gatoprediction™ the coming election: cringe vs based

but this is just the culture war, it will not decide the election

the incipient culture war seems increasingly to have locked into to a frame of “cringe vs based.” this seems a valid construction and one that is both instructive and predictive.

not everyone really understands these terms so let’s lay them out:

amusingly, the term “based” has its origins in rap. (from GROK AI)

Fast forward to the mid-2010s, rapper Lil B popularized a new meaning of the term "based" in his music and daily life. In a 2010 interview with Complex magazine, Lil B shared that "based" means being yourself and not being swayed by outside influence. This new interpretation of "based" became a term for authenticity, individuality, and not caring about what others think.

Since then, the term has been adopted by various online communities and subcultures, often used to express approval or admiration for someone's courage, authenticity, or unique perspective. So, the next time you see someone use "based" in a conversation, you'll know it's a nod to Lil B's legacy and the evolution of a slang term from the streets to the internet.

but humans are still more incisive expositors of these sorts of ideas. one of the better definitions i saw was this:

To be "based" is to self-express a word, deed, or idea that any individual playing status games would self-censor.

"I can't say that; what would people think?! They might say I'm sexist/racist/etc. Think of the consequences!!"

To be based is to do or say it anyway.

To hold back, talk yourself out of it, or convince yourself that the opposite is 'actually' true... Well, that is the opposite of based.

That is cringe.

i very much agree with this semantic frame. it lays it out beautifully.

the other key concept is “the longhouse” which is used either as derision or as aspiration depending upon whom you ask, but i think the reality is a bit more complex.

again from GROK AI:

In modern society, the term "longhouse" is sometimes used to describe a social order where taboos are weaponized by weak people to control the bulk of the strong. This can lead to a lack of privacy, freedom, and meaning beyond the mere continuance of life. It's like living in a giant dormitory where everyone knows your business, and you have to follow a set of unwritten rules just to avoid being ostracized.

However, the longhouse concept can also be seen in a positive light, as it promotes a sense of community and shared responsibility. It's like a giant family reunion, where everyone pitches in and looks out for each other. It's about finding a balance between individual freedom and the collective good, which can be a tricky tightrope to walk.

we’re all having to pick sides, more than anything about what the standards of the longhouse shall be, because there is always going to be one. that’s how civilization works.

ideas that you can assign this notion to just “weak people seeking to dominate strong ones” or (in particular) make this out to be a gender war issue seems to miss some of the frame. all societies and civilizations have some sort of cultural norms and expressions of disapproval when they are violated. they have to. it’s not the idea of this that’s the issue, it’s “what shall these norms be?” in particular around “equal opportunity vs equal outcomes” and “to how much empathy is anyone who cries about anything no matter how great or small entitled?” and “should we move at the speed of the fastest or the slowest?”

this really seems like the front line of the of the current culture war.

many are assuming that this also means that the pollical frame must be similar and that the impending election will be decided along similar lines because, after all “politics is downstream from culture.” but i fear this to be overly optimistic and neglects a number of key differences and salients that make elections quite different from cultural debates in much the same way that a court trial is different from “justice.”

mechanics matter to the point of being dispositive. in court, you can be guilty as all getout but skate on a technicality. in politics, you can have a losing message but win an election because who counts votes and how matters more than the will of the demos.

it’s an important distinction and one worth exploring a bit. let’s look.

consider JD and his incessant seeming foot in mouth disease to the point where one might seriously wonder if he’s got some sort of mint flavored shoes. (though this seems much improved in recent days)

but i suspect there is more complexity and purpose here.

vance attacked the cat ladies, maybe because he’s a political idiot, or maybe because the he thinks election may well come down to mobilizing the young men who generally do not vote and who feel increasingly attacked by the karen classes and the immigration replacement the karentocracy seems to champion.

they feel excluded and maligned and have clearly just about had it with times being what they are and getting marginalized over and over while being called privileged.

for them, the frame is one of dispossession and a struggle out of struggle sessions. they want to reassert themselves morally, economically, and socially. they want to speak without self-censorship regain the ability to have identities long suppressed by the prevailing longhouse. they want to be based. and and all over the world, these young men are swinging more conservative in their political beliefs while young women seem to be getting more liberal.

this gets far more pronounced as one gets younger, itself a really interesting trend especially when combined with the fact that women out vote men by 4-5 percentage points, likely more in the young. if you could actually get young men to the polls, it would be an electoral earthquake.

