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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Has anyone been checking out the reddit and hacker news reaction to TW's FAA scandal follow-up?

He's downvoted to -44 on /r/atc, which applauded his essay last year. Highlights from the comments:

Trace, the truth of the matter is you think you deserve a ton of credit for bringing this story to light. But this story has already been brought to light, been analyzed, and it’s nowhere close to the actual scandal of FAA hiring.

The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.

There are only two sides right now. There are the neoconfederate fascists intent on dragging us back to the antebellum era, of which Trump, Vance, and Sailer are definitely a part. And there’s the rest of us.

You don’t have to be on their side if you don’t want to be. But if you choose to be, at least be honest with yourself about what you’re doing.

The top-voted comment on hackernews is accusing it of being a rehashed non-scandal laundered by authoritarian fascists. But the actual comments are mostly in favor, or pointing out that there's suddenly a lot of brand new accounts defending the FAA & claiming "this wasn't real DEI."

Grendel-khan describes the reaction:

The left outside the institution at fault swears up and down that something like this would never happen, and it's just right-wing disinformation, and you're probably a closet right-winger if you believe it.

The left inside the institution at fault swears up and down that this is a good thing and it's obvious that it's happening and why are you making such a big deal of it?

Taking it for granted for a moment that a lot of this stuff is totally astroturfed by blueanon orgs with AI-assisted spamming, it looks like doubling-down and tripling-down on full spectrum information manipulation is still the only strategy on the menu, even as it's increasingly failing and backfiring outside of totally controlled environments like reddit and bluesky.

So, what are the next four years going to look like? Is there going to be any evolution in strategy? Are they correct that just repeating a party line hard enough will bring people back into the fold?

I think that right now it's easy to point at this sort of frantic concern-trolling and laugh, but in a few years the average voter won't remember anything about some FAA hiring scandal except that "Trump used a tragedy for a culture war attack on minorities." Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.

So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
Moldbug and especially Thiel may absolutely despise the press, but they see the manipulation of public opinion as a quirk of "demotic" regimes, and have no time for it themselves. Moldbug in particular dismisses color revolutions with the over-simplistic "why does the dictator not simply shoot the revolutionaries with crypto-controlled weapons?" Thiel is quieter but clearly sees controlling the murder drones and spying rings as more important than propaganda. Musk is the only one of Trump's big backers who thinks control of social media is important, and I'm convinced that's because of his showman's instincts and desire for attention rather than some strategic policy.

People here have been talking as if the left will shift to violence and hard power in response to their usual methods failing last year (assassinations of Musk & Trump, etc.). I'm a lot more worried about them doing the same thing they always do and getting away with it, because people don't have lasting immunity to propaganda.

I think this is key why Trump is trying to fire people at USAID contrary to the claims made below that he needs to do this through statute. I think one of the people At USAId also happened to have a role at Reddit. They are clearly interconnected. You kill the funding and you might kill the astroturf.

Also podcasts are key—Vance should be on a major podcast once every week or two breaking it down for everyone. He is a superb communicator and generally thoughtful. You can bypass the Reddit blob or the news blob and go straight to the people. Those people can then turnkey that to other people.

The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.

Ironic, given that just a few days ago we had people accusing TracingWoodgrains of being too leftist.

As someone whose positions are also sufficiently idiosyncratic that I don't fit in perfectly with either "side", I'm not unsympathetic to him. But this is simply the fate of all "centrists" - that's the reality of it. It would be like someone during WW2 saying "I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!" He wouldn't be looked upon with kindness in either country.

Ultimately if you want to avoid getting crushed by the tidal forces of politics, you have to decide which issues are most important to you, join the side that is most aligned with you on those key issues, and table your disagreements for a later date.

It would be like someone during WW2 saying "I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!" He wouldn't be looked upon with kindness in either country.

Yeah, everybody hates the fucking Swiss.

I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say here beyond, "TracingWoodgrains is just right."

He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible". That's unironically the sort of logic that gets you the Great Leap Forward, where lower-ranking officials are afraid to report anything that goes against the narrative preferred by the higher-ups, and the result is always disastrous.

Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.

The fact that people whose brains have been eaten by partisanship and culture war are unable to see that, whether that be lefties who have to deny and distract and minimise the scandal because it's going to be a win for the right, or whether it be righties who cannot possibly grant that a hated outsider did a better job of identifying and advocating for an issue that should have been an easy win for them, is really their own problem.

TracingWoodgrains is right.

Everything else is distraction.

or whether it be righties who cannot possibly grant that a hated outsider did a better job of identifying and advocating for an issue that should have been an easy win for them, is really their own problem.

TracingWoodgrains is right.

I don't know who had their brain eaten by culture war if you think that people who don't want to sing praises of your friend must be distracting from the issue.

How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.

He did a better job reporting on that particular story

It was Steve Sailer who brought it to the attention of the online right with his piece predating Trace's by a month, with basically the same information content.

Oh, that's hilarious.

Did we just confirm Sailer is actually a furry?

As I said, it doesn't matter whether you like him or not. Nor do I care whether or not you praise him. The merits of TW as an individual are beside the point. The point is the issue itself.

I submit that TW is right about the issue, and that he has done a better job of bringing this particular issue to the public attention than anybody on the Motte, much less James Lindsay or Chris Rufo. Rufo has probably been more effective as an anti-woke activist in general, but on the FAA hirings scandal specifically - movement there is because of TW. He notes this himself.

And yes, he voted for Harris. He voted for Harris while publicly and passionately expressing his dissatisfaction with her, and after the election, he went on to continue to explain his problems with her, and what he thinks the Democrats ought to do, which means that I think this portrayal of him as some kind of bootlicking Democrat partisan is absurd. He made a judgement that, as much as he disliked Harris, he found her on balance the less-bad candidate that Donald Trump. If you want to blame him for literally everying that Harris or her political faction ever advocated for, then by the same logic we must blame every Trump voter for literally everything that Trump or his political faction ever advocated for. That is a lunatic standard to hold any voter to.

And even so, it is irrelevant, because whatever you think of TW's choice in the 2024 election, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the FAA hiring scandal or his activism thereabouts.

On the issue - he is right. You don't have to praise him. You don't have to like him. But he is right about the FAA.

Rufo has probably been more effective as an anti-woke activist in general, but on the FAA hirings scandal specifically

Oh, ok. I thought when you said "the issue", you meant anti-wokeness (or anti-DEI-in-particular), not just the FAA thing. Yeah good for him, he noticed it when others didn't. Why is that supposed to be such a big deal?

EDIT: according to @ahobata, he wasn't even the first to report on this, and one the Internet's infamous noticers beat him to it by a month. So can you explain to me, why is this case supposed to be so embarrassing to the anti-woke?

And yes, he voted for Harris. He voted for Harris while publicly and passionately expressing his dissatisfaction with her, and after the election, he went on to continue to explain his problems with her, and what he thinks the Democrats ought to do,

That's nice, but tell, if more people listened to him during the elections, would there be anything being done against the DEI issue?

which means that I think this portrayal of him as some kind of bootlicking Democrat partisan is absurd.

