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.
Let me add that the Moldbuggian premise 'Cthullu always swims left' leads to the precise opposite conclusion from the one attributed to it in this article, namely that you need to cultivate the highest virtu to become worthy of ruling. Following this principle means, at a bare minimum, not indulging in the rightoid behaviors rightly criticized by Person Online.
I don't understand your comment. Person Online concludes that it is actually possible for the right wing to obtain power and that our further success depends on how well we exercise that power. I don't see how that's the "precise opposite" of the view you state.
Person Online writes: 'Anyways, the default mindset of the rightoid is that he has no power and can’t affect anything, so he can essentially say or do whatever he wants—extreme rhetoric, calls to “burn it all down,” talk of a second civil war, and the like.'
But in UR, the precise opposite conclusion is drawn. Precisely because right-wingers have no power, they must cultivate virtue so they can one day take power.
"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.
"It was never actually true that the left is backed by some sort of all-powerful “deep state” that is capable of rigging everything."
While this is probably not the case now, one suspects it was around the time Nixon was in office, and definitely was so when FDR was in charge.
"The squishy people in the middle—the people whose votes are actually up for grabs—are not tribal loyalists who are happy to see everything burn in the name of their side “winning.” They just want things to be normal and stable and not on fire."
Winning these people is nice and well, but it secondary to securing elite backing. Trump is Actually Doing Things now because he has a team of people who can get shit done, instead of lame hand me downs from prior Republican administrations.
There are good and bad ways of doing this, of course. The best way I have seen are the salons Rachel Haywire is organizing, that have genuinely interesting art as a means to gather smart and talented people together. The bad way is the Richard Hanania strategy of kowtowing to the left on every single possible issue except for free markets.
>Winning these people is nice and well, but it secondary to securing elite backing. Trump is Actually Doing Things now because he has a team of people who can get shit done, instead of lame hand me downs from prior Republican administrations.
There are good and bad ways of doing this, of course. The best way I have seen are the salons Rachel Haywire is organizing, that have genuinely interesting art as a means to gather smart and talented people together. The bad way is the Richard Hanania strategy of kowtowing to the left on every single possible issue except for free markets.<
I think Trump risks losing "elite backing" through poor governance at least as much as he risks losing swing voters. My suspicion is that many of the elites who tentatively made peace with Trump this cycle don't like tariffs/trade wars, don't like Elmo as a shadow President, and don't like an isolationist foreign policy where America withdraws from the rest of the world. Capital doesn't like uncertainty and chaos, and it also doesn't like nativism and protectionism.
I also strongly disagree that Trump "has a team of people who can get shit done." He does not have a team. He has Elmo and a bunch of sycophants. Perhaps one could say Elmo has a team, who act as Trump's team in a second-hand fashion, though I would again question the real value of such a "team."
So you want foreign wars and H1Bs. And no mass deportations. And despite DC voting 9x% Dem and being the richest place in the whole country and government work being the cushiest out there we can’t actually fire these people.
I do think that there is a risk that the tariffs will erode some of Trump's support. It gives the impression of left hand fighting right hand, like someone had not decided if it was just there to bully Canada or there to stay.
Trump's legal / political team also seems much more competent, as while they continue to break laws as much as before, they are getting a lot more done while doing so.
We'll see where things stand when the dust settles. If the executive more or less openly states "I am the law now" and just starts to do whatever it wants even if it's really illegal, of course it will appear that it's "getting a lot done" at first, because it takes some minimum amount of time for the judicial system and other relevant actors to respond.
I have yet to be presented with a decent reason for why anything that Trump needs to do actually *has* to be done illegally though. One would think that openly disregarding the law would be a last resort in governance, not the standard route taken as one's first plan of action. I would certainly cite a mindset of "break the law first, worry about the details later" as evidence that Trump does not, in fact, have a "competent team" around him.
"One would think that openly disregarding the law would be a last resort in governance, not the standard route taken as one's first plan of action."
It is a last resort, for the country. The alternative for Trump and his friends is to die of old age, and for anyone else who wants to improve things to die of old age, until things become so bad that a party in Congress would consider repealing the Administrative Procedure Act.
Again, why do illegal things need to be done at all, and why do they have to be done illegally? You're skipping straight to "it's the last resort to save the country!" without even trying to make a case for how or why.
