/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Everyone needs to read more Adorno

The “PMC” does not exist.

>>2826971
The labor aristocracy is kind of real but it's asinine to place schoolteachers in the labor aristocracy and not the skilled trades as well. And stuff like IT and software are nothing but highly skilled professions, only different from a skilled professional in the trades by a matter of degree and vibes.
>>2825988
There is kind of a battle between the rural petite-bourgeoisie and the urban labor aristocracy. On the whole, the urban labor aristocracy are still the progressive force. It's kind of like how the reactionary business unions of Northern USA are more progressive than the "right to work"ism of the South because "the right to work" cripples the development of the productive forces by driving down wages.

>>2825997
How is Adorno relevant here?

I think liberalism is being discredited and conservatism was already discredited, so people are going back to aesthetics for its own sake rather than, like you said, as a proxy for politics.

The popularity of trad shit is because it's genuinely pretty, cute, attractive etc. The values behind it is not the driving force here. The decline of liberalism means that's people are no longer afraid of touching aesthetics that are was considered "ick" by the previously dominant liberal culture. But that doesn't necessarily mean they agree with conservative values.

>>2825988
small business owners are only a small part of the petit bourgeois you pseud midwit

>and the PMC
wtf does PMC even mean? anyone between the proletariat and the haute bourgeois? we already have a word for that, middle classes or petit bourgeoisie

>>2827168 (me)

Now regarding class, I really don't think these things (PMC, petit bourg, urban/rural divide) matter much here. Remember the "diner goth" thing that came up a while ago? Due to the internet, you will find subcultures everywhere across different classes and ethnicities.

There are soyfacing IT workers making $300k/year who are furries and into Kpop and there lumpen Nazis who are into the same shit as well.

And finally regarding fashion, I was never much into fashion but I'll just give my vibes based opinion. Looking at picrel, I think people are just slapping random shit together. And this has been happening for many years now, so it's getting increasingly difficult to identify any real MASS trends. I emphasize mass here. Sure there are dozens of microtrends but they don't give much fodder for analyzing the underlying base.

Infrared haz glowingpoint, do not interact with thread. Report and move on.

>>2825988
>backlash against Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dress
who?
>hysteria over big retail chains like Target and Nordstrom selling milkmaid dresses
what?
who cares?
it's just social media people doing their thing - keeping engagement up among their audience. political discourse moves on from these people and towards calling everyone epstein or discussing bombing datacenters. not perfect but better

>>2825988
>Likewise, the working-class doesn't care about cultural issues all that much either and really only cares about short-term economic stuff like the price of gas.
I wonder if it's just because material factors figure more highly. Another example I was thinking of was the Ukraine war. In Ukraine, it's a real war that people are fighting. But overwhelmingly most NAFO people on the internet speaking English are pretty comfortable, their politics tends to be very establishment, and I think they relate to the war in a symbolic way.

>On an almost identical note, multiple liberal women have raised hysteria over big retail chains like Target and Nordstrom selling milkmaid dresses, calling it "tradwife coded" and saying it's indicative that women's civil rights will be taken away … We also see this very clearly with the "clean girl" aesthetic being demonized as right-wing or "eugenics-coded" with the heavy makeup/blue eyeshadow look being championed for being (allegedly) progressive.
You're telling me all of this for the first time, because I don't really use social media anymore (a little bit for different subjects). But I also thought it was the other way around? Like the clean girl look was liberal, and the heavy makeup look was conservative. Look at MAGA women for example, they go pretty heavy on makeup and plastic surgery.

I'm tempted to almost try to explain this more with psychoanalysis or something. People seem to "interpellate" politics through social cues, race, gender, how people dress, talk, walk. Do you remember Milo Yiannopolous. He was a right-wing provocauter who is washed up now, but he would go to college campuses and perform in drag and say stuff that was right-wing as hell, which provoked extreme, red-in-the-face rage among campus liberals. He knew they were going to do this and exploited it. But I'm not sure those liberals would have the same reaction if he wasn't gay and doing drag, because it wouldn't have destabilized their own framework of ingroups/outgroups (which includes gays in the ingroup as basically magical elves who exist to affirm their beliefs). He was just really threatening to some of these liberals, even though he was just some scummy fag with a drug problem.

Charlie Kirk? He didn't trigger liberals that much. One killed him, but mostly liberals (and the left generally) knew what to expect with him. Evangelical Christians also loved him, but he also looked like what older white Evangelical Christians want to see young men look like. It's that Disney child actor look. That to them is very safe and comfortable. Not threatening because he's in the in-group.

But it gets interesting when someone who shows up and destabilizes that. In the past few days, conservatives on social media have been obsessed and triggered af by James Talarico, who won the Democratic for Senate in Texas. It's something I've noticed. But he looks like that, dresses like that, and talks in a Texan accent. He could fit in very well with a conservative church crowd. But that has seemed to have fucked with them more than usual for a Democratic politician.

>So what material factors are causing liberals to lose their control of culture? Can we attribute it to the decline of the PMC? […] And now with AI slop everywhere the prestige of musicians and artists also appears to be disappearing.
Well, with music it seems like the middle has just collapsed. You still have some megastars like Taylor Swift. But the days of bands that could make at least make a living touring and selling records is over for a huge number of musicians. Also it's quite weird that Swift is such a huge and unifying figure (for women) at a time of cultural fragmentation. So you have some big stars, but then a bunch of people who are noodling around with software instruments as a hobby and putting things on Bandcamp.

