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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.

This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.

I don't like trump because he's made my situation materially worse and is likely to continue to do so. I don't like trump because he profits the outgroup at the expense of the ingroup. I don't like trump because I'm ideologically and morally opposed to his positions. I don't like trump because I think he is, personally, a very immoral individual.

In principle, you could convince me that any particular complaint is overblown. There are plenty of immoral, harmful, outgroup people I don't feel nearly the vitriol for. But Trump is the perfect storm; He's not just a villain, he's a villain that gratuitously kicks puppies. Sure, the media environment contributes to what you call "terror", but that's strictly adaptive. Everyone on my "side" would agree, sober-minded, that Trump is the single most important political figure to oppose. Adding a component of emotional motivation increases the time and pleasure in doing so. Consider any ideological cause leftists and liberals are interested in: creedal citizenship, wealth redistribution, climate change, alphabet people, etcetera. Assuming conflict theory, it's obvious that "Depose Donald Trump" is the first step in promoting any of them. The only reason to do anything else is if you believe in mistake theory instead-- but Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting mistakes (except in the "fifty stalins" sense) which means any attempt to find common ground just gets ran over by his conflict theory instead.

Consider any ideological cause leftists and liberals are interested in: creedal citizenship

This is off topic but: I am very interested in discussing this issue. I've seen the idea floated, I can grok it, but evey conversation where it's brought up seems to gloss over key details, that I'd really like to hear more about. If you could go into your views on the subject and answer some questions, I'd be much obliged.

Alright, here's my contribution: It sure would be nice if one society could manage to agree to one set of core values and live by them and everyone pulls on the same rope, as we say here, and also that creed turns out to be a really good one and there's nothing wrong with it. Others can come in so long as they comply with this creed. People are kicked out when they don't. But the creed is good, and the nation prospers.

Failure modes:

  • Inclusion does not work; people are let in but they do not actually uphold the creed. This happens all the time in western society.
  • Exclusion does not work; people ignore the creed yet remain citizens. This happens all the time in western society.
  • The creed is self-destructive, and upholding it is actively harmful. This happened in, for example, the Soviet Union.
  • The creed is viable, inclusion and exclusion work, the nation prospers, but the creed isn't actually western liberalism so we don't want it. I have no examples on hand.

I'm rambling a little. My core point is this: A creedal nation, if poorly thought out, will just be any western country as it exists right now, or a totalitarian nightmare, or something entirely unlike what we (for a given vaue of we) currently envision or desire.

IMO it's all hot air anyways. The future won't give a shit about what people believe or what ethnicity they might be traced back to. Technological totalitarianism that has full control of each and every individual seems more likely than grand social experiments of the feel-good kind.

The creed is viable, inclusion and exclusion work, the nation prospers, but the creed isn't actually western liberalism so we don't want it. I have no examples on hand.

The Amish? Depending on your definition of 'prosper'.

Actually a good example, thanks.

But would the Amish work if they weren't embedded inside a larger country?

It's complicated. They can't protect from depredations by more advanced neighbours, so in that sense no. But they aren't necessarily competing for the same type of resources. 'Produces food if you leave them alone' isn't the worst civilisation trait to have in a neighbour but it depends on whether you are Nuclear Gandhi.

Sure. Basically I think the purpose of a state is to be a back-scratching club: designate an ingroup, and then work to benefit them. The question, then, is what makes the ingroup-- and the answer, as with all back-scratching clubs, is people who agree to mutually benefit each other. That shared self-interest creates the first, and deepest, common value, on top of which all others are built on. Nations built on ethnicity, language, region, or skin color, are just Schelling points for applying that self-interest. But while those things can serve as unifying elements, they're not intrinsically helpful for scratching backs. But culture, and religion, are both adaptive-- they're collections of traits that help perpetuate the groups that bear them. Therefore it makes perfect sense to center a nation around them.

To be clear, as a catholic, I disagree pretty heavily with many liberals and virtually every leftist about what "creed" the nation should be based on, and how the government should contribute to its enforcement. But I think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed. By the very virtue of me believing the things I believe, I should rationally think they're the best beliefs, and that they're guaranteed to eventually win. The benefits of pulling in allies therefore massively outweighs the risk of allowing in enemies.

Sure. Basically I think the purpose of a state is to be a back-scratching club: designate an ingroup, and then work to benefit them.

Here you imply what is the main issue I have with the western liberal's version of this, and why they are unable to apply it in a way that actually functions; an ingroup implies the existence of outgroups, or at least of people not in the ingroup. If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup, who isn't? If people are denied a coherent definition of their ingroup, they cannot believe it will scratch their back, so they fall back on base individualism and all the civilisational gains that were achieved by nationalism slowly decay.

Honestly, I truly believe that the only thing that could potentially unite humanity in the way globalists dream of is the discovery of alien intelligence advanced enough to exclude from our ingroup. Because there is never an us without a them.

If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup

That's not what western progressive leftists believe, though. To them, the Muslims aren't actually illiberal themselves but simply conditioned to illiberal habits by the illiberal societies that oppressed them, and having escaped to the liberal West, they are sure to adopt liberal norms if not swiftly then at least certainly over enough time (and any failure to do so is because our own Western societies have too much residual illiberalism).

The temporarily embarassed liberal muslim is supposed to be our ingroup.

who isn't?

The Nazis.

Obviously.

(Where "The Nazis" is anyone who actively rejects the leftist agenda.)

The Nazis.

Hence the lack of coherency, as it doesn't escape the public that the average modern "Nazi" has more in common with them and with good western liberals than an average practicing Muslim, and that the practicing Muslim has more in common with the historical Nazi (including strong hatred of Jews, totalizing politics)

If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup,

extremely illiberal muslims shouldn't be in our ingroup (by default; I'd make attempts to convert them and bring them in). I'm very pro-coherent-definition. I'm happy with making an us/them distinction. I just want to make it on the basis of adhering to a particular creed, rather than arbitrarily assigning it via ancestry.

Yes, I am too a civic nationalist, and would like for this to work. But I find few liberals are okay with enforcing the clear us/them distinction, because it doesn't "feel" liberal to do so.

Nah, they're 100% okay with it, they just use a distinction that's largely orthogonal to the conservative civic nationalist one. Look at the hysteria about "gentrifiers", for example.

people who agree to mutually benefit each other.

And people who lie about it. And people who half-heartedly agree to it just enough to be let in. And people who are born into it and then reject it but there's no mechanism for excluding them or making them comply.

the best beliefs

Best as in most beneficial to hold, or best as in most able to propagate in a competitive environment? Because a belief that is the one may not also be the other.

but there's no mechanism for excluding them or making them comply.

What makes you think I'm against compliance mechanisms? I believe the government has a duty and an interest in enforcing prosocial behavior. That's the entire point of creedal citizenship! You can say that it's a problem that people might defect against shared values and I'd agree with you, but it's crazy talk to identify the shared values as the problem, rather than the defection. A society built on-- for example-- shared ancestry, doesn't even get to the starting line!

Best as in most beneficial to hold, or best as in most able to propagate in a competitive environment? Because a belief that is the one may not also be the other.

For every belief I have, if I thought there was a more beneficial belief to posses, I would believe that instead. Therefore I can rationally conclude that I have the most-beneficial beliefs. My meta-confidence isn't 100%, since I could imagine learning reasons to swap out my beliefs again-- but for that exact reason it makes sense to bring in people with competing beliefs, so that I can either convert them, dominate them, or assimilate their more-adaptive traits.

What makes you think I'm against compliance mechanisms?

Nothing. I don't think I said as much, either. I'm taking modern-day pseudo-creedal states and pointing out one of their failure modes as something to consider in this discussion.

I believe the government has a duty and an interest in enforcing prosocial behavior. That's the entire point of creedal citizenship! You can say that it's a problem that people might defect against shared values and I'd agree with you, but it's crazy talk to identify the shared values as the problem, rather than the defection.

If the shared values promote or tolerate continuous large-scale defection or prohibit acting against defection, then yes I certainly identify the shared values as the problem.

A society built on-- for example-- shared ancestry, doesn't even get to the starting line!

A society built on shared ancestry, depending on which ancestry that is, may not have to. I'm not saying it's universally superior to creedal citizenship, but in many cases, especially where the ancestry is an especially good one or the creed an especially bad one, it certainly would be.

For every belief I have, if I thought there was a more beneficial belief to posses, I would believe that instead. Therefore I can rationally conclude that I have the most-beneficial beliefs. My meta-confidence isn't 100%, since I could imagine learning reasons to swap out my beliefs again-- but for that exact reason it makes sense to bring in people with competing beliefs, so that I can either convert them, dominate them, or assimilate their more-adaptive traits.

This presupposes that you are indeed a competent judge of how beneficial a given belief is, and able to jettison old ones and replace them with new ones at will. You might be.

It's fair to identify particular values of particular creedal societies as being problematic. But as a trivial proof, an ideal creedal society is always better than an ideal ancestral society because the ideal creedal society can just capture whatever makes an ancestry "good" without the intermediary layer. It's like this: if you want the most law-abiding people in your society, you can admit people based on some proxy for law-abidingness, e.g., good SAT scores-- but that's always going to end up being less effective than just admitting them based on their actual history of abiding by the law. That applies ESPECIALLY if you take a strongly hereditarian position. If your entrance mechanism is looking for common descent, that actually relatively disadvantages the pro-social traits you assume are correlated with the descent.

That theory might work out for a society of completely atomized individuals, but...I dunno, I realize my perspective here is outdated and my even own life increasingly looks unlike it. But isn't a society a rather complex web of relationships? Not just on the level of the individual, but of places, families, institutions, cultural touchstones, language...Just dragging individuals out of one society to drop them into another results not in a society as I understand it but rather in a disjointed mass of people. There's probably a wide inferential gulf between us here. I'm sure that if you throw people into a creedal melting pot and wait for long enough, you do get something that resembles society-as-I-understand-it, but on the other hand I'm also pretty thoroughly convinced that if you keep stirring and throwing in new people that have nothing to do with the ones already in, what you get instead is just atomization again.

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Descent may be harder to fake and easier to test for though, at least at low resolutions.

To be clear, as a catholic, I disagree pretty heavily with many liberals and virtually every leftist about what "creed" the nation should be based on, and how the government should contribute to its enforcement.

This touches on the first question I was planning to ask - how should it contribute to it's enforcement? I would imagine that with a name like "creedal citizenship" it would at a minimum mean disenfranchisement of anyone who doesn't follow the creed. If that's how it is to work, I agree that a coherent nation can be formed this way, but you go on to say that over-exclusion is worse than over-inclusion. This makes it sound rather wishy-washy, and I don't know that a creedal nation can stay coherent, if you can participate without following the creed it's based on.

But I think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed.

I think I disagree. If you have a nation that's 98% Catholic, facing the importation of a sizeable population of Muslims, with some Middle-Eastern Christians sprinkled in, that seems like a clear example of excluding people who share your creed being to your benefit.

By the very virtue of me believing the things I believe, I should rationally think they're the best beliefs, and that they're guaranteed to eventually win. The benefits of pulling in allies therefore massively outweighs the risk of allowing in enemies.

If you're this optimistic about your ideas winning, I suppose that makes sense, but I think it's far from guaranteed. It's particularly strange to hear it from a Catholic.

Even if you're right, it's not clear it's worth the costs. For example, Communism may be destined to lose to capitalism (or whatever economic system you prefer), that doesn't mean there's any benefit in giving political power to communists.

I don't know that a creedal nation can stay coherent,

How many grains of sand does it take to form a heap?

"Coherent" is, ironically, an incoherent target. Rather than create a few hard rules, it makes more sense to define a number of overton windows and accept that they're going to shift over time... but within a self-correcting framework that advantages particular kinds of evolution.

I think I disagree. If you have a nation that's 98% Catholic, facing the importation of a sizeable population of Muslims, with some Middle-Eastern Christians sprinkled in, that seems like a clear example of excluding people who share your creed being to your benefit.

Assuming I had a creedal nation like I wanted, there would be particular mechanisms in place to enforce that creed, which people against that creed would likely be unable to tolerate. but if muslims really want to come to a country where you have to attend church on sundays to be able to vote, then I'll take the win with grace, and welcome all the soon-to-be-converts.

(apply this to your capitalist/communist objection too.)

It's particularly strange to hear it from a Catholic.