overall, this is a reassertion of more traditional male values and it’s certainly the coming thing. the reflexivity of culture is starting to rebound against having been so attacked and vilified and young alpha males are a difficult demographic to suppress for long.

whether through intent (less likely) or just inclination (more plausible to my mind) one could cast the moves of donnie and JD to be ones of seeking to engage with this.

but, of course, it’s going to enrage the younger women, who have grown more liberal. many people (not just women) benefited from cringe and are not happy to give it up. they hate based. they want people to fear social consequence and self-censor. it is the core of their cancel culture ethos.

it’s their happy place, their wubbie, and they want to keep running the longhouse their way.

people are trying to make this out as a gender war, but it’s really not. it’s the based of both genders having had it with cringe and starting to speak their minds.

and it cannot coexist with cringe.

the response from team kamala was to swing more wildly left with walz, a divisive figure because his pure social justice wokester warrior history sits very badly with just the folks trump and vance are seeking to energize.

there’s a “yuge” fault line opening here culturally and seemingly politically.

but team donkey is not stupid. much of this provocation is likely deliberate. foremost, it pushes the pachyderms into a position of needing to go “more based” and push harder as they call out this threat. this lets kammy and friends play jiujitsu with them and cast them as bullies and themselves as “the mommy and daddy who are here to save you from it.” they have been paying “influencers” to push talking points and the whole internet suddenly erupted in lockstep longhouse cringe.

lest you think i exaggerate, here’s a prime (but far from the most egregious) example (since taken down after being mocked into the stratospehere). you can see it come in wave after wave each time new tweeting points are released.

you want cringe? you can’t HANDLE the cringe!

if you read this carefully, you can really see the pathology. i want mommy and daddy to save me from mean tweets and bad orange men. their speech is violence but i titillate to the idea of using actual violence against them (baseball bat) and having it be sanctioned and OK (because “kamals” has a badge.). this is literal authority fetishism as the desperately beta seek to have their foes attacked. note the submissive, infantilized, and dependent frame. there is no fantasy of self-empowerment or agency, no personal taking of control. it’s “people come to save me from the bad men and i thrill to watch the power of my leaders wielded to protect my fragility.” this is adult swaddling.

had he really owned this, it might have landed differently, as the tiny dot in the middle of the yin yang where purest cringe pops out the other side into based. but he didn’t and so it went the other way.

cringe meters all over america exploded.

note that this is the actual talking point the campaign is pushing with such astro-turf falsity. “we’re the mom and dad saving you from the bully.”

it’s a truly awful set of salients and metaphor. as an argument, it’s a horrific loser.

and it breaks down quickly.

it’s repetitive cringe inversion that invites a calamity of getting clowned. they really seem to struggle to realize who they actually are.

but i think they can win on it, and here’s why:

this is not the real argument.

this is a distraction, a red cape, and a ruse. this is luring the bull away from victory and onto the sword.

it’s incendiary and galling. it elicits emotion and attention. walz having drag queens in the capitol and seeking to rank “pedophile” among “sexual orientations” focuses incredible attention, but it changes no one’s vote. neither do military records nor horse conspiracies. it’s all legerdemain.

the economy, the debt, the budget, and increasingly the border and immigrant welfare statism all go begging. these are the real issues, issues of import, issues that change minds in the middle. and they’re getting memory holed by sensationalist sideshows.

getting pulled off of them is a loser for orange don and the venture hillbilly, and worse, so is getting pulled into this culture debate while giving up ground in the ground game.

even though she’s losing this debate and her promoters are going right back to the “deplorables” well with “low information” accusations, i’m not sure it’s going to matter much.

she can be as cringe as she wants. it’s her actual brand. this is not going to be the decider.

the dems have an awful candidate with no charisma and a terrible track record. 5 minutes ago, everyone knew she was a hapless halfwit. suddenly, she’s “mamala the bullyslayer!” it’s all twaddle.

but the swamp donkeys also have a REALLY powerful machine and while it does not understand (or want to understand) rights or ethics or economics, it sure as shootin’ understands elections.

it understands how to register illegals to vote. it understands how to get out that vote. it understands rigging, cheating, control of counting, and massive scale ballot harvesting through mail in. they’re not going to win on the merits of their case to the american people. they’re going to win on technicalities, on knowing how to play the game that trump is tragically bad at. they are setting up the win/steal by playing every dirty trick in town.

and unless trump wins by a cheat-proof margin, he’s going to lose.

meanwhile, he is not helping himself.

