The center right will likely win the culture war

[JasonBlack]

Okay, hold your horses. Let me break this down a bit before you decide I'm extremely biased haha 

First off, a disclaimer: this is all conjecture. One must always retain a baseline of skepticism with lofty geopolitical casting, especially one's own.

With that out of the way, I'm going to point out some ways the right is not going to win. 
- no one wants to hop back on the evangelical social mess of late 90s/early 2000s, not even the majority of the boomers. 
- actual racists are not appreciated by the majority of either party 
- I think it's a strong possibility we could end this 4T with universal healthcare (likely more based on an Australian model than a UK one)
- We could very well see a return to unions 
- Taxes will almost certainly be higher than they are now 
- normal people never really stood with the "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd. This is what individualistic intellectuals who score low on trait agreeableness think, not normal centrists of either leaning (I am one of the former, but I'm not delusional to think the majority of people would ever behave like that regularly)

Now, why they are going to lose 
- no one likes the woke left, not even the genuine leftists. just look at the difference between critic vs viewer scores on rotten tomatoes. the liberal arts intelligencia loves it, everyone else is sick of it
- right wingers in the United States have a long track record of playing fairly nice with each other. Leftists tend to spiral into purity wars and end up cannibalizing each other. 
- everyone is tired of the modern dating norms, which are making them miserable. 
- Hispanic, Asian and black Americans are not nearly as "liberal" as white democrats like to pretend they are. Half the people I know in millennial/Gen Z right wing circles are interracial couples, and talk to people of other races far more frequently than coastal democrats tend to. 
- the more dangerous society gets, the more bargaining power men have in relationships, especially given the average millennial woman is around 32, and running out of time to have children. they will need to make some serious compromises and change their behavior if they want to grab a man for the longterm while they still can
- people are flocking to red states for a reason. everyone realizes the Covid totalitarian states of NY, NJ and CA are failing
- a large portion of the modern right...are people who have already been cast out by the left. 
- historically, the right is better organized and stresses principles of unity, discipline and strength. this is a lot more appealing to most people than division, being constantly antagonistic toward your country and viewing your entire civilization with the contempt of original sin

[pbrower2a]

The Center Right is exactly what we need for fending off the Hard Right. Britain in the 1930's had active Communist and fascist groups, but it also had a strong Conservative Party and a strong Labour Party. Conservatives made clear that fascists had nothing to offer but bigotry, and Labour recognized that the Soviet Union was not the paradise that it claimed to be. Conservatives showed that the fascists were unconscionable evil (concentration camps, book burning, Jew-baiting, and torture chambers) .

The Center Left (and the bulk of the American Left is Center Left) is the diametric opposite of the Hard Right. The problem is that the Center Left has little to offer the Hard Right except for ridicule that cause people on the bubble to stand with their neighbors co-workers, and drinking buddies when such people feel excoriation for believing FoX News and spouting conspiracy theories. We lack a Center Right that states clearly that this stuff is bad for business and contrary to traditions that have held the test of time.

[JasonBlack]

(10-21-2022, 10:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Center Right is exactly what we need for fending off the Hard Right. Britain in the 1930's had active Communist and fascist groups, but it also had a strong Conservative Party and a strong Labour Party. Conservatives made clear that fascists had nothing to offer but bigotry, and Labour recognized that the Soviet Union was not the paradise that it claimed to be. Conservatives showed that the fascists were unconscionable evil (concentration camps, book burning, Jew-baiting, and torture chambers) .

The Center Left (and the bulk of the American Left is Center Left) is the diametric opposite of the Hard Right. The problem is that the Center Left has little to offer the Hard Right except for ridicule that cause people on the bubble to stand with their neighbors co-workers, and drinking buddies when such people feel excoriation for believing FoX News and spouting conspiracy theories. We lack a Center Right that states clearly that this stuff is bad for business and contrary to traditions that have held the test of time.

Exactly. My biggest contentions with a few right wing groups/ideas are as follows
1) Almost have the US population is not white. Since we can't deport them even if we wanted to, we need to find some way to at least get along cordially. The business conservatives and midwestern rural and suburban conservatives have been good at this for a long time, but the younger, edgier right wingers need to temper that with a bit more cooperation and patience.
2) I hate modern feminism with a passion, but...I still have a mother, aunts, female cousins, etc. Straight men also will need to get along with a wife, and have a 50% of having female offspring. Just because feminism needs to be punished doesn't negate the fact that everyone needs to interact with women regularly in order to function either individually or societally. Yes, be willing to rebuke those who are disrespectful, but you also have to be kind during normal interaction and, especially, when they are doing something you want to encourage.
3) As I've mentioned in a few other posts, conservatives need to focus on....actually conserving something. The late millennial and early Gen Z boys are kicking ass with all the memes and being willing to stand up to all their peers and media outlets, but they are just that...boys. We need more of the men to step up and bring back some good ol' common sense, stability and responsible risk management.

