Dialectical MAGAterialism
This image is the consequence of asking Stable Diffusion AI to make an image of Redneck Ho Chi Minh
10 years ago, the Democrats tried to micromanage people’s caloric intake with edicts by Michelle Obama, banning trans fats, and banning fountain drinks above a certain volume. Republicans were like, “Fuck you, I love corn, subsidize my corn.”
Now the Progressives are DEEPLY concerned about fatphobia, and yass queening every time a dangerously overweight woman makes it into advertisements and TV/movies because she has a Basic Human Right™ to be validated and sexually desired. Conservatives are now obsessed with eliminating microplastics, suntanning their buttholes, worrying about birth control contaminating the water supply, lifting weights, and eating farm-to-table organic free-range beef.
The Democrats used to rage CONSTANTLY about pharmaceutical companies. In 2020, our soon-to-be Vice President said the vaccines weren’t trustworthy. The Republicans were cheering on Operation Warp Speed, right up until they abruptly did a 180 and hated the vax at precisely the same moment the Dems abruptly loved it.
The Cons used to reject biological evolution. Now they are the #1 biggest fan of Evo psych. The Progs still believe in human biological evolution, but only from the neck down.
There is a loud antiwar sentiment on the right, especially from veterans. The antiwar left suddenly and mysteriously vanished on Nov 4th, 2008, and never returned. I'm old enough to remember when Free Tibet was a left-wing bumper sticker. I've lived long enough to see Free Hong Kong become a right-wing bumper sticker. The people who told me growing up that the Red Scare was mostly baloney now openly fantasize about killing Russians.
I see rainbow flags hanging in front of Catholic churches and Conservatives accuse Progressives of doing surgical conversion therapy on gay kids.
America’s wealthiest homeless man, Steve Bannon, wants a heavy wealth tax on the rich. Tucker Carlson wants to outlaw AI cars because it would put too many people out of work. Alleged fascist Donald Trump ran and won as a Republican on a platform more liberal than Bill Clinton's.
These are not the Democrats and Republicans of even 15 years ago.
What's Going On?
Source: The Inverted New Deal: Elites Vote Democratic; Working-Class, Republican, by Bill Bishop
But wait. There’s more.
You can guess a person’s political affiliation stunning accuracy, simply by examining the calluses on their hands.
The Republican party is not the party of the rich Reaganite trickle-down free market Jesus people. It has become the party of anyone working a job that requires a diesel engine or a walkie-talkie. These are the people who wear mossy oak camo to funerals. These are people who are best friends with their cousin. These are people who hide their jet ski inside their girlfriend's barn so the repo man won't find it.
The Democratic party not only aren't interested in the working man, they openly loathe him, unless the underdog satisfies certain ESG-elevating diversity metrics. They’re the iLatte class with indoor jobs making 120k/year doing… something.
The sons and daughters of the failed socialist revolutions of the 60s and 70s are now the rich elites with degrees from expensive parochial schools like Harvard. The filthy capitalists, on the other hand, live in modest middle-class homes where they ease the pain of work-related repetition injuries with high-octane pain pills, the literal opiate of the masses.
A New Coalition
Forget the left vs right. That model doesn’t make sense anymore. I'm not sure it ever made sense. The real political division is north vs south, but it has nothing to do with the Mason-Dixon Line.
The new political divide fits neatly into Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, with the two overlapping near the middle.
The North represents self-actualization, self-esteem, and shit that becomes important only once you are wealthy and secure enough to have the luxury of caring about them.
This is the Democrats, who obsess over realizing their “authentic self” and policing others about pronouns. They care about increasing Asian representation in Hollywood, and decreasing it at Harvard. They care if trans women convicted of sex crimes feel "belonging" and "acceptance" inside of women's prisons.
The South represents survival. It's about obsessing over the basics: the need to eat, the need for shelter, and being prepared to air out anyone who threatens you and yours.
These are the Republicans, who want to arm themselves with weapons, fill their pantries with survival rations, and get their toddlers fitted with plate carriers just in case the Sinaloa cartel tries to shoot them or the teachers’ union tries to molest them.
Blue Team is about “validation” and “healing generational trauma” and “erasure of my identity” and consuming SSRIs and benzos on a Tony Montana scale.
Red Team is about how to properly organize an insurgency in case China invades and invests their life savings into vax-free semen futures contracts, preferably on a blockchain.
Blue Team now has the wealth to focus on pop psychiatry and personal journeys of psychedelic exploration. They can spend time on microaggressions because all of their macro problems have been solved.
Red Team are mounting the parapets, preparing for the Mad Max future where drag queen warlord bikers roam the wasteland looking for kindergarteners to sing nursery rhymes to about butt plugs.
Photo: Power-bottom Justin Trudeau on the left, leather-bear Nicolás Maduro on the right, on their way to confiscate your guns and waterboard you with seed oil.
Red Team are the workers. They are the proletariat. And as Marx predicted, they are spontaneously developing class consciousness. In America, it's the MAGAs. In France, it's the Yellow Vests. In Canada, it's the honking truckers. The bourgeois call the proletariat fascists, and the proletariat call the bourgeois communists.
This is politics in 2023.
It seems that the worker’s revolution won’t come from left-wing, pink-haired Silicon Valley people. If it ever arrives, it will come from people who listen to country music and decorate their homes with dead animals.
MAGAs of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.