On Medium: Why Conservatives are Better Than Liberals at Politics (and Why That’s Not a Compliment)
Here's an article that assesses the strengths and weaknesses of American liberals and conservatives, and how they matter to Machiavellian politics and to the abortion issue.
They want to repeal the abortion law and other probable ones because they believe that, with this, the fertility rate, especially of white women, will increase.
ReplyDeleteBut the most abortion practitioners in the US are black and Hispanic women.
Mainly responsible for the drop in fertility rates is the constant increase in the cost of living in urban regions, not just in the US. Blame it on the bourgeois elite, but blaming capitalism is a kind of sin for these people.
Leftists live inside bubbles. They analyze reality based on what their bubbles are saying.
See the example of former president Lula, here in Brazil, and this year's presidential candidate, what he said about the situation in Ukraine.
There is an authoritarian hierarchy, typical of a sect, among them, which prevents them from thinking for themselves.
This is very problematic because the other side of the spectrum is in favor of the fact that today's human reality is capitalist and conservatism remains variably strong across broad sectors.
The communication distance between leftists and the general population is greater than with conservatives. In fact, the conservative represents an important part of the population.
With the emergence of the identitarian ''left' above the Marxist left, everything got worse.
The left currently has silly political strategies of putting less popular struggles far ahead of the most popular.
If the left were to talk more about social and economic problems, and less about racial, minority, and gender issues, I think there would be a rise in popularity.
The conservative right cleverly centers its narrative on the cultural realm, where it tends to fare better or the same as the left, while hardly talking about social and economic issues.
I agree about the left's rabbit holes or informational bubbles. I think of it as the decadence of the elite, urban class. Aristocrats, too, can lose touch with the rabble because they've created an exclusive paradise. Liberals keep to their urban sprawls and fly over the rest of the country. The corporate media ignore or demonize the blue-collar majority. All of which helps to create the tribal conflict we're seeing in the US and elsewhere.
DeleteThe identitarian left replaced the struggle of classes with the struggle of identities. From then on, it stopped communicating with a wider public, and especially the white working classes, to communicate with historically underprivileged minorities and majorities, such as women.
ReplyDeleteIt did this because its intention was never to combat the intrinsic incongruities of the capitalist system, but to co-opt it to serve its group interests.
It replaces the fight against social inequalities with the fight against racial inequalities. But the first is largely responsible for the second.
So she turned to blaming abstract and morally vague groups like whites for the world's problems rather than focusing on bourgeois elites.
The Marxist left has bought a good deal of identitarianism, but its focus still remains on bourgeois elites and their significant role in perpetuating our socio-economic problems.
So now leftists waste a huge amount of energy on small fights and stupid speeches, for example, the trans agenda.
The left, Marxist and identitarian, did not realize that it is necessary to make conceptions, ''tolerate'' a greater variety of discourses, have self-criticism and invest in self-image in order to be more popular.
Another basic problem: the anti-middle-class discourse. Here, in Brazil, they are always criticizing the middle class, as if it were their own bourgeois elite, while they are always promising policies favorable to the working class.
This is very silly, because you are, right in the speech, dividing or limiting your potential reach.
The populist and necessary polarization among the people and the ''elites'' has been completely forgotten.
The Marine LePen case is super interesting. She was one of the few current politicians that tried to go beyond polarization, adopting agendas from both sides.
However, her two weakest points, on the discussion of the use of Muslim clothing in public spaces and on leaving NATO, probably cost her a lot of votes.
This is an important distinction you're making between leftist identity politics or wokeness, and left-wing, socialist or Marxian populism. There's the culture war and then there are the economic issues. With the left split along these lines, conservatives can dominate the discourse because they're much better at fighting culture wars, and the problems with capitalism will go unaddressed. The culture war becomes a distraction or a neoliberal divide-and-conquer strategy.
DeleteI think the culture war purposely avoids class. People have been divided in every way other than class. Gender, race, sexual identity etc. And most people have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.
ReplyDeleteAnd who benefits from all that social division? Is the culture war a case of "divide and conquer"?
DeleteWe're left to speculate about whether or not it's a divide and conquer strategy. I don't think there is any doubt who benefits from this division. Both Jacques Ellul and Edward Bernay's published books on propaganda and its effects.
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