My biggest issue with that Twix video (besides the extremely boring plot) is the total lack of candy. How is this an “ad”?? What are they selling besides moralizing? (A habit that, like you, I can only hope to manage.)
I agree w pretty much everything your wrote. What I find interesting about the ad, from a trans/gender ideology perspective, is that the child is not identified as trans at all. No pronouns are used. The bully says “you look like a girl, boys don’t wear dresses.” As far as we know, this is just a cisgender boy who likes to wear a princess dress. Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach. The progressive “if you like to wear dresses, you’re probably a girl, regardless of your genitalia” approach is strangely regressive. Can’t we just have a discussion that challenges gender essentialism entirely?
Anyway when I was a kid, the right would have been all over this ad for promoting the occult, so, progress I guess?
On a final note, this conundrum highlights the progressive power problem. Progressives are fixated on theories about power structures, power imbalances, etc. They/we fixate on the political power that the GOP manages to hoard through gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, etc. And rightly so. But the left is totally blind to its massive power over pop culture, a million little power moves like this ad. It’s a different kind of power but the right is hyper-attuned to it. Feeling powerless in pop culture is why the right feels justified in hoarding political power. It’s why they get so pissed about “cancel culture” even though they effectively invented it with conservative moralizing. Each side sees the other one’s unchecked power and feels justified in turning the dial to 11 to combat it. Whoever made this Twix ad felt like they were taking on The Man, even though they are The Man(x).
Well stated. They really are a wretched bunch. Like you, I was one of them most of my life (Seattle native with multiple graduate degrees). I once thought the world would be a better place if educated leftists had more power, and that it was only those damn Republicans standing between us and utopia.
But over the past couple of years in particular, I turned in my progressive card and became a libertarian. With the combination of the Great Awokening, "defund the police," the complete collapse of much of the media's anti-Trump narratives under the weight of contrary evidence, absolute nonsense getting published in once-respectable academic journals as long as it advances The Narrative, embrace of authoritarian Covid policies and attitudes, etc., etc., I came to the belief that basically no one should be in charge of anything, ever.
Okay, I just took the Hidden Tribes quiz and I have the same problem with it that I did with the old "Political Compass" quiz: The questions are designed to aggregate social liberalism with economic collectivism and economic libertarianism with social conservatism, as if these two pairings are the only ones that exist and have ever existed. In other words, it asks the quiz-taker to choose over and over again between social liberalism and social conservatism ("children should be self-reliant" v. "children should be obedient") or economic collectivism v. economic libertarianism ("people should help themselves" v. "government should help people") but never between, say, social liberalism and economic collectivism ("self-expression is important even if vulnerable people get hurt"), as if there is no such thing as a pro-life Catholic who thinks the government should help homeless people, or a hedge fund manager who donates to LGBT causes.
My point is just that whoever designed the Hidden Tribes methodology did so with a raft of assumptions about types of people who exist in American society and wrote the questions to screen out any evidence to the contrary. These assumptions, paradoxically, seem very much in line with the thinking of the "Progressive Activists" that the study singles out as the problem, which leads me to wonder if this isn't yet more narcissistic self-criticism from, for want of a better term, progressive activists.
The other built-in bias seems to be toward polarization. Otherwise why ask me about Donald Trump (the most polarizing figure in the history of American politics) as opposed to, oh, i don't know, Joe Biden?
66-year-old leftie guy here who's about to change sides because of the rise of the totalitarian trans cult on the left. (Totalitarian in that, in several states today, your kids can be taken away from you by the State if you, as their parents, don't confirm the gender fantasies that the trans cult seduced them into, and commit them to dismemberment and sterilization.)
But I'm here to make this point of scientific order: there is (almost) NO SUCH THING as a "nonbinary" human:
Today, even my beloved mistress science has been corrupted by the trans cult, so these former facts are being suppressed, 1984 style.
Alas, the only alternative to the trans cult (here in the US anyway) is the Trump cult, which is actually more sane. The future under Emperor Donald II will look a lot more like most of the human past than the sexless future than the trans cultists want.
I think this is exactly right. Democratic politicians are backing off from some of the woke language after seeing the backlash, but people's impressions of the left come from activism, journalism, entertainment, and social media. They also encounter it at work (diversity training) depending on the industry, and sometimes in schools.