In short, some form of multi-ethnic civic nationalism is the only way we can go. The question is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.

[pbrower2a]

(10-21-2022, 10:38 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(10-21-2022, 10:02 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Center Right is exactly what we need for fending off the Hard Right. Britain in the 1930's had active Communist and fascist groups, but it also had a strong Conservative Party and a strong Labour Party. Conservatives made clear that fascists had nothing to offer but bigotry, and Labour recognized that the Soviet Union was not the paradise that it claimed to be. Conservatives showed that the fascists were unconscionable evil (concentration camps, book burning, Jew-baiting, and torture chambers) .

The Center Left (and the bulk of the American Left is Center Left) is the diametric opposite of the Hard Right. The problem is that the Center Left has little to offer the Hard Right except for ridicule that cause people on the bubble to stand with their neighbors co-workers, and  drinking buddies when such people feel excoriation for believing FoX News and spouting conspiracy theories. We lack a Center Right that states clearly that this stuff is bad for business and contrary to traditions that have held the test of time.

Exactly. My biggest contentions with a few right wing groups/ideas are as follows

Quote:1) Almost have the US population is not white. Since we can't deport them even if we wanted to, we need to find some way to at least get along cordially. The business conservatives and midwestern rural and suburban conservatives have been good at this for a long time, but the younger, edgier right wingers need to temper that with a bit more cooperation and patience.

If you are to count the Jews (largely white even if they generally avoid making "whiteness" anything more than coincidence) and LGBT people (who cross all ethnic and sectarian lines) we have a large population of Model Minorities who largely cling to traditions and communal heritage (which I respect). These people are doing well, indeed perhaps too conspicuously well for America's white bigots. 

In general they respect formal learning and business enterprise and create alternatives to Corporate America consisting of bloated, bureaucratized firms often designated as "Too Big to Fail". With "Too Big to Fail" often comes "Too Inflexible to Adapt" or even "Too Corrupt to Survive". Many of those companies deemed "Too Big to Fail" are approaching the end of the business life-cycle



https://site.adizes.com/lifecycle/

Quote:Clearly a business in "Bureaucracy" is on the brink of death. It may be the last surviving firm offering a specific component or raw material. It got there as it lost its ability to adapt and modernize. It may survive because it gets subsidies from a key customer or from a government that does not want the company wound down with the loss of a large number of employees becoming unemployed (and hard to put back in employment due to bad habits necessary for survival in such a business. Creditors may keep it alive because it owns real estate, high-cost machinery, or intellectual property that the creditors recognize worth more than the book value, and that even with losses it might be paying taxes that the creditor would otherwise be on the hook for.  The company will die in a short order, most likely when the firm can no longer eat into fixed costs or when the creditor pulls the plug when someone buys assets worth more than the value of the going concern.   For a dying airline, the formal death may come when the creditors can sell off the jetliners to a competitor. For a film studio or publishing house, one of the competitors buys the copyrights.  Real estate purchased fifty years earlier may be heavily depreciated on the books, but a failing store chain might be 'executed' when the creditor finds someone who seeks to redevelop the property for apartments or medical clinics.   The company may lose its reason to exist if the clients fund in-house solutions to some item for which the company is the last supplier.   

  Problems of Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic organizations accomplish very little of any value. Their focus is frequently on control for the sake of control. With no inclination to change, everyone’s day is filled with systems, forms, procedures, and rules. People know all the rules, but they can’t remember why they exist. If you ask why they do things in a certain way, managers in a Bureaucracy will likely tell you, “Because it’s the policy.” The response to almost any request is, “Write me a memo.”

After the pressures of Recrimination, working in a Bureaucracy is a low-stress environment. There is little pressure to perform, so long as one abides by the rules and regulations. Bureaucratic managers are among the nicest people you’ll ever meet. To make change happen, they now need the cooperation of others, which is a near impossibility in a Bureaucracy. A single executive cannot mobilize people across organizational lines. Rituals must therefore substitute for action. Meetings take place. Minutes are taken. Papers get filed. There is plenty of voting, and debates rage but one sees little, if any, real action.

