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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24481 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.

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.

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