their parents.

Law of conservation of detail. If the kids are there, they're important to the story. Three kids probably won't be important to the story without having something wrong with one.

That might be a narrative reason in isolation, in the same way that the 5-man-ban trope really tends to support 2-siblings (so that 3 outsiders can be added), but that also doesn't really change that it's not terribly hard to find counter-examples in American media of sibling-ensemble casts. Swiss Family Robinson, Little House on the Prairie, Bradey Bunch, the Cosby Show, Boxcar Children. If you're willing to go animated, the Incredibles, Brave, Brother Bear, the Aristocats, Peter Pan, or the Simpsons. Even Disney's Coco and Encanto- which I'd consider far more 'conservative' than 'progressive' in theme- carry on with large families, albeit maybe in an ethnic stereotype fashion.

Not having families of 3 or more is a narrative choice, not a narrative constraint.

I know nothing about gridiron football or Taylor Swift but it seems obvious that it was an ad. I can point to the fact that during the entire NFL season the entertainment news site Deadline (which doesn't do celebrity gossip) ran a weekly story basically about Taylor Swift sitting in the stands during the games. It had the same vibe as these SNL ad stories they do every weekend where they basically describe the opening monologue from SNL and two sketches as if they need to be covered and are part of the zeitgeist but it's just another crappy sketch from a show that hasn't been relevant in years. I mean it's likely a circle of different media companies (Taylor, NFL, entertainment media) feeding and trying to broaden all their fanbases. Like a car commercial inserted into a TV show that's handled clumsily. Even people that don't realize it's a commercial can recognize that something is inauthentic about it. Maybe there's nothing intentional on either Taylor (probably impossible to tell) or the NFL (I haven't seen any of the broadcasts with her) about this but the entertainment media is absolutely using this, stoking it, and reveling in it when it might not even exist as a thing if they didn't.

My thought was, at first, that it must be a huge spectacle style distraction for them to run a news story about it. But the consistency of the articles and lack of any substance made it obvious it was an ad. The complaints make sense to me "Why do you care they're cutting to Taylor three times a game?" Because it's an ad and ads are annoying. Ads recently have an ideological bent which makes conservatives especially wary of them. Conservatives, to some extent rightly, see weird astroturfed media shit all the time dedicated to hating/destroying them because the media is mostly their enemy. The fact that they decide to create a conspiracy because the astroturfed weirdness of this is obvious and they're just making the mistake of thinking that this is political because most of the weird astroturfed stuff from the NFL in the past years has been political is understandable. And the fact that conspiratorial complaints get platformed to discredit real complaints is just business as usual for the media.

This is probably a large part of it. The NFL has for a long time been trying to appeal more to women. Taylor Swift fans are mostly women. Thus, more Taylor Swift = more interest for the women in the audience. Of course, that doesn't excuse this from being part of the Culture War. Why is the NFL, whose audiences were long a bastion of couch-locked junk-food-eating cheap-beer-swilling men, concentrating on attracting women? The innocent explanation is they are (or were, when this started) an untapped audience. But that doesn't really hold up; neglecting your core audience to attract a new one when your core is that big and that dedicated doesn't really make sense. You don't see soap operas adding car chases to get men interested! So I think there's quite a bit of "women are a more acceptable audience" mixed in.

How does it neglect the core audience?

It's usually an active rejection rather than neglect. "Expanding the audience" is just what they say to the moneymen. In practice, it's always about rejecting an audience who don't deserve to have nice things. I used to be more charitable about this, but fool me once and twice and all that.

It doesn't. Until it does. See: Marvel and Star Wars for increasingly bad pandering and weaponization of victimhood against the toxically masculine audience when the old audience complains.

Of course, sports doesn't need writing so it may not lead to any difference in this case.

But I get why people in the culture war are suspicious.

I think honestly it’s impossible not to see politics everywhere simply because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical. They cannot essentially participate in mainstream life without politics and specifically liberal politics being brought into the mix. And so now after nearly 8 years of politics invading every cultural touchstone, it seems a bit unfair to expect conservatives to try to play “cool” as liberals are coming after one of the few remaining mainstream entertainment outlets that they didn’t have to watch with their guard up.

because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical.

The knee-jerk rejoinder would usually be 'they were always political, the politics was just made explicit', but obviously it depends what you're talking about and how you define politics.

Again depending on the context, probably relating to the concept of 'white man as default', you know, 'it wasn't political when everyone looked and acted like me, it's political now that other people are being represented too.' That whole cultural dialogue is sort of an awful slog unfortunately, but it's the natural response to your perspective here.

This came up in the Bud Light thing too.

I get why liberals would pull the whole "what's it to you? It's just the thin end of the wedge!" . It has clearly been incredibly successful.

I'm always surprised that nonliberals who've seen liberals attempt to infect everything - decolonizing bird watching! also seem to share the same sentiment.

There is a reason people are on a hair trigger.

I’m surprised it took so long for conservatives to grow a spine on the issue. I wouldn’t consider myself super conservative. I’m egalitarian more or less, and I think that some of the culture war issues are overblown. But I can absolutely understand why conservatives, especially conservative parents are so unwilling to put up with the encroachment. It seems more or less that liberals are unwilling to allow anything mainstream to exist in an apolitical way. And this comes a problem precisely because it end up being a no quarter situation. A person wanting to raise their kids in a traditional manner has to be hyper vigilant on every piece of culture allowed in the house. Even down to children’s shows like Paw Patrol.

It feels like being colonized in a sense. The elites have decided that the old traditions must die, and have taken over everything in order to force the issue. Just like might have happened in the old west when Indians were forced to send their kids to boarding schools to kill off their culture and religion. Of course people are going to resist their culture and way of life being actively killed.

I am admittedly a progressive, which I'm sure colors my perspective, but I can't help but read your paragraph after the "AND YET" as exactly the kind of stuff Hanania is complaining about. If you roll up on some Normie Who Just Wants To Grill and start talking about the number of black people Swift has dated compared to the number of black people she danced with in what's basically an extended music video... what do you think their response is? How does the conversation proceed? I submit that a Normie does not spend one iota of brain power thinking about this fact and, if so confronted, would struggle to understand how the two things are supposed to relate to each other. Is this a particularly progressive perspective? Am I the one out of touch?

I don't think I was clear there, my apologies.

Hanania states that liberals are no longer the people who can't watch a football game or a Taylor Swift concert, who would be compelled to complain about some obscure political gripe. My point is that liberals have no problem watching the Eras Tour or a football game because the movie and the football game have already gone out of their way to make sure they don't offend liberals.

Swift and her team planned the Eras Tour movie specifically to avoid that kind of criticism from liberals. Wokie friends of mine gushed over the prominent placement of fat and trans and flamboyant dancers. Swift has been the subject of critique in the woke press for her taste in friends and in men before, she choreographed the event to avoid criticisms. She planned the whole event to avoid criticisms from the woke left.

If she had not done so, the film would have been the controversy in the woke press. There would have been articles about how her dancers weren't representative, how her romantic duet with a white man elevated white cisheteronormativity over black and brown bodies etc etc.

If Swift had not specifically planned her film to avoid those criticisms, we would be having the conversation about how lefties can't just watch a fucking movie without complaining about race.

Lefties are better at being normal, if you first go to a lot of trouble to make sure you're not offending them.

I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I suspect most people think a slogan like "end racism" being on helmets or in end zones is anodyne. The same way people are fine with the NFL turning everything pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month. When people see ads highlighting female athletes or coaches or whatever they don't think "Cringe Progressive Propaganda" they think "Neat!"

