Iran war

The Second Death of Redneck Chic

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

At the tail end of my childhood was when the United States formerly entered its decline arc. It was the response to 9/11 and everything that emerged from that which let loose the ravenous pack of entropy. Sure, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton had already laid the economic foundations for long term immolation, but the Bush Junior Administration really lit a match to that giant pile of kindling.

The Capitol Hill cafeteria changed french fries to Freedom Fries and many obnoxious small business owners followed suit for the gimmick. This was in protest for France correctly opposing the Iraq War. Legions of midwestern church ladies were quick to both capitalize on 9/11 as the foundational event of their lives while excoriating the very coastal states most likely to face further attacks as traitors for not loving the remarkably stupid failson of a President who was unfolding an unprecedented surveillance state at the same time he was waging an aggressive culture war to teach creationism in public school and ruin public education forever with No Child Left Behind (the ultimate tragic source of Zoomer intellectual degradation). 

The media played along. Despite being owned and operated by centrist liberals who usually cater to the other partisan tribe, they saw the cultural zeitgeist as one of right wing rage. Rural Americans were depicted as ‘real’ Americans in touch with the heart and soul of the country. Coastals were gay-married Islamosexual Communazis who Hated Our Freedumbz. The trucker nut adorned humvee was the mark of a REAL MAN. Toby Keith was everywhere conflating the definition of Americanism with endless war. CNN and MSNBC competed with Fox for the only audience they thought mattered: conservatives. It is often forgotten about now, but MSNBC once tried to outflank Fox on the right, firing Phil Donahue for opposing the Iraq War and hiring theocrat lunatics like Alan Keyes to host their own shows on the network.

Where did all this patriotastic pablum go? Down the toilet with W. Bush’s approval ratings into the 20th percentile after endless war sold on lies, natural disaster, economic recession, and growing suspicion of the surveillance state. And with its death came the era of liberal smugness. The rural rubes who were such a large percentage of Bush’s support became not the stars of the cultural show, but its rejected failures. The punching bag, the lumpen symbol of everything that had gone so wrong after the strong show of unity in the country after 9/11. No one was more ideological discredited in the late Bush Era than the ‘base’ of the GOP. And the revenge was to become the opposite of what they had been just years before- the most widely scorned broad base demographic. This was the first death of Redneck Chic.

They deserved it, frankly. And I say that as someone who (and the archives of this site and my outside publications can attest to this) finds dunking on yuppie libs far more proportionally entertaining. The liberal’s pretense to knowledge and objectivity while being effectively an urban-redneck in an equally hermetically sealed media consumption bubble is actually much funnier to poke holes at. That their favored intellectuals hold actual credentials while still descending into the madness of Timothy Snyderdom is objectively hilarious. With the actual rural lumpenprole, however, it almost seems too easy. Like bullying and punching down. Indeed, I offered a quantified defense of these people when Trump won the first time as effectively misguided rubes but ultimately motivated by real anger and understanding that the political establishment had screwed them. This defense was contingent, however, on them having learned their lesson about neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, evangelism, the billionaire class and the like. 

Now here they are, the only demographic in with the Boomers on another stupid, unnecessary, self-destructive war. Conducted on behalf of the bipartisan elite they claim to hate and for a foreign country whose priorities couldn’t be further away from ‘America First’. Their cries to not be forgotten gave them a brief second wind in the limelight, but now all we want is to make sure this astroturfed lament is the last time anyone ever has to hear of it.

They did put on a big show of moving away from endless interventionism, and I think many did and still do mean it, but not  nearly enough. Now, here in 2026, it is obvious like never before that MAGA is a cult of personality first and foremost and will bend with the wind following the mercurial moods of its Cholesterol Caligula. And how fitting a reality tv star who appealed to the tasteless would be such a totem of veneration. The midwestern and Appalachian desire for less foreign commitments still appears to survive in many quarters…while the bellicose bloviating of the lowlands southeastern Southern Baptist convention and the histrionics of the mountain west does seem to show that there are definitely many different rural mega-regions at play. It would be foolish to conflate them. But the redneck is less a specific place or even lifestyle today than it is an anti-aspirational mindset that can be found in disaffected losers anywhere. A form of identity politics not unlike a tumblr neogender. Something declared not so much as an actual culture but rather an ideological lifestyle. Perpetual grievance weaponized as a form of pride in being a loser. A cult of victimhood.

Sure, the return of the GOP to neocon-mode doesn’t make this any different from the Cheney Democrats who ignored Obama’s many foreign policy disasters and then tried to sweep U.S. involvement in the Gaza War and pretend Ukraine is the front lines of some global struggle against a vaguely defined ‘authoritarianism’, but if you are going to posture as against the establishment it might make sense to realize that a wealthy real estate developer is intrinsically part of said establishment. And this current president is the personal prostitute of Benjamin Netanyahu. Just as Biden was, and probably even more than Harris would have been…maybe.