Democratic politicians get punished for it whether they're woke or not, if only because Republican politicians score points by telling the left to go fuck themselves. And every time they goad us, a media/Twitter meltdown is guaranteed.
I don't know the solution. Identity politics is already unpopular, but as long as academia and the media are swept up in this stuff, it's not going to stop. And within those institutions, there are enormous benefits to being the most insufferable woke tool on the staff--and you can't disagree without risking your job. So it's not looking great for the near future.
> David Shor’s argument, in a very small nutshell (like a pistachio), is that Democrats should focus on popular things. Nobody really disagrees with this; there’s no “let’s throw Buzz Aldrin down a flight of stairs” contingent within the Democratic Party.
Don't kid yourself, there absolutely is! I would bet real money that if you went up to the GenZ Twixers who pushed this ad, and told them "this ad will lose the Virginia gubernatorial race," they would have doubled down on the ad.
There are just too many on the far-left who believe in the old trope of "rights > life" and are happy to sacrifice actual power for their own self-justification. These people are the most dangerous ones inside of the Left coalition and must be defeated if we're to make any progress.
How about Twix as a name for people who haven't yet made up their mind about their gender but have promised everyone they will. he/she/I'll get back to you
The fact you expected traditional liberal but instead got progressive activist is actually a pretty good summary of the situation! The same happens with almost all cultural elites like yourself. They have a distorted view of where the centre is, and what traditional liberalism means to most of America. That 55 year old landscaper in Wisconsin gets pretty confused when he finds out you think you're in the same tribe as him.
Of course the quiz is flawed. But it's interesting how everyone on the left thinks they are a traditional liberal these days.
"This creates a huge structural disadvantage for Democrats. Obviously, the left has our own garbage-y, partisan media sources — and also Twitter — but it’s nothing like the maximally-efficient bullshit factory that exists on the right."
I think this perception is part of the problem. The left has dominance of all the major networks and newspapers--for the most part--and outside of Fox, the right has YouTubers and Ben Shapiro and OANN and so on, the vast majority of which is no more polished or efficient than the NYT or the Atlantic or MSNBC or CNN.
But this is a gap that is hard to bridge: folks on the right tend to feel that the left completely controls all major media (and not without reason) while being more dismissive of Fox (who is not right wing enough for a lot on the right) and all the websites and YouTube channels and Rumble channels and Locals hangouts and the WSJ editorial page. Many on the right would suggest the right wing media is insignificant in the face of WaPo, NYT, Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the big three networks, NPR, the vast majority of everything that comes out of Hollywood, the apparently loyalties of big tech, etc.
While on the left, they tend to see Fox and the "right wing bullshit" machine as being this massive and devious, highly-efficient killing machine and will often lament "they have nothing like it"--which I'd argue seems hopelessly delusional to anyone actual in the political center-to-right--and at least center-right to far-right. To the degree Fox and the rightwing machine enjoys PR successess, it's mostly using the fodder provided by folks on the left.
And even then, who won in 2020? Biden did. Right-wing machine was out in force for those Georgia senate seats, but no go. I'm dubious of how much the media machines effect outcomes, at least nationally. Or how efficient or effective the really are. I don't think either the right or left--despite reach and institutional power--actually are that efficient at doing anything, except outrage theater and clickbait (and some folks--Daily Wire comes to mind--are actually doing investigative reporting, so that's nice).
If Republicans have proven to be more efficient at anything, it's been--most of the time--managing politics on the local level. In 2020 they enjoyed a net gain of 1 for both governers and state legislates, and hold the majority of state legislatures and governorships. Youngkins is just the latest addition, there.
But a lot of that is good campaigning, candidate selection, GOtV efforts and so on. Appropriate messaging for the local market plays a role--but it's not Fox or the rightwing bullshit machine that helped Youngkin win there. It's actual on-the-ground political work ... and McAuliffe being nice enough to run a blazingly awful campaign.
That being said, I think your general message is going to fall on deaf ears. But good luck! My experience is that (most) highly-partisan ideologues on both sides are literally incapable of reading the room, or demonstrating sufficient empathy to wonder how anybody who is not specifically them might take something.
