So part of what’s going to be confusing about the cultural shift coming up that I’m trying to prepare everyone for, is America still kind of has this image from a 60s model where “blue” = urban = liberationary and “red” = rural = authority.

But part of the story of the last decade was that broke down, after the financial crisis as money and good bourgeois concentrated in the cities and grew comfortable in power, we saw what “blue authority” looks like.

And since even red and grey tribe elites tend to live in “blue” territory that was taken as a sign of a national social “tightening”

But this whole time there has been a characteristically red-liberation proceeding apace. As resources and well-behaved gentlefolk drain from rural areas, as all the budget and staffing changes since the 90s realignment work their way through the system, “red” areas - where more “blue people” live than vice versa are becoming increasingly lawless.

Explosives, guns, and wilderness vehicles that urbanites don’t even realize are legal (if they even are) are popular forms of recreation; the forces of law & order are too under-resourced to get a hold of the physical territory let alone the internet and black and grey markets powered by organized crime thrive

It’s not like a federal court system overloaded with immigration and everything necessary to make the country actually run has capacity to spare on “sexting”, either, so you’re growing a sexual culture that based more on schoolgirls, prostitutes, and schoolgirl prostitutes than Japan

Gangs spawn counter-gangs, “protector of the sheep” becomes more an identity than a role, dissident local elites maintain their own military forces and challenge central authority

In Indian Country it has become common knowledge there’s no law binding the white man and they roam free raping, killing and taking slaves.

Meanwhile Christian-identified cultural conservatism has either elevated its members to middle class mainstream and passed them on to blue culture or totally failed to reproduce itself, God-fearing church-going Christian college girls go on Tinder to check “date a girl” off their list

Not completely unprecedented, the ‘60s outlaw motorcycle gang vogue and ‘70s back-to-the-land stuff was kind of about rural lawlessness as liberation. God knows “available drugs and sex with young women” was part of the mythos of Woodstock, or the rural outlaw raves of the British Summer of Love.

(Over those few years, to the traditional sounds of an English summer – the drone of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow – was added a new noise)

But no one thought of that as the plot of the last decade, because everyone thought “blue” culture was in the driver’s seat, would be in the driver’s seat for the every 30-years-or-so shift where we resolve social tensions by expelling a section of the respected polity and voiding their claims. That’s what “Flight 93 Election” was about.

But they charged the cockpit, and by now, basically, every part of the turnaround and mechanism of the purge is locked in. Blue culture’s tribunes yell just as much before but you notice they’re not trying to claim any new ground, they’re indignantly pointing out that things they thought they secured are being challenged.

Bluechecks have stock, reflexive Aimee Terese dismissals now because now they operate in a discursive world where they have to account for Aimee Terese.

And whether you were waiting for “liberatory culture” or “red culture” or “rural culture” to come back it is not going to be what you remember it as