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A question for the author to consider: to what extent does participating in a right-wing protest or supporting a right-wing cause event endanger one's ability to keep their employment compared to attending a left-wing protest event or supporting a left-wing cause? E.g. Brendan Eich

Could the explanation be that the entrenched dominance in popular culture of one viewpoint made it too personally costly to profess another?

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"...why one side has for over half a century now drawn more idealistic people who want to dedicate their lives to changing the world..."

Baloney. It's drawn idealistic people who want to change the world through activism and politics, rather than medicine, engineering, biology, etc. Norman Borlaug, presumably an idealist, changed the world more than any community organizer.

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Hey idiot.....Soros PAYS THEM. We don't have that. We work and we don't have time to protest.

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Which side do you think still has a culture of being able to live our lives without influence from government? That’s your answer. Conservatives do not want to tell people how to live. Conservative do not want to move into a district and change it. Conservatives do not want regulations used to create a totalitarian rule by a group of unelected bureaucrats. Conservatives want to watch TV and sports without cultural elites telling us how we should think. Plus, the left owns campuses and have now moved into K-12 so it’s easy getting youth emotionally compromised which hampers their critical thinking. It’s not about caring. It’s about the cultures.

I hope people comprehend this leftism only destroys nations. There is no end. Defund the police. Make college free. Get rid of the electoral system. They will all still be activist bc it’s emotionally addicting like a rush from drugs.

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Two things: (1) Zach Goldberg has pointed out that by 2015 a lot of major media institutions were already pretty woke, and that the trend began in 2011. If Trump had lost to Hilary, I wouldn't be surprised if we still saw the institutions bend more or less in the way they did. (2) To what extent are conservatives just bowing out of reading newspapers, watching TV, and watching movies? I'm fairly conservative, and I've pretty much entirely stopped watching movies and TV, save for children's programming, to accommodate my child--I don't really need or want to be lectured to about my (admittedly, numerous) moral failings by people who are meaner and dumber than I am.

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Some parts of this piece are high-quality, but some don't reach the same standard - missing elements or research. This is true for your analysis of institutions more than for politics. I wonder if it's an (unconscious) resistance to grapple with the trends in US conservatism and in the world.

1) Missing / underplayed: Barro and Klein both include (Barro is very explicit about this) the fact that younger people are much more important than older ones, as customers and employees. You also underplay the urban / rural split - people who live in cosmopolitan cities have been ahead on culture and consumer trends for decades, and they now lean strongly liberal. (Amy Walter of Cook Political had a piece making this exact point recently.)

2) Trends: Also, what Republicans now call conservatism has strong elements that push away educated people - e.g., refusing to take the COVID vaccine or denying the need to act on climate. (In other countries, this isn't called conservative.) You mote level of support, but not the the *rate* of change, and so you undercount this element too.

If a business leader sees a strong trend among important consumers, they would be remiss *not* to take action. Plus many have some conservative characteristics - enough that they used to be GOP voters - but believe in science and the environment, so they are cross-pressured. In today's world, many of those cross-pressures are much stronger than their old conservative tendencies. For example, getting the economy and health back on track and dealing with changes in the climate may be stronger than fighting a rise back to the tax rates of a few years ago.

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Do liberals also have an easier time forming a protest? Are conservatives more likely to have distance, density, and families as barriers? Is it easier for liberals to start a protest, they just need to walk or take public transport a short distance?

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Question: How fungible is "Attended a Trump rally" with "Attended a (conservative) protest", and do we have any way of knowing if 2016 "conservatives" surveyed would have thought so?

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I suggest looking into the astonishing rate at which these things have increased since 1970: the importance of going to an Ivy League or "affiliated" school (eg Berkeley, Stanford, U Chicago, any Boston university), the earning power of Ivy League grads, the number of nouveau-riche billionaires who are Ivy league grads, and the amount of political and judicial power held by Ivy League grads. Then look at the change in the political demographics of those admitted into the Ivy League.