I disagree, he very clearly is a partisan in the sense that he'll argue to vote for the Democrats over a Republican that's actually active on the culture war front, regardless of how much he will chastise the Democrats for not doing what he wants. I'm pretty sure I remember an old post of his where he was chastising Biden in much the same way he did with Harris, threatening that if things don't improve he just might defect to the Republicans. Would you say things improved over the course of the Biden administration? Would you say Harris was a better candidate than Biden? What exactly would have to happen for me to be able to conclude that he is, in fact, a Dem partisan?

because whatever you think of TW's choice in the 2024 election, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the FAA hiring scandal or his activism thereabouts.

Again, I disagree. You can't beat me over the head with "TW was right" if he effectively wanted to convince people to have the issue continue.

On the issue - he is right. You don't have to praise him. You don't have to like him. But he is right about the FAA.

If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you? To me, the FAA is just one of infinity cases where an institution engages in blatant racism, it's the least surprising thing in the world, and Trace did indeed come out on the side of the issue that is correct. I don't recall anyone here doubting his claims on the FAA.

Part of me sympathizes with TWG but only part.

Back in the twenty-teens he was a vocal advocate of the sort of "full spectrum information manipulation" that has become the standard. Where he once bragged about fabricacating evidence to pwn LibsOfTikTok he now wonders why nobody trusts him.

The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic. So as far as I'm concerned, they're stuck between the icky chuds like me who know it's a problem but have aesthetically unpleasant views and the other kind of people who stick their heads in the sand in the face of overwhelming evidence. People who will bald-facedly lie even when you bring the smoldering gun, the receipt, and a signed confession are bad people.

And despite all of this... they are more aligned with the latter kind of people then the former.

I will make a prediction now: TW will still be hacking at this ten years from now, doing their enlightened centrist gig, making no progress. Because the liberals they are trying to convince don't really exist: they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.

"I have no sympathy for people who are not fully on board with my team" is about the coldest take you can have in the culture war. I, for my part, hope Trace will still be at it in 10 years, showing that there is a way to survive without submitting to either of the two tyrannies of unreason.

Well said. I might borrow 'the tyrannies of unreason' - that's an excellent phrase.

It's not a question of "being fully on board with my team;" it's the prioritization of what is fundamentally an aesthetic choice ("these chuds are low-status and have low-status views; I don't want to think of myself as being like them") over purported principal ("people shouldn't impose racial gatekeeping mechanisms on hiring for life-and-death public safety positions").

they are trying to persuade a species of extinct men who could be swayed by reason and good faith.

They're not extinct, they just don't have loyalty to a particular party as their terminal value. Even in Europe, I'm nearly-literally watching women who were welcoming refugees 10 years ago, now dancing to the tune of "Ausländer Raus", and conspiracy-posting about woke NGO's sponsored by the EU (roughly analogous to the USAID scandal uncovered by Trump). Trace wants to arrest this process of defection by promising to reform the Democratic party from within, the problem he has is that:

  • People have eyes, and
  • With every defection he's losing an ally in the party, not only dropping the credibility of his promise, but lowering the actual chances of his success.

Its kind of the age-old dilemma. Speaking truth to power doesn't really work.

You have to acquire power, THEN speak truth.

But the process of acquiring power requires you to believe or promulgate so many falsehoods you will probably forget the truths you wanted to spread anyway.

If speaking truth, plainly, effected change we wouldn't even be in the mess needing saving.

Is there any information Trump is or has shaken the FAA up over this? At the minimum the ATCs who cheated should be identified and fired, the candidates who were denied because they failed should be awarded money damages with the option to apply again, and everyone at the FAA who was involved in this bullshit BA test should be fired and lose their pension. Surely whether or not it's actual DEI, everyone can agree it was misconduct and this is the appropriate remedy?

Directly? No. The anti DEI EO can be used by Duffy to correct the problem. The problem is that it will take years to affect change. It also seems clear that Duffy is going to work with DOGE to technological improve ATC. Curious to see how that affects the industry.

Moldbug is smart enough that he understands that a truly demotic regime, whether it is left-coded or right-coded, would likely put him up against the wall and shoot him for some reason. Hence his constant harping on the idea that we should treat the defeated regime's soldiers with decency and that we should let elves rather than hobbits take care of things. I agree with him about all this. Some people here on TheMotte don't understand what would actually likely happen to them in a true authoritarian/populist revolution. They think that this site would still exist and they would still be allowed to write politically incorrect essays. They wouldn't. We are far from that now, but I see the danger of it on the horizon. Just because leftist authoritarianism has been given a huge punch on the nose does not mean that we are not in danger of rightist authoritarianism.

We were able to keep this site going under leftist authoritarianism; who is to say we wouldn't under rightist authoritarianism, and write posts about how God obviously doesn't exist even if we are aren't allowed to say it in public?

A lot of neoreactionary though is about how authoritarianism is the default state of mankind, and liberalism is an unstable equilibrium that can only ever exist as an ephemeral waystation on the road to the next tyranny. That being the case, all we can decide is whether we would rather live under leftist authoritarianism or rightist authoritarianism. I know what I pick.

Christianity may have silenced Galileo, expelled Percy Shelley, fought against evolution, condemned heavy metal, and ostracized Dungeons and Dragons, but it also created a thriving civilization that stood for almost two thousand years and conquered most of the planet. Communism gave us the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward. Wokeness gave us South Africa and the Great Replacement.

Catholicism demands that you believe nonsense about the Eucharist and the Trinity, while Mormonism demands that you believe nonsense about golden plates and a planet called Kolob i.e. things that have absolutely no relevance to the rest of your life. Conversely, Progressivism demands that you believe nonsense about gender and race, while Communism demands that you believe nonsense about economics and human nature i.e. things you have to deal with every day. Given those choices, you are much better off taking your chances with the Christians than with the nominal Atheists.

The Dreaded Jim famously said:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

And:

If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.

If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.

Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.

Just because leftist authoritarianism has been given a huge punch on the nose does not mean that we are not in danger of rightist authoritarianism.

But we believe we can defeat rightist authoritarianism; we have a playbook, past victories, and technological solutions upon which we rest.

We might be right they'll work again, or we might be wrong; we might be right about the reasons they worked, or we might be wrong- but the fact the playbook exists, and that it worked once before, gives us that confidence. Right or wrong.

Has the Trump/Elon government made any moves to ensure the military is on-side? There's been a fair bit of left media labelling their actions with DOGE etc as a "coup" (eg https://x.com/micsolana/status/1888346474007670971) and last I checked, while the majority of the military votes Republican, the generals are largely woke-left and I'm a little (though not extremely) concerned they could be moved to act if the left-wing media noise heats up. I'm not sure if Hegseth has had time to do anything yet.

