Conservatives' Hilarious, Doomed Efforts to Be Cool [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/conservatives-hilarious-doomed-efforts-be-cool



Conservatives have a problem with cool. If they were smart, right-wing pundits and Republican political consultants would just ignore the whole concept of cool. Being conservative is inherently uncool, since the whole point of conservatism is to reject the forward-looking and liberated attitude that has always defined cool. Worrying much about it is just a waste of time. Trying to be cool just makes you look ridiculous, and paradoxically, more uncool. It’s a no-win situation, and yet conservatives continue taking the bait, forever trying to get this whole concept of cool to work for them and always, always failing.

The latest example of the Republicans trying to figure out to work this cool thing and failing is an ad campaign running in 14 states with Senate campaigns in 2014 that shows Scott Greenberg, a 30-year-old Audi driver saying things like he is “ticked off at politicians” for passing regulations, which he believes are the source of unemployment. We are clearly meant to believe that Greenberg is a hipster, demonstrating the infallible conservative ability to hop on any trend right after it’s run out of steam. Greenberg wears a striped shirt and glasses and has a scraggly beard, but sadly for Scott Greenberg and his benefactors, none of that does much to conceal the eau de dweeb that hovers over anyone who takes seriously the idea that wealthy businessmen are the major oppressed class of America.

It’s hard to see why Republicans even bother. Even if it were possible to trick young voters into thinking you can vote Republican and still be cool, it isn’t really necessary. It’s not like the millennial crowd is dweeb-free, for one thing. For another, the usual tactics of using catchphrases like “small government” and “personal responsibility” to cover up race-baiting pandering to white people is working pretty well on white millennials, though perhaps not quite as well as it did on white people before.

No, it’s safe to say that this attempt to be cool is less about really peeling off votes from the Democrats. No, this is about something deeper, a long-standing jealousy and resentment of the left for being a giant vacuum that sucks up all the cool people, leaving behind the right. (Let’s be clear, by no means am I saying all Democrats are cool. They have their fair share of dorks and dweebs. But it is, and many Republicans are keenly aware of this, true that most cool people are pretty liberal. It just comes with the territory.) This creates a major insecurity on the right, and periodically there are embarrassing attempts to deal with it by asserting, laughably, that they have cool people on their side of the aisle, too. It’s painful to watch.