1. Democrats have this problem too. Yes, they're more educated, but the number who went to public universities will always outnumber those who went to private unis. You see this on an issue like climate change or policing where democrats are out of step with the base. Or there are issues like free trade where Democrat economists are often out of step with the politics.
2. The stupid versus smart framing is not all that good. For one, conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness and lower in neuroticism, which is worth something as a signal of healthy thinking. But I think the biggest definer of trump era conservaticism is low social trust and trust in institutions, which is a clearer root for most of their bad ideas.
3. Another dynamic that is easy to miss is how old the GOP base is. The Daily Wire is supposed to be the young, hip, online right wing outfit, but their core audience is boomers and older who would otherwise be on FoxNews.com, while young people are the least engaged part of their audience.
4. One of the most interesting flip flops in GOP politics is the abandonment of anti gay marriage positions, not explicitly but fairly completely. Part of this is elite opinion, but public opinion on issues like gay marriage, or drug legalization for that matter, has swung to make positions that were core GOP planks in 2004 into unpopular hills to die on. Anti-trans politics is easy to see as a successor to anti-gay politics, but that means it could be just ad easily abandoned.
Steve Bannon went from denouncing Great Replacement to "let's built a multi-racial working class coalition to own white liberal women*"
*I've always found funny this obsession right wing populists like Carlson and Bannon have against white liberal women, while totally forgetting there are black and asian liberal women, as well.
You are confusing “right wing” with Republican. The Republican party is actually a coalition of people with various kinds of political ideologies. So is the Democratic party. The Democratic Party elite also has very little in common with many of their voters, and because their voters are more diverse, it is even harder for them to keep voters consistent.
Yeah, the Democrats have a big problem with their liberal elite ruling over young leftists and socially conservative minorities that pull them in different directions. It’s likely why Biden has largely had approval ratings worse than Trump.
Big business is still in the driver's seat in the Republican Party. Using anti-elitism to sell elitism is a very old playbook that has European roots. In 1848, the young Bismarck noticed that the liberal revolutions failed because they were economically and culturally out of step with workers, especially rural workers. The mature Bismarck exploited this fact over and over during his career as he stacked up Ws against the socialist left.
What's happening is that since 1945, Capital has been fighting Labor to restore the status quo before world wars. Capital has been succeeding -- life expectancy is falling, people are having fewer children, and employees keep getting squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, even as productivity gains pile up sky-high. The right's political alchemy transmutes the discontent from unpopular economic policies that immiserate the public into cultural backlash issues. They can even turn vaccines in the middle of a global pandemic into a backlash issue. It is quite amazing, sublime even.
The Republicans have always been tools of business. Even Abraham Lincoln was a corporate lawyer. The Democrats since Bryan were pro-labor. The South was the Solid South. The Republicans would give stern, unpopular Puritanical sermons about bootstraps, the blessings of liberty, and the invisible hand, even though it was the quite visible hand of the Federal army that wrecked the place. At the same time, the Democrats would deliver big on items like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Even as late as 1992, Clinton could carry states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas. What changed?
Clinton and Blair turned their respective labor parties into finance parties. Here in the United States, we had disasters like NAFTA in 1994, the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Banking Act which caused the 2008 collapse, etc. The idea was that this would help fundraising, women and minorities could be kept on board with anti-white and anti-male rhetoric, essentially trading rural America for suburbia, and Democrats would live happily ever after as long as they won about 40% of the white working class.
That has changed. Education polarization is hurting us badly in the Democratic Party. Our issues are overwhelmingly popular, but we're chained to this Boomer Cold War style of doing politics that, while generating a lot of fundraising money, keeps underperforming with the public. We should be up twenty points on someone like Trump. I'd like to see Democrats become more populist, especially on economic issues, and put away the finance + idpol strategy.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party is an unholy alliance between the professional elite and the dependent poor and has done a 180 on everything from censorship (now for it) to women's rights (now want trans women in girls sports) to gay rights (now effete men are women) to Israel (now Jews are white oppressors/bad) to civil rights (now minorities are avatars not individuals).
And as for data, you should check out Greg Lukianoff's (FIRE) recent post on the mental health consequences of social justice activism. Here's the punchline "Data shows that the farther left you lean, the more anxious, depressed, and unhappy you are."
“As a result, the right-wingers that reach the most prominence are the ones that despite clearly being elites, ooze disdain for the elites.”
I don’t see a problem here. Conservatives dislike “elites” not because they’re elites, but because they clearly have contempt for low/middle class conservatives. One prominent example of this is Hillary Clinton calling Trump-voters a “basket of deplorables.” My grandfather bought a bumper sticker with that quote.
Here is a nearby problem that Michael Sandel pointed out in his recent book on meritocracy. On the one hand, conservatives are meritocratic: you get to where you are in society by hard work, not by handouts. But then they see progressive elites at the highest institutions and are faced with a problem: if America is meritocratic, then how did these people I hate get to the highest institutions while I am living paycheck to paycheck?
