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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.
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"?
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.
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.
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