Yes, I know I was supposed to go on this week to discuss downward mobility as a way to freedom, the next of the themes that took the three top spots in this month’s fifth Wednesday competition. It’s a topical subject, not least on account of the wrenching changes now under way in the political and economic spheres. Still, that can wait a week. What I want to talk about this week is a sign I’ve been expecting for a very long time. It’s here, and that means that in the years ahead, a lot of things are going to change in a hurry.
To explain what the sign is and what it means I’m going to have to get personal for a bit. Specifically, I need to talk about my financial situation. As all the readers of this blog ought to know by now, I’m a freelance writer; I support myself by writing fiction and nonfiction books, with side gigs as an online essayist and political astrologer. I’ve been doing that full time since 1996. Any reasonably competent and active writer who makes good use of his or her backlist, keeping old books in print and changing publishers when needed, can expect a slow but steady growth in income over time. For the first twenty years of my writing career, that was certainly the case for me.
Since 2016, however, that phrase “slow and steady” stopped applying to my career. My income has more than doubled over the decade since then, and the growth curve shows no signs of slowing down. It’s been a little unsettling, really. During the years when my late wife and I were living at or near the poverty line, I picked up frugal habits, and I kept them when her health began to fail and we had to worry about medical expenses. (Yes, we could have gotten health insurance. In the wake of the cruelly misnamed “Affordable Care Act,” the policies we could afford had $6000 annual deductibles and 40% co-pays, and the firms who offer them have a reputation for dismissing legitimate claims with the legalese equivalent of “Yeah, we know we’re supposed to pay that, but we’re not going to, and you can’t make us. Too bad, so sad.”)
Fast forward to the brink of 2026, and I still have the frugal habits—they’ve served me well—but my annual income passed the lower end of six figures some time ago and it’s still going up. The charities I support, and certain esoteric schools I favor, have benefited noticeably as a result. Until quite recently, though, I was pretty thoroughly perplexed by this turn of events. None of my books have become bestsellers; no one category of books, among the many fiction and nonfiction genres in which I work, has broken from the pack to explain the sudden rise in income; my Wikipedia entry is just as shoddy and inaccurate as ever, and my name is no closer to becoming a household word than it was a decade back.
What’s more, these days, my writing is the subject of fairly extensive boycotts from both ends of the political spectrum, which was not true ten years ago. It so happens that in 2016 I wrote some blog posts that successfully predicted Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, and tried to explain that his rise to power wasn’t a random event—that it was the inevitable blowback from decades of misguided bipartisan policies that destroyed the working classes and did nothing to help the poor and disadvantaged, while pouring unearned benefits into the lap of the already overprivileged upper middle classes. A few years later I published a book, The King in Orange, which talked about that and also explored the considerable role of magic on both sides of the 2016 US presidential campaign.
A great many people on the American left have never forgiven me for either of those things, and that’s where their end of the boycotts came from. On the right? Well, to begin with, I’m a polytheist who writes about magic, and so the Christian end of the American right drew a hard line right there. It also happens that my novels quite often feature sympathetically portrayed gay, lesbian, nonwhite, and mixed-race characters, which alienates another subset of the American right, and my one venture to date into the military-political thriller genre, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, violates all the rules of the genre by having the United States suffer the consequences of decades of really stupid decisions, rather than being saved at the last moment by improbable heroics. (Spoiler alert: at the end of the novel, the US no longer exists as a nation.)
The results have been a source of reliable amusement for me. There are, for example, two entirely separate circuits of science fiction conventions in the US these days. There are the old established conventions, which fell under the control of woke activists a while back and chased off all their conservative and moderate attendees, and there’s an emerging constellation of conservative science fiction conventions, organized by some of the people who were thrown out of the original set. I don’t get invites to either one.
I don’t have any contacts in the conservative circuit, so I can’t tell you for certain what’s behind their reaction. It may well be that I’m simply not conservative enough for them; as a moderate Burkean conservative who’s written an essay making a conservative case for same-sex marriage, and heartily approves of legal immigration (though not the illegal sort being pushed so hard by corporate interests these days), I may simply be too squishy-soft to be allowed within their hallowed halls. On the other hand, I’ve heard from friends that the organizers of the local H.P. Lovecraft convention here in Rhode Island, which is very woke, reacted very badly indeed to the suggestion that a local author who’s published eleven novels based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos might be a suitable invitee to their event. Inevitably, The King in Orange is what was cited as justification for their fury.