Bureaucratic companies are internally disintegrated. Each department has responsibility for a particular task, but no one has responsibility for the combined result of the separate tasks. It is usually up to the client to put all the pieces together. Employees don’t know the inner workings of other departments. The customer service department often consists of telephone reps whose job it is to listen, record complaints, and answer them with a standard, routine letter: “We regret any inconvenience, but we will do our best to resolve your problem.” Mostly they respond to customer requests by demanding yet another document. Bureaucracies do not ask in advance for everything they will require. Rather than show its entire hand, a Bureaucratic organization shows only one card at a time.

Like an older person who follows a set routine every day and becomes highly aggravated with any change, Bureaucracies resent outside disruptions and aggressively create obstructions to limit them. Customers are an example of one such disruption. Bureaucracies minimize the possibility for external disruption by connecting to the external world through very narrow channels. Perhaps they allow only one incoming telephone line or they keep their customer service departments open for only a few hours a day. They keep people standing in lines, only to tell them which line they must go stand in next.

In a Bureaucracy, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. One department rejects what another one requests. Customers are puzzled, frustrated, and lost. To get results, a customer must build their own systems to deal with the ineffective organization. Businesses that must work with Bureaucracies usually have dedicated departments, systems and people that are experts on the inner workings of a particular government agency and getting the results they need from that Bureaucracy.

Because Bureaucracies rely on laws that provide them with a monopoly on services and allocation of funds generated by taxation, heads of bureaucracies spend most of their time in halls of government and with politicians safeguarding the source of their funds. What annoys politicians most is negative press. So, heads of Bureaucracies are careful to ensure that there is no negative press about their agencies. Ask people in a bureaucratic organization, “Who is your client?” The answers generally include a long list of state or federal agencies that either supervises its performance or its budget, other Bureaucracies that it works with, unions, newspapers and other media. Lost at the end of this long list of stakeholders, are the customers whom the Bureaucracy is really supposed to be serving.

The health of a full-fledged Bureaucracy is very delicate. Although it appears to be a robust monster, it may be relatively easy to destroy it. Many are rotten to the core, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Since many of them get their financial resources from politicians, they survive only as long as they are political assets. When they become political liabilities and the funds are withdrawn, they can collapse promptly. Others are vulnerable to changes in laws, privatization, loss of corporate support.

Any sudden change could ruin them. Bureaucracies forced to confront these sudden changes, quickly, often don’t survive the effort without considerable external support. This is particularly true for government-owned monopolies that are privatized. Many of these organizations have nothing in place that resembles marketing, sales or business development and so they quickly flounder in a competitive environment.
Managing Corporate Life Cycles, 2nd Edition by Dr. Ichak Adizes.Published by the Adizes Institute. © 2004, Ichak Adizes.

https://site.adizes.com/lifecycle/bureaucracy/ 
   

...Sears and K-Mart were in this position recently, and Montgomery-Ward preceded those decrepit two sometime earlier. Banks and insurance companies are bureaucracies by nature, but they can get very bad very fast, as shown in the financial crash of 2008. Plenty of large manufacturers (the automakers are prime examples of companies that skirted liquidation in 2008) survived once but might be going down to ruin in the next Big Crash. We have learned the wrong answer to corporate failure: a huge infusion of cash through subsidies. 

The government needs the auto industry for producing military vehicles; should we have a major war in which China is the Enemy and it is in occupation of South Korea and Japan and Russia has puppet regimes hostile to the USA all the way to Portugal and Ireland, then we might have big trouble producing tanks, armored personnel carriers, and the like. See also the aircraft industry. 

Often these companies dominate an obsolete activity. Today the American coal industry is in deep trouble as its coal seams are worked out. A few decades, as electric vehicles supplant gas buggies, Big Oil might find an inadequate base of customers. $50 a gallon for gasoline as a market price  in the equivalent of current prices might not turn a profit if practically nobody is buying gasoline. However glamorous "tech" is, the path from exciting start-up to worn-out companies can be surprisingly short.      

Quote:2) I hate modern feminism with a passion, but...I still have a mother, aunts, female cousins, etc. Straight men also will need to get along with a wife, and have a 50% of having female offspring. Just because feminism needs to be punished doesn't negate the fact that everyone needs to interact with women regularly in order to function either individually or societally. Yes, be willing to rebuke those who are disrespectful, but you also have to be kind during normal interaction and, especially, when they are doing something you want to encourage.
3) As I've mentioned in a few other posts, conservatives need to focus on....actually conserving something. The late millennial and early Gen Z boys are kicking ass with all the memes and being willing to stand up to all their peers and media outlets, but they are just that...boys. We need more of the men to step up and bring back some good ol' common sense, stability and responsible risk management.

