Luke Ford

Aaron Renn writes:

These are class markers that help demarcate the in group from the out group.

It isn’t precisely required to engage in all this stuff, but if you aspire to be a professional in a corporate setting, you’ll set yourself apart from your prospective colleagues if you don’t live at least something of this lifestyle. Top talent or other high status people can get away with flouting conventions. Most people can’t.

People understand that most upper middle class people realistically can’t deliberately go against many social trends, such as by explicitly rejecting Black Lives Matter or DEI. But similar effects are true for some consumption activities as well. If you want to avoid them, you have to somehow frame it as aspirationally higher status, such as by saying a spartan lifestyle is all about the environment or something.

The net result is a society that pushes people towards conformity with higher consumption norms, and to embrace patterns of life that might even be unhealthy (such as kids having smart phones).

Aaron Renn writes:

Cities also give the green light to people creating a very hostile environment for anyone who is openly conservative, or even merely insufficiently liberal. We’ve all seen the videos of BLM activists harassing diners at outdoor cafes, for example. Here in Indianapolis, a group of activists ran the donut shop around the corner from our old house out of business for political reasons. Not a single person or entity in the city came to the defense of that shop. Implicitly, every single civic leader in Indy is ok with conservatives actively getting run out of town.

So based on what liberals already do day in and day out in the places they control, red state leaders are well within their rights to pass laws that are culturally offensive to liberals in order to encourage them to leave, or not to come in the first place…

Ron DeSantis actually did a good job of reshaping Florida’s demographics politically, mostly through conservative “popularism” with substance: going against Covid shutdowns, restructuring a university, eliminating sexual content from kindergarten, etc. Notably, he has not pushed for anything like the Ten Commandments display.

Aaron Renn writes:

Loyalty is the coin of the realm. Disclosing personal emails, even if from an ex-friend, to the media in order to try to harm someone is treasonous.

It’s also to be expected. In a lower trust society, we can no longer assume that even our friends won’t betray us. This is doubly true if the friend has different politics from you. And it’s triply true if you are a conservative and your friend is a liberal, because liberals are more likely to unfriend you over politics…

We have to take stock of the new reality and simply put less trust in other people. It’s a good rule of thumb that you should not put anything in an email, text, or group chat unless you think you could handle the heat if it were published in the Times. Again, you especially can’t fully trust anyone with the opposite politics here.

We have to take account of the cold reality that we no longer live in a world of gentlemen, or one that lives by the old values…

[We should] find ways to build our own moral communities, whether in a church, a friend group, etc., where it’s possible to establish in-group standards that allow higher trust relationships to flourish.

In an essay on the quest for community, Aaron Renn wrote:

Our society deems any non-ideologically approved groups illegitimate. So any all male groups that aren’t devoted to some type of struggle sessions are going to be attacked. That’s why, as I’ve noted before, many of these men’s groups are now essentially underground and illegible.

What does it mean to be less legible?

Aaron Renn wrote:

…if you are not legible to the government and other entities, it is harder for those entities to impose their mandates on you.

One example is the growth of informal men’s retreats. As I’ve noted before, all men’s groups and organizations are heavily stigmatized in our society, and outright illegal in many cases. Church men’s groups, some remaining single sex schools, fraternities, and a few other groups are basically what’s left, and many of them have a target on their back. Witness the years long jihad the New York Times ran against the Augusta National Golf Club to bully them into admitting women.

What’s more, even if an all male organization managed to exist, becoming a member of it could be hazardous to your health, so to speak, if the media decided to make an issue of it, as they’ve been known to do.