You characterize the actions taken by Swift, the NFL, etc as being directed towards liberals but I think you underestimate the extent to which "normies" either agree with or don't care about those actions.

My position is that normies are, almost definitionally, people who don't notice or care about these things. They just want to watch football.

Circa 2002, when I was watching football as a youngster, watching Andy Reid coach Donovan McNabb and the Eagles to the playoffs every year but fall short in the playoffs, it was liberals who noticed and complained about things. I remember this because I was there, if you want me to dig up a bunch of NYT and Atlantic and Slate articles about it if you want proof. They noticed all the Iraq-War Era "Support Our Troops" and called it jingoism, they noticed that all the coaches and owners and pundits were white and all the players were Black, they noticed that there was no place or respect for women anywhere in the NFL unless they're wearing a slutty cheerleader outfit. And they complained about it, constantly. In print and in person. They called it toxically masculine, they said watching players get injured and carted off the field was to prepare us for American soldiers dying overseas, they said the idea of white "owners" "trading" and "bidding on" black players was bad, etc etc etc.

This kind of thing marked those liberals as weirdoes, and cut them off from a significant part of the mainstream. Normies shrugged at all that stuff, they just wanted to watch the game not get lectured by the politically correct. When Tim Tebow kneeled, atheists seethed, my grandmother thought it was great, I mostly just wanted to watch the Broncos (I still think they should have given him another year).

Today, it's the opposite. Because the NFL has sought to address all those criticisms. There's a lot less jingoism than there used to be. There's all these efforts to say they care about women, there's less of the cheerleaders and they wear more clothing. They have tried in many ways to force teams to hire some Black coaching staff (and I actually think there are a lot more white players outside of the QB and OL than there used to be, so there's that). They talk a lot about racism, and domestic violence, and all kinds of other causes, many of them liberal coded.

Now, instead, it's the edgy right wingers who want to lecture me on politics that they notice while I want to watch Andy Reid coach Pat Mahomes and the Chiefs. And political correctness is calling out affirmative action for Black coaches and not for white wide receivers, and calling Travis Kelce Captian Vaxxxx.

Sorry for the off topic question, but it's the first time I've seen it in the wild -- are you intentionally capitalizing "Black" and not "white?" If so, may I ask why? I always thought this was just a progressive journalist signalling thing.

I think it's a useful separation. Black is referring to African Americans, American Descendants of Slavery and those later black skinned immigrants who have assimilated into that community. It's a proper noun because it's a proper community, with a sense of itself and some unifying customs.

White to me isn't. Whiteness is much more fraught with questions of community and boundary drawing. I prefer terms with more precision like Amerikaner, redneck, SWPL, etc. Whites in America are more defined by class, politics, profession, religion. And speaking about whites as a group necessarily involves Europeans, in ways that are fraught.

I'm not really that committed to the bit, but I thought all that at some point, and autocorrect started doing it for me.

Interesting, thank you.

Did you and I listen to the same sports media in 2020? The sports media is absolutely still populated by a class of chattering scolds who are determined to bend sports leagues to their will by relentlessly manipulating narratives. This includes commentators who are employed by the NFL itself! I was there in 2020 when Steve Wyche and Patrick Claybon went on the Around The NFL podcast (an official NFL-owned media product) to literally drum up political and financial support for Democrat candidates.

I listened to these same commentators - Wyche, Claybon, Gregg Rosenthal, Mina Kimes, Cynthia Frelund - *refuse to say the name of one of the NFL’s teams (the Redskins) out loud for about a year, in a blatantly obvious attempt to force the league to force the owner to change the name.

Every time I listen to an NFL podcast I have to hear Cynthia Frelund read a long and lecturing ad about how the NFL is sponsoring programs to get more women involved in men’s sports.

I could bring up myriad examples of the same behavior by NBA commentators, NHL commentators, etc. (I finally stopped listening to the No Dunks guys - AKA The Starters, AKA The Basketball Jones - because they also had a whole episode where they fawning interviewed a Democrat political operative urging people to vote for Raphael Warnock. There was not a single piece of basketball commentary during the entire episode.) It’s just fundamentally not true that liberals have stopped hectoring people about politics just because they’ve had so many successes already; I’m sure I’m going to hear yet another offseason of incessant carping about why Eric Bienemy hasn’t gotten a head coaching job, and hmmmmm isn’t it interesting how so many other white retreads are getting offers but not him, our league still has so far to go, etc. Conservatives may be indulging their own cranks momentarily, but the left still absolutely owns the “can’t shut up and let people enjoy things” label.

Yes, but 2020 was four years ago. It was a whole presidential administration. A lot has happened since then. The BLM overreaction effort they put in is exactly what I'm talking about when I say they've done a lot to soothe liberals.

It used to be that sports media was more or less conservative, and the liberal media criticizing it was made up largely of people who hate sports. Now the sports media is largely liberal. And the right wing attacks on it are from people who seem to hate sports, like Vivek.

The flip side of that is, for instance, action movies where the good guy blasts criminals that has conservatives and normies cheering together, and liberals clicking their tongue "this is so problematic, this is encouraging people acting vigilante violence against the underprivileged and minorities who are driven to crime by this racist, unfair count..." and so on.

As the French critics of American cinema asked: is it everywhere because it is universal or is it universal because it is everywhere?

As you say, I think a lot of people just go along because they don't care to get into this stuff . But if they had been asked ahead of time if they wanted X Allegedly Anodyne Liberal Pandering what would they have said?

I suppose my intuition is they also would not have cared, had they been asked in advance. I'm imagining this kind of caring as being symmetrical about whether something has happened. If you would have objected to, or had a problem with, the thing happening before it happened why wouldn't you have the same objection to its happening after it happened?

I'd love to see this falsified one way or the other.

IRL I've never met a male sports fan that is plussed by antiracism slogans and pink ribbons. Not nonexistent, but I would have assumed I'd come across one at some point. I'm not 'in the mix' as much as I was ten years ago, but they either had no comment on such things or were lightly mocking. Women could be effusive despite not really following the sport closeley.

Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing. It's a popular sentiment online that I don't ever see materialize in the world, with the exception of 'normie women' who are more progressive at baseline than I ever see men being vis a vis conservatism. Like many other things, my sense is men have learned to keep their opinions to themselves.

I'd also be curious if any recent polling data would indicate a turn for or against pink ribbons. I could tolerate it as a minor cringe thing up to a point, but maybe I feel very different about it now after seeing what else the NFL picked up afterwards.

I think the vast majority of men would just as soon watch the game and ignore all the ancillary crap. So to the extent that pink ribbons etc. exist, it is merely an annoyance - commentators talking about that rather than something actually game-related. However, when it reaches the point of not being able to ignore it (franchise name changes probably the #1 example) people will get actively mad. Also of course if someone is pushing a message that is diametrically opposed to your beliefs, that's going to rankle.

Admittedly most of my experience with dedicated sports fans was around a decade or so ago. I do not watch it much myself nor do most of my friends. I absorb its happenings via some combination of social media and family osmosis. It's possible things have shifted since then, although I'm skeptical.

Personally, I question if the "normies are surprisingly OK with all of this" is really true or a product of astroturfing.

Insofar as "all of this" refers to the specific examples in the OP, I think it is organic. Beyond that I would need more specification to have an informed opinion.

I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.

I don't think he's arguing that... what he's arguing is that normies have been influenced dramatically over a short period of time by extremely aggressive and disingenous political moves from the left. As others have discussed, basically entryism and underhanded tactics to force public spaces to cater to their norms.

Once you have the norms changed, by definition the "normies" will follow along. They're really just people who default to what the norm is, and don't think too much about it.

