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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   25852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right? As dispositions, left and right aren't intrinsically authoritarian or libertarian in nature. In the United States, the broader right tends to be the home of people that are more libertarian-inclined, not uniformly, but to the extent of having guys like Ron Paul (in the older days) and Thomas Massie around.

I do think it's interesting to look around the globe and note that being Covid-insane (or Covid-cautious/Covid-serious if you're not the kind of hater that I am) doesn't really look all that linked to political ideology, but to belief in the power of the state to improve lives through controlling citizens. But really, in the United States, this does look like the sort of thing that will wind up highly left-coded and it's reasonable for Americans to react to their own politics accordingly.

There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right?

There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.

Well, the obvious counterexample would be Sweden, ruled at that time by Social Democrats (who had historically based their power specifically on the power of the state to improve lives through controlling citizens), but with a notoriously lax Covid regime compared to most other European countries. (Belarus had a laxer one, but it's also led by a bonafide authoritarian populist who was initially elected as the left candidate and has exploited Soviet nostalgia even more heavily than Putin.)

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