In short, some form of multi-ethnic civic nationalism is the only way we can go. The question is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.

We all adapt to change lest our lives be miserable. Feminism seems here to stay in part because toxic masculinity is consummately dangerous in a time of nuclear weapons. I look at the gangs in our slums and I see the sorts of people who kill for little cause. This sort of behavior often spills out into the mainstream. I look at some of the mass shooters and I often see the combination of anorexia and testosterone. Obviously we do not want people like that in charge of nuclear arsenals or other weapons of mass destruction!  

Quote:“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

[url=https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2796883][/url]
Cassius was among those who would assassinate Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, and in turn Plutarch, were onto something. 

Technology changes, and we can take advantage of it or be left behind. To be sure, there are some advantages to being a "late adapter" as one gets stuff at a much lower price... but in the end the stuff is worthless. Economic reality changes, and if America ever becomes the sort of place in which those who own the assets have everyone else in thrall, we accept such misery and pretend to love it -- or die, whether by suicide of by revolt against overwhelming force. 

So do social relationships. Many people found it unsettling that black people were no longer subjects in their world and had achieved meaningful citizenship. Their precious white daughter attending the same school or in the same classroom with some black male of such age? Oh, the horror (of miscegenation, arguably even worse than "common-ism"), thought many Southern white people. 

If you want a woman who has something of interest to say, then accept that that woman is most likely a feminist.  The couples who cannot speak to each other are the ones who get divorces. Feminism and formal education seem to correlate, so it is getting harder to find a wife perfectly willing to live to do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Many couples (the wife as much as the husband) want that; they hire a maid.  If you want your daughter to do well in life, then accept that she will need a solid education wherein she comes to adopt feminist ways.  If you want your son to be something other than a frustrated young man who morphs into a frustrated and lonely young man, then you will need to teach him to adopt to the feminist majority of women.  

Life is never as easy as it looks.

[Tim Randal Walker]

Perhaps there will be a general tendency towards social conservatism when we begin transition into 1T. However, compared to the 1950s, there may be some 2T tendencies that may stick. A few examples:

1. Women largely transitioned from skirts/dresses to pants.

2. Legalization of marijuana.

A few other 2T themes might retain some influence. Environmentalism, for example.

I don't know about LGBT. Perhaps there will be a general tolerance?

[JasonBlack]

Quote:If you want a woman who has something of interest to say, then accept that that woman is most likely a feminist.  The couples who cannot speak to each other are the ones who get divorces. Feminism and formal education seem to correlate, so it is getting harder to find a wife perfectly willing to live to do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Many couples (the wife as much as the husband) want that; they hire a maid.  If you want your daughter to do well in life, then accept that she will need a solid education wherein she comes to adopt feminist ways.  If you want your son to be something other than a frustrated young man who morphs into a frustrated and lonely young man, then you will need to teach him to adopt to the feminist majority of women.  

Without knowing what your definition of "feminism" is I can't say how much I agree, but at the very least, 3rd wave feminism on was little more than a narcissistic power grab. Several truths related to this are, at this point, undeniable
1) Almost no one is happy with modern relationship norms, and the idea that the solution is more feminism would ignore how trends of marital satisfaction fell lower and lower as women gained more and more power. A recent study showed that as much as 28% of modern 30 year old men....are virgins. A peaceful society in which 1/3 of men have no access to sex and
2) The idea that men and women are basically the same on the inside is supported by...nothing. Women are a standard deviation higher on both trait agreeableness and trait neuroticism, men have a much wider standard deviation in intelligence scores (same mean, but much more representation at the extremes), men have an average of 17 times the testosterone of women. 
3) The new norm of single motherhood and society footing the bill makes no sense either economically or socially. Children from two parent households outperform their peers from single parent households on rates of depression, gang activity, suicide, drug addiction, risk taking behavior spousal abuse....just about everything. We need fathers to provide order and discipline in the house, not more feminism.

[Eric the Green]

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.

