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Notes -
This weekend, I witnessed the Vibe Shift firsthand.
When we met for lunch, my mother’s first topic was the DNC. Who spoke and how great they sounded. How excited she was about the whole thing. She corrected me on “Comma-lah’s” name, which I’d apparently been mispronouncing, and used that as a springboard to discuss Kamala t-shirts. She didn’t mention that watching the DNC had been inspiring enough to get her volunteering to write postcards and stuff mailers. It was clear that she was all-in on the program without ever discussing policy—or even Donald Trump.
Dad chimed in a couple times to note that the overall messaging was much more positive, except for Bernie Sanders, who sounded unchanged from the last ten years. He appreciated this. I’d say he represents a section of the populace with immense distaste for Trump, but a comparable disdain for politicians who spend too much time talking about the man.
I had been under no illusions that Mom would vote anything but Democrat. Dad, not so sure; I’d have given good odds of a protest vote if the Libertarian candidate wasn’t such a non-entity. More likely that he abstained. But the last couple weeks appear to have left him much more comfortable voting D. The same has to be true for Mom, too, as I never saw this level of enthusiasm for anything Biden did or said.
That’s the Vibe Shift: apathy to enthusiasm.
It doesn’t take a coordinated blitz of friendly op-eds, since my parents were getting this straight from the TV. It doesn’t take an iron grip on that TV presentation; the DNC herds their cats, but they can’t convince Bill Clinton to get off stage. And it doesn’t even take a winning policy slate. The Democrat base, the casual never-Trumpers, maybe even the grillpillers? They’re just glad to have a candidate under the retirement age.
The last few years have been a bit rough for me politically speaking, in that although I have since childhood intellectually understood that most people are unthinking morons when it comes to politics, the last few years have really viscerally made it apparent to me.
I am no Republican, but at this point I also cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat. After the 2020 riots and the way that Democrat supporters ran cover for them, after all their soft-on-crime policies, after their years of childish propagandistic attacks on the right and on Trump... no, can't do it. Obviously the Republicans are also guilty of a lot of bullshit, very much including childish propaganda, but then, I'm not about to vote for them either.
The last few weeks have been sobering for me, I intellectually understood that electoral politics is about optics, not about anything substantial, but it has been rough to see the signs of the vibe shift that you refer to happening on social media. Especially, I am annoyed by the completely blatant astroturfing that both sides engage in. Pretty much every prominent political account on X, for example, is either an astroturf account or is run by someone who is so partisan that their writings are indistinguishable from an astroturf account.
I will echo what @plural said:
I feel much the same way. While Trumpists are guilty of many things, they do currently not worry me on the visceral level that the left does. It is quite likely that part of this is just because the right is not as strong as the left, and if it was, the right would worry me just as much. But for someone who has read as much about history as I have, the hardcore lockstep groupthink of the modern left is very concerning. It raises alarm bells in that it is reminiscent of totalitarian leftist movements from history. Maybe this is just my version of what leftists do when they worry about Trump creating a fascist dictatorship. I am not sure.
Another reason why the left currently worries me more is that their delusions are deeper than the right's delusions. The left tends to believe in grand systemic delusions like "hardcore socialism is a good idea" or "modern America is horrifically racist against black people". The right, on the other hand, tends to believe in more surface-level LARP delusions reminiscent of thriller novel plots, like "the Clintons are running a pedophile organization and Trump is just pretending to spend all his time on Twitter, he is actually leading a secret special ops campaign to round them up" or "Klaus Schwab wants to make us live in pods".
Both of these types of delusions are ludicrous, but the left's delusions actually worry me more. Leftists actually believe their delusions deeply in some important way, whereas the right-wingers who have bought into typical right-wing delusions are largely, I think, just doing it for fun on some level, although most of them are not consciously aware that they are doing it for fun. The way I would put it, and of course these are generalizations: the left think that they are engaged in a deep meaningful struggle against an evil enemy, which has to end with the complete overthrow and eradication of that enemy from the earth - meanwhile, the right think that they are in an X-Files episode about wacky conspiracies. Clearly the former is much more likely to lead people to fight hard politically than the latter.
The right is also easily satisfied. The left is never satisfied, if they win one battle against what in their delusional world-view is the evil oppressor, they immediately find another level of supposed oppression to battle against. The right, on the other hand, is happy any time they get some kind of win, and they immediately start relaxing and celebrating. The left is deeply committed to the fight, they are in it to win it. Their entire perspective of the world is that it is an epic and grueling battle of good against evil, and the evil must be destroyed. The right, on the other hand, kind of just wants to relax and go watch some football, even if the football is interspersed with ads containing left-leaning propaganda. The left is not like this - if they go watch some fun TV show that is interspersed with ads containing right-leaning propaganda, they will form ranks and march on social media against it.
