Conservatives have been complaining for a while about one of the most pressing civil rights crises of our time: the fact that no one wants to bone them.
Some conservatives are so, so troubled by this injustice that they’re willing to throw away their libertarian principles and advocate for some kind of governmental intervention to — I guess — somehow force people to like them.
At least that seems to be the main argument of a very long and very very confusing essay in the National Review with the somewhat unnerving title “Political Discrimination as Civil-Rights Struggle.”
Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, starts out his screed by citing a poll revealing that most Ivy League women have about as much interest in dating Trump supporters as they do in sticking their head in a bucket of bees.
When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him).
While Kaufmann notes in passing that “people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating” — how thoughtful of him! — he’s worried that such “discrimination” against Trumpists will lead to various other kinds of social “intolerance.” In his eyes, the survey results reveal what he calls “the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism.”
And it’s basically a new kind of racism, without that whole racial aspect. He seconds another writer in arguing that “those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews.”
To fight back against this terrible threat, Kaufmann argues,
conservatives will have to overcome their squeamishness about government to have any chance of holding back the woke domination of American institutions.
Apparently, “woke domination” can only be fought by embracing a new form of governmental “civil rights” activism.
To counteract the rising threat that progressive authoritarianism poses to freedom of expression and conscience, conservative policy-makers will need to lose their 1980s libertarian blinders and embrace government-led, civil-liberties-focused intervention in the elite institutions of society.
While Kaufmann discusses several other supposed social injustices against conservatives, he seems obsessed with the ways in which “Trump supporters get the short end of the dating stick,” citing several other surveys that reveal how much students hate the idea of “making America great again” in bed. Or even in the campus dining halls.
Bobby Duffy shows that those who are liberal on culture-war issues find it much harder to befriend those on the other side than vice versa. Cultural progressivism is increasingly emerging as a status marker, which is one reason why, as Bari Weiss reports, elite private schools are hotbeds of left-modernist (“woke”) intolerance, as are elite universities and liberal-arts colleges such as Smith. …
Wherever the culture of campus, dominated by the young and educated, predominates, progressive intolerance and political discrimination against conservatives are in the ascendant.
Apparently it’s gotten so bad that some conservatives have started keeping their opinions to themselves. (If only.)
As progressive authoritarians become a larger share of the elite workforce, institutions are likely to grow more intolerant … As in authoritarian regimes, dissenters keep their views to themselves through preference falsification.
The only solution? A new “crusade for political civil rights” designed to protect Trumpists’ and other conservatives’ right to offend everyone with their nonsense and still get laid.
The solution is similar to that imposed on segregated universities of the South that were compelled by the federal government to desegregate … It’s not that progressive illiberalism is as bad as segregation, but rather that the underlying principle of institutions violating individual rights, and of the government overruling them to protect such rights, is the same.
So our current situation isn’t as awful as Jim Crow but it kind of is.
To wage this battle, those on the right, along with freedom-minded allies on the left … will need to ditch the deregulatory libertarianism that is paralyzing political action and permitting woke takeover. Unless this battle is joined, the power centers of the country will increasingly move toward campus-style intolerance, further entrenching the system of progressive conformity.
Sorry, National-Review-reading dudes, but none of this is going to make women want to fuck you.
H/T — Wonkette
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@occasional reader
My husband and I had an argument about the proper way to pronounce clitoris. Apparently he thinks I say it weird and to prove his point he pulled up a how google pronunciation says it. Well it’s a male voice that says like how he says it, so I told him I’m not going to listen to either of them because neither of them have one to begin with.
I really really hate when anybody makes this comparison. You CHOOSE to support Trump, you CHOOSE to be a republican. Discrimination based on something someone can not control is wrong discrimination based on your dumb choices is not.
They think those awful, ugly “Ilsa, the She-Wolf of the SS” movies are blueprints for the final solution of their dating troubles.
Today’s “conservatives” will ALWAYS see labor and death camps of those they hate and fear (literally everyone else) as the more satisfactory answer to their peevishness.
(Actually, I’ve never watched more than clips, since even two minutes of these were so awful as to give the term “Nazi sexploitation movie” a bad name.)
It’s not that Trump-supporting men generally want to date only ivy league students/graduates. Instead, what’s happening here is that rightwing propanda mills obviously like to cherry pick studies done on specific demographics, that overexaggerate how few young women are politically Trump-compatible. It’s an outrage industry, after all.
I think most Trump-supporting men on the dating market think they want a generic “woman”, while mentally picturing a white, fairly conventionally feminine woman with little in the way of personality. They think they could date “any woman”, except for a few straw-leftist wokescolds who don’t really even count. With their white-conservative background and associated bias, they probably severely underestimate how many young heterosexual women on national level are POC, insufferably feminist, gender-nonconforming, etc. If they stick to dating white, relatively traditional-appearing women, they’ll have somewhat better chances of finding someone Trump-compatible.
Still, there is some overall gender differential in political views, which presumably makes dating somewhat more difficult for conservative men and progressive women. In individual cases it could be considerably more difficult, for example if you happen to be a Trump-supporting man living in a liberal city and your main social environment is an ivy league college student community.
