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Posts Tagged ‘Cool’

Being ‘hip’ is everything to Progressives

by Phantom Ace ( 217 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Entertainment, Hipsters, Progressives at July 28th, 2014 - 11:00 am

Recently on the show True Blood, there was an episode based on fundraiser for Ted Cruz. Republicans were portrayed in bad light and became objects of ridicule. This is one of the Progressive movement’s most potent weapons, the use of the popular culture to deride their political opponents and define what is cool.

If you took great offense of the recent episode of HBO’s True Blood in which two vampires crashed a Ted Cruz fundraiser — at the Bush Library no less — and said some bad words about Republicans, I have some advice: Lighten up.

The other week I wrote about how the standard conservative critique of the popular culture is just a bit too tightly wound. This minor kerfuffle strikes me as a good illustration of my point.

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And that I think is the source of the real problem here. By any objective or commonsense measure, the uptight Republicans slaughtered at the Ted Cruz fundraiser are happier and more productive members of society than virtually every other character in the show. From the sympathetic white-trash werewolves to the corrupt human rabble-rousers, from the vampire aristocrats to the endless string of slatternly young women and men who come and go with regularity, the show focuses on creatures who are, variously, decent-but-doomed, evil, stupid, or morally, spiritually, or intellectually lost.

The one thing these people have going for them? They are cool — at least by the glandular, knee-jerk liberal, fashion-forward, standards of the show’s producers and its niche pay-cable audience. In other words, to the extent the show is politically appealing, it is an irrational hot mess (much like the goo vampires turn into when struck with a wooden stake). It’s like it was written for Bill Maher’s studio audience, a group that doesn’t care about real facts or arguments — they just want to hear how they’re awesome and the people they hate aren’t.

[….]

Once you start looking for it, it’s amazing how much liberal commentary — particularly about sex and religion — boils down to a kind of sneering self-satisfaction that liberals are hip and conservatives are squares (just think about how much “analysis” of Obama has been rooted in the assumption he’s cool).

Progressives view themselves as cool and hip. This view is perpetuated by their control over the popular culture and mistakes the Right has done in the culture wars. This episode of True Blood is just a microcosm of the advantages the Left has in defining the political narrative.