???

I think God is willing to personally intervene on behalf of my religious community... and you think it's strange that I'm confident? I think it would be stranger if I wasn't! The truth is an asymmetric weapon. If I'm right, then I should be confident that I'll win. Not in the short term, maybe, but in a general, cosmic sense. And if I'm wrong... then I should have no fear of being set right!

How many grains of sand does it take to form a heap?

How's that relevant to anything I said?

"Coherent" is, ironically, an incoherent target. Rather than create a few hard rules, it makes more sense to define a number of overton windows and accept that they're going to shift over time... but within a self-correcting framework that advantages particular kinds of evolution.

Well, I think that's a recipe for having your creed undermined and completely subverted over time, but that's beside the point. I'd like to know some specifics. What happens to people who stray outside these overton windows? What specific self-correcting mechanisms are you talking about?

Assuming I had a creedal nation like I wanted, there would be particular mechanisms in place to enforce that creed, which people against that creed would likely be unable to tolerate. but if muslims really want to come to a country where you have to attend church on sundays to be able to vote, then I'll take the win with grace, and welcome all the soon-to-be-converts.

That's great, I think it would work as well. However, you said that even though you disagree with leftists and liberals on matters of creed, you "think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed" and went on to say how you're confident truth will win out in the end. This would imply that you'd be fine with importing a sizable Muslim minority even if you didn't have the ability to force them to go to church, and that the costs of excluding the tiny amount of Christians would outweigh the costs of excluding the Muslims, even under those circumstances.

Have I misunderstood something?

???

I think God is willing to personally intervene on behalf of my religious community... and you think it's strange that I'm confident?

Correct. Catholics aren't known for just letting it go, because they're confident the truth will win out in the end. They are known for a highly organized church, a highly formalized dogma, and putting significant resources into their maintenance, and proselytization. It's like that quip from Star Control "peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon".

The truth is an asymmetric weapon.

Yes. It's not the only one though, and the other ones might have the advantage depending on the situation. You wouldn't be considering forcing people to go to church otherwise.

And if I'm wrong... then I should have no fear of being set right!

Huh? If you're wrong about the truth winning out in the general cosmic sense, you should have no fear of being set right? Wouldn't that be your absolute worst case scenario? If you actually had the truth, but it lost, because you refused to fight for it?

How's that relevant to anything I said?

Reference to the sororitas paradox. "Coherent" isn't a well-defined idea. You can come up with a definition to make anything coherent or incoherent. I'd rather speak in terms of degrees-- accepting that any social target is going to have to be fuzzy, and working to keep it useful over trying to define hard boundaries.

What happens to people who stray outside these overton windows?

The same thing that currently happens. Escalating levels of social sanctions followed by criminal punishments.

Have I misunderstood something?

That's accurate.

Correct. Catholics aren't known for just letting it go, because they're confident the truth will win out in the end. They are known for a highly organized church, a highly formalized dogma, and putting significant resources into their maintenance, and proselytization. It's like that quip from Star Control "peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon".

Being confident in God isn't incompatible with working hard toward virtuous ends. "Faith without works..." etcetera etcetera.

Yes. It's not the only one though, and the other ones might have the advantage depending on the situation. You wouldn't be considering forcing people to go to church otherwise.

It's not about being afraid of muslims, it's about, it's that going to (a proper) church is a strictly good thing, for both the individual and the community. Rather than impose it because I'm afraid of an enemy group, I'd impose it because "getting people to do good things" is one of the main purposes of a community. And yes, as a consequence, it would keep out bad people and bring in good people. My beliefs are the best; that's exactly what I'd expect them to do.

Huh? If you're wrong about the truth winning out in the general cosmic sense, you should have no fear of being set right? Wouldn't that be your absolute worst case scenario? If you actually had the truth, but it lost, because you refused to fight for it?

If I'm wrong about having the best (most beneficial) beliefs, then I have no fear of adopting better beliefs. You're missing the point by focusing on "truth" here. Of course, I also believe that my beliefs are true, but that's noncentral.

Reference to the sororitas paradox. "Coherent" isn't a well-defined idea. You can come up with a definition to make anything coherent or incoherent. I'd rather speak in terms of degrees-- accepting that any social target is going to have to be fuzzy, and working to keep it useful over trying to define hard boundaries.

Fuziness does not imply incoherence, my approach is pretty much identical to yours, and you're just arguing over semantics. What I said was that with "over-exclusion is worse then over-inclusion" approach, you will turn the category of the nation useless.

The same thing that currently happens. Escalating levels of social sanctions followed by criminal punishments.

Well... do you mind providing some details? General rules as to what kind of transgressions would meet with what kind of sanctions? Examples?

That's accurate.

You're really not making this easy... What is? My description of your views, or the statement that I misunderstood something? If the latter, could you put some effort into bridging the inferential gap? Where do you think I've gone wrong?

I'm not sure how else I'm suppose to interpret it. If the main contingent pushing the idea of a creedal nation are the liberals / the left, you strongly disagree with their creed and how it should be enforced, but "think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed", how specifically would you prevent the importation of a sizable Muslim minority if that idea gained traction? This isn't much of a hypothetical, by the way, actually existing 90+% Catholic countries ended up going the "mass migration with no creed enforcement" route because they drank the liberal Kool-Aid.

Being confident in God isn't incompatible with working hard toward virtuous ends. "Faith without works..." etcetera etcetera.

Yeah, and carrying weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon is not, strictly speaking, incompatible with a peaceful mission through the cosmos. It does say a lot about what kind of universe you believe you're living in, though.

It's not about being afraid of Muslims, it's about, it's that going to (a proper) church is a strictly good thing, for both the individual and the community. Rather than impose it because I'm afraid of an enemy group, I'd impose it because "getting people to do good things" is one of the main purposes of a community.

And if it can be shown that a mosque is a proper church, with similar advantages for individuals and their communities, you'd be ok with that, and you'd enforce your rule by forcing people to go to EITHER a mosque OR a Catholic church?

If I'm wrong about having the best (most beneficial) beliefs, then I have no fear of adopting better beliefs. You're missing the point by focusing on "truth" here. Of course, I also believe that my beliefs are true, but that's noncentral.

What was the point of the "truth is an asymmetric weapon" thing then?

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and I don't know that a creedal nation can stay coherent, if you can participate without following the creed it's based on.

How about second-class or otherwise tiered or modular citizenship?

Yeah... something. I'd like to know what the idea's proponents have in mind.

Do you think lefties like creedal citizenship? Because that's been the opposite of what I've seen and heard.

They might not conceive of their position as such, but in practice they're in favor of letting in every refugee who claims to be part of the alphabet. Meanwhile, they're mostly in favor of taking away the privileges of citizenship from groups like, for example, nazis. (They might not want to change their citizenship status on paper, but the powers citizenship confers are more important than the actual accounting value.)

Again, I don't believe in their creed, but I agree with them that in principle, someone with the right creed should be allowed the privileges of citizenship (after some time spent proving themselves) regardless of ancestry, and that people granted the privileges of citizenship should be inculcated with particular values.

JD Vance characterised lefties recently as being believers in creedal citizenship, whereas Vance prefers a citizenship based on ancestral line (with creed actually not being part of it at all). I don't really agree with him as I don't think it is a uniting feature of the left but I guess it's probably true that the right is less likely to believe creed is 'enough'.

I don't like trump because he's made my situation materially worse and is likely to continue to do so. I don't like trump because he profits the outgroup at the expense of the ingroup. I don't like trump because I'm ideologically and morally opposed to his positions. I don't like trump because I think he is, personally, a very immoral individual.

But how? Unless you are a rulebreaker or someone who gets money from the government for non-poverty or oldness related reasons you cant have been. If you are amongst the rulebreakers, certainly you knew you were, right? The rules as written are much harsher than the Trump rules. The third option is tariffs.

If you are a government subsidy for non-poverty reasons-er, well that could always have ended at any time right? Was your work nonpartisan? Like were you researching how to grow trees with wood 2x as strong in 1/18 the time? Or were you doing something else?

The tariff affected I see and understand. Its a rapid change in the business environment, and those always suck. If you can show me an approximately equal amount of outrage about the passage and implementation of Obamacare you are certified fresh to complain about the Trump tariffs.

Tarrifs and fewer immigrants increase cost of living. Plus he's personally annoying, and that counts.

If you can show me an approximately equal amount of outrage about the passage and implementation of Obamacare

Were you born after 2008? because people were definitely Big Mad. The outrage reduced over time, but only because Obamacare is actually decent policy. (And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)

Anyways, if you want to make a 1-to-1 comparison the outrage about Obamacare is definitely bigger than the outrage over tarrifs. Immigration and healthcare are flamewar lightning rods, but barely anyone actually cares to discuss trade policy.

Was your work nonpartisan?

I'm a government contractor. I believe my work is relatively nonpartisan, though if I doxxed myself maybe you would find a reason to disagree. But apparently the trump administration doesn't, because the contract I'm on got renewed... just, after a whole lot of time-and-money-wasting nonsense.

Were you born after 2008? because people were definitely Big Mad. The outrage reduced over time, but only because Obamacare is actually decent policy. (And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)

Not generally, from you. Its not good policy at all. Medicaid should be abandoned not expanded. Implementing the mandate and coverage on preexisting conditions has caused a cost spiral in the personal/family health insurance market. Trump hasn't gotten rid of it because 1) He has never had close to the votes; 2) He doesn't really care, its not his issue; and 3) Taking away benefits causes farm more wailing than imposing diffused and hidden costs. The cost to the economy of Obamacare is equivalent of probably a 100% tariff on all goods in perpetuity.

Okay, so your argument is that:

  1. I claim I don't like trump because I don't like his policies because I think his policies are bad.
  2. Obamacare is bad.
  3. ... consequently, I should dislike obamacare
  4. ... consequently, I should dislike the people who passed obamacare as much as I dislike trump
  5. But I don't.
  6. Therefore 1 is in contradiction with 4.
  7. Therefore I am not accurately representing why I dislike trump.

I have two counterarguments.

#1: Narrow

Point #2 is wrong. Obamacare is good. Therefore 3 and 4 are wrong, and there's no contradiction.

#2: Broad

Even if I were to admit that obamacare was bad, that would not be sufficient to demonstrate a contradiction in my position, because my position rests on the particular degree of trump's badness, and also on the utility of opposing him.

Consider this non-political example:

  1. Bob murders his family and then hangs himself. I find out about this only after it happens.
  2. My coworker, Jim, kicks puppies every chance he gets. Right now, he's winding up to hit a daschund.

Bob is clearly worse than Jim, no question. But it would be more rational for me to be emotionally motivated to oppose Jim. No amount of anger and hatred would reverse bob's actions, or even be particularly likely to deter future Bobs. But the right emotional reaction to seeing Jim about to kick a puppy might let me intervene in time to stop him, and perhaps even deter future puppy-kickers from doing what they want.

Consider this second example:

  1. Jim kicks puppies.
  2. Joe kicks babies.

Jim is clearly bad. But if Jim is willing to get angry with me about Joe, it's politically expedient for me to join Jim in his anger so we can intervene against Joe together than to be angry at Jim first.

So you like Obamacare and dislike tariffs. Thats fine. Whats the cost imposing measure that was implemented before tariffs that you dislike as much?

Zoning laws. I hate, hate, hate them. They're also mostly a Democrat thing, so there's an example of me being appropriately mad at "my side" for acting against my interests.

Aside from that--

Other tariffs. Excessive FDA regulatory burden. The existence of patent law. The Jones Act.

I could go on.

Zoning laws are more bipartisan than you let on, and, given that most local governments are saddled with many state and federal mandates, are unfortunately necessary. In a more libertarian world you might be right, but I can't say I've ever lived in that world.

But consider this, town of 20k people with mostly or all high income single family units plus a quaint downtown. Now, the school district is "awesome" (in other words it contains children who are intelligent and nonviolent/disruptive). Some developer decides to knock down 10 houses and build a 40 story slum. This just absolutely blows up the finances for the town. They now need a whole new plumbing system, double the cops, and, most expensively, their school now sucks. These kids pay way less per capita in taxes, plus they run around stabbing other kids. Libertarianism has many good aspects, but far too many on that side dont understand you need to do things in order. You cant have no zoning laws without repealing the CRA and eliminating the public school system. It just doesn't make sense.

