From Pat Buchanan to AOC: Moving the Social Overturn Window
Trading ultra right-wing extremism for lesser left and right-wing extremisms, circa 1990-2020.
In many ways, the 90s and 2000s were the peak of the Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party. The Republicans prior to Trump wore their social Conservative hearts on their sleeves, no strings attached. The Democrats under Bill Clinton were legitimately a social libertarian party, if not somewhat socially Conservative. When you compare the record of Bush Republicans and the MAGA Republicans, it’s almost night and day. Bush Republicans’ track record is more akin to the track record of modern Democrats while the MAGA Republicans are more urban, more working class, less socially Conservative, more macho.
I believe that the Republicans have transformed from a suburban, socially Conservative party to a working class urban party.
The modern Republicans may be viewed as black sheep by liberals and establishment media, but the Republicans of the 90s and 2000s were even more reprehensible. A lot of them were very sexist and semi-racist, especially when you have guys like Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Pat Buchanan, and Bill Maher at the peak of their cultural relevancy (I know he’s liberal, but still). I think the old school racism of the Republicans is increasingly being shunned out into the shadows under Trump, in exchange for cultural diversity and electoral shenanigans.
Let’s look at what’s going on on the other side of the political aisle, shall we? While the Republicans are beginning to heal their decency wounds, the Democrats have created a new injury in the country. This time, it’s from an entirely different place: college campuses. It’s kind of like the distinction between Fascism and Communism and MAGA and the Progressive Democrats. The modern Democrats are basically an affluent white party who is hyper-sympathetic to social justice issues. Who knows if the minority coalition will hold for Democrats in the next 20 years but now, it is pretty clear that the Democrats are becoming increasingly uneelectable to the non-SJW American majority.
20 years ago, the Democrats were much more moderate and the Republicans much more right-wing. Back then, the Democrats were much more competitive in the swing states. Ohio and Iowa used to be solidly blue Democratic states as late as 2012. Even Florida was Democratic for a while.
However, shouldn’t it be considered a good thing that America has traded one extremism for two lesser forms of exteremism, from both the left and right? Sure, but we are talking about normalcy here. The liberals have turned into a “Black Lives Matter Only” party while the Republicans have turned into an anti-democratic populist party. While in the media department, the Republicans at the national level were terrible in the past, their state level equivalents then were much more competent, similar to state level Democrats today, excluding California.
Young people in the 90s were libertarian. Nowadays, they’re socialist, although I doubt that’ll last. Silicon Valley has become pro-Trump in the 2024 election cycle, much like the Boomer Yuppies voting for Reagan but on steroids. In the 2010s, Millennials were long touted to be the generation of progressivsm and Democrats, but when their most successful members are voting for Trump, are they really that progressive anymore?
PS: Oh yeah, and gay marriage. I don’t think Dobbs will last forever though (200 judges aren’t going to win against 20,000,000 Americans in the long-run).
It has also recently come to my attention that Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan folks are of the “Straussian” school. In my opinion, from my basic reading of the intellectual school, it is essentially rationalism with no soul. I think it is fundamentally vulnerable to far-left and far-right xenophobic nationalism. I do consider it to to be a libertarian equivalent of wokism, almost a reaction to wokism. They’re the same type of people who are willing to crown Trump as a American emperor if they find out the economy runs better under Trump than a Democrat. I don’t know why are rational cults so insane, from either left or right. I do believe that it is this ideology which permeates Twitter (as well as the Conservative rationalism of the Sam Harris/Brett Weinstein ilk). There is also a smug elitist element in regards to their writing that basically only creates more similarities between them and the woke left.