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Wow, this really rings true to me. In particular, I think that it meshes extremely well with my own sense of how the political right has evolved since Buckley:
"Political Dad" was the religious right, or at least the way that capitalists and anti-communists spoke when still coddling the religious right. Strength, but also manners; he can crack open a cold one and tell off-color jokes, but only when Mom is out shopping. If Dad is stuffy and uncool it's because Dad has nothing to prove; you already know Dad fucks, that's how he became Dad. But Mom went from being a bitter church lady to being a blue haired political lesbian so she kicked Dad out and now we only see Dad on weekends when he's not on a Disney cruise with his hot girlfriend, Crypto. In short, it's like I said:
Not to overmix the metaphor but this last semester I had five students in one of my classes show up with ashes on their forehead for Ash Wednesday. The Children do not seem impressed with... whatever the hell this is, this political upheaval that is happening between the Boomers and the Millennials. (Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.)
This doesn’t really mean anything; Catholic Churches are notorious for having Christmas-level attendance on Ash Wednesday(to think that attempting to get rid of Ash Wednesday was what made pope Paul VI end the liturgical reforms), and ashes have become trendy in imitation.
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2.25% (15y refinance), and I won't shut up about it!
(You've got to let me have this one; in hindsight the biggest financial decision of my life was "I guess gwern makes some good points about this 'bitcoin' thing, but I just can't bring myself to buy any fake money tokens for nearly a dollar a piece!")
Man... sometimes it feels like I hit bitcoin at just the right time. It was worth enough to make me take it seriously, it was after Mt Gox so lessons from that were in the zeitgeist, and I was zealous enough to never sell and keep DCAing for almost 10 years. Some people have done better buying it earlier and selling the tops and buying the bottoms. Some people have done a lot worse panic selling the bottoms. All in all I can't complain.
They probably frequent /r/buttcoin daily now, praying for the downfall of the entire "ponzi!"
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Nice.
(I built a mining rig in 2010 because I thought Bitcoin was philosophically interesting, then I never actually mined anything because it was beyond my technical abilities and I was busy with other philosophically interesting stuff. My only consolation is that there is no possible world where I both actually mined Bitcoin and held it beyond a total value of, say, $50,000, which would be a nice amount of money to have, but is not really a life-changing amount.)
Yeah, that's good consolation. I'm likewise pretty sure that even if I'd cleverly scooped up a thousand bitcoin at $1 I'd just have sold almost all of them at $25.
My roommates got a mining rig in college and, in hindsight, it's great for my FOMO because it made it clear I obviously would have done what they did and sold BTC off long before the peaks.
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Heh, I remember a page linked from HN of a similar vintage that was giving away what was at the time a couple fractions of a penny in Bitcoin (IIRC 0.01 or 0.001BTC when 1BTC was a couple pennies). At the time it didn't seem worth the effort, so I didn't create a wallet. If I had done so, it'd at least be worth my while these days.
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I know millennials who bought in (youngish, but out of college) at that interest rate. Post-2008 was an interesting time for most of a decade. Also very quietly, I suppose: their equity is also up 200% or more.
My equity is only up about 100% these days, down from those pandemic peaks, but I still love my 3% mortgage.
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Here's an extension of this theory that I've also been kicking around.
I remember, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump was still being treated as a joke, him racking up surprisingly big wins (in a Republican primary context) in places like Massachusetts. And I was reading something at the time that noted, essentially, that there was a surprisingly big, untapped demographic of voters all throughout New England and places like Illinois (or other Midwest places with dominant progressive cities ) that wasn't particularly religious or pious or prissy, and wasn't large enough to win local elections, but that sounded a LOT like Trump and was really receptive to Trump. But neither major political coalition had had anything to say such people for a very long time.
And ever since then, I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners. The Democratic party had turned into the party of coastal winners, and the Republican party had evolved into the party of sunbelt winners. And that meant Democrats were more attached to old money prestige cultural institutions like universities, and the Republican party was especially connected to new money success like booming California and Texas and Florida population growth and business (although over time, the political culture in California shifted from the ur-Sunbelt model to a much more coastal, entrenched model). And this bifurcation was comfortable and made a lot of sense to all involved - of course the two parties are going to be heavily utilized by various winning elements of society and work as their megaphones and enact their interests. And the winners of the Democratic coalition were morally prissy about PC stuff, and the winners of the Republican coalition was morally prissy about evangelical and personal sex stuff, and so that go reflected in how they became annoying in public discourse, and how they got attacked rhetorically.
But the George W Bush years, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis, were very bad for the Sunbelt winners coalition. It was badly weakened. And a lot that coalition, particularly the parts that had gotten wealthier and were more drawn to the cultural attraction of the Obama story, really didn't want to be associated with the culturally low class (but still economically booming) Sunbelt model any more.
And that coalitional weakness opened the door to a new faction, one that wasn't really getting any representation or being courted... the Northern (and Midwest / rust belt) losers faction. And the Northern losers faction is a nightmare for the Northern winners faction, because 1) they aren't prissy like the Sunbelt evangelicals, 2) they've embraced counterculture energy to a more serious degree than even the Northern winners had (which had always been a cultural Achillies heel for southern evangelicals), 3) they're actually way more racists and tribal than sunbelt winners have been for the last several decades, and much more unapologetically so, which morally horrifies Northern winner sensibilities, and 4) on a deep and profound level, their condition is in many ways the FAULT of northern winners, their own local expert class who has been much more interested in growth through globalization than the economic fortunes of their downscale neighbors.
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney. That's a very self-flattering world for them, where everything makes sense and they get to fulfill their role of being cool. But quite frankly, the 2016 campaign was the first time in my entire life where I was seeing campaign material for Republicans, at least online (much of filtered through 4chan anarchy), where I recognized the Republican side of political rhetoric being, unambiguously, much cooler in a countercultural sense than what Democrats were doing. I found it fascinating, to be honest.
I mean, people just explicitly say this. Even with a sense of humor
They frame it as Trump being particularly awful but W was called a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands for years, hard to say that 2016 - especially early - Trump was worse by any utilitarian calculus. It isn't just that Trump is loathsome, it's that it doesn't seem to stick. People giggle along way too much.
Oh, totally. But I think I'm trying to get at something slightly different. To go with a slightly strained metaphor...
It's more like George W. Bush was a basketball team, everyone knew it and knew that the communal sport seemed to be basketball, and so the Democrats trained to play and beat a basketball team. And they arguably got really good at violating the spirit of basketball while staying in the letter of the rules of basketball (or so it seemed, if you were not sympathetic to Democrats).
And then they show up to play basketball, and Trump is there, announcing that the actual sport is boxing. And the refs angrily shake their heads no - we play basketball here! - and then Trump cheerfully gives them the finger and sells ticket to the upcoming boxing match, a giant crowd shows up for the boxing match, the crowd gets rowdy and ignores the refs, and then the refs shrug and the boxing match starts.
I think that's roughly what I'm getting at. Democrats couch it in moral language, but as you well note, it's extremely difficult to see how Trump (especially earlier Trump) was morally worse that Iraq War era George W. Bush. But it is easy to see that Democrats really liked the social, cultural terms of debate they had against the Mitt Romneys of the world, and they really don't like the terms of debate they have against Trump.
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Both of your comments are great.
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