Other tariffs. Excessive FDA regulatory burden. The existence of patent law. The Jones Act.

Tariffs are another similar case. When you think about it, it is objectively unfair to American workers that we have the FDA, EPA, NLRB, OSHA, etc and then they have to compete against someone who can burn coal and dump arsenic into rivers.

I'd be very interested in your patent law take. I've worked in it extensively and it mostly works well outside of pharmaceuticals and a few "innovative" patent categories (which IMO the patent acts as written shouldn't ever have applied to. To get an idea of those categories of what IMO are fake/illegal patent categories see Bilski v. Kappos, Mayo v. Prometheus, and Alice Corp.

I don't actually think I, or anyone actually knows what the Jones act does. It outwardly seems fairly stupid.

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fewer immigrants increase cost of living

A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class. The idea of foreign laborers as beneficial because they make goods cheap is somewhat reversing causality. Goods have to be cheap because we have so many foreign laborers. If people couldn't afford the staples, they wouldn't buy them. The outcomes from there are: goods cost less, or workers are paid more, or revolution.

"Cheap goods" are an illusory benefit. You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970. Or the $0.25 for bread and the $1.25 for milk.

Your stresses over cost of living are the direct consequence of these three events:

  1. The frontier was settled, no more pioneering, the supply of labor only rose
  2. Women entered the work force, the supply of labor was effectively doubled
  3. Since the late 20th century, >100 million more people are living and working in this country than it would have produced naturally

Also bankers being bankers, amidst all that.

(And if you want to argue that, explain why even Trump still hadn't gotten rid of it.)

This should be an entire post. In brief, the wealthy have too much to lose by the ACA being repealed, and the #1 way to improve healthcare in this country is to deport >50 million people.

A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class.

Set aside the immigrant/native question for a minute. Is it your belief that killing half the workers in the US would make the other half materially better off? Because that is the implication of your claim.

(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)

You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970.

It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.

In the spherical cow hypothetical of half the supply of labor vanishing with literally no other negative effects, yes, quality of life for the remaining would improve profoundly. This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed. It's ecological succession as applied to humans.

Not to be taken as personally misanthropic--I'm quite pro humans, quite pro there being many, many more. The US is simply not presently equipped for its number of inhabitants, and this is not a problem that can be solved without first deporting 50 million people.

(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)

It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.

You describe the mechanism. Yes, flooding supply is how you decrease prices. I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory. Abundant cheap offshore labor is how you produce abundant cheap plastic garbage. We wouldn't need abundant cheap plastic garbage if bankers hadn't destroyed the value of the dollar, if the owners hadn't outsourced so much labor, and if those same owners hadn't stalled out worker compensation.

That's all the economy is, now. The ongoing attempt to outrun the consequences of those decisions.

This isn't a matter of "belief," it's history and biology. Wherever civilized and sufficiently stable nations have recovered from sudden and large declines in population, golden ages have followed.

I'm going to have to ask for a citation, because this seems like an extraordinary claim and contrary to basically every historical example I'm aware of. What's the mechanism here? It is true that the recovery that follows an apocalyptic event will seem like a golden age compared to the apocalypse. However, the fact that hitting rock bottom leaves nowhere to go but up does not mean hitting rock bottom is welfare enhancing.

(I have a weird feeling you're going to pick the Black Death, but maybe you'll surprise me).

I'm not denying the mechanism, I'm saying its benefit is illusory.

What are you actually trying to say? Like, what is the counterfactual scenario you are proposing? You say the benefit of material abundance is illusory, but also seem to expect that things would be better if instead of having more stuff workers were paid better. Is your position "actually, things would be better if we had less stuff"? If so, you should say that. If not, there's a basic problem where higher worker compensation and lower prices are isomorphic. If worker compensation rises but the amount of goods remain the same (per your stipulation) the result is the inflation that seems to incense you.

I guess “golden ages” are just the dead-cat bounces of civilizational history.

A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class.

All your objections are empirically wrong. HDI has risen over time, coinciding with the greatest increase in labor supply in the history of the planet. And in general, GDP is correlated with population growth

The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.

GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.

HDI is a lagging indicator for what could be called civilization development factor C. C associates totally with homogeneity except in Singapore (75% Chinese anyway) and the US, whose C increased following predominantly European immigration and has consistently declined over the last 5 decades. Those countries with high C reached their peak before accepting significant numbers of non-European immigrants, now their C is in uniform decline.

Economics is a pseudoscience whose total positive contributions to humanity are counted on one hand. It endures because it is useful to power, laundering corrupt motive under the veneer of something scientific. "The GDP is high," they say. They mean "Don't believe your lying eyes."

The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.

Only pharmaceuticals stand as a market sector where surplus drives innovation, and there it is intramarket surplus from the profits of optional and less-critical therapies funding research in critical therapies. Abundant plastic garbage has resulted in no innovations, improving the delivery of said plastic garbage is not innovation. Millions of foreigners originating in H-class visas either stifle innovation, in itinerant farmhands preventing automation, or cheap tech roles for workers who, as H-class visa holders, are by definition not innovators. No innovation has resulted from the proliferation of Indian hotel, gas station/C-Store owners and low-class tech workers; among the behemoths, the rise of Indians in Alphabet and Microsoft, among many other corporations, preceded not innovation but enshittification. Amazon may be credited for leading to AWS, but Prime is now the lamprey on the whale of their hosting services. The billions who owe cheap computers for their access to the internet will stand in history as evidence directly disproving the utility of cheap goods.

We reached the moon in the 60s. Beyond medicine, the idea we have become more innovative is laughable. We do have better medicine, we do have better entertainment. Day-to-day life today versus the 60s remains worse. It's no coincidence video games, television, and cinema declined, and now the previous bastion of culture in the left is on the verge of collapse. In the absence of such distractions, we would have already seen revolutionary violence.

GDP as an idea is like a belief that doesn't pay rent. It doesn't tell you whether a country is good, a benefit in raising it is not found in evidence. Given otherwise equal choices among westerners, >95% would rather spend their lives in #39 Switzerland or #105 Iceland over #1 China or #3 India.

I didn't cite GDP, I cited GDP per capita. Critical difference. And while I wouldn't use GDP per capita to prove that any particular country is good, but I can use it to make statements about the general trend of increased goodness because it's very strongly correlated with a lot of measure of goodness like e.g. life expectancy that everyone agrees on.

civilization development factor C

Not well defined. Give me empirical data or give me death.

Economics is a pseudoscience

You're using no science whatsoever. I'll take "psuedoscience" over that.

Abundant plastic garbage... Millions of foreigners

You're trying to make an a priori argument but I reject this comparison on it's face and also empirically. Go look at a graph of utility patents granted in the united states: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2023/08/utility-patents-granted-calendar.html . It doesn't anti-correlate with graphs of "immigrants as a share of US residents." so I'm pretty damn confident that if you want to track down a graph of "noneuropean immigrants as a share of US residents" it's not going to anticorrelate with that either. It just correlates to graphs of US population growth. More people means more innovation.

Your argument is entirely based on vibes. That's cool, but I've got statistics.

Your modus ponens is my modus tollens, though: if the vibes don't match the stats, then either the vibes are wrong or the stats are wrong/irrelevant.

For example, looking specifically at that patent page, do you really believe that innovation from 2010 to 2020 was 2x or 3x the innovation between 1870 and 1990?

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Women entered the work force, the supply of labor was effectively doubled

Temporarily.

And now here sit we, these modern countries so proud of their female workforce, and wonder where the babies have gone that should have been the next generation of labor.

Were you born after 2008? because people were definitely Big Mad.

Ok, but can you show yourself being Big Mad about it? That's what he's saying would be required for you to be in the clear.

Why would I be big mad about Obamacare? I liked obamacare. I think the benefits were worth the costs, regardless of the change to the business environment. I don't understand why I have to be mad about obamacare to be mad about tariffs, which are more disruptive and have no such benefits.

Consider any ideological cause leftists and liberals are interested in: creedal citizenship

If leftists and progressives were that interested in that cause they would have freed their slaves legalized their illegals when they had the power to do so. They have had it several times in the past.

They did not, and because of that inaction- that inability to make a deal with the rest of the country and get it Done- now their cause suffers. Perhaps it was because they'd be destroyed as a party for making legible that flagrant and absurd violation of the laws and norms of the country? Perhaps it was because they believed that holding "they'll be deported otherwise" hostage would curry greater electoral success by driving turnout? Perhaps it was because they could do the county-level equivalent of court-packing by counting them in the census and redistricting accordingly? Perhaps it was because they were of a demographic that (socially, politically, economically) profited most from being able to undercut domestic labor, being of the class that most often buys it? It's difficult to say.

Now, we can talk about corruption in the sense that some slaves are getting rounded up faster than others, or who it's being done to first/who's getting exempted. And I have sympathy for your material conditions; economic instability is, naturally, bad for business as finance for it depends in large degree to a now-frustrated economic forecast (and of all the criticisms of Trump this is the greatest and most grounded, and affects both the capital of the Empire and all of its provinces).

But a side doesn't get to claim it's some unique badness because it [mistake theory] never made the sacrifices and compromises necessary to fix the issue and in so doing revealed that side didn't care, or [conflict theory] where it intentionally made the problem worse.

when they had the power to do so.

They made their best effort. DACA, Dreamers, etcetera. Democrats have had a government trifecta extremely rarely over the past few decades.

Anyways, illegal immigration is better than legal immigration. I'm a neolib, not a leftist; anyone who wants to live here can come, but if they want to stay here they shouldn't ask for welfare.

That inability to make a deal with the rest of the country

What deal? Republicans view immigration as a capital-t Threat. Look at any thread on this site and you will see that there are plenty of near-single-issue anti-immigration voters. Democrats couldn't have made any deal that didn't hurt more than it helped.

It's difficult to say.

It's not difficult at all. Illegal immigration is a good thing. I want as much of it as possible.

But a side doesn't get to claim it's some unique badness

don't twist my words. I'm not claiming trump is uniquely 'bad' in some objective sense. I'm claiming trump is uniquely placed to oppose my values and interests. Sure, clinton is also a rapist and I admit I don't feel nearly as much vitriol against him. But as much as everyone on the epstein list deserves to be taken down, I think it's perfectly rational to motivate my ingroup to focus on specifically the biggest threat to our interests. Call that Trump Derangement Syndrome if you want, but emotions are part of motivation and motivation is a part of political change, so it's perfectly rational for us to be "deranged."

Republicans view immigration as a capital-t Threat. Look at any thread on this site and you will see that there are plenty of near-single-issue anti-immigration voters.

Doesn't everyone? You, on the other hand should look at the reactions to the Martha's Vineyard, be it in threads here, or on other place forms. No one seems to actually be pro-immigration.

Doesn't everyone

You must live inside the most well-fortified filter bubble known to man. Do you seriously believe no one is pro-immigration? Are you such a mistake theorist that you think literally every leftist/liberal is simply ignorant of the downsides?

For myself, I understand that not everyone benefits from immigration. I understand why people in particular cultural-economic positions might rationally want to reduce the number of migrants. But I am not one those people. Immigrants directly benefit me and my ingroup. We want more of them.

Are you such a mistake theorist that you think literally every leftist/liberal is simply ignorant of the downsides?

Quite the opposite, I'm a conflict theorist who believes the only reason the left is "pro" immigration is that it's bad for their outgroup. This also explains the sudden change in attitude when they're at the receiving end of it, in situations like Martha's Vineyard, or Lukashenko shipping Middle-Easterners into the EU.

What? The left is pro-immigrant because they have an overly naive desire to help everybody (at least those who do not hold a set of beliefs they despise). The left was mad about Martha's Vineyard because reportedly said immigrants were given a bunch of promises that Maryland never made, and that a relatively small town doesn't have a lot of capacity for helping a lot of people arriving at the exact same time.

They don't want to help, because given the chance, they didn't. It's not about size, because New York cried uncle too, and they got sent a tiny portion if what the southern states have to deal with. Being upset about promises would make sense, but being upset at getting sent the immigrants does not, if they actually believe what they say this they do.

And what were the fake promises anyway?

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I live in a location with tons of migrants-- both internationally (from latin america, and india) and internally (colleges nearby). It's great. Tons of services, no discernable effect on crime, plenty of new capital moving in to energize the local economy.

