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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.
The proper way to do things is first reach the moral high ground, then attack your opponents for not being there. They skipped a step.
If the Right has to own up to this (at this point only alleged) failure, what does the Left have to own up to (or better yet: What has the Left already owned up to, to serve as an example)? The closest Scott gets to answering that question is through a link that contains a link that links to resources for thinking critically about Social Justice. I assume that there are object-level criticisms in the resources listed there, but I haven't actually checked.
The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age. Could you imagine MAGA doing anything remotely similar, i.e. saying "yes our enemies were broadly right about this particular issue, and we have no choice but to change our strategy"?
The MAGA movement itself is largely exactly that - a concession that liberals were right about neocon wars and "free trade".
No one here ever said anything remotely close to "yeah, you guys were right", and I'll believe they've owned up when they refrain from lazy insults like "conspiracy theorist" the next time something obviously true is pointed out.
I think there's some truth to movements themselves being concessions when they replace something, although I still think it's useful to look within the movements to see if there's corrections within the movements as well. When Dems lost 2024 they had a notable period of reflection where new ideas were more accepted. When MAGA lost in 2020 they denied the results and said the election was a scam without any compelling evidence. And again, I can't see MAGA doing anything close to what the left did in regards to Biden's age.
I don't see why anyone here is relevant since this place is small and mostly dominated by conservatives. Demanding they stop rejecting conservative critiques more broadly is just silly since there's so many conservative (really, MAGA) critiques that are just utterly wrong, like thinking 2020 was rigged or that vaccines cause autism. I'd like to see MAGA really change it's position on any major thing in a way that implies their critics are right.
You can't use the Dems as your example for a concession done within a movement, when you just rejected MAGA as an example of "Repubs" doing the same. Earlier you were using even broader categories like "the left", so this just comes across as gerrymandering.
What happened in the Democratic party is the same kind of factional warfare of one movement trying to supplant the other that we've seen inside the Republican one... except it's a strictly inferior version of it, because whereas the neocons got beaten so badly that a good deal of them decided they have better chances with the Democrats, woke progressives are alive and well.
There was a brief period of Dems asking questions like "how do we win young men back?", but the answer apparently was "by doubling down on nagging them to death". There was absolutely no repudiation of their positions on culture that they supposedly were introspecting on.
Because we are specific people with an ongoing relationship, and discussed the subject. If anything it makes more sense to discuss people here, because talking about Democrats or progressives at large usually gets you accused of homogenizing the outgroup. If there was such a widespread mea culpa on Biden's senility, it should have been reflected on this forum, the same way the original "Biden is fine, and if you disagree you're crazy/biased/both" was.
All I'm demanding that they reckon with why they rejected what was clear and obvious reality, and why they attacked anyone who disagreed with them.
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