Congress made it illegal for the executive branch to reduce the size of the civil service in 1946. When the GOP had a majority in the House in the 90s, they did jack shit. There is urgency to attack the civil service now, because waiting for a hypothetical based congressional majority means enduring many more years of unchecked immigration, inflation, and other bad things.
I think a lot of policies are nascent and still being realized. Thinking of the absurdities of the Covid policies in 2021, they were barely mentioned in the voter polling of 2024. Your hardest and most challenging policies should get resolved early, and in two years you can have a steady ship after the government and market has adjusted.
I don’t think the US is about to hit a massive depression as a result of trade. I think the current shocks are in play which will stabilize and normalize when people understand how things will be. In a few years, those places that get those big investment commitments might very well be materializing.
I’m also curious to see the results of foreign policy. Ukraine seems to be in constant flux and the trade conflicts seem to be cracking with the inconsistencies of narratives.
But to your point on the Deep State, I could never bring myself to believe that they *rig* elections in a direct way. But things like just how leaky the Trump WH was compared to how airtight and enigmatic the Biden WH was, it had a way of controlling information in and out of government to influence elections.
Calling it all-powerful is hyperbolic, but it is very potent and it is important to not pretend that government officials are somehow these inhuman paragons of administrative order; they are partisan, ideological, and very capable of manipulating their offices to advance their ends.
Feds infiltrating the Catholic Church or FEMA responders ignoring properties impacted by hurricanes because they have Trump signs are just small examples of them getting caught doing things that impact everyday American. Never mind the litany of abuses done to go after larger political enemies like Trump with the FBI or during the Obama years with the IRS targeting conservative organizations.
The importance of the Deep State narrative is to know that the Federal government is filled with political actors that do much more than just push paperwork around - even if they are a small minority, it is not something to ignore.
I will agree that the RW will need to “grow up” and stop acting like they are the fringes of society nobody notices. People they like are in power and they should take that seriously.
Honestly, the simple fact that communism (at least the Soviet version of it) was defeated and discredited makes the "Cthulhu always swims left" statement dubious. This was a clear example of an ideological struggle that conservatives have won (perhaps the most common argument against communism is that it "goes against human nature", which is really a conservative argument in nature).
The progressives of the 1920s also supported prohibition, eugenics etc. and were defeated, and a socially conservative attitude change followed from the 1930s to 1950s (Hays Code, college gender gap opening in favor of males). In some ways, Andreessen, Musk and other "right-wing progressives" are modern reincarnations of these progressives who were optimistic about humanity's immense capability for flourishing.
I agree with you on the importance of technology and how much it drives political change, such as reformation, the end of slavery, the "democratization" of societies, or accessible birth control enabling modern feminism and alternative sexual lifestyles (LGBT movement).
In the case of the Jim Crow laws, the other important factor was the Great Migration - I think any attempts at giving voting rights to blacks would have faced much more stiff resistance if some of the Southern states had a black majority or near majority (as it was the case during the Reconstruction) since most whites absolutely dreaded "black rule".
I take the quote that "Cthulhu always swims to the left" to mean that the natural tendency of things within our cathedral-based oligarchic system is a general leftward drift absent political energy being spent to counter it. Currently large amounts of political energy are being spent and we see as a result not insignificant rightward movement, but once that energy runs out, the eternal leftward drift will resume under its own inertia. It's like the political scale is on an incline that slopes down to the left, you can move against the trend with effort, but gravity will always still pull towards the left. The only thing that would get rid of this structural slope would be an actual, complete regime change that replaces all the cultural-political structures of the cathedral with an entirely novel monarchical system.
Bingo. Yarvin never said at UR that conservatism could not win any battles, only that it could not win the war under the democratist system. Though arguably the regime change that could alter this state of affairs would have to be further-reaching than even he envisaged.
Yes, yes, and yes. Completely agree the blackpill is busted, elections matter, and conservatives need to take on a sense of responsibility if they are to maintain power. Domination of social media networks by conservatives is not inevitable.
I disagree with you on the trans issue simply because technology is going to make transitioning more easy over time. We're still at a stage where medical changing of sex is extremely harmful, but that won't necessarily be the case in 50 or 100 years, with a tiny chance of much sooner. If conservatives fail to keep up with tech changes and policy, they will fall behind.
I think you're way off the mark in that prediction, but either way, you're talking about a hypothetical future that quite plainly does not exist. In the here and now, my position on the "trans issue" is the only one.
