All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.
This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it’s not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico — a seminary student-turned-politician — embodies an existential threat to the right’s long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.
I’m Gen X, and I remember hearing older generations from the working class - and the very poor part of it, no less - bitching about FDR, comparing him to a dictator, saying he was a Communist, etc…and these motherfuckers almost surely had their lives improved by FDR.
My parents were boomers and would overhear this kind of thing (usually with lots of colorful language not really meant for kids) and when I was asking what they were talking about, they would just shake their heads and I could tell they were quite pissed about all of the stupidity they had to wade through daily. We lived in the rust belt and in a very red area.
And that’s all pre-hate radio, pre-Faux News. And wayyyyy before shit platforms like Xitter and Facebook and Nextdoor…somehow, I doubt these types will learn much of anything.
Nextdoor drives me nuts. I see people posting ChatGPT-generated menu poster things with not-food images in them and some folks just slurping it up despite things like when there’s 5 sides listed, and because 2 of them are potato it ends up scrambling them into one gross object (raw/boiled fry-shaped potato sprinkled with paprika, mashing up ‘potato salad’ and ‘french fries’).
Or ‘chicken’ that is Ribbed For Your Pleasure, or chicken where every hair pore is toasted so that it looks simultaneously burnt and raw.
I guess I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing that.
When I bother to look into Nextdoor - it seems my feed is filled with Karens upset about kids and their e-bikes, lots of reactionary bullshit that seems to revolve around water restrictions - “why can’t I have a lush green yard full of a non-native grass when they are building apartment high-rises in Denver?! That’s obviously where all the water is going!”
Lots of people that refuse to accept the idea that what they assumed is some kind of eternal “way of life” is itself something that was socially engineered - everything from lush green grass of a species that is non-native to the high desert, to eating loads of meat for three meals a day, as well as unwalkable neighborhoods miles and miles from a city center with no viable public transit…I think because Nextdoor is kind of rooted in the idea of the physical space people occupy that’s why this seems to come to the fore.
The very idea of imagining changes for the better seems to be antithetical; it’s more about preserving all the systems that are currently in place, as if they have been in place for centuries instead of decades, no matter how stupid and myopic they are.
I guess I haven’t seen the AI slop. So far, it’s all human-generated.