Sincere thanks for keeping an eye on the ideologically insane, so that I don't have to. My tuppence worth, by way of analysis, is that because the Right lost the culture war, it is mostly just having a weird kind of fun by being openly stupid now.
To me this is symptom of a larger identity crisis of conservatism in general, which is completely lost in the semantic jungle of the culture war, because it has forgotten about its structural underpinning, which is the conservation of societal wealth. The culture war used to be a platform ensuring the necessary mobilization to pursue this goal, but it has long become the thing itself.
Just one example, the fight against global warming should be a textbook conservative goal, not only because it's conservation in the most literal sense - our ecosystem - but also because it is the biggest threat to societal wealth for the foreseeable future, whereas the position most prominent for non-climate-denying conservatives - market solutions and technological innovations - actually resembles a classic liberal position (even though this is not some cute reversal that generalizes to other domains, rather the liberal position suits very nicely as a way to ignore the problem altogether, so don't read too much into this).
Sincere thanks for keeping an eye on the ideologically insane, so that I don't have to. My tuppence worth, by way of analysis, is that because the Right lost the culture war, it is mostly just having a weird kind of fun by being openly stupid now.
To me this is symptom of a larger identity crisis of conservatism in general, which is completely lost in the semantic jungle of the culture war, because it has forgotten about its structural underpinning, which is the conservation of societal wealth. The culture war used to be a platform ensuring the necessary mobilization to pursue this goal, but it has long become the thing itself.
Just one example, the fight against global warming should be a textbook conservative goal, not only because it's conservation in the most literal sense - our ecosystem - but also because it is the biggest threat to societal wealth for the foreseeable future, whereas the position most prominent for non-climate-denying conservatives - market solutions and technological innovations - actually resembles a classic liberal position (even though this is not some cute reversal that generalizes to other domains, rather the liberal position suits very nicely as a way to ignore the problem altogether, so don't read too much into this).