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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.

He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.

Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.

I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.

He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.

As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"

As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.

Hard agree with Scott here: MAGA's refusal to try to rein in Trump when he does something silly is not a fluke, it's an essential part of the cult of personality that MAGA has become. The fact that the usual suspects are working backwards trying to justify it from nearly any angle (many of which are mutually conflicting, but they broadly don't bother trying to rationalize their defenses) should update the priors of anyone who thought MAGA was an ideological movement rather than a cult built around aggrandizing the whims of a single capricious man.

I get that sneering at populists is whole reason you made this alt account, but this is hilariously out of touch even for you.

MAGA is not "failing" to reign Trump in. MAGA is cheering him on because he is following through on his campaign promises. He is pursuing thier objectives.

MAGA is not Trump. MAGA became the rallying cry of a Tea Party that is done asking politely and has now adopted an attitude position of "Fuck it, we ball". Trump is the avatar of that attitude. The guy who will actually say "Fuck you, we did in fact build that" on behalf of all the construction workers, architects, structural engineers, real-estate developers, Et Al. who did in fact build that, and are fed up with crime, inflation, and constantly being lectured by idiot wordcels about race, gender, and whatever else is on the menu this week.

I know it's an unpopular position but again I urge theMotte to consider the possibility that Trump (and Trump-voters) know what they are doing.

Trump wants to import foreign workers to work in factories driven back to America by tariffs. That is pants on the head retarded version of globalism.

This might be more compelling if MAGA ever criticised Trump when he goes the other direction. When the tariffs came out MAGA defended them as sound economic policy. When he backtracked they still defended them as a brilliant negotiating tactic, despite having supported them in substance days before.

This might might be a compelling argument if MAGA opinion on Tarriffs didn't run the gamut from "ambivalent" to "positive". In cases where Trump's stated preferences did go against those of the base, (EG school choice or, as @The_Nybbler observes, vaccine mandates) the preferences of the base appear to have won out.

In any case the fact that he at least seems to be taking the base's concerns about thier wages, jobs, contract-bids, Et Al. being undermined by foriegn labor (be it Chinese slave camps, or illegal immigrants) earns him a fair amount of good-will. He at least pretends to care, instead of dismissing those concerns out of hand.

"Fuck you, we did in fact build that"

Some real Obama Derangement Syndrome here. A throwaway line from a campaign speech 13 years ago and people are still mad over it. This is the equivalent of if people were still referencing the Malaise speech all the time in the 90s.

  • -11

One of the hallmarks of the American populist right is, on the one hand, an almost gleeful cruelty, and, on the other, a fragility and hypersensitivity that is remarkably at odds with their self-image as tough and emotionally resilient (unlike the snowflake libs). Obama in particular evokes paroxysms of rage (for, uh, reasons) and "you didn't build that" rather bluntly punctures one of their core myths and their hypersensitivity means they can't let it go.

This is a hallmark of human beings in general. It’s no different to jibes about Margaret Thatcher stealing milk.

Elizabeth Warren is not Barack Obama, and it wasn't just a throw-away line, it was an expression of a core belief that ideas matter more than actions. A belief that continues to shape Democratic party policy and campaign strategy.

Elizabeth Warren is not Barack Obama

?

Warren made the initial 2011 speech that Obama was referencing/expanding upon in his 2012 speech, but the whole controversy arose over Obama saying the line.

that ideas matter more than actions.

What does this even mean In context it's just a completely anodyne exposition of the notion that no man is an island. Idk what 'ideas/actions' has to do with it when one of the examples he gave of facilitation of success by govt. is physical infrastructure.

A belief that continues to shape Democratic party policy and campaign strategy.

If this were true one wouldn't have to reach back for a statement from four Presidential campaigns ago. Nobody references 'I'm not concerned about the very poor' do they.

MAGA is not Trump. MAGA became the rallying cry of a Tea Party that is done asking politely and has now adopted the position "Fuck it, we ball". Trump is the avatar of that attitude. The guy who will actually say "Fuck you, we did in fact build that" on behalf of all the construction workers, architects, structural engineers, real-estate developers, Et Al. who did in fact build that, and are fed up with crime, inflation, and constantly being lectured by idiot wordcels about race, gender, and whatever else is on the menu this week.

There's nothing about tariffs here. The architects, structural engineers, real-estate developers of America have been moving away from a Republican party increasingly associated with low-class people. Real-life Howard Roark types are not happy about the tariffs suddenly making the cost of inputs higher. Even Trump slop accounts like Mike Cernovich are having second thoughts now:

https://x.com/AlexanderTurok/status/1911558128082255965

I know it's an unpopular position but again I urge theMotte to consider the possibility that Trump (and Trump-voters) know what they are doing.

I'm sure Trump's doing what he's doing on purpose, and MAGA supports him in it. But tariffs are still bad.

As for "cult of personality", that just gets an eyeroll. There's some of that, it comes with any charismatic politician (which is most Presidents, Gerald Ford and Bush Sr. being notable exceptions). But being lock-step with Trump really isn't a characteristic of MAGA, the biggest split being on vaccines, where Trump yielded to his base.

I get that sneering at populists is whole reason you made this alt account

It's not an alt, he renamed.

When did Scott usurp the throne of rightful caliph from Eliezer?

Eliezer is 'The Prophet', aka the originator. and Scott is 'the rightful caliph', aka successor.

in cultural influence Scott exceeded Eliezer years & years ago.

Eliezer disappeared at the height of his power and influence. He could have been much more impactful on AGI development but he was too tired from writing a fanfic and being a micro-celebrity. He relegated himself to side-character territory at best.

If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing. And maybe that particular metaphor owes more to Biden’s age than the inexorable logic of liberal institutionalism. But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent

I'm unsure how to react to this statement. On the one hand, it seems like a fairly straightforward argument. On the other hand, it seems to make several assumptions that I don't think are true, and I'm unsure how much of that is because I am ideologically opposed to the overall sentiment and how much is based in cold hard fact.

Well, let's game this out. My prior is that Congressional Democrats, State Department Bureaucrats, White House staffers, DNC operatives, and Democrat-controlled media all move more-or-less in lockstep. Sure there are sometimes stutters and gaps when it takes time for the new messaging to be passed down from the decision-makers to the apparatchiks, but generally speaking the Democrats are able to put out fairly consistent messaging across the broad spectrum of their PMC alliance members. All that to say, where one goes, they all go. If the Congressional Democrats decide Fuck Ecuador is the right message, then so do the State Department bureaucrats and the White House staffers and the DNC operatives and the MSM. The same holds true no matter what order these are listed in.

