> if some of my blogging on conservative issues has given me any political capital with potential Trump voters, then I this is where I want to spend it.
> So here are some reasons why I would be afraid to have Trump as president even if I agreed with him about the issues.It seems to me like this argument was one of not-so-many straws that might have broken some camels’ backs if they’d been allowed to accumulate… [the encouraging response I got from Trump supporters in the comments] isn’t what you get when you do a splendid virtuouso perfomance. This is what you get when you show up.
–Scott Siskind, 2017, re 2016
I’m under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen… No guarantees this is useful to anybody.
–Scott Siskind, 2024
The 2024 Essay
In “ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, or Stein”, Scott makes very little argument himself, instead farming the majority of the case out wholesale by reference and putting his own few contributions in such handwavey language and roundabout structure that it was almost impossible to identify his arguments.
His essay, as I see it, comprises 3 parts (which don't align with the section headings he stuck on the post):
- Notable Harris endorsements / Trump non-endorsements, incorporated by reference;
- Specific allegations of Trump’s wrongdoings, and argumentation on their relevance;
- Counter-arguments to specific popular anti-Harris / pro-Trump arguments.
Specific Allegations & Arguments
(I'm putting this section first, since it's obviously the most relevant.)
“Fiddl[ing] with” election law (#)
One worry is that Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win (I don’t claim Democrats never do this, just that Trump has openly endorsed doing it orders of magnitude more).
My gut reaction as a red-triber is simply to ask:
- Is this referring to Trump's support of pre-election integrity measures such as voter ID requirements?
- Is this referring to Trump's demands of post-election integrity efforts such as ballot audits?
- Or is there some genuine misconduct Trump is allegedly “giv[ing his supporters] a mandate” for, which I haven't heard about because I'm in a Republican echochamber?
The hypothetical marginal Trump voter this essay aims to chip away at, who's got over the psychological hurdle of “this is a waste of time; I already know what the conclusion will be” and tries to give Scott a fair shake in hopes of learning more about the timeline he's actually in, is rewarded for this openness with nothing but a punch in the nose.
“A bipartisan issue, my foot!” we can imagine the reader saying, as Scott refuses to provide so much as a Google Search keyword to bootstrap the case for his premise that Trump is wielding the symmetric weapon[jargon] of election official misconduct at all, much less more than the next guy; but immediately changes the topic—
“Might” threaten opponents (#)
Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.
Again, rather than give us any actual exposition on how to get from “symmetric weapons exist” to “vote not red”, he veers off into a 3-paragraph, 445-word tangent about how bad it could be if America were a dictatorship:
This is far from Hitler or even Stalin. The model I worry about most is Hugo Chavez… None of these [tinpot generalissimos] will ever be the villains in an Indiana Jones movie, but none of [them oversee] First World countries with great economies and vital contributions to scientific progress either. They’re just somewhat-poor, somewhat-corrupt places whose citizens keep trying to swim across the Rio Grande and make it to the US where there’s still freedom and opportunity.
Why does autocracy correlate with low development? I’m not sure, and I’m not trying to make some grand Acemoglu-style thesis, but again Chavez provides a useful model. Chavez fired everyone competent or independent in government, because they sometimes talked back to him or disagreed with him; he replaced them with craven yes-men and toadies. His ideas weren’t all bad, but when he did have bad ideas, there was nobody to challenge or veto them. He frequently chose what was good for his ego (or his ability to short-term maintain power) over what was good for the country, and there was no system to punish him for those decisions. Since rule-of-law would block his whims, he kept undermining rule-of-law until it was no longer strong enough to protect things like property, investment, or a free economy. Ambitious educated people, seeing nothing left in Venezuela besides a lifetime of trying to out-bootlick the other bootlickers to curry favor from a narcissist, left the country for greener pastures.
You don’t get from a flourishing democracy to Hugo Chavez in one leap - at least not without a politician younger and more vigorous than Trump. But our democracy isn’t entirely flourishing right now, and frogs are easily boiled. My threat model is less “Trump himself is exactly like Chavez”, and more “Trump’s election shows there are minimal consequences for violating norms; he brings us 10% closer to Venezuela; during the next election, both candidates violate the norms, the next guy brings us 20% closer to Venezuela, and so on.” The Republicans are already arguing that the Democrats’ authoritarian experimentation with cancel culture means it’s only fair that they get to have a mobocratic censorship regime too, if they ever get back in power. Once Trump escalates a bit, the Democrat after him will feel the same way and escalate even more. There will be plenty more chances to stop the cycle - but, like the proverb about planting the tree, the best time was ten years ago and the second-best time is now.
— like, sure, man, I get conditional hypotheticals — but that's not the disconnect here! Harris “might” threaten opponents, too! So “might” Stein; so “might” Oliver! Why are they endorsed but not Trump, on this basis?
Trying to parse some sense out of the passage, I see two hideously conjoined arguments that would stand better surgically separated:
- Trump surrounds himself with poor council; this may lead to mild economic ruin, as it has in dictatorships.
- Trump “violat[ed] norms” in the election process; if he succeeds, it will lead to escalating retaliation from the Democrats; this will converge on a sequence of increasingly dictatorial candidates; this may lead to mild economic ruin.
Regarding the first of these: that Trump does surround himself with good council on issues he's personally ignorant on was explicitly named to me as a consideration by several people I knew who supported his campaign in 2016. The Ben Carson nomination was named as one; and even living under a rock as I have I haven't escaped notice of RFKj and his apparent excellence. (If only I had some smart, well-informed, words-and-research loving, democrat-voting blogger who could tell me which Orange Man cabinet picks I might look into to to find evidence of this pale quasi-corruption... instead, I just have Scott Siskind, 2024: No Guarantees of Usefulness to Anybody. Oh, well.)
