Quote:
Originally Posted by Icky Thump
That’s what happens when bread goes up a dollar. But I tell people, bread is cheaper in Russia.
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Normal people just don't like progressives. It's a thing.
I don't think they like MAGA, either.
Pet theory on why Trump's numbers are resilient:
1. Inflation
2. Immigration
Hardly revelatory, I know. But those are bedrocks. Kind of like Harris' bedrock issue, which is reproductive rights.
Where it gets interesting, IMO, is the third issue, which I'd call "Officious Overreach."
There is a type of person, and they seem to gravitate toward progressive and right-wing politics, who think they know what's best for everyone, and insist that their views be enshrined in policy.
In the 80s, this was most pungently apparent in the behaviors of people like Brent Bozell and Focus on the Family groups boycotting media and products advertised on it which they deemed obscene. They even got Ed Meese to get behind policies to try to police and ban what offended them.
This pissed off the quiet majority of the country. And Meese became a kind of politically toxic Joe McCarthy in his day. Despite all their efforts, these "morality hall monitors" failed. Normal people told them to fuck off. And so they went back under their rocks and festered within the evangelical and fundamentalist cultures.
From 2010 on (and really aggressively after 2016), the most pungent example of this busy-bodyism has been the progressives. They've been scolding everyone who isn't 100% on their page for wrongthink for a long time now, and people are really irritated by it.
Unlike Meese and Bozell and the "culture police" of the 80s, who had to fight against an often mocking and openly disdainful media, the current puritans enjoy the support of much of the mainstream media.
Now, of course, few people watch mainstream media anymore, so this support is limited. But it is enough to keep their message - their insistent, naive, and white-hot righteous scolding - loud enough to create a highly annoying background noise withing our politics.
We can ignore the MAGA because, well, they're overtly nuts. They're in red hats, at rallies, assuming a posture akin to something between LaRouche supporters and Birch Society Members.
But its not so easy to ignore the left wing culture police. They look a bit more normal, they are far more articulate, often credentialed (in silly subjects, but nevertheless adequate to put letters behind their names) and they're armed with just enough pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-scientific "scholarship" to present defenses of their frequently preposterous positions.
Nobody wants a govt of hall monitors. Nobody wants to be scolded about how he needs to think by some 35 year old PhD in gender studies or intersectional anthropology.
This country's essential DNA is still individualism. One cannot expect to get anywhere in America by perpetually tsk-tsking people in a strident and self-assured manner. Particularly where, in the case of progressivism, the intellectual and empirical underpinnings of the ideology are weak and falter under even slight cross-examination. (Every extreme ideology falters the same way.) The quiet majority are not fools. They may be credulous in some regards, as all people are, but they can spot people selling unrealistic utopian policies.
It doesn't sell any form of widget and it certainly doesn't sell political candidates to tell people "We know what's best and you must listen to us." First, people who say that are almost always dead wrong. If one is that strident, he is demented, and that dementia is negatively impacting his thinking and his judgment. So whatever he's selling is probably going to turn out horribly post-purchase. Second, at no time in human history has anyone ever successfully shamed his opponents into conceding he is right and they are wrong. The rigorous studies explaining why are myriad (Haidt's
The Righteous Mind is a good start.)
Telling half the country they mustn't - they cannot, ever - vote for a certain candidate is a great way to drive tons of voters to that candidate. Like it or not, this country reveres the outlaws, not the compliance officers who tell us "no" and school marms handing out detentions. We were founded on the idea that nobody tells us what to do.
And that's a good thing. Because that preserves the ragged and often cruel dynamism that has made this country different and better in many regards than all others.
If His Orangeness should win this fall, which looks increasingly possible, if not perhaps likely, I would hope the left takes a different tack toward this Project 2025 stuff (should there be an attempt to enshrine it in law). Rather than scold everyone and offer its own competing vision of a controlled and managed society, make the argument that every American feels in his or her bones: "No. I'm not going to do what you tell me. Go ahead and try to make me."
The last thing anyone needs - the very worst thing imaginable - is what we have now: One side arguing "My version of a control structure for our govt and culture is best," countered by, "No, yours sucks. My version of a control structure is best."
How about both of these groups of assholes stop trying to control everyone and instead, live and let live?
This would be welcome by all of us in the middle, who are sick and tired of attempts by competing groups of Officious Overreachers to dictate how the rest of us are expected to behave.