You should check out the work of Hyrum and Verlan Lewis, who argue extremely persuasively that there are no underlying values, philosophy, or worldview at all to undergird the right/left spectrum. That you would never be able to predict policy preferences on any given issue based on what are the popularly understood but entirely false animating philosophies of progressive v conservative. And that in fact they are strictly tribal affiliations that one initially chooses bc of family, peers, aesthetics, or a single salient issue, and then after initially choosing, later adopt the other issues that are arbitrarily bundled in with that tribe, not because they're philosophically coherent but because of social psychological and tribal conformity reasons. And that the particular mix of issues bundled in with one tribe or the other is circumstantial based on the particular coalition of the tribe at any given time, but which issues otherwise have no common underlying value system or worldview despite reams of writing and a popular understanding that they do. Which is why the parties can entirely flip on issues over time.
It's a little hard to fully accept their argument...sure some issues definitely seem arbitrary but there does seem to be SOME underlying orientation that sorts right from left. But if you go through their whole book, it's pretty persuasive and they give hard-to-argue counterfactuals that refute all of the common arguments made about what distinguishes right from left: https://www.deseret.com/2024/1/15/24002083/the-myth-of-left-and-right-politics/
But look at the current state of the Ds. They march in lock step for war, censorship/thought control and racial socialism. We'll see if the pro-Gaza upsurge has any lasting effects.
Ann Coulter said she endorsed Romney in 2012 because he was more of an immigration restrictionist than anyone else running on the GOP side. Romney tweeted in support of Antifa and against 1A rights after Charlottesville That tweet is.still up despite Romney certainly being aware by now of what really happened. (it's in the Heaphy Report, Heaphy being a liberal D ex-US Attorney)
Thank you for your views of the contemporary Republican party. One item, which you perhaps may have felt redundant to mention, is their association with the Christian churches. I remember the "Moral Majority" of the Reagan years, and four decades later, we lost Roe vs. Wade and saw Repblican candidates for governor who were threatening to push for legislation that would imprison any woman who gets an abortion. Clearly, they oppose the separation of church and state.
The right as often more sociological and linguistic barriers than purely intellectual impediments when it comes to unity. There is another phenomenon, one purely of the right wing elite, which is intellectual atomism (one man, one movement, one ideology).
What right wing thinkers needs to be is not similar or close to the hoi polloi, what it needs is to be loyal and consider unity a value and originality, at best, a bug, never a virtue. But this needs mature people…
A few things I think you're missing here:
1. Democrats have this problem too. Yes, they're more educated, but the number who went to public universities will always outnumber those who went to private unis. You see this on an issue like climate change or policing where democrats are out of step with the base. Or there are issues like free trade where Democrat economists are often out of step with the politics.
2. The stupid versus smart framing is not all that good. For one, conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness and lower in neuroticism, which is worth something as a signal of healthy thinking. But I think the biggest definer of trump era conservaticism is low social trust and trust in institutions, which is a clearer root for most of their bad ideas.
3. Another dynamic that is easy to miss is how old the GOP base is. The Daily Wire is supposed to be the young, hip, online right wing outfit, but their core audience is boomers and older who would otherwise be on FoxNews.com, while young people are the least engaged part of their audience.
4. One of the most interesting flip flops in GOP politics is the abandonment of anti gay marriage positions, not explicitly but fairly completely. Part of this is elite opinion, but public opinion on issues like gay marriage, or drug legalization for that matter, has swung to make positions that were core GOP planks in 2004 into unpopular hills to die on. Anti-trans politics is easy to see as a successor to anti-gay politics, but that means it could be just ad easily abandoned.
Steve Bannon went from denouncing Great Replacement to "let's built a multi-racial working class coalition to own white liberal women*"
*I've always found funny this obsession right wing populists like Carlson and Bannon have against white liberal women, while totally forgetting there are black and asian liberal women, as well.
You are confusing “right wing” with Republican. The Republican party is actually a coalition of people with various kinds of political ideologies. So is the Democratic party. The Democratic Party elite also has very little in common with many of their voters, and because their voters are more diverse, it is even harder for them to keep voters consistent.
Such is the nature of a two-party system
Yeah, the Democrats have a big problem with their liberal elite ruling over young leftists and socially conservative minorities that pull them in different directions. It’s likely why Biden has largely had approval ratings worse than Trump.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
Politics is coalitional, and the elites do not need to be the same as the average voters. In fact , the definitionally cannot be.
Big business is still in the driver's seat in the Republican Party. Using anti-elitism to sell elitism is a very old playbook that has European roots. In 1848, the young Bismarck noticed that the liberal revolutions failed because they were economically and culturally out of step with workers, especially rural workers. The mature Bismarck exploited this fact over and over during his career as he stacked up Ws against the socialist left.
What's happening is that since 1945, Capital has been fighting Labor to restore the status quo before world wars. Capital has been succeeding -- life expectancy is falling, people are having fewer children, and employees keep getting squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, even as productivity gains pile up sky-high. The right's political alchemy transmutes the discontent from unpopular economic policies that immiserate the public into cultural backlash issues. They can even turn vaccines in the middle of a global pandemic into a backlash issue. It is quite amazing, sublime even.