Regarding the second: The Trump supporters I know explicitly think that he had the more norm-respecting stance on election interference. His vilified “I love you” speech telling the protestors to stand down is a great Shiri's Scissor[jargon] case, and Scott entirely missing that is basically the theme of the whole post. Even when Scott claims to be trying his best (or more charitably, is trying his best) to imagine what a representative, reasonable Trump supporter believes, the idea that it might include “I support Trump because he is the candidate who didn't violate or attempt to violate our electoral system” just... doesn't come up, somehow—
The strongest counterargument [I can think of] to the above is that yes, authoritarianism is bad - and yes, Trump will take us a bit of the way to being a second-world country - but the Democrats are more authoritarian and worse.
Or, rather, the Democrats may not be “authoritarian” in the strictest sense of the dictionary definition, but that’s because the Democrats wrote the dictionary and defined the term to mean “bad in the exact way that bad conservatives are bad” (this is almost literally true; a lot of the current authoritarianism discussion comes from a construct invented by Theodor Adorno called “right-wing authoritarianism”).
… you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
When I look at actual democratic backsliding, it looks nothing like this. It looks like a group of clever well-placed people gradually tightening the knot while maintaining plausible deniability. A court-packing here, but only because the old court was hidebound and reactionary. A carefully-worded constitutional amendment there, but only because nothing ever got done under the old system. A corruption crackdown, but only because corruption is genuinely bad. Then ten years later you wake up and one set of guys control everything and if you speak out against them they can destroy your life.
So (continues the strongest argument I can think of for supporting Trump) the Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Democrats got every social media company in the country to censor opposing opinions while swearing up and down that they were doing nothing of the sort, all on some sort of plausible but never-put-into-so-many-words threat that things would go worse for them if they didn’t. They did it so elegantly and naturally that even now nobody really wants to call them on it - partly because it’s hard to tell where free corporate choice ended and government coercion started, and partly because they’ve successfully established a culture where it’s declasse to even talk about it. So, which side are you more scared of?
This is the one pro-Trump argument that genuinely bothers me…
He doesn't make any effort whatsoever to spell out the case for the foundational premise that {Republicans-elided-into-Trump} “egged on” the {{protestors, at least some of whom plausibly believed themselves to be acting lawfully}-elided-into-{specific rioters who caused demonstrable property damage}}. He says that the argument is what most affects him, and is the “strongest” counterargument he can imagine. The idea that any reasonable Trump supporter is against political violence and trashing the rule of law and supports Trump on that basis is apparently just inconceivable, so Scott doubles down—
Vaguely: Trump broke the law (#)
You can’t even start worrying about whether bureaucrats are forming a priestly caste until you solve mobs trying to beat up the opposing side’s politicians. Yes, left-wingers are subtly weaponizing norms to support their own side, in much the same way that once you’ve established basic principles of non-murder / non-theft / capitalism, businessmen can exploit those principles to run businesses you don’t like. “People are working within the system to do something I don’t like” is a more refined level of problem than “there is no system and we’re in the state of nature murdering each other”. First you need to maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, and if you succeed, only then can you take your next step of worrying about all the people trying to find sneaky ways to gather power within the system.
Unless you want to vote third party, you can only use your vote to thwart/punish one side or the other. I think thwarting/punishing Trump’s foundation-level attack on norms using violence and rule-of-law-violations is a higher priority than thwarting/punishing the Democrats’ more subtle strategy of undermining liberalism within its existing norms.
—yes, OK, we get it, Scott! *If* Trump were a violent insurrectionist destroying the fabric of society, *then*, sure, we should probably stop him or whatever.
But that's not the contentious point and you should know that, Scott — around half of all Republicans think the very attempt to connect him criminally to J6 was politically motivated!
You can prove “if P then Q” all day, and we still need you to prove P per se before we'll believe Q. You have spent the entire essay so far claiming, assuming that Trump is the more violent choice, that Trump is the one who did objectively worse stuff, arguing from those assumptions without ever deigning to throw a crumb of support under any of them.
Referenced Essays
Curtis Yarvin, “Biden/Harris 2024”
Nick Fuentes, “How the GOP Conquered Trumpism | America First Ep. 1356” (via Newsweek)
Richard Spencer, various comments (via Newsweek)
David Duke, “Human Rights Radio [Ep. 2024-10-15]” (via Newsweek)
Scott Siskind (2016), “SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein”
Noah Smith, “Realistically, how much damage could Trump do to the U.S. economy?”
Noah Smith, “The free world teeters on the edge of a knife”
Matthew Adelstein, “In Defense of Trump Derangement Syndrome”
Counter-Arguments
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Appendix A: table of contents
Sticking this here at the end as an interim editorial thing
- Claim (with no source or reference provided): “Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win … [and] has openly endorsed doing it orders of magnitude more [than Democrats have].”
- Claim (with no source or reference provided): “Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him.”
- Claim/Argument (with no source or reference provided): “Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol … thwarting/punishing Trump’s foundation-level attack on norms using violence and rule-of-law-violations is [a] priority…”
- Argument (to readers who value non-unified government): “SCOTUS… is firmly Republican… we have a judicial defense against the left but not the right…”
- Argument (to readers who value non-unified government): “Donald Trump spent the past eight years purging the Republican Party of people willing to stand up to him. … Meanwhile, the Democrats are delightfully unorganized…”
- Argument (to readers who value freedom, liberalism, and democracy):
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