Eh. I don't think the right has much of anything to offer culturally; being as their focus is either one of two things: arrogance or peevish complaint. Flag-waving goes stale pretty quick, even the 80's Golan-Globus/ "Iron Eagle" movie trend only lasted about 3-4 years back then; Nobody roots for Goliath, as Wilt Chamberlain titled a book once.
As for standup/memes/whatever: they've gotten more desperate in inventing new guys to get mad at, and it shows; they're so eager to antagonize now that the idea of being, well, funny in general is getting left behind. Sinking deeper into the right's in-group duckspeak may endear them to a few 60-year-old salesmen on their second divorce; but more and more they're unintelligible to younger and more normal people. There's just a certain fatigue setting in after over a decade of "backlash energy" spent for nothing; and all the frantic attempts to revive it are failing.
The "alt" and dirtbag left still have more of the future's energy, yet to be felt by the rest, and that sense of possibility is still attractive and growing. The right has nothing to counter that with besides threats and hamfisted suppression attempts, and you can't run a society on those.
There are of course myriad factors at play (e.g. declining American military hegemony fueling an MSM nationalist counter-response), but another interesting factor is that it does feel like a component of this cultural rightward pivot is American Zionists pivoting hard right in the wake of the mass slaughter in Gaza. The very extreme state-backed reaction to the campus protests feels like an instance of that but I suspect as Israel continues to shift more and more rightward over time (it's trapped in its own escalatory ethnosupremacist political ratcheting dynamic), the "tail will wag the dog," so to speak in terms of its supporters in America.
you should read my piece, hyperreal individualism
Ok i opened a tab for later
Every day I learn something from substack. I get all my news and knowledge from people like you :)
Thanks :)
No pressure
Eh. I don't think the right has much of anything to offer culturally; being as their focus is either one of two things: arrogance or peevish complaint. Flag-waving goes stale pretty quick, even the 80's Golan-Globus/ "Iron Eagle" movie trend only lasted about 3-4 years back then; Nobody roots for Goliath, as Wilt Chamberlain titled a book once.
As for standup/memes/whatever: they've gotten more desperate in inventing new guys to get mad at, and it shows; they're so eager to antagonize now that the idea of being, well, funny in general is getting left behind. Sinking deeper into the right's in-group duckspeak may endear them to a few 60-year-old salesmen on their second divorce; but more and more they're unintelligible to younger and more normal people. There's just a certain fatigue setting in after over a decade of "backlash energy" spent for nothing; and all the frantic attempts to revive it are failing.
The "alt" and dirtbag left still have more of the future's energy, yet to be felt by the rest, and that sense of possibility is still attractive and growing. The right has nothing to counter that with besides threats and hamfisted suppression attempts, and you can't run a society on those.
There are of course myriad factors at play (e.g. declining American military hegemony fueling an MSM nationalist counter-response), but another interesting factor is that it does feel like a component of this cultural rightward pivot is American Zionists pivoting hard right in the wake of the mass slaughter in Gaza. The very extreme state-backed reaction to the campus protests feels like an instance of that but I suspect as Israel continues to shift more and more rightward over time (it's trapped in its own escalatory ethnosupremacist political ratcheting dynamic), the "tail will wag the dog," so to speak in terms of its supporters in America.
Unless of course Trump wins. Then they could just pin this all on him.