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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.
The Neocons killed the conservative movement by expending its credibility in support of ruinous Forever Wars. If the Republican candidate had been anyone but Trump in 2016, I was planning to vote Hillary.
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves. While Reagan's three legged stool makes clear the neocons weren't the only part of the conservative movement, Trumpism has also abandoned the other two legs: the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
The Old Right/Paleos have essentially entirely won the battle and so the Conservative Movement is dead. The Conservative Movement in America was something that grew out of the collapse of the Old Right in the face of the Eisenhower Presidency as essentially another path for opposing the New Deal Consensus. While the. Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
But the old Movement is 100% gone.
I voted for W, and one of the biggest reasons I voted for him was his firm stance against nation-building. 9/11 was shocking enough to change my mind for a year or two, but before his first term was out I had achieved escape velocity from the Conservative movement of my birth almost entirely because of the war and the whiplash-inducing abandonment of principles that went with it. Torture was fine. Fiscal responsibility was out the window, with the meme at the time being us dumping pallets of hundred dollar bills out the back of airplanes in Afghanistan. Two ruinous foreign wars leading to what were obviously going to be indefinite and doomed exercises in nation-building, based on deliberate lies to the public. Massive violations of civil liberties, "free speech zones", ubiquitous government surveillance. I had opposed Clinton and the Democrats explicitly because I didn't want any of that!
I suppose I was fooled then, because what I remember is The Project for a New American Century and W's administration being notably staffed by neocon true believers in numerous prominent positions, and that they set policy in numerous ways from those positions. I remember those policies defining the era, and I remember the results.
The social conservatives have gotten Roe overturned, and are now one of the core nuclei for serious Red Tribe organization in the culture war. W's attempts to support the social conservatives as an integrated part of American society failed categorically. The current strategy seems like a better deal to me, given the present realities. We no longer have any illusions that public morality can be maintained, but that is probably for the best. Better for us to accept our role as the outsiders, to recognize that this nation and its social order are incompatible with our understanding of universal truth.
As they should have been, because they have zero credibility with any part of the public any more. Offshoring manufacturing in favor of the "service economy" was supposed to provide broad prosperity. It did not. "Learn to code" is a cruel joke now, but I remember when that was the actual, inironic policy prescription. Fiscal responsibility is a joke after W and the Obama presidency; there will never be a balanced budget, and pretending otherwise is foolish; even if we could maintain it under Republican leadership, which we couldn't, there is no benefit to tightening Red Tribe belts to pay down Blue Tribe's credit card. We let the business conservatives lead, and they consistently led us to failure and to outright disaster. Then when we'd beggared ourselves supporting their defunct ideological prescriptions, they promptly dumped us and defected wholesale to the Blues.
You are describing outcomes, but you are not accounting for the process by which those outcomes arrived.
The social base of America is dead. The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. In less than a week we're going to vote in a national election, and no matter what the result may be, social cohesion is going to decrease significantly, yet again. Nor is it going to recover in the next ten years any more than it did in the last ten. The Culture war consumes all other concerns, and it continues to escalate. Red Tribe has a pressing need to mobilize to a war footing versus the Blues, and MAGA is the best option available for achieving that. There is no reason to compromise that mobilization to prop up a social order not only dead but visibly rotting off the bone.
So you agree with me that the Conservative Movement is dead.
I agree with you that a conservative movement is dead, certainly.
Yes, for 60 some years now what people meant when they said 'Conservative Movement' is dead.
And given what that "conservative movement" looked like, how is that a bad thing for people on the right?
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And yet, it seems to me that my conservative principles find better representation under the current environment than they did under the old arrangement. Why should I mourn this outcome?
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