site banner
PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   33438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Richard Hanania: Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism

The mad man has done it. He’s stopped listening to anyone who isn’t a complete sycophant or the market, and enacted a tariff policy more extreme than we would have seen under what most thought was the worst case scenario. The formula of “reciprocity” being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself, though you can read about it here. I don’t think this ship can correct course. The Trump movement has been selecting for loyalty to Trump above all else, and we’re seeing the results. As Vice President Vance said during his trip to Greenland, “we can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”

...

At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders. Government adopts an irrational policy, the market has a reaction, and officials hopefully take that information into account. If a politician runs on an anti-corruption platform but then ends up being more corrupt than his predecessors, that should be discrediting and cost him support.

Yet this entire process requires voters to be connected to reality. If they’re in a fake news bubble, then even the most obvious failures will go unpunished. There have always been a lot of uninformed people who are reflexively partisan. Yet the most successful populist movements in the West overwhelmingly rely on uneducated voters. With some notable exceptions, the general pattern holds across much of the rest of the world. The reigns of Chavez and Maduro have been characterized by concentrated support for the government among the poor, as was that of Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose program appealed disproportionately to rural indigenous communities.

The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.

One of my favorite fun facts from the 2024 presidential election is reflected in the chart below, which I put together based on numbers from Data for Progress. It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024. In fact, among college voters in particular, the voting gap between those who paid a lot of attention to the election and those who paid little attention was much larger than that between college and non-college educated voters. This dovetails with completely separate surveys showing that conservatives don’t read serious sources of information. One shouldn’t actually need surveys for this, as we can simply look at the almost total absence of popular right-leaning newspapers and magazines with high journalistic and intellectual standards.

...

You sometimes hear people say that they like Trump because they’ve been lied to by Democrats or the press. Joe Rogan, for example, said he was radicalized by misrepresentations made by Tim Walz about his military background: “You’re telling me you don’t care if someone is a liar?” He ended up endorsing Trump, which is sort of like being fed up with religious intolerance and therefore becoming a fan of bin Laden. If you are someone who hates lies, there should be nobody in public life that you find more unbearable than Trump, except perhaps Elon Musk. I have every reason to believe that Rogan and his fans are sincere when they say they recoil from dishonesty. They’re just not plugged into accurate sources of information, and so are poorly equipped to judge who they should be mad at. Or alternatively, they’re simply engaging in motivated reasoning, but being this biased becomes more difficult the more one knows about the world.

Hanania has written about Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican, in the past, but it appears he's close to buyer's remorse (end section of this article). We've had previous discussions about how reality-based Trump's policies are, and Hanania makes a fairly good argument that - except for political loyalty - reality isn't a concern, and that this isn't just true of Trumpism, it's an inherent flaw of populism, in general:

All of this means you should think very carefully about signing on to an anti-establishment movement just because you disagree with the establishment on some things. If you attack elites and their institutions, it’s very unlikely that this will only mean empowering people who agree with you on where they have gone wrong. Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes. If a few sensible voices that would otherwise have been censored benefit, they will be a tiny minority. You might find Joe Rogan to be better than the NYT on the trans question, but Rogan’s status rising at the expense of the mainstream media makes the culture dumber on almost every other topic, and any politician who is more plugged in to podcasts than newspapers is likely to make unforeseen mistakes.

The "Trump's tariff agenda is an attempt to create a new Bretton Woods-like system" theory works well enough for me to think it can be judged against reality (specifically, if negotiations with allies for lower rates occur and the administration lays out a financial mechanism for reconciling export-friendly exchange rates and reserve-currency status, that would be strong evidence of a coherent, reality-responsive plan), but perhaps the Trump administration will just continue to tariff manufacturing inputs while claiming to be protecting manufacturing...

I mean he’s not exactly wrong which is why I’m much less enamored with the idea that final authority should rest with the people and that the legitimacy or rulership should rest on the people.

It creates a lot of really strange results simply because it rests on a flimsy idea. The basic idea is that somehow the sum of several million people who don’t understand a system voting on how to run the system somehow results in a well run system. Or the sum of ignorance is knowledge. This doesn’t work. 300 people who know jack all about city planning simply cannot accidentally figure out how to time traffic lights. 300 million people who can’t even find Ukraine on a map cannot possibly be making a good decision on whether to conduct a war there, how to conduct it, or when to end it. No other place on earth do we do this. Parents generally do not get their four year olds approval on dinner because they’d choose ice cream. Children are not trusted with the family budget. Soldiers are not asked to approve of war strategy. Workers are not given the right to vote on the direction the company will take in the next year. And on it goes — when we need a system that just works, we put competent people in charge and let them run the thing. Except government where anyone over 18 can choose the general direction of almost every function of government by choosing leaders to do as they promised when asking for their votes.

And as Hanania rightly points out, modern democratic governments are highly tuned to avoiding the realities they exist in. Whether or not a policy is a good idea doesn’t matter. What matters is that the public supports it. Giveaway programs of various types are always popular — leading to a famous warning from Alexis de Tocqueville that democracy would only last until people discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public coffers. And so we have. Welfare, student loans guaranteed by the government, a big push for universal healthcare (provided by the government) etc. it doesn’t matter if these things work — it can easily be shown that government guarantees of student loans has ruined not only education (dumbing down college to the point where anyone who graduated high school can go, and lowering standards until literally anyone can pass), but job markets (as lots of jobs that require no higher order skills now require 4-year degrees as a minimum). This is just one reality avoided — we don’t have infinite money, and even if we did, handing out money tends to distort markets and create more problems than it solves. You can add in things like social liberalism where every form of deviant behavior is tolerated if not celebrated. Don’t kink shame adult babies, porn actresses, furries, or drag queens, and don’t keep them away from kids, even if their fetish is only plausibly not pedophilia. And again, a lot of this turns out to be bad for society. But it gets votes, so who cares.

But beyond that, it’s the perfect engine for avoiding responsibility. Who is responsible for the decisions in a democracy? The people. They voted for the guy who did the thing. He was only doing what the people wanted. So 300 million of us are responsible for the results of the tariffs. Or the negotiations with Russia. Or the bombing of the Houthis. Or whatever happens with Iran. Or anything else that happens. It’s even better for elected representatives when it goes through a parliament or congress. They can do nothing, collect a paycheck and come back for reelection and blame everything on those other guys for messing it all up. If you send us back we’ll fix it. And if it doesn’t work or doesn’t pass, blame the other guys and run again. At no point is anyone In government accountable for the results of the votes he casts or tge decisions he made. The people voted for it!

It seems worth noting that avoiding the specific problem of 'the economy produces more college graduates than it knows what to do with' is not something anyone has figured out.

In America the existence of a certificate in following basic directions, using the English language, being able to not make problems when working in groups, etc is the function of a bachelor's in psychology, but what else do you suggest fill that role? I will grant that a bachelor's in psychology or communications or English is a very expensive way to grant this certificate. But America isn't cost conscious about anything else in general- or indeed, any other portion of the education system in particular- and there does have to be some way to tell employers 'look I have no experience but I'm literate, understand white collar norms enough not to violate them too bad, can follow directions, communicate, and won't make problems when working in a group'. My first AAQC was about this. And at least for now the economy needs workers who can follow directions, communicate, read and write, use the English language effectively, and can keep drama to a minimum. Maybe chatgpt will change that, but the majority of people whose employment depends on having a 'literate and not a retard' certificate are women so the government will protect their jobs even if it's pointless and stupid- the end goal of western governance is to maximize female LFPR at all costs, after all. The existence of a complicated, expensive, and baroque process to prove you aren't a retard and can read is an inevitability and other countries are even worse. In East Asia there basically aren't any non-fuckups who don't go to college.

In America the existence of a certificate in following basic directions, using the English language, being able to not make problems when working in groups, etc is the function of a bachelor's in psychology, but what else do you suggest fill that role?

I am not sure if college degree provides that certificate anymore. First, universities now tend to produce culture warriors that can endanger you business if they think your corporation is the best platform to promote their political ideas. Additionally I am not sure if even ability to cooperate in a team or command of English language is something necessary to get a degree anymore. I think what you basically have to do now as a business owner is to do your own testing of potential employees including basic tests such as composing some simple email to customer or related to reading comprehension of some corporate memo.