So Generic DNC President decides that the message of the day is Fuck Ecuador, for whatever personal reasons you may choose to ascribe to him or her. Through some level of backroom dealing, favors owed and repaid, dirt dug up, whatever, Generic DNC President gets the DNC operatives on board. So the MSM starts sane-washing Fuck Ecuador because Daniel Noboa is a right-wing authoritarian now because he declared war on the gangs in Ecuador and that's not allowed. Ecuador is vital to the stability of the Western Hemisphere so obviously the United States has to Do Something about this right-wing authoritarian strongman. So the Congressional Democrats start pumping out statements about how they support Generic DNC President's brave stance against right-wing authoritarianism, and the MSM continues pumping out articles about how Ecuador is really really really important and Noboa is just plain evil, and the State Department Bureaucrats get on board because hey they read in the New York Times that Noboa is just plain evil, and the White House staffers get on board because they truly believe that Generic DNC President has the country's best interests at heart. And so we went to war.

Evidence in support of this: Biden, despite promising to be a transition candidate, decided to run for re-election. And everyone fell into lock-step behind him. The Congressional Democrats said they'd never been prouder to be an American, the State Department Bureaucrats said they loved everything President Biden did, the DNC operatives spun-up their fundraising machine for him, and the Democrat-controlled media said anyone who thought Biden was a dementia-riddled walking corpse was fake news. This continued right up until it became completely undeniable on live television. At which point, without holding an abbreviated primary, without holding any kind of candidate search, every element of the party, after a few of those aforementioned stutters and gaps, fell into line behind Harris. And then the Congressional Democrats said they'd never been prouder to be an American, the State Department Bureaucrats said they loved everything Vice President Harris proposed, the DNC operatives spun-up their fundraising machine for her, and the Democrat-controlled media said that anyone who thought Harris was going to lose was fake news.

That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me. Because if I am right, well the entire thrust of Scott's argument kinda falls apart. If I am wrong, I'd like to know.

And everyone fell into lock-step behind him

Initially yes, but not post-debate (Pelosi being the obvious case) and I doubt that happens with Trump.

That's how I see that going. Someone sanity-check me.

I think you are mostly right, but I think the structure of the machine you’re describing is a bit different. It’s not a linear chain coming down from the White House, and the White House isn’t the one controlling it. For foreign policy, the locus of control is the State Department and CIA (but I repeat myself) and then other entities emanate out from that locus like spokes on a wheel.

So in your hypothetical, some group deep within the State Department looks at the numbers and maps and decides that conquering Ecuador is vital to America’s geopolitical interests. Suddenly, the President starts getting alarming security briefings about Ecuadorian weapons of mass destruction and imminent Ecuadorian aggression. The media gets their marching orders and starts running two articles a day about how the Ecuadorian President might actually be Satan. The NPCs take the lead from the both the White House and media and pretty soon you have people burning Ecuadorian flags on the street and demanding war.

The second thing is that the October 7 attack and the subsequent invasion of Gaza is the first major hiccup in the machine, where the gears seized up and the NPCs in the colleges and on the streets didn’t perfectly spin along with their state department orders. That might just be a one off thing. Israel-Palestine had been a culture war issue for over half a century, and people had much more baked-in preexisting opinions about it than they ever did about Ukraine or Iraq. So it was significantly harder to just beam their NPC programming right into their heads and send them off. But it could also be a sign that the control machine is just generally breaking down. I have a theory that the fervor over the Ukraine War was supposed to be a whole-of-society thing in America, not just a center left neoliberal cause celebre. It’s just that the programming ended up being rejected by large sections of the American populace. I see evidence of that and I keep meaning to make a post about it.

My prior is that Congressional Democrats, State Department Bureaucrats, White House staffers, DNC operatives, and Democrat-controlled media all move more-or-less in lockstep.

The best counterexample I can give is how Biden handled Israel-Palestine. Much of the leftist base along with some true-believer DNC operatives and parts of the media are very much pro-Palestine, and wanted Biden to basically say "fuck Israel". He didn't do this, and it was an ongoing point of tension within the Dem coalition for most of Biden's presidency.

Another counterexample would be to read up on Matthew Yglesias' take on "The Groups", and how during the Biden admin it seemed like on many policies (with the exception of things like the aforementioned Israel issue) the base got to functionally overwrite what the President wanted. Furthermore, it seemed like Harris would have liked to pivot harder to the center if she could have, but the base was fractious enough that there were concerns about wide defections, so Harris ended up being a mealy-mouthed "something for everybody" candidate.

I agree that the topic of bombing Ecuador was probably not a well chosen example by Scott, because few Americans truly care what non-Western country their air force is bombing today. It will not affect them in the same way as declaring a trade war on the rest of the world will. Still, I think that Obama or Clinton would have had to spend a lot of political capital to bring the Democrats and MSM on board with it (unless there was a "bomb Ecuador" lobby who had already laid the groundwork, of course). Perhaps a Democratic president can get away with one or two whimsical decisions on that level per term, but certainly not with three per year.

Biden deciding to run again was a disaster, and the Democrat's leadership was absolutely asleep at the wheel to not stop him well in advance. Rallying behind Harris -- while clearly not a winning move in retrospect -- can be seen as the Democrats trying to make the best out of a terrible situation they had maneuvered themselves into.

Everyone seems terrified nowadays of having contested conventions which used to be the norm.

I'm reading Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and it's an eye-opener.

After the first few primaries nowadays, everyone just drops out to make room for the Chosen One. And it's happening earlier and earlier.

That election is the reason both parties are so afraid of contested conventions. The Democrats came out of that with George McGovern, who got absolutely wiped out in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. After that, both parties quietly decided that candidate selection was too important to be left to the voters.

No, this is why The Democrats are so afraid of a contested convention. The would-be technocrats know that thier preferred policies (Socialism, Globalism, LGBTQism, Degrowth, Et Al) are deeply unpopular with the electorate which is why they have to rig thier primaries and are constantly appealing to emotion and identity politics in thier party messaging rather than expressing any sort of positive vision.

Meanwhile the GOP's willingness to let the voters choose the candidate is the only reason Trump was on the ballot in the first place.

Degrowth

Get real. Trump has just delivered the most anti-growth policy of the post-war era but Democrats still get this moniker because they, what, don't always acquiesce to tax and spending cuts?

As TequilaMockingbird pointed out, "degrowth" refers less to market statistics and more to the literal expansion of the "physical economy:" less power generation, less manufacturing, less consumption, etc., stemming from a belief popular among eco-minded progressives that syncretizes socialism and envrionmentalism into a desire to return to the state of nature where Man is theoretically more fulfilled and healthier, and in doing so, heal the Earth from the damage caused to it by civilization.

Now, of course, you can still be cheeky and say that Trump will accomplish the same things anyway, which I can't bring myself to dispute, but I would also like to register, per my recent posting history, that I truly do suspect that the setbacks to global capitalism will not spell the end of civilization.