I find it interesting that the entire alt-right, the whole ecosystem ranging from 2016 Trumpist meme populism to hardcore 4chan /pol/ white supremacy, is both notably leftist in some key aspects of its psychology, and also clearly more committed to the fight and in many ways better at fighting it than mainstream right-wingers are. I say leftist because the alt-right, in their populist economics, their sense that they are oppressed by shadowy elites, their obsession with race and sex and the cultural meanings of both, is very reminiscent of a leftist movement. Forgive me Curtis Yarvin! It is too long that I did not understand one of your central points, but I do now, and the point seems to be true - leftism is, simply, politically more effective. Even people with right-wing views become more politically effective if they adopt a leftist psychology and political attitude.
I do not think that either side is currently strong enough to overthrow our liberal, small-r republican system of social organization, but the left currently seems stronger than the right, and both sides are alarming in different ways, so I am currently more alarmed by the left. Also, while I find a large fraction of right-wing policies to be insane or just simply unappealing, the right is currently - and again, this might just be because they are weaker - more open to intellectual dissent than the left is. I find a large fraction of left-wing policies to also be insane or just simply unappealing, but at least on the right there seems to be a bit more room for thought, a bit more space for dissenters, whereas on the left it is "either you are with us, or you are with the enemy".
My deep political offline conversation with the average committed right-winger is kind of like "Hey man, we don't agree but whatever, it's fun talking about this stuff". My deep political offline conversation with the average committed left-winger consists of me trying to get them to question their ideas while gingerly ballet-leaping my way over the various minefields that, if I stepped on, would cause them to classify me as Adolf Hitler. Don't get me wrong, I also often just straightforwardly speak my mind with leftists in the mode of just "chatting about politics for fun", and this has not brought me any harm. Most leftists I know in person are not about to go report me to the thought police, they are not totalitarian. What I mean is that in those occasional really deep political conversations that one engages in, the ones where both people actually care about talking about the politics in a meaningful way rather than doing it just for fun or to vent, I have found that right-wingers are generally more easily accepting of disagreement, whereas with left-wingers you have to slowly seduce them into letting go of their instinct to assume that your disagreements with them mean that you are Hitler.
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan. For all their macho posturing, the reality is that today's right-wing is soft, easily bullied, and unstrategic. Think of when Greg Abbott bussed those migrants to blue cities. Didn't it seem like a brilliant political move? Well, part of why it seemed that way is because that was one of the very few things that any right-wing politician has done in the last few years that actually seemed like a good chess move. It's hard to name any others. Also consider that despite years of bluster about how guns are a bulwark against oppressive government, pretty much nobody on the right who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (which I do not believe, but many do) did anything about it with their guns. The bluff has been called, and I think on some visceral level the left understands that they can push the right a lot harder than they currently are pushing before the right would actually react with anything other than online whining.
Yes: The left is smart and understands the system and has been re-engineering it for decades. I am far more wary of smart people who know how to accomplish bad things than dumb people who might accidentally break some stuff but don't know how to permanently damage the structure of it. It's a grim choice, and I can't endorse either one, but I know which one is more frightening.
Do you believe the "permanent structure" can survive, say, the next decade, regardless of who wins this election?
Next decade, sure, there is enough structure left yet. It'd be a gradual process anyway. If the Dems win, the Left will devour SCOTUS first. That'll take time. Then they'll do immigration amnesty. That'll take time too. Next elections will be likely full mail-in with pretty much zero security, so guess who suddenly gets permanent majority. Then there will be Green New Deal, whatever it will be then, and killing the First Amendment, at least online. Electoral college probably will be done somewhere on the way too. Then the Second Amendment - it's not as big impediment as many think, but it must be done, and it'll take time to do it properly. Then there are no limits, anything goes. May take way longer that a decade overall. If Republicans somehow manage to pull an upset anywhere on the way (though I am not sure how it'd be possible after the amnesty) it may slow it down further. But in two decades, I'm not sure it'll be the same republic - or any republic at all.
The timeline you've laid out seems to presume that the Progressives do as they please, and no real effective response ever emerges. I would hazard a guess that you'd justify this lack of opposition by pointing out that these steps are self-reinforcing, that each step makes the next step much easier and opposition harder. Certainly this seems to be how Progressives see things; they see themselves as snowballing a set of advantages into even greater advantages, with the hope that eventually the snowball gets too big to stop or even slow down, and their opponents simply give up and die off.
