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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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It seems clear a future where the GOP gives up on winning election will not be good for gun rights.

Except you're assuming that right-wingers giving up on winning elections means doing nothing at all.

Plus, you ask us to focus on one small, narrow area where the Right is winning — for now, though the long-term demographic trends point toward an almost-certain reversal down the line — and ignore the many, many more issues where we're losing. Again, it's another version of the assertion that we should be happy merely with losing slowly, on the grounds we could be losing faster.

And, if you’re a conservative, avoiding a bad change is a victory itself.

Well, good thing I, for one, am a reactionary, not a conservative. "Not losing" is not winning, winning is winning.

If the culture war situation was, on average, where it is specifically on gun rights

But it's not, and there's no way within the "rules of the game" to get it there.

Let’s be very clear about something:

I am not asking to focus on one narrow area. I was responding to someone who brought that up. It is, I think, illustrative of the fact winning elections is good actually, and that if the GOP could do what it does on guns on other issues the world would be a better place (it helps that guns are more popular than polling tends to suggest, unlike abortion bans).

Long term demographic trends doom everything unless the changing of minds happens. That’s a fully general problem.

So you’re a reactionary and not a conservative. Obviously you would prefer/predict things will get worse before they can get better, presumably under some newfangled system. When the Dems win it’s good news, in the long run, because they will make things worse. When Republicans win they’ll fail to really turn back the tide, at best they’ll just prolong the inevitable (Trump is a fun wildcard because he is an agent of chaos).

You don’t say what other things can be done in the present, and I was going to suggest “why not both” with respect to trying to win elections, but perhaps winning elections is actually bad, for the long run.

Do reactionaries commonly believe it’s actually good to vote for the bad side? The same question goes for lefty revolutionaries.

You don’t say what other things can be done in the present

Because I'm pretty sure I'd eat a ban for doing so. What exactly did you think I meant by "flipping the table"?

Do reactionaries commonly believe it’s actually good to vote for the bad side?

In my circles, no, because it's "bad" to vote at all, being against democracy as we are.

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