Very nice. Teetering on subscription, but I've jumped into such relationships before and it didn't end well. Still, though. Very perceptive.
Especially the insight or analytical strategy you break out in the Shor/Yglesias smidge/some bit. Two ideas that are different are NOT automatically opposed. It seems that waaaay too many people take any thought about politics, or Current Year Culture and assign it a binary value "black/white", "good/bad", etc., assigning any differing perception the opposite binary value. And that does not represent the galaxy of opinion. It is not a good way to think about things. Hell, it really isn't even useful.
Keep doing that, and I got a sweet fiver here for ya lol.
PS) "Too often, our politics are like a jaunty hat: A desperate attempt at an identity that makes people not want to be around us." Taibbi-worthy, lol.
“You talk to older people and they’re like, ‘Dude we sell candy bars, we don’t sell politics,’” ... “Then you have younger people being like, ‘These are political candy bars. This is political chocolate.’”
Right, see, I got to the bit where you said a lot of nonwhite, working-class Democrats are more "popularist" than PMC Democrats and asked why people can't acknowledge that, and I think you're missing why people can't acknowledge it.
The basic way the progressive activism industry works is that every group, to get funding, basically has to portray themselves as a revolutionary vanguard lacking only This Grant to surge forward with a mass support base. If they just admit that there's no insurgent mass waiting to take the Capitol but looking for its leaders, they're out of a job.
Is it possible that the party is in a lose-lose? If they don’t play the game with the 8% they won’t get the turnout from that group AND they’ll pay dearly in the cultural centers that amplify the slogans of the 8%. If they play along however they continue to lose the median voter.
This reminds me of your "In Defense of Dumb Nationalist Bullshit" piece.
Dumb Nationalist Bullshit inserted into everything is annoying to many progressive activists in exactly the way that this sort of thing inserted into everything is annoying to the 80% that think political correctness has gone too far.
If the secondary message in that Twix ad had been "USA is great", then it would have annoyed 6% of the population and been a positive for 80%.
My biggest issue with that Twix video (besides the extremely boring plot) is the total lack of candy. How is this an “ad”?? What are they selling besides moralizing? (A habit that, like you, I can only hope to manage.)
I agree w pretty much everything your wrote. What I find interesting about the ad, from a trans/gender ideology perspective, is that the child is not identified as trans at all. No pronouns are used. The bully says “you look like a girl, boys don’t wear dresses.” As far as we know, this is just a cisgender boy who likes to wear a princess dress. Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach. The progressive “if you like to wear dresses, you’re probably a girl, regardless of your genitalia” approach is strangely regressive. Can’t we just have a discussion that challenges gender essentialism entirely?
Anyway when I was a kid, the right would have been all over this ad for promoting the occult, so, progress I guess?
On a final note, this conundrum highlights the progressive power problem. Progressives are fixated on theories about power structures, power imbalances, etc. They/we fixate on the political power that the GOP manages to hoard through gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, etc. And rightly so. But the left is totally blind to its massive power over pop culture, a million little power moves like this ad. It’s a different kind of power but the right is hyper-attuned to it. Feeling powerless in pop culture is why the right feels justified in hoarding political power. It’s why they get so pissed about “cancel culture” even though they effectively invented it with conservative moralizing. Each side sees the other one’s unchecked power and feels justified in turning the dial to 11 to combat it. Whoever made this Twix ad felt like they were taking on The Man, even though they are The Man(x).
Well stated. They really are a wretched bunch. Like you, I was one of them most of my life (Seattle native with multiple graduate degrees). I once thought the world would be a better place if educated leftists had more power, and that it was only those damn Republicans standing between us and utopia.
But over the past couple of years in particular, I turned in my progressive card and became a libertarian. With the combination of the Great Awokening, "defund the police," the complete collapse of much of the media's anti-Trump narratives under the weight of contrary evidence, absolute nonsense getting published in once-respectable academic journals as long as it advances The Narrative, embrace of authoritarian Covid policies and attitudes, etc., etc., I came to the belief that basically no one should be in charge of anything, ever.