If the US military became un-neutral in the politics battle in either direction, I feel that it would lead to civil war. The only rational and emotionally satisfyingly honorable plausible response from non-right-wingers if the military came out largely in support of the right to the point that the left was about to actually lose all power in a real genuinely frightening way and not just in a "I'm going to move to Europe cause Trump sucks" way would be secession. Likewise, the only rational and emotionally satisfying response from the right if the military overthrew Trump would be revolution, since without revolution they would be certain to never have any power again in the foreseeable future.

If there is ever a coup against President Trump, it will come from waters much darker and deeper than media hysteria over a cabinet organization named after a cartoon dog.

Anything I'd see from the media I would completely disregard.

Hegseth (while young) is a warfighter's warfighter. I think a large part of the military will be very very happy to have his priorities entrenched in the SecDef.

I would suspect a large part of the military signed up because of particular personality traits and some of those are reflected in Hegseth.

That said, he has his flaws and he might flame out. We'll see.

(I meant to do a bigger post about this but never got around to it) Sure, Hegseth is a "warfighter". He's still not qualified, though. I'm not talking about cheating on his wife, and cheating on his second wife, both of which blatantly violate the UCMJ, and although that's already very selectively enforced, this really can't help. Nor am I talking about his reported alcoholism (also a UCMJ issue), which many sources had claimed led to him being forced out of leading a veterans organization. Nor am I talking about allegations he abused his wife, nor allegations of sexual assault (which I don't think had enough evidence to be worth considering here anyway). All of those are modifiers - things that might make you not hire someone who you'd otherwise hire. It's just, directly, his lack of experience. Any given 'warfighter' wouldn't make a good secdef, you need to manage an incredibly large bureaucracy, which is a distinct skill, and also just make good decisions. There's just no strong reason to pick him instead of many other very qualified candidates. Fox news host?

I agree with criticisms of Biden's Lloyd Austin pick - he's obviously a diversity hire. When you pick the best black person, instead of the best person, you'll get a worse person, and in critical leadership positions that matters! It'd matter even without HBD, with which the best black person will usually be significantly worse than the best person. But, if you believe that, that it's very important to pick the best person, how do you get Hegseth? Austin was at least qualified:

Shortly after brigade command, he served as Chief, Joint Operations Division, J-3, on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. His next assignment, in 2001, was as Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver (ADC-M), 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Georgia. As the ADC-M, he helped lead the division's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.[9] Leading the fight from the front, Austin traveled the 500 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad in his command and control vehicle. The division reached Baghdad and secured the city.[14][15] Austin was awarded a Silver Star, the nation's third highest award for valor, for his actions as commander during the invasion.

On December 8, 2006, Austin was promoted to lieutenant general and assumed command of XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.[17] In February 2008, Austin became the second highest ranking commander in Iraq, taking command of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq (MNC-I). As commander of MNC-I, he directed the operations of approximately 152,000 joint and coalition forces across all sectors of Iraq.[18] He was the first African American general officer to lead a corps-sized element in combat.[15] Austin assumed the mission during the period when the Surge forces were drawing down. He expertly oversaw the responsible transition of forces out of the country while ensuring that progress continued on the ground.

Austin became the commander of CENTCOM on March 22, 2013, after being nominated by President Obama in late 2012.[37][38][39] Austin was preceded as CENTCOM commander by General James Mattis, whom Austin would later succeed as secretary of defense. In his capacity as CENTCOM Commander, General Austin oversaw all U.S. troops deployed and major U.S. military operations around the area of Middle-East and Central and South Asia. The area consisted of 20 countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon.[40]

Whereas Hegseth 'served first as an infantry platoon leader and later as civil-military operations officer' and then 'returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain' in Afghanistan. And then went into politics, and then became a Fox News host. All that should be respected, but qualify you to be secdef?

You cited credentials. Are they worth a damn or just a signal that for example Lloyd played politics really well? I think the primary goal with Hegseth was to pick someone far away from the blob. Necessarily that meant picking someone who doesn’t have the credentials but hopefully has innate competency.

Any given 'warfighter' wouldn't make a good secdef, you need to manage an incredibly large bureaucracy, which is a distinct skill, and also just make good decisions

He can always ask Elon for help.

What does "qualified" in your eyes even look like?

I can't disagree with you. He has the flaws you've outlined. There should have been someone better that would be willing to potentially burn their reputation in order to strip DEI from the Dept of Defense and make other needed reforms.

There's been a fair bit of left media labelling their actions with DOGE etc as a "coup"

Between this and the Jan 6 riot, I see people are trying to water down "coup" until it's just as meaningless as "Nazi" or "fascist".

The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."

While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.

Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.

Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.

An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test.

(Emphasis mine.)

Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.

Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.

And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.

Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.

But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.

I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.

To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.

I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.

EDIT: Typos.

I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances.

I would have guessed the Covid Hysteria would have been when you were worried about "democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances" given the rule of law was thrown out the door, judges refused to do anything to help, and tens of millions of people were seriously harmed. Were you opposed to and outspoken against those vast power expansions and legal, constitutional, and civil rights violations?

The "rule of law" and "checks and balances" thing is all an illusion (or at least a poor description); the actual check and balance is power. The way you get back to a détente where the "rule of law" and checks and balances illusion looks like the real thing is you have the ability to harm and punish the political opposition who would do otherwise.

Free speech, rights, etc., only exist as long as the people who want them have enough power. When they don't have power, they are ran over irrelevant of whatever law or constitution or anything else.

I would have guessed the Covid Hysteria would have been when you were worried about "democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances" given the rule of law was thrown out the door, judges refused to do anything to help, and tens of millions of people were seriously harmed. Were you opposed to and outspoken against those vast power expansions and legal, constitutional, and civil rights violations?

I've written a little bit on my views on the Covid response here.

Free speech, rights, etc., only exist as long as the people who want them have enough power. When they don't have power, they are ran over irrelevant of whatever law or constitution or anything else.

Sometimes, I view it rather differently: A society allowing free speech is often a sign of the ruling coalition's power, and the weakness of its citizens.

China needs to control speech because they are weak. The speech of their people actually poses a threat to them.

The United States doesn't usually need to control speech because the ruling coalition is strong. The speech of its people poses no threat to its overall stability.

COINTELPRO is the kind of thing that happens in the US when a group poses an actual threat to the United States, and has moved from words to actions.

This is just such an insane understanding of the current state. You are complaining about a lack of checks and balances. Fine. Understand that for the last fifty years the administrative state has run amok with functionally no checks. No balances. They fund their own activists and media to make sure they get what they want.

So now we have an executive cutting down that bureaucratic state — an energetic executive trying to eliminate the unelected unaccountable and unconstitutional fourth branch. Yet you are upset about it from a checks and balances? No you need to kill the admin state in order for congress and the presidency to actually have power and therefor effort there to be actual checks.

Understand that for the last fifty years the administrative state has run amok with functionally no checks.

