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Christopher F. Hansen's avatar

I think this post by NonZionism is basically correct:

https://nonzionism.com/p/the-role-of-conservative-parties

In the last fifteen or so years, the left was winning a lot. This made things worse. Now things are getting worse more slowly. This is not adequate; we need to make things get better.

For example, Biden let huge numbers of third-worlders settle in America, legally and illegally. To make things get better, we need to actually reverse this. Slowing the influx isn't adequate. I doubt that Trump will remove more than a small fraction of these people. The numbers so far aren't encouraging.

Similarly, trans mania led to absurd demands like men being included in women's sports. Perhaps this will be rolled back somewhat, although Trump can't simply force sports leagues to exclude men. This will depend on the values people have and their sense of what is and is not acceptable behavior. But even so, trans will still be normalized. It will be accepted that this is a feature of American society in a way it was not 20 or even 10 years ago. Vulnerable and mentally ill people will still be groomed into the gender cult, and so on.

To make things get better, we need to actually produce and implement right-wing solutions to our problems. Frankly, I see these solutions as still largely outside the Overton window. The picture isn't encouraging.

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Jack Laurel's avatar

"The thing that has finally broken it is, appropriately, the next stage in communications technology—the Internet. The entire right-wing ecosystem behind the Trump administration is a product of the Internet and social media."

I think you put your finger on it here. To the extent that there is a paradigm shift, it comes from a drainage of authority from the mass media caused by the blossoming of a true free press on the internet, in which every dissident group from race realists to flat-earthers can have its say and garner an audience. If the Right had any sense it would be doing what Yarvin suggested in his "antiversity" posts, trying to make the most of this free press and set itself up as a new and permanent locus of authority, in recognition of the maxim that nature abhors a vacuum and that the anarchy of viewpoints is not going to last forever.

Instead, the Right attributes its success to politics, which in my view is mostly the same old routine: leftists overreach, divide governing class opinion and cause popular backlash by going too far, and finally allow the conservative Shit Janitor to have his day in the sun while doing the dirty work of cleaning up the mess (see here also the NonZionist post linked by another commenter). Note that, as you say, no-one is talking about going after 'gay marriage', or seriously expecting Trump to deport the majority of immigrants let into the US by the Biden open-door policy; overreach and correction works just fine to promote leftism, and defuses popular resistance into the bargain. (One possible destabilizing factor is that the cons are decreasingly able to play the Shit Janitor role effectively, either because they are too wretchedly cucked like the Tories in the UK, or because they are like Elmo and just want to attack their political enemies under the rubric of economic justifications.)

We in the West may not have a Deep State rigging everything, but we certainly have a Broad State running everything, broadly incentivized towards leftism and composed largely of shitlibs who still take their direction from the academy-media complex. And that will not change until the whole system collapses (probably not good for most of us) or we come up with a workable alternative to the administrative state. Thus I expect that the 'blackpill' (by which I mean realistic pessimism, not conspiracism or despair) will be vindicated in the long run – though the Right still has the chance (for now) to take the 'whitepill' by reorienting itself from a losing power struggle towards the struggle for authority that is actually up for grabs.

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