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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21894 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.

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.

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.

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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.

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