In bang for buck, I think you could do much the same thing with less cost and less lost opportunities (another cost of college is that you’re keeping your 18-24 year old young adults out of the workforce, which not only means they aren’t earning money for the company, but it effectively means that they don’t start households until later on and thus aren’t buying things and are behind on saving for a house and for eventually having kids), by having the high school diplomas do the same thing. If you’re not reading and doin* maths on grade level, you shouldn’t graduate high school and the reason that college became the “well at least he can read” degree is that high school diplomas stopped being that.

Yes, Motteizean rationalist technocrats can devise a better system, but there doesn't seem to be a better system anywhere in the world. A high school diploma doesn't serve as the entrypoint to white collar work in any society that I know of(although there might be countries where some alternative to a college degree is widely accepted- can you list any? I think the US and Germany accepting a master license in the trades as equivalent to a bachelor's degree is the closest thing that exists- and that's more of a government convention than a real thing).

This isn't like low-carbon electrical grids where someone has gone and done it. It's the closest thing to an iron law of industrialized societies(that is, those needing a lot of scribes- people who can read, write, follow directions in not-retarded ways, act in all the ways white collar workers are expected to, etc but who don't have specific skills) that education of minors gets inflated in pointless rigor that gets coupled with grade inflation because society thinks it's just that important. Basically all non-fuckups in East Asian countries are shoved into a college admissions rat race, the percentage of German high school students in Gymnasia as opposed to Hauptschulen keeps rising, etc. This isn't just a democracy thing; China isn't one, and countries with vastly different political cultures keep doing it. And the scribal class is mostly women so prevailing ideology insists it needs to be feted and expanded, but that isn't the sole factor- Iran is not a very feminist place but it does the same thing with pushing more education than really needed.

Iran is not a very feminist place but it does the same thing with pushing more education than really needed.

At least in Iran's case, they have the excuses of "semi-isolated nation that has been building a nuclear program for decades" and "ran by an Islamic theocracy, which requires rigorous study of religious text."

That being said, I agree that it's...weird how much societies around the world have commoditized(?) education.

Yes, Motteizean rationalist technocrats can devise a better system, but there doesn't seem to be a better system anywhere in the world.

There is at least one foreign country that has a better system in this respect: the past. And I don't mean pre-industrialization either. Pre-GI bill, certainly.

In America the existence of a certificate in following basic directions, using the English language, being able to not make problems when working in groups, etc is the function of a bachelor's in psychology, but what else do you suggest fill that role?

A high school diploma, or better yet, a certificate of graduation from the eighth grade. This would require reversing much of the educational "progress" made in the last 100 years, of course.

Hanania occupies the same memetic ecological niche as guys like David French.

His role is to write things that flatter the sensibilities and biases of the priestly caste from an ostensibly outside view so that his readers can then pat themselves on the back for being so reasonable. Reassuring themselves that thier opponents are indeed stupid, and don't have any legitimate concerns by telling themselves "I listen to people with outside views and they agree with me on all the important things. We even boo the same outgroup!"

In this case the outgroup is the Tea-Party/MAGA right to which Hanania is opposed, and people who don't trust "the media" or "the experts" classes with which Hanania identifies as a member.

His characterization of Rogan is particularly egregious. Rogan wasn't "radicalized" so much as he was told to "get the fuck out" by all the "serious people". He did, and he took a lot of his listeners with him. Now all the "serious people" like Hanania are shocked and appaled to see former Bernie-Bros walking around wearing MAGA hats because while he was berating them, the populist right was telling them "pull up a stool and watch the game with us". The same thing happened with RFK Jr.

His role is to write things that flatter the sensibilities and biases of the priestly caste

This is strongly off-base. Even just a year or two ago he spent most of his time attacking woke ideas more than anything, something that had strong buy-in from the "priestly caste". Hanania is probably more responsible than anyone for the Trump admin cracking down on woke ideology so effectively in the first month. This forum broadly loved him a few years ago, and only recently turned on him once he started aiming his sights on the foolishness on the right.

There are many people whose politics are entirely based around tribal loyalty and cannot fathom anyone operating differently. So when they see someone agreeing that the mainstream media is right about issue X, they imagine that person must be getting on his knees and deep-throating the mainstream media, because that's what they do with Donald Trump. When shown evidence this isn't true, such as Hanania's right-wing views on crime or race and IQ, they just ignore it.

Whenever I read something by Hanania about a topic I am familiar with, I notice that he has a tendancy to get basic details wrong and grossly mischaracterize interactions. Furthermore I notice that his "mistakes" seem to have a consistent directionality to them.

Hanania's right-wing views on crime or race and IQ are indistinguishable from those of Woodrow Wilson or any other "centerist" Democrat from the last century. Which is to say that they are not particularly right-wing at all.

My read of Hanania is that while he may have been willing to disagree with his fellow affluent costal blue tribers when he was confident in his tribe's ascendence, now that it looks like they might be on the back foot he is joining them inside the wagon circle.

"Persian letters" (or Chinese etc.) was a popular genre, applying this outside view for whatever use. It's interesting to see modern careers riffing off the same.

Our best hope is for congress to come together and pass a bill that takes the power to impose tariffs away from the president. This actually seems plausible now, since if the tariffs stay in place the democrats will obviously win landslide elections in 2026 and 2028. Republicans no longer have to worry about fitting into the Trump brand.

Hardly; the Senate's revealed preference was for Cory Booker to stroke his own ego for 25 hours straight.

The Senate rules make it possible for Cory Booker to do that without the co-operation of other senators. It takes the organised opposition of 60 senators to break a talking filibuster.

The revealed preference of other senators was to go back to their offices and dial for dollars while waiting for his bladder to give out rather than making him stop.

All I can say based on my sources (which we probably share) is that Hanania, if anything, understates his case, fearful of NDAs, and so focuses on blatant but not very consequential demonstrations of ineptitude. The brain rot in this administration is unbelievable, it's on par with the goofy early Communist governments I've marveled at in historical materials. People here who eloquently steelman them have their work cut out for them. They'll easily exceed the wokes in concocting justifications for pure primitive malice and barbarity in the coming years.

What are your sources?

Wasn't this a case of people devising some relatively thoughtful tariff regime suggestion and offering it to Trump and then Trump then picking the dumbest option because he's like that ?

I mean I'm not losing much sleep over the occupying empire doing stupid things - the dumber, the better for me. I've even seen threats of US leaving NATO if EU puts a billion $ fine on Musk over twitter. That'd be most excellent.

Wasn't this a case of people devising some relatively thoughtful tariff regime suggestion and offering it to Trump and then Trump then picking the dumbest option because he's like that ?

Source?

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-personally-decided-his-new-tariff-rates-report-2055571

Thanks. Though it makes it sound like Trump was taking false credit for someone else's work:

He explained that the "reciprocal" tariffs were based on tariffs those countries imposed on the United States. The numbers Trump cited, however, were inaccurate and the White House clarified later on that the formula it used was based on just two variables: the U.S.'s trade deficit with a foreign country divided by that country's exports to the U.S.

Trump then halved that number to arrive at his "discounted reciprocal tariff," which he said he was doing to be "kind."

I find that it was the post war consensus and American Empire that were barbaric and inept, actually. And am quite fond of the collapse of both which will ultimately be a good thing for the American people and the world.

If that's malice of the primitive sort, so be it.

Acceptable collateral damage. Trump's election gave us a preference cascade and stopped wokeness ascendant. I'll take that any day over optimal trade policy.

If he crashes the economy and loses, even that is going to reverse. Democrats will win and see little reason to compromise on woke.

If he'd stopped at 'suboptimal' and hadn't gone all the way to 'utterly ruinous', I'd agree with you.

At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders. Government adopts an irrational policy, the market has a reaction, and officials hopefully take that information into account.

This sentence isn't even wrong.

"At its best, [government based on the principle that sovereignty is vested in the people and wielded by periodic plebiscites or representative elections] works by providing feedback to leaders."

No, it works by either, in its representative form, selecting leaders from among a pool of candidates, or in its direct form by allowing the masses to select policies themselves. I think Hanania might mean "market liberalism" or possibly "modern political polling" or even "modern rapid-communication technologies."

"Government adopts an irrational [NB: according to whom, and on what time scale?] policy, the market [stock? futures? bonds? currency? commodities? CPI?] has a reaction, and officials take that information into account."

This really feels closer to divination than any serious theory of political economy.

