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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.
Trump essentially killed the conservative movement. It's not healthy, the old base now hates it and it's institutions have had to choose between sacrificing their souls or irrelevance. Just go to a MAGA space and say the word 'neocon' and see what happens.
MAGA doesn't even trust Conservative intellectual institutions. What progress is still being made (say, what's happening in Florida), is localized, not part of the national movement, which has shattered and died in most places.
If it 'died' it is in large part because it wasn't fit for the new environment and DEFINITELY wasn't fit to battle its major competitor.
I'd view this as more of an adaptation than anything else.
History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.
Trump is probably a net drain now that he's broken the consensus. But Dobbs is a huge confounder here. The GOP was projected to gain in midterms even with Trump and the result of standard conservative maneuvering for the last few decades seems to have interfered.
Trump is notably less gung-ho on the pro-life issue than many in the party.
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Well my personal take is that "MAGA" as such dies with Trump. Doesn't mean he takes the entire right-wing edifice with him.
I'm far more interested in what comes after Trump, given how disruptive he was to prior alliances.
I suspect JD Vance is a hint of what we'll be seeing later on.
Realize how much of that was almost inevitable given the ideological demands the Dem base now makes. Think about why Kamala didn't pick Shapiro despite desperately NEEDING to win PA. Think about why the Dems can't do effective outreach to male voters or even acknowledge that male voters have their own independent set of concerns.
Can the Dems even run a standard, electable candidate without ticking off a large part of that base and triggering infighting anymore? Do they have candidates that can clear the primaries (a significant portion of the Dem electorate backed Bernie Sanders twice) and then be dominant in the general these days?
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Yes. And what were the outcomes of those victories? Why are election victories valuable?
Because otherwise you get the New Deal and the Warren Court.
I hate this argument. That the right should accept losing slowly as a "win," because it's not as bad as losing quickly.
I don't remember if it was here, or at the old subreddit, but I remember reading yet another gun control argument, yet another "cake slicing" characterized as a "compromise." When someone asked what exactly the pro-gun side got out of such a compromise, one gun control proponent got quite honest: you get to keep some of your guns for now. You get them taken away slowly, a bit at a time, rather than all at once right now. You get to lose slowly, instead of quickly, and you should be happy with that. It's a very vae victus attitude, an "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further," attitude.
I'm also reminded of a Nick Freitas video where he complained about a constituent who called him "useless," then spent an hour explaining how state legislatures work, how little power elected politicians have, how the system is rigged against right-wingers so that it's often "lose-lose" — in short, how he's useless. Or, more specifically, that he personally is not useless, but that any right-wing politician in his position playing by "the rules of the game" will be just as impotent.
As I see it, "well, at least you get to lose slowly" isn't an argument for playing the rigged game, it's an argument for flipping the table. Because, as @FCfromSSC notes, even when we "win" electorally, we still end up in the same place.
Sun-tzu says not to fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong, fight where you are strong and the enemy is weak. Your argument is one that says electoral politics is a battleground where the right is weak. So why should we fight on that one, instead of one that's more favorable to us. Because there's one battlefield where we have, if not an advantage, then the least disadvantage — the literal battlefield. We have a lot more guns, more veterans, a lot of favorable geography, control of the food supply, and less dependence on some highly-vulnerable infrastructure.
As I see it, your statement here isn't an argument for why we should seek electoral victories for the Republican party, it's an argument for why we should grab our guns and start shooting.
Please stop saying this.
Why? He's right, given the premises. The people offering the lose-lose alternatives should take notice, unless (as I suspect) they already have and are perfectly willing to fight the real war.
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Nice, fedposting, consensus building and stupid rolled in one.
Not entirely sure is it trolling or genuinely advocating for civil war. And unsure which one would be sadder.
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And my point is that we got the equivalent of the New Deal and the Warren Court even when we won.
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