All this is happening, furthermore, at a time when by most measures, science fiction is at a very low ebb. Hugo Award-winning books are still praised to the skies in what remains of the fandom scene and in science fiction-related corporate media, but their authors routinely have to keep their day jobs or rely on a spouse’s income, as their book sales are quite often at levels that would have been considered disastrously low just a couple of decades back. Self-published e-books about galactic space navies and print-on-demand novels rehashing clichés from Robert Heinlein for the umpteenth time reliably outsell the loudly marketed products of the big corporate presses that dominate the official science fiction scene these days.
Meanwhile, I’m doing very well writing fantasy and science fiction novels that the big corporate presses consider unpublishable. That’s not just an intuition on my part, as it happens. The last novel I ever submitted to one of the big names in the industry, The Shoggoth Concerto, came back to me after the usual epic delays with a charmingly patronizing little note from one of the acquisitions editors telling me that it was “too quiet and too weird” for them, but that she’d be happy to see something more commercially viable from me. (I laughed, filed the note away for future amusement value, and sent the manuscript to a less constipated publisher, which snapped it up at once.) As I noted in an earlier post here, the big corporate publishers have embraced a failed business model that causes most of their new books to lose money. Even so, it’s intriguing to watch the extent to which the praise of critics and activists correlates with failure, and their active hostility and denunciation correlates with success.
It was just in the last few days, when I stopped and worked through the implications of all this, that I realized what had been staring me in the face the whole time.
To explain this realization, it will be useful to jump from my career to that of a vastly more successful author, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels and other works of popular fiction. She’s one of the world’s wealthiest writers these days. She’s also the target of organized and highly publicized boycotts from both ends of the political spectrum, on a much grander and more hysterically shrill scale than anything I’ve faced. Like me, she offended the right first, by writing a series of novels that featured magic (or, rather, fake magic, but we don’t have to get into that right now), thus annoying religious conservatives, and also embraced most of the clichés of turn-of-the-century mainstream leftism, thus annoying the rest of the right.
It’s a matter of history that none of this slowed down the spectacular commercial success of the Harry Potter books. What deserves attention here is that a far more vitriolic response by the left a little later on didn’t slow down Rowling’s success either. Her sin, in the eyes of today’s woke leftists, is that she retained the values of an ordinary turn-of-the-century British liberal feminist, rather than abandoning those for the latest upgrade once pressure groups backed by the medical industry and the corporate media insisted on redefining the word “woman” to include men who had, or claimed to have, gender dysphoria. Her failure to swap out her values on command netted her spectacular tantrums from the media and activist circles, and was followed by a boycott intended to silence Rowling once and for all, and return her to the grinding poverty from which her writing raised her all those years ago.
It’s been quite a few years now since that boycott got declared. I think we can all agree at this point that it’s been a stupendous failure. Rowling continues to publish books, and to rake in royalties on a scale that would have impressed old Scrooge McDuck. It was when I contemplated her continuing success, and my own far more modest but still gratifying prosperity, that the true irony of our shared situation lit up with incandescent intensity. We, and others like us, aren’t succeeding despite those equal and opposite boycotts from left and right. We’re succeeding because of the boycotts.
Let’s take this a step at a time. Opinion polls show that here in the United States, for example, only about 8% of the adult population supports the extreme liberal agenda being pushed by activists and their corporate and media allies. That’s around the share that supports, for example, allowing men to redefine themselves as women just by saying so, spending government funds to support unrestricted illegal immigration, and the rest of it. Meanwhile, maybe twice as large a share of adults supports the extreme conservative agenda being pushed by a different set of activists, and amplified by their own corporate and media allies: abolition of same-sex marriage, mass deportation of legal immigrants, and so on.
All in all, then, the collective dialogue of our time is being dominated by views that only a quarter or so of the electorate actually support. The other three-quarters? To say that their views aren’t welcome in public forums is to understate things considerably. Activists at both extremes have proven to be ready, willing, and able to suspend their bitter hatred of one another so they can cooperate in shutting out more moderate voices. It’s a common strategy of extremists, and it generates a predictable pattern of blowback.