The mad man has done it. He’s stopped listening to anyone who isn’t a complete sycophant or the market, and enacted a tariff policy more extreme than we would have seen under what most thought was the worst case scenario. The formula of “reciprocity” being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself, though you can read about it here. I don’t think this ship can correct course. The Trump movement has been selecting for loyalty to Trump above all else, and we’re seeing the results. As Vice President Vance said during his trip to Greenland, “we can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”

This is an even deeper issue than just Trump. Any leader be it government or business must be regularly exposed to views and information that upset them and they disagree with so they can maintain a hold on reality. And Trump has captured the conservative party and media so tightly that they essentially function as echo chambers for him.

In the first administration he had to deal with the regular Republicans who were hesitant to yield to his nonsense under the worry that he would be a fad. He lost the popular vote and didn't have a full grasp on the media yet. Mike Pence's refusal to play along with the fake electors is a perfect example of this.

But this isn't the first admin, you do not survive in a 2nd Trump government if you confront him too much. And Fox News, Trump's favorite source might as well be Trump News now. Trump will say something out there and unexpected and instead of being distracted with a new shiny toy like before, he gets reinforcement. His obsession with Canada as a state is being rewarded in his eyes when fox news tells him about Maple MAGA and how much the Canadians totally love his ideas. They'll run stories with Russian envoys saying how he prevented WW3 (No seriously, they did that), heaping lots of over the top praise on him.

He lives in a world that says everything he does is so amazing and so smart and all the people love him for it. Even the former Trump critics like Vance realized this, the Republican party is the party of Trump right now. It also makes me wonder where the GOP can go when Trump finally kicks the bucket, a lot of candidates who try to emulate the man aren't doing well electorally. The electoral magic exists in Trump himself, not an idealogy.

It also makes me wonder where the GOP can go when Trump finally kicks the bucket, a lot of candidates who try to emulate the man aren't doing well electorally. The electoral magic exists in Trump himself, not an idealogy.

Trump's genius is in combining working-class appeal with generally moderate politics in issues other than immigration and tariffs. But his biggest fans have a psychology inherently opposed to moderation and compromise. For instance, Trump said "My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights." The mini-Trumps would never say that. Even if they don't personally care much for "unborn children," giving their "enemies" even symbolic concessions is "cuckoldry" - totally opposed to their worldview.

Vance might be the bridge to a new generation of right-wing politicians who grew up on highly online alt-right and dissident right culture, not on traditional American conservatism. Whoever becomes the most prominent Republican figure after Trump probably will not be a Trump impersonator, since generally speaking trying to impersonate another successful person in an attempt to acquire their level of charisma is counterproductive - the very attempt to be inauthentic makes one less charismatic unless one is a spectacularly talented actor, and probably most politicians are good actors but they are not that good. Politicians with the charisma level of a Bill Clinton, Obama, or Trump do not grow on trees, but they do come along every once in a while. The Republicans would probably do well to keep having actually competitive primaries so that the best talent can rise to the top, instead of trying to shoe-horn in some kind of Trump version 2. Trump is one-of-a-kind in so many ways that realistically, there will never be another one. All the Republicans can really do is have a fair primary process so that they can give themselves the best odds of finding someone who isn't Trump, but has Trump-level charisma.

It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024.

This is probably true. Does it also correlate with believing Biden was senile, Hunter's laptop was genuine, that COVID was a lab leak, and that the lockdowns and vaccine mandates were a mistake? Their estimate of unarmed black men killed by the police would be much closer to the right end of this graph, and opposition to defunding the police, before such fictions and the policies they spawned caused the largest single-year increase in violent crime ever reported. Does it correlate with being able to define the term "woman", and predict that transitioning children would not be a sustainable practice from a scientific point of view? I imagine we could continue in this way for some time, but let's leave it there.

Hanania's argument here is that Trump supporters are more likely to be disconnected from bedrock reality. Would it be fair to say that his implicit argument is that bedrock reality is congruent with the views of professional academics and journalists?

We've had previous discussions about how reality-based Trump's policies are, and Hanania makes a fairly good argument that - except for political loyalty - reality isn't a concern, and that this isn't just true of Trumpism, it's an inherent flaw of populism, in general.

I do not see a way for either you or the author to argue that it is less of a problem for the previous uniparty regime. Afghanistan in particular and the GWOT generally seem like really good examples; for the Afghan war, we have the documents now and can confirm that the entire two decades of policy was founded entirely on lies, that no one ever actually had a plan, and that the entire procedure was built around concealing this fact to the public as extensively as possible to maintain the flow of resources and human lives. The more one listened to "the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics," the worse one's fundamental understanding of that conflict would be.

More generally, the self-serving nature of the argument here would be appalling if it were not so monotonously common from people of the author's ilk.

Tear down the gates in a system that is working relatively well, and you will get liars, morons, grifters, and cranks of all stripes.

We are in the present situation because the system was not working well, even relatively. Likewise, the previous system was absolutely chockablock with liars, morons, grifters and cranks of all stripes. Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.

I do not see a way for either you or the author to argue that it is less of a problem for the previous uniparty regime. Afghanistan in particular and the GWOT generally seem like really good examples; for the Afghan war, we have the documents now and can confirm that the entire two decades of policy was founded entirely on lies, that no one ever actually had a plan, and that the entire procedure was built around concealing this fact to the public as extensively as possible to maintain the flow of resources and human lives. The more one listened to "the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics," the worse one's fundamental understanding of that conflict would be.

The large majority of salt-of-the-earth no-college white people supported the Iraq war. The Iraq war should have reduced the confidence people put in the media and the CIA. (though not "the experts" in general) It should not lead one to adopt the attitude of many people here that the army of Fox News watching no-college boomers are never wrong on any issue.

You have examples of this behaviour of course. You aren't just strawmanning your outgroup again and confusing politics for science I'm sure, you can link to examples of people on the motte saying no-college boomers are never wrong on any issue right?

Why don't you tell me an issue you think no-college, Fox-News watching boomers are wrong about?

That's not how this works and you know it Alex. If you are going to make claims about people on the motte you need to be able to back it up.

It is a farcical request of me anyway. I say journalists are the enemy of the people so often random birds in my neighbourhood now repeat it. So if fox news watching is a necessary component then I disagree with them on a fundamental basis. You are confusing the fact that I defend them when people think up the stupidest possible justification for doing something and assign it to them with me supporting them.

We are in the present situation because the system was not working well, even relatively. Likewise, the previous system was absolutely chockablock with liars, morons, grifters and cranks of all stripes.

It provided a better quality of life for the median American than for almost anyone else on earth, so yeah, it was working objectively pretty well.

Such a low bar! But in all seriousness, America is a very rich country mostly for historical and geographical reasons. Then the previous system parasitised America's economy with DEI etc. but did not actually destroy it (whilst wrecking a lot of intangibles), and this is sort of a win. But this line of thinking seems to lead to the 'let the culture warriors do whatever they want as long as they don't touch the economy' thinking that has damaged the West so much over the last two decades.

Hanania's entire method here is to present a parade of horribles from the Trump administration, some of them still hypothetical, and to quietly allow all previous disasters to sink into unmentioned obscurity.

The scales here are totally different. There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs, and more saliently for Hanania's point, no policy more ill-thought through. He couldn't even be bothered to properly calculate a reciprocal tariff!

That’s all pretty rich coming from you Harry. You screwed up your country’s economy so badly that you almost got kicked out by a military coup.

What is this in reference to?

Wikipedia article

On the BBC television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, broadcast on 16 March 2006 on BBC2, it was claimed there were threats of a coup d'état against the Wilson government, which were corroborated by leading figures of the time on both the left and the right. Wilson told two BBC journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, who recorded the meetings on a cassette tape recorder, that he feared he was being undermined by MI5. The first time was in the late 1960s after the Wilson Government devalued the pound sterling but the threat faded after Conservative leader Edward Heath won the election of 1970. However, after a coal miners' strike Heath decided to hold an election to renew his mandate to govern in February 1974 but lost narrowly to Wilson. There was again talk of a military coup, with rumours of Lord Mountbatten as head of an interim administration after Wilson had been deposed. In 1974 the army occupied Heathrow Airport on the grounds of training for possible IRA terrorist action at the airport. Although the military stated that this was a planned military exercise, Downing Street was not informed in advance, and Wilson himself interpreted it as a show of strength, or warning, being made by the army.

There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs,

The high inflation caused by the runaway government money-printing destroyed a helluva lot of wealth. The decision to throw the border open resulted in quite a lot of harm. Just to name two.