[Eric the Green]

(10-22-2022, 03:59 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:If you want a woman who has something of interest to say, then accept that that woman is most likely a feminist.  The couples who cannot speak to each other are the ones who get divorces. Feminism and formal education seem to correlate, so it is getting harder to find a wife perfectly willing to live to do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Many couples (the wife as much as the husband) want that; they hire a maid.  If you want your daughter to do well in life, then accept that she will need a solid education wherein she comes to adopt feminist ways.  If you want your son to be something other than a frustrated young man who morphs into a frustrated and lonely young man, then you will need to teach him to adopt to the feminist majority of women.  

Without knowing what your definition of "feminism" is I can't say how much I agree, but at the very least, 3rd wave feminism on was little more than a narcissistic power grab. Several truths related to this are, at this point, undeniable
1) Almost no one is happy with modern relationship norms, and the idea that the solution is more feminism would ignore how trends of marital satisfaction fell lower and lower as women gained more and more power. A recent study showed that as much as 28% of modern 30 year old men....are virgins. A peaceful society in which 1/3 of men have no access to sex and
2) The idea that men and women are basically the same on the inside is supported by...nothing. Women are a standard deviation higher on both trait agreeableness and trait neuroticism, men have a much wider standard deviation in intelligence scores (same mean, but much more representation at the extremes), men have an average of 17 times the testosterone of women. 
3) The new norm of single motherhood and society footing the bill makes no sense either economically or socially. Children from two parent households outperform their peers from single parent households on rates of depression, gang activity, suicide, drug addiction, risk taking behavior spousal abuse....just about everything. We need fathers to provide order and discipline in the house, not more feminism.

"On the inside" means spiritually, not physically. People who express views like yours are often limited to either a materialist view of reality, or they are captured by long out-of-date religious mythology and authority. In either case they are alienated and cut off from the inner life, a malady that particularly affects Americans.


Feminism is not one-parent household. There is no connection between those two concepts at all.

Two parents and the "it takes a village" approach works better for children. But many people of both sexes (including me it turned out) are no longer wedded, so to speak, to the ideal of family, and have no children. Others put it off longer. And some realize that a mere nuclear family is not very fulfilling or very helpful either. Such families were much larger before world war II and suburbia.

[JasonBlack]

(10-22-2022, 07:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-22-2022, 03:59 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:If you want a woman who has something of interest to say, then accept that that woman is most likely a feminist.  The couples who cannot speak to each other are the ones who get divorces. Feminism and formal education seem to correlate, so it is getting harder to find a wife perfectly willing to live to do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Many couples (the wife as much as the husband) want that; they hire a maid.  If you want your daughter to do well in life, then accept that she will need a solid education wherein she comes to adopt feminist ways.  If you want your son to be something other than a frustrated young man who morphs into a frustrated and lonely young man, then you will need to teach him to adopt to the feminist majority of women.  

Without knowing what your definition of "feminism" is I can't say how much I agree, but at the very least, 3rd wave feminism on was little more than a narcissistic power grab. Several truths related to this are, at this point, undeniable
1) Almost no one is happy with modern relationship norms, and the idea that the solution is more feminism would ignore how trends of marital satisfaction fell lower and lower as women gained more and more power. A recent study showed that as much as 28% of modern 30 year old men....are virgins. A peaceful society in which 1/3 of men have no access to sex and
2) The idea that men and women are basically the same on the inside is supported by...nothing. Women are a standard deviation higher on both trait agreeableness and trait neuroticism, men have a much wider standard deviation in intelligence scores (same mean, but much more representation at the extremes), men have an average of 17 times the testosterone of women. 
3) The new norm of single motherhood and society footing the bill makes no sense either economically or socially. Children from two parent households outperform their peers from single parent households on rates of depression, gang activity, suicide, drug addiction, risk taking behavior spousal abuse....just about everything. We need fathers to provide order and discipline in the house, not more feminism.

"On the inside" means spiritually, not physically. People who express views like yours are often limited to either a materialist view of reality, or they are captured by long out-of-date religious mythology and authority. In either case they are alienated and cut off from the inner life, a malady that particularly affects Americans.


Feminism is not one-parent household. There is no connection between those two concepts at all.

Two parents and the "it takes a village" approach works better for children. But many people of both sexes (including me it turned out) are no longer wedded, so to speak, to the ideal of family, and have no children. Others put it off longer. And some realize that a mere nuclear family is not very fulfilling or very helpful either. Such families were much larger before world war II and suburbia.

Tell me more about all those conservative single mothers.
....yeah, I don't know many either, and the ones I do, it was because the husband died.

While we're at it, the right wingers I know are all full of vigor, ambition and inner drive, and most of them are far more satisfied with their faith than liberals are in theirs. Being focused on personal ambition doesn't mean you have to lack "spiritual focus" (though it tends to say a lot about the nature of that spiritual focus). More often than not they're complimentary.