I have run across a fair number of mixed politics couples that are almost always conservative man/liberal woman. So, it’s very possible that it’s harder for conservative men to find a date with a non-conservative woman than 20-30 years ago. But it’s not because liberal women are less tolerant than they used to be. It’s because conservative men have become outright mask off fascist. That’s on them.
But it’s no shock that the party of personal responsibility has once again decided to blame everyone but themselves for their problems.
Semi OT: apparently there’s a group running around at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas this week that is promoting a seven-step plan to return the Former Guy to the US Presidency in a matter of days once it’s implemented.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_60e8cbace4b00edbf3833e8c
Based on what’s shown in that tweet, I feel like putting “Then a Miracle Occurred” in front of each step, because otherwise I’m not sure it’ll work otherwise.
@Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen, Intergalactic Meani:
Okay, that’s hilariously stupid. The funniest part is where they assume that the Democratic Party is such a monstrous evil and that evil can be suddenly revealed at the right moment (when they’ve been trying and failing to do that for decades) that all but the most hardcore dem voters will stand aside when the Republicans trample all over the Constitution… yet said members of the monstrously evil party will do the “right thing” and install Trump once the time comes. That or some of the Democratic members of the House will be magically replaced by Republicans.
And realistically even if all the miracles needed for their plan lined up they’d need another miracle to avoid a long slog which would take them into at least mid 2022 (and probably more like sometime in 2023) to get things completely done… when they could just adopt a faster, easier, stripped-down version of that plan which would require them to wait until late 2022 but would require fewer miracles. Still not realistic though.
Hard to say if it was made by idiots or made for idiots. Or both.
I was not talking about employing actual fascists.
Erm. Ok.
@Joe
I do agree here – but so still think you can make an argument that people should not necessarily be fired for a choice.
For example I am pretty sure under UK employment law you cannot fire somebody for being a practicising Muslim / Christian which seems fair to me despite your faith and your level of adherence being options.
I do agree that comparing discrimination against people’s choices is different to discrimination against physical traits for the obvious reasons you mention.
@Steph
That’s precisely what you were talking about. The topic of the article is fascists whining that people don’t want to date or even employ them. You agreed that the second part was a valid point.
What Nequam said.
Also I’d like to ask them “Have you tried NOT being a fascist?”
Gee what could have possibly given these women the idea that people who support a man who
grabs pussysexually assaults women unapologetically, might also be prone to doing that sort of thing themselves, and therefore they might not want anything to do with that?why does it not surprise me that the people who bitch and moan the most about how the government should stay out of free markets, are wanting the government to intervene and control the “sexual marketplace”?
@Elaine the Witch
Is it a debate of CLIT-oris vs cli-TOR-is, or something else? Which side did you fall on?
I think the difference is an American vs British pronunciation thing at least with these two, from the people I’ve observed pronounce it one way or the other.
@Dalilama
I may just have a feeble lady brain but I am pretty sure I know what I was talking about and it was not about actual fascists in the workforce.
Turns out, when your personality can be boiled down to “I’d like to treat everyone else like shit”, people tend not to want to hang out with you.
I’d love to hear Mr. Kauffman’s views on men who are explicit in their stance that they would never date a liberal feminist.
@ big titty demon
Well if you don’t see women as fully individual people but incubators than there’s no contradiction.
@Step
I believe Daliama is equating Fascist with Trump supporter.
Which I think for many it’s justified. The majority of them have a positive perception of Qanon for a reason.
I think anything outside of innate differences don’t need to be protected in terms of employment and it can compromise a person’s wellbeing having to work with someone who actively works to do things that seem a threat to their existence politically.
Though it’s not feasible for most trump supporters to be canceled or whatever.
Can’t fire all of them without throwing the country into further economic turmoil.
OT; but possible brain bleach.
There’s an old mining trail I walk a lot. It’s especially nice as, at the half way point, there’s a sweet and cake cart. (As seen here in a photo someone better at photos than I took.)
You take what you want and leave the money. But the other day I came across this note.
It just really tickled me.
@Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen
Some might see funny delusional people. Other might see a proof of how entitled they are. Personally I see it as a proof the higher up in republicans think they have a herd of compliant goons that would follow any order. I don’t think they are wrong, either.
Notably, that kind of propaganda is destined to the kind of active, open fascists scumbag that Dalillama and Gaebolga refer to (and probably that the National Review refer to too). Most Trump supporters aren’t anywhere near as aggressively, visibly fascists as that, but luckily they also are conditioned to ignore messenging not destined to them. So they can just vote for the orange man, ignore the various brutalities as long as they don’t apply to them personally, and hope that somehow their special interest will get fulfilled.
@Big Titty Demon
I’m on team cli-TOR-is.
@Ohlmann
Immediately and with prejudice. Tolerating fascists just encourages them. You know this perfectly well, the issue has been explained to you many times; if you still don’t get it, Popper’s essay on it is widely available online, go and read it yourself maybe.
In fact you do not. They have stated that they are Trump supporters, which means that they actively want me (among many others, including literally all of my loved ones) dead. That creates a hostile environment for anyone who isn’t a fascist or fascist sympathiser, and most especially for any members of oppressed populations.
@Steph
Right here is where you explicitly supported hiring/retaining open fascists in the workplace.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Help this benighted Yank out: what’s a Hapjack? Google is proving unhelpful, and I don’t see anything that looks like a flapjack (pancake; in the US, the word has cowboy connotations) on the cart.