(10-22-2022, 08:31 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(10-22-2022, 07:22 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: One historian I read wrote that the right ultimately always loses the culture war. More social and self-expressive freedom always wins.
But since we're moving into a 4T/1T era, and even into a 4T from which we may never emerge, who knows. Culture usually tightens up in those periods, and the right has already won on several fronts, temporarily. If civilization collapses, then culture may become very primitive again anyway, and culture wars will be redundant. There will be too little culture to fight over.
I think that would probably suit all those Republican voters just fine. They have no regard for anything, or anyone.
I love self-expressive people, and that does not describe the majority of millennial Democrats. Hell, if that's your metric, Donald Trump is one of the most self-expressive presidents we've ever had. I don't think that's the angle you want to take in this argument
After this 4T is over we will see a political and cultural order hostile to craziness and absurdity of any kind. The test between the Center Right and the Hard Right will be what one thinks of Obama as President. I see multiculturalism becoming a means in which to recognize the validity of traditions not one's own and to recognize common points of solidarity, such as respect for formal education and for small-scale enterprise as solutions to much that has been wrong with America. No culture respects depravity not tied closely to their own culture, and even that tolerance is limited. (German-Americans generally hate Nazis; the most fervent hatred of Mafia types comes from Italian-Americans). I see us likely to promote some minimum of liberal arts education as an expectation of any adult smart enough to use it. The post-Crisis world is likely to be complicated enough even in cultural, let alone political, choices, that we will need more intellectual sophistication and not less.
Having shared experiences in education is likely to bring people together and not to separate them. We are going to largely see Donald Trump and his political hangers-on as well as the extremist militia types and promoters of conspiracy theories as civic pariahs. If I never hear another person claim that the Moon Landing was a hoax -- let alone much-more insidious beliefs such as that the 2020 election was stolen -- I will not miss it.
Yes, in some ways Barack Obama is a model of conservatism. His closest analogue as President is Dwight Eisenhower (someone has to be and an overlay of their electoral victories suggests similarities). Think about it:
- Recognition of tradition as a valid fallback when the political and cultural avant-garde fails. Those avant-garde types usually do.
- Modest, conventional family life
- Disdain for crime and corruption. "Do the crime and do the time"
- Respect for formal learning as a virtue in its own right.
- Rejection of populist demagoguery.
- Rational thought and outright sobriety.
- Undeniable loyalty to one's country and overall support of national allies
- Personal integrity as practice and expectation. Avoidance of scandals.
- Support of sustainability.
- Acceptance of protocol and precedent as guides for governance.
None of that is radical. Obama recognizes that traditions not his are as valid as his, and in a society in which E pluribus unum has gone from thirteen once-squabbling former colonies recently independent into a recognition of the validity multiple traditions Obama may have been silent about thrift and work, but the consumer society adequately inculcates those virtues. What constitutes conservatism changes from one era to another, but the outline simply redefines what is conservatism. Bad behavior is simply the Old Immorality, and a quest to return to something discredited is genuine radicalism: right-wing reaction.
Within twenty years those will be conservative virtues. Consider well that the conservatives of the 1960's rejected the extremists of the Right, including the Birch Society, Kook Klux Klan, and neo-Nazis.
.........
Something related to culture wars:
If the Homeland Generation should follow the pattern of the Silent, then it will be masters of self-effacing comedy. As the Silent pass from the scene, so does their comedy except as video. Comedy at its best melds undeniable wisdom with parody and some ribbing. I think of Britain's Monty Python's Flying Circus... often mocking British fascists of the 1930's in cartoon-like sketches. When Q-Anon lunacy and Trumpism are no longer relevant to American life, then we can expect this stuff to be objects of ridicule when such ridicule is safe to comedians. Do not ignore comedy as an essential part of life. Its comparative scarcity reflects Silent comedians dying off or no longer doing comedy. Even if such people as Joe Biden are President, Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, Mitch McConnell is Senate Minority Leader, and a surviving Koch brother is the driving force between Dark Money politics, then such are last acts in one of the last areas that the oldest living generation vacates: politics.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.