When woke activists got control of the established science fiction conventions and drove out anyone who wasn’t willing to kowtow to their views, after all, those moderate and conservative readers and writers didn’t just disappear, like the Dark Lords of all those painfully derivative fantasy novels when the plucky protagonist finally gets around to wielding the Magic Macguffin. They simply stopped going to those science fiction conventions, and in due time some of the exiles began to organize their own. In exactly the same way, driving the opinions of three-quarters of the population out of the realm of public discourse doesn’t make the opinions disappear, and it also does nothing to convince the people who believe those opinions that they should change their minds. It simply means that they go elsewhere, and look for other ways to express themselves.
There’s a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect that’s received a certain amount of discussion in this light. In 2003, as many habitués of the internet know, Barbra Streisand tried to suppress an aerial photo of her seaside mansion in California. As a result of her efforts, the photo, which had previously been downloaded only six times, was viewed more than 420,000 times over the next month. It’s a common form of blowback against unpopular attempts to suppress information. I wondered at first if that effect might be behind the phenomenon I’ve outlined, but the facts simply don’t support that. On the one hand, Rowling already had worldwide name recognition when the boycott against her was proclaimed; on the other, I don’t have noticeably more name recognition now than I did ten years ago.
No, what’s going on is something considerably more interesting. It seems tolerably clear that at this point, when activists at either extreme of the political spectrum mount their soapboxes and, with the usual saliva-flecked rage, insist that this or that author be boycotted because they don’t grovel before this or that activist demand, a fair number of people in the excluded middle go out and buy at least one of that author’s books, as a way of expressing their unspoken disagreement with the ranting activist. I propose to name this remarkable phenomenon after its most obvious current beneficiary, and call it the Rowling Effect: the process by which bullying intended to enforce an extreme position boosts interest and support for more moderate views.
The Rowling Effect has relevance that reaches far beyond the careers of dissident writers, but that’s certainly one of the significant places it shows up these days, and it’s worth taking into account there. May I offer a bit of career advice to would-be authors, especially those who have become convinced that they can’t get their manuscripts into print because their views don’t align with either of the two extremes? Don’t worry about it. You’ll have to get by without a contract from any of the five huge corporate publishers that dominate the officially approved end of the book world, but you’re much likely to get a favorable response from one of the hundreds of small to midsized independent presses that also produce books, and they’ll offer you better contract terms anyway. The markets for alternative views are there; you just have to do an end run around the gatekeepers who try to shove everything into one or the other extreme viewpoint—and that’s becoming increasingly easy these days.
Yet it’s the broader political context that has me watching the Rowling Effect carefully just now, and counts as the sign I mentioned at the beginning of this post: the first clear indication that widespread rejection of the official political discourse of our time is beginning to drive active resistance. The three-quarters of the electorate whose views are excluded from that discourse, after all, make up a political resource of considerable scale and, at least potentially, explosive force. Recent elections here in the US, and in some other nations as well, have reliably confounded the pundits in two ways. First, there’s been a considerable mismatch between public opinion polls and the actual outcome of elections, and it’s always in the same direction: away from whatever the corporate-bureaucratic establishment wants. Very clearly, a significant share of people are refusing to tell pollsters what they really think, and wait until they can take action in the voting booth.
The second challenge to the pundits is that voting behavior doesn’t reliably fit into the partisan straitjacket into which the ruling classes keep trying to stuff it. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election confounded Democrats in exactly the same way that Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral election confounded Republicans. Neither outcome should have been any kind of surprise, however, because in both cases the voters turned to the candidate they thought was most likely to overturn business as usual.
That, not the usual partisan issues, is the unmentionable driving force behind the politics of our time. Nobody outside the airtight and oxygen-deprived bubbles of the overprivileged wants the status quo. Nobody, other than the current system’s kleptocratic beneficiaries and a gaggle of hangers-on begging for scraps from their masters’ tables, supports the dysfunctions with which politics as usual have saddled the nations of the industrial West. The first well-organized faction that takes over the abandoned center of politics, and offers the disaffected three-quarters what they want, will sweep everything else before it. The only requirement is that the faction really does have to move to the center. Insisting that the other side’s extremism is so bad that it’ll make people embrace your side’s equally unwelcome extremism is what got us into this situation in the first place.