I sincerely don't care about how immigration hurts conservatives, and I mean that in every sense. I'm not encouraging it just to hurt you... but if it does, tough luck, buttercup. I'm pro-immigration because cheap labor is awesome, and network effects make it even better. I would probably be more anti-immigration if it was my labor being cheapened... but as a software engineer that works remote, my field is already at the upper end of globalization. You cannot threaten me with immigrants taking my job. If they could, indians in bangalore would already be doing it.

That's great, but I still want to know why the reaction to Abbot's and Lukashenko's shenanigans wasn't an amused confusion. If immigration is really so great, shouldn't the recipient jurisdictions be saying something like "thanks, you're only making us stronger"?

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And which location is that?

Does it perchance happen to have a bit of a history of possibly White, possibly Christian people either from a homogenous culture or engaged in the process of forming a homogenous culture building it up? Is it still, or was it until very recently, majority non-immigrant?

Possibly not. Maybe you're in Singapore. But as a matter of probability, I doubt it.

We'll see what's left of your location after a generation or two of Multikulti.

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I mean, the next time they get power when the MAGA cult dies upon its leader's death, I expect them to just legalize them unilaterally. Also college debt should just be deleted and the papper work lost and deleted. If the next Democratic president listens to the Supreme Court a single time, I will consider them a failure.

  • -10

I expect you to be quite disappointed when Trump kicks the bucket and the half of America that considers you an enemy doesn't abruptly vanish like the morning mist.

From my perspective, everything you've listed is already priced in. I know that people like you are in favor of what is, from my perspective, corrupting institutions, looting the treasury and mocking the concept of rule of law. I've observed these tendencies for more than a decade, it would be very late to affect surprise now.

Anyone voting for Trump or his allies now on the belief that electoral success would result in permanent victory is a fool. I, and I think many others, have long understood that we can rely neither on the Constitution nor purported "rule of law" to protect us from rule by those who hate us, and that to the extent that we uphold institutions or norms at our own expense, the response will be ceaseless defection. We do not consider people like you to be our countrymen. We do not wish to share a society with you, and if providence be kind we will not do so much longer. We will never accept your authority nor your rule. We are, collectively, now in the process of burning what shared institutions remain, and then either we will go our separate ways in peace or resort to fratricide.

Anyone voting for Trump or his allies now on the belief that electoral success would result in permanent victory is a fool

Has the US ever struck you as a place with a fool deficit?

I expect you to be quite disappointed when Trump kicks the bucket and the half of America that considers you an enemy doesn't abruptly vanish like the morning mist.

Yep. Might have happened before the 2024 election (well, it would have been more an angry red mist). But now someone's going to take the MAGA ship and try to sail it. J.D. Vance being the obvious candidate, though a few years can be a long time politically. Probably won't be as successful in energizing the base (either their own or their opponents) as Trump; maybe the middle will come back into play, or maybe it'll be more trying to separate the Democrats from groups they've neglected. I can't tell from here.

I don't think I have any particular insights into this, but I do think other commenters have gotten at the truth of the matter, along the likes of Trump violating Blue Tribe sanctity and getting away with it or signalling OUTGROUP or whatever. Now, if you think about this for a few minutes, this isn't a dissatisfying answer. But, on first blush, I used to find this answer dissatisfying, because it just moves the question back a step: why did the Blue Tribe/Dems/liberal leftists/etc. decide that there were certain things that they held sacred, such that if they were violated without censure, they would lose their shit?

Because, in the decades leading up to Trumps POTUS run in 2015, much of Blue Tribe rhetoric was based around categorical rejection of one's emotional reaction as having moral authority. This had been happening for decades with narratives around stereotypes or implicit bias, and more recently with the victorious fight for gay marriage, which was quite explicit in stating that one's disgust reaction to something has no relationship to that thing's ethical or moral considerations.

One mistake that I personally think is reasonable to make - because I made it - is believing that the fact that much of Blue Tribe rhetoric supported this implied that much of Blue Tribe thinking supported this. Which would imply that, when members of the Blue Tribe noticed that they had an emotional reaction to Trump due to doing things that offended their sensibilities, they would understand that such an emotional reaction provides precisely the same amount of moral information as their born again Christian uncle Jim reaction to seeing 2 leather daddies kissing at the local pride parade and treat it similarly to how they treat Jim's homophobic rants. But evidently, a very significant portion of Blue Tribers do not do this and, instead, take this emotional reaction of theirs as seriously as if it were shot into their brains as a command by God.

I think what we observed 10 years ago now is a shift from the Blue Tribe being rarely challenged in its commitment to this idea, because the landscape was almost entirely filled with things that barely offended their sensibilities (i.e. "norms," which is really just another way of describing "tradition") - at best, they offended them just enough to create a credible-looking example of how, unlike those Red Tribe ignoramuses, they're virtuous enough to tolerate being offended! - to them constantly being challenged, and that commitment being proven to be just cudgels with which to beat their ideological opponents rather than actual principles they hold.

It's arguable if "no one is principled" is a satisfying answer, but I at least see it as the solution to the puzzle that I had first started noticing a year or two before Trump's 1st POTUS run.

I caught up on the thread during my ban and I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, the real reason why the Democrats hate him so much. It has nothing to do with rational reasons. Indeed, the dislike goes beyond any explanation rooted in logic. We must go back to more primal human urges to explain the vehemence of his opposition.

Trump has violated the sacredness of the republic and for that he can never be forgiven.

It is a cliche that the right wing never fails to bring up the Romans: I'm bringing up the Romans. As I understand it, republicanism in antiquity had a sacral, religious quality that continues on in all republics that followed in its mode: that elections were not just two wolves deciding on the sheep to eat today, but a duty before the gods themselves - that no matter how many maniacs and power-hungry warlords ascended into authority, the process itself was sacred. Long after elections became meaningless, people still became senators and consuls pretty much until the end of the Principate.

That is his crime: making a mockery of the goddess of Democracy, grabbing her by the hair and wooing her by force. Trump is a idolator in the temple of liberal democracy. He profanes the altars, the most sacred places... he rejects the authority of the institution itself. Those who fear him and hate him do so with the intensity one might reserve for the raper of one's virgin daughter.

That they themselves have abused the republic is no reason for sober self-reflection. That is in character for Optimates, to be hypocrites. It does not make what the Populares do any better but as HBO Rome so eloquently put it: "People want bread, not clean elections." All of the men of virtue and integrity are long gone: the last of the Americans perished from this world a hundred years ago.

Y’all are overcomplicating this. @Corvos got closest.

He can’t keep getting away with it.

That’s the sentiment behind almost every controversy from Trump I. Whenever he said something racist, or mocked a disabled journalist, or bragged about fingering models, blue-tribers expected him to lose status. But he didn’t. When he hired his family members and funneled money to his own businesses, his followers were supposed to recognize him as a grifter. But they didn’t. And when he took a mob to the U.S. Capitol to contest the election, Congress was finally going to stop trying to ride the tiger. But, of course, they didn’t.

Same for the intertrump period. By the time he was accused of sexual assault and collaborating with Russia and selling state secrets and daring to do business in New York, dedicated Trump haters were salivating for him to finally get some sort of comeuppance. Even when the case was terrible. He was supposed to be cancelled, disgraced, away from the levers of power. Possibly in prison, possibly dead. I’ve seen gentle, empathetic liberals seriously wishing that the Butler shooter had been a little more accurate.

Instead, Trump is back in office. He’s learned how to actually staff his administration and he’s actively purging his critics. The institutions are more favorable to him now than they were in the past ten years. Everything that might be considered an overreach is justified by his supporters because at one point, a Democrat did something similar. Congress has consistently declined to rein him in; the Supreme Court has likewise been permissive. There are no more obvious routes to keep him from doing what he wants. @Dean calls this “lack of control.” I’d call it “getting away with it.”

I’ve spent way too long trying to make this convincing. Given our userbase, I expect most people reading it will grin and think about how cool it is that their guy is getting what he deserves. Or, worse, pick one of the points I’ve mentioned and launch into the standard Trump apologetics. It’s infuriating. It’s pervasive.

I want those people to understand that what they’re calling “TDS” isn’t realpolitik or delusion. It is a deep-seated frustration at someone getting away with it. The same frustration that you feel when the government refuses to deal with rioters, or senatorial insider trading, or catch-and-release for illegal immigrants, multiplied over ten years and concentrated into one man. One guy who has proven above the law, above public opinion, and above the checks and balances which make up so much of our national mythos.

He’s getting away with it, and that’s not a good thing.

A lot of things shouldn't have happened prior to Trump doing the things he did, but they did happen and here we are. I can empathize the frustration from an intellectual standpoint, and I'm not saying the things he's doing are all good, but this country went through some radical shifts over the past 15-20 years leading to a massive cultural schism. The 2008 financial crisis, the explosion of social media, Trump's first term, and a global pandemic all played a big role in the gradual loss of faith in our institutions, for both sides.

The left's aggressive cultural takeover starting in 2012 and then peaking in the early 2020s served as my gradual, and then sudden psychological/philosophical turning point. There's plenty of blame to go around on the right side of the aisle, and I know for others (maybe you) it was Trump's brazen disrespect of our political norms and law breaking that served as their turning point. Going back to me (and millions of others) it was the coordinated takeover perpetrated by progressives in literally everything we interacted with when it came to the society we all shared. News, academia, entertainment, social media, social norms, even the definitions of words were all hijacked and rapidly moved into a new progressive framing that none of us agreed to. And yet, we were aggressively "encouraged" to comply or face the new social penalties, most of which involved formal and informal versions of ostracism and cancellation. We were subjected to it for years.

The people who supported all of that, who sat deep within all of these institutions, who literally could not distinguish between an actual Nazi and someone who wanted stronger borders and less critical theorizing all over the place, made their policy positions moral positions that could not be argued against. They couldn't help themselves from hating and othering and ostracizing. They still do not see themselves as part of the problem, and now, to whatever extent they do, the time for "I fucked up. Let's make a deal." has come and gone. I mean, I'm certainly happy to accept any mea culpa from a recovering progressive, but many others won't. Not now when they have the advantage. There are economic issues, and health issues, and birthrate issues, and AI issues, but underneath it all is an ideological issue that seems irreconcilable at this point; and even if they don't realize it, progressives started that fight.

I think that's a definite correlated result. But it seems like the 'TDS' step must come at some point before that, in order for someone to interpret those things in your first 3 paragraphs with maximum uncharity. A Sam Harris for example, definitely does feel an extreme version of frustration that "he can't keep getting away with it". But that's down the line from his extreme TDS where he treats every little thing uncharitably as pieces of an obvious whole, even though he can agree on any individual piece (when litigated) having completely benign or subjective interpretations available.

Everything that might be considered an overreach is justified by his supporters because at one point, a Democrat did something similar.

I want those people to understand that what they’re calling “TDS” isn’t realpolitik or delusion. It is a deep-seated frustration at someone getting away with it. The same frustration that you feel when the government refuses to deal with rioters, or senatorial insider trading, or catch-and-release for illegal immigrants, multiplied over ten years and concentrated into one man.

It's fine if you don't like The Drumpf, I just don't get how you get chastize people for pointing out that you already got away with it, while also chastizing them about how he's getting away with it, and that’s not a good thing.

I haven’t gotten away with shit.

Assuming you mean my guy, fine, I guess Biden is getting away with some bullshit. I’m mad about that too. Thanks to living in Texas, he’s about the only national official I’ve ever voted for, and he fucked it up.

In that case why so much sympathy for people who don't like to see Trump getting away wity it, and so little for people who don't like to see the Dems getting away with it? It's even weirder when you claim to be an outsider to both groups.

Well, this was a thread asking about Trump. And I saw a lot of answers I figured were wrong. Cunningham’s law kicked in.

I definitely let it get too personal in the second half. I started the comment as an observation about the gut-deep sentiment behind other Trump haters. It ended up begging people to understand my own frustrations. Not my best work.

At least in my case, because I believe Trump's norm violations are bigger, more frequent, and with worse justifications.

Debatable, and I asked the question spefifically because he was asking us to take Blue Tribe greviances without litigating the details.

Not your guy, though that's part of it. Your party.

Don’t have one.

I think you’re right. Twenty years ago, though, he wouldn’t have got away with a lot of the controversies he’s had.

