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Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens. If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.
Presumably if you hold an idea like "smaller governments are generally better for a country's growth" or "the state taking ownership in companies leads to bad incentives" or "free speech benefits the country's citizens and the country as a whole" then it would make little sense to abandon them once you've taken power if you want the best for the nation.
After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial. Suppression and censorship when their side is in power would be traitorous to the good of the country in their mind, even if done out of a desire for revenge. A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.
They aren't "turning the other cheek", they just actually believe in the words they say and the ideas they promote. They want good policy (or at least policy they think is good) for the benefit of the country. Sometimes you can see this in politicians, like how Bernie Sanders supports the plan to take equity in Intel. He believes government ownership of corporations is good for the country so he supports it even when the "enemy" does it. I think he's a stupid socialist but it's consistent with what I expect from a true believer. And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy.
Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying. It suggests their stated beliefs don't reflect what they think is good for the future of the US, but rather personal feelings and signaling to their in-group community. If they changed their minds it would be understandable, but if that's the case then the revenge narrative is unnecessary to begin with, they can now argue on the merits.
To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective. Alice and Bob are playing iterated prisoner's dilemma and raking in money by cooperating with each other. One turn, Alice hits the defect button and makes more money than Bob. Bob says "what the hell" and Alice says "sorry, my finger slipped". Even if she's (probably) lying, Alice likely isn't stupid enough to pull the same trick on the next turn, so in the short-term, Bob's best bet is to hit cooperate on the next turn too. But if he does this, Alice will realise that she can occasionally hit the defect button and face no repercussions for it. So in the long term, it might make more sense for Bob to hit the defect button in the next turn (even if Alice pre-commits to doing so as well) in order to send a credible signal that defection will be punished: if he doesn't, he's incentivising Alice to repeatedly defect in future. Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.
A member of the Red Tribe may not think it's in the best interests of the country if Blue Tribers get fired from their jobs for opinions they expressed privately, a fate which befell many Red Tribers (or even insufficiently ideologically pure Blue Tribers) between 2009-16. But they may also be aware that, if the Blue Tribe faces no repercussions for the cancellation campaigns they wrought in the period, then they're bound to give it another try as soon as the boot is back on the other foot (as it inevitably will be sooner or later). From a game-theoretic perspective, the best solution might well be sending a credible message that "if you do this to us, we WILL do it back to you, so don't do it to us in the first place and we'll all get along just fine".
The obvious rebuttal is that there's a missing mood and the Red Tribe aren't dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch: they're baying for blood. No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads. But I refer you to The Whole City is Centre. Evolution gave us a set of instincts which approximate the game-theoretic-optimal choice that a learning algorithm would naturally arrive at by trial and error. The fact that two people learned how to play iterated prisoner's dilemma using different algorithms doesn't necessarily mean there's any difference in the course of action they would opt for at any point in the decision tree.
When Alice hits defect and Bob hits defect in retaliation, his blood is pumping and his face is bright red. If Alice was playing against ChatGPT and hit defect, ChatGPT would weigh up its options and calmly, dispassionately hit defect in retaliation. But both Bob and ChatGPT hit defect in retaliation.
In the presence of noise which amplifies defections (this can be unintentional defections, or one player wrongly perceiving the other player's co-operation as a defection), tit-for-tat is equivalent to defectbot. You need to play x-tits-for-a-tat for x<1 in order for a tit-for-tat-like strategy to support stable co-operation. (And if you opponent is playing y-tits-for-a-tat where y is slightly above 1, then your optimal strategy is to reduce x further such that xy<1).
In the real world (rather than Axelrod's experiments) there is obviously noise, and that the noise amplifies rather than suppresses defections is one of the oldest unfortunate facts about the human condition. So playing tit-for-tat, and even more so playing two-tits-for-a-tat, is equivalent to playing defectbot.
Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.