Can you give a specific example of this you think is representative? I think there are a lot of possible criticisms of government bureaucracy, but they are very 'checked' by congress and the courts. Courts limit or grant power to agencies all the time, and Congress for the most part creates them and grants them any of the power they have. Agencies can't do most things they want to do, and they have to work within the complicated game the courts and legislature and president present them. That's the checks and balances doing their thing. The output is obviously not ideal, but 'bad outcome' doesn't mean 'no checks or balances'!

Well, USAID is a prime example. They funnel billions to pet projects clearly unrelated to their purpose with nary a peep. Indeed, it seems like they used these programs to help maintain control Over the narrative and therefore Congress. Another concrete example is the Hunter laptop story and the IC integrating itself at Twitter / Facebook etc. read the Twitter files. Infamously, Chuck Schumer stated that you don’t try to correct the intelligence community because they have six ways to Sunday to fuck you over.

More broadly, look at Chevron. It was a judicial theory that said “if the statute is ambiguous, then we defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law provided it is reasonable.” In practice, this meant if there was a hint of ambiguity the courts would defer to agency action.

But the rabbit hole goes even further as you had Auer deference. Auer deference is the idea that if an agency’s regulations are ambiguous then you defer to the agency’s interpretation of its own actions provided it wasn’t just a litigation position. So the very basic guardrails of the APA need not be respected because the agency can outside the APA turn ambiguous legislation into law.

And even the APA is pretty toothless. The standard for overturning agency action is arbitrary and capricious— a very high bar.

Of course the SCOTUS has been reducing the scope of agency power in recent years (eg major questions doctrine, Loper Bright, Kisor) but that’s changing the deck after 40+ years of largely unchecked power. Trump now is going after their narrative control.

Interstate commerce regulations are a big problem. Basically, Congress was given the power to regulate “interstate commerce”, which by now has been stretched by the administrative state to mean “anything a person can conceive of offering for sale, even if it never crosses sate lines, and even if nobody actually buys or sells it.” This redefinition of “interstate commerce” is the reason for most of the overreaching by the AS, because it allowed them to basically regulate all commerce anywhere. Which is why we have things like regulations on the kinds of toilets you can install in your house, or tge kinds of materials that can be used in mattresses. You name it, there’s a regulation for it, and most of it traces back to an insane court ruling that allowed the government to tax wheat grown on private property, and not only had no intention of selling it across state lines, but had no intention to sell it at all.

Can you give a specific example of this you think is representative?

Just off the top of my head: was anyone in the IRS ever punished for going after conservative NGOs?

I have already said words to the effect that I am fine with dismantling the administrative state, if that is what voters want Trump and Congress to do. I am less convinced than you are that Trump couldn't have done this the "right way" with actual laws. Sure, a few Republican lawmakers defecting would scupper his plans, but if they did, that too would be an important check in our system working as intended.

Trump has the bully pulpit. Trump claims he has a mandate. Let him actually do the work of getting the laws he wants passed.

This is a better path for one big reason: If Trump accomplishes his dismantling of the administrative state via EOs, that will mean that if Democrats ever get the presidency again they can just bring the administrative state back even if it will take some doing. This is all assuming we actually have a republic where Democrats could actually get back into power again, of course.

I would argue there is a constitutional requirement for Trump to destroy the current iteration of the admin state under the take care clause. Also if he waits to do it through legislation first nothing will happen. He needs to expose in full the fraud and abuse while showing the programs do shit to give republicans cover to gut a decent chunk of it. I will be disappointed if laws ultimately don’t come down but I see this as step one; not step one of one.

I am less convinced than you are that Trump couldn't have done this the "right way" with actual laws.

Respectfully, are you an administrative lawyer? How familiar are you with the Administrative Procedures Act and the dozens of legislative and executive actions which together, in concert, have intertwined to create the tangled mess that is the current administrative state? How familiar are you with the history of the legislative veto and INS v. Chadha?

It's not reducible to schoolhouse rock-tier "you need congress to pass a law," and you shouldn't minimize the legal and bureaucratic infighting that's taking place.

Isn't it? Trump, 50 R senators, and a R majority of the House could pretty much immediately nuke the filibuster and repeal/revoke all of that. They're not going to, and that's, depending on your perspective, the checks and balances working, or the checks and balances failing, but they could.

They don't have to, and shouldn't have to just because people don't actually understand the state of the law and the left is willing to strategically misrepresent and/or lie about it when it suits their purposes (for the record the right isn't much, if at all, better). Significant powers have already been delegated to the President, or arguably unlawfully usurped from its constitutional power as commander in chief (e.g. protection from at-will removal).

I feel like the administrative state is like Planet Fitness. It's easy to sign up for but impossible to cancel.

We should make it just as easy to get rid of as it was to implement in the first place. We voted for the Department of Education so that children would have better outcomes. But this hasn't happened. In fact, since the DOE was founded, our international rankings have tumbled.

Congress never voted for "Let's hire a bunch of workers with no accountability whatsoever and, once they are hired, they can never be fired for any reason whatsoever".

The President is in charge of the executive branch. He is empowered to enforce the laws passed by congress which clearly means firing workers for incompetence and dereliction of duty.

I think the president has a constitutional duty to ensure the laws are being properly enforced by the admin state and therefore any law that limits his ability to provide oversight infringes on a core constitutional power of the president. I have wholly bought into the Scalia dissent in Morrison.

No one ever voted for "and once they are hired, they can never be fired for any reason whatsoever".

The original Civil Service Reform Act was passed by enormous margins

Passed the Senate on December 27, 1882 (39-5) Passed the House on January 4, 1883 (155-46)

The most recent one passed by even larger margins

Passed the Senate on August 24, 1978 (87-1) House on October 6, 1978 (365-8)

While on one hand today's GOP can only dream of such majorities in wiping it away, they really don't need much more than 50% + 1. Given that remove employees fixes the deficit, they can even use reconciliation to skip the filibuster.

Thanks. This is kinda nuts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_Reform_Act_of_1978

In March, President Jimmy Carter sent a proposal to Congress to bring about civil service reform in order to “bring efficiency and accountability to the Federal Government.”

The act also created processes for firing employees found to be incompetent and provided protection for "whistleblowers".

Chalk one up for mistake theory I suppose. This act was supposed to do the very opposite of what it did.

Passed the Senate on August 24, 1978 (87-1) House on October 6, 1978 (365-8)

It's mindboggling going back 50 years and seeing what a high-trust society really looks like. Back then Carter could propose a law that said "oh sure we're going to make the government accountable and efficient" and everyone just assumed that it would happen. Because, um, that's what the law says.

No one understood "who, whom" back then. They all just thought "We're all on the same team guys. I'm sure the government workers won't just rob us blind. After all, they love their country too."

Like many awful things, this was there to solve a different awful problem, and now that the original problem is gone we don't even realize it.