What happened IMO is that the sheer unilateralness of reputational attacks (and the increasingly obvious willingness to manufacture them) became so clear that people stopped going along with it.

The same process is not quite as advanced in the UK which is one reason why Boris Johnson was brought down by IMO a largely confected scandal: Cakegate.

In an ideal world, we would all retrench and agree on what compromises we need to see and what rules we’re seriously willing to hold in common, but people don’t work like that and neither side believes they’ll gain more from peace than war.

confected

A-
I love it, but I see most people actually refer to it as Partygate

Whenever he said something that offended [conservative sensibilities], blue-tribers expected him to lose status. Instead, [conservatives] have lost the ability to exert moral power.

Hence, TDS.

These are conservatives, and their conservative media, whinging about the loss of their social credit. (Blues/Ds are, make no mistake, fundamentally conservative- they are everything they once claimed to criticize. They pretend they aren't The Man and purposefully evade the label of "obsolete, entrenched, and corrupt" by defining those things away from themselves, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.)

That's why they have to blast out misinformation (and why the new South Park episodes are just... lame). Just like Fox News (and something the new conservatives- that is, Blue voters- complained bitterly about the old conservatives' version of this), the goal is to keep America divided the moral outrage machine hot enough that they can convince voters that way.

This is why they use words like "corrupt". It's not actually a complaint about physical corruption- though one could claim their opponents don't care, people always make their strongest arguments all the times and there's barely anything there so I draw my conclusions accordingly- but about moral corruption [in the eyes of those who believe they're in charge of what 'moral' is].

Moral people worship Safety, Equality, and Consent. Trump is therefore an icon of sin, an avatar of the sinfulness of an age rejecting the Goddesses.

Remember, it was immoral to end slavery, too.

One guy who has proven above the law, above public opinion, and above the checks and balances which make up so much of our national mythos.

That's our criticism, just of conservatives in general. Of course, it's fine for them to do that because it was popular, and what's popular should always win no matter what the law actually says, right?

mocked a disabled journalist

This is the sort of thing that makes me not take arguments like this seriously. It's been a long time since this supposed incident, but I recall it being pretty conclusive for anyone who spent more than thirty seconds listening to the outrage bait of the day, that he wasn't trying to mock a disabled journalist, and it was just the press once again seizing on an opportunity to claim Trump was the worst person ever. I don't recall the details, but it seemed clear (I thought at the time) that he was just doing one of his normal mannerisms. It's crying wolf and it makes me not take other claims seriously.

He was trying to mock a disabled journalist, but he probably wasn't mocking his disability. But then, that's a pretty standard SJ conflation.

Haha yes, that's fair. I really don't remember the details, I just remember that when I looked into the details 7 or whatever years ago, it was another straw on my personal "Believe Trump's Critics" camel's back.

pick one of the points I’ve mentioned and launch into the standard Trump apologetics.

Thank you for your cooperation.

I really, really don’t want to litigate how bad any one of these actions is. That’s why I included the Russia and New York circuses. The opposition has done all sorts of shameful things in response to Trump.

The point is that polite (blue) society sees this and goes, “damn, reminds me of uncle Ricky telling jokes about the short bus.” It’s low-status. It’s decidedly not supposed to appear on national TV. If an ingroup politician did something like this they’d be groveling for months. Aaaaaaaannd none of his supporters care. They chuckle and move on. Reality has failed to meet expectations.

Many such cases.

If somebody thinks Donald Trump should have lost 1 point of social credit for telling a rude joke, she probably would have deducted more for the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment. Or the “bleeding out her wherever,” or “I like veterans who weren’t captured,” or any number of his greatest hits. Curiously, his balance never seems to go negative. From this perspective, he’s consistently avoiding his just desserts.

I really, really don’t want to litigate how bad any one of these actions is.

Of course not, because that involves getting BFTO most of the time. Not that it'll ever matter. The defining trait of TDS is the antimemetic effect where the afflicted form an angry conclusion, lose the argument on the details, and then immediately forget that step two ever happened.

Let whosoever among you never repeated the Fine People lie for years after it's thorough debunking retain a shred of credibility here.

The point is that polite (blue) society sees this and goes, “damn, reminds me of uncle Ricky telling jokes about the short bus.” It’s low-status. It’s decidedly not supposed to appear on national TV.

No, it's more venal than that. It appears on national television 500 times per day - but there's a removal. It's not supposed to be the politician making the jokes. It's supposed to be the legion of Colberts and Kimmels and media flacks, etc, etc who gin up clapter and Two Minute Hates while the "respectable" politician laughs in the audience.

Well, the right doesn't have that (aside from shitposters on the internet) so Trump (the OG shitposting king) just makes the jokes himself. It's truly something watching progressives pretend to be Maude Flanders while Stephen Colbert is nervously trying to pretend his audience doesn't want Trump dead.

I truly, sincerely do no understand how anyone over thirty can take it seriously. The whining, prissy fussiness about muh respectability standards from the same people who brought us Piss Christ and That's My Bush and Samantha Bee. If I say "Fuck your norms, fuck your pearl-clutching, fuck your traditions, I piss on all your self-righteous, self-serving bullshit"... where on earth could I have learned that except the last 60 years of blue tribe culture? They're like mean girl bullies who throw a crashout fit whenever they catch some flak back. It was all fun and games until the right grew a sense of humor. Have you seen the new South Park? Shit's fucking hilarious.

If an ingroup politician did something like this they’d be groveling for months.

I call bullshit. That particular one might, because it triggers a blue tribe sacred cow of ableism, but I bet even that would be waived if the target were a Red. And I don't even have to bet, because I've been hearing progressives call Abbot "Governor Hotwheels" for years. Oh, remember when a congressional meeting devolved into Jerry Springer? Far from groveling, Ms. Crockett's star rose. I can't really think of an example where mockery of the other side triggered an internal backlash. I mean, they're all sister-fucking, illiterate white trash nazis with meth mouth, right? The insults just sting because they're true, no?

If somebody thinks Donald Trump should have lost 1 point of social credit for telling a rude joke, she probably would have deducted more for the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment. Or the “bleeding out her wherever,” or “I like veterans who weren’t captured,” or any number of his greatest hits. Curiously, his balance never seems to go negative. From this perspective, he’s consistently avoiding his just desserts.

No one cares, Maude. His immunity to social criticism is his biggest drawing point. Because if he hadn't said any of those things, they'd just be making them up, like the hundreds of other examples that never seem to die.

Learn to take a joke.

The point is that polite (blue) society sees this and goes, “damn, reminds me of uncle Ricky telling jokes about the short bus.” It’s low-status. It’s decidedly not supposed to appear on national TV. If an ingroup politician did something like this they’d be groveling for months.

I have to go a little ways back... but not THAT far... to find Lyndon Baines Johnson. And not so much further back was "Give 'em Hell" Harry Truman.

I say this not just because "A Democrat did it", but because these particular norms simply didn't exist.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

I'd wager most people most vehemently opposed to Trump aren't very familiar with Lyndon "Big Dick" Johnson. Those I've made aware have immediately pivoted to it being a matter of policy instead.

I'd wager most people most vehemently opposed to Trump aren't very familiar with Lyndon "Big Dick" Johnson. Those I've made aware have immediately pivoted to it being a matter of policy instead.

Thus, the crassness argument turns out to be another soldier. (And LBJ was worse on policy )

I'm not engaging in standard Trump apologetics. I'm trying to tell you why he doesn't lose the social credit, at least to someone like me. It's because I can't trust anyone when they say these things about him, because everything for the past 10 years has been an exaggerated character attack, even the things that don't remotely deserve it. Time and time again I hear "Trump is Hitler for having done x", and then I look at x and I see that if you squint at it the right way you can see that, or not. Repeat for 10 years (or even 1 year), and I get my own form of epistemic learned helplessness.

So fine, the mechanism by which Trump is punished is dead. Because leftists killed it.

What do you think the standard apologetics are?

“That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, you deserved it.”

In this particular case, I happen to think #2 is correct. This really isn’t that bad. I included it in the list as an early example of the kind of weak evidence that liberals were cataloguing.

But you had to pick it out, since you knew it didn’t apply to you. So he wasn’t trying to mock the guy. And if he was, it was exaggerated by a hostile media. And if it wasn’t, well, the leftists started it.

…therefore you should never trust anything they say about Trump, and you still can’t take any of the examples seriously.

I think this is unreasonable.

I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.

I do not think your skepticism is unreasonable.

I do think that you were illustrating the “standard Trump apologetics,” which consist of denying something as fake news, downplaying it, and then deciding it was actually a good thing.

I find that particular pattern frustrating. There’s nothing wrong with believing any of the steps. Combined, though, I think they’re bad practice.

Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.

I wonder if this is just a general human behaviour, and we would have seen exactly the same pattern discussing the Dreyfus Affair in 1894.

He’s getting away with it, and that’s not a good thing.

I mean, I know this just falls under "Everything that might be considered an overreach is justified by his supporters because at one point, a Democrat did something similar." but... uncritically yes? Like why does this just fall under immediate dismissal? Some sort of throw away line said with a sneer to dismiss the argument just 'cause?

Why shouldn't Red Tribers finally rejoice that one of their guys is finally just doing things like mass deportations, fighting crime and pulling school funding, in the way Democrat's "just did" lockdowns, and vaccine mandates, and eviction moratoriums, and trans kids in schools? Why should they care about the naked corruption when for my entire adult life the corruption was already pretty out there and naked? Did Trump rip off the last fig leaf? Maybe, but it was a pretty damned wilted and decayed fig leaf already. Also I'll gladly take a hospitality industrial complex over a military industrial complex any day.

And I mean... the cherry on top is Trump is a New York City Democrat. He literally learned all this from playing with the other team for 60 years. He just lost the protection of the respectability cartel which covers for that side relentlessly. Your sneering "a Democrat did something similar" is our lived "Democrats have done this to us for our entire lives, my business was bankrupted, I've been ethnically cleansed from my home town, and now my kid wants to get sterilized because of what they were taught in school."

You have it lodged in your brain that there were rules, but when "Democrats did something similar" it didn't count. It all counts, and now there are no rules.

and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.

Setting the Trump issue aside, this seems overly naive to me. Laws are exploitable. Many laws are designed to be exploitable. Gerrymandering, lobbying, pork barrel spending, filibustering: these were all created by finding a tiny crack in the wording of a law that was intended for normal common sense behavior and then bending the interpretation and exploiting it towards some obviously unintended but technically legal end. Heck, 90% of the federal governments actions are "constitutional" only on the basis of deliberately misinterpreting the Commerce Clause. As long as they can convince a judge to sign off on it, literally anything could be considered legal on the basis of literally any existing law.

The law is not automatically moral, or just, or well-designed. Broadly speaking we should have respect for it and follow it because that creates a predictable and orderly society. But that's while keeping an eye on it to make sure it leads to good outcomes, and the instant it stops doing that we ought to have an emergency scramble to fix the loophole before people get used to it and think that's normal. Not that that's what they usually do, usually half the politicians are the ones exploiting the loophole and block any attempts to fix it by the other party. But that would be an appropriate response, rather than shrugging and saying "if it's legal it's intended behavior." Politicians are too good at deceitful word games for that to be true.

Well, that statement of mine is purposely simplistic, to kind of try to get at the point.

First, this is closer to what I actually believe (or naturally am inclined to jump to): I'd expand that statement to a belief in a general state of equilibrium when it comes to abusing the power of the government (especially by the Right), such that if actors go too far, then there will be a reaction against those actors whether by checks and balances in the law or by other means (though I'm glad that checks and balances do exist to help along the equilibrium, unlike in the social justice mob case). I definitely don't believe in the automatic axiomatic morality or infallibility of written laws.

Second, I know that overall my general high level belief in this equilibrium is a simplistic belief that probably doesn't hold true all of the time. This is just like my wife's simplistic belief that the power of social justice mobs will never go too far, because she believes in an equilibrium; that if they push the societal norms too far the societal backlash will correct it. Neither of us trusts the other's belief in the equilibrium, but we maintain analogous simplistic beliefs ourselves.

The issue is that the pushback is elastic: if it has enough momentum it can go far beyond the equilibrium before it gets pushed back. I don't think the social justice mobs are going to end up strong enough to push forth a violent revolution and take over the country, but if they try they might kill dozens to hundreds of people before the national guard cracks down on them hard enough to stop them (and possibly hundreds or thousands die in the ensuing chaos).