I'm not talking about FAANG's stock prices

That may have been the beginning of it, but IIRC as late as 1988 the Democratic nomination was up in the air as late as June/July. (Anyone remember the "Seven Dwarfs"?)

Every election cycle since then, the front-runner has been locked in earlier and earlier, and the whole process rendered less and less interesting to watch.

Also note the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party in the UK. A very old, very socialist man who was thrown in as a sop to the far-leftists on the basis that he couldn't possibly win; the organisers had forgotten the reforms they'd made to try and grow grassroots support and boy, did Corbyn have grassroots support. Then he gets elected to the head of the Opposition party and he promptly starts talking about how he would never fire nuclear weapons to defend Britain, how he would prevent people taking their money abroad to prevent them avoiding the swingeing new taxes he was going to create, and videos started coming out where he referred to 'our friends from Hamas' etc. Not popular.

I would simply remember Syria Libya. Why did the Democrats who had run against regime change in the Middle East decide to bomb them back to hell again? What was accomplished besides the reopening of slave markets? They didn't even bother selling it to the public, they just did it.

"We came, we saw, he died" was the main sober analysis offered by the administration at the time.

The regime change that Democrats ran against was very specific to what had gone on post-9/11. Democrats were by no means advocating any kind of peacenik isolationism; they were responding to a brash neocon foreign policy that suggested we could remake problematic countries in our own image by unilateral military action. We had attempted to do it in Iraq and there was talk suggesting we should try it again in Iran. To be clear, I was opposed to action in Libya at the time, but the context in which it occurred was very different from Iraq or even Afghanistan. One of the big problems identified in the years following the Iraq invasion was that by removing Sadaam Hussein without any obvious successor we created a power vacuum that ignited sectarian conflict that had been supressed by decades of Baathism. And then, as Colin Powell said. "You break it, you bought it". Combine this with the questionable justification, presence of US ground troops and the associated casualties, and lack of international cooperation, and it was an easy war to criticize.

And yet, the Republicans kept saying that the problem was a lack of all-out commitment. Hell, even as the war's popularity hit a low ebb in 2008, John McCain was running for president saying he wanted to commit more troops to Iraq. Libya had several advantages. There was an active civil war against the regime, and opposition leaders made a natural governing class once Qadafi was taken out. We weren't going to attempt to remake the government ourselves once the war ended. Limiting it to airstrikes decreased the risk of US casualties to near zero. And the whole thing was a NATO operation, not a unilateral adventure with a "coalition of the willing" that had the stink of a failed UN Security Council resolution. It would have, and did have, more in common with the air wars in the Balkans than with Iraq or Afghanistan.

Contrast this approach with what Republicans were saying at the time. They were criticizing Obama for not acting decisively enough. Qadafi, like Sadaam, needed to go; we didn't need to wait for NATO to see what they wanted to do; we needed to take control of the situation with massive airstrikes. The contrast was put in much clearer terms after the Benghazi attacks, which Republicans alleged could have been prevented had Obama taken the threat of terrorism more seriously and provided actual military support for the diplomatic mission in Libya. Instead, Obama was too much of a squish to stamp out terrorist influence along with Qadafi, and was allowing the country to go to shit. "We Came, we saw, he died" was offered as a pithy summary of the quick in-and-out operation that Libya was, and how we were able to take out a dictator without it turning into a quagmire.

Libya was a "pick your poison" scenario, in which the options were to exempt Qaddafi from the "world police" treatment for atrocities (I don't recall the details of what the inciting incident was - some anti-dissident thing gone too far), because he had relinquished WMDs and it would send a bad message to rogue states, or to treat Qaddafi like any other dictator without WMDs. If anyone knows whether threading the needle on that one was possible (i.e., prevent further mass-murder by Qaddafi without getting Qaddafi overthrown), they probably aren't a Motte commenter, but it wasn't an arbitrary about-face on Libya or (to the best of my knowledge) done with regime change as a terminal goal.

The USA did, and still does, nothing about Sudan except some toothless sanctions.

Is Sudan as geopolitically important as Libya was?

Somalia sure is and we let that be a shitshow which sometimes has a government. Yemen combines the strategic importance with the government backed human rights abuses and, well…

My understanding that Somalia's primary effect on the West is that its coast needs to be avoided. Yemen policy is inextricable from Iran policy. Syria is the closest parallel I can think of.

The US could have told the Europeans to more firmly eat shit when they suggested intervening, and it likely would have proceeded in the same way that many other African insurrections have, i.e. it would be over quickly... or maybe it wouldn't, but in either case it wouldn't be our problem. Unless of course it became another power-vacuum that allowed a proto-ISIS to rise. In any case the US was probably more deferential to European calls to intervene given how they helped the US to some extent in its wars in Afghanistan + Iraq, and there were a lot of people wondering if NATO had any purpose any more, so they probably hoped to kill multiple birds with one stone and ensure NATO didn't look like "all for me, none for thee".

After the Iraq affair and 15 years of State department media psyops, I don't trust a damned thing they say anymore and don't see why I should believe that Qadaffi did these alleged atrocities

Especially given that digging into the Lockerbie bombing shows a lot of weird stuff as to the provenance of the attack.

Libya was a "pick your poison" scenario, in which the options were to exempt Qaddafi from the "world police" treatment for atrocities (I don't recall the details of what the inciting incident was - some anti-dissident thing gone to far)

Qaddafi was fighting an armed rebellion, something he had done a few times before. My recollection is that he was winning that fight pretty handily as well, that it was not a terribly bloody victory, and that his previous victories over armed rebellions had not been terribly bloody either; based on prior behavior, he would have executed or imprisoned the rebel leadership, and then things would go on more or less as before. The three-way civil war that resulted from our intervention likely resulted in bloodshed roughly an order of magnitude worse than what would have resulted had we just let things play out. At least, that's my understanding; I invite correction from those who know better.

I don't think it was so much about the amount of domestic bloodshed with Qadafi versus some unknown quantity. We had already been through Iraq and Afghanistan and weren't naive about what a power vacuum could look like. The problem was that it was a volatile time in the Middle East due to Arab Spring, and Qadafi had a history of sending troops into nearby countries and destabilizing them so as to get his own mini-sphere of influence. It was bad enough when he did it in places like Chad or Niger, but the possibility of something similar happening in Egypt was probably more than Western governments were willing to tolerate. This is all speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if the State Department wasn't adamant about this narrative when it came to selling the operation to the American public, because a history lesson involving the complex histories of countries they've never heard of combined with hypotheticals doesn't pack quite the same punch as "there will be civilian reprisals if he regains power".

Libya was already in what could only be classified as a fullblown civil war well before the French pushed NATO to intervene. The country had already functionally split in half, with pitched battles between the rebels and state forces.

