I hadn't seen the voting ID and school funding wins. Truly a disastrous week for the left, but Roe overshadows it all, infanticide being a sacrament second only to man on man anal fisting. Perhaps part of the reason they've seemed so muted is that all of these defeats have piled on at once. There's a psychological effect where misery (and happiness, for that matter) saturate, and further setbacks don't make any difference to mood. Then, on top of that, there's the colossal letdown the Biden White House has been ... and lurking in the background, the growing difficulty of ignoring the damage done by a certain experimental medical treatment that failed to live up to expectations.
As you say, they have to press on; but the cognitive dissonance of reality denial is a steady emotional drain on their energies, coming just at the point where they most need it. On the margins, voters are abandoning the left (or vice versa), quietly walking away from the mob. Meanwhile, they've turned parents into a voting bloc, pushback against woke in the schools and workplace is increasing the level of friction their program encounters, and the breakdown of the economy is restricting their ability to project institutional power.
We're not out of the woods yet, but we've moved from the seeming inevitability of the left's victory to a giant question mark that looms very large in their minds.
Why did we lose the culture war? We didn't fight it to begin with. Nothing but retreat after retreat.
"Is this really the hill you want to die on?" The beta cuck asks again and again until eventually we will all be drowned in a shallow puddle of wokeness at the bottom of a muddy ditch surrounded by hills everybody was afraid to fight on.
I say no. I'm not going to die on this hill or the next one. I'm going to make the other poor sonsabitches die instead. The pendulum is swinging back in the right direction. We all need to give it a push and turn it into a wrecking ball.
That corporations and even sports leagues, usually afraid of taking any controversial positions, are throwing in completely with the leftist agenda leads me to think that something very, very big is going on under the surface.
"since for them everything is situational in nature. Once something, anything, outlives its usefulness to them, it goes up against the wall."
Or the other way around - when they have control of something, then suddenly it is great. People don't know it today, but in the 18th century the Left's hatred was aimed at teachers as much as police, since the teachers were conservative men.
And today you have the social democrat governments in Sweden and Finland, who only won the elections through immigrant votes, joining NATO with no referendum, no waiting period, no discussion allowed.
When NATO was run by conservative, "capitalist" Americans like Reagan, and the opponent was a communist USSR, they hated it. The social democrats would write long articles and books, hold speeches in schools and have university students write essays, on why WE MUST BE NEUTRAL.
But - when NATO is run by socialists and the target is a conservative Russia, then they join immediately. As soon as there is a war to fill every tabloid front page with daily hatred as cover. Not even waiting for an election to be in between decision and action. Suddenly NATO is great, and if you wait, they know people would say no.
To be fair, the American right has also reversed its stance on NATO v Russia, and for largely the same reasons. Political communities, like nations, do not have permanent alliances, only permanent interests.
But that's the point. The whole idea was to not have "interests". That neutrality from other people's interests was valuable. It's like the Pope never taking sides in a war. It was a fundamental principle, we were told. A principle they held up for generations. Which went out the window in the flick of moment. Generations of principled stance simply discarded in a matter of months. It's like every politician in the U.S. deciding to abolish the Constitution overnight.
I hadn't seen the voting ID and school funding wins. Truly a disastrous week for the left, but Roe overshadows it all, infanticide being a sacrament second only to man on man anal fisting. Perhaps part of the reason they've seemed so muted is that all of these defeats have piled on at once. There's a psychological effect where misery (and happiness, for that matter) saturate, and further setbacks don't make any difference to mood. Then, on top of that, there's the colossal letdown the Biden White House has been ... and lurking in the background, the growing difficulty of ignoring the damage done by a certain experimental medical treatment that failed to live up to expectations.
As you say, they have to press on; but the cognitive dissonance of reality denial is a steady emotional drain on their energies, coming just at the point where they most need it. On the margins, voters are abandoning the left (or vice versa), quietly walking away from the mob. Meanwhile, they've turned parents into a voting bloc, pushback against woke in the schools and workplace is increasing the level of friction their program encounters, and the breakdown of the economy is restricting their ability to project institutional power.
We're not out of the woods yet, but we've moved from the seeming inevitability of the left's victory to a giant question mark that looms very large in their minds.
Why did we lose the culture war? We didn't fight it to begin with. Nothing but retreat after retreat.
"Is this really the hill you want to die on?" The beta cuck asks again and again until eventually we will all be drowned in a shallow puddle of wokeness at the bottom of a muddy ditch surrounded by hills everybody was afraid to fight on.
I say no. I'm not going to die on this hill or the next one. I'm going to make the other poor sonsabitches die instead. The pendulum is swinging back in the right direction. We all need to give it a push and turn it into a wrecking ball.
Great analysis, as always.
That corporations and even sports leagues, usually afraid of taking any controversial positions, are throwing in completely with the leftist agenda leads me to think that something very, very big is going on under the surface.
"since for them everything is situational in nature. Once something, anything, outlives its usefulness to them, it goes up against the wall."
Or the other way around - when they have control of something, then suddenly it is great. People don't know it today, but in the 18th century the Left's hatred was aimed at teachers as much as police, since the teachers were conservative men.
And today you have the social democrat governments in Sweden and Finland, who only won the elections through immigrant votes, joining NATO with no referendum, no waiting period, no discussion allowed.
When NATO was run by conservative, "capitalist" Americans like Reagan, and the opponent was a communist USSR, they hated it. The social democrats would write long articles and books, hold speeches in schools and have university students write essays, on why WE MUST BE NEUTRAL.
But - when NATO is run by socialists and the target is a conservative Russia, then they join immediately. As soon as there is a war to fill every tabloid front page with daily hatred as cover. Not even waiting for an election to be in between decision and action. Suddenly NATO is great, and if you wait, they know people would say no.
To be fair, the American right has also reversed its stance on NATO v Russia, and for largely the same reasons. Political communities, like nations, do not have permanent alliances, only permanent interests.
But that's the point. The whole idea was to not have "interests". That neutrality from other people's interests was valuable. It's like the Pope never taking sides in a war. It was a fundamental principle, we were told. A principle they held up for generations. Which went out the window in the flick of moment. Generations of principled stance simply discarded in a matter of months. It's like every politician in the U.S. deciding to abolish the Constitution overnight.