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Notes -
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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