Prior to 1892, administrations routinely gave out the vast majority of federal commissions as graft. It was a giant crony network robbing the country blind. Hiring by merit and removing firing except for-cause was, believe it or not, a step forwards at the time.

Of course, in the end you can't destroy a power you can only shift it around the plate. And so instead of being robbed by nepotistic machine politicians, we empowered the civil service. And then the civil service turned around and robbed us blind.

You can only destroy a monster by summoning another monster.

You can only destroy a monster by summoning another monster.

If Final Fantasy X has taught me anything, you can destroy a monster without doing that. But you do have to kill God to do it.

But you do have to kill God to do it.

But we did that 140 years ago. Nothing else should stand in our way.

The Federalist Papers never conceived of an imperial executive because they never conceived of an imperial state. The Federal government was always intended to be small, with most real governance done by the states. And until 1941, with the exception of the Civil War, this is exactly what it was.

In 1913, the federal budget was only about 2-3% of GDP. It was funded almost entirely by tariffs.

Today, the federal budget is about 25% of GDP, funded mostly by taxes of individuals. The federal government touches every aspect of our lives, and its bounds exceed anything the founders could have conceived. If this is to be the case, it is better to be governed by democratically-elected representatives than by an unelected elite.

The founders never intended America to be ruled by unelected judges and bureaucrats. To restore their vision, it is imperative that we shrink the size of the state as much as possible. But as this directly takes money out of the mouths of very powerful and corrupt people, it will not be easy.

The Federal government was always intended to be small, with most real governance done by the states. And until 1941, with the exception of the Civil War, this is exactly what it was.

Kind of kicks it down the road dunnit? Did they expect the States (doing most of the governments) to be dominated by state legislatures or state executives?

Historically, the check on monarchs' power was the need to convene parliament to raise new taxes. Now, the president must convene congress to beg permission to spend less money. Is it tyrannical for the executive branch to not spend money raised by congress? Is president Trump ushering in a Daoist dictatorship through unilateral inaction?

Yes. If parliament or congress identifies an area of interest and specific actions, including dictating funds to execute those actions, the executive must see that the law is faithfully executed.

Trump has a friendly Congress -- he doesn't need to impound anything, he can just have his fellow party members remove those appropriations. This whole thing is the most absurd kayfabe.

Where was all this complaining about the forms of the Republic when Obama was using his phone and pen, or everyone from Johnson to Biden was implementing DEI by executive order?

No, the Democrats have knocked every check and balance in the nation flat in their attempt to purge Republicans from power, and now the Republicans have turned tail on them. It's too late to call upon institutional integrity now.

The Imperial Presidency is a bipartisan creation more than a hundred years old, not something created in 2008. Of course, point out all of the abuses of power by Democratic presidents - they're an important part of the story. But don't ignore the way Bush Jr. used signing statements to attempt line item vetos, or Reagan's actions in the Iran-Contra affair, or Nixon's abuse of the impoundment power, or if you want to reach back to the Civil War, all of the things Lincoln did that were clearly unconstitutional.

While I would characterize myself as broadly left-of-center, I still have a strong libertarian strain, and I've become increasingly convinced of the importance of Federalism over the last few years as I've turned more of my attention towards Renaissance and Classical political theory. I'm happy to condemn abuses of power whether they're Democratic or Republican, since I increasingly see myself as not being at home with either of them, even if I have my preferences.

I was mostly happy to nod along and agree with the far more able posters here, who condemned Biden for his abuses of the pardon power. I have no illusions that in the counterfactual world where Kamala Harris was elected president, many more able and interested critics would have taken the stage here and condemned her every abuse of power. But I would say that the forum has been strangely quiet about Trump - not that nothing has been said, but far less than I expected. And so, I felt the need to step forward and make my case, even though I know I am far less well-equipped than some of the posters here.

I'll be the first to say that the end of the American Republic doesn't have to be the end of America. Maybe we'll pull a Rome, and enjoy an empire that will last 300 years or more. (Or perhaps "Empire without end" if we believe Virgil.) I don't pretend to know. But in the moods where I was willing to put on my pragmatic hat, I actually felt like America was a largely functional society that got a number of "big questions" right. We're wealthy, powerful, and our institutions are mostly compatible with a life of flourishing, even if few people make choices that can actually result in flourishing. I was worried about some of the things Obama and Biden did, and wasn't thrilled at many of the things Kamala would likely have done, but I am genuinely worried from a little-c conservative point of view that Trump might actually kill the goose that lays the Golden Egg.

Many of Trump's actions I have no real issue with. Let him have silly symbolic victories like renaming the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Of course, he should be able to use executive orders to dismantle DEI programs that were created with executive orders in the first place. But I would feel a lot better about him dismantling the Department of Education or USAID if he was doing it with Congress by his side, instead of by giving admin access to the spending system of the Treasury to a random citizen. He certainly had the votes and the momentum to create an actual DOGE and give Elon Musk power the right way.

Maybe we'll pull a Rome, and enjoy an empire that will last 300 years or more.

Sorry to completely change the subject, but how is this even a consideration in the age of AI?

I do think that a lot of what Elon is doing here is informed by the desire to create the correct initial conditions at the dawn of ASI. ASI under the control of a totalitarian state would be 1984 brought to life. Thus, the need to destroy statism and increase liberty on a relatively short timeline.

We could still end up in the AI Fizzle world, even if it isn't the most likely possibility. If AI ends up being "just" another industrial revolution, and not a singularity then society will change quite a bit, but it might still bear a family resemblance to our world.

And for powerful enough ASI that we lose control of, or which is unaligned in some way, I don't see how it would make much of a difference whether we are a totalitarian state or a decentralized federation.

And for powerful enough ASI that we lose control of, or which is unaligned in some way, I don't see how it would make much of a difference whether we are a totalitarian state or a decentralized federation.

Presumably, the ASI doesn't have qualia. Its terminal goals are its initial prompting. So, let's say that the AI was programmed with the woke consensus of 2020. It could lead to terrifying realities such as:

  1. Safetyism. Humans are denied any agency and forced to live life according to the goals of a 2020-era HR lady.

  2. Leveling. Humans are denied any beauty or enlightenment beyond which the lowest human is capable of.

  3. Racism. "Evil" humans, as defined by whiteness or maleness, are punished as a terminal goal of the AI

To be fair, these are fairly esoteric concerns. We have no idea which path AI will take us on. But, as we are potentially at an inflection point in history, I think it's important that we bend towards liberty. It's more imperative than ever that statism be destroyed to prevent worse case scenarios.

We could still end up in the AI Fizzle world

Yes, we could. But just because P(doom) < 1 doesn't mean it's not important. At the risk of engaging in Pascal's mugging, even a 1% chance of short term ASI makes it by far the most important issue we will ever face. Personally, I think the odds are closer to 50%.

I feel like your "woke consensus of 2020" ASI would be a problem regardless of whether our governments bend towards liberty or not. All that matters is whether the creators of the ASI bend towards liberty.