As the last hours of 2025 slip away and 2026 dawns, then, I see the first stirrings of an unnoticed landscape of possibility. That is balanced, however, by certain equally unnoticed dangers. A crucial fact about the fascist regimes of the early 20th century that all sides have gone out of their way to suppress is that a great many of them seized power by offering electorates the commonsense policies that everyone outside the political class wanted and none of the established parties would discuss. That’s why the 25-Point Program of the Nazi party, for example, demanded such bland and reasonable steps as government food subsidies for pregnant women and children, reforms to make education available to all, and the expansion of old age pensions.
In the United States and a great many other countries in the industrial West, the future belongs to whichever political movement establishes itself most effectively in the abandoned center. If that movement is committed to civil liberties and the rule of law, well and good. If it is not, we could be in for a very rough quarter century or more. The bitter events of a century ago show clearly enough that if the elites in charge of democratic political systems insist on the preservation of an intolerable status quo in the teeth of widespread popular dissent, the people will turn to anybody who will overthrow the existing system—even if that means accepting jackboots and armbands. I can only hope that enough people in the political classes recognize what is happening in time to move to the center first, and prevent a repeat of that ghastly experience.
Dear John,
You deserve every penny that you have earned. I don’t comment much but I have followed you forever and always stop what I am doing if I hear that you are on some podcast or other. (I tend to listen because so much of my life involves keeping my eyes on screens or books.
Isn’t it Leonard Cohen who says “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”? I have kept a list of your “appropriate technologies” on my desktop and whenever I have an opportunity to influence some policy in that direction I do it. You have kept the light getting in to my life for 25 years.
Happy New Year and a job well done1!!
Hello JMG and commentarists:
I want to wish you all a Happy New Year 2026 in advance (at least from my own location local time).
Interesting post. “Extreme viewpoint fatigue” seems to be becoming a force. My sense is a socially conservative, economically liberal movement would sweep the field. But we’ll see.
Also, I’ll send a book recommendation (to your email address, I don’t want to name drop here) on successfully adapting to a life of prosperity for those who come from a situation of lack. It may be of use to you.
Glad to hear you are prospering financially, FWIW!
Right on point, as usual. You are not the only commentator drawing the parallels with the rise of totalitarianism in the 20’s and 30’s as a result of the failure of any European politicians to offer anything resembling a reasonable social program after WWI; Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism makes your points precisely, (although she takes 10s of thousands of words to do it, as a classical academic)
I think the challenges to having something reasonable emerge to inspire the middle are immensely more intense than 100 years ago. The internet, and its undermining of the distinction between reality and fantasy, the level of consumerism, and the reality that no reasonable way forward is possible without serious downward mobility (I look forward to that column) seem to me to mean that the peddlers of alternative realities and surrender of self along the lines of Hitler and Stalin may have an even easier course.
“When woke activists got control of the established science fiction conventions and drove out anyone who wasn’t willing to kowtow to their views”
Ah, it’s so regrettable that my one-time vote for entryism got zero traction. Because that is exactly the mechanism that brought all of the West to the current dismal situation. The example you mentioned was The Troth, and the ousting of its founder Diana Paxson; the example I’m thinking of was the hollowing-out and warping of the formerly conservative CDU by GDR wonder weapon Angela Merkel. I’d really love to read your thoughts on how to prevent one’s organization, party, or resistance movement from being taken over by moles.
Well, people who don’t like what you’re selling and tell you they’re not going to buy it – aren’t your customers and you don’t really have to think about them too much or respect them either. Customers do need to be respected though.
As an aside, I visited a local corporate chain bookstore recently to see if I could find Devon Eriksen’s Theft of Fire and I was a bit shocked at what I encountered. It seems physical brick and mortar chain bookstores these days only care about angry lonely single women and nobody else. I’ve also never seen so many things-that-aren’t-books being sold in a bookstore. And they didn’t carry his book either. I guess that’s the last time I visit a physical bookstore, it’s Big Slimy River from now on.
