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Notes -
Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump
The main points:
I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.
The main points:
I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:
I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.
He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".
Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.
I don't want to get into an object-level argument about this (though my personal stance is probably blatant), but it's interesting and funny how for the opposite side it's viewed as the exact opposite of this, with the perception that all media across the spectrum is always "grading Trump on a curve" / minimizing his actions because they're so acclimated to it while the left can get away with much less than he can.
Freddie deBoer recently wrote about this, in Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us:
He proceeds to gives a ton of examples from the New York Times.
I'm sure there are people on both sides that claim their guy isn't treated fairly, and the other guy deserves more scrutiny. But I think this is a case where the Democrat voters are simply wrong.
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Grading Trump on a curve as, say, Ben Shapiro says he does, does not exclude dubious media hysterics over Trump. I think the shrinking institutional media leans hysterical while claiming objectivity, while new media tends to grade him on a curve, and simply says thats what they do.
The other point is that various biases cause both old and new media to focus on trivialities (process scandals, horserace polls, gaffes, bimbo eruptions etc.) over substantive coverage of what is actually at stake. And, at least in this cycle, both candidates are leaning in to the media obsession by not sharing meaningful policy proposals at all (Kamala) or sharing stupid proposals which his intelligent supporters insist he won't actually implement (Trump).
Because partisans of both sides think that their side is right on the merits, they see a bias in favour of trivialities over the merits to be a systemic bias against their side.
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I never understood this either. There's an argument that I've heard that the media is biased precicely because they don't go after Trump hard enough. I can't compute it. As a reasonably disinterested American, all I've seen for 15 years is the media constantly going after him, but in the last few months, basically since he was shot at, the media kinda, sorta treats him like he's a presidential candidate--while also reminding us how terrible he is at the same time. The idea that "Trump has been normalized " is so far beyond my perception of reality I don't even know how to engage with it.
What? Who says that?
Trump has been normalized only in the sense that what would have been shocking for another candidate is blasé for him. He’ll do something scandalous, the media will insist it’s a scandal, and then everything will continue exactly as it was.
I remember not too long ago, a bunch of conservatives got excited because the audience for whatever show Colbert hosts now, booed when the CNN affiliated host said something about them being impartial. It was amusing to me, because the conservatives took it to mean, even this progressive audience knows how biased (against Trump) CNN is. Of course, the reality was that they were booing CNN for being biased in favor of Trump, because this was within about a month of the debate and that was the normie progressive take, that CNN was basically in league with Trump.
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I've seen the claim a few times on notes on Substack and shared posts from Twitter. Along with things like, "If Trump is elected we will literally be killed!"
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I'm not sure if you're objecting to the claim that the media is saying Trump is being normalized or that people are complaining that media has been normalizing Trump. Both have happened a lot.
How Not To Normalize Trump
Fallon: I Didn't Mean to 'Normalize' Trump
The Case for Normalizing Trump
Don't Normalize Trump's Vision for America
Normalizing Trump: An Incredibly Brief Explainer
How We Normalized Trump
We are Normalizing Trump. Again.
Protesters Outside of New York Times demand newspaper "Stop Normalizing" Trump
This has been going on since 2016. I mean the media obviously aren't normalizing him, in my opinion and experience, but people are certainly claiming that it's happening.
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At least one progressive has said something like that to me directly. In particular, there were quite a few examples of this attitude in the recent aftermath of Trump/Biden debate, where I saw quite a few tweets to the effect of "Why is the media being so harsh on Biden when Trump said/did XYZ" etc.
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I've seen it said, or maybe heard it said. But I can't point to anything specific.
Usually when I see or hear it I just realized I'm living in a totally different information environment than whoever said it, and I give up most hope of discourse with them.
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