Most of the Bad Political Takes I see are generalizing from powerful prestige institutions becoming more ideologically uniform that the rest of the culture is, too. It's pretty coherent for the culture to be becoming more conservative in various senses while the elites go insane.

Even well off people with a lot of advantages and respectable liberal beliefs are becoming more *cautious* about themselves, their families, work, etc. The sense that true liberalism required trust in the society's beneficence is rapidly fading, leaving a scared, suspicious land.

That those same people are able to reconcile their personal sense of fear with, say, voting for anti-incarceration district attorneys who will make cities less safe is just the usual problem of a performative democracy with only empathatic, virtuous voters, not responsible ones.

This is what I thought that /019 George Packer essay about his kids' NYC public school going Woke captured very well: people filled with anxiety about their children's prospects,but not self-aware to admit that it conflicts with their political posturing https://mobile.twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1172876793239527424

The 2020 summer's craziness was overdetermined - the result of many layers of deliberate, planned action and collective mania- but it must be true that the guilt of cowering at home and having your every need delivered made the contradictions of liberal affluent life more salient

When the most respectable liberals you know start making jokes about arranged marriages for their kids, you know that nobody trusts the system to actually provide stability and sanity to the next generation, not without (far beyond Getting into a Good School) lifelong struggle.

Remember who actually reads the New Yorker- not this woman's generation, but her parents' https://mobile.twitter.com/Kerrypurcell/status/1333766560964628481

Even the 2019 NYT Weddings section was making clear that the Old Ways of respectably finding a class-compatible spouse no longer exist https://mobile.twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1153739186035449856

arguably the central optimistic thread of modern Western narrative- that marriage is the culmination of individual self-discovery- ("every comedy ends in a marriage") has given way to an older understanding where marriage is a expression of familial status https://mobile.twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1151136631555969025