The ASI's goals and the governmental constitution/societal culture seem fairly orthogonal to me under most circumstances. If a lone principled libertarian with a meritocracy fetish creates the first aligned godlike ASI, then that's what we'll get, regardless of whether the rest of America started with a woke consensus of 2020 culture. The same goes for almost any combination.

There was plenty of complaining about it. As someone who dislikes both the left and the right, I am not impressed by "the Democrats did bad thing X, so now the Republicans should also get to do bad thing X" arguments. I'd rather that nobody did bad thing X, if X is actually bad.

It's fair that you complain. But, let's be honest, 99% of the complaining is not coming from principled libertarians. It's coming from totalitarian statists who are mad that their toys are being taken away.

Suddenly, when their 300k per year no-show job is under threat, they rediscover the Federalist Papers.

I'm not a libertarian either, and I also didn't like seeing the expansion of executive powers under Obama, or much of anything that Biden did.

Mostly what I see here is arguments over who smashed the Defect button first. If we can't get back to a stable equilibrium where everyone isn't choosing Defect, then whatever America becomes, it will just be wearing labels like "Democracy" and "Republic" as skinsuits. (I'm aware some people believe this is already the case. But if you're an accelerationist who thinks we should just abandon the pretense and make Trump God-Emperor, then I'm not interested in your opinions about executive authority.) There is very little Trump can do that a succeeding Democratic administration can't undo (except perhaps fix it so there can never be another Democratic administration - is that what you are actually hoping for?), and of course, they will continue following precedent and the next Democratic president will act even more like a monarch. Everyone cheering for Trump and Musk now will be outraged - outraged! - at this abuse of power and violation of norms.

Yes, a lot of the people outraged today are hypocrites who thought it was just fine when Obama and Biden were abusing their authority. So what? Do you think it's actually bad for presidents to do this, or do you think it's only bad when it's not the president you voted for? If the former, then what do you expect to be the outcome of each president being encouraged by his supporters to expand his powers? That your party will be in power forever so it's okay?

I guess I should say here that I am very much in a "Wait and see" mood right now. As I said before the election, I don't think Trump is going to be a good president, but I'm willing to be proven wrong, and I am enjoying the leftist convulsions. However, the President can't just abrogate the powers of Congress and decide (or delegate to Elon Musk to decide) which pieces of the federal government he'd like to keep and which pieces he'd like to do away with. (And if you are saying "Yes he can!" and triumphantly quoting Andrew Jackson, well, see above. Better lube up for when the Democrats return to power. And Andrew Jackson also ran a notoriously corrupt spoils system, in which federal employment was explicitly conditioned on party loyalty and when your party lost an election, you lost your job. This obviously created undesirable incentives, and led to the civil service reforms some are so eager to dismantle.)

On a slightly more pedantic point, I see a lot of people talking about "$300K laptop jobs." No government worker makes $300K - even the top of the SES pay scale is capped at around $250K, and the GS workers (with or without laptops) are making far less. If you mean NGO workers, maybe some of their executives make that much, but the peons who are mostly the ones losing their jobs don't. Lobbyists, lawyers, and contractors, though? Sure, and oddly enough, I don't see many of them losing their jobs yet.

(except perhaps fix it so there can never be another Democratic administration - is that what you are actually hoping for?)

I feel I should point out that there's a middle-ground here: specifically, "fix it so that SJ is a political non-starter" such that there might be another Democratic administration but it wouldn't get there without abandoning SJ (and then wouldn't want to roll all of it back).

The most obvious, rapid and permanent way to do that ("start WWIII, laugh as the Blue Tribe burns"), I'm decidedly against, at least assuming there's no proper reason for one. The subtler methods I'm less sure about; dismantling the SJ lock on academia-as-gatekeeper-of-the-middle-class I'm fervently in support of, while extreme measures like e.g. bringing back sodomy laws and stripping the vote from those that break them I'd oppose.

Yes, a lot of the people outraged today are hypocrites who thought it was just fine when Obama and Biden were abusing their authority. So what? Do you think it's actually bad for presidents to do this, or do you think it's only bad when it's not the president you voted for? If the former, then what do you expect to be the outcome of each president being encouraged by his supporters to expand his powers? That your party will be in power forever so it's okay?

Yes, it's bad when presidents abuse their authority and Congress is dysfunctional and supine. But it is worse when abuses of authority are only ever policed in one direction and thus policy only ever moves as a one-way ratchet. That dynamic is far more unhealthy than the underlying abuse itself because it cuts at the popular legitimacy of the democratic process entirely, and also leads to degradation of the quality of the party in power (see California, Illinois, NY, etc.).

I agree with most of what you said but I just want to correct the record and say that plenty of NGO officers make 300k or more much.

Yes, a lot of the people outraged today are hypocrites who thought it was just fine when Obama and Biden were abusing their authority. So what? Do you think it's actually bad for presidents to do this, or do you think it's only bad when it's not the president you voted for?

If you can ask "so what?" when it comes to Bush and Obama, why can't you do it regarding Trump?

Anyway, forget the talk about hypocrisy, and let's just focus on the outcomes. Yes, if Trump keeps ruling by decree, the next Dem administration can just undo everything by decree. What you're leaving out is that if Trump doesn't do that, the Dems can still just rule by decree (and have the advantage of not having their institutions disrupted). Show me a path to sustainably reducing abuses of power in the future, and you'll have a compelling argument, but right now you're asking for unilateral disarmament.

Do you think it's actually bad for presidents to do this, or do you think it's only bad when it's not the president you voted for? If the former, then what do you expect to be the outcome of each president being encouraged by his supporters to expand his powers?

There are two possible outcomes. One: The Democrats do it when they are in power, and the Republicans refrain when they are in power. Two: Both do it when they are in power. The second is less bad, unless you're a Democrat.

And Andrew Jackson also ran a notoriously corrupt spoils system, in which federal employment was explicitly conditioned on party loyalty and when your party lost an election, you lost your job. This obviously created undesirable incentives, and led to the civil service reforms some are so eager to dismantle.

And this was a major error. Better that the civil service change political valence with elections than it become a power bloc of its own which remains aligned with one side regardless of who is in power now.

And this was a major error. Better that the civil service change political valence with elections than it become a power bloc of its own which remains aligned with one side regardless of who is in power now.

I don't think it was necessarily an error in and of itself. Neutral civil services are a thing. Even Bush had far less issues on that front than Trump, and TTBOMK it did great for the first 100 years or so. It's a problem when polarisation and especially educational polarisation are very strong, which they often aren't.

Neutral civil services are a thing.

Are they? I agree with FC's take that this sort of neutrality is just an artifact of relative homogeneity. The distance between Bush and Obama or Biden just isn't that great, there's a reason why all the neocons jumped ship to the Dems, and why the supposedly neutral civil service started having problems with neutrality when Trump showed up.

I know you're not directly calling me out here, but I must say in my defense: I don't think I've ever claimed to be anything I'm not.