What people on the right are complaining about is that there used to be, seemingly, a sort of 'gentleman's agreement' not to use tactics that are too underhanded to change norms. The left recently with all their policing of language, pronouns, media, etc. seem to have thrown that informal agreement out of the window. Which, to be fair, is very explicit in leftist who/whom political philosophy. It's part of why people on the right have been warning about communism for the last century.

If you have a political opponent who will stop at nothing to enact their views, it's hard to impossible to work with them in a liberal democratic setting.

Could you tell me what underhanded tactics the left used and describe this agreement not to use them in more detail? As best I can tell the way the left has effected societal and institutional change is some combination of (1) joining up with an organization to change its culture from the inside and (2) criticizing various aspects of an organization or culture in media (social or legacy) to effect change from the outside. What is "underhanded" about these tactics? Similarly what was disingenuous about these attempts to change the culture? I'm pretty sure leftists believed their own criticisms of these institutions and cultures.

I made an effort post describing my experiences here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184826?context=8#context

It's hard to pin down exactly - but Venkatesh Rao gives an excellent overview of the types of underhanded, manipulative tactics that 'sociopaths' use to protect themselves and advance their goals at the expense of others in The Gervais Principle.

C.S. Lewis also writes about this sort of maneuvering in his novel The Hideous Strength. There are plenty of other examples of this type of thing.

Of course these tactics aren't limited to leftists exclusively, but leftists and Marxists explicitly embrace the "win at all costs" mentality, while their opponents typically do not. This means that on average more leftists are going to be willing to throw moral scruples to the wind and use whatever manipulative techniques they must to advance their cause.

No i don't think you're not the one out of touch.

I wonder why Taylor Swift blew up over the past year despite having originally entered superstardom in 2010-2011. There was a decade cooling off period in which other singers like Lizzo, Katy Perry, and Beyonce held the mantle, and then she suddenly blew up. I think this shows again the power of Twitter to create superstars and affect news cycles. The Musk effect is real. Sure, Meta is a far bigger network of platforms and YouTube is bigger overall, but Twitter is where the discourse and culture are shaped.

I don't think Twitter has much to do with it. The night before Thanksgiving, I attended a Taylor Swift trivia night that my cousin's boyfriend convinced me to attend because it was at a local brewery. The vast majority of the attendees weren't the typical brewery clientele, but suburban moms and their young daughters. Not too many men. And the place was absolutely packed; there were at least 20 teams. I guarantee you very few of these people have Twitter accounts, or care too much about Elon Musk. I attribute Swift's sudden blowup to the following factors:

  1. She was already very famous. This may seem obvious but it seems like there's more staying power when an already famous person reaches this level of popularity compared with the meteoric rise of an unknown. She's 34 years old and has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years; there's no sense that she's the flavor of the month.

  2. She has a history of making risky professional moves that have the potential to wreck her career but end up bolstering it. In 2014 there was some serious discussion as to whether she'd be able to appeal to the pop market in the same way she appealed to the country market. There have long been country stars with crossover appeal, but most of them never stop ostensibly being country musicians, no matter how pop they get. The only other musician I can think of who pulled this off was Linda Ronstadt, but she gets an asterisk because she was at the fringes of the country world; she came out of the more rock-oriented Laurel Canyon scene rather than being a product of Nashville. I think a big part of the reason Nashville artists are hesitant to break out like this is because country is a sort of security blanket. The country world wants something that's ostensibly country, and they will loyally buy it if it's marketed as such. Making a full transition out of Nashville means casting off the last vestiges of this to make it in the wider world. You run the risk of losing your old audience and failing to find a new one. But she correctly calculated that the country fans who were buying her music were probably already buying pop records anyway, and that her pop audience was where all the growth was. And when I say she I mean whoever does her marketing. So she managed to get two audiences for the price of one, so to speak.

  3. Then — and people often forget about this — she pulled her music off of streaming services because she didn't like the business model. For three years. I'm not going to attempt to quantize the impact this had, but I doubt it did her career any favors in the short-term. However, it probably helped her career long-term, because it encouraged people to buy her albums rather than stream them. This probably fostered a sense of loyalty that she wouldn't have had if she'd been available at the touch of a button to anyone with a Spotify account. And then it was a big deal when she got back on the streaming services, which again increased her audience.

  4. So at this point she's been steadily consolidating her power for over a decade. This is important in and of itself because most pop stars don't stay on top for that long, especially just by being pop stars. Contrast this with Lady Gaga, who is still famous but more because she did things like movies and albums with Tony Bennett. No one has cared about her pop records since 2011. The fact that Swift is in her mid-30s and has been able to sustain a career since her days as a teen idol without making any major changes is an accomplishment in and of itself and probably feeds into our current moment. She's been around long enough that women who listened to her in high school can take their kids to her concerts.

  5. Despite her fame, and her numerous celebrity relationships, she's managed to avoid the kind of scandals and tabloid gossip that surrounds other pop stars, especially ones who become famous at sixteen and have to navigate the transition to adulthood while in the public eye.

  6. She has an uncanny knack for making decisions that are totally about money and convincing people that they're not about money. The whole "Taylor's Version" thing is a prime example. She didn't like the fact that she didn't own the rights to her old recordings. The main advantage of owning the rights to her recordings is that she can collect all the money they generate. Otherwise, there's no real advantage. This is a big deal for most people, but for someone like Swift, who has more money than she's ever going to be able to spend, the schlubs at whatever private equity firm owns the rights to them probably need the money more than she does. But she casts it as a matter of principle, rerecords new versions she owns the rights to, and convinces her fans to shell out money for five different collectors' editions of the same albums they already own. The whole thing was about as transparent a cash grab as you could find, yet she pulled it off in such a way that even people who could care less about her career thought it was a slick move to stick it to those fatcats. It got her the kind of publicity you can't buy while minting her a pretty penny.

  7. And, finally, in the same vein, we have the Eras Tour. At some point in every pop star's life, there comes a point where they are no longer a "frontline artist", by which I mean a contemporary artist who makes contemporary music for a contemporary audience. At some point, people don't go to your concerts to hear the new album but to hear the old favorites. It's usually the obvious sign that a band is over the hill — there's a new album out and the kind of people who paid 70 bucks to hear you play don't give a fuck. And if your biggest fans no longer care... Becoming an oldies act is depressing. Bob Dylan and Neil Young have defiantly refused to go down that path, regardless of the crap they take for it, and insist on being contemporary musicians who will tour the new album and maybe throw in a few old favorites. Mike Love's insistence on the Beach Boys playing touring their 60s hits in the wake of the compilation album Endless Summer's success in the mid-1970s drove a wedge between the band that they never really recovered from. (And most of the band was younger then than Swift is now.) The huge appeal of the Eras Tour was that, for the first time, Swift would be taking listeners on a musical journey through her entire career. She was becoming an oldies act, proudly and deliberately. At a time when she was still viable as a frontline artist. This is almost unheard of. Sure, contemporary bands usually play some older material at all their shows, but it's unusual for someone to actively embrace what is usually the sure sign of a has-been. Because the dirty secret of oldies acts is that they're very profitable. People like hearing old favorites, even when they're still willing to pay good money for the new shit. And the whole Taylor's Version thing was perfect cover. Combine this with the fact that she hadn't toured in half a decade and the stage was set for all hell to break loose.

I wonder if the whole "lottery" aspect to the tickets also made this go crazy. They were so exclusive! I know people who couldn't get tickets. I know someone who bought tickets online (Stubhub maybe?) And flew to brazil and when they landed found out their tickets didn't exist! There were all these stories and tales of great sacrifice to go to these concerts.

7.