Biden tried to do a wide variety of destructively idiotic policies, they just got blocked by the courts. Particularly his eviction moratorium, if it had been allowed to proceed into a ‘yeah no one has to pay rent ever again’ policy, would have been very close.

How long did the eviction moratorium last (federally)? I know there were people here who didn't pay rent for several years, but the state could have also had a hand in that.

The Biden admin showed every sign of wanting to keep it indefinitely; it was struck down by the supreme court in late August 2021.

Eviction moratorium, OSHA vaccine requirements, the full student loan forgiveness policy.

Proxy war with Russia in Europe is on a whole other level to tariffs.

You receive:

risk of nuclear war

Russo-Chinese alliance consolidation

Many trillions in realized economic damage to Europe, destabilizing the political consensus there, heightened global inflation

Massive drain on munitions and capabilities

Small number of US special forces dying in combat as 'volunteers' or 'technical support'

Unknown future blowback, almost certainly negative

Many, many dead Ukrainians

A crippling blow to the Rules Based International Order due to...

Near-certain defeat in the stated goals of the war (Ukrainian territorial integrity, 2014 borders)

You gain:

Many dead Russians

All Sullivan had to do was declare that no, Ukraine wouldn't be joining NATO, or at least make some kind of basic diplomatic effort to prevent a Russian invasion.

The level of escalation the Biden administration was pushing was scary. I was seeing organized pro-nuclear war shilling everywhere. They were even smart enough to vary the message depending on the medium. On Reddit it was “lol Russia is so corrupt and their nukes are so old that they probably don’t even work” on 4chan it was “Nukes don’t really exist, the Jews just made them up”. For offline boomers you just had a lot of glossy magazine articles about American missile defense systems.

I encountered a mentally ill homeless man ranting about Russia and Putin. I couldn't understand most of what he was saying but I'm sure he was on the Biden administration's payroll too.

And in the rat-o-sphere there were all the effortposts about "sixties-era MAD/nuclear winter stuff was based on false premises, sure we'd get our hair mussed a little, but check out this fallout map..." -- truly nowhere is beyond their reach.

Yeah the 4chan nukes stuff was very strange. I think pol can be a useful source of news from time to time, they were early on covid. But you really have to wonder about the qualities of all the people who respond to the 'your mom will die if you don't respond' posts. Even if you accept the potency of these images, there are retroactively acting immunity doggos who can save your bacon! Is it just a meme like 'turn 360 degrees and walk away'? Seems lame to be a meme.

To be fair, the popular science version of came from an obnoxious 'science popularizer' and deGrasse Tyson of his day that fudged a lot of the analysis as hard as possible -- made more obvious when he reused similar scenarios for climate change and the aftermath of the Kuwait war, the latter of which pointedly didn't happen.

But the actual scenario of hundreds of megadeaths is bad enough.

Dunno if anyone on /pol/ is persuaded of anything by Carl Sagan, they'd immediately whip out the early life check and reflexively disbelieve him.

Interesting stuff about the Kuwait oil burning, I didn't know they predicted apocalypse from that too. Seems a good prior is that the climate is fairly stable, most climate apocalypse stories turn out to be nothingburgers.

I think gattsuru's response might have been meant for jkf's comment next to your's.

No diplomatic effort could have prevented a Russian invasion. Nobody is choosing to be in a proxy war with Russia, we are at war with them whether we like it or not. We can either put in the (extremely minimal) effort required to defeat them now, or fight them later after they've seized more territory.

Either way, it's laughable that we're talking about an issue that has literally zero effect on the average American in the same context as tariffs that will raise prices on everything by at least 30%.

The war in Ukraine had huge effects on the average American, it was directly responsible for much of the inflation in the Biden administration (and Trump regaining the presidency). You can't just try to cut off one of the world's biggest energy and food exporters without ramifications. It's a global, interconnected system.

Investors don't like risk, how do you think they feel about prolonged, major proxy war between the two nuclear superpowers? Gold prices have skyrocketed in the last few years.

Furthermore the effort required to defeat Russia is clearly not minimal, since they're not being defeated after significant effort. Apparently the US arms industry is incapable of competing with Russia in shell production. The war goal is being reframed in real time from 'Ukrainian territorial integrity, NATO membership and EU membership' to 'at least they keep Odessa!', that may not even be the final destination.

Does Boris Johnson count as "nobody" or how does this work exactly? Is it the kind of "nobody" where responsibility for foreign policy is diffused over an entire organization so nobody is to blame?

The claim that there was a good deal on the table at Istanbul until Boris Johnson sabotaged it is a mildly conspiratorial take on the "The war is the West's fault because Ukraine should have surrendered." The deal was rejected because it included a binding treaty commitment by the UK and the US not to help Ukraine if Russia restarted the war.

I would say that the more realistic version of this argument is that a lot of Russian speakers dramatically overestimate the power and influence of the British government and in particular the British upper class (which Boris himself is arguably not necessarily part of, but to a Ukrainian / Russian clearly is). Ilforte / Dase wrote about this a number of times but it really is true and explains the unusual level of hostility toward Britain by many of the more ideological Putin supporters and Russian nationalists in general. Many believe earnestly that America is just a puppet of Britain.

In this context one can see why Boris’ bloviating posturing and general bluster (which everyone in Britain mostly tuned out while he was mayor) might make a different impression on Zelensky, especially when it came to his Churchill LARP and telling Ukraine to fight on until the end. For example, maybe Zelensky genuinely got the impression that Johnson would ensure the US spent whatever it took to defend Ukraine and that the ‘official’ position from the masters of the world order was that they should fight on.

I see, nobody's doing it, and when they are that's a good thing.

I guess I should not listen to Boris about his own actions, or Merkel and Macron for that matter.

Has it occured to you that the West's foreign policy could be disastrous even if Russia isn't blameless?

I am aware of the possibility that Putin is the remarkably sane kind of nuclear madman, such that handing him Ukraine on a plate would lead to the return of the status quo ante except for the unfortunate Ukrainians, and failing to do so will eventually lead to nuclear armageddon. I do not consider this particularly likely, but were it true the current western policy would be disasterous.

More comments

tariffs that will raise prices on everything by at least 30%.

I think tariffs are harmful, but that‘s a very high estimate. US Foreign trade to gdp ratio is only 25% (for comparison, canada 67% or germany 83%). Why would all prices increase by the tariff rate when most goods are produced in the US?

I admit, I put as little effort into coming up with that number as Trump did when deciding the tariff rates. I'm not sure anyone can predict all the feedback loops and unexpected incentives that will be created by such extreme meddling in the economy. Regardless of the exact numbers, we are doomed. It's over.

Why do you believe the US adopting a policy change towards a global norm 'dooms' you? Why is it 'over?'

I am not particularly a fan of tariffs, and I even find arguments that they are net-negatives to theoretical economic efficiency persuasive to a point. I also feel obliged to note that tariffs are normal. Having a default higher level of tariffs is a negotiation tool to pressure other states to make trade concessions on access for your exports.

The ultra-MAGA European Union characterizes its trade policy rational as-

The EU actively engages with countries or regional groupings to negotiate trade agreements. These agreements grant mutually-beneficial access to the markets of both the EU and the countries concerned. EU companies can grow their business, and can also more easily import the raw materials they use to make their products.

Each agreement is unique and can include tariff reductions, rules on matters such as intellectual property or sustainable development, or clauses on human rights. The EU also gets input from the public, businesses, and non-government bodies when negotiating trade agreements or rules.

Trade negotiations and agreements

The EU supports and defends EU industry and business by working to remove trade barriers so that European exporters gain fair conditions and access to other markets. At the same time, the EU supports foreign companies with practical information on how to access the EU market.

This is a policy that starts with a premise of higher tariffs as a starting point of negotiations. Mutually beneficial access is not the starting point with low tariffs, it is something to be judged based on the degree of access you receive in return based on various factors. Tariffs are just one of the trade barriers to be negotiated downward from a premise that starts high.

However, 'fairness' has always been a matter of judgement. I am certain many would assert that the EU mooting a $1 billion fine against Twitter/X is a demonstrative of a fair market access relationship. I suspect some of them might also concede in private, where no one is around to hear them, that those who don't believe this to be a politically neutral penalization of a media company known for hosting politically disfavored speech may have a point.

Regardless, though, the self-described-

The European Union is one of the most outward-oriented economies in the world. It is also the world’s largest single market area. Free trade among its members was one of the EU's founding principles, and it is committed to opening up world trade as well.