My recollection is that the rebels were losing ground pretty steadily, and fear of Qaddafi committing massacres once he broke the rebel forces was used to sell intervention to the public. That was how it was sold to me, in any case.

Yes. And then the mandate of 'intervene to stop the advance to prevent a massacre' was reasoned into 'and then reverse the advance in the other direction.'

And so one of the only people in history to actively give up a WMD program under external threat ended up ensuring that they would be one of the only people in history to give up a WMD program under external threat. WMD non-proliferation had a terrible setback that year, but at least Hillary got a quippy one-liner and bolstered her tough-on-national-security reputation.

Yeah, that's approximately correct.

There was also, as a lower-stakes and economics-only version, the recent Biden admin call for an unrealized capital gains tax -- which quite a lot of supposedly The Good Ones were willing to bend over backwards to present misleading or outright false arguments for, and never engage with criticisms. To be fair, it wasn't successfully enacted; to be less charitable, that was not for any mainstream progressive pushback.

That wasn't a Biden-idiosyncrasy, though, that was a logical consequence of the left-populist/activist call for a wealth tax - the wealth they want to tax is unrealized capital gains. It would only be comparable to Trump and tariffs, if Biden had spent decades promoting it, against party consensus, and the party adopted the policy, after he was elected.

I took that as an attempt to stop the tactic the rich use where they keep all their money in assets, take out loans using said assets as collateral and report no income because they're technically living off loans, then the loans are repaid by the estate at a different tax rate.

I make no claims that that specific proposal was good, but I would be interested in some method of making the above tax scheme not viable.

I'm curious if there is another way to prevent that tax "scheme." (Is the primary benefit taxes? There's also compounding gains on the assets, themselves.)

I'm hardly an expert on how to write laws that can't be exploited, but an idea I toyed with was that if you meet some threshold of money borrowed vs assets and/or income (high enough that the average person wouldn't meet it), the amount you borrowed to maintain your lifestyle counts as your income and is taxed as such.

That’s politically impossible because it hits seniors getting reverse mortgages for their cruise ships.

More comments

capital gains taxes are bad actually so this is fine.

Alternatively, they still have to pay sales taxes on what they buy.

Do you mean Libya?

Yes, my bad.

Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day. It's distinctly less personalistic. People learned that the message of the day was that Biden is the greatest person in the whole world, and they knew questioning it made you a Bad Person who must be punished. But the Democratic blob recognized a weakness in the candidate that they couldn't paper over and, in the span of a few weeks, shivved him, memory holed him, and made Harris the greatest person in the whole world. That dynamic does not and could not exist with Republicans and Trump. In Presidential politics, Democrats perform a kind of pseudo-personalism: the point of acting as if you believe X is the Great Person of History is not to indicate any true belief but to indicate tribal membership. Biden dead-enders were heavily marginalized everywhere a day after Harris became the heir apparent, if Biden dead-enders even ever existed.

It's not as clear to me as it is to Scott, though, that one cult is clearly less damaging than the other. The reaction to COVID did far more damage to our economy and wellbeing than the tariffs will (and I believe the tariffs are ridiculous and incredibly damaging), and that can be squarely laid at the feet of the neoliberal bureaucrats.

Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality;

How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".

Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".

I would argue that this is mostly orthogonal to which side has more of a cult of personality. Historically, I think most cults of personality are closer to falling in line -- believing that that guy is just the right man for the job -- than falling in love -- believing that that charming guy is actually a very decent person.

Sure, Obama had some cult of personality, but he was equally the figurehead of an ideological movement. If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant. By contrast, Trump has much more slack. The evangelicals who voted for him to get Dobbs certainly did not love him as a faithful Christian. He was a sinful tool for them, but he was the tool which got the job done. And the dissatisfied poor people did not vote for him because they precisely shared his philosophical beliefs about tariffs. They were simply dissatisfied with how the DC elites ran things, and correctly noticed that these elites really hated Trump, and correctly figured out that they could piss off these elites maximally by electing him. (Immigration is the other motive, and one where Trump's hands are likely tied. Opening the borders is something which his base would not forgive him -- like Hitler converting to Judaism or Stalin declaring himself a Tsar. So I guess that all movements are some fraction ideology and some fraction cult of personality, only that modern left-wing movements are stronger on the ideological side.)

If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant.

Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!

Anyone know to what extent it was an open secret among activists that Obama was pro-gay marriage, but thought "take what you can get" was the better political strategy? He had been more transparent, as a State Senator.

if at any point he had stated he was opposed to gay marriage

This actually happened though: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-still-opposes-same-sex-marriage/

Did his base turn on him in an instant? It seems like they reelected him instead.

Huh, I either hadn't heard of or forgot about him opposing gay marriage in 2010, after his election. The general running narrative among Democrats in my sphere is that Obama had cynically lied in 2008 about his opposition to gay marriage in a (what turned out to be successful) bid to gain voters for his presidential election. This was an openly stated belief during the 2008 campaign before he got elected, and it seemed to be the common belief the last time I encountered the topic among my peers a few years ago, and I generally leaned in the direction of believing that, but now I'm wondering if he really was stating his honest beliefs, which actually truly changed over time.

I don't know how old you or your peers are, but I was in law school in 2008 and was following both the primary and general election campaigns pretty closely. There wasn't any consensus among Democrats at the time regarding the gay marriage issue. Minority voters were generally opposed to it, and the only people seriously in favor were activists and gay people themselves. Even the more leftist wing of the party didn't exactly place a top priority on it. The mainstream opinion, held by both Obama and Clinton, was to be in favor of civil unions and against statewide initiatives to prohibit gay marriage outright. They basically punted, and it basically worked, since the issue was at the bottom of most voters' list of priorities. Republicans would occasionally bait Democrats with the issue since gay marriage wasn't particularly popular among the general public at the time, but the moderate, boring, amorphous position gave them sufficient cover that only the true religious firebrands bothered to bait them that often. Neither Obama nor McCain mentioned it much during the 2008 campaign.

I'm probably around your age or a little younger, as I had very recently graduated college in 2008, and most of my peers were around my age. We were in Massachusetts, which had already legalized gay marriage by that point, and our perception was that gay marriage was so obviously a human right (it was vanishingly rare to encounter people socially who didn't agree with this - the few times we did, that person was usually socially ostracized by people within my circle - I was never enough of a social butterfly to have much influence over or feel much impact of these decisions) that either mainstream Dem politicians who were against it and for civil unions were just making cynical, calculated decisions to misrepresent their true beliefs for the purpose of not scaring off the superstitious/bigoted conservatives (including the more conservative/religious Democratic voters) or were just superstitious/bigoted themselves due to clinging to religion.

For Obama specifically, we almost definitely projected a lot of our own values onto him as the avatar of Hope and Change who would lead us out of the dark Bush 2 years. With gay marriage, we thought it was basically an open secret that he was cynically lying about his opposition to it, and plenty of us, including myself, also had a lot of confidence that he was actually an atheist cynically lying about his faith in Christianity.