“ill kemp’d”

trump is kicking own goals and showing once more what an awful candidate he is because he’s such a pathological narcissist that he literally cannot bear any other high status person near him getting even a lumen of spotlight. he’s picking fights with governors in key swing states. he’s alienating the people around him. you cannot compete with the well oiled donkey machine with a ground game like that. you need allies, real allies, strong, capable allies. and no one like that wants to be lined up alongside “the donald” whose rapacious demands to kiss the ring and the posterior prevent serious people from wanting to be anywhere near him. this has been a longstanding issue for his campaigns and administration.

now, kamala is a complete sociopath as well, abusive to her people, and lazy and stupid to boot. she’s unfamiliar with issues, unprepared for meetings, and she literally forbids junior staffers from making eye contact with her. (perhaps not such a cool aunt after all? mamala appears to be a jerk of hillary clinton proportions but without the wonkish work ethic.) no one wants to work for her either. but it matters a lot less for kammy-whammy because she is basically maggie simpson pretending to drive the car and the donkey machine is candidate agnostic and unified against allowing the one time cheeto in chief to chief again.

the DNC could get a rutabaga elected.

hell, they did it once already…

and with two bad candidates (in the sense of being someone you want to build a campaign around) it’s going to come down to this:

• kamalas’s ideas are awful and trump’s are a mixed bag (but far better than hers) but the fact that he speaks them plainly wins with “based” and kamala cringe is iffy in the center but intensely on brand for the left

• trump has a real following, but one too small to win outright on. kamala has no genuine friends, just “blue no matter who” and “never-trump” tribalism.

• but kamala has a massive machine backing her and the backing of “team lawfare” and trump is going to get his jersey pulled up over his head again and get jacked against the boards while the refs all look at the rafters.

trump needs to win by 5 to tie, and that’s going to take doing. his only shot is to:

• win the middle decisively on real policy

• win the young males by actually getting them to vote (something they generally do not do)

and this will likely come down to some issues outside the control of both candidates: it’s going to be the economy, stupid.

if the economy holds on and sputters on through november, trump is likely in trouble.

if it breaks and markets tank, he’s going to win.

current polls are silly and manipulated. they are not to enlighten, they are to justify. the point is to lay claim to possible victory so that a machine can be passed off as popular opinion.

the next couple months are going to be an agonizing mess as the worst election in US history unfolds. you could seriously walk into the DMV in pigsknuckle arkansas and pull 3 random people out of line and get better candidates than this.

vote beavis: it’s time we got some adults in the room

and JD at least is starting to learn the game. he’s still awkward at it and tried some poorly conceived “whaddaboudist” pivots before realizing that the best frame was a frame-break to “do you seriously think offhand comments from 3 years ago are what matter to people this election?”

that’s a strong move and the right answer. it discredits media and makes them look petty and it moves the debate back onto serious salients. he needs to learn to go right to this, not fumble around maligning the offhand comments of others first in defense of his own. that serves only to reinforce the frame he needs to escape.

i suspect he will and that’s the right play. he’s new to this kind of stage and needs to get his legs under him on tone and content.

this will help, esp if the donald follows suit.

but in the end, it’s machine vs ideas, technocracy vs democracy.

it’s a candidate that won zero votes in a primary against a popular populist who has no idea how to play the actual game and winds up being his own worst enemy.

the media knows how to fight him now. they just starve him of coverage and make every story a fawning kamala puff piece.

but this can get galling and saccharine to the point of emetic if taken too far. (and they probably will)

i had been of the opinion that there was no way kamala could win and mostly, i still believe that. but trump could lose if he cannot get his act together and gather a ground game.

and unless the economy bails him out, even the astonishing awfulness of harris won’t sink her. this gang has run a campaign from a basement before.

the US election system is so broken and corrupt that the campaign has (mostly) been relegated to being the flourish of the magician’s assistant. it’s a distraction away from the bunny getting stuffed into a ballot box.

and the deafening silence from both parties on this topic shows you just how deep the rot goes.

if we really want to fix something, let’s start there.

only citizens can vote. voting requires verified ID, in person unless you are overseas military.

if we cannot manage that, all we’re going to get is this.

(author’s note: yes, pretty much no matter what dog you have in this fight, i probably just mocked your candidate or laid out flaws i see in them. this is election and culture analysis. it needs to be blunt and on point or we’re all just churning out cringe. so, sorry, not sorry. i think they all deserve mockery and have little respect for any of them. if we normalize normalizing this sort of mockery and disdain, we’d likely have a better civic system. any system that starts with “only great leaders can run it” is doomed from the start. )