-is also one which formally views tariffs as a starting point for future negotiations.

Starting points tend not to be 'the end.'

I think you misunderstand Trump, you misunderstand the EU, and your own position is incoherent.

Trump does not actually believe international trade, negative balance trade at least, is mutually beneficial, and this sets him apart from the EU and most of the rest of the world. He‘s not negotiating, he really prefers no trade to a trade deficit. He‘s been saying so for decades, but his supporters, and even the market until recently, refused to believe him.

Your attempts to read a sinister motive into the EU‘s trade policy : yeah, they want markets for their exporters – and the very next sentence, they say they support foreigners in their attempts to export to them. They acknowledge most countries have some tariffs in place – this means Trump unilaterally 5Xing every tariff is ‚moving towards the global norm‘?

You once made the bizarre argument that the US ‚gave‘ europe a trade surplus against itself in exchange for (europe‘s) military support. This is a zero-sum trumpian understanding of international trade. If europe cancels this ‚agreement‘, what trade is there to negotiate? The ‚subventions‘ (US trade deficit) will simply stop. Just like the ‚subventions‘ to cambodia and fiji and the rest of the world.

More comments

Why do you believe the US adopting a policy change towards a global norm 'dooms' you? Why is it 'over?'

Vastly increasing the cost imports crashes the US economy, which crashes the global economy, which sends the world into a Great Depression. It's a pretty straight line.

More comments

Regardless of the exact numbers, we are doomed. It's over.

It sounds like this would be a really good time to have solid institutional credibility to draw on with the public at large.

Nobody is choosing to be in a proxy war with Russia, we are at war with them whether we like it or not.

That makes no sense whatsoever. A proxy war is always going to be by choice. There is no law of nature that says we have to arm Russia's enemies, even if they were to take more territory. The only point at which we don't have a choice is if they decide to start knocking on our door.

Right, and if we wait for them to reach our doorstep, they will be much more powerful and our soldiers will have to do the fighting, rather than Ukrainians. All we have to do right now is spend a few tens of billions and let Ukrainian heroes on the other side of the world do the dirty work for us. It's a huge bargain.

Right, and if we wait for them to reach our doorstep, they will be much more powerful and our soldiers will have to do the fighting, rather than Ukrainians.

Unless you and that guy above you are both from Moldova or something this is complete fantasy bullshit. Russia has beaten itself half to death taking over 20% of its own personal Canada after we armed it with some secondhand leftovers. The worst nightmare scenario possible is that they force Western Europe to wake up and actually do a thing, and they're never "getting to our doorstep" unless aliens show up to give them phasers and shit.

Seriously, it's some fundamentally unserious stuff to say.

If global warming opens new shipping lanes in the arctic (likely), that is a potential source of conflict. I suspect someone in the Trump administration has this notion, as well. It’s the best case for wanting to acquire Greenland.

More comments

Maybe, maybe not. But that's still a choice.

10 million illegals? Child abuse and mutilation mandated by the government?

I'd like to be wrong, but without having searched, did Hanania comment against the Biden proposal to tax unrealized gains? Because if not, even accepting the Trump actions as worse, it's going to be very hard to see this as not carefully calibrated for whatever situation Hanania wanted to comment on.

Yeah, Biden wanted/tried to do lots of things that would have been as bad as if not worse than this. He just couldn’t.

I think the real answer here is "do not under any circumstances allow a party to win all three organs of government."

Yeah...Hanania invokes Chavez and Morales, even though part of the problem is that, from the perspective of some Americans, the Dems were leading us down the same path as Venezuela and Bolivia anyways.

Trump is a flailing incompetent, I can't really argue with that, but why weren't his rivals that much better about governing convincingly? Not to deny any agency of Trump, but our present situation is the culmination, the natural consequence of billions of smaller choices that have led us to his second term and this tariff madness. The populist anger that defeated Harris at the polls is perhaps simply the wages of 21st-Century sin.

This is where I start wearing my "don't blame me; I supported DeSantis" shirt.

It shows that even when you control for education level, how much someone followed the race was negatively correlated with support for Trump in 2024.

I realize this is a tangent but I find this incredibly funny. To me, because of the very specific news media dynamics in the last couple of elections, that is like suggesting we should trust cocaine addicts to set drug policy.

Richard Hanania’s whole schthick is ‘republicans are dumb but I’m stuck on the same side of the aisle’. No matter the news of the day, he has to come up with that take.

You should, accordingly, downgrade the weight of evidence of him coming up with that take.

Have you considered that maybe the Republicans are indeed dumb?

In the sense that everyone in politics is dumb? Yes. Do I think that their voter base being less college educated means a whole lot? No. The Republicans were just as dumb back when they were barely winning the college educated vote and running Romney. I mean, nominating a painfully patrician rich vulture capitalist for President one election cycle after the great recession who was also weak on the GOP's signature issue (It's hard to argue against Obamacare when there's a state level equivalent with your name on it.) is self-evidently dumb, one would think.

The actual politicians, staffers, and even primary voters are more educated than the average American. Even the Republican primary electorate is (or at least was circa 2018, and I doubt that the primary coalitions have changed that much since then) majority college educated with a relatively small four point gap between the two parties (This is dwarfed by the education gap between primary voters and the electorate as a whole.).

The current Trump administration coming up with these policies are all college educated, usually hold graduate degrees, and disproportionately hold them from the Ivy League. Unless level of education and the prestige of the degree-conferring institution are inversely correlated with intelligence, these people probably aren't dumb. Catch is, you don't have to be dumb to be wrong, and that's what makes Hanania's whole "elite human capital" argument so grating.

Hell, I think a small genre of argument here on The Motte is "intelligence is no guard against foolishness; in fact, it only lets you rationalize your idiocy better."

Is that basically matty for the dems too.

Kinda. Yglesias has a pitch that centrist democrats have a reasonable economic policy(which is not true, but if you throw out the moonshot lunacy they’ll never get done is close enough) but aren’t able to rein in the weirdos and nutjobs in their coalition.

I'm not sure what your point is. Intellectual consistency is... bad? Uninteresting? Something else?

Your point is correct, nobody has a good retort here because they just dislike the fact that Hanania has turned his gun on right wing foolishness now.

Yeah, it's a perfect example of this hilarious early post from Scott:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/13/arguments-from-my-opponent-believes-something/

  1. Argument From My Opponent Believes Something, Which Is Kinda Like Believing It On Faith, Which Is Kinda Like Them Being A Religion: “The high priests of the economic orthodoxy take it on faith that anyone who doubts the market is a heretic who must be punished.”
  1. Argument From My Opponent Believes Something, Which Means They Believe It Is The Answer To One Question, Which Is Kinda Like Believing It Is The Answer To All Questions, But It Isn’t: “Statists believe government can solve all our problems. They need to understand the world doesn’t work that way.”

There's 8 more examples, Hanania is being criticized for having a belief he's been consistent on.

Equivalent to the Pope claiming Catholicism is the one true way. If he wasn't saying that, he wouldn't be the Pope.

Hannia's brand is basically to present himself as the much neglected wiseman that the right should be listening to. Leveraging this self-styled reputation is how he makes money.

I'm not sure how to distinguish this from Hanania having a consistent view and Hanania believing that he is correct. That seems like a standard that would rule out pretty much everybody.

Show examples of him holding to his principles, whatever you propose them to be, in a way that undermines Dean's view of his 'brand'.

I'm sorry, I don't follow the actual criticism here, or what you think I need to prove.

This tangent began with hydroacetylene writing:

Richard Hanania’s whole schthick is ‘republicans are dumb but I’m stuck on the same side of the aisle’. No matter the news of the day, he has to come up with that take.

You should, accordingly, downgrade the weight of evidence of him coming up with that take.

I read this as stating that it is unsurprising that Hanania states things consistent with things that he has stated previously. Well, yes. But this hardly seems to make sense as a criticism of him. Intellectual consistency is not a vice.

This was followed by Dean stating:

Equivalent to the Pope claiming Catholicism is the one true way. If he wasn't saying that, he wouldn't be the Pope.

Hannia's brand is basically to present himself as the much neglected wiseman that the right should be listening to. Leveraging this self-styled reputation is how he makes money.

Again, it's not clear how this is any kind of valid criticism of Hanania - any more than "you're Catholic!" is a valid criticism of the pope. Hanania's articles tend to be consistent with articles that Hanania has written in the past. The pope's statements tend to be consistent with the pope's previous statements. If there's a difference between the two of them, it's that Catholicism is explicitly formalised as an ideology in a way that Hanania-ism is not.

