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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   34900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump

The main points:

  1. Trump will move the needle towards right wing strong man authoritarianism.
  2. The democrats might seem worse, but they aren't.
  3. Some of us want to punish the democrats for being bad by voting for Trump, but this isn't a good thing to do if Trump will be actually worse on the things we care about punishing the democrats.

I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.

The main points:

  1. Trump doesn't have solutions, he just wants to blow up the system.
  2. Trump is high variance.
  3. He will lead to anti-intellectual populism dominating the conservative movement.
  4. Trump won't do as much about global warming.
  5. Trump pisses off the libs, and this will further radicalize the libs rather than bringing us back to a better spot.

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:

  1. Trump did not blow up the system. People blew it up in an attempt to oppose him. Generals lied to him about troop deployments. Prosecutors invented novel legal theories for going after Trump. The FBI encouraged censorship of a story by heavily implying it was false when they knew it was true. Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump. Congress and intelligence agencies spent three years persecuting Trump based on an accusation that was entirely made up by the Clinton campaign.
  2. Trump had a high variage twitter account. Crazy things were said sometimes. But the actual day to day governance was fine. There were fewer major wars and foreign entanglements started. War seems like a very high variance problem especially wars with a nuclear power involved.
  3. I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
  4. He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.
  5. He did indeed piss off the libs. Trump Derangement Syndrome did not go away. He also didn't "crack down" on them. He didn't send Hillary to jail, despite how much her Russia hoax thing probably meant she deserved it (I know she would have gone in for other reasons, but seriously talk about norms breaking). Trump has weathered a great deal of hate. He seems uniquely suited to it. I am happy with him in this role. It has helped a large number of people learn to basically ignore "cancel culture" attempts. Or to immediately look with suspicion at any story of someone doing something awful.

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 feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.

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.

The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too.

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.

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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