I think this is an often underappreciated aspect of an artist's career. Many of them just do not know when to throw in the towel on new stuff. Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years but still plays a few concerts (including Madison Square Garden) every month. He's someone who knew when he was done.

Mad respect to Billy Joel who has not released new material in 30 years

Or since yesterday:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/billy-joels-turn-the-lights-back-on-1234958448/

How can you be a pessimist when life is this funny?

great write up. nominated

Thank you for providing positive reinforcement.

Doesn't require a comment.

Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.

The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.

I don't see any confusion. The left is going leftward, as it historically has done. Conservatives are in the strongest position in a long time. So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout, successful buycotts of brands, plagiarism scandals, SCOTUS, etc. . Biden's approval numbers are among the lowest ever for an incumbent. They right just needs to step back and let the left hang itself by its petard. Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.

So many wins over the past few years, like Elon Twitter buyout

They retaliated first by cutting off Twitter's ad money, then by taking all of Elon's compensation ($55B in options) for being CEO of Tesla away from him. Looks like they're still ahead on that one -- if the pattern continues there will be no Twitter and Musk will lose his fortune, unless he gets with the program.

Wokeness does not need a counter-response; its existence turns off enough people.

No, every "win" you've mentioned is part of a weak counter-response.

Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.

No doubt, parts of the system are being updated in ways that will decrease the amount by which they are preferentially enriched, which is a net loss in real terms for them personally. And no doubt they can and will get extremely mad about that.

But they are still enriched by the system in both absolute and relative terms, and therefore cannot be too enthusiastic about burning it to the ground. A reshuffling would not be likely to benefit them by chance, unlike the more typical style of counter-culture member who is relatively disadvantaged by the system and might benefit from seeing it overturned.

  • -10

No point, just an observation: They are also, in most places, the people who contribute the most to the system.

Enh, I'll just submit my mistrust and dissatisfaction with every metric and framing that would lead to that conclusion, while admitting that it is true if you accept those very common metrics and framings.

That's a pretty huge conversation that I'm not an expert on and probably don't have time for today anyway.

Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.

Can you expand on this? Who are these conservatives that are being enriched?

When I look around at my incredibly rich and favored city, all I see are far left progressives.

(This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent).

Define "incompetent" because in my experience conservative protests/rallies (especially the pro-life and pro-gun ones) are typically larger in terms of attendance, and better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc... than progressive protests. They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.

better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc

See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).

My take on this is essentially the same as @ArjinFerman's

Seems to me that your complaint against conservatives is that they are too conservative and need to become less so if they want to be taken seriously. Forgive me for finding such arguments unconvincing and suspecting ulterior motives.

I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member. They're too uncomfortable with disorder and nonconformity. The types that do suffer from being intolerably crankish - the type of person who thinks a pop star dating a football player is a Pentagon (?) op.

I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member.

Except we've seen what happens when anyone to the right of the establishment does do effective counterculture - deplatforming, shadowbanning, algorithmic throttling, selective giving in to heckler's veto.

I get it, Western societies base their legitimacy on the consent of the governed, so we all have to act like anything that happens is a bottom-up organic event. The illusion looks convincing as long most people trust their elites, but the moment they start doubting them, it turns out the consent of the governed is no more real than the divine right of kings, or any other myth. This is how we go from the establishment fighting for the free speech rights of actual Nazis to them declaring parents who don't want racism taught to their children being declared Nazis.

Except we've seen what happens when anyone to the right of the establishment does do effective counterculture - deplatforming, shadowbanning, algorithmic throttling, selective giving in to heckler's veto.

...arrest and conviction on novel felony charges, disqualification from office. Thanks to January 6 we know what happens when the right protests like the left; the right is punished severely and further suppressed as a result.

He did say "counter culture", so I was thinking more memes than protests.

tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).

I'd like to remind you that the media turned a conservative teenager standing and smiling into a national (maybe even international) scandal. Something that couldn't possibly get more docile was somehow portrayed as too aggressive. If you think there's a way out of this bind, and can actually deliver results, I'm sure lots of conservatives would love to pay you to be a protest organizer.

but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).

If you were a right-wing protestor, how would you protest in order to get positive media coverage?

They just don't enjoy the friendly relationship with the media that the progressives do.

That's like saying a business is run amazingly well, but can't make any sales. A friendly relationship with the media (or at least positive coverage in a wide-reaching format) is an essential part of many protests. If you can't do that, then your protest is failing at one of its core goals.

Are you saying that we are not discussing "competence" per se so much as "conforming to liberal preferences"?

More "rationality competence is systematized winning".

If a protest's goal is to get people to show up and raise the profile of an issue, then your comment only focused on the participants and not on what effect they have on the wider world. I'm not fully convinced that conservatives are worse at effective outreach given the loss of prestige of the mainstream media, but those (alleged) failures can't be dismissed by pointing to the challenges they face.

Which brings us back to @Lewis' point.

You can argue that conservative protests are typically "unsuccessful" but that's a very different charge from being "incompetent".

The enemy gets a vote, and sometimes the enemy simply has overwhelming force. The best possible protest a conservative organization could run (say, the March for Life) might not get any traction because of the efforts of the media to minimize it. That's not a competence problem; it's a power problem.

But that just goes back to institutional capture. What you’re essentially saying is that the protests are irrelevant and impotent, which, while quite possibly true, is a different problem from them being incompetently held.

This entire discussion is just painfully terminally online.

My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff. The weirdo conservatives you see online are just as rare in real life as the weirdo antiwork type communists you see online. Yeah there are weirdo conservatives...but the guy wearing a MAGA hat at this point is considered a weirdo even by his conservative friends, unless he lives in an extremely rural area. Most cons just want the economy to go back to the way it was, and wand their kids left alone.

I mean, yes, but, from the article:

The key difference, however, is that Democrats did not pick the worst caricature of everything their party stands for and make them their leader. Also, while no Democratic legislature abolished the police, state Republican parties are ensuring that women have to risk their lives and health to deliver doomed pregnancies. Each side has freaks. But the problem with the current Republican Party is that the most unappealing members of the coalition, in this case Trump and pro-lifers, are the ones in charge.

The people saying that Taylor Swift is an FBI agent or w/e-the-fuck may only be known to the terminally online.

The fact that abortion is getting outlawed or regulated in a bunch of states is not. That actually affects people in meat space.

Meat space people tune in to the conversation when they find out something like that now applies to them or their niece or their sister or w/e and is frightening them.

My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff.

Where's the border? Fox News has a host calling Swift a "pentagon asset". If your claim is that no actual R is watching Fox News...idk what to say here. Ross Douthat covered this in a column in today's local paper.

Mainstream Rs are going to have a hard time if they have to run against the online right conspiracy types this year, because Trump has cozied up to them so effectively.

Relatively few conservatives are in MAGA hats these days, but get rid of that percentage of the party and the Rs are dead in the water.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes. I myself have half-joked that if Swift and Kelce get married and have at least a couple of beautiful, tall, talented white children, it could serve as a genuinely impactful cultural signal to other white Millennial women. If anyone could make having blue-eyed excellent babies cool again - and prove that such a thing is actually still possible even for women in their 30s like Swift - it’s those two.

However, Swift and Kelce themselves have certainly gone out of their way to make themselves poor vessels for right-wing hopes. Kelce acts black, in a very low-brow way, and my understanding is that Swift is the first white woman he has publicly dated; before that he was the center of a reality show where a bunch of ratchet (mostly black) women competed for his attention. The carping about his appearance in an ad campaign for the Pfizer Covid vaccine is cringeworthy and represents the DR at its most pointlessly oppositional and conspiratorial; that being said, it does suggest that Kelce might be willing and eager to act as a mouthpiece for whatever culturally-approved shibboleths he feels like he needs to parrot. He is apolitical in a way that makes him useful to forces larger than himself, and he appears to have no deeply-held principles which would countervail against attempts to leverage his cultural influence for political ill.