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As a devout liberal and progressive, I can tell you that there is nothing -- absolutely NOTHING -- that will keep me away from the ballot box in every single election for as long as I live from here on out. If that means I have to stand at my polling station for 24 hours in the middle of a simultaneous blizzard, pandemic, tornado, earthquake, and an ongoing mass shooting, I will do exactly that. There is nothing -- absolutely NOTHING -- that will keep me away from my polling station. I will not speak for anyone else, and I will not speak for any other liberal. I only speak for myself when I say thi, but based on anecdotal evidence and conversations I've had will fellow liberals, there are a LOT of us who feel the exact same way. And the reason we will stand in line to vote Team Blue up and down the ballot in every election for 24 hours as a mass shooting is going on in the middle of a simultaneous blizzard, tornado, pandemic, serial killing spree, and the intentional release of poison gas and/or radiation? His name is Donald Trump. I first became old enough to vote prior to the 2012 general election where I then cast my ballot. I then sat out the 2013 and 2014 elections because I just didn't think it was worth it. The Party I had voted for didn't give me anything they promised, so I became cynical. I voted in thr 2015 general election because I wanted to vote for my state Supreme Court seats due to policy reasons. Then in 2016, Bernie Sanders gave me hope and convinced me to change my Party registration from Independent to Democrat to vote for him in the primary. Mitch McConnell pulled that BULLSHIT with Merrick Garland. Then the Access Hollywood tape came out, and Republicans closed ranks behind this dastardly misogynist. And it was over for me; I was never going to sit on the sidelines ever again. I have voted in EVERY primary, special, general, midterm, off-year, and presidential election since 2015. And from now on, I only care about one thing when I go to the ballot box from now on: Making sure that the Republican Party never in my lifetime gets into power -- or at least, doing everything I can through the power of my vote, my petition signature, my political donation, and my protest to make sure they are as ineffective as possible even when they get into power. And there are plenty of liberals who feel the exact same way as me. Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett woke up a sleeping giant of liberal electoral strength. As Kavanaugh said in his disgrace of a "confirmation hearing", "If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind."

And for all you conservatives who are so happy and proud about taking over over federal courts, remember something: By definition and design, the federal courts are the WEAKEST branch of government. In fact, if either Congress or the President wanted to, they could NEUTER the federal courts tomorrow -- WITHOUT court packing through methods that would be much WORSE for both judicial independence and judicial supremacythan court packing. So if the Federalist Society's ideological goons trying to take us back to the good old days of 1787, there are plenty of ways to deal with and DEFEAT their obstruction, just as Schumer and Biden have already made McConnell and his goons pay for their obstruction. All my life, I've heard that conservatives believe in "judicial restraint" and "judicial deference to the elected branches". Well let's see if they actually mean it. But remember: "Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it."

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The right has created an enormous number of parallel institutions that exist only for other right-wingers and have no interest in gaining broad popularity. Consider the explosion of right-wing media outlets, and the degree many Evangelical churches/preachers have become openly, unapologetically Trumpist/Republican. I think conservative apprehension about traditional American institutions began from a valid place, but that disposition has now become a bit of a caricature of itself. Today's conservatives no longer want to merely be included in institutions, they want to be members of institutions that are as aggressively partisan as they themselves are.

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“Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the left and the right is that only the former has even a rough definition. What is called “the right” are simply the various and disparate opponents of the left. These opponents of the left may share no particular principle, much less a common agenda, and they can range from free-market libertarians to advocates of monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or innumerable other principles, systems and agendas.” -Thomas Sowell

The right may simply be too diverse ideologically to unite together consistently in the same way as those on the left seem to do.

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While it may be true that liberals care more about politics, Republicans care more about winning and will do what it takes to win. So while liberals worry about right and wrong, Republicans worry about winning and do anything to win. Capitalists on either side will do what it takes to make more profit, thus investing in which ever promises them the best chance to profit, and the freedom from regulatory infringements on their ability to profit. Unfortunately, the average voter is swayed by the rhetoric and chrisma of the candidate and how well the candidates address their own beliefs. Reagan led the way in this, he could deliver his lines in a convincing manner. He convinced a majority that government was their enemy and Trickle Down economics would benefit them personally. Many still believe both.

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"Liberal" is defined by the mainstream media as a narrow set of woke issues, but the bounds are set by what the intelligence community declares to be the truth. The intelligence institutions (CIA, FBI, etc) tolerate liberality along some dimensions, but otherwise dictate that the "liberal" institutions take very reactionary positions with regard to issues of empire.

So, for example, the NY Times is liberal with regard to being on the Democrats side -- the side which has traditionally been more liberal. But that changed in 2016 and the Democrats are now characterizing anyone who disagrees with the intelligence community as Russian tools. This is rooted in foreign affairs (and the budgets for the military and intelligence agencies) but spills over into domestic politics in a big way. Trump was pounded for colluding with the Russians, being soft on N Korea, being inhumane with regard to immigrant, etc. Meanwhile Bernie Sanders was dismissed by the media for being too liberal and possibly a tool of the Russians.

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From my perspective it seems pretty obvious that a spike in protests starting in 2016 would be people coming off the sidelines when they recognized an existential threat to democratic institutions and America as they understood it following Trump's election

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I think you’re not taking into account the way different ideologies perceive protesting. On the left, protesting is viewed as almost sacred—standing up against oppression is central to progressive ideology. Meanwhile on the right, law and order is a central value and protesting is often viewed as having the potential for disorder and lawlessness. This impedes interpretation of protest participation as evidence of caring more to some degree.

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