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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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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.

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