Swift, meanwhile, expresses political views that are totally typical and standard-issue for white women of her age and social class. This doesn’t reflect particularly poorly on her, so much as it just reflects poorly on women in general and of the ever-widening ideological gulf between men and women. I have no contrarian stance toward Swift; she’s a gorgeous, extremely talented woman, with considerable intelligence and impressive levels of personal agency, and she has a pleasant and dorky (and very very white) personality which I find very endearing. She’s a shameless theater kid; she appeared in the ill-fated Cats film, with zero concern for whatever damage it could have done to her career, even going as far as to co-write a new song for it with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, all because she had always loved the musical and wanted to dance around in a catsuit. (And say whatever you will about that film, but as far as that specific scene is concerned… furries, I kinda get it now.)

She is, though, also a serial monogamist who has slept with an order of magnitude more men than even the average slutty urban Millennial woman ever will. The extent to which this reflects poorly on her character is debatable. Perhaps her odd and sheltered upbringing doomed her to be susceptible to the entertainment industry’s temptations in a way that she wouldn’t have been if she’d had a more normal teenage years. From a conservative perspective, it’s undeniable that this makes her at best an imperfect role model for girls. Much of Swift’s lyrical content is still quite wholesome and aspirational toward conservative ideals of fidelity and young love, but it’s impossible not to notice the contrast between those sentiments and the way she’s actually lived her life.

However, a Swift-Kelce marriage - and especially some beautiful blue-eyed Swift-Kelce babies - could still be a momentous cultural whitepill for normal white people. Kelce’s black-centric cultural interests and Swift’s endless string of disreputable boyfriends are not heritable traits; their children, brought up with a stable wealthy upbringing and able to learn from the youthful mistakes of their parents, could unironically be ubermensch paragons of American bourgeois excellence. I’m rooting for the Swift-Kelce romance (although there’s still time for her to change her mind and decide that she’d rather go for the type of guy who leaves fawning racially-aware comments about her on rationalist-adjacent internet message boards) and I think Taylor can still be our Aryan Princess whether she wants to be or not.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes

The twitter-right so badly wants to bring her under the fold. Not going to happen, I'm afraid. She is a 'cat person' which is not a good sign either for those hoping she will repopulate the Aryan race.

I think the important thing is that it’s the message, not the person, that’s most relevant when it comes to pop culture. There have been ‘red tribe’ movies or shows about grizzled macho white marine super soldiers or whatever and invariably the lead actor is a progressive and the screenplay is written by some nebbish guy in Hollywood but everyone understands, implicitly, that it’s a ‘conservative’ movie. Yellowstone is another example, it’s created by a progressive and is if anything a wholesome™️ tale of plucky farmers and natives up against evil white capitalist business republicans, but it doesn’t matter, the vibe is red.

Taylor Swift’s image is a wholesome blonde blue-eyed Americana cheerleader prom dress ‘50s diner vibe, played completely straight (unlike, say, Lana, for whom it’s ironic and a little postmodern). That’s the image she sells to hundreds of millions of people around the world, of that image of America. Her personal politics or lifestyle aren’t relevant in the way they would sometimes be if she was a politician.

This is only for the online too much people and needing people to either be with us or against us with them.

On net hottie marrying beefy football guy is trad and good.

The only thing really here is Kelce took a knee for BLM. But he’s also a football player so he fell for the propaganda in my opinion and didn’t dig deep enough to realize the stats on police killings were nothing like reality.

Yep.

I was laughing at how this union is just an arrested development version of the most stereotypical teenager romance for the last 70 years.

The hyper-popular prom queen marrying the football star. Granted Kelce isn't the quarterback, but if his team wins the Superbowl and he proposes to her on the 50 Yard Line it'd be almost the most cliched Americana-style union one could conceive of.

Literal rivers of happy tears will be shed by the women looking on and living vicariously through them.

High School never ends, it seems.

High School never ends, it seems.

Reese Witherspoon - she’s the prom queen

Bill Gates - captain of the chess team

Jack Black the clown, and Brad Pitt the quarterback

I’ve seen it all before… I want my money back!

16 years since that song came out and a most of those specific lyrics are still accurate.

Jack Black the clown

https://twitter.com/jasoncrouch/status/1748507393128869929

Time is a flat circle, Hoff.

This feels to me like he's going for embodying the "No, it's the children who are wrong." meme. Millennials (who aren't remotely "children" anymore but make up the plurality of Swift's fans) and younger are mostly wondering what is wrong with Republicans constantly going on about the existence of hair dye and queer people; those are normal to most of those age groups. And just maybe it's a hard sell to women looking to date men and/or intentionally have children to vote for the party who has state officials making national news for actively trying to prevent women from getting medical care to prevent infertility due to pregnancy complications; that seems a lot more likely to be popular with older women who can feel ideologically pure about opposing abortion without being worried about it affecting themselves directly.

There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.

it's not so much that her fans will become allies, but the right's hardline position on abortion and alleged conspiratorial thinking turns off potential normies, which can make a difference for close elections.

Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.

The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives.

The "or is at least perceived to be" is the critical part. That "center-right is dead" is the narrative that both the woke left and dissident right want to push because what power and credibility they have absolutely depends on convincing enough people that this is the case.

Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?

I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.

Dude was/is a vaguely right-leaning Democrat. His political positions and persona hasn't actually changed all that much since the 90s and early 00s. That what used to be the centrist/moderate position of both parties less than 20 years ago is now considered "far right" by the media and academia shows just how far they've shifted to the left.

The Wokies hate Trump because he's an unironic "'Murica Fuck Ya" sort of guy. Meanwhile the DR hate him because his popularity is effectively a big old middle-finger to everything they believe.

I agree that the vast majority of Trump's policy positions are comfortably inside the Republican Overton window, and if a Democrat had run for President in the nineties under this exact package of policy positions, no one would have batted an eyelid. What keeps me from calling him centre-right is his pronounced tendency towards conspiratorialism and his increasingly obvious authoritarian streak. "The election is rigged, this goes all the way to the top - as soon as I seize power I'm going to keep it forever, drain the swamp and get revenge on my enemies" is not the kind of thing a normie Republican says. One might say he doesn't really believe this and it's just smack talk to rally his base, but again, I don't think a normie Republican would present this kind of narrative of the US even as insincere smack talk.

I don't consider Trump far-right by any stretch, but the "centre-right" label doesn't sit well with me. Maybe some kind of synthesis of bog-standard centrist Republican policy proposals with the "paranoid style"? I think this is probably what people are getting at when they describe him as a "populist".

I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.

I guess it was a "gotcha" insofar as it was extremely predictable that you'd say Trump despite the absurdity of that claim. "Tear the rotten edifice down" is not and cannot in any meaningful sense be a center-right ethos because the core principle of the center-right is that the status quo are basically fine. Trumpists are shouting that things are emphatically not fine - that the Federal government is hopelessly corrupt, the Democrats are stealing elections, the Mexicans are invading, the trans are corrupting the youth, globalists are stealing our jobs, etc... and that radical action is needed to fix it.

despite the absurdity of that claim.

I it really "absurd" though? That's what I am questioning

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”

That's not center right.

I can't believe I'm asking this years after the fact - but did Trump actually say "They are rapists"? Because in that sequence of words, it's obvious to me it's possessive 'their'. As in 'their drugs, their crime, their rapists'. But everybody up to a VP candidate in the debates just so conveniently interprets it as him calling Mexicans rapists or whatever. And now it's one of those things that "Everbody knows he said" like the fine people smear job, the koi fish smear, and 'Tim Apple'.