Any attempt to have a sane conversation about this is likely to be derailed by the ultimate scissor of American politics - the 2020 election. If you believe that the 2020 election was tabulated honestly and that Biden won by more than the margin of sloppiness, then Trump's response to losing the election was the biggest defection since Reconstruction, and the milquetoast effort to prosecute the people responsible wasn't even a 0.9-tits-for-a-tat response. Whereas "The 2020 election really was rigged and the overly harsh treatment of the people who protested this is a mega-defection" was the grievance narrative at the core of Trump's 2024 primary campaign, and appears to be the words that an ambitious Republican needs to mouth to go along to get along under the 2nd Trump admin. The slightly weaker proposition that "Regardless of what actually happened in the 2020 election, the overly harsh treatment of the people who protested it is a mega-defection" is table stakes for an elected Republican in 2025 in the way that signing the Grover Norquist tax pledge was table stakes for Republicans in the 1990's. And if the 2020 election really had been rigged on the scale that Trump claimed it was, then rigging the election would itself be a mega-escalation such that a correctly calibrated 0.9-tits-for-a-tat response would be harsh enough that what Trump is doing now would count as milquetoast.
In the same sense that it's "arguably correct" that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns, riots, and total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him. The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested. That would have been a perfect example of "revenge logic" if the whole post weren't artlessly partisan, but it's an even starker example than that. Bolton is about the most perfect patsy to sacrifice to defend "principles", to regain some clout and credibility for the next time people want to throw a show trial at Trump. And instead we just see wall-to-wall meltdowns decrying and denying any possibility of fair play.
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.
The gap between 'grace and forgiveness' and 'punching back twice as hard' is wide enough to drive a semi through, but I'll try:
After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?
Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.
Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.
Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.
You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'
You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?
Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?
There's this funny phenomenon I've noticed during my time here. Regardless of what happens in the real world, regardless of the fortunes of Blue Tribe or Red Tribe, blackpilling only increases. Lockdowns/COVID end? Roe V. Wade overturned? Trump wins a trifecta in 2024? Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.
I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.
Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s? And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?
Interesting question of where to set the clock and what counts as grace, given how atrocious the original decision was.
Yeah, response was much more muted than I expected.
The malicious compliance/indeterminate regulation (choose your charity level) has probably killed a few high-risk people.
LOL. Moving on-
Probably, yes. Alternatives aren't fairing much better in my experience though.
70 years ago, yes: post-war optimism, being the main country that mattered and wasn't wrecked, fairly strong sense of national unity. 50 years ago it was already declining.
Distinct lack of alternatives. Information control works if you manage it; it's much, much harder to manage now. Harder to hide the sneering contempt and the high/low cultural differences.
Define "flawed." All models are imperfect; some are useful.
We should probably rewind to prehistory, when women risked infection to get back alley abortions with filthy stone age awls. we ought to retvrn to the old ways, where women would give birth and then drop the baby in the ocean or jungle.
Is the joke that the 10 million refugees is the defection, or the angry letters in the newspaper and on tumblr?
Just curious, what are you basing this on? Because I bet if I dug into the history books it wasn't as wonderful as you might imagine. The McCarthy trials and Korean war can't have been universally popular, the scars of Japanese internment, continuing racial segregation, miscegenation laws...even then, setting your norm as the high-water mark the decade after winning a world war and emerging as one of two superpowers does not seem like a solid foundation for a nation.
Besides, we won another global conflict within our lifetimes! The Berlin wall fell, the USSR dissolved and for my childhood the USA was the sole superpower. The budget was balanced and our biggest problem was that the president was getting BJs in the oval office. You really don't think the 90s were another high-water mark?
Had I the time, my thesis would be that the institutions of the 20th century were just as shitty as today. As you say, information control is simply much harder now.
Uniting behind a flawed leader is usually better than no leader at all. Or at least that's what I tell my employees.
Reminds me of a poem.
While I am morally pro-life, I am just enough of a squishy lib at heart to think that abortion shouldn't be banned entirely (at this stage of technology). But I find pro-abortion people viscerally disturbed and pro-choice wildly inconsistent. They really shouldn't have given up on "safe, legal, and rare."
Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.
MASH was! (Yes, I'm joking and aware the actual war was not nearly as popular, and also years shorter)
Talk about a failed opportunity.
Well yeah, that's kind of the point, and that it was already declining into the 70s (your 50 years ago mark). I think the post-war years were unusually good (though you're absolutely right, not perfect) times, and they set a cultural memory bar that's basically impossible to achieve without that set of circumstances.
We either have to redefine down what a good life and good country is, or we have to find a different route to get there.
Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.
But I also think it's cliché for a Millennial to say that the late 90s/early 00s minus the terrorism response were a golden age.
