The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.

You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out.

And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a generic criticism of what happens when you centralize political power and then allow special interests to divide people into camps.

The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.

And which party started the culture war? By definition it's not the conservatives.

What do you mean "by definition"? They do nothing else. Against transgenders, against gay people, against foreigners, against hippies, against black people; it goes back a long time, and always to recruit the support of poor white people by giving them a sense of superiority over an even more oppressed group. Culture war is their primary weapon to distract from the class war they're also waging.

Continually inventing new categories of "opressed" people and then demanding that others grant them special protections is exactly how you start a culture war.

Those people were always there. Just stop oppressing them. They don't need "special protections", just the same rights as everybody else. Why is it so important to have an oppressed class?

You can't just call everything oppression to force people to go along with your views. And no, progressives haven't wanted the same rights for everyone for decades. The spiel has been all about giving them more rights to compensate for perceived (often hereditary) oppression for too long that anyone can claim that with a straight face.

I don't call everything oppression, I only call oppression oppression. Slavery was oppression. Jim Crow was oppression. Discrimination against Irish, Italians, Hispanics and black people was and is oppression. Denying people the right to be who they are, restricting their rights based on who they are, denying them rights that other people enjoy, is oppression.

The issue is that conservatives have always tried to force people to go along with their views, and reacted with oppression and violence towards anyone who didn't fit into their straightjacket.

> progressives haven't wanted the same rights for everyone for decades

It's been a developing journey. It started with rights for people who weren't noble born, then men who weren't rich, then women and ethnic minorities, then gay people, then transgender people. It's a gradual expansion of rights until everybody is able to enjoy the same rights.

> The issue is that conservatives have always tried to force people to go along with their views, and reacted with oppression and violence towards anyone who didn't fit into their straightjacket.

All valid, but as always, there's nuances in how people think about assimilation and other things: Normative-ness shouldn't be mistaken for intentional racism. As for normative-ness being systemic racism, there's good deal of changes to be sought there as well, but social institutions that rely on social norms often resist dramatic changes without dramatic escalation in social struggle. The thing with escalation is, it brings about social unrest, which most would prefer to not deal with at all, especially those (who believe in) climbing up the social ladder, or are (relatively) less harmed by the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normativity

Valid point. Of course society needs norms. And I suspect every healthy society has norms. The big difference is what you do when those norms turn out to be unreasonably restrictive to some people. Do your norms override individual freedom even to the freedom to exist and be yourself?

There has to be a point where norms have to give way to freedom, but where do you draw that line?