I hope you understand that this is one of the many reasons people who aren't already persuaded by this hackery place low value in your assessment of what constitutes moderate or far-right.

video: https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2015/06/25/29292957/

And even if it was "they're" rather than "their", I would interpret it as "the subset of Mexicans illegally migrating to the US are rapists" not "all Mexicans are rapists". Radically different in meaning to how it was presented.

That's not center right.

It's not "center right" according to whom?

Like I said, that what was the moderate/centrist position in the 90s is now considered "far right" should be an indication of just how far off the reservation the media has drifted in the last 20 years.

Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency. Taylor is an icon the most shallow of feminisms, the kind that can easily be co-opted by the right. Women have lead right wing parties across the west at different times.

Here's the question at the core of the article, for me: if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?

Rich, mainstream white people are the right's natural constituency.

No, no they are not.

Such were the wages of the Clinton years. The Democrats cut ties with their labour roots and now "the Left" is wholly a Hi-Low alliance of wealthy capitalists and urban lumpenproles against the working class and petite-bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile it remains the petite-bourgeoisie who are (and always have been) the right's natural constituency.

if the Right can't attract the support, or at least the tolerance, of white men who like the NFL and white women who like Taylor Swift, who does that leave?

Nobody. The left has won.

Edit: OK, you all don't like short answers to rhetorical questions, there's a longer version. The longer version is given by others here but not in so many words. The schools, entertainment media, and most news media have been for generations now pumping out the message "Left is good, right is bad". The counterculture message has been "left is good, right is bad". At some point the message "anyone who says right is not bad is bad, don't listen to them" got put in too ("Faux news"). And this has never stopped. The exceptions in entertainment (a few right-wing action stars) are gone. So why would you expect anyone to be attracted to the right any more?

Someone reported this as:

You need to ban Nybbler for his own sanity.

Which is funny but also, man, maybe he has a point?

I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.

I am not officially warning you here, but this post was kind of low effort and you really have been sort of a one-note piano lately, enough that even people who broadly agree with you are getting annoyed.

But is he wrong though?

Being right doesn't mean you aren't being an annoying one-note piano.

Yes. Frequently. Regularly, even.

Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative. I've argued here before that conservatism, to appeal to its natural constituency, has to try to preserve the world as it exists today and as I grew up in it, not try to tear that world down. Chesterton's Fence and Chesterton's Ruins denominate the proper area of conservatism.

That world was probably as degenerate if not more so compared to today. Drug usage was rampant, as was smoking and drinking. Instead of computer porn, it was done at home. And lots of brothels and adult film theatres. Except for LGBT+ going mainstream, America was in many ways as deviant.

I wonder if listening to a bunch of Cole Porter songs might help. The sound is unmistakably early 20th century and there is plenty of sex and drugs involved - he references cocaine, morphine, cannabis and drinking to excess, all as if they are totally normal elements of life.

Conservatism has often been criticized as the "Coalition of the Comfortable;" Hanania is nodding towards it as a positive rather than a negative.

It seems to me that the problem with this analysis is that a lot of actual conservatives aren't on board with that idea, do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

...More generally, would it be fair to say that Hanania is taking a Blue stereotype of Conservatism, and complaining that Reds aren't conforming to it? Is Hanania a Red or a Blue? If, as seems likely, he's a Blue, why is any of this surprising at all? Ingroup member confused and horrified that the outgroup doesn't act like the ingroup, news at 11.

Is Hanania a Red or a Blue?

Almost positive he's a Red. He unabashedly endorses HBD, he's an outspoken critic of wokeness, wants to repeal the civil rights act of 1964, he recently published an article arguing that average female intelligence is lower than average male intelligence, has little sympathy for the Palestinian cause and thinks Israel should crush any hope of Palestinian independence, was outed as having routinely used ethnic slurs before writing under his own name etc.

On the other hand he's anti-Christian, anti-populist and pro-euthanasia.

(His dismissal of the Palestinian cause stems from lacking any bleeding heart Abrahamic universalism.)

do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be trying to conserve it. They would be trying to destroy it, to uproot the world as we know it and create a new one, a progressive or reactionary utopia. I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built. But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

As a general rule, the answer is "because the people tearing it down didn't care about/didn't know about X thing, and if X wasn't a concern the fence would be obviously insane".

Haidt made the point in The Righteous Mind that conservatives understand progressives much better than the other way around, because it's easier to hypothetically take things out of your moral compass than to correctly conceptualise and hypothetically insert things into it.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

That's not exactly hard. We've been swimming in propaganda for why fences must be torn down. Some of us are even old enough to have seen a fence or two being torn down, and all the promises of what would and would not happen after it's gone.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are.

That is not a definition of Conservative that seems useful. It's conservatism as a tendency, an unreflective inclination, a mood.

I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built.

Chesterton's Fence does not preclude Chesterton from believing that he does, in fact, understand exactly why a fence was built, and why tearing it down is vitally nescessary.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

Yes. Hanania's problem is that, increasingly, the general class of people he is complaining about are confident that they can do this, for what seem to me to be good reasons. It seems to me that this portion is growing fairly rapidly, and its presence is starting to have serious real-world consequences. When it gets large enough, which fences are up and which ruins are down will change.

Hanania's schtick seems to be the Republican who exclusively criticizes Republicans for being unlikeable and out of touch.

The problem is that he himself embodies the very things he criticizes in others.

  • Unlikeable? Check
  • Unattractive? Check
  • Trollish behavior? Check
  • Obsessed with weird online drama? Check

The argument Hanania goes like this: When the Republicans do have genuinely nice, non-weird leaders like Romney or Mike Johnson, those leaders still have massive amounts of shit slung at them. Is it any wonder that the Trumps and Musks of the world don't want to play the nice and normal game?

But for the record, I think Hanania's right. All thing's being equal, nice and normal wins. The average urban cat mom will still see Mike Johnson as the devil incarnate, but there are swing voters out there that will see a beautiful smiling family and think "maybe this guy's not so bad".

Hanania's a good writer. He should take his own advice and I bet he'd be more popular. He's trolled his way to a small amount of attention. Now it's time to pivot. When you're on the right, you need to save your weirdness points for what matters.

I have to respect the hustle though. It's 2020-2021. Biden is inaugurated following Jan 6th . Trumpism and election-fraud and anti-vaccine conspiratorial thinking dominates discourse even on Twitter despite old ownership, as does right-wing economic populism. In early 2022, Elon buys out Twitter. The Jan 6th people get picked off one by one. Wokeness seems to get worse. Hanania comes along and carves a niche, so-called high status conservatism, which brings the likes of Marc Andreessen, Chamath, David Sachs, and other high-status influential important centrist/middle people under the fold. This style of conservatism harkens back to neoconservatism, in rejecting populism and the victimization and conspiratorial thinking that otherwise dominated pre-2022. It found a huge success even if it is still overshadowed by Trump-populism, plus the rise of the Musk-approved HBT-left/center, like @eyeslasho and @cremieuxrecueil that came later. He was smart to find this underserved niche of center-right people who were tired of Trumpism and seek practical solutions to wokeness where Trumpism failed.

Hanania's schtick seems to be the Republican who exclusively criticizes Republicans for being unlikeable and out of touch.

This isn’t really a problem. If you want Republicans who primarily criticize Democrats you can switch on Fox or try any of dozens of other outlets or commentators.

Hanania’s point, which he kind of keeps drilling in, is that a lot of Republicans aren’t serious people. They have a poor understanding of their own voters, their own principles and political strategy in general, kind of a trifecta of disastrous realities.

