To_Mandalay
6mo ago
Sure, and it's quite fine for you to have that position, and the topic is a very interesting one for a conversation, but your actual position is a lot less bombastic than you started off.
Well there were two points in my tongue-in-cheek OP. The first is, again, the specific, concrete predictions that They would not "allow" Trump to take office in 2025 regardless of what the vote totals in November 2024 were, and he would not be allowed to do anything if he did. This seems to have been pretty clearly falsified.
The second is the broader idea that "democracy is fake." Admittedly this is not that well defined, because even many people who agree that democracy is fake disagree on exactly what about it is fake. But in any case, I think under most conceptions of "democracy is fake," (RW ones at least) the Trump victory in 2024 is less expected than under the democracy not-fake model.
Sure. But if you advertise a certain maximum level of oppression, and you cross it, you cannot than tell me that everything works as advertised.
Is there an advertised maximum level of oppression? This is, again, somewhat blurry. If the government was literally rounding up hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters and shooting them into large pits I would say "this is not very liberal." The most egregious actions of the Biden and Obama administrations were pretty far from that. Of course, the governments of liberal democracies interfering with the speech of private citizens is nothing new, and there have been more egregious cases in the past, from all of the various scandals of the Hoover FBI to the internment of anti-war critics in 1917. One response is to say, "and therefore, liberal democracy has never been real." Another, which is the response I would make is, such repression, while bad, is significantly less bad than that practiced by not-liberal democracies, even if it's impossible to point to an extremely specific line where you could say "the repression has gotten so bad that the promises of liberal democracy have been exposed as empty lies."
if there's a known and significant case of a line being crossed, that case needs to be punished, otherwise there is no reason to believe the promises were anything other than a lie.
It seems likely that, various people who participated in anti-RW repression during the Biden administration, for whatever value of "repression" we're using will indeed be punished to some extent under Trump.
Anyway, if some exceptions are allowed without it disproving the broader point, I don't see why we should dismiss Yarvin wholesale.
It doesn't entirely disprove his whole theory, even though I do think he's wrong. It is a data point against it. He himself admits he's surprised. I threw a jab at Yarvin, but I mostly have in mind actual, concrete predictions that They were so powerful and so well-entrenched, and democracy is such a fraud, that Trump specifically would not be allowed to win.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression, we're just more subtle about it".
All political systems engage in repression to some degree. But differences of degree are important. Less is better. The repression experienced by the American right over the past several years has been quite mild compared to even the mildest of twentieth century dictatorships, which is why terminology like "the Regime" (obviously chosen to imply an equivalency between liberal democracies and the various states most people imagine when they hear the word "regime," Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and others) is very silly. I expect Trump will exercise some degree of repression against the left over the next four years as he's promised to do, though it won't be particularly severe by historical standards either. And if the GOP loses in 2028 (or even loses badly in the midterms), it will stop.
That's not a promise of liberal democracy specifically, all democracies promise that, including illiberal ones
I don't consider "illiberal democracy" to be a very useful term. All states have some democratic features. Even the Soviet Union in the 1930s did. All states have some non-democratic features. It's also a matter of degrees, and there are edge cases, but that doesn't mean the distinction between non-democracy and democracy is nonexistent, just like there's a distinction between purple and blue despite the seamless blend.
To_Mandalay
6mo ago
That liberal democracies never employ repression against political opponents, or that their doing so immediately falsifies the premises of liberal democracy? I don't think this is really held by anyone. Certainly I think very few defenders of liberal democracy would argue that, though they may argue that liberal democracies tend to pursue political repression less than countries which aren't liberal democracies, or do so less harshly, both of which I believe are true.
Granted that's my fault for glibly talking about "advertisement" as if there's a CEO of liberal democracy. A more important promise of liberal democracy is that if you don't like the current government, including if you think the current government is ineffective, corrupt, or unfair, you can vote it out, and the government you vote in its place will pursue different policies.