And, yes, Hanania makes money from people paying to read his writing, but I missed the part where that was a criticism.

My objection is that these criticisms prove too much. It's bad when authors give takes consistent with their previous takes? It's bad when authors make money from their writing? These criticisms, if generalised, exclude almost every writer.

Now, to your comment specifically:

Show examples of him holding to his principles, whatever you propose them to be, in a way that undermines Dean's view of his 'brand'.

Yes, Hanania has a financial interest in catering to his readership. This is true of every author who gets paid for their writing, including every Substacker in the world. We do not automatically dismiss all writing on this basis.

I am aware of no compelling reason to believe that Hanania is insincere in the top article here, and at any rate, even if he were, that wouldn't invalidate any of the observations in the article itself.

So I am left very confused at what seems to me to be a desperate and unproductive groping for an ad hominem. What is the point?

Hanania has a narrative he’s selling and every headlines-dominating story has to fit into that narrative.

That doesn’t make the narrative wrong. But it means that example #9000 from Hanania isn’t something we should just trust.

How can that be distinguished from any pundit who has a consistent worldview, though? Certainly we should take all pundits with a grain of salt, but I can't see anything that makes Hanania worse or less trustworthy than any comparable pundit. Scott Alexander has a bunch of narratives that he's selling - rationalism, effective altruism, AI nonsense. Freddie deBoer has a bunch of narratives he's selling - Marxism, socialism, education reform. Matt Yglesias has a bunch of narratives he's selling - YIMBYism, economic centrism. It feels to me like you're holding Hanania to a higher standard that every other Substack bloviator out there.

More comments

Again, it's not clear how this is any kind of valid criticism of Hanania - any more than "you're Catholic!" is a valid criticism of the pope.

"You're Catholic" is absolutely a valid criticism of someone trying to convince you that some piece of information proves that Catholicism is true. The piece of information truly might prove that Catholicism is true, but an already-believing Catholic can't be trusted to make that judgment call. No more than Trump can be trusted to make a judgment call on how good a president Biden was, given that he's demonstrated a penchant for characterizing everything Biden did as the worst thing any president did ever.

Fitting every new piece of information into a pre-set narrative that one likes is intellectual consistency only in the sense that it's a consistently confirmation bias. That's sort of what it means when some narrative is described as someone's "schtick."

Now, it's possible that it is factually not the case that it's his schtick, but rather that he genuinely takes a skeptical look at each new piece of evidence and is helplessly forced to conclude, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, that his narrative is shown to be correct yet again.

As you allude to, distinguishing between these two things isn't particularly easy. In both situations, it's being intellectually consistent and believing that he is correct. This points to the fact that being intellectually consistent and believing that oneself is correct isn't actually worth anything: the value in such a thing only comes from the belief of oneself as correct having some actual basis in fact. That's something one can make arguments about by looking at the actual behavior of the person. I'd say that, by default, everyone should be presumed to be falling prey to confirmation bias all the time, doubly so if their preferred narrative is self aggrandizing, triply if that person is particularly intelligent and thus better able to fit evidence to narrative. It's only by credibly demonstrating that they are open to other narratives that they can earn any sort of credibility that their arguments have any relationship with reality. That's where showing oneself to be capable of undermining one's preferred narrative comes in, and there's no better way to demonstrate this capability than by doing it.

"You're Catholic" is absolutely a valid criticism of someone trying to convince you that some piece of information proves that Catholicism is true. The piece of information truly might prove that Catholicism is true, but an already-believing Catholic can't be trusted to make that judgment call.

I'm ambivalent on how reasonable this is.

On the one hand, a Catholic would seem to have a natural bias towards the truth of Catholicism. If we are evaluating some novel piece of information that may or may not bear on the truth of Catholicism, we should expect the Catholic to be predisposed to interpreting that evidence in ways that support the truth of Catholicism. In that sense knowing that the person is Catholic should make us more skeptical of any Catholicism-supporting conclusions they draw.

On the other hand... I would expect people who encounter evidence that Catholicism is true to be disproportionately Catholic, because factual beliefs can be motivating. Suppose there's an argument that, if correct, shows that Catholicism is true. Obviously people who think that the argument is correct are going to convert to Catholicism - I'd question anybody who didn't. To say that we can't trust Catholics on the subject of Catholicism is to stack the deck. People who find Catholicism convincing become Catholics. If by doing so they remove themselves from the community of people with whom we can have reasonable discussion about Catholicism, well, then we would seem to have an arbitrary prejudice against Catholicism. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, for any belief or ideology.

For instance - you can't trust evolutionary biologists on the subject of whether evolution is true. They're evolutionary biologists! We should immediately distrust the testimony of people who believe evolution is true on the subject of evolution. That seems absurd. So too with everything else.

The problem is that both these points seem compelling to me, to an extent, especially because for an overarching ideology like Catholicism, people are likely to adopt Catholicism for reasons unrelated to the merits of any given argument. This is less the case for a specific theory like evolution, though ideologies like rationalism, conservatism, socialism, etc., are more like Catholicism than they are like evolution. I think where I end up is that we should not rule partisans of a particular ideology out of discussions of that ideology, though we should be aware of their biases and take them into account. Thus, say, Catholics can and should be consulted on the subject of whether or not Catholicism is true (we can hardly expect anybody else to make the case for Catholicism!), but we should be more critical than usual of their assessments of new information.

On Hanania specifically:

Now, it's possible that it is factually not the case that it's his schtick, but rather that he genuinely takes a skeptical look at each new piece of evidence and is helplessly forced to conclude, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, that his narrative is shown to be correct yet again.

I guess I don't see a valid criticism of Hanania here relative to other pundits. Yes, I'm sure it's true that his positions are a combination of sincere assessment of new data and his best interpretation thereof and a retrofitting of that new data into his existing conceptual framework. He has an existing view or narrative of the world, he will think that narrative is correct or at least the best, most plausible one available, and when he obtains new information, he starts by trying to fit that information into that narrative.

But the last I checked that was how everybody thinks. Everybody has narratives or interpretative frameworks that they apply to experience, and first interpret new evidence in ways that fit with their existing categories. It's only when new evidence becomes overwhelming, or else so dramatically contradicts the existing framework as to be undeniable, that they are forced to reconsider.

I'd say that, by default, everyone should be presumed to be falling prey to confirmation bias all the time, doubly so if their preferred narrative is self aggrandizing, triply if that person is particularly intelligent and thus better able to fit evidence to narrative. It's only by credibly demonstrating that they are open to other narratives that they can earn any sort of credibility that their arguments have any relationship with reality. That's where showing oneself to be capable of undermining one's preferred narrative comes in, and there's no better way to demonstrate this capability than by doing it.

Can you think of any particular examples of this? The thing is, what this sounds like to me in practice is the idea that everybody should be presumed to be dishonest except for people who have radically changed their belief systems.

That seems like a heuristic that will easily lead one astray - it would imply, for a start, that inconsistent opportunists are more (intellectually) trustworthy than people who stick to their principles. Doesn't that seem bizarre?

More comments

And quadruply if the only way you ever interact with them is online and you never have in person conversations with them, because then you don't have facial tells and they have time to craft a response.

Gattsuru's point is solid though too - arguments providing evidence against the shtick would be counter proof of the shtick - a single article in the opposite direction wouldn't prove much, but it would be some proof that he wasn't just arguing in this direction because he always argues in this direction. I also consider it genuinely noble to argue against self-interest, if not necessarily wise.

It's hard to tell what Hanania actually believes, since he is a troll, an unabashed X grifter who is happy to post controversy bait, and to me at least he sometimes comes off as a sociopath. That said, he has been very consistent in supporting free market principles above almost everything else. To me, he seems untrustworthy, and I probably wouldn't trust him with anything important to me, but he does seem to genuinely be a principled free market supporter, so it does not surprise me that he views Trump's tariffs with horror. Free markets and free trade might be one of the few things that Richard Hanania genuinely believes in.

So, MSM consumers? Were they really 'more informed'? I dunno...

The typical Gell-Mann amnesia take is that the consuming mainstream media about a topic is significantly less informing than engaging with a topic in a personal capacity. This is almost certainly true. But it can also be true that reading the New York Times buisiness section makes one more informed about the state of the national economy than not doing that.

