One of the quandaries I ruminate over is "what makes a liberal/what makes a conservative." I've tried on a number of ideas and haven't rejected any of them; however, my current favorite hypothesis is that youth tend to be liberals because a liberal/progressive/permissive social structure tends to favor innovation and innovation favors the young. We grow conservative as we age, however, because we've accumulated wealth and resources and wish to retain them for future generations.

I was struck yesterday by what a socioeconomically regressive institution peerage is. Drew Barrymore is John Barrymore's kid is John Barrymore's kid and Drew Barrymore's kids are gonna have an easier time in Hollywood than mine will but ain't none of 'em gonna be Lord and Lady Barrymore, Eighth Viscount of Tujunga or some shit. You ass out in America? You've assed out. You ass out in the UK? So long as you dot your I's and cross your T's you can lord your upbringing over the proles until the sun is a cinder. The Commonwealth's favorite spectator sport isn't football it's class warfare. And if you can parse your society into "our people" and "the help" then Nazis are just saying the quiet part out loud.

I think that's why the Fascists did better in the UK than the US - if it had been rabble-rousing East Enders who wanted to round up the jews they would have been shipped off to India or some shit. But since it was Lord Curzon's son-in-law pip pip cheerio heil hitler.

The wrongness of the second half of this sentence is why the first half is wrong. Power is all these people are interested in, and considering how much power we've consolidated into the executive, that's the main focus of the GOP, but hey, waging lie-based "cultural" warfare at a local level is apparently entertaining in the meantime.

Naaw, dawg you're missing the forest for the trees. Their power structure has been hijacked. That was something that stuck out for me in Frances Haugen's testimony: Facebook has fielded complaints from legit G8 politicians saying "your platform forces me to pander to extremists in order to get elected." THAT is why the world is full of MTGs and Lauren Boeberts: Teh Crzy has been platformed above the archetypal sops-before-proles aristocracy. And yeah - the Republican Party has devalued integrity and character faster than the Democratic Party so there are more craven opportunists who will lick that doorknob on the Right but there's no fucking future in it.

I don't know if you've noticed how many bright stars have burned out since Trump. He's a career-ender. There's no loyalty there, there's no strategy there, there's no payback there.

Don't vote until they restore me to godhood. Until the Republicans change the narrative they will accomplish nothing on a national level. What's Trump's platform, exactly? Besides "I'm president" and "build the wall"? What does anyone else have to run on? I'm not saying they won't. I'm not saying they won't make the most of it and try their hardest. I'm not saying they aren't hell-bent on a hereditary monarchy and have been since the Virginia Colony.

I'm saying the clever are out of power. Georgia doesn't flip in a universe where Trump isn't actively, deliberately sabotaging the Republican Party. Certainly, there are opportunists who can use a little TrumpGloss for a short-term bump. But as a national strategy? Trump was something that happened to the Republican Party, not something they chose. They would have been in a better position running Carly Fiorina against Clinton, even though she woulda lost, because they'd still control the narrative.

They want the narrative back. If they run Trump in 2024 it'll be because they haven't wrested control.