To_Mandalay
6mo ago
No, but they advertise that if the government is being mean to you, you can go in the booth and press the button next to the name of the guy who says he'll make the government stop being mean to you, and make it be mean to the other guys instead, and if more people press that button then press the other button, the government will stop being mean to you. This is what just happened.
To_Mandalay
6mo ago
He only got to do that because more people pressed Trump button. That's the central point, if more people had pressed Harris button, Trump wouldn't get to hire or appoint anybody. Yarvin is as turgid and obnoxious to read as usual, but "moral energy" is conveniently unquantifiable.
RWers have spent the past several years LARPing like they were Soviet dissidents living under a regime of red terror when it turned out they actually lived in a liberal democracy that functioned as advertised the whole time.
To_Mandalay
6mo ago
Also Trump has to be one of the most Zionist presidents the US has ever had. He was grand marshal of the salute to Israel, he just passed an executive order on antisemitism.
And yet a supermajority of American Jews voted for the D candidate, like always. The only Jews that vote GOP are observant Orthodox that have very little political influence. Trump and Republicans in general are probably more Zionist than your average secular American Jew.
To_Mandalay
6mo ago
I didn't vote for Trump, though considering I live in one of the least-swing states in the country, I didn't vote at all because I didn't think it would be worth the gas I would expend driving to the polling place.
In any case, Trump is president now.
When I was a kid at the time of Obama v McCain my nice teacher Miss Collins gave us a very simplified and seven-year-old friendly explanation of politics. In some countries, one guy got to be in charge and nobody else got any say. But America was different because we got to have elections every four years, which let the people choose who we wanted to be in charge. Everybody went into a booth and chose who they wanted to be president, and whoever got picked by the most people automatically won.
When I got a little older I started spending a bunch of time on various forums and image boards where I learned that actually democracy is fake and gay. It's all a sham. We live under the system/the Cathedral/the regime/whatever. Voting doesn't matter because no matter who wins, The Regime will never allow a true based right-winger to come to power.
This skepticism continued through the Trump years, with the explanation for his 2016 victory being that They were caught off guard. And of course his loss in 2020 was because the System was no longer off guard, and had fortified itself against the possibility of another Trump victory through means of gross election fraud. "There's no voting your way out of this." In the lead up to 2024, various RW voices, including many on this forum, insisted that Trump would never be allowed to take office again. Mysterious votes would be hauled out at 3:00 AM to ensure a Harris win. Or else he would be assassinated. Or once in office, he would not be permitted to actually do anything Based™ by the Deep State.
Well, despite the universal opprobrium and opposition of every single group of people I've been assured are really running the show, variously journalists, left-wing billionaires, the CIA, other unelected federal bureaucrats, college professors, the Jews, NGOs, liberal white women, or some combination thereof, Trump won. "They were caught off guard" no longer remotely works as an explanation.
Trump doing mass firings of federal employees, mass deportations, and dismantling DEI, just like he promised. The libs are coping and seething, but they can't do anything more than that, and the reason they can't do anything more than that is because more people pressed the "Trump" button than the "Harris" button in the voting booth, and according to the magic piece of paper, this means Trump is in charge now. Democracy worked exactly like Miss Collins said it would. This literally happened, just replace Hitler with "woke DEI". As soon as it the results of the election were clear, the libs immediately acted in accordance with the magic piece of paper and handed over power, without any attempt at military coups, riots, Hail Mary legal endeavors, or even a lib January 6th. And no Deep State has stepped forward to prevent him from doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. The Magic Piece of Paper has spoken.
While this is a massive L for the libs, it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
Like what is the cope for this? Trump isn't a real right-winger, the System would never allow the election of a real right-winger who would restore seigneurial dues and reverse the industrial revolution? The System is just biding its time until it can do a reverse QAnon Storm?
All the based esoteric schizos gibbering about the Cathedral and ZOG and how everybody is a communist were wrong. Turns, they were the fake and gay ones all along, and my sweet normie liberal second grade teacher was right the whole time. Democracy is Real and Straight. Sorry Miss Collins.
It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."
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