Something weird happened on the way to this presidential election cycle - the public perception of ideological "coolness" switched places.
For as long as I've been alive, the mantra was widespread and well-known: Republicans were the rule-followers, Democrats were the bad boys. Republicans played by the rules, Democrats bent the rules and used the Republicans professed morality against them. Republicans were defined by Sunday morning, Democrats by Saturday night. Republicans you'd take home to mom, Democrats you'd take home from the prom.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not under the impression that youth culture is loving them some Mitch McConnell. I'm not dumb enough to believe that the Republican Party has become the party of untucked shirts and keg stands. I also know that Democrats continue to have a lock on Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The Republicans have Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood, but the Democrats have, well, everybody else. I get it.
But what I am suggesting is that with the ascension and triumph of Donald Trump on the Right, the public perception has changed about who is a nagging moralist and who will leave you alone.
But don't take it from me. Here's Vox writer and leftist media aggregator Aaron Rupar lamenting this same phenomenon:
There's some truth in this, along with some to-be-expected Ruparisms that need correction. First, neither Rogan, Barstool, or X, can be sanely described as "right-wing." Rogan is a freethinker who certainly balks at some aspects of true conservative thought. He didn't endorse Donald Trump because of the candidate's solidarity with Goldwater's "Conscience of a conservative," for heaven's sake.
Neither did Barstool founder Dave Portnoy who, in one of his epic rants, said it himself: "The Democrats gave us no choice" in this election.
Here's a thought experiment that can help Rupar and all of us understand what's happened. Put either of those two guys - Rogan or Portnoy - back in the 1980s and 90s and imagine how they would have responded to the public posturing of Pat Robertson and the "Moral Majority." They would have pushed back against it. Hard. I can picture Rogan picking Robertson apart. I can hear the string of profanities Portnoy would direct at Jerry Falwell for pushing laws that impose some religious morality on him.
What is hard for the Left to understand is that they have become the new moralists, dictating what people can say, what they can think, and legislating it whenever they attain power. Mary Katherine Ham tried explaining this very point to Rupar in a quote tweet:
She's right. Look at Portnoy's own statement, where he went on to explain:
That was the worst campaign, and the pure arrogance and the moral superiority have driven people away. If you say you're voting for Trump, suddenly you're a Nazi, you're Hitler, you're garbage. Enough. Enough!
Did you see that? Portnoy complains about the Left's sense of "moral superiority" and goes on to cite their moral condemnation of voters who prefer Trump.
It's really a simple formula to understand if you aren't locked in, as Rupar is, by partisan blinders. Free people don't like being told what they can do, what they can say, and what they can think. They don't like a nanny state that attempts to do that, and more. That is what the Left has become, and any movement pushing back against it is going to attract the free-spirited, liberated, and independent-minded (read "cool") voters.
You can call Donald Trump a lot of things, but a moral scold is not one of them. And that is ultimately why cool people may come to Democrat rallies to watch free Lizzo or Beyoncé concerts, but then vote Republican when they pull the curtain at the ballot box.
