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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.
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.
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.
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day. It's distinctly less personalistic. People learned that the message of the day was that Biden is the greatest person in the whole world, and they knew questioning it made you a Bad Person who must be punished. But the Democratic blob recognized a weakness in the candidate that they couldn't paper over and, in the span of a few weeks, shivved him, memory holed him, and made Harris the greatest person in the whole world. That dynamic does not and could not exist with Republicans and Trump. In Presidential politics, Democrats perform a kind of pseudo-personalism: the point of acting as if you believe X is the Great Person of History is not to indicate any true belief but to indicate tribal membership. Biden dead-enders were heavily marginalized everywhere a day after Harris became the heir apparent, if Biden dead-enders even ever existed.
It's not as clear to me as it is to Scott, though, that one cult is clearly less damaging than the other. The reaction to COVID did far more damage to our economy and wellbeing than the tariffs will (and I believe the tariffs are ridiculous and incredibly damaging), and that can be squarely laid at the feet of the neoliberal bureaucrats.
How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".
I would argue that this is mostly orthogonal to which side has more of a cult of personality. Historically, I think most cults of personality are closer to falling in line -- believing that that guy is just the right man for the job -- than falling in love -- believing that that charming guy is actually a very decent person.
Sure, Obama had some cult of personality, but he was equally the figurehead of an ideological movement. If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant. By contrast, Trump has much more slack. The evangelicals who voted for him to get Dobbs certainly did not love him as a faithful Christian. He was a sinful tool for them, but he was the tool which got the job done. And the dissatisfied poor people did not vote for him because they precisely shared his philosophical beliefs about tariffs. They were simply dissatisfied with how the DC elites ran things, and correctly noticed that these elites really hated Trump, and correctly figured out that they could piss off these elites maximally by electing him. (Immigration is the other motive, and one where Trump's hands are likely tied. Opening the borders is something which his base would not forgive him -- like Hitler converting to Judaism or Stalin declaring himself a Tsar. So I guess that all movements are some fraction ideology and some fraction cult of personality, only that modern left-wing movements are stronger on the ideological side.)
Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!
Anyone know to what extent it was an open secret among activists that Obama was pro-gay marriage, but thought "take what you can get" was the better political strategy? He had been more transparent, as a State Senator.
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This actually happened though: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-still-opposes-same-sex-marriage/
Did his base turn on him in an instant? It seems like they reelected him instead.
Huh, I either hadn't heard of or forgot about him opposing gay marriage in 2010, after his election. The general running narrative among Democrats in my sphere is that Obama had cynically lied in 2008 about his opposition to gay marriage in a (what turned out to be successful) bid to gain voters for his presidential election. This was an openly stated belief during the 2008 campaign before he got elected, and it seemed to be the common belief the last time I encountered the topic among my peers a few years ago, and I generally leaned in the direction of believing that, but now I'm wondering if he really was stating his honest beliefs, which actually truly changed over time.
I don't know how old you or your peers are, but I was in law school in 2008 and was following both the primary and general election campaigns pretty closely. There wasn't any consensus among Democrats at the time regarding the gay marriage issue. Minority voters were generally opposed to it, and the only people seriously in favor were activists and gay people themselves. Even the more leftist wing of the party didn't exactly place a top priority on it. The mainstream opinion, held by both Obama and Clinton, was to be in favor of civil unions and against statewide initiatives to prohibit gay marriage outright. They basically punted, and it basically worked, since the issue was at the bottom of most voters' list of priorities. Republicans would occasionally bait Democrats with the issue since gay marriage wasn't particularly popular among the general public at the time, but the moderate, boring, amorphous position gave them sufficient cover that only the true religious firebrands bothered to bait them that often. Neither Obama nor McCain mentioned it much during the 2008 campaign.
I'm probably around your age or a little younger, as I had very recently graduated college in 2008, and most of my peers were around my age. We were in Massachusetts, which had already legalized gay marriage by that point, and our perception was that gay marriage was so obviously a human right (it was vanishingly rare to encounter people socially who didn't agree with this - the few times we did, that person was usually socially ostracized by people within my circle - I was never enough of a social butterfly to have much influence over or feel much impact of these decisions) that either mainstream Dem politicians who were against it and for civil unions were just making cynical, calculated decisions to misrepresent their true beliefs for the purpose of not scaring off the superstitious/bigoted conservatives (including the more conservative/religious Democratic voters) or were just superstitious/bigoted themselves due to clinging to religion.
For Obama specifically, we almost definitely projected a lot of our own values onto him as the avatar of Hope and Change who would lead us out of the dark Bush 2 years. With gay marriage, we thought it was basically an open secret that he was cynically lying about his opposition to it, and plenty of us, including myself, also had a lot of confidence that he was actually an atheist cynically lying about his faith in Christianity.
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It did lead to the weird situation where Trump entered office as the first non-incumbent who was not opposed to gay marriage.
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