[JasonBlack]

(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

[pbrower2a]

(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.

[JasonBlack]

Some of those are valid points. Where I think our 1T presidents will be different from Obama is that, in the coming era, people will grow tired of all the belligerence and divisiveness. A center right, or even center left president would be expected to take a harder line stance on riots, political unrest, etc. "We tried to bring to the table for 20 years. You will not threaten the peace we fought and died to build. Cease and desist..."

This will be even more true on a societal level.  People will be open to discussing topics like socialized medicine, higher estate taxes, etc, but your histrionic liberal celebrity types, types like Meghan Markle or Ezra Miller will get kicked to the curb. It will no longer be acceptable to throw around terms like "racist", "misogynist", "transphobe", etc without a much greater burden of proof. Here in South Carolina, it's already like this. It's acceptable among both black and white people to punch someone in the face if they are excessively belligerent with you. Rather than creating a hostile environment, it creates an environment where most people have very good manners, because if you don't, you will eventually face the consequences when someone punches you in the mouth. Rather than the more mousy, apologetic manners of the US, it is a culture of a more gut-level kind of respect, where it's easy to be accepted if you don't come looking for trouble, but where you will be kicked out the door if you do. Don't get me wrong, there are still some pretty nasty vestiges of racism that pop up every now and then, but for the vast majority, you can get along just fine as long as you don't disturb the peace in the jungle. 


Actually, come to think of it, I saw a meme awhile back that is, imo, closer to the kind of culture we're going to see in the 1T. The wholesomeness, patriotism and libertarian side of the right, with the broader net inclusiveness, denouncement of demagoguery and libertarian side of the left. 

[pbrower2a]

Much of the South had an "honor" culture in which perceived insults can result in violence. At one time such could be duels. Up North, such was unacceptable. Those who use excessive force to protect their self-image go to jail.

Southern "white culture" is closer to Southern "black" culture (referring to the Deep South as opposed to the Mountain South that has few African-Americans outside of such large cities as Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Louisville, and St. Louis... maybe Tulsa) and the most likely meeting place for discussions will be churches. I suspect that Southern whites trust African-American preachers who promote the same ethical values. Both Mountain South whites and Deep South Whites have little in common with white people Up North.

[JasonBlack]

(10-23-2022, 08:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Much of the South had an "honor" culture in which perceived insults can result in violence. At one time such could be duels. Up North, such was unacceptable. Those who use excessive force to protect their self-image go to jail.

Southern "white culture" is closer to Southern "black" culture (referring to the Deep South as opposed to the Mountain South that has few African-Americans outside of such large cities as Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Louisville, and St. Louis... maybe Tulsa) and the most likely meeting place for discussions will be churches. I suspect that Southern whites trust African-American preachers who promote the same ethical values. Both Mountain South whites and Deep South Whites have little in common with white people Up North.

There is a difference between hair trigger pride and hot tempers (bad) vs putting verbally abusive people with bad manners and boundaries in their place (good). Both are present in the South.

Your comment about black culture and southern white culture being similar is spot on. Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" is a must-read on this topic. On one hand, it slants a bit too far in favor of the negatives imo, but on the other hand, it's one of the hilarious roasts of both ghetto people and white rednecks I've ever seen, especially as they tend to be mortal enemies and would resent the comparison. Being an elderly black gentleman who grew up in Harlem, he can get away with saying a lot more than most would be able to pull off.

[pbrower2a]

(10-23-2022, 09:56 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(10-23-2022, 08:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Much of the South had an "honor" culture in which perceived insults can result in violence. At one time such could be duels.   Up North, such was unacceptable. Those who use excessive force to protect their self-image go to jail.

Southern "white culture" is closer to Southern "black" culture (referring to the Deep South as opposed to the Mountain South that has few African-Americans outside of such large cities as Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Louisville, and St. Louis... maybe Tulsa)  and the most likely meeting place for discussions will be churches. I suspect that Southern whites trust African-American preachers who promote the same ethical values.  Both Mountain South whites and Deep South Whites have little in common with white people Up North.

There is a difference between hair trigger pride and hot tempers (bad) vs putting verbally abusive people with bad manners and boundaries in their place (good). Both are present in the South.