In the Culture book series, they have nanotechnology that lets people change their sex through reconstruction at the molecular level, and some characters do this frequently. It's never made a plot point. As far as I could tell, everyone in this fictional society considers this a normal and sensible thing to do.
If it worked the same in real life, I think people would have more or less the same attitude. Maybe a few people would be against it for religious or anti-technological reasons, but most people would consider it as controversial as dying your hair.
So what's the difference? Well, in the books, it works. You can actually become the other sex. In real life, it does not work. You cannot become the other sex. All you can do is destroy the actual body you were born with.
I think the Dems are going to have to go through a civil war to rid themselves of the loons. The views of the far left are so unpalatable to even moderate progressives that the Dems will continue to suffer electoral defeats on a regular basis until they are rid of those people for good. The problem for the democrats is that the most energetic, zealous and die hard part of their party ARE the loons. These aren’t the type of people to just gracefully accept defeat and cooperate with the new program. As of right now they have no answers, and I struggle to see how the more sensible faction prevails. One thing I worry about is if the Republicans manage to screw everything up (which they are eminently capable of doing) then the hard core left will take that as confirmation that they were right all along if the Dems regains power before some sort of intra party reckoning. I feel a hell of a lot better about things now than I did before the election though, so I’ll just enjoy the moment for the time being
This is how I imagine a "worst case scenario" return of wokism playing out: Trump and Republicans shit the bed during the next four years, the economy tanks, Democrats lean into Bernie-style economic populism and ride that sentiment back into power without ever really having to talk about wokeshit.
If I were Trump, this is the main political threat that I'd be worried about.
This has been your justification for not voting for a long time now. If republicans ever win, it will just make the dems worse. So they should never win!
I went through a lot of fucking shit the last four years because of that attitude.
Yes, and they would be incredibly vindictive at that point. That might be what kicks off something really bad, like an actual civil war. Hope we don’t find out
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.
Let me add that the Moldbuggian premise 'Cthullu always swims left' leads to the precise opposite conclusion from the one attributed to it in this article, namely that you need to cultivate the highest virtu to become worthy of ruling. Following this principle means, at a bare minimum, not indulging in the rightoid behaviors rightly criticized by Person Online.
I don't understand your comment. Person Online concludes that it is actually possible for the right wing to obtain power and that our further success depends on how well we exercise that power. I don't see how that's the "precise opposite" of the view you state.
Person Online writes: 'Anyways, the default mindset of the rightoid is that he has no power and can’t affect anything, so he can essentially say or do whatever he wants—extreme rhetoric, calls to “burn it all down,” talk of a second civil war, and the like.'
But in UR, the precise opposite conclusion is drawn. Precisely because right-wingers have no power, they must cultivate virtue so they can one day take power.
"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.
"It was never actually true that the left is backed by some sort of all-powerful “deep state” that is capable of rigging everything."
While this is probably not the case now, one suspects it was around the time Nixon was in office, and definitely was so when FDR was in charge.
"The squishy people in the middle—the people whose votes are actually up for grabs—are not tribal loyalists who are happy to see everything burn in the name of their side “winning.” They just want things to be normal and stable and not on fire."
Winning these people is nice and well, but it secondary to securing elite backing. Trump is Actually Doing Things now because he has a team of people who can get shit done, instead of lame hand me downs from prior Republican administrations.
There are good and bad ways of doing this, of course. The best way I have seen are the salons Rachel Haywire is organizing, that have genuinely interesting art as a means to gather smart and talented people together. The bad way is the Richard Hanania strategy of kowtowing to the left on every single possible issue except for free markets.
>Winning these people is nice and well, but it secondary to securing elite backing. Trump is Actually Doing Things now because he has a team of people who can get shit done, instead of lame hand me downs from prior Republican administrations.
There are good and bad ways of doing this, of course. The best way I have seen are the salons Rachel Haywire is organizing, that have genuinely interesting art as a means to gather smart and talented people together. The bad way is the Richard Hanania strategy of kowtowing to the left on every single possible issue except for free markets.<
I think Trump risks losing "elite backing" through poor governance at least as much as he risks losing swing voters. My suspicion is that many of the elites who tentatively made peace with Trump this cycle don't like tariffs/trade wars, don't like Elmo as a shadow President, and don't like an isolationist foreign policy where America withdraws from the rest of the world. Capital doesn't like uncertainty and chaos, and it also doesn't like nativism and protectionism.