Yeah, I had to delete my OP because I made it offhandedly while I was both working and exhausted. I agree that there are 'more-informed' vs. 'less-informed' people, but I don't think there are actually 'High-Information Voters.' I think that's a story some people like to tell themselves so they can look down on 'Low-Information Voters.' The biggest issue with information is the quality and usefulness. For the longest time anything /true/ seemed useless and everything /useful/ has seemed designed to mislead. Information is too loaded of a term for me these days.

But it can also be true that reading the New York Times buisiness section makes one more informed about the state of the national economy than not doing that.

Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are. Obviously ok you could do better than the MSM if you started pouring time into critically reading academic, industry or legal sources, but most Americans don't even understand how marginal tax rates work. You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.

I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are.

I’m reminded of the NYT study of low information voters during the 2024 campaign. Specifically, there was one woman they interviewed who liked Biden but was angry that he’d banned abortion and so planned to vote Trump. This woman lived in a blue state and so could have gotten all the abortions she wanted.

It doesn’t make you uninformed, it does quite often make you misinformed. Yes, if you read NYT, you’ll know there’s a recession, you’ll know the unemployment rates, stock prices, and so on. But it will be misleadingly contextualized to appear that the recession is All Trump’s fault. And they’ll use their think piece section to push the idea that “is this the end of the Trump Era?”, “Will the Trump-cession cost Republicans control of Congress?” But when Biden was in charge, the NYT would cover the inflation and people not affording groceries as if it just happens like that sometimes. It’s the typical thing where they’re looking to the business cycle, Covid, the Republican Party holding up stimulus checks, bird flu, and everything else even if it’s nonsense. Conversely, economic booms are always caused by the Democrats’ economic policy — even when that democrat hasn’t been in power for years and most of the policies have been curtailed or reversed. The Trump boom, boys and girls, was really the Obama boom, at least according to the NYT.

Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are.

You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.

The argument is that you can model people as having three axes:

  • accuracy of information against objective reality*
  • proportion of relevant information known / concepts understood
  • confidence in their knowledge.

The question is: how does reading a mainstream serious newspaper (NYT/WSJ, etc.) affect each axis?

My personal answer is that I agree that proportion of known information is going to go up for newspaper readers. The accuracy, I don't know. Information directly stated by a newspaper is still usually accurate, but their bias leads them to communicate lots more information through implication that is inaccurate, e.g. reporting accurately on a given murder implies that such murders are common, or accurately reporting the words of an academic on Yasuke the black samurai (see below) may lead people to believe them even though the base research is fraudulent. Finally, confidence. I don't know whether 'low-information voters' are more or less epistemically confidence than the self-professed 'well-informed'; I'd say maybe slightly less?

*to the extent this is philosophically possible for different types of information

Good post overall, but low information voters are waaaaay more confident generally, that's why they don't need more information.

I'm not confident in that! Haha. In either direction. I suspect you have multiple groups of different kinds of non-news-reading voter, and that their confidence varies wildly depending on the topics, and even potentially on how it's brought up. People feel a lot less confident when they're comfortable than when they're under attack, for example. But I think that having an institutional backing telling you that you're a Very Serious Person gives you a bit more arrogance than you might otherwise have.

If Trump crashes the economy, the Republicans will lose heavily in the midterm elections in 2026 and will also lose heavily in the general elections in 2028. This isn't Venezuela. The Republicans only have 2-4 years to show that they know what they are doing with the economy. If they actually seriously damage the economy, they will lose power hard and Trumpism as a brand will sustain serious damage even among those who currently support it. Hanania seems to overestimate the degree to which voters being stupid and uninformed could sustain unsuccessful politicians in power. Sure, the overwhelming majority of American voters on both the left and the right are stupid and uninformed. And sure, voters in all democracies seem to have a remarkable level of tolerance for clearly failed government policies and politicians. However, one thing that voters usually do not forgive is economic problems. You do not have to be smart or pay much attention to politics to notice a major economic downturn. If the economy blows up, Trumpism will be done as a political force for the next several years unless the Democrats manifest a level of dysfunction and miscalibrated messaging that eclipses even their recent pathetic performances. Are the Democrats capable of fumbling the ball so hard? Yes, they are. I have never before in my life seen the Democrats be as disorganized, pathetic, incapable of communicating with the average person, captured by insane ideological purity spirals, detached from reality, and happy to sit in their mansions and make money instead of actually going out and winning elections as they have been these last few years.

I don't see how Trump's tariffs are going to make things economically better for the average American. It's literally a tax hike. Yes, there are also some tax cuts supposedly in the works, but I'll believe them if and when I see them. Part of what made America great back in the 1950s wasn't just that you could go easily get a job as a factory worker, it was also that your job as a factory worker would be enough for you to afford housing. Bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if it happens, will not magically create the demand for the sorts of relatively low-skilled positions that existed decades ago. Modern manufacturing is a lot more technological than it used to be. And tariff increases will not magically make landlords and home owners offer their properties to renters or buyers for cheap. What good would it be if you can suddenly get a factory job, but all the housing is still expensive? Trump's administration barely even talks about the housing crisis. When it comes to economics, they seem to be laser-focused on tariffs and on some small cosmetic efficiency improvements such as what DOGE is doing. But realistically, DOGE isn't going to substantially cut the federal budget. I don't believe that the Republicans have either the courage or the political will or the desire to touch any real big spending, such as the military budget. And even the military budget is less than a fifth of the federal budget. Meanwhile, they're laying off a bunch of government workers, thus causing many of those people to enter the private workforce and add more competition to everyone else who is trying to get a job in the private sector. Which could theoretically be beneficial if the resulting federal savings get passed back to the taxpayer... but again, I'll believe that if and when I see it, and in any case, even if the savings did get passed back to the taxpayer, it would take some time for the results to manifest themselves.

I very strongly doubt much of anything could make one of the two parties lose "heavily" at this point, especially the Republicans. Trump and the legion of Trump defenders and Trump cultists have plenty of excuses to blame the outgroup. Off the top of my head, if a recession were to occur then the following excuses could include:

  • The economy was built up with "fake money" from the Dems, so it's not Trump's fault.
  • The media is lying to you about the state of the economy. Also, have I explained to you in detail how much I hate the media? Let's deflect the conversation to that instead. I'll start my laundry list of media hatred at vaccine mandates and Biden's age.
  • The USA is an evil empire of PMCs who want everyone to become transsexuals, so a crash is good, actually.

Roughly half of the country will be in echochambers hearing nothing but these excuses. There might be a swing, and Republicans could easily lose, but it will be by a tiny swing of like 2% of the population, involving a handful of seats in the House, and <5 seats in the Senate.

The economy was built up with "fake money" from the Dems, so it's not Trump's fault.

Is that not true?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1083150/total-us-debt-across-all-sectors/

Total -public, corporate, private - debt in 2000 was 28 trillion. Now it's 93 trillion.

Debt is a normal financial instrument that has plenty of legitimate uses. Since 2000 the US economy has almost tripled in size, so an increase in debt is both expected and normal.

The main danger of debt right now is too much US federal debt, which Republicans and Democrats are both roughly equally at fault for not reigning in. Trump is poised to blow out the deficit even harder than ever before.

..people selling each other overpriced services they don't really need counts as GDP too.

Has the real economy tripled in size? I don't think so. US electronics industry is .. pretty much shambles now. Car industry isn't doing that great either, or at least, certainly hasn't tripled. Neither has agriculture.

Everything is worth what it's purchaser is willing to pay for it.

A lot of what we'd see in both GDP and debt numbers is just inflation. But there's also been genuine growth, especially in tech.

Total -public, corporate, private - debt in 2000 was 28 trillion. Now it's 93 trillion.

Numbers not accounted for inflation don't mean much. Why is corporate debt a problem?

Since 2000 the Democrats and Republicans have been in power for the same amount of time.

You’re right that the numbers who actually change their voting behavior off of this may seem unimpressive but “roughly half the country” means a very different thing in the modern American two party system than it does in typical day to day human life. 2008 was the most recent politically relevant election that was considered to be a true landslide and the popular vote result was 53% to 46%.

If I’m taking a poll of 20 coworkers to see where we want to go to lunch and 11 of them want pizza and 9 of them want tacos I would consider that a very close decision. But in modern American politics a vote that close is a blowout. A small percent of Trump voters switching sides next time or just not voting changes things dramatically. And this type of insane and economically destructive brain rot if it isn’t stopped immediately is the exact type of thing that will make that happen.