Okay, I just took the Hidden Tribes quiz and I have the same problem with it that I did with the old "Political Compass" quiz: The questions are designed to aggregate social liberalism with economic collectivism and economic libertarianism with social conservatism, as if these two pairings are the only ones that exist and have ever existed. In other words, it asks the quiz-taker to choose over and over again between social liberalism and social conservatism ("children should be self-reliant" v. "children should be obedient") or economic collectivism v. economic libertarianism ("people should help themselves" v. "government should help people") but never between, say, social liberalism and economic collectivism ("self-expression is important even if vulnerable people get hurt"), as if there is no such thing as a pro-life Catholic who thinks the government should help homeless people, or a hedge fund manager who donates to LGBT causes.
My point is just that whoever designed the Hidden Tribes methodology did so with a raft of assumptions about types of people who exist in American society and wrote the questions to screen out any evidence to the contrary. These assumptions, paradoxically, seem very much in line with the thinking of the "Progressive Activists" that the study singles out as the problem, which leads me to wonder if this isn't yet more narcissistic self-criticism from, for want of a better term, progressive activists.
The other built-in bias seems to be toward polarization. Otherwise why ask me about Donald Trump (the most polarizing figure in the history of American politics) as opposed to, oh, i don't know, Joe Biden?
66-year-old leftie guy here who's about to change sides because of the rise of the totalitarian trans cult on the left. (Totalitarian in that, in several states today, your kids can be taken away from you by the State if you, as their parents, don't confirm the gender fantasies that the trans cult seduced them into, and commit them to dismemberment and sterilization.)
But I'm here to make this point of scientific order: there is (almost) NO SUCH THING as a "nonbinary" human:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264
Today, even my beloved mistress science has been corrupted by the trans cult, so these former facts are being suppressed, 1984 style.
Alas, the only alternative to the trans cult (here in the US anyway) is the Trump cult, which is actually more sane. The future under Emperor Donald II will look a lot more like most of the human past than the sexless future than the trans cultists want.
I think this is exactly right. Democratic politicians are backing off from some of the woke language after seeing the backlash, but people's impressions of the left come from activism, journalism, entertainment, and social media. They also encounter it at work (diversity training) depending on the industry, and sometimes in schools.
Democratic politicians get punished for it whether they're woke or not, if only because Republican politicians score points by telling the left to go fuck themselves. And every time they goad us, a media/Twitter meltdown is guaranteed.
I don't know the solution. Identity politics is already unpopular, but as long as academia and the media are swept up in this stuff, it's not going to stop. And within those institutions, there are enormous benefits to being the most insufferable woke tool on the staff--and you can't disagree without risking your job. So it's not looking great for the near future.
> David Shor’s argument, in a very small nutshell (like a pistachio), is that Democrats should focus on popular things. Nobody really disagrees with this; there’s no “let’s throw Buzz Aldrin down a flight of stairs” contingent within the Democratic Party.
Don't kid yourself, there absolutely is! I would bet real money that if you went up to the GenZ Twixers who pushed this ad, and told them "this ad will lose the Virginia gubernatorial race," they would have doubled down on the ad.
There are just too many on the far-left who believe in the old trope of "rights > life" and are happy to sacrifice actual power for their own self-justification. These people are the most dangerous ones inside of the Left coalition and must be defeated if we're to make any progress.
How about Twix as a name for people who haven't yet made up their mind about their gender but have promised everyone they will. he/she/I'll get back to you
The fact you expected traditional liberal but instead got progressive activist is actually a pretty good summary of the situation! The same happens with almost all cultural elites like yourself. They have a distorted view of where the centre is, and what traditional liberalism means to most of America. That 55 year old landscaper in Wisconsin gets pretty confused when he finds out you think you're in the same tribe as him.
Of course the quiz is flawed. But it's interesting how everyone on the left thinks they are a traditional liberal these days.
"This creates a huge structural disadvantage for Democrats. Obviously, the left has our own garbage-y, partisan media sources — and also Twitter — but it’s nothing like the maximally-efficient bullshit factory that exists on the right."
I think this perception is part of the problem. The left has dominance of all the major networks and newspapers--for the most part--and outside of Fox, the right has YouTubers and Ben Shapiro and OANN and so on, the vast majority of which is no more polished or efficient than the NYT or the Atlantic or MSNBC or CNN.