But of course, that is part of the problem. Israel is the Holy Land to so many of these people, and they need it to justify their apocalyptic fantasies of making The Road real so they can be raptured to heaven or whatever. Hell, I would feel pretty down on real life too if my cultural surroundings were strip mall megachurches and Waffle Houses too. The thing is they are speedrunning the death of the Era of Chud. It took us 10 years to fight through the horrors of the Woke Era, but we (collectively) seem to be ready to emerge from its backlash in barely over a year after Trump’s deranged return to office and the rural-and-subruban grievance machine that still swears fealty to him. 

By swearing fealty to Trump above actual policy and priorities, MAGA, the largest organized faction of redneck gnosis, has betrayed almost everything it claimed to care about and shown clearly that it has no inner core save spiteful rage and daytime television gawking at fame. If one cannot maintain the scorn for an elite when it switches from D to R then one’s scorn never was anything but a branding exercise in optics. 

There was a golden opportunity by ‘the base’ to show they of all people could be better than the myopic libs they hate so much. They could have had a consistent critique that transcended partisanship. Some of them, like Thomas Massie and those who still appreciate him, do. But it is often these consistent ones who are attacked by the true party loyalists, happy to have their standards of living decline so long as the people they hate for media-heightened grievances suffer just as much. They live not to govern, but to own the libs. But the real lesson here (and I speak as someone who loves owning the libs) is that the best way to own them is to beat them at making constructive policy.

With such rapidly collapsing cultural cache I think it can be stated with strong confidence that, much like the late 2000s, the second death of redneck chic is now upon us. Having given them the benefit of the doubt 10 years ago on their supposed redemption arc, only to end up here, I can now clearly say I have no more interest in sympathy or mercy. Let us make it so that this particular demographic is never allowed any kind of sway over the cultural zeitgeist ever again. And, to cover all bases, let’s also make sure that unlike last time we don’t let the smuggest and most out of touch urbanite liberals be the primary ones who benefit from the great Good Ole Boy Self Immolation of 2026. To ascend away from this low-information culture warrior hellscape requires rejecting all of its dumbest adherents. 

I am an economic populist for social stability and meritocracy reasons, but have always been strongly anti-populist on pretty much any other issue. It is one of the reasons I like the Federalist Party more and more over time. Anti-monarchy, Anti-demos, anti-alliance, pro-neutrality, pro-material development, scornful of rubes. They (at least at first) understood that no matter how much one might share a just hatred of an entitled elite, the point is ultimately to replace said elite with another better one. Not to let the drooling provincials wage a popularity contest to elevate whatever carnival barking snake oil salesman flatters their hayseed sensibilities. They were American Kemalists before Kemalism was even a thing. But if we don’t do something to get those priorities back we will end up ruled over by Çomar-backed grifters again and again.

Siren Call of the Unholy Land

/ geotrickster / 5 Comments

A predictable outbreak of debate and reaction has washed over the United States and many of its allies in light of the joint U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran that is presently unfolding. This includes debates over what percentage of the Iranian people want to see their government overthrown against how many would fight against foreign attack, what the damage done to diplomacy in the region will be, and how dangerous the Iranian and Israeli nations are to the Middle East. What all of this is often missing, however, is geography itself. And when looked at through the lens of geography- so core a concept to understanding geopolitics that it is part of the name- something becomes apparent:

The Middle East is not a particularly vital region of the world for those who live far outside of it.

My perspective is based in North America, but much of this applies to other regions of the world too. Many countries have pivoted away from fossil fuel dependence on the Persian Gulf. The United States in particular is now the world’s largest oil and gas exporter. There is no major world power based in the Middle East nor is there one (as the endless War on Terror seems to be showing) capable of utterly dominating it. Locally rooted middle powers are the most dominant long-term actors, and they have the capacity to outlast the imperial flirtations of more outside powers with global interests.

For profit defense contracting is certainly a major influence, keeping an unbroken stream of revenue pouring in from endless conflicts, and made especially lucrative by both the United Arab Emirates and Israel’s constant addiction to behaving as interventionist powers in their near abroad. Such honeypots in turn fuel media advertisement which in turn purchases favorable coverage and lobbying. But perpetual conflicts also exist in Myanmar, the Congo, the Sahel, and, albeit frozen, the Korean Peninsula, and in none of those places is there such a drive to intervene and to internalize the struggles of various peoples as there is for the Middle East. There is a genuine and seemingly at least partially organic push by many to see the safety and even outright expansion of Israel as some kind of existential virtue on behalf of some grand civilizational struggle. Likewise, amongst opposition to this consensus, the struggle of the Palestinians has become a moral litmus test in a way few other causes are touted. How Iran is governed internally also has become interwoven into these local struggles that so many insist on making global. The push for an Israeli regional supremacism is generally given far greater credence in mainstream commentary than its inverse doppleganger. Up to and including the Wall Street Journal’s editorials salivating for the next war for Israel against NATO-aligned countries before the present is even finished.

