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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.
Yes, we fundamentally disagree with you on morals and the purpose of government. If we didn't, then we'd be liberals like you.
That's not as much a decisive argument then an acknowledgement of the facts.
Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not. If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides. You can't technocrat your way out of politics. What is your good and effective policy is my bad and harmful policy. The bad and inefficient parts of policy that I support are called tradeoffs that I can live with.
It would be very nice if the institutions were run by liberals. I wouldn't mind being governed under liberal rule. But the people who ruled in the immediate past were not liberals, and were not constrained by liberals. It is the failure of liberals to rule properly that has led to this point and given the choice between the terrible experiences of the past, I'm willing to gamble on the excesses of the current regime. If no one cares about liberal principles, then at the very least the power of the state can crush the oppressors and petty tyrants of the previous decade.
Allowing liberals to be in charge again will only lead to tyranny, because liberals have no defense against the feminine prerogative of the progressive class. If the state must be powerful, if it must be strong, then it must avenge these slights to win my vote. I don't want a government that lets these people off easy. The men and women of the previous regime made an enemy of me, and made promises to sweep me into the dustbin of history. Now they quiver in fear and beg for mercy that I do not have, and demand the continuation of privileges I made no promise to give.
Ha ha. No. You call it revenge: I call it justice, finely ground and granulated.
And you may object to this. But to that, I say...
"If you kill your enemies, they win." QED.
Ok, sure. Please show how the tariffs, as implemented, will achieve their stated goals, or any other goal that could not have been better achieved some other way.
Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?
Without going into a Putin-esque diatribe about the history of the United States, free trade was the bribe that Americans gave to the defeated Axis and their European partners to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Now that Americans no longer benefit from this arrangement, they are free to end it as they please. Economically? Not very good. As a scheme to destroy the liberal, atlanticist order? Very good.
And there's the root of the problem, of which the OP doesn't get. You can't paper over ideological differences like that. What if I see destroying the old order as a good thing? What if we don't agree on the role of American hegemony? Can the Americans back away from their own empire if they want to?
If my ends are the fundamental destruction of your world order, we can't chalk it up to democratic plurality. There really are positions of which are irreconcilable to the liberal worldview. What are you going to do about it? Honorably lose to me? Have many moral victories to your name as I take power?
I'd like that very much, actually. That sounds great.
The rest of the world doesn't do it, with the exceptions of India and Brazil. In those two cases, yes, they're being stupid. Here is the latest official WTO stats for effectively applied trade-weighted tariff (WITS) for the top 10 countries by GDP - most data seems to be sourced from 2022 reports as far as I can tell:
As of now, the average trade-weighted tariff for the US is sitting at about 16%.
So no, this is very much not a standard policy, which is why I'd be interested to see someone sincerely defend it as a good policy rather than as a way to own the mean libs by burning down the house we all live in.
... but Americans do benefit from free trade? Can you find me some examples of business owners or manufacturers in the United States who are happy about the tariffs? Because as far as I can tell nobody with skin in the game is very happy. Happy to be proven wrong here.
Then you can join the tankies over in the "deeply unserious people" corner. "Destroy the current order, I'm sure somebody has a better plan" has not historically been a successful strategy.
Realistically? Make sure I have non-dollar-denominated assets, stay within my decidedly not destroyed blue enclave, and be sad as I stop being able to take pride in my country. As they say, there's a lot of ruin in a nation.
I disagree with WITS as measure: it doesn't matter if dates and feta cheese are duty-free if it's averaged out with protectionist tariffs for trucks and other heavy industry. Tariffs aren't even the whole story when it comes to protectionism. There are subsidies, designated country of origin, etc...
But that's beside the point. There are many Americans who, have, in fact not benefitted from free trade, from the free movement of peoples. I have this bloody shirt of three innocent people killed by a trucker u-turning on the highway with his truck. The countless dead of working-class communities who were eaten alive by fentanyl and despair. The general collapse of the affordability of housing. I could go on and on.
The old social contract is already dead. Why cling to an order that gives nothing for my compliance and has no resistance to offer for my defiance?
I expect the business owners and manufacturers to be unhappy about the tariffs: their profits are made at the expense of the people and communities they live in. Skin in the game is a good model of demonstrating sincerity, provided that access to the table is possible. It hasn't been for a very long time. Well, now our problem is your problem. The red-browns, one way or another, will come for the little urban enclaves eventually. Whether it be putting soldiers in your streets or giving you bloody shaves by taxation, the end result is the same. Pay up, liberal. What are you going to do, write an angry letter to your congressman?
It didn't work for us: why would it work for you?
It's not so fun when you're the number on the spreadsheet, is it?
What metric do you prefer?
This has to do with tariffs how? Would the truck have had better sightlines if it were American-made?
This does not seem like a problem tariffs solve.
This does not seem like a problem tariffs solve.
Because the rumors of the death of the old social contract are exaggerated, and because you want to build a world that is better rather than worse for your children. If you do want to build a better world for your children, but just disagree what "better" looks like, then sure, let us discuss specifics. Particularly the specifics around tariffs, which I note you have still not given a concrete defense of. But if you are so far gone that you care only for the suffering of your opponents, if you have no positive vision for the world, then I agree that there is no value in talking to you. It's not like either of us is particularly influential.
You're glowing. Might want to get that checked out.
I mean, I'm already a number on the spreadsheet. So are you. Such is life in the modern analyzed world. I don't think there is any time or country in history I would prefer to live in than current America, even given the problems we have now. I expect, absent a civilization-ending catastrophe, this will remain true. I am worried that something precious is being lost, but the "something precious" is "the crown jewel of the world" and not "a serviceable nation" - I expect the decline to look like what Britain has gone through.
Anyway, are you planning to defend the tariffs as being good at accomplishing some specific concrete policy goal that you care about accomplishing or no?
As captain Haddock would say...
/images/1756240343907219.webp
I take it this means you are not actually up for showing me why there's a partisan side under which tariffs are sane and well thought out and are actually expected to achieve some specific goal? And you didn't actually mean it when you said
Or are you saying "the point is to break shit because I'm mad, I don't actually care about outcomes". In which case please speak directly into the microphone.
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