I'm neither a principled libertarian, nor a totalitarian statist, but I'm not just discovering the Federalist Papers for the first time. I've spent a lot of the last few years reading history from antiquity to modernity, and political theory from Rawls to Julius Evola. I don't think I've reached a point of equilibrium, but I do find a lot I agree with in the Classical Liberal tradition, especially in my recent forays into Mills and Locke.

But I have no idea where I'll end up once I fully digest all the ideas I'm considering, because I'll admit I think there are attractive ideas in a ton of mutually incompatible political positions. I'd tentatively say I'm a left-of-center state capacity libertarian, but my views are still evolving.

Fair enough. Our views are always evolving, and I definitely would have disagreed with my 2008-era self who was ecstatic about Obama being elected.

I think we should all be given the grace to consider many different positions and try, as best we can, to arrive at the truth. That journey will be different for everyone, and I'm willing to admit that my current opinions might be very wrong

That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?

That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?

Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.

I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.

If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.

I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.

I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)

Thanks for this. This is mostly my position too. The reason I asked is because I think it’s a pretty good Rorschach test for motivated reasoning. The strongest opponents of Trump’s overreach in 2025 were the greatest proponents of totalitarianism in 2020. Those people suck, frankly.

Probably where we differ now is on pragmatic grounds.

It is my opinion that the sowing should be followed up by the reaping.

Namely, if they knock down all the checks and balances, formal and informal, in the pursuit of what they believe is good: and then this house of cards they made falls into the hands of their enemies. How foolish they were! Those rules were not to protect their enemies, or to bar what was right. It was to protect themselves.

No, they don't get to stand on principles. Because in this moment, they are not lamenting the death of the republic. They are weeping because all the enemies they have made in their ascent are waiting for them at the bottom. Their only regret is that they didn't get away with it. If they didn't want to live in Schmittian friend-enemy world they should have lived up to the liberal principles they so callously abandoned.

What follows will not be happy, or even pleasant. But it will be indisputably just.

I don't mainly care if it's just or not, I mainly care about living with a political system that delivers to me the sorts of things that I want in my life. How is one group of people vindictively doing shitty things to get back at another group of people who did shitty things going to help me?

But how does this affect you personally? Think of it this way.

We are prairie dogs watching humans test atomic bombs. The kulturekampf is fundamentally the clash of inhuman worldviews, as impersonal and inscrutable as the forces binding subatomic particles together. As individuals, there is very little we can do to affect the outcome, unless we use our fifteen minutes in the right place at the right time.

But not all worldviews are created equally.

As distasteful and terrible the new regime may seem to be... it is closer to consensus-reality than its ideological opposite. It benefits you to live in a regime that believes in up and down and left and right. Men can't be women. There is no infinite money printer. The liberal world order is dead and gone and it's time to move on. It never benefits you to live under a regime that has delusional principles, even if makes your bellyfeel cozy.

It's easy to be cynical and just shrug it off as mere partisanry. But the left has been more dangerously deluded for a long time now. Sure, the right may be cruel in their revenge, but nothing they can do is worse than the shattering of the illusion of the end of history. That in of itself is a crime that will never be forgiven by the left, but the right was never obliged to participate in its perpetuation.

Is it cruel to tell someone they have to fight for everything they took for granted? Perhaps. But my side began that journey a decade ago. What can I say? You're not going to convince to stop anytime soon. I am full of hubris. I will die someday, but today is glory and triumph.

I mean... libertarian and anarchist types were indeed complaining from at least Obama onward.

Are you in agreement that this executive is overstepping its powers, and just think it's justified?

If you think both this administration and the previous one are overstepping its powers... do you think they are doing it to the same degree? Which Biden-admin actions do you think are of a similar level to those mentioned above?

Biden went so far as to proclaim a new Amendment to the Constitution.

Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.

I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.

Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.

But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.

Biden gives 10 year broad pardons for any "non-violent" crimes known and unknown to his immediate family, all of whom are involved in corruption and pay-for-access schemes, including his own son who has been the bag man for Biden family corruption for at least a decade and left a laptop of him recording himself doing it among like 100+ other crimes

Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.

think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain

and even if you don't think they were fully justified, putting them in the same category of "abuse of the pardon power" as Biden giving full pardons for crimes known and unknown covering 10 year periods to his family is ridiculous and stinks of "poisoned partisan thinking"

Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so

what is a "presidential act" which "proclaim[s] a new Amendment"?

Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused. So instead, he had to settle with twitter and a media blitz trying to make it happen.

Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.

think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain

I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.

J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.

I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.

The following statements can all be true:

  • There are similar lawless acts carried out by more left-sympathetic perpetrators that should have been prosecuted more vigorously than they were.
  • Many peaceful January 6th protesters were treated unfairly in some way, and it was appropriate to pardon them.
  • Many violent January 6th protesters probably should be in jail in a fair and just world.
  • Trump acted irresponsibly in pardoning the vast majority of the protesters and commuting the sentences of 14 others.
  • Biden's pardons were worse abuses of power than Trump's.

Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused.

I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.

I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.

I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.

You need to be looking at the subset of unambiguously violent protestors within the set of those convicted -- it seems quite unlikely that everyone guilty of violence was identified and arrested.

Which makes '14' at least plausible -- what criteria do you suppose Trump was using in deciding whom to pardon and who's sentence to commute?

That just doesn’t make any sense. The Obama admin expanded its power. This admin is cutting down the bureaucratic state. It is cutting down the unconstitutional fourth branch; not impinging on the first branch.

Yes it is muscular but muscular in a pro constitutional way.

"justice 40" and the total drilling ban are two things that come to mind. How about this?

US government agrees to confer ‘minority’ status on Jewish-owned businesses

“We’re going to be able to benefit from billions of dollars of these programs, contracts, some loans, grants, the hundreds of different programs that every single Jewish business is going to benefit from,” Duvi Honig, founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, told JNS.

Tribalism is here to stay. I cannot actually find much information about the total amount of benefits that Hasidic Jews will reap from this ruling. The Minority Business Development Agency considers Hasidic Jews to be “socially disadvantaged”, which means that they would be eligible for the $50,000,000,000 in yearly benefits allotted to Small Disadvantaged Businesses. Harris increased Black SBA loans to 1.5 billion in 2023.

Trump is handing shit out in ways that benefit his party, everyone saw this coming. Orthodox Jews are a relatively easy growth area for the GOP- religious socially conservative zionists already mostly agree with the party platform, a few handouts to bring them onboard is cheap.

Same reason Trump wants to admit Afrikaners as refugees, if they get naturalized they'll vote republican just like the Vietnamese.

Awful. Race (or whatever)-based spoils is bad. Expanding it to include more groups just make such policies even more permanent and further punishes people who aren't on the minority-subsidies list. I'm not sure how this happens in post-1964-CRA America but the last time I looked it up, the courts more or less punted on the issue in the 90s.

Again, I see this as a clear case of "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced fairly" vs. "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced unfairly".