What accounts for this constant return of the U.S. and others and the comparative enthusiasm it receives from many despite often dismal results? I would argue that it is religious identification. Numerous sects of Christians, usually Protestant in denomination (and almost always evangelical variants) view Israel as a chosen land governed by a chosen people. In alliance with the equally ideological objectives of the neoconservative movement, which is almost monomaniacally fixated on the support of Israel, they seek to disseminate a narrative of prophecy and apocalypse- a final showdown for the entire planet at the ancient battlefield of Megiddo. The Jews were chosen by the Abrahamic God to be a special people on Earth, even if Evangelicals effectively view them as a human sacrifice to usher in the Book of Revelation’s promise to bring about a final war of all that is good against all that is evil. The True Believers, who make no secret of their intentions to use the United States military as their crucible of prophecy, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and the rest of us evildoers will be cast down into Hell where we can no longer remind The Elect about such pesky principles such as nuance, balance of power, and the fact that geopolitics at its most rational is ultimately not about morality or absolutes. A calculation that would inevitably turn up a dim view of outside powers being involved in local Levantine power struggles.

This is an even more unhinged-albeit clearly related- version of the liberal-humanist world view of an ever-advancing wave of democratic-capitalist societies putting on the ‘right side of history’. Both, however, share a total disregard for any sort of sustainability and see human lives as expendable in the face of some grand globalist ideological project. As it is, many supposedly secular people from outside of the Middle East have still adopted a Middle East-centric world view as a kind of automatic cultural inheritance. The time to critically interrogate this baggage is now well overdue.

The monomaniacal fixation of being involved in smaller regional wars on the other side of the planet from one’s home has exposed the dangers of universalist ideology. And no part of the world seems to attract this ideology quite like the Middle East, the place where it was first born. The Abrahamist world view taught that the local and situational was to be disdained for the existential and the absolute. A world whose only distinctions were moral, not geographic or cultural. From U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee to the Mullahs in Tehran, to the wailing snake-charmers surrounding the present President in the Oval Office, all agree; the fight for the soul of the world lies in the disposition of this dry and dusky land once known as the Fertile Crescent.

The spatial focus that should be at the center of all policy priorities is rejected, and countries like the United States, who should be rooted in the Western Hemisphere or, at most, the Pacific and Atlantic littorals as an offshore balancer, is once again dragged by the baggage of someone else’s history into wading into a strip of land no more valuable than any other on the far side of the world. In the heads of the Christian Zionist, the pro-Israel activist, or the global jihadist, the center of the world lies in the Levant. Therefore, their priorities remain fixated first on what they consider the ‘Holy Land’.

But the U.S. (and many of its allies) are secular countries. The First Amendment declared that the state would have no established religion, likewise the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli explicitly disavowed that religious traditions of other nations were of interest to American diplomacy. Knowledge of the horrors of 17th Century Puritanism has prepared the new ruling class in America for the dangers of an overly ideological foreign policy. George Washington himself was primarily motivated by a non-ideological spatial conception of national interest– a legacy that would influence an entire century of U.S. foreign policy after him.

Looking forward, I would urge those who live far from the Middle East to reconsider what the concept of a Holy Land is or should be. Rejecting the cause of universal telos and apocalyptic revelation, all rational foreign policy analysts must know they should not be in the game of rapture-making but rather supporting the stability and prosperity of the homeland. Any world view that advocates for a focus on a distant land over that of one’s own home is one that engaged in a kind of treason against any rational concept of the national interest (something that must be wrestled with first as domestic politics) on behalf what is effectively a globalist mythology of eternal cosmic battle amongst abstract and otherworldly ideals.

The deserts and scrublands of the Middle East are a far cry from North America’s varied natural splendor. If I needed a holy land, this ancient and biodiverse land that contains everything from temperate rainforest to swampy bayou to wide open plains does perfectly fine. Its centrality in its own geospatial mandala must not be sacrificed to those who live amongst its abundance and yet would still place the fables of the Dead Sea above it in importance. Those who live elsewhere may come to a similar conclusion about their own lands and thus they too must resist the siren call of yet more interventions in a distant and utterly unholy land.