republican party

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.

All Hail the Revolutionary Vanguard of the Republican Party!

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

You are more likely to hear some Very Serious People give their takes on the new tax bill that now seems very likely to pass once the house and senate versions get merged. But I present you with something else.

The Republican Party, like the Democrats, is largely just a giant incompetent monster that hoovers up donor cash and spews forth priorities based on that with a few hot button issues thrown in as an afterthought in order to maintain the facade of freedom of choice among partisans. Like below:

2 party venn.jpg

What the above misses, however, is that the Democrats actually seek to maintain the status quo through just enough (often topical) maintenance that it can at least survive enough to stave off civil war. The Republicans, since Reagan anyway, are under no such pretense. They want full Late Imperial Russia of the 1890s-1917 while forgetting what happened to that state. Full speed ahead until a collapse is inevitable. If you think about it, they are taking an enormous bet that they can turn the bland neoliberal status quo that democrats love so much and ramp it up into a type of globalized neofeudalism where corporations become landlords over an increasingly serf-like labor force (with no doubt some jus primae noctis thrown in for the libertarian wing). Now, this plan could totally work if they paired it with a guaranteed basic income, some social service giveaways, full support for universal access to VR, and full drug legalization. But as usual, the hubristic codgers are want of imagination or long term strategy and think only of short term gains no matter the costs to themselves or especially their children. Considering the ramifications of Reagan era tax reform are largely the decay of infrastructure, the erosion of non-partisan civil society, the massive growth of largely parasitic defense contractors who double the defense budget but without doubling the results of the spending, and the entrenchment of American power as a fragile thing based on arms sales and not internal strength, a second round may just yet bring about its collapse.

So if one was to assume that the GOP leadership is rational (I don’t, but lets humor ourselves here), one must assume that they are in fact Revolutionary Vanguards participating in Accelerationism. As Lenin said, ‘Worse is better.’ He did of course, mean for him, not for the Tsar. Still, with Reagan having made America into a nation defined solely by its empire and business interests, and whose contradictions became most apparent when Dubya signed into law massive tax cuts the same year he started a war in Iraq that soon proved bankrupting in more than one way, its quite possible that America will not survive a further bout of supply-side policy. The irony is that in making the state solely about business and empire that supports only said business rather than a more general national and geopolitical interest, these lawmakers have only guaranteed that if the empire loses legitimacy as the prime force of the state then the entire system will also lose it subsequently since no other institution that makes policy does so with civic responsibility for all citizens. Ibn Khaldun would diagnose our society as having entered the terminal stage where a decadent and incompetent ruling class of the spoiled generation has sabotaged any future for its state by removing all the bonds of group-feeling (assabiyya) necessary for societal cohesiveness and loyalty. The future is thus made by the next regime, whatever that might be.

Big business is already extremely unpopular. But the military remains a bedrock of public support. Defense contractors, however, when exposed to the light do not retain such veneer. Interventionism was dealt a major blow by Iraq, leading it to be more covered up like a dirty secret, though its popularity has never returned to 2003 and before levels. With our society going to end up increasingly hollowed out as money is distributed upwards and social mobility withers on the vine to the increase of social alienation, the question of future political partisanship remains only to which revolutionary party and/or Mad Max style gang of post-apocalyptic bandits one wishes to sign up for. We are just one more disastrous interventionist war away from having to choose. And the wise Accelerationists of the GOP have gladly offered up their own lives in the coming class revolt as the first sacrifice to make a bold new tomorrow. For surely, in the utter impotency of the two party system to deal with climate change and properly harnessing technology and infrastructure, only a clean break could offer us some future. And make no mistake about it, a clean break will come for them and their donors first.

Its just a question of timing at this point. For years I feared this outcome and wanted to do anything possible to stave it off, but now I think I am quite coming to welcome it. Even if it does not come in my lifetime, it surely will come. And we must all prepare to be accelerationists of one stripe or another as strategists if nothing else. The Revolutionary Vanguard of the GOP has forced the issue, choose the future or die like a dog!

Otherwise we’ll end up just as more self-justifying tools unwittingly digging their own graves, like Paul Ryan, lanyarded policy wonks…or the Warboys. But having to chose, maybe we should chose to be Furiosa instead? The decision has been forced on us, why not revel in it?