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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 is not a vote for restoring norms. That’s just stupid, I’m sorry but Trump did and continues to violate norms regularly. He still won’t concede the 2020 election and J6 may have been small potatoes(it was), but it’s definitely not within the norms.
Now all that being said- democrats are a lot worse. As Scott correctly notes, democratic backsliding in the real world, as opposed to Netflix shows beloved by progressives, is one party that packs the courts and colludes with private media to censor the opposition and finds three felonies a day reasons to go after dissidents after spying on them and ending meritocracy in economic and educational opportunities to distribute spoils to supporting groups. Sort of like what we have with democrats. You know, the things they’re actually literally doing. Not the ones we can imagine Trump doing.
Do you think Erdogan is going around saying he’s ending judicial independence to consolidate his own power?
This is an election between two sets of norm violators. Trump will do far less damage.
I don't see how you can restore the norms until both sides want to restore the norms. If the left doesn't want to restore any norms acceptable to the right - and they clearly do not appear to - then "restoring the norms" for the right means capitulating to whatever new norms the left is going to want. And doing it again and again, repeatedly, with the "norms" shifting arbitrarily far left, and taking flak as "norm-breakers" at each squeak of disagreement. I think it can only be "norms" if they are acceptable and agreed on if not by all than by the majority of the society, and I don't think there's anything the current left could offer that would fit the mold. If they want to go back from "western culture is racist" and "everybody who says is a woman is a woman" and "the left should control and police every public discussion" and "any speech not approved by the left is violence" and "violence against people lower in oppression hierarchy is not real violence" and so on - then there will be some norms. Until then, I see the talk of the "norms" as psychological warfare aimed at convincing the right they have already lost, they just don't realize it yet, but it's time to accept it.
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