But this is a gap that is hard to bridge: folks on the right tend to feel that the left completely controls all major media (and not without reason) while being more dismissive of Fox (who is not right wing enough for a lot on the right) and all the websites and YouTube channels and Rumble channels and Locals hangouts and the WSJ editorial page. Many on the right would suggest the right wing media is insignificant in the face of WaPo, NYT, Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the big three networks, NPR, the vast majority of everything that comes out of Hollywood, the apparently loyalties of big tech, etc.
While on the left, they tend to see Fox and the "right wing bullshit" machine as being this massive and devious, highly-efficient killing machine and will often lament "they have nothing like it"--which I'd argue seems hopelessly delusional to anyone actual in the political center-to-right--and at least center-right to far-right. To the degree Fox and the rightwing machine enjoys PR successess, it's mostly using the fodder provided by folks on the left.
And even then, who won in 2020? Biden did. Right-wing machine was out in force for those Georgia senate seats, but no go. I'm dubious of how much the media machines effect outcomes, at least nationally. Or how efficient or effective the really are. I don't think either the right or left--despite reach and institutional power--actually are that efficient at doing anything, except outrage theater and clickbait (and some folks--Daily Wire comes to mind--are actually doing investigative reporting, so that's nice).
If Republicans have proven to be more efficient at anything, it's been--most of the time--managing politics on the local level. In 2020 they enjoyed a net gain of 1 for both governers and state legislates, and hold the majority of state legislatures and governorships. Youngkins is just the latest addition, there.
But a lot of that is good campaigning, candidate selection, GOtV efforts and so on. Appropriate messaging for the local market plays a role--but it's not Fox or the rightwing bullshit machine that helped Youngkin win there. It's actual on-the-ground political work ... and McAuliffe being nice enough to run a blazingly awful campaign.
That being said, I think your general message is going to fall on deaf ears. But good luck! My experience is that (most) highly-partisan ideologues on both sides are literally incapable of reading the room, or demonstrating sufficient empathy to wonder how anybody who is not specifically them might take something.
Awesome.
Very nice. Teetering on subscription, but I've jumped into such relationships before and it didn't end well. Still, though. Very perceptive.
Especially the insight or analytical strategy you break out in the Shor/Yglesias smidge/some bit. Two ideas that are different are NOT automatically opposed. It seems that waaaay too many people take any thought about politics, or Current Year Culture and assign it a binary value "black/white", "good/bad", etc., assigning any differing perception the opposite binary value. And that does not represent the galaxy of opinion. It is not a good way to think about things. Hell, it really isn't even useful.
Keep doing that, and I got a sweet fiver here for ya lol.
PS) "Too often, our politics are like a jaunty hat: A desperate attempt at an identity that makes people not want to be around us." Taibbi-worthy, lol.
Came across this “behind the scenes at Twix” expose: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/business/gen-z-workplace-culture.html
“You talk to older people and they’re like, ‘Dude we sell candy bars, we don’t sell politics,’” ... “Then you have younger people being like, ‘These are political candy bars. This is political chocolate.’”
Right, see, I got to the bit where you said a lot of nonwhite, working-class Democrats are more "popularist" than PMC Democrats and asked why people can't acknowledge that, and I think you're missing why people can't acknowledge it.
The basic way the progressive activism industry works is that every group, to get funding, basically has to portray themselves as a revolutionary vanguard lacking only This Grant to surge forward with a mass support base. If they just admit that there's no insurgent mass waiting to take the Capitol but looking for its leaders, they're out of a job.
Compelling data that backs you up (and is, to my elation, getting attention in Dem circles): https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/08095656/CWCPReport_CommonsenseSolidarity.pdf
Is it possible that the party is in a lose-lose? If they don’t play the game with the 8% they won’t get the turnout from that group AND they’ll pay dearly in the cultural centers that amplify the slogans of the 8%. If they play along however they continue to lose the median voter.
This reminds me of your "In Defense of Dumb Nationalist Bullshit" piece.
Dumb Nationalist Bullshit inserted into everything is annoying to many progressive activists in exactly the way that this sort of thing inserted into everything is annoying to the 80% that think political correctness has gone too far.
If the secondary message in that Twix ad had been "USA is great", then it would have annoyed 6% of the population and been a positive for 80%.