I also strongly disagree that Trump "has a team of people who can get shit done." He does not have a team. He has Elmo and a bunch of sycophants. Perhaps one could say Elmo has a team, who act as Trump's team in a second-hand fashion, though I would again question the real value of such a "team."
So you want foreign wars and H1Bs. And no mass deportations. And despite DC voting 9x% Dem and being the richest place in the whole country and government work being the cushiest out there we can’t actually fire these people.
Why even elect Trump! We win so we can win.
I do think that there is a risk that the tariffs will erode some of Trump's support. It gives the impression of left hand fighting right hand, like someone had not decided if it was just there to bully Canada or there to stay.
Trump's legal / political team also seems much more competent, as while they continue to break laws as much as before, they are getting a lot more done while doing so.
We'll see where things stand when the dust settles. If the executive more or less openly states "I am the law now" and just starts to do whatever it wants even if it's really illegal, of course it will appear that it's "getting a lot done" at first, because it takes some minimum amount of time for the judicial system and other relevant actors to respond.
I have yet to be presented with a decent reason for why anything that Trump needs to do actually *has* to be done illegally though. One would think that openly disregarding the law would be a last resort in governance, not the standard route taken as one's first plan of action. I would certainly cite a mindset of "break the law first, worry about the details later" as evidence that Trump does not, in fact, have a "competent team" around him.
"One would think that openly disregarding the law would be a last resort in governance, not the standard route taken as one's first plan of action."
It is a last resort, for the country. The alternative for Trump and his friends is to die of old age, and for anyone else who wants to improve things to die of old age, until things become so bad that a party in Congress would consider repealing the Administrative Procedure Act.
Again, why do illegal things need to be done at all, and why do they have to be done illegally? You're skipping straight to "it's the last resort to save the country!" without even trying to make a case for how or why.
Congress made it illegal for the executive branch to reduce the size of the civil service in 1946. When the GOP had a majority in the House in the 90s, they did jack shit. There is urgency to attack the civil service now, because waiting for a hypothetical based congressional majority means enduring many more years of unchecked immigration, inflation, and other bad things.
I think a lot of policies are nascent and still being realized. Thinking of the absurdities of the Covid policies in 2021, they were barely mentioned in the voter polling of 2024. Your hardest and most challenging policies should get resolved early, and in two years you can have a steady ship after the government and market has adjusted.
I don’t think the US is about to hit a massive depression as a result of trade. I think the current shocks are in play which will stabilize and normalize when people understand how things will be. In a few years, those places that get those big investment commitments might very well be materializing.
I’m also curious to see the results of foreign policy. Ukraine seems to be in constant flux and the trade conflicts seem to be cracking with the inconsistencies of narratives.
But to your point on the Deep State, I could never bring myself to believe that they *rig* elections in a direct way. But things like just how leaky the Trump WH was compared to how airtight and enigmatic the Biden WH was, it had a way of controlling information in and out of government to influence elections.
Calling it all-powerful is hyperbolic, but it is very potent and it is important to not pretend that government officials are somehow these inhuman paragons of administrative order; they are partisan, ideological, and very capable of manipulating their offices to advance their ends.
Feds infiltrating the Catholic Church or FEMA responders ignoring properties impacted by hurricanes because they have Trump signs are just small examples of them getting caught doing things that impact everyday American. Never mind the litany of abuses done to go after larger political enemies like Trump with the FBI or during the Obama years with the IRS targeting conservative organizations.
The importance of the Deep State narrative is to know that the Federal government is filled with political actors that do much more than just push paperwork around - even if they are a small minority, it is not something to ignore.
I will agree that the RW will need to “grow up” and stop acting like they are the fringes of society nobody notices. People they like are in power and they should take that seriously.
Enjoying this but the weird trans voice narrator is horrific.
If you're listening through text-to-speech, sorry, but I don't have any control over what sort of narrator they assign to that.
I didn't realise it was random and it was the first time I had heard it. Regardless it was a good article.
Honestly, the simple fact that communism (at least the Soviet version of it) was defeated and discredited makes the "Cthulhu always swims left" statement dubious. This was a clear example of an ideological struggle that conservatives have won (perhaps the most common argument against communism is that it "goes against human nature", which is really a conservative argument in nature).
