the post of the guy with the milk has me thinking. has anything written anything at length about how RWers in the west seem to have a lot of hangups relating to childhood? there are a bunch of weird things that they have done/picked up on that seem childish to me, or seem to display an inability to move past childhood:
-the brief milk obsession that seems to rear its head again every now and then (oedipal?)
-the frequent focus on what’s going on in schools and colleges, often in lurid terms: furry hysteria, transphobes often discussing locker rooms/bathrooms
-obsession with gaming, anime, star wars, etc. hobbies/interests that most people pick up as kids
-charlie kirk’s diaper thing a while back, i think crowder has also dressed up as a child/baby in public too?
-doubling down on things instead of confronting them, like going on all-meat diets as a reaction to more people questioning the ethics of animal agriculture, and then doubling down on THAT and going on an all raw meat diet. also the pro-tobacco fringe that seems to be especially popular among red scare, “post left” types
-aversion to sex and sexuality
-“this is what they took from you” captions accompanying images of kids playing N64 or riding bikes, nostalgia more broadly
-“trad” stuff presenting essentially a dollhouse version of motherhood
idk if there’s anything there but it seems like enough that someone could write an interesting essay about it. tie it into alienation and the nuclear family/suburbanization and the end of the american dream maybe. like all these people want to live life like a 1950s burger ad, the only time in their life where they’ve felt close to that was in childhood, and now as adults they see that the whole one-income, two kids in the suburb thing isn’t possible anymore so they just retreat into memories of childhood (consciously or not) and get angrier and angrier about it
You could say the same about anyone born in the 80s or later. Libs are obsessed with Harry Potter and other YA vomit, Disney adults, etc. I think the major factors are exponentially increased alienation/atomization (with better access to subcultures thanks to the internet) and that many people are stuck renting forever and barely scraping by. So many people are unable to have a stable home life because they can’t just buy a house/condo/apt and settle down somewhere. Couple that with the death of the career job and people are forced to constantly move house and grind to find better jobs so the level of anxiety and despair is at an all-time high. This leads to severe mental health issues and I think increasingly alarming levels of escapism is one of the outcomes.
that’s true, there’s definitely a mirror image to a lot of what i’ve written above. i think you can combine what you’ve written with the general fears of the future - climate change, political instability domestically and abroad, demographic changes for chuds, and so on weigh on the minds of even the people who are doing relatively well - and it’s no wonder that people across the political spectrum retreat into nostalgia.
You could say the same about
anyone born in the 80s or lateranyone currently living. The boomers all want to go back to 1950.