—
One way or another change is what we’ll get, whether we want it or not. It’s a question of who does the changing and how messy it is at this point. The people who think we can keep the status quo going forever are living in a dream world. Literally. My guess is that things have to go *flump* first. Brace for impact.
John, I’ve just read your today essay, and unsurprisingly, I agree. The echo chambers and cancelation culture by the two extremes of political spectrum (though until last times we in the western countries have to suffer more the woke b**t), have harmed near to a not recovery point the politics everywhere, with effects over culture, society…
It’s wry irony you’ve been rejected outside the woke and Christian right fortresses alike, but when you’re a Burkean Conservative polytheistic Druid, indeed it’s an uncomfortable view for political zealots. I understand your situation. I myself find me in a not equal situation like you, but also between the Scilla and Caribdis of nowadays current political tension (which in my country isn’t the same as in the USA, but it rhymes). Some times I’ve told you I’m a not very usual Christian who was a social-democrat in mu younger age, but now I’ve been pivoting towards what I call “Traditionalist Socialism”. I don’t want to proselitize you all, so I only will tell you I like William Morris socialism, the Situationists and post-Situ literature and another fringe thinkers. Well, this puts me in a fatal “sandwich” between wokeized “Socialists” of our “beloved” Madrid government (which probably it’s going to lose next general elections) and neoliberal/far extreme right coalition which probably will be next Spain government. We will check soon that the opposite of a bad idea is another bad idea.
You and me don’t think the same in politics and religion, but until some extent, we’re sailing in the same ship inside a stormy sea, John. We have chosen the “wrong” beliefs and thoughts mix to the current conventional “wisdom”.
I’m glad you sell more books than some years ago. I’m happy Harry Potter books keep being sold well in spite (thanks to) of their author failed cancellation attempt. Well, I don’t like that saga but it seems cancellation failure is always good for democracy.
We’ll see wether politicians end paying attention to the orphaned political center, and soon start to migrate from their extremists echo chambers, or a new kind if fascism would be born soon to fill that void. Of course, I’d like the first future. Happy 2026 for you all!
I spent yesterday evening with a couple I’m good friends with who just came back from AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona. They were full of stories about how encouraging it was to be in a huge sold-out convention centre full of people who are awake to the lies being pushed by the powers that be and who are talking openly about a brighter future. Apparently there was a great set of speakers sharing a diverse set of viewpoints, tons of young people, and those young people were dressed like they were going to prom.
My friends and I, by the way, are Canadian. This couple flew all the way to Phoenix to get excited about hopeful stirrings of change in *American* politics.
That’s the way it is now in the great North- my Boomer parents and their friends are choosing to boycott the Orange Man by giving up their snowbird time in Florida this coming winter, while several of my Gen X and Millennial friends are making active plans to gain or re-establish American citizenship. We still can’t get anyone here to listen about Covid overreach, but in Arizona they’re talking openly about it and half a dozen other taboo topics, and the Vice President and Speaker of the House are showing up to wish them well.
If Charlie Kirk were alive today I think he would wholeheartedly agree with you about the Rowling Effect. Becoming a martyr seems to have done precisely nothing to slow down his life’s work.
JMG:
I am glad to see that you are making good money writing. Your work is excellent and engaging.
What a good start to the new year. I read it and the quote from the movie popped into my head. I just double checked the book and it’s there, not just a movie abridgement.
“Your quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true.”
What a good sentiment for the times.
Here the year is ending becalmed but clear under a high pressure system. A storm is on the way for the weekend which is normal for the time of year.
Happy New Year.
I’ve seen the Rowling Effect play out many times in the women’s sex realist movement. A woman speaks, saying something blasphemous, and the mob try to cancel her. It doesn’t matter if she’s a writer, a speaker, an artist or what, but then other women say to each other, ‘Hm, that’s annoyed me enough that I’m going to buy her product/make a donation’ and if they already have the product, they’ll buy another one as a gift or make another donation and whoever the targeted woman is finds that, far from being ruined, she’s actually doing a good deal better than before the attempted cancellation. I’ve ended up buying a lot of books I might not otherwise have known about because of this effect. It works very well indeed.
JMG, “sympathetically portrayed gay, lesbian, nonwhite, and mixed-race characters”, also, I recall you stating that one of your characters, in fact a main character, is an asexual woman. Them’s fighting words for a certain male and female segment of the public, who devoutly take it for granted that sexuality is a given which does not vary person to person.
The effect you describe applies to more than books. I make a point of buying the occasional product from Eden Foods, when I can afford them. Eden Foods is an organic processor which supports local organic farming, hires local staff, and was one of the first to eliminate a certain dangerous chemical from it’s packaging. What’s not to like here? Seems that the owners are devout Catholics and the health insurance they offer their employees–please note they DO offer health insurance–won’t pay for abortion. Howls of outrage from feminists, who have forgotten that many of the founders of their movement themselves opposed legalization of the procedure. Eden products are still being offered at the health food store in my area, where the proprietor is known for summarily cancelling products he thinks don’t sell well enough. Upscale young mothers of all political persuasions have become a mainstay for the organic foods industry, not a constituency likely to be impressed by feminist outrage getting in the way of them sourcing the best possible products to feed their babies.
Inciteful and well stated. For some time now I have been refusing to talk politics with anyone who can’t answer the question “name one thing liberals did that helped elect Donald Trump”. It helps sort out those who are unwilling to look at both sides of the issue. Not surprisingly conservatives are much better at figuring out the answer than liberals.
Just wanted to let you know that your blog and books have helped me immensely in my life, both in finding my spirituality and bringing me to Freemasonry. Those two things in turn have brought a good number of positive people into my life and helped me find deeper meaning and purpose. I subscribe to your Astrology Patreon, not for the insights you provide, but as a small way that I can help support someone who has had a vast influence on my life, even if he may never meet me in person. Here’s to hoping the next year will be just as fruitful for you!
Jason, in what sense is “a socially conservative, economically liberal movement” different from the Republican party ca. 2015? Or the Canadian Conservative party both before and after 2015? Or the Tories? Or Merz’ CDU nowadays? I fail to see the novelty there (unless I am misunderstanding your use of “liberal”), and I note that none of these parties have achieved actual majorities with that program.
This is one of your most prescient posts ever, IMHO! “The Wind is changing!” as Ghân-Buri-Ghân said, and I think you have sensed something very important here.
I think it’s probably a good time to remind people that if something like fascism does come to the United States, one should not assume that one will be able to recognize it by assuming it will be goose-stepping down Main Street in jackboots and pillbox hats underneath banners with misappropriated Runic symbols on them. American fascism is likely to be every bit as American as apple pie and hot dogs!
I thought you already noted recently that every time political extremists screech about JKR, her book sales go up (I don’t remember where).
I wonder if anyone has quote-mined your essay “Hate Is The New Sex” to write or generate a hit piece against you.
And did you notice an uptick in book sales/blog views back when leftists were labelling you as an “ecofascist”?
It’s good to hear that you are doing so well financially. My favorites among your fiction are “Stars Reach” and “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.” And “A World Full of Gods” in non-fiction. (The Cthulu themed stuff has never appealed that much to me. )
I think the one dimensional liberal/left and conservative/right spectrum fails. We need at least a two dimensional space, maybe even a three dimensional space to describe US politics. The name “Kirk” seems to have be hijacked by Charlie and Erika. Hardly anyone thinks of Russel Kirk these days. That’s a shame. He’s a Burkean conservative, too, unless I’m mistaken.
Wonderful essay; you helped me sort out something.
I spent a couple of years reading in what is called revisionist history of World War II and Nazi Germany. I’ve read Mein Kampf in a good sympathetic modern translation and found it fascinating. I’ve also read a lot about Weimar Germany and was struck by how many parallels it has with America and Europe today. It struck me strongly that some – not all, but some – of what Hitler and the Nazis were proposing made an uncomfortable amount of sense.
It is unfortunately all-too-true that the kinds of reforms that Hitler wanted could only have been pushed through if he had total control of the government. If he had had to deal with the corrupt Weimar “democratic” process, his policies would have been stalled, obfuscated, buried in their congress, and tied up in the courts with stalling tactics – which again sounds far too uncomfortably similar to the situation in the Western “democracies” today.