The funniest thing is that most of the increase in the illegal population occurred during our mutually agreed upon golden age, and evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Although, I often forget that MAGA has retroactively decreed Bush to be a democrat, the same way that every politician elected between prior to 2016 (maybe with some exceptions carved out for Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington) was a democrat.
Even if you argue that there were an extra several million that came during Biden's presidency, this is more a return to a historical trend than 'an invading rapist horde' to paraphrase someone here.
Numbers of illegal immigrants almost seems to correlate with the relative prosperity of the USA to South American countries rather than ICE enforcement, which I'm told was a bipartisan issue in the 90s and early 2000s...
Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring? Even as you decry a lack of national unity, you're just as angry as everyone else.
...why?
No, I missed it. That's...an interesting choice.
I have two, and I'm confident they are growing up in a better world. They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.
You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves. Fauci is still trusted by close to a majority of Americans; there's every possibility that regardless of what Fauci did, half the country would hate him. I worked at the same institute as Fauci and met him in passing, and I'm sure you've read enough of my writing in the past to know I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.
If you do, it will look like this. The politicians you would like are not the politicians that would win elections.
Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university? The center of gravity around biotech and STEM are shifting towards China, and the only question (in biotech at least) is whether the equilibrium will be that of peers or whether we go the route of low/mid-value manufacturing, aka extinction. NIH is probably getting budget cuts next year too. Ten years from now neo-MAGA will be bitching about how they have to buy their new drugs from China because their elites sold them out, without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.
You want justice? Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine. Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.
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Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.
In general, the hiatus went well enough. The problem came last summer, when I had both parents trying to talk to me about whatever Facebook story they were incensed about that day, from both different sides, and then Trump got shot. I let myself get sucked back in. I still think it's not a productive use of my time (and I find myself thoughtlessly developing workarounds for my self-imposed limitations), but the last year has certainly been more cause for optimism than the previous four (at least in the US), as well as being a ton of fun.
The OP here, with it's Rose Tico concern trolling, just really grinds my gears. And really, I should probably just stop interacting with the OP. They routinely post stuff that hits me as so earnestly "someone is insanely wrong on the internet" that I get all riled up. And frankly, if it's not spectacularly fine trolling, then they are probably a literal child who simply lacks the experience to grasp that other sides do, in fact, exist. In which case, my own brand of scathing heat is less than helpful.
Anyway,
In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.
Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.
But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."
The reponse I've seen is more like "The Supreme Court is illegitimate, fuck the entire institution, pack the court, we literally live in The Handmaid's Tale." Along with a slew of very dishonest news stories, at least some of which look suspiciously like hospital administrators letting women die to own the cons. Alongside that was a bunch of low grade domestic terrorism, which was tacitly tolerated by the Biden administration.
I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.
They made a huge, grandstanding spectacle calling Abbott and Desantis cruel monsters (for exposing their own hypocrisy) and demanded they be investigated by the feds for human trafficking, kidnapping, fraud and deprivation of liberty. The feds didn't comply - is that where we want to set the bar for compromise and reconciliation?
Yep, the best examples I could think of were old. We're well down the slippery slope at this point. There are examples of Trump doing things like that, but they're all blatantly insincere and backhanded.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.
My incensed objection rather, is to the naive or trollish implication from the OP that the Democrats have clean hands.
Most lockdowns were state and local. It wasn't the Trump administration that was prosecuting gym owners - that was my Democrat governor.
I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.
I hardly think the man covered himself in glory there, but there's a reason that investigation fell apart after the only prosecutor willing to push it was caught using the situation to engage in blatantly shady corruption.
And that was the "good" case. The asset valuation fraud and the 34 counts ones were, I believe, very clearly corrupt, politically motivated lawfare.
The DoJ was already weaponized. Do you remember when they were falsifying evidence to spy on the Trump campaign?
Tons of people write nasty books about Trump. And there's a thing among that cohort, where a lot of them seem to want to believe that Trump is out to get them personally, but most don't even merit a nasty Truth Social post. The Bolton investigation had been going on for years before it was shut down by the Biden admin. If anything, it looks like he was being protected by politics.
And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?
Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.
Honestly, polarization spawns clicks and posts. Like I said in the beginning, I'm honestly pretty happy about how the country is going. I just don't feel the need to post about how I got what I voted for again. I just laugh at the meme and move on.
And I understand that the other side is going to be less than pleased with this turn of events.
Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers.
My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.