The progressives of the 1920s also supported prohibition, eugenics etc. and were defeated, and a socially conservative attitude change followed from the 1930s to 1950s (Hays Code, college gender gap opening in favor of males). In some ways, Andreessen, Musk and other "right-wing progressives" are modern reincarnations of these progressives who were optimistic about humanity's immense capability for flourishing.
I agree with you on the importance of technology and how much it drives political change, such as reformation, the end of slavery, the "democratization" of societies, or accessible birth control enabling modern feminism and alternative sexual lifestyles (LGBT movement).
In the case of the Jim Crow laws, the other important factor was the Great Migration - I think any attempts at giving voting rights to blacks would have faced much more stiff resistance if some of the Southern states had a black majority or near majority (as it was the case during the Reconstruction) since most whites absolutely dreaded "black rule".
I take the quote that "Cthulhu always swims to the left" to mean that the natural tendency of things within our cathedral-based oligarchic system is a general leftward drift absent political energy being spent to counter it. Currently large amounts of political energy are being spent and we see as a result not insignificant rightward movement, but once that energy runs out, the eternal leftward drift will resume under its own inertia. It's like the political scale is on an incline that slopes down to the left, you can move against the trend with effort, but gravity will always still pull towards the left. The only thing that would get rid of this structural slope would be an actual, complete regime change that replaces all the cultural-political structures of the cathedral with an entirely novel monarchical system.
Bingo. Yarvin never said at UR that conservatism could not win any battles, only that it could not win the war under the democratist system. Though arguably the regime change that could alter this state of affairs would have to be further-reaching than even he envisaged.
Yes, yes, and yes. Completely agree the blackpill is busted, elections matter, and conservatives need to take on a sense of responsibility if they are to maintain power. Domination of social media networks by conservatives is not inevitable.
I disagree with you on the trans issue simply because technology is going to make transitioning more easy over time. We're still at a stage where medical changing of sex is extremely harmful, but that won't necessarily be the case in 50 or 100 years, with a tiny chance of much sooner. If conservatives fail to keep up with tech changes and policy, they will fall behind.
I think you're way off the mark in that prediction, but either way, you're talking about a hypothetical future that quite plainly does not exist. In the here and now, my position on the "trans issue" is the only one.
In the Culture book series, they have nanotechnology that lets people change their sex through reconstruction at the molecular level, and some characters do this frequently. It's never made a plot point. As far as I could tell, everyone in this fictional society considers this a normal and sensible thing to do.
If it worked the same in real life, I think people would have more or less the same attitude. Maybe a few people would be against it for religious or anti-technological reasons, but most people would consider it as controversial as dying your hair.
So what's the difference? Well, in the books, it works. You can actually become the other sex. In real life, it does not work. You cannot become the other sex. All you can do is destroy the actual body you were born with.
I think the Dems are going to have to go through a civil war to rid themselves of the loons. The views of the far left are so unpalatable to even moderate progressives that the Dems will continue to suffer electoral defeats on a regular basis until they are rid of those people for good. The problem for the democrats is that the most energetic, zealous and die hard part of their party ARE the loons. These aren’t the type of people to just gracefully accept defeat and cooperate with the new program. As of right now they have no answers, and I struggle to see how the more sensible faction prevails. One thing I worry about is if the Republicans manage to screw everything up (which they are eminently capable of doing) then the hard core left will take that as confirmation that they were right all along if the Dems regains power before some sort of intra party reckoning. I feel a hell of a lot better about things now than I did before the election though, so I’ll just enjoy the moment for the time being
This is how I imagine a "worst case scenario" return of wokism playing out: Trump and Republicans shit the bed during the next four years, the economy tanks, Democrats lean into Bernie-style economic populism and ride that sentiment back into power without ever really having to talk about wokeshit.
If I were Trump, this is the main political threat that I'd be worried about.
This is why I'm worried about WTF Trump is trying to do with his tariffs.
This has been your justification for not voting for a long time now. If republicans ever win, it will just make the dems worse. So they should never win!
I went through a lot of fucking shit the last four years because of that attitude.
Yes, and they would be incredibly vindictive at that point. That might be what kicks off something really bad, like an actual civil war. Hope we don’t find out
WOKE not dead, just taking a vacation. The summer of 2028, is going to be another "Summer of love".