Your comment about black culture and southern white culture being similar is spot on. Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" is a must-read on this topic. On one hand, it slants a bit too far in favor of the negatives imo, but on the other hand, it's one of the hilarious roasts of both ghetto people and white rednecks I've ever seen, especially as they tend to be mortal enemies and would resent the comparison. Being an elderly black gentleman who grew up in Harlem, he can get away with saying a lot more than most would be able to pull off.

Impulse control is essential to a good life. It allows one to stick with something worth sticking through and keeps one from doing something permanently destructive or disgraceful. I've been a substitute teacher, and one thing that I have learned is that one must ordinarily find a way to back down. That may not always be possible, as with assaults or certain "fighting words" that rhyme with trigger, rag, and "puck cue". Life often entails one frustration after another, and of course the more responsible one's job the more difficulties one can expect (unless one refer to povert or abuse by customers toward the low end of the scale of employment. Not everyone who walks into a car dealership is a sure customer, which explains why car salespeople make much higher incomes than people who simply act as cashiers at a convenience store. Should I ever sell cars I am going to remember that a car seat is furniture and use that as a selling point.

Much of the preparation for extraordinary performance in the arts, academia, athletics, and most professions is sheer drudgery. How much effort must a prospective violinist for a symphony orchestra put into playing an E-major or C-sharp minor keys (four sharps) A--flat major or F-minor (four flats)... playing those scales smoothly is not easy and is far from musical mastery. It is a necessary start for some works. Seemingly anyone can do raw labor or unimaginative toil. Going beyond that can take years of preparation.

.............................

If stuck in a motel in a God-awful place because it is along the expressway, one potentially-enlightening deed is to look at the phone book. In rural northern Indiana (Industrial or farming North) one will find plenty of Polish and Italian surnames. Little Caesar's. Domino's, and Pizza Hut may be among Italian restaurants, but they are few of them.  In parts of rural Indiana (Mountain South -- southern Indiana has much more in common with Tennessee highlands than even with the flat plains of northern Indiana) one will not see so many 'exotic' surnames. (German and Irish surnames are everywhere). This will tell whether a place once welcomed immigrants. if nothing else.  

A telling work on American History is David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which relates how early patterns of settlement and subsequent migrations created the regional differences in American local culture. If, as in southern New England the descendants of the early Puritans moved west to richer farmlands, the immigrants who replaced them (first Irish Catholics) took over the local institutions other than churches and made them theirs. Irish political machines supplanted WASP political machines. 

Basically the early patterns were as such:

New England (Puritans). Largely middle-class and from southeastern England, they believed in Church, law (they liked their communities orderly), and education (they established Harvard University in 1636, barely fifteen years after surviving a horrid New England winter -- all the better for coherent sermons and legal practice.  Few people would have settled New England; it had no precious metals or high-return agriculture (tobacco, sugar, indigo) or precious metals to sell for a profit back in Merry Old England.  The most valuable mineral was granite, good only as a building material.  Soils were rocky, so they required much labor to till. New England was too cold for Africans except for some coastal areas, so slavery never took hold. But -- the coastline is irregular enough that fishing is a viable supplement to not-so-great agriculture. Commerce flourished. Hartford, Connecticut was an early center of insurance to protect people with interests in ships and cargoes from economic calamity. 

The Puritans had no tolerance for drunkenness, brawling, or garden-variety crime. The legal system worked efficiently to the detriment of criminals (something like Japan today, a criminal's nightmare due to efficient policing and courts, and thought control upon prisoners).  There were few First Peoples to fight or exploit (contrast much of the rest of the Americas except perhaps for Quebec. With little drinking, no tobacco, little brawling, little tolerance for sexual hanky-panky, Puritan America had freakishly-long, even modern, life expectancies for a pre-industrial society. 

The Quakers came from the English midlands, and they brought over a contempt for ornamentation and display. They built their houses to the street, not needing lawns for display even of gardens. They were more egalitarian on gender than others (Fischer attributes this to Viking settlement of the  the Danelaw. Vikings treated their wives better than any people in pre-modern times. Commerce was OK, but most people had trades, and a trade was a badge of honor. They did not have the extreme reverence for formal education that the Puritans had, as college degrees were themselves the damnable 'ornaments' of life. Literacy was an expectation. The Quakers got along beautifully with Mennonites from Switzerland and the Palatinate, who believed much the same things. To be sure, southeastern Pennsylvania is warm enough for plantation-style slavery as northern Virginia; the Quakers saw slavery as an abomination and would not tolerate it.  