The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down. Beto is giving speeches about how the problem isn't that they support Unpopular Thing, but that they haven't been big enough assholes in their support of Unpopular Thing. And Trump has just been baiting the shit out of them, taking positions like "Crime is bad", and then watching them scramble over each other to claim the extremely bold "There is no crime and also all this crime is your fault" position.
I see videos of people who seem to think that the Ministry has fallen and Voldemort rules the land, genociding the Muggleborns... even as they feel emboldened to harass and attack federal law enforcement officers. If those people honestly think that the Biden administration was unacceptable generosity towards the outgroup, and that once they get into power it's time to be brutal and cruel...
And I do see many people openly calling for this.
On the plus side, I think/hope that the Democrats are going to spend the next 10 years in the political wilderness, and all their bloodthirst will amount to little.
But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table.
Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.
The NYT, no. The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.
It's more general than that. One of our earliest social technologies was loyalty, because faith in an imperfect leader was better than no leader at all. But there does come a point where a terrible leader is so bad that your loyalty becomes maladaptive. The hard part is figuring out where that inflection point lies.
It'd be better if Trump and China weren't busy spitroasting the biotech industry, but the home life makes up for it.
And now you've updated your priors in the opposite direction, right? And false prediction is a fun euphemism for being wrong :)
Somehow I doubted that you would. But you asked for instances where your tribe won without a corresponding escalation, or 'cheating' such that your side couldn't win. Your personal life notwithstanding, there was no supreme court stacking, there's been no widespread riots or criminal activity (Amusingly, there are more recorded instances of vandalism/violence against abortion clinics in the same timeframe than what you call low-grade domestic terrorism), conservatives took the W and moved on. In your words, 'it's been a fun year.' And yet, and yet, you still aren't happy.
As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?
Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.
There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.
And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.
And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.
I used to work for a guy who reminded me of Trump in some ways (insofar as I can know Trump from watching him on the television). He'd commit borderline research fraud, but do it in such a way that he kept his hands clean. Hey, I've got this great research idea! Go find the evidence for it. Oh, you've got 3 months worth of negative data? You must have fucked up the experiments! Go do them again and stop being so incompetent, I'm going to take you off the project and give it to a real scientist, etc etc etc. I know a lot of his old research is fraudulent, but when the chickens came home to roost he just said his postdoc fabricated the data.
If nothing else, Trump showed that the only check on a president's behavior is impeachment, and so long as the president is popular enough with their base, he can go shoot someone on fifth avenue and Republicans would say that guy had it coming and vote against it. Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.
Frankly, and I'm surprised I've never seen this theory floated, I thought Trump intentionally broke a relatively benign rule that he knew would have to provoke a serious response from the feds. He'd keep himself in the news, get to complain about witch hunts for the next couple years and make it look like the feds were picking on him. It's probably what I would do were I playing the game.
I don't, other than that it's suspicious when a government's legal system starts going after people the president is personally pissed off at. I'd give it a low probability of progressing, but it's not a great sign.
And we just had a long discussion about overturning Roe, the keystone project of Christian fundamentalists, that your party executed a plan over a decade or more. Tell me again how those factions have lost and millennial atheists are in the driver's seat? What fraction of voters in the Republican party today voted for Bush in 2000 and/or 2004?
In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.
Sure, things don't look great for the dems today. But four years is a long time, and Trump's got plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Either he's as successful as you think he'll be and I profit (at least if he stops fucking my industry), or he tanks babyface JD's chances for 2028 and dems win again.
Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.
Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.
I'm skeptical that the government of 50 years ago was particularly honest or well-meaning (see: the Power Broker to start), and I wonder if it's more likely our environment changed. But I sure as hell don't have time to develop that idea in any meaningful way. /shrug
"It's difficult to predict when the Riot Party will riot" might not be as much of an update as you're looking for.
You seem to be joking here but have you already forgotten those psychotic blanket pardons?
Referenced later on in the same post:
The point stands. Even now, the typical angle of attack is 'senile admin run by the deep state' because that lands a lot closer to the mark for normies than radical leftist firebrand.
At a certain point, this level of cynicism and bitterness starts reflecting more on you than the people you hate. You, too, seem to be even angrier now that your star is ascendant.
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No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.
But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.
Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.
Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.
I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.
Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.
The people who made up his administration are a different story.
They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.
But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.
Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.
They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.
It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.
No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.
I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.
So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.
I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.
This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.
Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.
I'm fine with that in the abstract, although in terms of concrete details it seems like a system open to abuse. But I'm sorry you're in that situation, and I imagine you don't want to debate something so personal.
The bad thing about McCain and Romney is that they lost, and the good thing about Trump is that he won.
Not to mention it's easy to lionize men who never won the presidency and had to actually get their hands dirty.
You think Mangione doesn't have fans on the right? Are you telling me MAGA is a populist movement that loves CEOs of health insurance companies?
For all the conservative memes mocking childless liberal women for their breathless, supposed erotic fixation on the Handmaid's Tale you have a shocking lack of awareness for similar fantasies on the right. There's this odd fetishism with home invaders and having to defend your family from the rapist hordes at the gates.
Isn't that the point of this place?
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Because most of the senior people in US institutions at that time were rags-to-riches war heroes. There would have been people there that were literally born in a hole in the ground, and every single one of them would have experienced the Great Depression.
That sort of thing tends to bring... certain perspectives that most today lack: that without restraint, and conservation of the same political mechanisms that took them from rags to riches, it could all be destroyed if mismanaged. For instance, the hysteria over the uncommon cold would never have occurred with them in charge, because this actually did occur, twice, with flu viruses that were deadlier per capita than said cold.
The generation in charge now, in aggregate born in 1970, is past the cutoff point to have any memories of that; it's taken for granted. The opposition to their institutional prerogatives now is people directly made poorer due to their mismanagement, which is something the US has literally never had to deal with before.
Well, there was that time after Jan 6, 2021 where he could have issued a blanket pardon to the meanest supporters he had [from the Blue viewpoint]. But he didn't do that, and once he left office it was open season with a de facto pardon issued to the meanest supporters Blue tribe had [from the Red viewpoint].
I legitimately think that when reformers are empowered, and reform happens, that things improve. I think the efforts of Red tribe to end what is functionally slavery in Blue states should improve things for the native population, I think constraining the powers of the education-managerial complex [and forcing it to follow its own laws] is long overdue, I hope that reform continues (and believe that what has occurred over the last 6 months has been impressive) and hope the rest of the Western world starts following that example, though I acknowledge it will take them longer to do that due to never really having
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This is quite easy. Unfortunately from the rest of your post I suspect you have quite a different standard of evidence than the plain meaning of your words as written. But here goes anyway. If your standard is, "John McCain telling his supporters to be less racist", then here is a symmetric example:
https://freebeacon.com/issues/joe-biden-on-free-speech-liberals-have-very-short-memories/
That's actually a very good example. Thank you.
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Pointed but fair, even the heated rhetoric at the end. I’ll clarify that blue/red tribalism changes the perception of the cooperative value lost in each defection, inflating the out-group’s tats and deflating the in-group’s tits.
If the average red-tribe American (citizens since their grandfathers’ time at least) have the perception that they’re being prevented as a class from getting jobs by blue-tribe HR choosing naturalized immigrants, H1B workers, or unnaturalized migrants, tit-for-tat looks like mass deportations. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against their in-group or favored far-group.
If the average red-triber sees their wages stagnant vs inflation since 2008, yet the lowest rung of blue-tribe government worker can buy a suburban house and pay “our” taxes for their kids’ soccer practice, tit-for-tat looks like mass firings of government regulators. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against the people keeping them safe from capitalist overreach.
And so on, and so on. Sure it’ll make the Whigs (the blue-tribe and grey-tribe Republicans who disproportionately make up the GOP’s donor class and elected representatives) take pause, but the red tribe can finally smile at the perception of having shaken off, or at least told off, their oppressors.
This is also what it looks like when the red tribe no longer sees the blue tribe as a far group but its outgroup.
This is a good point. I'd extend it even further. I think a lot of heat arises from the fact that news media brings political conflict right to our faces, but doesn't give an outlet that viscerally feels like retaliating.
I think this is a major cause of the phenomena of "progressive woman screams at her phone camera" videos. It's why people spiral deeper and deeper into violent ideation. If they redistrict us and then we redistrict them back, it just doesn't feel like a proper retaliation to an ape brain that expects retaliation to feel like knuckles violently impacting something. The endocrine response is just frustrated.
So we do a 2X tat, but it feels like a 0.1X tat, so we demand a 20X tat.
Multiple by emotional incontinence, mental illness, and arrested development.
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