Likewise, someone who thought that Trump was an actual fascist and would try to coup the government might fear that hundreds or thousands of people would die in the ensuing chaos before enough legal force got around to stopping him.

The damage is bounded, but it's a high bound. I don't want hundreds or thousands of people to die. I don't think either scenario is especially likely to get that bad, but part of preventing it from getting there is starting the push back via complaints, critiques, and votes, before it gets there.

To be clearer about my fears about social justice mobs; I'm less concerned about people actually getting killed by them than I am about them changing social norms that make people's actual lives actually worse.

I'm not sure how much I qualify as 'scared' of Trump, but I at least dislike and oppose him, which I suppose makes me a minority here? The thing is, though I think he's a terrible president and generally a disaster for America, I spend most of my time talking about him trying to calm down people to my left, who I think have fixated too much on the wrong comparisons (re: fascism, Nazism, etc.). To me the more productive comparisons to Trump are more like a Latin American strongman, or perhaps like Jonah Goldberg's metaphor of Trump as a Mafia boss. He's corrupt, self-centered, unprincipled, and deeply transactionalist - he is motivated by Trump as a brand, not by any concept of American national welfare, or even American ideals.

I feel more 'resigned', I think, rather than afraid or indifferent. To me the case for hope around Trump is that, in his corrupt flailing, he destroys that which ought to be destroyed, or inadvertently opens up a kind of space for new growth. The case for fear or despair is that he destroys that which much must be preserved, or opens up a space for more organisedly malignant actors in the future. Personally I am not strongly invested in either reading.

That might give me a more mundane view of Trump, I suppose? What I see is a petty individual who has great talents for communication and self-presentation, but very little talent for organised governance, who's in power but doesn't have a strong vision for what to do with power beyond use it to establish "I am the greatest!" over and over. In a sense, I think many on the left and on the right make the same mistake in attributing him too much power, making him either devil or saint.

Of course, none of that means that he's not dangerous. There are a lot of things a venal egoist might do that are bad, even if he has no vision. But what I expect to see, I suppose, is more American decline, mostly in the direction that America was already going, while Trump and his allies try to stand on top of the scrapheap. I see a bigger risk in neglect than in sabotage.

who I think have fixated too much on the wrong comparisons (re: fascism, Nazism, etc.)

At the beginning of Trump's first term, I was on board with the view that Trump wouldn't be That Bad. I anticipated he'd be something akin to an American Berlusconi: vulgar, corrupt, lawless, and an overall national embarrassment, but not in a way that was systemically threatening. My views turned steadily more negative as it became clear that the TDSers were basically right, albeit overly pessimistic about the strength of political guardrails.

I don't think Trump is a fascist (because fascism is something very specific), but I think he is a personalist and reactionary authoritarian who has surrounded himself with advisors who are, while also not properly fascist, share the same fixation on a directionally fashy illiberal nationalist renewal. Trump is too venal and brainrotted to conceive of anything as ambitious as fascism, but that doesn't stop him from cheerfully taking on the mantle of mad king while wrecking the country. (There's also the matter of conservatives more broadly openly flirting with authoritarian ethnonationalism)

And given the... provocative nature of how the second Trump admin is governing, I don't expect there to be any less energy in the next swing of the pendulum.

To me the more productive comparisons to Trump are more like a Latin American strongman

The USA is becoming a Latin American country, so I'd expect lots of electoral choices to be between socialists or strongmen. I have a very clear preference between the two.

To me the case for hope around Trump is that, in his corrupt flailing, he destroys that which ought to be destroyed, or inadvertently opens up a kind of space for new growth

I think the case for hope, and the reason I've never been much of a doomer about Trump, is that he's taking up oxygen that could be going to an actual fascist, or some other effective representative of the forces of evil. My bitterest political opponents have decided to spend all their energies pumping up a petulant old windbag who's all bark and hardly any bite. Not to mention his cult of personality becoming synonymous with their values means that his death - which is, in the grand scheme of things, imminent - will deal a tremendous blow to the entire way the Red Tribe is organized. Trump is not Hitler, and to the extent that one is worried about the prospect of an American Hitler in principle, one should therefore be very thankful that Trump is hogging the spotlight. He's like a kind of tyranny lightning-rod, collecting the loyalty of everyone who'd support an actual dictator while having very low odds of actually declaring a dictatorship. Long may he continue to do so.

Trump has also dismantled the democrat’s base, however. How the Trump realignment shakes out is ultimately unknown but it doesn’t thus far look like bad news for republicans or good news for democrats.

Trump has also dismantled the Democrats’ base

This doesn't matter if his death just totally disengages and fractures the entire MAGA coalition. If this occurs the Dems basically win by default.

I think this is fair. He's a powerful disruptor, but not a builder. It is safe to say, I think, that the old GOP is dead and gone, but Trump provides no central ideas or organising principles for the new one. The centre of Trump's movement is Trump himself, and his most distinctive policy preferences (e.g. tariffs) seem idiosyncratic to Trump, rather than penetrating more widely into the base. My biggest concern with the GOP or Red Tribe is what they will become after Trump. There is clearly a lot of energy and organisational power there, even if there is a void of actual beliefs. If anyone, after Trump, is capable to capture most of that energy - and that's a big if - then whatever direction it goes in will reshape America again.

To me the more productive comparisons to Trump are more like a Latin American strongman, or perhaps like Jonah Goldberg's metaphor of Trump as a Mafia boss.

I've also generally considered that the best comparison. I've also thought that, at least in his first term, all the Hitler hysteria locked the Dems out from the opportunity of a lifetime: they could have had most of their wishlist if they'd just been willing to swallow their pride, flatter his ego, and let him take the credit. "Hey, President Trump, how does 'Trump Rail' sound? How about the 'Trump National Wildlife Refuge' or the 'Donald Trump Saves America' pro-union bill?" Other than the things he was opposed to on a personal level, like offshore wind, but even then I feel like they could have made an offer and gotten a deal done. But even if any of them were willing to work with him in the first place, once he's Hitler, there's no crossing the aisle.

I think you're absolutely right. Of course, if the Democrats were capable of such introspection and smart politicking, they wouldn't have lost to Trump once, let alone twice. I firmly believe that the Democrats could've run basically anyone except Hillary "it's her turn" Clinton and beaten Trump pretty easily in 2016. And again in 2024, if they had bothered to consider that maybe just maybe people had legitimate grievances, rather than doggedly sticking with the "it's all a bunch of racist fascists" rhetoric that they continue to use to this day. There are a whole lot of people who don't particularly like Trump, and would gladly vote for another option that wasn't busy spitting in their face at every opportunity. But the party has consistently chosen to spit in those people's faces, so... play stupid games, win stupid prizes I guess.

I'd sure like to know solid numbers on who would preferentially vote "#3 Kamala, #2 Trump, #1 literally anyone else, surprise me". I'm guessing it's quite a bit larger than his popular vote margin.

I would guess that the number of people who would say this is vastly larger than the number of people who would do it when it came time to pull the lever. "Literally anyone else" has the tremendous advantage of being whatever you can imagine and lets you tell yourself that you only voted for Trump because the Democrats made you.

You say "tell yourself" as if they're lying about their motivation, but this is a perfectly accurate description of many people's reasoning...? There are only two real choices. They hate Trump, but the Dems put up a candidate that was, in their eyes, even worse. That's basically "Democrats making you".

I think when rubber hits the road however most people would not, in fact, vote for “literally anyone else”.

Yes, but this doesn't have much to do with either Kamala or Trump. There's a reason why demicracues tend to not provide a "none of the above" option.

As an external observer to this whole thing of US politics but affected by it when living in a western nation: We are watching western democratic institutions unraveling and no political ideology can save them. For me the whole woke/DEI/BLM/third wave postmodern feminism marxist march through institutions to unravel them is equally damaging for the human potential as whatever project 2025 is doing with appointing Trump commissars in the very institutions that were in control of the opposition last year. No one in power for the last say six decades have been about maximizing the potential of the human race which has been the point of institutions and western democratic governance in my interpretation.

It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards.

What if you both are right? What if neither of those institutions are to be trusted? Because my view is that the institutions is not about to protect the people it is there to protect the power.

I think a lot of people (myself included) are mostly worried about Trump's economic policies. The ballooning deficit with no real attempt at austerity is certainly a major issue, but that has been discussed in other comments, so I'll focus on two other ones; tariffs and monetary policy.

The tariffs in and of themselves are not a major issue, but the uncertainty around how they are implemented (and the speed at which they are altered) is. One of the primary things that has made the US a major world player economically is stability. When things become unstable, businesses (and people in general) circle the wagons, stop investing in riskier things, and stop spending. While this all might seem very abstract, there are a lot of concrete examples on this one. The most salient for the average person is the fact that you can no longer reliably mail things to the US. But in the long term, disruption of industrial supply lines is likely to cause a much larger problem, especially in terms of inflation.

The other piece of this is monetary policy, and Trump's attempt to directly control the federal reserve. The reason for the federal reserve's independence is that lowering interest rates is very useful for short term political gain, a fact that Trump seems quite aware of. But in the medium term, the combination of increasing the money supply, putting supply constraints on the whole economy via import duties, and heavy deficit spending is likely to cause large amounts of inflation. And that, more than anything else, is what worries me about the current administration.

I think everyone here is putting far too much thought into this. The well-to-do hate and fear Trump for the same reason that others love him: because he’s been spamming I AM YOUR OUTGROUP signals at them ever since he rode up a golden escalator and announced that Mexicans coming over the border were largely rapists and thugs, and nobody has been able to nobble him for it.

Their hatred legitimizes him to his base. They can't trust politicians who lie to them, but they can trust the guy with a hundred felony counts and a bullet hole in his ear to not swap sides. Trump elicits these responses because the one thing his people need to be sure of is that he's not The Elites' Guy. Luckily for Trump, our elites are stupid and their culture makes no distinction between Hitler Hisself and someone who wants a border.

The funny thing is that Trump is very much elite, just not the DC political elite, which is good enough for his voters.

Leaders are almost always elites. You need to get your shit and run if a former bank robber or army corporal takes over the government.

What's interesting to me is how far down the elite governance scale Republicans had to go to find someone who would fight. Whole goddamned party, not one set of nuts between them. Turns out, only Democrats are willing to fight Democrats, the Republican establishment has completely internalized its social position as the Washington Generals of politics.

Saw this early on in 2015. He had an asymmetrical attack, all of his opponents were career politicians and he could hang various governmental failures around their neck, and they absolutely could not do that against him.

Attacking him as an out of touch elite might have worked... but the self-identified 'elites' were arrayed against him too.

Every attack by an elite institution solidified the point that he was an outsider in that regard. Maybe he doesn't have his base' best interests in mind, technically, but they know he's NOT selling them out to the same class of people who openly despise said base.

To see why either Trump or BLM are scary to people, just imagine a movie where large sections of the populace have apparently lost their minds due to a mushroom virus or whatever and will believe in whatever they're told to, either by some unpleasant chaotic creature or malevolent force. In that movie, the character who pipes up saying, 'Don't worry, we can trust in our civil norms and structures to stop it' is a fool.

So when you say you believe in governmental checks and balances, that is just proof you don't really see the monster the way your wife does in the first place. Trump may be to her a viscerally horrific entity, why would you decide it was okay to keep it in your spare bedroom? Even if the lock is sturdy, if you saw it the way she does, you would be afraid of it until you were sure it was under the ground.

Historically, both over- and underestimations of the norms of civility and the strength of checks and balances have appeared.

The people who predict the rise of the fourth Reich whenever a right-of-center politician takes power are certainly wrong more often than a rock with the text "it's gonna be fine, checks and balances, baby."

But ever so rarely, that rock ends up being wrong, and when it is wrong, it will be so much more wrong than the wolf-criers.

To see why either Trump or BLM are scary to people

I don't know about Trump, but I can speak to BLM somewhat.

Back during the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020, the police had to shoot a man in the large town close to my father.

Protests formed, and the protestors almost immediately started burning and looting. My father, who lives outside the town, spent the day on his porch watching the smoke clouds get closer with every passing hour. By sundown, the sirens were close enough that he sent his wife and other kid away to stay with their relatives.

