In 2023 counterculture is right wing but that's a hard to swallow pill for a lot
Doubt.
That'll be the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel, Harlan Crow, Paul Singer, etc. You'd probably count Musk in there now, too.
The DNC receives more money from Wall Street than the GOP now. Same with Tech.
Believe what you want, but the Right is mostly driven by small donors now.
Hand-waving away right-wing billionaires as if they don't have an impact is disingenuous.
As for small donors, Trump bucked the mold here a bit; it's not typically true for Republicans:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/21/gops-2022...
> Democrats have long relied more on small-dollar donations, and that trend continues today. Some key Republican candidates are also relying heavily on wealthy benefactors like Peter Thiel funding super PACs to support them.
> One of the stories of the GOP in the Trump era was its ability to close the gap on small-dollar fundraising — a gap that has yawned again with Trump out of office, at least through these two platforms. (Not all small-dollar donations are routed through them, but they are the parties’ respective choices for facilitating such donations.)
> And now comes more data, which shows that Democratic small-dollar donors — one key measure of how engaged a party’s base is — appear significantly more motivated than their GOP counterparts.
Edit: another modern counterculture that's easy to identify: the Amish.
Sure the republicans have won elections, but would you really call Trumph conservative?
This ended when they won Row vs Wade, but short of that, they lost almost every battle they engaged in. The US is less religious than ever, porn and violent video games (not to mention DnD) is available everywhere and trans people are accepted at least in some places.
The difference is that the poor and middle class of the right don't get to enjoy the benefits of their side's "win".
That dynamic is kind of inevitable when you buy into someone else's battle for your own win condition. Falling for the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic was never going to result in a good outcome. But the same lack of benefits of "winning" apply to the "left" as well - the majority is still heteronormative, and so doesn't directly benefit from societal acceptance of homosexuality. So in reality the grassroots of both tribes are mostly looking at symbolic victories that don't convey direct benefits, and directing focusing on a single one is just further stirring the pot.
(And yes there are definitely arguments to be made that appeal to loftier goals such as freedom etc, but those are orthogonal to discussing who actually benefited from each winning trend).
But sure, it's less tangible than the rich benefitting from sucking up all the money.
There are tangible reasons for social progress as well, like for example in a world where women aren't pressured to be closeted I don't have to worry about marrying a lesbian who's trying to fit in.
But rather than iterate the reasons we all benefit from living in a world with acceptance, it feels like enough to support it on principle.
>> (And yes there are definitely arguments to be made that appeal to loftier goals such as freedom etc, but those are orthogonal to discussing who actually benefited from each winning trend).
Sure. This type of comment is exactly what I meant by the last bit I said. Including a summary of one team's well-reasoned support for a topic is also one-sided stirring the pot, regardless of whether one agrees with the argument specifically (which I do).
(The "right" would make an analogous argument about trickle down economics and how things would be so much worse for the grassroots right if big business was further constrained in any way)
By this logic the counterculture can’t be left-wing either.
Counterculture among the right would be the alt-right/white supremacist movements and QAnon, which counter mainstream conservatism. Among the left it would be actual (not the American definition of "anyone to the left of Reagan") communists, tankies, black and indigenous activism, etc.
It's true that not every counterculture has to be defined, or define themselves, along the left/right axis, but given the greedy nature of that axis, it seems inevitable that any counterculture could be.
When they finally overturned Roe v Wade they went too far. Their results from the 2022 midterms, which should have been an absolute bloodbath with GOP dominance, was one of their worst showings ever. President's party usually gets punished, rampant inflation, another war, rising interest rates, housing crisis, etc. The GOP barely managed to take the house and did slightly worse in the senate. It's because of abortion. They exposed themselves as The Man, for all time.
I think maybe what true counterculture needs is risk. Something has to be at risk, either by the participants being excluded naturally from a greater system, or choosing to exclude themselves and risking their privilege. Being queer is still countercultural, because there is still significant risk to them every day. Rainbow flags at Starbucks does not mean they are "safe." They can get married, but they still find themselves excluded from a lot of traditions later in life. Young women now literally risk death from accidental pregnancy in many states. Being a vocal proponent of unionization can lose you your job.
There's really nothing at stake for the right wing. Their mouthpieces fall out of fashion and go on to lucrative gigs at consulting firms, or writing books filled with grievances, or really just sitting at home because they were already obscenely wealthy. Tucker Carlson doesn't need to work ever again. Haven't heard from Ann Coulter in a while, but she's still worth tens of millions.
But these people aren't necessarily conservatives, at least as their defining attribute, they frequently maintain liberal values after their exile from the increasingly illiberal world of the left. They very rarely turn into gun-toting and God-fearing, card-carrying Republicans. Two great examples - Tulsi Gabbard and Naomi Wolf recently doing strangely cordial interviews with Jordan Peterson, you could hardly call either of those women conservative Republicans, but they get along with him splendidly on the topic of why the Left is f*'ed up.
I think the article hits the nail on the head with the line "To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform" - this really is the essence of it, it so happens that the mainstream platforms are pretty Left, so betraying them feels like an anti-Left thing to do, but to do so isn't necessarily Right.... it's a counter-culture going off in its own direction. The mainstream may call them Right wing as a slur to discredit them, whether they are or not.
No, there isn't and a sector defined by a particular ideological position doesn’t get “more ideological”. (There might be a belated exit of lingering ideological conservatives from the Democratic Party, a historically right-wing institution, as it has stabilized as the left-most major party with its main factions center-right neoliberal and center-left progressive, but most of that happened in the 1970s-1990s.)
It may also be the case that previously politically detached members of privileged groups that were well-served by the past status quo are becoming reactionarily defensive of their privileged status as it seems threatened but still identify with the privilege of being “apolitical” and with ideology being a thing other people do and they remain “above”, forming a group that is very much part of the reactionary right (with a very clear and self-focussed ideology) but identifies as “apolitical” and “non-ideological”. Which is a much better understanding of the “grey tribe”.
When I said the Left is becoming increasingly ideological perhaps I should have used the word intolerant instead. It is becoming more rigid in terms of what beliefs its members are allowed to hold, and the punishment for holding transgressive beliefs is becoming more severe. Another example of this is the "canceling" of JK Rowling - a liberal feminist who is virulently anti-conservative - for stepping out of line on a single issue. This list of liberals being ejected from the Left for their thought-trangressions is growing rapidly. I don't see how any clear-headed observer can deny its existence.
Tulsi Gabbard has had bizarre (usually extreme but also radically inconsistent over time) set of political positions, her moving around relative to a group generally isn’t a matter of the other group moving at all, its usually (including her formal move away from the Democratic Party) directly associated with substantive changes of her positions, whether its her move from being an extreme anti-LGBT activist where she built he early political career to a move to a moderate mainstream Democratic position, her move from an extreme Islamophobe and anti-Arab racist activist to rhetorically coddling Assad, or her more recent moves.
Wolf seems to have been an opportunistic, dishonest hack her entire career, and pushing culturally conservative angles at least as far back as her work under Dick Morris doing image work for Clinton.