Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying off his debt to all those in his caucus who held him hostage in his attempt to become speaker by letting them hold all manner of hearings on culture war issues.
However, I think that they will never run out of things to be outraged about. Outrage over trivialities serves to distract from their lack of any program of action that can command mass support.
Unfortunately it doesn’t take much to generate new stories of this type. Even a mediocre storyteller can craft something like this endlessly.
For example, you could summarize Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings epic in very short order. “In Middle Earth, a ring with the power to reshape the destiny of the world surfaces. A diverse group from all over the world band together to fight against the tide of darkness to destroy the ring.” That’s the meat of the story. But that covers an epic of four books. And Tolkien didn’t do as much to drag the story out as he could have. Any or all of the characters could have had many more campfire talks about their hopes, fears, and dreams for the future. In a modern novel this might have shown up as more dialogue while if I’m remembering Tolkien, he tended to show this sort of thing through how people acted. Frodo, Sam, and Gollum got more of character development while they were alone in Mordor but the author could have done something similar with any or all of the rest of the Fellowship.
What Republicans are doing… It’s not great literature. It’s about on the level of a jump scare. It’s very low effort because they aren’t appealing to a large audience. If you’re not gulliible and already primed to get into their performances they don’t care what you think.
lanir makes an interesting point that leads me to believe that Republicans are analogous to internet scammers who deliberately use misspellings and such to weed out those who wouldn’t be scammed anyway. I hadn’t tought of that. I guess Republicans are just weeding out the comatose.*
*”comatose” shamelessley stolen from Jaws’ comment 7 to PZ’s post, “woke”.
Oops…weeding out the non-comatose.
@2
“Republicans are scammers”…you got it mostly right;-)
“…hearings on culture war issues.”
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Culture affects Politics. Politics affects Culture. The Law usually reflects the cultural norms of society. And Culture keeps changing. Sometimes changing for the better. Sometimes changing for the worse. As the population grows the society forcibly becomes more and more multicultural. Maintaining cohesion and harmony of a multicultural society is very difficult because having different cultures implies having intercultural differences which are often irreconcilable. In a multicultural society, tolerance -- not love -- is the glue. With many cultures within a society, there are always areas of irreconcilable differences within which love is impossible but within which tolerance, compromise, accommodation is possible. Tolerance damps down passions which can explode. The American Left is particularly and peculiarly intolerant.
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Do democrats wage cultural wars in the political arena? Answer: yes. Do republicans wage cultural wars in the political arena? Answer: yes. So what?
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In the past Conservatives fought cultural wars at the local level while the Left waged cultural wars at the national, federal levels. Fortunately, Conservatives are taking the Julius Cesar route in crossing the Rubicon, taking the cultural war to the National, Federal level.
friedfishe:
Not in this reality. Quite the opposite.
(Might as well claim cats are peculiarly canine, or dogs particularly feline)