He's a "normal person" who watches a lot of TV, so up until that point he completely believed the Peaceful Protests narrative that the newsman told him.

The fires didn't make it outside the city limits, but it was still a huge shock to his worldview. Now almost everything he hears on the news is tempered with "but are they lying about it"? He's also views the local large town as a powder keg that could go off at any moment.

He doesn't go downtown much anymore.

I had the pleasure of watching multiple BLM protests move slowly closer and closer to my home, with various things being thrown, smashed, or set on fire while the police did nothing. At night their were gunshots outside, something that hadn't happened in recent memory where I lived.

Millions of Americans shared this experience and likely have a corresponding amount of wariness.

Same here. Big crowds blocks away from me. I listened to the panicked voices on the police scanner as the police officers attempted to hold the line at the village border and were overrun, and sat on my balcony with a weapon ready. Felt bad.

Not only that, but in a lot of people's perception nothing was done. This may be an inaccurate perception, to be fair - unlike with the Jan 6 riots, these were different events in different jurisdictions throughout the country, so it's entirely possible that some or even most locations prosecuted the rioters vigorously, and there were only limited cases where the rioters got off the hook. But certainly the perception is that the BLM riots were ignored by the justice system. That, too, increases people's wariness.

In multiple cases, they were awarded large sums of taxpayer money for even having been arrested

I still recall driving into work and seeing advertisements from various federal agencies on how to snitch - excuse me, inform them on potential instigators and people whom may have attended the J6 protests.

Or posts on my local state reddit celebrating when people were arrested due to being tied to said J6 protest.

I don't recall anything of the sort being persecuted for the BLM riots, or the June 20 riots. This is what I have in my head when people try to claim that left-leaning/associated were treated the same as J6.

Why are people trying to claim that? There’s no real equivalent to J6.

BLM riots involved a lot more people, caused a lot more property damage, but didn’t involve the heart of the U.S. government. I don’t think it’s surprising that said government responds harder to a direct threat.

I guess the protests which defaced the Lincoln memorial would be closest. They definitely got a police response, a National Guard response, and arrests.

There were also hundreds of arrests for the LA ICE riots. No idea how many turned into charges.

  • -10

Protestors took over a section of Seattle to create a literal militarised zone in the middle of a major city that seceded from the United States, in which multiple people were murdered. I can't find records of any associated prosecutions.

On the one hand there was no possible way this threatened the US government. CHAZ was dismantled by force after a month, once enough people had tied that police felt okay taking action.

On the other hand I can't see any viable way that Jan 6 threatened the government either. People broke into the government building for a while, milled around and then left. There's no chance they make it past armed security to the VIPs and even if they had, it would have sucked for the VIPs but not affected the US government one iota.

If your argument is that senior officials take threats to themselves from the outgroup much much more seriously than threats to vastly greater numbers of people arising from looting, burning and murder by the ingroup then I agree with you but it doesn't paint a pretty picture.

I can't find records of any associated prosecutions.

Tbf, one of the CHAZ murderers was prosecuted and convicted, total sentence 14 years. Most of the others don't seem to have been prosecuted or seriously investigated. Nor were the various efforts to block police and medical first responders, or to destroy evidence, punished.

It's certainly possible that some, or even most of those people were prosecuted fairly in the court of Law. However, they weren't found guilty in the court of Mainstream Media and Democrats. Summer of 2020 rioters were heralded as social justice warriors fighting against a racist dictator, and almost any act of force against them was liable to be treated as an act of tyranny.

Cops and DAs could have arrested and prosecuted way more, but I don't think there were many large departments or DA offices chomping at the bit to be sued into oblivion. Most large city DAs are blue anyway and are all about whatever "perception" wins them their seat come next election cycle. The perception at the time was that any person who fell between Hitler himself all the way to some average Joe saying "I'm not sure people should be burning that." was racist, and the mainstream media and Democrats leaned into it.

There were plenty of actually-literally peaceful protests, too. It's not hard to find examples to muddy the waters any way you want.

People are terrified of Trump because they don't really know what 'fascism' actually means. If Trump was really fascist, the first thing he would've been doing is purging/ensuring loyalty of the military to consolidate his power base. The failing New York Times would've been shut down or put under new management, not sneered at on twitter. Party cadres in key institutions, 'coordination' of Google, Facebook, Disney... NGO LGBT centre staff brought in for police questioning until the message is made clear and they shut down, not merely cancelling funding for an LGBT suicide hotline. Boots on the ground in Greenland, not posturing and talk without action.

People are concerned about Trump doing the fake version of fascism (enforcing immigration law, banning immigration from shithole countries) because they think it's the real version of fascism (totalitarian government, military expansion overseas, active suppression of dissidents/ethnicities). They don't appreciate that there's a qualitative difference. There's no law of nature that says an administration that starts with enforcing immigration law ends up pursuing extermination of non-whites.

People are concerned about Trump doing the fake version of fascism ... because they think it's the real version of fascism ....

Or they're concerned that the former is a Camel's Nose for the latter.

He kind of is purging the military, though. At least to the low key degree that presidents can. I actually almost posted this article as a top level post about how civilians are being purged from West Point, on top of other firings that have been happening.

President Donald Trump co-signed his quest via an executive order pledging to overhaul the “leadership, curriculum, and instructors” at the military service academies. This was part of Trump’s broader effort to restrict and reshape the military’s elite and highly influential officer class after feeling so profoundly betrayed by them by the end of his first term that he reportedly pined in private for “the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Trump’s drive for military loyalty extends from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom, targeting everyone from the second lieutenants churned out of places like West Point to three-star generals, all of whom must now personally meet with Trump before their fourth star is formalized.

And stuff like

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar on fascism, believes that the Pentagon’s fixation on the service academies is part and parcel of a broader effort to shore up military loyalty, a campaign, she argued, that is, “at its root, a pedagogical project.”

Ben-Ghiat was herself slated to discuss historical examples of strongmen and the military at the Naval Academy’s vaunted 2024 Bancroft lecture, scheduled to take place a few weeks before the 2024 election. She planned her talk to be explicitly apolitical, in keeping with the academy’s regulations, focusing strictly on historical figures like Augusto Pinochet and Benito Mussolini.

But after conservative military academy alumni caught wind of her coming speech, they exerted intense pressure for it to be canceled. “They did not want those 500 midshipmen to hear about Pinochet,” Ben-Ghiat told me, “because one of my points was going to be that that militaries under autocracy become ravaged by corruption, and that politicization undermines professionalization. Instead of loyalty to the nation, it becomes service to a leader.”

The story also ends with the reporter themselves not only being denied a press pass to a West Point speech by Trump but then being harassed by the Secret Service on invented accusations.

More broadly there was the set of lawsuits settled against law firms he was annoyed with on a personal level - seen by many as dangerous overreach. I’m not sure how much stock to put in allegations of suppressing various news media outlets, especially TV ones, but that accusation has been made. Having read a few books about Hitler, one thing that struck me was a key part of his drive for control was street thuggery. Brownshirts brawling with Communists but later suppressing more general protest. Cultures of fear and reprisal. Yes, some leftists have been guilty of this, but is rightist revenge touring really the answer? Cultures of fear and their effect on free speech are bad period. FBI raids on Bolton. Harris losing secret service protection. Executive orders directly instructing DoJ to investigate treason against specific people. Leveraging honestly pretty petty mortgage inconsistencies to attack a Fed governor and a sitting state Attorney General. Trump recently called for Chris Christie to be (re)investigated over Bridgegate, conveniently right after he was on Sunday TV criticizing Trump. But it’s not just these big names, it’s the smaller governmental cogs who also are now worried.

Moreover even neutral observers can admit that the system of checks and balances is not working as it should - especially I blame Congress for this, however, not Trump directly, but he has played a role. They recently sat a federal judge, Emil Bove, who very credibly was accused of outright making plans to defy a judicial order and lie to the judge about it!

I do honestly think fascism allegations are a little overblown but they aren’t at all invented out of nothing. Trump quite literally does admire tyrants and dictators at the end of the day.

OK but has the military been made to take a personal loyalty oath to Trump?

I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.

Or for the civil service:

"I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfil my official duties, so help me God!"

Hitler would also give generals huge estates, pay off their debts informally, personally.

Not having some anti-fascist scholar show up at West Point or not giving Harris secret service protection is not the same kind of thing fundamentally as real fascism. The Secret Service are no match for random 20 year olds anyway, anyone who wants to kill her probably can if they learn how to shoot or use a drone. But under real fascism Harris would've been sent to exile, imprisoned, disappeared, Navalnyed... The anti-fascist scholar would be whisked away to a prison camp. There'd be paramilitaries under direct Party control like the Blackshirts, PAP or SS/SA muscling in on the Pentagon's domain.

Something can be unseemly, dubiously legal, illegal or authoritarian but not actually be totalitarian or fascist. And the latter is what many on the left get so hysterical about.

It's like the Trump-Russia collusion angle. Trump is slightly warmer to Russia than the Biden administration. But Trump is actively sending Ukraine munitions used to kill Russian troops in war. He's anti-Russian. He was anti-Russian in his first term too, sending Ukraine Javelins. I don't recall him providing sanctions relief, the Magnitsky sanctions remained. But the left doesn't care about this at all, they live in an alternative reality where Trump is a Russian stooge because he's not deadset on antagonizing Russia 24/7 and has other priorities besides that.

It’s worth noting that Hitler rolled out the oaths gradually to supplant an existing loyalty oath to the constitution.

Also, I think wikipedia has a minor error. If the Wehrmacht wasn’t renamed until March 1935, it’s quite unlikely that the Führereid mentions it by that name. But according to this dispatch, the August 1934 version does say “defense force.” Is this a translation error or a timeline error?

But I digress.

Would you change your mind if the military did get a new oath? What about the civil service? Does it have to mention Trump personally?

We actually have a specific law against Nazi-style loyalty tests. The administration did try to get around it anyway. I think that intentionally trying to take down guardrails against fascist policy is a bad sign.

Would you change your mind if the military did get a new oath?

Yes. Even the proposed 'free response' questions are less overt than 'I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler'. Loyalty to the office rather than loyalty to the person.

They do this all the time. It's like in academia, they phrase it as 'how do you implement diversity and love diversity and advance diversity, write an essay about it'. You get a choice as to how you respond. They don't go 'swear an oath that you'll advance DEI' formally. Likewise, in the US Air Force under Biden, they sent a memo around saying that they wanted an Air Force that represented the country, so it should have these demographics. Of course they added the 'don't actually act on this, it's all supposed to be meritocratic, it's not a quota haha' part too: https://www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/2022SAF/Officer_Source_of_Commission_Applicant_Pool_Goals_memo.pdf

If they strip out the waffle and say 'this is the goal, now make it happen' then there's a phase-shift. De facto and de jure are brought into alignment.

Maybe a better question then would be: if the US were to become more authoritarian (because let’s be honest that is probably the more accurate word), what would it look like? I’m puzzled as to what you think it would look like. Of course the Bayes calculation is something separate, but no country ever goes from 0 to 60 instantly

The US is becoming more authoritarian. I agree with that. But my point is that it's being pattern-matched to fascism too aggressively by libs who have these nightmare-wishmares about Trump sending LGBT to camps and implementing white supremacy. Or they go 'tariffs will crash the economy' when tariffs are bad but not beyond the usual range of terrible economic policies the US indulges in. They can't possibly do as much damage as the EU has done to Europe.

You can legitimately use troops to crack down on criminals, the US crime rate is too high by developed world standards. Send the criminals to prison, crack down on them. The US sent a bunch of criminals to prison in the 1990s but we don't necessarily consider that fascism. Trump hasn't even gotten that far. The US just blew up that boat of maybe drug smugglers and people are complaining about it. But the US blows things up all the time. Biden blew up a 'maybe terrorist' that was just an Afghan trying to get water for his family during the chaotic evacuation. Clinton blew up a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant for no good reason.

That's not necessarily fascism either. It can sound like fascism if you make the argument, it's aggressive and obnoxious behaviour. Authoritarian too. But you can go from 30 Authoritarianism to 40 Authoritarianism and stop there, it's not a slippery slope in and of itself. The situation may change and being stuck at 30 is no longer adaptive.

In this house, Pinochet was a hero.

To be clear, there is a lot that Trump is doing which it is reasonable for lefty institutionalists to be concerned about. I'm not disputing that. But thinly veiled political lectures being canceled is not it. And Letitia James needed to be prosecuted under something after her own political targeting scandal.