The Republicans have always been tools of business. Even Abraham Lincoln was a corporate lawyer. The Democrats since Bryan were pro-labor. The South was the Solid South. The Republicans would give stern, unpopular Puritanical sermons about bootstraps, the blessings of liberty, and the invisible hand, even though it was the quite visible hand of the Federal army that wrecked the place. At the same time, the Democrats would deliver big on items like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Even as late as 1992, Clinton could carry states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas. What changed?
Clinton and Blair turned their respective labor parties into finance parties. Here in the United States, we had disasters like NAFTA in 1994, the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Banking Act which caused the 2008 collapse, etc. The idea was that this would help fundraising, women and minorities could be kept on board with anti-white and anti-male rhetoric, essentially trading rural America for suburbia, and Democrats would live happily ever after as long as they won about 40% of the white working class.
That has changed. Education polarization is hurting us badly in the Democratic Party. Our issues are overwhelmingly popular, but we're chained to this Boomer Cold War style of doing politics that, while generating a lot of fundraising money, keeps underperforming with the public. We should be up twenty points on someone like Trump. I'd like to see Democrats become more populist, especially on economic issues, and put away the finance + idpol strategy.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party is an unholy alliance between the professional elite and the dependent poor and has done a 180 on everything from censorship (now for it) to women's rights (now want trans women in girls sports) to gay rights (now effete men are women) to Israel (now Jews are white oppressors/bad) to civil rights (now minorities are avatars not individuals).
And as for data, you should check out Greg Lukianoff's (FIRE) recent post on the mental health consequences of social justice activism. Here's the punchline "Data shows that the farther left you lean, the more anxious, depressed, and unhappy you are."
“As a result, the right-wingers that reach the most prominence are the ones that despite clearly being elites, ooze disdain for the elites.”
I don’t see a problem here. Conservatives dislike “elites” not because they’re elites, but because they clearly have contempt for low/middle class conservatives. One prominent example of this is Hillary Clinton calling Trump-voters a “basket of deplorables.” My grandfather bought a bumper sticker with that quote.
Here is a nearby problem that Michael Sandel pointed out in his recent book on meritocracy. On the one hand, conservatives are meritocratic: you get to where you are in society by hard work, not by handouts. But then they see progressive elites at the highest institutions and are faced with a problem: if America is meritocratic, then how did these people I hate get to the highest institutions while I am living paycheck to paycheck?
It’s an interesting dynamic.
"The most popular people on the right are those who are part of the elite but talk like they’re not"
In the '70s you had white liberals from NY larping as a poor black man getting lynched in Louisiana.
Since 2015 you saw wealthy guys from est coast larping as a appalachian redneck.
Right wing radical chic
You should check out the work of Hyrum and Verlan Lewis, who argue extremely persuasively that there are no underlying values, philosophy, or worldview at all to undergird the right/left spectrum. That you would never be able to predict policy preferences on any given issue based on what are the popularly understood but entirely false animating philosophies of progressive v conservative. And that in fact they are strictly tribal affiliations that one initially chooses bc of family, peers, aesthetics, or a single salient issue, and then after initially choosing, later adopt the other issues that are arbitrarily bundled in with that tribe, not because they're philosophically coherent but because of social psychological and tribal conformity reasons. And that the particular mix of issues bundled in with one tribe or the other is circumstantial based on the particular coalition of the tribe at any given time, but which issues otherwise have no common underlying value system or worldview despite reams of writing and a popular understanding that they do. Which is why the parties can entirely flip on issues over time.
It's a little hard to fully accept their argument...sure some issues definitely seem arbitrary but there does seem to be SOME underlying orientation that sorts right from left. But if you go through their whole book, it's pretty persuasive and they give hard-to-argue counterfactuals that refute all of the common arguments made about what distinguishes right from left: https://www.deseret.com/2024/1/15/24002083/the-myth-of-left-and-right-politics/
But look at the current state of the Ds. They march in lock step for war, censorship/thought control and racial socialism. We'll see if the pro-Gaza upsurge has any lasting effects.
"Romney, for instance, had principles. "
Ann Coulter said she endorsed Romney in 2012 because he was more of an immigration restrictionist than anyone else running on the GOP side. Romney tweeted in support of Antifa and against 1A rights after Charlottesville That tweet is.still up despite Romney certainly being aware by now of what really happened. (it's in the Heaphy Report, Heaphy being a liberal D ex-US Attorney)
Thank you for your views of the contemporary Republican party. One item, which you perhaps may have felt redundant to mention, is their association with the Christian churches. I remember the "Moral Majority" of the Reagan years, and four decades later, we lost Roe vs. Wade and saw Repblican candidates for governor who were threatening to push for legislation that would imprison any woman who gets an abortion. Clearly, they oppose the separation of church and state.
The right as often more sociological and linguistic barriers than purely intellectual impediments when it comes to unity. There is another phenomenon, one purely of the right wing elite, which is intellectual atomism (one man, one movement, one ideology).
What right wing thinkers needs to be is not similar or close to the hoi polloi, what it needs is to be loyal and consider unity a value and originality, at best, a bug, never a virtue. But this needs mature people…
Albions seed perpetually relevant (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/)