The Cavaliers from the British Southwest who settled from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia were still living with feudal norms of economic exploitation. They sought to bring serf-like crofters with them... but who was going to make the dangerous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean for more of the same that they  knew in England? The Cavaliers took large tracts of land and brought over indentured servants to do the hard labor of farming.  The cavaliers could not find enough of them, so they settled on... slaves. The Cavaliers obliterated any culture brought over from Africa and of course any organization. The slaves were obliged to act much like the peons of southwestern England even down to singing the same songs. This well fit the subtropical lowlands from just south of Philadelphia to the modern Florida-Georgia state line  initially. Education was excellent for the elites, but minimal for anyone else. Religion was largely the Church of England, where it had recently supplanted Catholicism. 

One further settlement was of the peoples of northern England, southern Scotland, and Northern Ireland (especially the "Scots-Irish"). Many were herdsmen, and they were a wild-and-wooly lot. People involved in animal herding  (destroyed after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715) tend to have an "honor" culture to protect property, which for them is largely their livestock. Cattle rustling that would mark much of the violence of the Wild West was in practice there. So was lynching.  They would not get along with any other settlers of the other three folkways except by going to the Backwoods away from the prying eyes of the highly-organized Puritans, the staid Quakers, or the hierarchical Cavaliers. 

(OK -- what of the Dutch colony of New Netherland? First, it did not last long. It wasn't particularly Dutch, and the multicultural character of new York City existed when it was new Amsterdam. The Dutch gave refuge to French and Walloon Huguenots who had the same religion as the Dutch Reformed Church. There were German soldiers and Scandinavian sailors. There were Greek refugees from the Turks. Plenty of people had Spanish or Portuguese surnames, but these were not Catholic Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, or the like. There were religious dissidents from New England. They were Jewish refugees from the Inquisition. If one was hostile to the Catholic Church one was welcome in New Amsterdam  

The English found it easy to take over once the Dutch traded it for Surinam. The Puritans were avid traders, and they were likely to do their trading with Flanders, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. The Dutch were much like the Puritans anyway, By the time in which New Amsterdam became New York, the people were not particularly Dutch. The Puritans could assimilate them. 

The other is the comparatively-late US acquisition of Louisiana... it is unique and colorful, but it is also small. 

People generally moved west as veritable clans -- not as individual adventurers. They moved almost due west as a rule (except for escaping slaves). Appalachia and the Ozarks are difficult to distinguish, and they blend through the right bank of the Ohio River. Note well what I said above of northern and southern Indiana. The divide between the Mountain South and the Deep South ensured that a state like Tennessee split almost evenly between them and had its own civil war. The Backwoods types had no desire to die to protect slavery. They hated slavery, but they hated the slaves just as much as agents of the planter elites. 

Over time, one of the marked characteristics of the regions is the receptiveness to immigrants. Just thumb through the phone books.

[JasonBlack]

We will probably disagree on whether there are going to be more extreme right or extreme left terrorist groups left over on the fringes of the 1T, but either way, I think we all agree the people will be electing a president who is hard on such individuals and will bring the hammer down on those who seek to disrupt the hard-won peace.

[Eric the Green]

(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

Well, hardly. He is fat, and only wears business suits.

Despite his immoral exploits, he appointed himself general in the fight to suppress free expressive culture. His supreme court appointees are his enforcers.

[pbrower2a]

(10-27-2022, 09:58 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: We will probably disagree on whether there are going to be more extreme right or extreme left terrorist groups left over on the fringes of the 1T, but either way, I think we all agree the people will be electing a president who is hard on such individuals and will bring the hammer down on those who seek to disrupt the hard-won peace.

Extremists assert their individuality before they take power, but they enforce robotic conformity once in power. 

It may be mere coincidence, or simply timing, that we have a much larger and more militant Hard Right than a Hard Left.  The legal hammer is coming down on members of the Michigan Plot and on participants in the Capitol Putsch.

[Eric the Green]

(10-21-2022, 04:34 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Okay, hold your horses. Let me break this down a bit before you decide I'm extremely biased haha 

One more thing. I don't think we have much of a center-right in this country these days.

[JasonBlack]

(10-27-2022, 08:13 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-21-2022, 04:34 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: Okay, hold your horses. Let me break this down a bit before you decide I'm extremely biased haha 

One more thing. I don't think we have much of a center-right in this country these days.

For all our disagreements, we agree here. The US lacks a branch of the right which has any interest in rebuilding institutions. Their temperament is essentially that of a young 3T reactive. I keep telling them "the nexus of conservatism is the father. If you lack a movement of strong father figures, your movement will not win".