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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.
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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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
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