It did lead to the weird situation where Trump entered office as the first non-incumbent who was not opposed to gay marriage.

Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day.

Failure mode implies a repeated failure in this mode. Which other Republican cults of personality beyond Trump are you thinking of? Reagan?

What makes Democrats distinct from this? Obama actually did have an adoring media, and to this day there are people that unironically argue that he had no scandals. Clinton and his charisma was so central to the Democratic party's adoption of neoliberalism that he almost made Hillary electable. If we want to go back to the cold war, JFK was subject of so much mythologizing that the term 'camelot' only refers to him in a US political context.

The proper way to do things is first reach the moral high ground, then attack your opponents for not being there. They skipped a step.

If the Right has to own up to this (at this point only alleged) failure, what does the Left have to own up to (or better yet: What has the Left already owned up to, to serve as an example)? The closest Scott gets to answering that question is through a link that contains a link that links to resources for thinking critically about Social Justice. I assume that there are object-level criticisms in the resources listed there, but I haven't actually checked.

The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age. Could you imagine MAGA doing anything remotely similar, i.e. saying "yes our enemies were broadly right about this particular issue, and we have no choice but to change our strategy"?

  • -13

Could you link examples? Among articles ostensibly about Biden's failures due to his age, I found (summaries all mine):

The rest were either on the right, or past the first page of results.

Actions speak louder than words. The fact they forcibly butted him aside due to the age concerns should be enough proof.

But if you want articles, here's one explicitly issuing a mea culpa.

Beyond that, here's some more: From the Times, from the WSJ

  • -12

EDIT: missed this earlier.

Actions speak louder than words.

Maybe in general, but see the post:

After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself. Right?

Don’t let them get away with this.

Hypothetical!Vance both admits that it was bad and changes course, but it still doesn't satisfy Scott. I don't think punting Biden is any better than what was laid out there.

END EDIT

Yglesias is a decent example, but he's also heterodox enough that he doesn't consider himself a part of the core. In fact he calls out the core constituency for continuing to make the mistake he just admitted to:

One thing that I do think I was right about is that the chorus of pundits, myself included, who suddenly rose up to say “Ezra was right, Democrats need a new nominee” had basically no efficacy. People love to get mad about articles, but the Democratic Party is not, in fact, run by a cabal of center-left columnists.

Were they just a bit slower than him, and admitted their mistakes some time after the article was written (Jul 08, 2024)?

I couldn't read the Times article because they patched my latest paywall bypass, and the WSJ is completely broken and threw my browser into an endless loop of reloading the page before crashing to the desktop.

Actions speak louder than words. The fact they forcibly butted him aside due to the age concerns should be enough proof.

All that is proof of is that they believed that Biden, given the emperor-has-no-clothes moment at the debate, was less likely to garner more electoral votes against Trump than an alternative. The action of taking your hand out of the cookie jar after you're caught with your hand in it isn't proof of any sort of owning up to screwing up by trying to steal the cookies in the first place.

I agree, though, that actions do speak louder than words. If all the White House staff and journalists that ran cover for Biden's infirmity had actively pointed spotlights at the past words and articles that they had stated and published that had misled people, followed by resigning and swearing never to pursue politics or journalism again, those actions would be proof enough in my view. Actions that don't go quite as far could also serve as proof, depending on the specifics, but it would have to be in that ballpark.

No, but I can imagine them claiming an equivalence, being debunked, and then claiming they were directionally correct so it doesn't matter, then repeating the same talking points next week.

The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age.

Could you give a brief understanding of what "owning up to screwing up over Biden's age" looks like to you? Because my observation is that this was limited to withdrawing him as a candidate, and some after-the-fact passive voice about "we were fooled".

Could you imagine MAGA doing anything remotely similar, i.e. saying "yes our enemies were broadly right about this particular issue, and we have no choice but to change our strategy"?

As @ArjinFerman notes below, a large part of MAGA's motivation was a rejection of the GWOT and to a lesser extent the economic principles of the Republican party. The movement is the most significant example in generations of the thing you say they can't possibly do.

The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age.

Lmao what? Where? Did they do it so broadly nobody but you noticed? Do you mean George Clooney or has someone who actually matters like Schumer or Pelosi done it? They definitely dropped the whole 'we're the good respectable people' shtick, but I haven't seen any mea culpas over lying to the public and jeopardising the security of the nation by insisting the obviously declining old man is better than ever.

The MAGA movement itself is largely exactly that - a concession that liberals were right about neocon wars and "free trade".

The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age.

No one here ever said anything remotely close to "yeah, you guys were right", and I'll believe they've owned up when they refrain from lazy insults like "conspiracy theorist" the next time something obviously true is pointed out.

I think there's some truth to movements themselves being concessions when they replace something, although I still think it's useful to look within the movements to see if there's corrections within the movements as well. When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted. When MAGA lost in 2020 they denied the results and said the election was a scam without any compelling evidence. And again, I can't see MAGA doing anything close to what the left did in regards to Biden's age.

I don't see why anyone here is relevant since this place is small and mostly dominated by conservatives. Demanding they stop rejecting conservative critiques more broadly is just silly since there's so many conservative (really, MAGA) critiques that are just utterly wrong, like thinking 2020 was rigged or that vaccines cause autism. I'd like to see MAGA really change it's position on any major thing in a way that implies their critics are right.

  • -12

although I still think it's useful to look within the movements to see if there's corrections within the movements as well. When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted

You can't use the Dems as your example for a concession done within a movement, when you just rejected MAGA as an example of "Repubs" doing the same. Earlier you were using even broader categories like "the left", so this just comes across as gerrymandering.

What happened in the Democratic party is the same kind of factional warfare of one movement trying to supplant the other that we've seen inside the Republican one... except it's a strictly inferior version of it, because whereas the neocons got beaten so badly that a good deal of them decided they have better chances with the Democrats, woke progressives are alive and well.

There was a brief period of Dems asking questions like "how do we win young men back?", but the answer apparently was "by doubling down on nagging them to death". There was absolutely no repudiation of their positions on culture that they supposedly were introspecting on.

I don't see why anyone here is relevant since this place is small and mostly dominated by conservatives.

Because we are specific people with an ongoing relationship, and discussed the subject. If anything it makes more sense to discuss people here, because talking about Democrats or progressives at large usually gets you accused of homogenizing the outgroup. If there was such a widespread mea culpa on Biden's senility, it should have been reflected on this forum, the same way the original "Biden is fine, and if you disagree you're crazy/biased/both" was.

Demanding they stop rejecting conservative critiques more broadly

All I'm demanding that they reckon with why they rejected what was clear and obvious reality, and why they attacked anyone who disagreed with them.

When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted.

The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age.

Oh wait, you're serious..

More effort than this, man.

I'd think claims made without evidence can be dismissed without them, too, but okay, then:

  • Trivially, no, the Democratic party did not have some notable period of introspection where new ideas were more accepted or old ones reviewed. The few who actually tried were beaten down far faster than even the most anti-Trump parts of the right ever were; most just made mouth noises, and didn't even do that consistently. TheAntipopulist will not be updating his priors when his specific examples of "leftist"s changing their position on something turns out to just be them "suggesting it is bad to increase the salience of immigration" (aka, trying to massage media focus).

  • Trivially, no, the Left did not own up to screwing up over Biden's age. Alex Thompson wrote a book about it... with Jake Tapper and the summary he presented was that "Every White House is capable of deception", not "maybe I shouldn't have called everyone who had eyes a conspiracy theorist". Jen Psaki has her own show, and it's not titled "You Fucked Up, You Trusted Me". KelseyTUOC proposed expelling from the Democratic party everyone involved in concealing Biden's decline... while highlighting Yglesias as a great example of the New Democrats, who happened to be one of those people doing exactly that. People owned up to Biden (and Harris) losing, and that only to the extent that they're literally this next week getting feted. No one's taking responsibility; they're shuffling blame.

  • Nor anything else. Everyone's happy to pretend that they were always right: Ezra Klein will tell us that he warned that Russiagate was a fraud, KelseyTUOC that she wasn't calling Kavanaugh a sexual assaulter, ProPublica's writers insist that they're happy to talk about a story with interested polite people, but there's a simple problem that none of these things are true. As an industry and as a political party, the admission of even the clearest error is harder than pulling viper's teeth or hen's teeth.

But he's not going to engage with me, he's not going to engage with you, he's sure as hell not going to admit he's wrong, and certainly he's not going to live up to his standards.

I'm not talking to him so much as about him, given that he's blocked me. But now that he's done that, it's worth noticing how often his points, to the extent he makes any rather than just waves his hands and demands we believe whatever he makes up without foundation, are laughable.

Huh. I knew he was a old-forum poster, but I'd forgot/never noticed he was an alt of unitofcaring. Why did unitofcaring have to change personas again?

More comments

The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.

The trouble is that left-wing/centrist wrecking of the economy is totally normalized and proceeds in boring administrative steps. Biden initiated an inflationary spending plan to invest in inefficient energy production (the Green New Deal), he continued along with costly DEI programs. Trump has launched an inflationary and chaotic tariff agenda. Both things can be bad but one is more spectacular and novel than the other.

In Australia there's been all kinds of discussion and criticism over Trump's tariffs despite the fact that we sell the US very little. Meanwhile the government's been inflating a massively fraudulent disability program. Costs are growing about $5 billion a year on a $40 billion base, it's about the size of Australia's defence budget. Providers are eagerly sucking on the teat of the government, creating imaginary disabilities and getting the government to pay for them. It's institutionalizing and subsidizing deliberate incapacity, if children have trouble at school there are ways to find that they're disabled whereupon they get special accommodations and help.

I have no doubt that similar levels of fraud and wasteful largesse are happening in America, albeit scaled up massively. Huge numbers of New Yorkers are paid as carers for family. Do they actually need that care? Nobody knows and there's no way to find out without making lots of people very angry, going to the media with sob stories, real or imaginary. And because of that it's all shrouded in euphemisms. There's endless discourse about getting costs under control. Costs aren't actually brought under control of course, we might go from galloping bureaucracy to a gentle canter. And nobody would dare to dispute the pressing need to guarantee boomers as many subsidies and entitlements as the state can afford, if not more. That's what they have in the UK, with the 'triple lock' where pensions are decreed to grow with the highest of inflation, wages or 2.5%.

All this redistribution constrains investment. We know how to grow prosperity and improve quality of life. R&D + capital deepening. But you can't do much of that if you're busy extracting as much wealth as you can from the productive economy to bribe huge swathes of the electorate.

However, tariffs make almost nobody better off so everyone can freely declare that they're retarded and thus it seems like Trump's policies are especially harmful when they're only especially stupid and the true balance of harm is yet to be seen.

This just seems very premature. If in a three months, tariffs have increased only a little compared to Jan 20th and there are a lot of trade deals, will Scott say “hey I was wrong and the right can course adjust much faster than the left.”

Of course not. These “rationalists” are rational as long as their takes don’t touch anything political or CW-related. Otherwise, yikes

that or they are excellent at rationalizing their biases.

Scott writes that the rule of the experts is more compatible with normal economic activity, to which I say- the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did.

the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did

I still find it shocking that everyone important just agreed to never talk about COVID and our response to it again. I don't know how anyone can discuss bad policies that wreck the economy without at least bringing it up to refute it being an example. It's like remembering the COVID shutdowns happened is icky and uncouth.

Not only that, but if you bring up the economic consequences of the response (which we are certainly feeling today), they just say "oh well, you can't blame <govt X> for that, everyone else did the same thing" -- like, yeah -- that's the whole point: EVERYONE IN THE GNWO TURNED INTO A BUNCH OF RETARDS AT THE DROP OF A HAT. Seems like something worth talking about, but I guess not.

Seems like the answer is yes, they mostly all went into effect on "liberation Day." Just because he has changed some due to various changes in circumstance doesn't mean he did not implement them.

the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did.

Putting a pin in this.

Scott is a Democrat partisan now. He used to have useful insights, but then they got him, first by attacking his reputation, and then his Californian social circle has naturally limited the scope of acceptable opinions that he can hold. Of course he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left. All of his friends live there.

Scott has been a de facto Democratic partisan ever since Trump walked down the escalator - he thinks that the badness of the Orange Man is comfortably the most important issue out there right now. You don't need to be a leftie to think that - you just need to think that there is a character-based filter for high public office, and that Trump fails to meet it. He doesn't have TDS - he is able to distinguish between true and false negative statements about Trump (see You are Still Crying Wolf).

See my most-updooted post about Boris Johnson for a worked example of how character can derail an administration and harm the country in a way which doesn't depend on conventional partisan political views.

I enjoyed your Boris post and have no issue with having a character-based filter for high public office, in isolation. Where that breaks down is when one combines it with the ongoing effort to ruin anyone of good character (empathetic, intelligent) who tries to represent the populist anti-woke anti-immigration Right.

At the moment:

  1. A good chunk of the population (let's say at least 20%) is anti-immigration / wokeness to at least a Farage level and willing to vote accordingly.
  2. Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life. You will be debanked, nice people will desert events if you are invited, friends will not return your calls, and intelligent people on anonymous forums will call you Nazi collaborators who should have been discredited long ago. This means that anyone willing to represent the widespread serious anti-immigration sentiment in public must be either too impulsive to toe the line or too anti-social to care.

The voting support (1) is sticky for as long as immigration keeps up. The social response (2) is not.

If you aren't comfortable with politicians getting elected who don't meet your character bar (a sentiment I understand), the only viable thing to do is to rehabilitate anti-immigrationist, populist sentiment as an acceptable position for a gentleman of high character.

Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life

Farage has, fairly obviously, not had his life destroyed. He makes more money in his Saturday job as a TV talking head than the average professional makes in a 50-hour week.

He is persona non grata in polite society and in every household that does not contain a Reform voter. He was publicly debanked for having opinions that bank staff disagreed with. He will never be able to get a job outside the right wing grift circuit ever again. News outlets regularly hold a Daily Hate for him, as does my genteel and very conservative maiden aunt.

This is precisely my point! The social sanctions levied on people publicly representing populist and anti-immigration sentiment ensure that the only people who will represent those voters are people who will put up with social disrepute for the money, the power or the fame. If you don't like grifters getting elected, you have to prevent nice guys from being put off i.e. stop levying social sanctions.

You need to source politicians from separate social strata that don't care about secular social status; the US has successfully done this with evangelicals and conservative Catholics, for example. Of course this comes at a cost of having to serve those constituencies but it's doable.

That’s a possibility. The US is larger, of course, so you have more diversity of factions to draw from, but still potentially viable.

Why do you think it is that any right-populist politician with serious chances has these character problems? Like, I often read something like "Orban is just cynically using anti-immigration/wokeness so he can stay in power and crony it up", and I dont necessarily disagree... but why isnt there anyone using it for good or even neutral goals? Parties picking up issues and demographics for electability is pretty normal, except here anyone who does so is beyond the pale for claimed-independent issues. You can be an ultralefty and argue that borders are intrinsically anti-democratic or something, but what do the liberals making this claim actually believe?

I don't actually know if it is true that right-populism naturally throws up politicians of base character, or whether Trump and Johnson are just highly salient bad examples. Farage seems marginally more honest than the average politician (a low bar, but one Trump and Johnson profoundly fail to clear). Marine le Pen clears the even lower bar of being more honest than the average French politician. Meloni clears the lower still bar of being more honest than the average Italian politician.

My thinking is that the right-wing elite collapsed, due to and resulting in more rising right-wing populism, and populism basically selects for bad characters. It's the responsibility of the elites to not screw up so much that no one has faith in them anymore, and they failed to do that

At what point of his ideological history would you have expected him to go "actually, tariffs are great and Trump is great for trying to do tariffs"?

I wouldn't go that far, but I bet it the equivalent article would've been about something like political theory vs. enacted policies back in the Slatestarcodex days instead of Left vs. Right now. It might have even used many of the same examples and reached the same object-level conclusions.

Tariffs used to be a pretty standard left-liberal policy position, Paul Krugman literally got the (not)Nobel Prize for arguing for them. The only coherent objection to what Trump is doing from that perspective is "his goals are good, but he's doing it wrong", which a few principled left-wingers are doing.

He wasn’t a Paul krugman tier democrat hack, though.

Scott has never been a standard left-liberal, though. "Liberaltarian" would probably be closer.

What's "liberaltarian" if not the liberterian-ish wing of left-liberalism? If the minimum wage or basic income are good enough for him, why would he be ideologically opposed to tariffs?

It's the sort of an ideological position that you would expect to be committed to free trade in all conclusions. Minimum wage and basic income are separate questions, I'm not sure why they need to be mentioned here.

I've followed Scott's writing for over 20 years (before he started blogging, even!) and I'm not sure if there are any points where I would have expected him to support tariffs on the basis of his other ideological positions, is the point.

Minimum wage and basic income are separate questions, I'm not sure why they need to be mentioned here.

Like tariffs, they belong in the "economic policies that contradict libertarianism" bag, so they seem pretty relevant, and I'd expect the position on them to predict the position on tariffs. At least barring an explicitly stated theory that would justify supporting one, but not the others.

and I'm not sure if there are any points where I would have expected him to support tariffs on the basis of his other ideological positions, is the point.

If the point is "he's not ideological about economics in general", then my point is that he is pretty clearly leans left on economics, and as such he should not be expected to support free trade.

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for the New Economic Geography, which includes an agglomeration model where industrial policy can have a long-term benefit even if markets are efficient. And that industrial policy could use targeted tariffs as a tool. But Krugman the political commentator has consistently said (ever since he became a Famous Economist whose political views are taken seriously - not just since Trump started supporting tariffs) that he doesn't think that countries at the technological frontier can make industrial policy work in practice. He supported NAFTA and the WTO when those were live political issues.

Krugman the economics populariser put a lot of effort into debunking the macroeconomic case for broad-based tariffs. About a third of his Slate columns were attacking the idea that imports destroy jobs. And he said things about current and capital account imbalances (the two are opposite sides of the same accounting identity) are broadly that bilateral imbalances are harmless, and that overall imbalances can be good or bad, are always dangerous, and that the right tool to control them is capital controls and not tariffs.

It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy). My personal guess is that there isn't a policy at all, just vibes. But the arguments Navarro is making for the tariffs are macroeconomic, and the details of the tariffs we got are consistent with the goal being macroeconomic rather than industrial policy. So Krugman opposing these tariffs is entirely consistent with what he has been saying since the 1990's.

Paul Krugman, the famous economist whose views are taken seriously, is the guy writing academic papers. Paul Krugman, the economics popularizer whose political views are Taken Seriously, is possibly the biggest hack who ever existed in the history of punditry, so to the extent the distinction is worth making, it works against your argument.

It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy).

If tariffs are a tool not a policy, then the absence of "Trump tariffs are implementing a good policy incompetently" as a possibility should show you that the argument is not being made in good faith. There are principled leftwingers who do make that argument, they point out why the trade policy done up to now was bad for America / the world, why you might want to change it, and why tariffs can be the right tool for the job, and then proceed to show why the way Trump is doing it is bad. But implying that tariffs are somehow ideologically incompatible with left liberalism is just historically wrong.

the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.

the classical argument against tariffs is the change in trade they produce is bad. so if you find some technique that produces the same change then it just seems like you have come up with some abstraction to try and hide that you are doing the bad thing. tariffs would be a great tax if they did not produce a change in trade.

the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.

I endorse Steve Waldman's argument on these points (split across multiple blog posts dated April 2025), which is broadly the same as Krugman's. The tl;dr is that tariffs discourage balanced trade as well as imbalanced trade - in a world where everyone agrees that the rules of the game are the deficit countries increase tariffs and surplus countries reduce them to restore balance, there are a bunch of tariffs and therefore less trade than there would be otherwise, making the world poorer for the usual Ricardian reasons*. Whereas achieving balance with capital controls allows balanced trade while discouraging balanced investment. And balanced foreign investment** is not obviously good in the way that balanced trade is - there is a reason why "absentee landlord" is a slur.

