a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  2135 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Fight Over Men Is Shaping Our Political Future

I'm not so sure.

    Talked to a guy recently who had known the Weather Underground back in the day. He made a very interesting analogy: Charlottesville was the alt-right's equivalent of Weather's "Days of Rage" protest, an episode of dumb street violence that discredited the people who did it.

I didn't know that much about the Weather Underground a week ago; I mean, I knew they were a bunch of spoiled white kids that decided hippies weren't violent enough to enact real change. But I've been reading up and holy shit, they were the Richard Spencers of the left. Tedious fucks every one of them, holing up in a 4-bedroom estate out at Tiburon while deciding how best to blow up post offices to pander to hippies.

The hippies, meanwhile, faced the existential question of "do we want to hurt people to get our way?" and largely answered in the negative. And we got the EPA, we got Miranda, we almost got the ERA.

Bush won 2004 by getting out the vote in defense of marriage. 11 years later same sex marriage was 50-state recognized. There wasn't a single bomb, there wasn't a single martyr. Meanwhile I've been cranking through old Frontlines and it made me realize that the nasty-ass pro-life demonstrations of my youth have largely abated, no doubt due to the fact that the day-after pill has been around for a dozen years.

I'm optimistic that the majority wants to do the right thing. The minority can squawk but at the end of the day, most people don't give a fuck what Ben Shapiro thinks.