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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29237 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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In America, it’s out of a political polarization spiral that started with bush and became irrecoverable under Obama; both sides can’t quite understand why their president and his merry men is so uniquely alienating to the other side and so make up motives. It’s because he’s black, or because they hate America, or whatever.

You can couple that with a preexisting liberal elite prejudice that we’d be just like some fantastical utopian version of Denmark if the typical red tribe demographics would stop preventing it(never mind that these people do not know what Denmark is actually like), and it’s a recipe for different interest groups banding together in a no-criticism-allowed way to beat up on their opponents. That’s basically where the culture war comes from.

But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?

He's "clinging to guns and religion" and stopping progressives from solving the gun crime problem.

And that was Obama trying to be charitable.

Factually: no, they did not, and the utopia envisioned doesn’t look much like Denmark or indeed anything else that exists

However, it’s important to look at the theory and interests here- cousin Merle not having any incentive to support public transportation is pretty obvious, for example. He already owns a pickup truck and doesn’t go into the downtown areas where it’s less useful all that often. He’s an easy scapegoat for things like that. There’s other examples, too, of course, that’s just an easy one. But ‘preference for rural-coded lifestyle choices’ has been a progressive scapegoat for not having the same nice things they think Europe has for quite a while. There’s something to hlynka’s point that the Twitter DR are more progressive than conventionally conservative because a lot of them are the same, they just blame blacks instead(and factually blacks and rednecks get along much better than commonly believed).

The red tribe still has significant political power. Especially in state legislatures where they are not afraid to flex their power to do things like ban abortion.

Started with the Clintons.

All that hate for Hillary wasn’t new.

US is already spending high levels on social spending.

https://twitter.com/data_david1/status/1759013986023190724?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

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