>>2827232
well i'd say that a lot of the culture war nonsense is really extra-political, it's entirely fought in an abstraction over everything else, and has replaced a good deal of what politics is/was, obviously it's not a unique element of the past 30 years or so, but it is something you can notice as well

>>2825988
No, you're still not going abstract enough: they are wars between different basic personality types, taste / "cultural capital", and, in aggregate, intelligence.. While petite-bourgeoisie skew one way and "PMC" skew the other, this pseudo-class analysis breaks down when you have to account for proletarians on both sides, different kinds of lumpen and pseudo-lumpen on opposing sides, tech workers generally skewing reactionary but occasionally skewing outright communist, and so on.

If you take a look at any piece of polling data you can find, the last thing on earth you want is the decline of university education. Politics today is fundamentally a conflict between high-openness, high agreeableness, mid-high neuroticism leftists/liberals, and low openness, low agreeableness, low-mid neuroticism reactionaries. The number one empirical predictors of where you'll fall on that scale are education level, and age. Now, you can't do anything about age, but you can control education levels. (And since University enrollment has gone up over time and older degree-educated people generally skew left-liberal, age may just be a proxy for education anyway.)

The dominant material factor beyond liberals losing control of culture is that the underlying neuroticism of the liberal type lead them to social justice and thence to socialism. That constant sense of unease needs an intellectual explanation, and they settled first on identity issues, and then as token measures on that front didn't work, on the economic system as a whole. The bourgeoisie as a whole realized by around 2023-4 that the carrot approach to co-opting these demands wasn't working, so they went for the stick and backed Trump, which set an expectation of a general rightward cultural shift.

This, however, has not really materialized. Institutions will continue to skew liberal because you have to be pretty smart to run an institution and rightists have basically made it their mission to look as dumb as possible. The cultural status of liberals remains basically intact. AI slop undermines the market position of freelance logo designers or whatever, but it does nothing to harm the cultural status of artists as a whole - if anything, it raises it because now people with bad taste can flag themselves more openly.
Taste is much harder to empirically verify than age or education, but there's a reason most artists skew left/liberal and there's a reason all the most tasteless people in the world are drawn to Donald Trump, the most tasteless man in the world. There's a reason the right is much better modeled as a global Trump cult than as a nationalist movement or whatever it purports to be. Fundamentally: It is people with bad taste / low cultural capital seething with resentment that liberals (correctly) think they are better people and lashing out as a result. If you think it is cruel to say this of rural proletarians and lumpen, then don't take it that way: look at Elon Musk to see how you can have more money-capital than you will ever know what to do with and yet primarily use it to show the world that you are an unfunny loser desperate for approval.
The Urban/Rural element also comes into play here because there are selection effects: if you are open-minded, you are much more likely to move to the city to be with other open-minded people than you are to stay in a rural area filled with closed-minded (or even randomly allocated) people. If you are closed minded, however, you are unlikely to move from where you were. Result? Culturally vibrant cities and cultural deserts outside them.

If you want a good worked example of how things have played out, look at Charlie Kirk's death. That was supposed to be the Reichstag fire moment for this rightward cultural shift, and what's his actual legacy? kirkification, the word lowkirkenuinely, and "we are charlie kirk" remixes. He's a punchline. The right did not have the power to impose a white MLK (or even George Floyd) on the world. Of course they didn't: they aren't cool! the president can't issue an executive order that being right-wing is cool now!

This post needs an edit since I've hit all my main points but not in the most coherent order. Oh well.

>>2827235
>If you want a good worked example of how things have played out, look at Charlie Kirk's death. That was supposed to be the Reichstag fire moment for this rightward cultural shift, and what's his actual legacy? kirkification, the word lowkirkenuinely, and "we are charlie kirk" remixes. He's a punchline. The right did not have the power to impose a white MLK (or even George Floyd) on the world. Of course they didn't: they aren't cool! the president can't issue an executive order that being right-wing is cool now!
well for him i think it was more that he was the antithesis of cool, the opposite of what people are, and so when this guy who no one really cared that much about gets popped for really no reason, they tried to make him into saint kirk, and the problem with kirk was he wasn't anything more than an annoying right wing dweeb, and so they attempted to make him look better than he was, and no one gave a shit, people mocked him, they waved around the sword, but ultimately they could do nothing, he was turned into a laughingstock from simply how absurd the situation was, no one cared until he died and was whitewashed, obviously you can see this happening in smaller, less surreal ways throughout the right wing push, but kirk is close to the ideal example of it

>>2827235
>Politics today is fundamentally a conflict between high-openness, high agreeableness, mid-high neuroticism leftists/liberals, and low openness, low agreeableness, low-mid neuroticism reactionaries.
I'd argue conservatives actually do have a lot of empathy, but that empathy is only for people in their in-group. Religiously conservative communities like Mormons in Utah (for instance) are very mutual aid-based among themselves even if they're hostile towards, say, queer people.

>>2827232
You Charlie Kirk, Milo and Talarico example is an N of 3, while the number of rage inducing politicians among both sides number in the dozens. This is isn't scientific.

>>2825988
Isn't this what Gramsci talks about?

>>2827235
How does this analysis square with the fact that even university educated types in Europe are increasingly voting far-right after enough contact with problematic immigrants from Africa and Middle-East? The same people who used to vote for centre-left and centre-right parties are switching to populist right and far right by the millions.

>>2827274

1. Because there are many factors at play: there are some educated people with no taste, for example.
   
2. Centrist parties have generally been incompetent and self-destructive
   
3. The center right also tends to appeal to uneducated types. 58% of Germans with only "basic education" voted CSU (32) or AFD (26) vs 40 with higher education (27 CSU, 13 AFD), and I chose Germany at random as an unsympathetic example. (The UK is a total victory for this theory)