The argument Hanania goes like this: When the Republicans do have genuinely nice, non-weird leaders like Romney or Mike Johnson, those leaders still have massive amounts of shit slung at them.

Romney did fine but was up against a hugely charismatic president on his second term who drew out the black vote and was a darling of white progressives.

Romney would have won in 2016, I’ve had arguments on this topic before and it’s an unproveable counterfactual but his problem was his opponent, not that he was ex-Bain or looked like a hedge fund manager. Similarly, 2008 McCain would also have won in 2016.

And of course the general perception of Obama was that he was a wholesome “nice, non weird” leader who loved his wife and kids, didn’t publicly cheat and seemed like a friendly enough guy, so Romney didn’t exactly have an ‘advantage’ in that area. Hillary, by contrast, was hated and seen as a soulless mercenary who chose to stay with her husband not out of love but out of a ruthless desire for political power.

Hanania's a good writer. He should take his own advice and I bet he'd be more popular. He's trolled his way to a small amount of attention. Now it's time to pivot. When you're on the right, you need to save your weirdness points for what matters.

I see Hanania more as a provocateur, less in the Fuentes or BAP sense where establishment conservatives will just switch off because of the language and overt extremist views, and more as someone who asks interesting questions about where US conservative priorities actually are.

The challenge for the right - which Hanania correctly diagnoses - is in converting little bursts of public outrage about things like BLM, trans bathrooms, the bud light controversy, Asian anger around affirmative actions, uproar in some southern states about critical race theory in schools etc into a coherent ideological program with policies at the local, state and federal level.

People like Rufo, Tucker and LibsOfTikTok have a big reach and make people angry, but their shtick is outrage bait. That’s not a bad thing, but it often goes nowhere.

Hanania’s point, which he kind of keeps drilling in, is that a lot of Republicans aren’t serious people. They have a poor understanding of their own voters, their own principles and political strategy in general, kind of a trifecta of disastrous realities.

He's pragmatic, which I think helps. He knows that sentiment, getting people mad on twitter is not good enough. Change comes from affecting institutions and in the courts.

Romney would have won in 2016, I’ve had arguments on this topic before and it’s an unproveable counterfactual but his problem was his opponent, not that he was ex-Bain or looked like a hedge fund manager. Similarly, 2008 McCain would also have won in 2016.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

whenever you fill in the any details or support for your counterfactual argument, significant claims of yours are wrong and yet when it's corrected the belief survives

it's the great myth of alternative GOP winner who will win resounding victories for the electorate of... 1984

Not only would Mitt Romney have won, but John McCain, a candidate who represented George W. Bush's 3rd term, a president so disastrous it caused a cultural shift making right-wing behavior and words as low-status and the opposite as high status and whose admin was so unpopular by the end of it that a near 60 Senate majority of the opposition party which made substantial changes to law and government which fundamentally shifted the entire apparatus leftward, was going to win in 2016? Okay.

not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it

Do you not understand the difference between low turn out midterms and high turnout presidential election years?

And 2rafa is right: 2014 was the best recent Republican Congressional year, when they peaked at 54 Senate seats and 247 House seats (more than any time since the 1920's in the House). The fringes of the Tea Party cost the GOP Senate seats in 2010. Remember the Witch? Republicans could have had a Senate seat in Delaware.

Your claims are typically that Trump won because he energized some hardscrabble white working class communities in a handful of key states. Regardless of whether that’s true, it’s ridiculous to suggest that it represents the sole possible route for a Republican candidate to win in 2016.

Not only would Mitt Romney have won, but John McCain, a candidate who represented George W. Bush's 3rd term, a president so disastrous it caused a cultural shift

This section is entirely your opinion about vague cultural shifts and the qualities of Bush as a leader. The brief “60” seat majority for the Democrats was during the biggest financial crash in postwar American history. The GOP losses in 2006 were within normal bounds well into the term of an existing president (Obama lost as many just two years into his first term).

There’s no actual argument to your thesis, and certainly no evidence. By contrast, Hillary was the most unappealing Democratic candidate in decades, possibly ever, reviled in polling data and distrusted even by many Democrats. All suggest any Republican would have won, as does polling from the 2016 primaries in which match-ups between candidates and Clinton (while Trump was already by far the dominant candidate) show Cruz and even Kasich outperforming Trump.

Eg.

The Republican front-runner holds a 3-point lead over Clinton statewide, 46 percent to 43 percent with 11 percent undecided. Trump’s advantage, however, falls within the margin of error, while Cruz and John Kasich safely carry the state by double-digit margins.

Bush-era congressional Republicans had already harnessed the tea party movement to do extremely well in 2010. They understood some of their constituency. Blue voter turnout would be depressed with Clinton against a neocon type and 8 years of minimal change™️ minus a Trump-tier villain, which no amount of CNN could turn a Romney into. There were plentiful routes through the suburbs (which had done very well for the GOP in 2010) that didn’t require Trump’s county-by-county path to victory.

The onus is on YOU to prove that polling from 2016 clearly suggesting many or even all GOP candidates could beat Clinton in a match-up is somehow wrong.

Yeah. My perception at the time was that the Democrats nominated the only candidate who could have lost to Trump and the Republicans nominated the only candidate who could have lost to Clinton.

My basic argument is Trump motivated non-regular voters and non-voters (as well as swapping Obama voters) in key states to win in 2016, some of which the GOP hadn't won in over a generation, and these states were necessary in order to make the electoral college math work for GOP victory. I didn't say white nor working class, although "working class" likely correlates. Trump made the election about trade and immigration while the non-GOP wouldn't have. I would address your alleged "other way to win," except I've never seen you make that argument. The comments I've seen on this topic are typically short and lacking an explanation or details for support. Any details provided, as I've linked, are at best missing details.

In this comment, your suggested "pathway to victory" is "There were plentiful routes through the suburbs (which had done very well for the GOP in 2010) that didn’t require Trump’s county-by-county path to victory." So like what routes in which states? Mitt Romney didn't do "very well" in the suburbs in 2012. Presidents aren't elected by national polling, they're elected by individual states. When you talks about a pathway to victory, you need to talk about states which you're going to win and why. I made those arguments in linked comments.

The GOP losses in 2006 were within normal bounds well into the term of an existing president (Obama lost as many just two years into his first term).

Losing 6 Senate seats isn't within normal bounds of a midterm for a 2nd term president. Losing another 9 Senate seats in 2008 with McCain on the ballot isn't within normal bounds either for a "recession," one which only in hindsight is described as "the biggest financial crash in postwar history." Winning 6 seats in 2006 and 9 seats in 2008 is not within the normal bounds of 2 cycles. This fact-pattern supports my narrative of a deeply unpopular admin leading to a turning point. And a ~65 seat swing in the House and a 5 seat swing in the Senate in Obama's first midterm wasn't the norm either.

There’s no actual argument to your thesis, and certainly no evidence. By contrast, Hillary was the most unappealing Democratic candidate in decades, possibly ever, reviled in polling data and distrusted even by many Democrats.

the linked thread includes "evidence" at least as good as the "evidence" you present here; it's good enough for your argument, but apparently represents "zero evidence" when on the opposite side

what are we to make of that?

All suggest any Republican would have won, as does polling from the 2016 primaries in which match-ups between candidates and Clinton (while Trump was already by far the dominant candidate) show Cruz and even Kasich outperforming Trump.

Mitt Romney lead in some early primary polls over Barack Obama in 2012 and yet he lost. Using early primary polling data even in election years where the polling wasn't garbage (and it was in the 2016 cycle) is tricky because it doesn't have much predictive power; it's an unknown versus an unpopular known. Trump was known. Hillary was known. Mitt Romney was not. Mitt Romney was going to beat Obama! And then he didn't get close.

