I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were the Cool Party. All of the big movie stars, edgy comedians, and rock gods advocated for Leftist causes and held massive fundraisers for the DNC. What you saw in every form of mass media was that Democrats were open-minded free spirits with a lust for life. They were cool, and they had the little guy’s interests at heart. Republicans were always depicted as stodgy old white guys in last season’s business suits.
You might ask what changed. All the talking heads, pretty boys, and autotuned THOTs are still lock-step Democrat shills.
That’s quite true, but there are two new variables in the equation. First, there are no big movie or rock stars like there were twenty years ago. The Left’s own project of globalization has resulted in a country with a culture so broken we can’t even agree on what sorts of entertainment we like.
Second, the Democrat party’s brand is in the gutter. They made a Faustian bargain with hysterical SJWs to win the culture war. Now their need to placate the hate mob has put the inmates in charge of the asylum. The party must now pander to their extreme fringe and ignore calls for sensible platform planks like those urged by soon-to-be indicted porn lawyer Michael Aenatti. He pointed out that the Democrats need something resembling a coherent legislative agenda to get a blue wave and correctly insisted that they steal the border security issue from Republicans. But they can’t take his advice, even if he wasn’t going to be spending the next several years behind bars.
As a result of selling their souls to the secular death cult of social justice, the Democrat party has become terminally unhip. They’ve lost their edge. Comedians are no longer funny. The music has died. Movies target third world audiences and end up appealing to no one. The laid back free spirit has been browbeaten to silence by the finger-wagging androgynous scold.
The Dems as Cool Party meme started in the 60s as a weapon of the counterculture movement, which was really a battle between liberal and less consistently liberal Boomers. No generation before or since has been more obsessed with being seen as cool, so it made sense that whichever side could capture the elusive aura of coolness would win. The Dems made their devil’s bargain with Alinskyites and grabbed the crown. Republicans were tarred as squares by default.
Not that Republicans don’t bear their share of blame for ceding control of the West’s institutions without a fight.
The current problem facing the Dems is that Generations X through Z care less about looking cool and more about securing a reliable income, housing, and soon, access to food and water. Elections do indeed have consequences, and fifty years of Leftist triumph in the culture wars has left most of the younger cohorts living in Clown World.
That’s why Trump’s “Jobs not mobs” rhetoric is striking a chord with voters.
Earlier I’d pointed out that Democrats need to vote at 2016 levels while Republican turnout dipped to 2014 levels in order to get a blue wave. Let’s look at the data.
As you can see, current conditions are the diametric opposite of what’s needed for a blue wave. The early Republican vote now beats their numbers from the 2016 elections, which you may recall they won. Meanwhile, more Democrat early voters are staying home than in the election they lost.
Sad. And uncool.
RED STORM RISING
Before these numbers came out, I was pretty sure Republicans were looking at slight losses in the House and gains in the Senate. If early voter turnout ratios carry through to election day–which is not a guarantee; R voting usually dips, and D voting rises the day of–we may be in for a Red Wave.
Brian,
And the catastrophic consequences of AIDS,no fault divorce, abortion and blocked social mobility have galvanized the younger generation to regress harder. They seek stability to create an identity for themselves not what others tell who they are
xavier
Funding and performing blatantly obvious false flag gay ops doesn’t help the Dems either.
That's another consequence of Dems letting the SJWs dictate their agenda. Their need for safe spaces and hugboxes means they have zero understanding of what how right-wingers actually operate. They honestly believe all the "Rednecks clinging to guns and bibles" stuff.
This is why every Leftist hoax from nooses left on college campuses to backwards swastikas spray-painted on garage doors smacks of Underwear Gnome thinking.
If you want a good analogy for these SJW hoaxes, read Charlotte's Web.
I live in a place that is incredibly liberal and has voted that way long before I was born. A recent election voted in a center right party for the first time ever. I never thought that would ever happen in my lifetime.
But this is what happens when more and more are realizing the emperor is not only naked but hasn't bathed since Woodstock.
Boomer hippie-ism is dead, and everyone knows it. Not to mention that the rise of the internet and the subcultures within have utterly demolished traditional media, pop culture, and centralization of ideas.
All these problems started from Boomers throwing caution to the wind and gorging themselves like pigs on everything before them, and now that everything their parents built up has been destroyed and the younger generations are being left with the bill? They have nothing left to fight back with except bad names and smug superiority.
And yes, the right deserves blame for never challenging the left. This allowed each side to get their own undeserved ego and cult where they never interacted with each other and let a tiny crack split into a giant fissure. Now its so split that no one even speaks the same language any longer.
But it was better to pull the sheets over their heads and pretend to be asleep, I suppose. And now we're all paying for it.
Your pessimism is understandable. I can't say I shared it, exactly, but I've always been a fatalist.
Now I'm starting to think that the West might just turn back from the brink at the last second. The Polish education minister just ordered all their public schools to cancel a "Rainbow Friday" celebration meant to brainwash children with the usual pro-sodomy agitprop. Not only is the event canceled, the minister promised severe consequences for any principal who ignored the order.
The Conservative and Libertarian allergy to government intervention was a foolish mistake. We don't need to reduce government power. We need to start using it to achieve our ends.
Brian,
Agreed. But one of the goals is a return to subsidarity and radically reduce the state's reach in our lives
xavier
@Brian – lately I’ve been think that Lord Acton got it wrong. It’s not power that corrupts. In the hands of the virtuous, power is okay, even great. The issue is that power attracts the corrupt, and absolute power attracts the absolutely corrupt.
*nods* Frank Herbert made much the same observation.
XSeed update: Got the mech cards today, well before I expected.
Glad to hear the cards arrived. Honestly, delivery took longer than expected.
I was expecting in November around the time of eBook release. So this was a case of my expectations being far more pessimistic than warranted.
And they look great.
The Democrats shaman Silver is still predicting the Dems will still take the house with a very high percentage. The Senate he's more circumspect the banana peel reading were inconclusive
xavier
In MO, both sides of the Senate race turned up the negative snail mail campaign.
They all go in the trash because I'm voting for not-clair mcclaskel. That other guy might be a uniparty shill (or not, don't know), but he's not a boomer.
Around these parts I've noticed that not a single Democrat running this fall will put a "D" or "Democrat" or a donkey image on their signs. The best you'll get is that it is colored blue.
Their brand is in the gutter.