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I think what happened is that Moldbug and BAP’s stuff (and to an extent Hanania’s) worked ‘so well’ and (often via Scott and others) was read by a broad enough - though still small proportionally - slice of ‘the elite’ (tech billionaires, powerful political donors, influential media figures like Yglesias and Klein, some people on Wall Street) that they began to be invited to actually meet these people. And when they did they realized what would be required to effect genuine political change, and realized that there was simply no way it was going to happen through either the established Trumpist or mainstream conservative movements in the US. Moldbug always knew this, to some extent, the only thing to be done is to convince elites, which is disastrous because progressivism is a patrician ideology designed to appeal to them. Smart reactionaries, people who aren’t tradlite evangelical Christians with two sons in the US military, these people (‘blue tribe’, whatever) are always going to be outsiders on the American right. They’re always going to be thrown under the bus. They don’t have Trump’s magnetic charisma and TV personality. Their natural constituency is people who already have great power and wealth, and so they move to them.
I think the biggest black pill for them was abortion, though. The right finally wins a great cultural victory decades in the making that requires the meticulous coordination of multiple Republican presidents over 30+ years, extensive lobbying, the invention of a whole legal apparatus in the Federalist Society to funnel anti-abortion lawyers into the judiciary and the participation of countless Christian movements and churches. And it was all to slightly reduce the number of poor black women having abortions. That was the great American conservative victory of the 21st century, the towering achievement. Nothing could be more of a black pill than that.
Man, that’s a good description of what a hollow and expensive victory it was.
But it was the strongest motivator for conservatives to try so hard for court control, and that is likely to pay dividends in other issues even if it hurts GOP elections (until they moderate down to safe/legal/rare).
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