Surely part of having a triple-lock on the branches of government allows you to get past varieties of "your rules" towards "our rules"?

Giving spoils to some random ethnic minority doesn't benefit me (or the Trump/right coalition) in any way. It's not even a real tit for tat because it doesn't cost the left anything. This is much more a case of doubling down on idpol and spoils and creates a new enemy to any movement trying to remove these kinds of gibs.

Hasidic Jews got minority status for federal programs back in 1974.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/07/06/rights-chief-erred-about-eligibility-of-hasidic-jews/479a7679-2127-4d03-b735-57d04fc1aaff/#:~:text=But%20what%20Pendleton%20didn't%20know%20is%20that,when%20the%20Opportunity%20Development%20Association%20of%20Brooklyn%2C

I think this was actually a key plot point in War Dogs, Jonah Hill had to pretend to be Hasidic.

This rule seems to be just extending that, since trying to determine if a given Jewish person counts as Hasidic or not is probably pretty difficult.

It is kind of silly that the two wealthiest religion groups in the US, Jews and Hindus, get special treatment for loans.

This rule seems to be just extending that, since trying to determine if a given Jewish person counts as Hasidic or not is probably pretty difficult.

Seems pretty easy to me, at least for men, you just check the hat. Small, round, flat -- regular observant Jew. Tall, black or brown, fur, cylindrical -- Hasidim. Black felt with a wide brim of any sort -- probably still Hasidim.

I'm sure Goodhartberg's minority-owned Shtreimel shop would do brisk business under that rule.

Can you imagine the 'how dare you say I'm not Jewish enough' conversations?

Ethnic spoils indeed.

There is a rebuttable presumption that the following individuals are socially disadvantaged: Black Americans; Hispanic Americans; Native Americans (Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, or enrolled members of a Federally or State recognized Indian Tribe); Asian Pacific Americans (persons with origins from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, The Philippines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru); Subcontinent Asian Americans (persons with origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands or Nepal); and members of other groups designated from time to time by SBA according to procedures set forth at paragraph (d) of this section

There's another 50 billion we could save, plus all the time wasted having to order from your local "minority owned office supplies" company at a 50% markup.

Good.

This strikes me as an easy lay-up from the perspective of both the Trad and MAGA right. Jews are clearly a minority so if we are going to have carve-outs for minority-owned buisinesses they should obviously apply to jews.

Both the woke left and dissident right hate jews so naturally they're going to argue against this move, which in turn will only hieghten the contridictions furthering the shared Trad/MAGA goal of discrediting/dismantling Id-Pol entirely.

Its not 4-d chess, but it is some competent Jui Jitsu.

Its not 4-d chess, but it is some competent Jui Jitsu.

Jew Jitsu?

Jew Jitsu?

I dunno, seems more like Krav MAGA to me.

Accelerationism has a bad track record.

"Surely if we heighten the contradictions by taking stupid ideas to their logical conclusion and making things as bad as possible for everyone people will realize that the stupid ideas are, in fact, stupid and destroy the whole system!"

They really, really won't.

Its not "accelerationism", its an incremental step towards the pro-civilizational end goal. We are going from "your rules enforced unfairly" to "your rules enforced fairly" and if either the woke left or dissident right have a problem with that, crush them.

You just last week strongly opposed identity politics for white people, but you support it when it benefits Jews?

If the identitarian right and the wider priestly caste are going to hold on to Identity Politics as an organizing principal/value they are going to have to have to confront the fact that the perception of Identity Politics in the popular zeitgeist is that of an ideology for losers. An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy.

But when Jews get ever more handouts from the federal government, that's a good thing? Do I have that right?

I oppose identity politics for white people but support it for specific groups of republican white people(eg, Cuban-Americans, combat veterans). It is perfectly reasonable to oppose white identity politics which in practice will mostly go to democrats.

You are clearly unfamiliar with the common game theoretic formulation of "My rules > your rules enforced fairly > your rules enforced unfairly"

Im not endorsing identity politics. Im saying that "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced fairly" is preferable to "your rules (Identity-politics) enforced unfairly".

Wouldn't identity-politics enforced fairly mean White people participate in identity politics? But you oppose that? So you aren't even consistent in your pseudo-"game theoretic formulation." You just every step of the analysis support Jews and oppose white people and then find some justification for it.

"White people"? no. Because "white people" is a stupid made-up catagory with no real basis in history, culture, or science. Anglos, French, Italians, Portuguese, Et Al. on the other hand...

Europeans absolutely have a shared history and culture, and, as with other racial groups, they form a distinct natural cluster. To take two obvious examples of shared culture, all European countries are historically Christian and trace their intellectual heritage back to Greece and Rome. That alone makes them more unified than “Native American” as a single ethnic category.

All identities are fundamentally made-up categories. American Whites certainly have a history and culture. But anyway, it's been demonstrated you don't actually support "Your rules (Identity-politics) enforced fairly", you support Identity Politics for Jews and oppose it for White people.

More comments

You seem to be saying 'identity politics enforced unfairly' (no gentile white identities allowed) > 'identity politics enforced fairly' (all ethnic groups allowed).

What contradictions are there here? What is it you hope is going to be highlighted?

EDIT: I think you are trying to say that giving money to literally all minorities will make it clear how stupid it is to give money to people just because they are a minority. I don't think this is going to work. Everyone can conceive of themselves as a minority in some way, and it's easier to force yourself into the buffet than to dismantle it. Dismantling it will require much more power than adding yourself to it, and you're not even going to benefit. This is why the British Conservative strategy of 'take power, then performatively throw it away" never works. It just gets picked up by everyone else who lacks those scruples.

Its not "accelerationism", its an incremental step towards the pro-civilizational end goal. We are going from "your rules enforced unfairly" to "your rules enforced fairly" and if either the woke left or dissident right have a problem with that, crush them.

Nah, more likely antisemitism will continue to grow as people wake up to Jewish influence in the American government. I'm not sure reforms like this are going to be effective owns against the Dissident Right when it validates their criticism of Jewish behavior in American society.

Fuck it, why not? They’re a minority right? What’s kind of crazy about this though is that Jews by and large did not vote for Trump, despite Oct 7 and all the fallout of that. But in an accelerationist sense maybe this is a good policy, heighten the contradictions and hypocrisy of these programs

But are these benefits going to stay around under Trump?

Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.

I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?

Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?

As much as I love your comment, please consider that the vast majority of current legislators, as well as a disproportionate amount of political commentators have law degrees or legal backgrounds - often elite ones - and all it's got us is ever-more sophisticated rounds of "obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games."

A few weeks ago, people were posting questions from the LSAT on Twitter which they described as especially difficult. Invariably, I found them all to be really easy. This seems to fit with something I've struggled to understand which is why do most people seem cognitively normal most of the time, but as soon as anything becomes just a little abstract, they seem utterly incapable of understanding it? It doesn't usually come up, but if you try to teach someone really