The Republican front-runner holds a 3-point lead over Clinton statewide, 46 percent to 43 percent with 11 percent undecided.

The onus is on YOU to prove that polling from 2016 clearly suggesting many or even all GOP candidates could beat Clinton in a match-up is somehow wrong.

If only Democrats had run someone like Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would have made even Mississippi competitive! We have good early polling data clearly suggesting Trump was a terrible candidate who would certainly lose. It's too bad that other Hillary Clinton actually did run in 2016 and lost the state of Mississippi by over 17 points.

Your own example shows the issue with relying on this sort of polling data to support your counterfactual.

A case could have been made that Trump mattered in the swing states which delivered his 2016 win. A more mainstream candidate would not have delivered those key votes.

A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.

Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.

The challenge for the right - which Hanania correctly diagnoses - is in converting little bursts of public outrage about things like BLM, trans bathrooms, the bud light controversy, Asian anger around affirmative actions, uproar in some southern states about critical race theory in schools etc into a coherent ideological program with policies at the local, state and federal level.

This is very slowly happening, with conservative normies coalescing behind positions like ‘the race narrative stuff has gone too far’(that is a direct quote) and ‘Ukraine lost, get over it’ and ‘trans are .3% of the population or whatever, they don’t need any accommodation if they don’t want to be reasonable’.

People like Rufo, Tucker and LibsOfTikTok have a big reach and make people angry, but their shtick is outrage bait. That’s not a bad thing, but it often goes nowhere.

The outrage bait fuels a bunch of this stuff. Yes the right needs better thought leaders and narrative setters, but having too much of an ideology is actually counterproductive. To run as an ideologue you need a specific program, and the only specific programs available to the right are mostly very unpopular. It’s better to be a little vague on ideology and lean into it not being ridiculous or unworkable. Center-right parties the world over do exactly this; the usual term is something like ‘pragmatic good-governance’ or the like.

Center-right parties the world over do exactly this; the usual term is something like ‘pragmatic good-governance’ or the like.

Center-right parties the world over go into coalition with far-left and center-left parties and let them drive the bus, rather than go into coalition with far-right parties, so I don't think center-right parties are really a good example of anything.

And, notably, the US party structure makes that failure mode much more difficult. RINOs caucusing with the democrats exist but it’s generally an extreme minority of the party.

Keeping center right normies married to the actual right wingers by not talking about 0 week abortion bans(which is what the Republican Party would dearly love to enact) is a key part of a republican strategy for the foreseeable future.

There are very few viable coalitions that could include the far right that don’t. It happened a handful of times but when they hit 20% the center-right almost always capitulates, as happened in eg Austria several times and in Sweden recently. In France the center-right would vote with Le Pen in parliament on most issues. Vox could easily become part of a future Spanish coalition. The AfD is a unique case because there are some state member parties with relatively close NPD / neonazi ties through figures like Höcke, but even in Germany it’s not impossible to imagine a CDU-AfD coalition at some point in the future.

But it’s also the fruit of the Long March Through the Institutions.

I know nothing about the NFL and its cultural context. That said, this phrase is typically meant to imply that there was some kind of anti-democratic, inorganic effort by leftists (meaning Marxist, not just progressive or necessarily radical) to take over the NFL. I would like to see some proof of this sort of thing. A cursory search of the issue with the helmets and endzones saying "stop racism" or other anti-racist slogans suggests this happened in 2021. You don't need much "Long Marching" to make an institution think that it might get them some positive attention if they were to do this while not alienating enough people who would disagree.

(meaning Marxist, not just progressive or necessarily radical)

Huh, why? I mean, I think a case can be made that a lot of these progressive ideas are Marx-derived, but I don't see why the idea of the long march through institutions requires that the effort be explicitly Marxist.

I would like to see some proof of this sort of thing.

I'd similarly like to see proof of it being organic. I see no reason to grant it null hypothesis status.

A cursory search of the issue with the helmets and endzones saying "stop racism" or other anti-racist slogans suggests this happened in 2021.

By 2021 the March was over and done with. If you want to see it taking off you have to go back to Atheism+ or GamerGate, where community after community started going through struggle sessions about how it is no longer enough to be [the core subject the community was centered around] you must now be [whatever the whole your group does] plus, and stand for anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc., etc., etc.

You don't need much "Long Marching" to make an institution think that it might get them some positive attention if they were to do this while not alienating enough people who would disagree.

If the NFL made helmets saying "all lives matter" do you think blue tribe would just shrug, because they don't support grooming? There's an infinite number of messages you could be putting out that "should" get positive attention without alienating anyone, but only blue-coded ones ever get put out.

Huh, why? I mean, I think a case can be made that a lot of these progressive ideas are Marx-derived, but I don't see why the idea of the long march through institutions requires that the effort be explicitly Marxist.

The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists. We have neutral words, like entryism, and it's possible that the OP meant something neutral, but I'm on a platform where I don't think people are so obviously using it as a perfect substitute for entryism.

I'd similarly like to see proof of it being organic. I see no reason to grant it null hypothesis status.

I'm totally fine shrugging my shoulders and saying I don't have proof of that, because I'm not going to do a deep dive into the NFL and its politics. But then we're left with the position of simply not knowing one way or the other.

By 2021 the March was over and done with.

I was indicating what incidents I could find that matched the description. I don't know what the OP was necessarily referring to sought to indicate what seemed likely. But even granting your point about Atheism+ and all that, why should I assume the NFL was subject to the same thing? Atheism+ was about the split between people who would go on to be SJWs and the Skeptics/Anti-SJWs.

If the NFL made helmets saying "all lives matter" do you think blue tribe would just shrug, because they don't support grooming? There's an infinite number of messages you could be putting out that "should" get positive attention without alienating anyone, but only blue-coded ones ever get put out.

Whether the blue tribe would shrug isn't the point. We're asking about the intention behind the slogans and rhetoric being deployed, not whether one tribe would or wouldn't react.

Moreover, one issue with this line of analysis is the asymmetry in what ideas are part of the status quo or not. The idea of non-whites facing systemic discrimination isn't in the water, it is the water. Why this matters is that people who don't have an axe to grind against the status quo on this point don't, in my view, engage with politics the same way as those who do. Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.

The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists.

And it's also a reference to Mao's "Long March" during the Chinese Civil War. Several of modern China's space program rockets are named after it as well.

Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.

That's what I'm getting at. There's no conspiracy to make the NFL blue, because the NFL turned blue as a result of a conspiracy that came to fruition years ago. The nutso-types claiming that the NFL is fixed so that Kelce will win the Super Bowl for the purpose of benefitting the Democrats are expressing a feeling of unsettled-ness. But it's not a mustache twirling, cigar chomping villain actively fixing games like Meyer Wolfshein; it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.

it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.

Is this what you meant by "Long March through the Institutions?" I have never heard that phrase be used to describe conservative retreat over leftist entryism.

They are two sides of the same coin. Prior comment on the topic.

The OG Long March is widely seen by revisionist historians as being stage managed by KMT forces, who didn't put real effort into destroying the Communists under Mao, preferring to let them shuffle off into the hills never to be seen again. In the same way, the Long March Through the Institutions, leftist entryism as you put it, has been largely unopposed. Conservatives have been criticizing academia since the Eisenhower years, probably before!, and leftists walked in to the vacuum. Conservatives assumed that the crazy college kids would never hold power, and they were wrong. Just like Chiang Kai-shek was wrong about Mao's forces dwindling in the mountains.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats