To overwhelming and deserved ridicule, the Republican party recently posted these videos to YouTube, featuring young urban hipster Scott Greenberg:
There may have been clumsier and more cringe-inducing attempts by a political party to reach beyond its base, but I’m not aware of them.
Still, I can understand the party’s need to reach out to hipsters, among other groups, since the GOP’s current base is more typified by this fellow:
While Republicans are still strong in certain regions of the country, and among certain groups, the long-term demographic and social trends are decidedly against them, and I don’t think Scott Greenberg is going to change that. But if they want to waste their donors’ money on videos like these, who am I to protest?
The political Right’s efforts to appeal to hipsters are rather undercut by Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld’s latest book Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You.
From politics to the personal, from fashion to food, from the campus to the locker room, the desire to be cool has infected all aspects of our lives. At its most harmless, it is annoying. At its worst, it is deadly, on a massive scale. The Cool are the termites of life, infiltrating every nook and cranny and destroying it from within. The Cool report the news, write the scripts, teach our children, run our government—and each day they pass judgment on those who don’t worship at the altar of their coolness. The cool fawn over terrorists, mock the military, and denigrate employers. They are, in short, awful people.
But wait; it wasn’t so long ago that another conservative author, Charlotte Hays, was blaming all of America’s problems not on hipsters, but on white trash.
So who in fact is responsible for the decline of America: hipsters or rednecks? Perhaps it’s the intersection of the two, which I believe I’ve identified:
Yes, it’s Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. In the 1970s Pabst had a reputation as a beer favored by rednecks, as immortalized in this song by Johnny Russell:
However more recently, for reasons that are not entirely clear, PBR became a talismanic beer among urban hipsters.
Back in the 1950s Pabst aimed for a different demographic:
I’m not sure how to describe that demographic, except that it was decidedly neither rednecks nor hipsters.
Update: Building on the success of the Scott Greenberg videos, it seems the GOP has released two more in a similar vein.