The problem with this is that a considerable portion of their opposition will not give up, that escalation can and will invalidate all advantages of the snowball, and that the snowball cannot, in fact, prevent escalation and in fact makes it inevitable. They can absolutely dominate the society we have now, but the society we have now depends on a lack of domination to survive. They are committed to destroying the foundation for their own existence.
Right now there are mainly three venues, as I see, that Republicans can resist. First: SCOTUS, which is the most powerful, even if the slowest and least sure way, and its power means it's going to be destroyed first.
Second: electing Republicans that are capable of blocking Dems in Congress, in numbers that enable that. With filibuster pretty much gone, and Republicans still unable to figure out how to counter things like mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, and completely incapable of handling lawyer superpredators like Elias, this option's time seems to be running out quickly. Oh yes, and if Big Tech keeps its informational war against the Right - and I see no reason why they wouldn't - it means reaching the masses necessary to make cheating impossible, and delivering message consistent enough to entice them, is extremely hard. Not many normies read Gab and TruthSocial (and tbh things happening there aren't always good for convincing normies, either). Musk helps but it won't be enough - and with enough force deployed, Musk will fall too. If 2024 elections would resemble 2020 in any way, this option is out.
Third: red states conducting independent policies and blocking federal Dems. This is also a weak option and becomes weaker once SCOTUS falls, because this means state rights are gone, Constitution is a living document, and Feds can do anything they want. Plus, many states have been long dependent on massive federal funding grants, and threatening to pull those would politically kill any local Republican that becomes too uppity. So yes, these things are reinforcing each other, each of them makes resisting others harder. Please tell me which venues of resistance I am missing.
What kind of escalation you are talking about? Strolling through Capitol again and getting 8 years in jail for that? I am not sure it's as scary for Dems as some may think.
Why didn't Biden use this power against Abbott when Texas defied the federal government on the border?
...It seems to me that many such predictions vastly overestimate Blue Tribe's willingness to actually prosecute a fight, or to enforce their will in the face of significant opposition. They absolutely like dropping the hammer on isolated Red Tribers who they estimate they can destroy without consequence, but they do not actually seem to relish a fight that costs them casualties. Rittenhouse ended the Kenosha riots single-handedly, after all. The ATF will absolutely murder some isolated loner's wife. I doubt they will relish going door-to-door in Texas or Arkansas, and I doubt they can make the locals do it for them.
See here. In short:
Perhaps that seems implausible to you. If you believed it were true, though, would it shift your assessment of the probability of success for the current Blue Tribe snowball approach?
Here's a fresh example of using funding power to coerce a red state to change their policy: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/09/04/scotus-blocks-oklahoma-federal-family-planning-funds-amid-abortion-fight-n2644339
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First of all, Texas didn't really do anything substantial. The border is still largely non-existent and the migrants are still pouring in. Second, SCOTUS and Republican house are still there, for now. Third, Texas is a big state which may be harder to make to bend the knee. Smaller red states could be much easier. Texas would probably be the last to go, and likely will fall from the inside rather than the outside.
Which fight would that be? They don't need to make army to invade Texas. They just need to restructure subsidies and pork spending and Republicans that are too feisty suddenly find themselves unelectable because they can no longer bring home the bacon. No casualties necessary.
He didn't. 1000+ National Guard deployment did.
How many locals refused the lockdowns and the mask mandates? That was a trial run. Most complied. Seriously, I've seen people wearing masks on the street as late as 2023, and this is a deep red area. They will comply the next time too.
And btw, if anybody on the right gets some ideas about "shifting the probabilities toward collapse of centralized authority" - that would be the left's wettest dream of all. Now they need to wait for China to make a suitable virus or to invent some bullshit threats involving FBI entrapping a bunch of idiots, but if they get a real, genuine thing... They will use it to scare the population so shitless that they will agree to literally anything just for the nightmare to end. They are good at it, judging by the results. And terrified people are very easy to herd.
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Sure. There's a lot of ruin in a nation. If Trump wins, the Democrats probably stymie him and win in 2028, and assuming they win with a candidate who isn't Harris, we probably continue plodding along the road to serfdom. If Harris wins, we'll speed up that trip, but this nation has more than a decade of ruin remaining regardless. Probably not two decades at Harris pace, but she'll likely overshoot and in reaction the next president will be a plodder.
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