My view of the conservative side of the political spectrum has grown increasingly dark. It’s not a matter of finding bad people on social media. The dominant impulses of the movement, as demonstrated in the words and behavior of Trump, Vance, and the most popular influencers, are rotten to the core. This naturally leads to the question of what might set the movement on a different path.
I think that whether the right reforms in any meaningful way or continues its slide into stupidity and genocidal vibes will depend on election results. Parties are always responding to messages from voters, and this will continue to be true going forward.
Democrats’ loss in 2024 has them moving away from woke. Those in the party running for office have largely remained silent on the rollback of affirmative action, become less likely to frame their policies in terms of racial redistribution, and increasingly have come around to the position that biological males shouldn’t participate in female sports. In some ways, the party has moved to the Left with the rise of the DSA. But even committed democratic socialists no longer talk like it’s 2020, and are embarrassed by their old tweets. The left got the message that woke social views were electoral poison, which doesn’t mean that it needs to moderate on economic issues.
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Hanania pulling the classic "judge them by their words rather than their actions" in his supposedly cutting edge analysis. Do you really think Abbot is a '"slopulist" who really freaking hates H1b's? This whole thing is disingenuous.
Trump won the 2016 primaries because of his extreme charisma, but also because of he represented the desperate reaction of his party against republican losses over the prior decade. Trumps nativism was a contrast to republican blind support of neoconservatism, forever wars, nation building. He also was a reaction against Obama’s refusal to say Islamic extremism, which meant something in the era that Merkel had opened the gates to a million random arab Muslim men, seemingly unaware that anything could be wrong with them.
The nativism that had a point in 2016 has been taken to an extreme this term. And his base was always stupid and extreme, but the party is losing votes from people who aren’t mindless nativist. But the republicans still had enough votes in 2024 to win the presidency on an ‘eating the dogs and eating the cats’ level campaign. Granted they ran against Kamala, who had not renounced any of her party’s excesses.
In the long term, I think the republicans are the better party and that Democrat woke excesses are 1mm below the surface, waiting to resurge. The republican base will continue to be mindless haters for a long time, but my hope is that republicans will learn quickly from an electoral loss. They might not even learn not to cater to their nativist base, but they could at least learn to stop covering for bottomless corruption at the top.