I absolutely despise the ethos of the modern left and have from the very moment I became aware of it when I was literally a middle schooler. But I’m not supporting a cult of personality whose leader is hellbent on crashing the global economy just because. If this keeps up and whoever gets the GOP nod in 2028 isn’t clearly intent on changing course I don’t think I can stomach it any longer. I don’t know how many people like me are out there but if even s small percentage of the vote defecting can make a big difference.

I don't really disagree with anything you've written here, although I have some quibbles around the edges. In 1984, Reagan won with a margin of over 18%. Close elections aren't an immutable fact of the US electoral system, they're just a modern result of (most likely) partisan echo chambers.

I agree even small victories can bring outsized vibe shifts. The most recent election was a good example, with Trump barely winning but everyone treating it like he won by a 40% margin.

What do you, Antipopulist, believe? What policies do you want to see?

I only see you crawl out of the woodwork when you want to dunk on stupid Republicans. You don't even engage in the faintest cheerleading of Democrats, which is strange. You only talk about Republicans, and only negatively.

I, like Hanania, was dunking on Dems plenty when they were in the driver's seat in terms of wokeness and immigration. I can appreciate how effectively Trump dismantled wokeness in the first month of his admin. But I oppose buffoonish as a rule, and while the delusions were previously coming from the left, now they're mostly coming from the right.

The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.

Thinking that the electorate MUST regain the confidence of the elite is a notion reserved only for the most biting of satires and Hanania's midwittery.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lösung

News flash: the people have ALWAYS been stupid, always been short-sighted, provincial and backwater in sensibility and lacking in education. And in a democratic system, their votes are equal to your well-educated and informed one. So you better have a convincing argument to sway them to your side! Use what they say, rhetoric? The classic politician's art?

What is presented here is not even an argument. It is simply a fact. Most people are uninformed. You can't govern a country as if it consisted entirely of reporters from the New York Times. Any argument against populism is inherently a argument against democracy. The masses chose their own elites in defiance of reality or whatever standard you might impose on them. There is no argument against this that does not end in 'some animals are more equal than others'.

Hanania is merely restating what the Greeks have always known, which puts into doubt the depth and quality of his education. If democracy requires the electorate to be highly educated elite human capital like himself, perhaps democracy is a BAD IDEA because such a thing will never happen. If he would just flat out state that he wants democracy but only for himself and his pals, it'd be more honest but he is not in the business of honesty, is he?

Voters have always broadly been braindead morons, but something happened around 2014-2016 to make both sides dovetail into their worst excesses despite things generally being good, at least better than the Great Recession which did not immediately provoke such foolishness.

That was the advent of social media: elites could no longer gatekeep the masses. In previous eras media elites controlled both context and expression so that the political elite could pretend to have a popular mandate (because that is the basis of legitimacy in a democracy). Even in the so called golden era of democratic norms it could only exist because it was tightly controlled.

The masses were never wise, temperate, or well-informed. The current failsons of the western world came into power naively believing in their own liberal rhetoric: and thus, they have no defense against the crudity of the people they ostensibly lead. They can't even muster a defense without twisting themselves into knots as Hanania does, trying to bring forth the nanoangstrom of difference between bad populism and good democracy.

The truth is cold and unforgiven. There never was such a thing.

This doesn't seem true to me. Social media rose in the 2005-2010 era, which predates the 2014-2016 mark by up to a decade.

More damningly, social media rose all throughout the first world, but it was really only the Anglosphere (mostly the US, to some extent the UK) that went insane during this time period. The rest of the first world remained relatively tranquil until quite recently, even Germany which had a lot of challenges around the 2015 era.

This is correct, but going further, social media rewired the masses. Low-information voters in the era of analog media possessed incumbency bias. Low-information voters in the era of digital media now have anti-incumbency bias.

In the 20th Century, the list of incumbent presidents that lost the White House is: Taft (faced a third-party run from Roosevelt that split the Republican vote), Hoover (the Great Depression), Carter (stagflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis), Bush the Elder (significant third-party run from Perot). Now we've gone back-to-back in incumbent losses while third-party candidates garnered nowhere near Roosevelt or Perot's support.

Social media stumbled into boosting negative content. They weren't optimizing for it, but rage bait travels faster and farther than other kinds of content, and as they were opting for engagement above all else, their algorithms boosted rage bait. There are certainly echo chambers, but still that rage gets directed at whomever is in power.

Martin Gurri's 2018 book The Revolt of the Public tracked this through events like the Arab Spring, arguing that the center can't hold, and whomever replaces an incumbent becomes the new center, which still can't hold. The Financial Times picked up on the gist in looking at how most incumbent parties in Europe, regardless of if they were right or left, lost in 2024.

I can think of another reason besides social media that Trump 45 lost. (And I don't mean electoral chicanery either)

Telling his voters not to vote by mail.

It's certainly not mono-causal. The point is the low-information voter, and not just in America, now has anti-incumbency bias.

Is it the ill-informed masses being driven insane by social media or the educated elites themselves?

I'd argue that media gatekeeping affected the informed policymaking class a lot more than the masses who never read, say, National Review. Speaking of gatekeeping, how many prominent political media figures aren't posting heavily on Twitter or some equivalent? Same goes for policy wonks.

This is an important distinction because it isn't mostly high-school educated voters who make policy, but the college educated, and most of those have graduate degrees. If the highly educated are just as prone to making bad decisions due to confirmation bias and/or falling victim to social-media driven stupidity, or are flat out uninformed, that's it's own problem, but these people aren't exactly "low information".

The masses were, however, docile. People didn’t vote for extremists. Only a radical fringe opposed ongoing foreign policy commitments. There was more domestic terrorism than today, but normies didn’t have anything to do with that.

The reigns of Chavez and Maduro have been characterized by concentrated support for the government among the poor, as was that of Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose program appealed disproportionately to rural indigenous communities.

It is important to remember that both Chavez and Morales did deliver substantial bennies to their voters in the early years of their time in power, before they ran out of other people’s money.

Three years into power, hordes of natives streamed down from the mountains into the settler city of Caracas to defeat the CIA coup attempt against Chavez in 2002. He really did build schools, social housing for people who had previously lived in shanty towns, handed out countless jobs for the poor. Was it unsustainable? Sure, but it happened.

The consequence of Trump's current economic policy will be not be that. The uncertainty it creates will slow or freeze corporate hiring and investment; inflation will make it harder for the fed to cut when it needs to. If Trump wanted to build a large working class of people who owe him economically, it may have been possible, but I doubt it’s this.

I think you're completely misreading Hanania's argument. "The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class..." This is, flipping the subject/object, literally a word for word critique of the ruling class - that they are out of touch, live in an ideological bubble that insulates them from reality, that they are incapable of appealing to the populace at large (and do not appear to care to do so), etc.

Otherwise, is Hanania suggesting that the post-WWII elite consesus was populist in nature? Because we've been living in a kakistocracy since then (realistically, we can go back even further).

"...but perhaps the Trump administration will just continue to tariff manufacturing inputs while claiming to be protecting manufacturing..."

You mean, exactly like every other country in history did with tariffs, and currently still doing so? Of all the rebuttals to Trump's tariffs, this is the one most disconnected with historical reality.

This is, flipping the subject/object, literally a word for word critique of the ruling class - that they are out of touch, live in an ideological bubble that insulates them from reality, that they are incapable of appealing to the populace at large (and do not appear to care to do so), etc.

The evidence in support of his argument was Trump winning "low information" voters, even after controlling for college education - how do you appeal to low-information voters with facts?

"...but perhaps the Trump administration will just continue to tariff manufacturing inputs while claiming to be protecting manufacturing..."

You mean, exactly like every other country in history did with tariffs, and currently still doing so? Of all the rebuttals to Trump's tariffs, this is the one most disconnected with historical reality.

What other developed economies? Did it work during the first Trump administration? The data seems to show a continuation of a post-recession secular trend in manufacturing employment.

What are facts? I’m serious. Who gets to determine what is factual? Haniana believes the media doesn’t lie because in the end he accepts that they by and large get to determine what is factual. This position is prima facie absurd and therefore Haniana is absurd.

The mainstream media is untrustworthy and should be replaced with what, Catturd?

I don’t know. Competitive news environment? But going to ancient sources of wisdom I need to know that I don’t know. That is, I need to know the media is wrong. I don’t need a solution. Because it is better to know you know nothing as opposed to now things that just ain’t so.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats