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Notes -
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.
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.
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"?
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
EDIT: missed this earlier.
Maybe in general, but see the post:
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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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.
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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.
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The MAGA movement itself is largely exactly that - a concession that liberals were right about neocon wars and "free trade".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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