I get the very uncomfortable feeling that, like mid-1930’s Germany, the corrupt democratic process in the West may be too far gone to be reformed in any sort of non-coercive way. I am sure I am not the only person to notice the dysfunctional state of so many levels of our government processes, and to be fed up with it.
That does not bode well at all.
EllenA, thank you for this! Cohen was right, of course.
Chuaquin, and likewise.
Jason, I’ll look forward to the recommendation. I don’t think that a socially conservative, economically liberal movement would accomplish much, as that niche has already been filled many times over. What about a socially and economically moderate movement?
Jerry, I’m sorry to say you may well be right — in addition to the factors you’ve noted, the collapse in the quality of education in recent decades also predisposes people to the kind of simplistic solutions the Hitlers and Stalins of the world have always peddled.
Athaia, I suspect part of that is that I’ve already written about entryism to some extent on my blog and my Dreamwidth journal. That said, I’m not sure entryism is the most important factor here. When Fortune 500 corporations are pushing these dysfunctions in lockstep, I think something rather broader is involved.
Other Owen, it really is interesting to see the extent to which the entire corporate world has stopped noticing that there are markets other than politically liberal, chronically depressed, white middle-aged single women in upper middle class corporate jobs. I wonder if they’ll wake up and notice reality before they slam face first into it.
Chuaquin, I don’t have to favor traditionalist socialism to be delighted that you’ve taken up something other than the two failed ideologies of the status quo. Huzzah for William Morris! 😉
Dylan, when a political, religious, or cultural movement starts martyring its opponents, it’s doomed. The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk went straight through him and hit corporate liberalism, dealing it a fatal wound; it’s just that, like so many other big and stupid dinosaurs, it hasn’t noticed the blood loss yet. I’m intrigued to hear that people are flying down from Canada to draw inspiration from our current political transformations; that may lead interesting places on your side of the border in the years ahead.
Chris, thank you!
Siliconguy, it is indeed from the book — Galadriel said it to the surviving members of the Fellowship in Caras Galadon. (Yes, I used to win trivia competitions at science fiction conventions; autism has its privileges!)
Bacon, I hadn’t encountered the term “sex realist” before — thank you. I’d say that the emergence of that movement is another good sign that the Rowling Effect is getting pretty fair traction these days.
Mary, that’s another good point; I also have an important character in another of my books who’s intersexed, which doubtless has somebody or other bent out of shape. As for Eden Foods, good heavens — they’re owned by a Catholic family these days? I remember when they were one of the main suppliers of the Zen macrobiotic movement. Yes, I used to follow that diet, and yes, I still buy Eden products tolerably often, as they’re good clean foodstuffs.
Brad, excellent! That makes a fine litmus test of the ability to think. I wonder what would happen, though, if you also asked people to name one thing conservatives did that helped elect Zohran Mamdani…
Trubrujah, thank you and I’m delighted to hear this.
Robert, thank you. Yeah, Ghân-Buri-Ghân’s been on my mind of late, too.
Mister N, exactly. American fascism, if it appears, will look patriotic, earnest, enthusiastic, and normal. That’s how the fascism of a century ago looked to people in the countries where it flourished.
Patrick, I haven’t seen a Hate is the New Sex hit piece yet, but yes, the claims that I’m an “ecofascist” were followed promptly by an uptick in my viewers and book sales.
Phutatorius, yes, Russell Kirk was mostly Burkean in his focus, and I found his book The Conservative Mind very helpful in sorting out my own political understandings.
Charlie, I know. It’s precisely the fact that most people who screech about fascism have no idea what it actually was, much less why it appealed to so many people, that makes a genuine recurrence of it so likely.
Brad Strand @ 13, I will take a whack at that. I can think of a lot of things the Dems did to get Trump elected, but what in particular stands out is that they stole the 2016 nomination from Bernie Sanders in favor of one of the (deservedly) most disliked women in the USA. Even our host, no fan of Sanders, was heard saying on a podcast in about 2017 or 18, that if we had had a fair election in 2016, Bernie would be the president.
@Phutatorius
We need at least a two dimensional space, maybe even a three dimensional space to describe US politics.
Unfortunately, the popular, 2-D Political Compass test is biased and designed to herd those who take the quiz into the Libertarian Socialist quadrant (while alleging Democrats and Republican politicians are in the opposite quadrant.