XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics, alt.politics.democrats   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: transheuser-busch@gmail.com   
      
   On 30 Dec 2023, Culture War  posted some   
   news:umpqko$1cfnh$14@dont-email.me:   
      
   > Bud Light, Target, Starbucks, McDonalds are all going to be woke   
   > victims because of their leftist ways.   
      
   If the years since 2020 have demonstrated anything, it’s that the elites   
   of blue America and the elites of red America are both driven by fear of   
   non-elites.   
      
   On the left, they’re afraid of disaffected underlings organizing on   
   Slack. On the right, they tremble before enraged strangers yelling at   
   TVs.   
      
   Consider two big political-media stories that bookended 2023. Both   
   concerned events that took place in 2020 — and, in their contrast, say   
   tons about the dueling political impulses that have shaped the country   
   ever since.   
      
   Back in the spring, the big news was Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit   
   against Fox, which had aired luridly false accusations about the   
   company’s ballot-counting machines. Before the network settled for $787   
   million, the public got a chance to read thousands of damning words of   
   internal Fox communications. The messages between executives revealed   
   that higher-ups were aware that the stolen-election story was dangerous   
   nonsense — but absolutely terrified of alienating regular viewers.   
      
   Last week, media chatter was about another 2020 controversy: New York   
   Times editorial page editor James Bennet’s sacking amidst a staff   
   uprising over a conservative op-ed. Bennet this month finally published   
   his side of the story, making nuanced arguments about the alleged   
   decline of open-minded reporting. But the organizational picture he   
   paints is much simpler: The Times, in his telling, was led by some of   
   the most accomplished names in American journalism — but absolutely   
   terrified of alienating junior staffers.   
      
   On one side, an institution afraid of its base. On the other, an   
   institution afraid of its team. Does this sound familiar?   
      
   It should: It’s the difference, in a nutshell, between the worlds   
   occupied by the institutions of the right and the institutions of the   
   left, particularly in Washington.   
      
   Kevin Phillips, the mastermind of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,”   
   famously said that he never understood Washington until realizing a core   
   truth: “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” The   
   line, from the 1960s, got a lot of attention when Phillips died this   
   fall. But by that point, it may already have been obsolete. In the   
   2020s, it turns out that the key to understanding politics is knowing   
   who’s afraid of who.   
      
   At the very least, the concept can serve as a decoder ring to a lot of   
   otherwise odd-seeming stories that have roiled Washington’s institutions   
   — from nonprofits to Capitol Hill offices to political parties trundling   
   toward the nomination of two historically unpopular candidates.   
      
   Take the world of think tanks and advocacy. On the left, a storyline of   
   the past few years has been of institutions ground to a halt by   
   staff-driven turmoil over workplace diversity. One particularly vivid   
   story in The Intercept detailed leadership vacuums at top pro-choice   
   organizations — the same month that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.   
   Wade. Less explosively, there have been high-profile departures like the   
   exit of Ruy Teixeira from the Center for American Progress. A   
   self-described social democrat, Teixeira opted to swing to the   
   conservative American Enterprise Institute — because, he said, he felt   
   stifled by the workplace culture created by young colleagues at CAP who,   
   he said, distrusted his interest in the white working class and issues   
   like crime.   
      
   Ordinarily, think tanks are eager to keep high-profile media stars, and   
   advocacy organizations are even more eager to fight the clear and   
   present danger. So why not pull rank and do what it takes to keep the   
   big shots happy? It would be the rational move. But in the world of   
   liberal America, a piece of power held by staff — the ability to call   
   out racism and privilege — can lead to fundraising and reputational   
   disaster. In part because of that power, there’s also been a spate of   
   successful union-organizing drives, even though many of the   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)