ANOTHER CULTURE WAR CASUALTY.
Remember that "Intellectual Case for Trump" made by Mytheos Holt at The Federalist a few weeks back? If you saw it, surely if nothing else Holt's tale of how he turned out a racist chick when she let him "probe her ideology" stays seared in your brain. Did you know that was only Part One? Yeah, I blocked that out too, but Part Two has arrived and it's even stupider. A lot of it is about how liberals got bored with free speech and now they're Hitler -- but God help us, Holt also has a Culture War angle:
For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.
Not sure what "voices" have advocated a "countercultural movement" as Holt provides no link -- but the voices urging conservatives to "co-opt some of modern culture for itself" we have heard; they're the guys who write articles like "How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism" in rightwing rags, and who come up with concepts like "South Park Republicans" to make their sponsors feel au courant.
Holt is true to the template -- he even devotes a paragraph to a South Park episode recap! -- and tells us that the problem with conservatism is that it has become infested with "young fogeys" who are no fun at all, which is why all the cool conservatives are flocking to Trump: "Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not." Trump makes liberals mad, see, just like us cool dudes make our parents mad; he's "taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality," and when all those WWE fans get old enough to vote they'll vote for him, or maybe for Triple H -- he's pretty awesome too.
Eventually Holt gets to the inevitable "choc-o-muts ice creams is conservative" list:
The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness?
Boring a girl at a party with a rant about how your favorite TV show means Social Security sux is the revolution, comrade -- I mean bro!
These people are always going on about Saul Alinsky -- and The Frankfurt School and the Long March Through The Institutions and all those other wingnut equivalents of the Illuminati -- so naturally they think culture is not something to make, or even to appreciate and enjoy, but something to "co-opt."
UPDATE. Sorry, I can't leave out this bit from Holt's essay about Bill Clinton yelling at the Black Lives Matter guys and how it shows liberals went fascist:
In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.
No, you read that right: he's really saying BLM's protest signs lost an argument with Bill Clinton. I'd say the signs were at a serious disadvantage; maybe they should have used dry-erase to reduce response time.