*Countries may be able to better than free trade with enforced balance if they adopt targetted tariffs as part of an effective industrial policy - this is an argument against broad-based tariffs as a macroeconomic policy.

** I disagree with Waldman on the desirability of foreign direct investment - I think a world where BMW opens car factories in America and Intel opens chip fabs in Germany is better for it because of the resulting knowledge-sharing. I am more sympathetic to the argument that it would be better if there was less foreign portfolio investment - if I buy Tesla stock from the UK and you buy
AstraZeneca stock from the US it arguably weakens both countries' asabbiyah for a trivial benefit to our portfolios' diversification.

Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question...

It's not. One cannot turn the question of whether international trade policy that costs some fractional percentage of production is worse than promoting racially discriminatory college admissions policies. Hell, one can't even reliably determine which economic policies are better or worse in a strictly empirical question. Most political questions are values questions, not empirical questions, and you should immediately distrust anyone that claims that their preferred policies are just The Science.

Scott's post begs the question though: what does he think reform of the institutions looks like? I think what we are seeing is what we should have expected.

Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.

What will it take to restore most Republican's trust? Either gutting those institutions entirely, or reforming them with punitive measures until they seem cowed and fully cooperative.

Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.

The left isn't capable of reforming institutions, just like the right isn't capable of reigning in their strong-men (and women). They need each other to play those roles. And obviously if you identify more with one side than the other you don't like having to be the side that reigns in the other. My side's honest mistakes and forgiveable excesses, are the other sides willful maliciousness and unforgivable escalations.

I recently spoke with my mother who has worked on cancer research contracts with NIH. She is a lifelong moderate Democrat (pro choice). She had spoken in fearful tones about Trump and Doge. But recently when Doge began taking an axe to medical programs she sounded pretty happy. Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb (there is some joke in there about DOGE's meme name sake, but I'm too lazy to find it). Her words were basically that they cut the things she would have cut.

I live in the northern Virginia area. I know many people who work in government. The common refrain is that "yes they definitely needed to trim the fat and slim down government, but this just seems crazy the way they are doing it". But there was an opportunity to trim the fat during the Biden administration and they didn't take it. They were too busy starting dog cancer research programs. So maybe this is the only way you cut things, with a side of bad ideas from a strongman willing to do it.

Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb

I know this is only a side note to your main point, but could you explain why?

We're getting better about allowing terminally-ill patients access to experimental treatments, but even in a libertarian utopia there's always going to be a lot of cases where you'd like to learn faster via experiment but where you have a tough time getting volunteers - e.g. with cancers these days there's typically a non-experimental treatment that's not ideal but that's good enough to not leave people desperate for a still-in-testing alternative. Plus, with any research of medical conditions which are linked to aging there's always going to be some benefit to being able to do studies with a population that ages five times as fast.

On the other hand, I could see an argument that dogs specifically are pointless here - start research in mice where you get even faster aging and less ethical concern over their deaths, finish (the animal testing phase of) research in monkeys or apes when you need closer relatives to humans, and then maybe you want to just skip right over dogs.

I only got the brief description that it was one of Biden's "moonshot" research programs. I'm guessing it just was unlikely to have payoff for learning about human cancers. Instead it was likely to have payoff for treating dog cancers, but she thought that was a bad use of taxpayer money.

Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.

I don't know enough about Reagan but Thatcher was very cautious and targetted in her attacks on institutions. In her first term she identified a specific enemy (unions, particularly blue-collar unions in state-owned companies) and spent several years planning and executing the attack on them before she went after anything else. She went after other institutions in the same methodical way later, but there was never a purge of the civil service and the purge of middle management in the newly-privatised industries took place over about a decade post-privatisation.

MAGA lump all the PMC-led institutions together, declare war on the whole blob, and demand rapid shock-and-awe attacks on all fronts simultaneously. (Trump responds, but mostly with kayfabe - you don't actually bring the Deep State to heel by cutting USAID's Politico Pro subscriptions). We will see how effective this is, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.

I mean, if that's your thesis, surely the current MAGA strategy won't help even if it succeeds at its stated aims. Institutions reshaped by Trump in his image won't be trusted by the Left. Best scenario, you'll just flip the problem.

Yes, but a bilateral conflict is how you reach a new stable equilibrium; one-way ratchets don't have any brakes.

I think there is a degree of stickiness when it comes to trust. That institutions can be bad or against a certain party and still enjoy reputational effects for a while. I think this happened in the Obama and first Trump term when the military and intelligence agencies were still strongly trusted by the right.

I'd argue that the speed Blue Tribers went from thinking electric cars were going to solve global warming to them becoming the tools of the devil that need be purged with fire is Not Encouraging. That Red Tribers have some latency does not demand that the Blues do so.

For a lower-stakes example, see Mercedes Lackey.

This is the way pretty much any sort of energy thing from environmentalists goes. As long as it is expensive, small, and impractical, it's something they point to so they can claim their banning of all the good stuff won't actually leave us shivering in the dark. Once someone demonstrates the new "clean" thing can be done at scale, it's the Devil. Dams kill fish, wind kills birds, solar damages the delicate desert ecosystems (and reduces the albedo of the planet), the transmission lines for all cut off animal migration corridors, and electric cars help Bad Orange Man.

But really, Musk aligning with Trump just pushed up the timetable a bit. The idea was always to take most of the cars away, not replace them with electric ones.

I think it's important to note that lack of trust in institutions isn't a strictly policy problem- the left knows full well the decline in childhood vaccination rates is driven by 'well doctors were actively lying about covid, so...'.

I agree with the strong butterfly, most people don't know.

Even if that’s the case, ‘parents are less willing to vaccinate’ isn’t strictly a policy problem.

not sure i understand your point relevant to what i was saying

That would make sense to me, except I don't know a single leftist who thinks so. There's either a total blind spot in their memory or they insist all statements were made in good faith at the time, depending on whom I'm talking to.

Some will acknowledge that lies were told about masks, but for the greater good. Most don't want to discuss it at all. Again, IME.

Reagan

David Stockman's Triumph of Politics describes the Reagan revolution's failure/betrayal. Stockman left congress to direct Reagan's budget, but was prevented from cutting the welfare-warfare state. They never balanced the budget during Reagan's terms, rather tripling the budget instead.

but was prevented from cutting the welfare-warfare state

Nice use of the passive voice here. Reagan explicitly supported expanding the warfare state, and his big idea on the welfare state side was that free market policies would allow the economy to outgrow the cost of an aging population. Reagan's White House economic team were believers in starving the beast and the two-Santa theory - not in cutting spending themselves.

Stockman was the subject, not Raegan! Betrayed by Raegan!

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