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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.

There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state

I disagree that this is a "hidden" veto, I think it's an obvious feature of liberal democracy. A president can't govern without the lower level bureaucrats' cooperation. If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything. To become an actual totalitarian, the president would have to replace all the bureaucrats with yes-men, and that takes time. If he just fires them all immediately, he won't have the infrastructure to govern. I find this very comforting, and it makes me less scared of a Trump presidency than many of my family members and friends. But when a politician talks about "draining the swamp", that's a clear sign that he's not willing to work within the system. We need to protect the swamp.

If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything.

That is not how it went when marriage ceased to be between a man and a woman: if bureaucrats had an objection of conscience at facilitating a man marrying man, they lost their jobs. Such firings weren't called totalitarian by those who now object to insubordination possibly having actual consequences.

I'm not exactly saying that bureaucrats shouldn't be fired if they disobey the president. Just that the process of firing them and finding replacements would serve as a buffer against a totalitarian president implementing his agenda. If only a few bureaucrats object, it's obviously not much of an obstacle. But their act of civil disobedience can still raise awareness of what's going on.

Right - the conscience veto didn't work in the case of marriage because it was only a small handful of people willing to stand up for it. It's different when you're looking at most of the bureaucracy. The president can fire them all, but if so he's destroying his own state apparatus and thus his own ability to act.

There's an obvious rebuttal here - "If I fire the bureaucracy I won't be able to act? But I'm not able to act now! My choice is a bureaucracy that refuses to do what I want, and no bureaucracy that does nothing. At least with no bureaucracy, there isn't an institution actively impeding me, and I can get started on the long, difficult process of building a new state apparatus."

But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.

But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.

First, I — like many — would question just how necessary so much of the federal bureaucracy is. There was that discussion here recently about what the Department of Education does. I'd also point to some of Curtis Yarvin's comments in this interview by Harrison Pitt about bringing in Elon Musk to head a "Department of Government Efficiency":

Well, if you wanted to run the government efficiently, you would do actually the California startup thing, which is you would simply replace it with a different organization; and which is about approximately 100,000 times easier and more effective than trying to take a process-oriented bureaucracy and turn it into some kind of mission-oriented thing.

It would be like, you know, if you told Elon Musk, basically, that he had to build a space program and start with NASA, he would simply fire all of NASA and build SpaceX.

…

Like you can't actually make these organizations more— I mean, you cut a little here; modify, tweak a little, but you can't make them into organizations that are even 1/1000 as efficient as SpaceX.

Moreover, if you're doing this kind of organization where you're just, like, "okay, I'm going to replace the State Department," uh, great, then you're face-to-face with an even more knotty question of what is the State Department, and what does it do, and why does it do it, and is this organization going to have the same goals and missions as the State Department; because the State Department is, of course, living in this sort of, like, exquisite historical fantasy, which it itself has constructed, of the Global American Empire.

…

You would not, if you actually worked from first principles in the way Elon Musk does when he launches a rocket, you would be, like, I don't even know even the concept of a rocket is up for grabs here, because if you look at what the State Department does, and the system it administrates, it is almost entirely a contingent product of history.

…

There's all of this just frame-breaking, where you try to make this thing— we're going to make the State Department more efficient, and you start thinking harder and harder what is the State Department? Why do we need a State Department? Right. And you're just basically, as you get more and more galaxy-brained, you're basically just, like, the reality is the United States does not have an Executive Branch, it has an administrative branch.

So, if you focus only on rebuilding the most core, essential functions of the federal government — can we get by for awhile without a Department of Energy? Transportation? HUD? CPSC? USAID? The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service? the Postal Regulatory Commission? — I can see quite a lot getting done in just four years.

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