Having read a few books about Hitler, one thing that struck me was a key part of his drive for control was street thuggery. Brownshirts brawling with Communists but later suppressing more general protest.

Has Trump tried to encourage anything like this? Maybe I'm not plugged-in enough but I can't think of any semi-organised street thuggery that could be called right-wing or meaningfully tied to Trump. The only things that come to mind are explicitly left-wing groups like Antifa and parts of the Free Palestine crowd.

Nazi street thuggery was justified as being in response to Communist thuggery. Of course it then didn’t stop there. I will be the first to say it’s not quite the same thing but you could see a parallel with loyalist-coded troops being used to put down antifa-types/palestinian protestors/anti-ICE types as justification. We have not really had an opportunity to see this in full action during his new term so far, but the groundwork is there based on Trump’s increasingly explicit partly-legal justifications for having direct and limitless control over the military in addition with his claims about what he would’ve done if he had been in charge during the full BLM protests. So to be more clear, I’m saying some similar ingredients are right there so in that light I think it’s fair to be just a little nervous. For example, what if a situation/scandal happened sparking mass protests in a city that happened to have a national guard or military contingent deployed? We could see something that rhymes.

Has Trump tried to encourage anything like this?

His actions in LA and DC immediately jump to mind.

Right-wing political violence in the US is almost always carried out under the guise of law enforcement, and at the moment the Trump admin is trying to build out ICE into a massive organization full of people who owe effectively personal fealty to Trump.

(Of course, I think it would be a mistake to attribute this to some sort of 4-D chess plan - Trump just has the mind of a thug and thinks having an army of brownshirts with a veneer of police authority is super cool)

ICE people do not owe personal fealty to Trump. They tend to favor him for, because they tend to agree with his policies more than other government employees -- this is self-selection, of course those who go into immigration enforcement are more likely to agree with a President who supports more immigration enforcement.

The big controversial thing Trump did in LA and DC was send in the National Guard, which certainly does not owe Trump personal fealty.

As for "Right-wing political violence in the US is almost always carried out under the guise of law enforcement", that's certainly a hard one to swallow. Especially when the obvious though unstated corollary is "any time a right-wing government uses law enforcement, that counts as political violence". For non-law-enforcement right wing political violence, the KKK in its heydey comes to mind; it included law enforcement officers, but not acting in that guise. Or is the KKK allowed to be considered on the left now?

ICE people do not owe personal fealty to Trump.

The vast majority of them just owe him their jobs and are recruited from his most die-hard base (and are well aware they'll be kicked to the curb when Trump is gone).

As for "Right-wing political violence in the US is almost always carried out under the guise of law enforcement", that's certainly a hard one to swallow.

I don't know why, other than selective perception. We have the extremely prominent examples of the Civil Rights Movement, the history of labor protests, recent protests against the police themselves...

As for 'Especially when the obvious though unstated corollary is "any time a right-wing government uses law enforcement, that counts as political violence"', this is flipped around. The use of law enforcement gives cover to political violence.

The vast majority of them just owe him their jobs and are recruited from his most die-hard base (and are well aware they'll be kicked to the curb when Trump is gone).

That they were hired as part of a policy to increase immigration enforcement, and would be "kicked to the curb" if that policy is reversed, does not equal "personal fealty".

to three-star generals, all of whom must now personally meet with Trump before their fourth star is formalized.

Is this unusual? Per 10 U.S. Code § 601, generals, lieutenant generals, admirals, and vice admirals (three- and four-star positions) require nomination by the president, and confirmation from the Senate. I'd be more surprised if the president, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, didn't feel it necessary to meet with his top checks notes 37 military officers (plus a few currently-vacant positions).

I think it’s reasonable. But if it wasn’t prior practice, it could also be interpreted (in conjunction with Trump’s well known wishes for personal loyalty) as something more nefarious - these generals are intelligent people and can read between the lines (or overreact of course too). That’s why context is important. My perception of Trump’s military “reforms” is that they are more than merely counter push against woke stuff. To be fair I don’t know how many military top brass do or don’t agree with that, but it’s quite plausible.

Honestly, that's a good question. I have no idea how the president generally picks the top flag officers, or if he usually just lets a military board/his aides recommend someone and then says "yep, sure, I'll trust your judgement and nominate them".

Boots on the ground in Greenland

I hate to break this to you, but there have been US troops stationed in Greenland since 1951, in addition to the Allies taking over the island during the German occupation of Denmark (Iceland became independent after the war).

Yes but you know perfectly well that I mean 'annexing Greenland like Trump kept talking about' rather than 'keeping a military base that's already there'.

Eh fuck it.

Since there doesn’t seem to be any other people who are actually “terrified by Trump” answering (that is to say, leftists) aside from some light interjections by @Skibboleth, I suppose I ought to chime in and try to provide some actual responses, instead of just relying on admirable-but-inaccurate “steelmans” from more modal right-wingers who are at least trying to understand the screen the “other side” is watching

…Or worse, less-charitable right-wingers who neither understand the perspective of us Others nor want to understand, who instead just chalk it all up to pure TDS.

———

Honestly, though, you pretty much answer your own question in your opening paragraph;

I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors.

My very first comment on this site -the whole reason I was inspired to create this account and bother screaming into the void here to begin with- has to do with the fact that, y’know, a lot of us TDS-rotted leftoids actually believe in the ‘scare tactics’ and ‘misinformation’ that the conventional wisdom around here holds to be mere anti-Trump propaganda.

Believe it or not, a lot of the time people actually do believe in what they say they do.

When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it

Trump is openly, proudly purging the government of anyone willing and able to disagree with him. I do not share your optimistic read on the situation. In other words,

I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.

Well I don’t.

The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards.

The fact that the administration has, in the past few months, been hard at work trying to bypass, eliminate, and ignore those built-in restraints gives me a very different read on the situation.

However, it’s the fact that the Republican half of the government (and at least a third of the population) is either doing nothing to stop it, or even actively cheer it on, that really causes me to despair over the situation.

Nothing scares the left like the thought of the right doing politics to them the way they do it to the right. That's really the fear. That all these corrupt and undemocratic mechanisms the left uses to exploit their dominance in media, bureaucracy and academia to electoral effect might be used against them.

Charge the leading presidential candidate with a hundred felonies over some bullshit? Hope your mortgage applications were all in order!

"Onoes, muh norms and civility!"

I don't like Trump much, but my dearest hope is that he does exactly everything the left has done to him by the time he's out of office. Two wrongs don't make a right, but they do make it fair, and that's as close as politics gets to "right".

Nothing scares the left like the thought of the right doing politics to them the way they do it to the right.

I can't remember which historian it was, but I remember reading a book excerpt wherein a historian, in analyzing "fascist tactics" noted that every tactic the Italian Fascists, the Nazis, etc. used had been developed and used first by Communists and other leftists, and thus, not only are there not so much "fascist tactics" as "tactics that become fascist when adopted by the Right from the Left", but that "Fascism" can pretty much be defined as "when the Right starts using Left's own more-effective tactics to use against the Left" (and thus, as a good opponent of "fascism," he then exhorts that we must ensure the Right remains forbidden from using the Left's best tactics.)

I honestly wish you could remember what historian that was.

I could always use another book to add to my 'to read' pile.

I'm AI skeptical than most around here, but must admit that chatGPT is becoming a damn good search engine:

Otto Rühle, a German Marxist and left communist in the council communist tradition who also came close to anarchist positions, wrote that "the struggle against fascism must begin with the struggle against Bolshevism", adding that he believed the Soviets had influence on fascist states by serving as a model. In 1939, Rühle further professed: "Russia was the example for fascism. ... Whether party 'communists' like it or not, the fact remains that the state order and rule in Russia are indistinguishable from those in Italy and Germany. Essentially they are alike. One may speak of a red, black, or brown 'soviet state', as well as of red, black or brown fascism."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fascism

That's interesting. Can you cite historical examples, from various time periods over the past century? What specific tactics are we talking about?

What specific tactics are we talking about?

Well, mostly in the context of interwar Europe, it's the "street-fighting" tactics adopted by the blackshirts and brownshirts, but first developed and used first by Communist and anarchist gangs. That's what I remember the author focusing on.

Well, at least you’re honest.

In the spirit of fairness, let the spiral continue towards civil war, I guess.

  • -10

Adopting the exact same tactics as your side is a "spiral toward civil war"? What was it when your people were doing it?

Now that the other side has learned, now it's a spiral?

There's nothing you think the left should do to de-escalate? No off-ramps you see? The entire elite superstructure of our nation and the world just has zero accountability? No amends that could be made? No compromise?

Doesn't sound like it's my spiral. But I am waiting at the bottom for the rest of you.

Adopting the exact same tactics as your side is a "spiral toward civil war"? What was it when your people were doing it?

Bullshit. I don’t really care if the mods ding me for ‘incivility’, or whatever- this is so wildly in opposition to the reality I’m familiar with that I can only conclude that one of us has a wildly distorted recollection of the past warped by echo-chambered propaganda.

Of course, neither of us are going to own up to that, so I guess we’re just going to disagree and keep living in our own bespoke realities.

On a related note-

There's nothing you think the left should do to de-escalate? No off-ramps you see? The entire elite superstructure of our nation and the world just has zero accountability? No amends that could be made? No compromise?

I genuinely do not believe that there is anything the left could do short of total, 100% concession to every single rightist demand under the sun (and mass ritualistic suicide probably wouldn’t hurt) that wouldn’t then immediately lead to right-leaning culture warriors immediately finding some other issue to then blame the evil leftoids for. Chris Rufo (and Yarvin, and Dread Jim, and whatever other deranged grievance-collector currently featured on TheMotte today) and his ilk will always be able to find another scapegoat.

So, you live in a different reality to me, your side is incapable of even token compromise, and you think three internet edgelords are the marginal Republican voter?

You don't need to convince Yarvin of anything. You need to convince fifty thousand midwesterners. But because you don't think some blogger who has been banned from most internet forums would accept it, you don't think it's even worth attempting.

But please, for the love of god, don't take my word for anything. You stay so angry at (who was it again?) :checks notes: Curtis Yarvin that you can't support politicians who maybe could see their way to enforcing basic public safety. Maybe someone who lies and pays a little lip service to having a border? Even Obama did that! Maybe accept people in the party who don't support gay marriage? You know, like Obama! Maybe someone who would write some legislation to crack down on a nationwide crime wave like Joe Biden and sign it like Bill Clinton?

There's just nothing to be done! Those wacky Republicans just won't accept anything!

So, you live in a different reality to me

Sure seems that way!

your side is incapable of even token compromise

Things I Didn’t Say Count: 1

“My side” isn’t incapable by many miles, but I admit I am increasingly skeptical of the value of token compromise in this era of polarization- and that sentiment is increasingly spreading, and probably for good reason. I believe political triangulation as the key to electoral success is definitely on its way out.

you think three internet edgelords are the marginal Republican voter?

Things I Didn’t Say Count: 2

Certainly not the marginal Republican voter… but I do think the radical fringe currently in the driver’s seat of the GOP are shifting ever-closer to said edgelord’s viewpoints. I can always hope that the GOP regains some modicum of sanity before the Overton Window of the ‘general right’ shifts too far, but admittedly I’m not holding my breath.

You don't need to convince Yarvin of anything. You need to convince fifty thousand midwesterners.

Correct.

But because you don't think some blogger who has been banned from most internet forums would accept it, you don't think it's even worth attempting.

Things I Didn’t Say Count: 3

I do believe it’s pointless and not worth the effort to try and reach out to the non-trivial portion of those midwesterners who dyed-in-the-wool partisan, they’re a lost cause. The rest can probably be reached with appropriate (and, critically, appropriately targeted messaging), though that’s not going to an easy task, and I’m deeply pessimistic that the Democratic Party (or any single party, for that matter) will be able to thread that needle. Outrage-farming and negative partisanship are probably the future, I fear.

But please, for the love of god, don't take my word for anything. You stay so angry at (who was it again?) :checks notes: Curtis Yarvin that you can't support politicians who maybe could see their way to enforcing basic public safety.

I know you don’t believe this (‘alternate realities’ strike again), but the public is already safe. It could and should be safer, but I don’t think you and I are going to agree on what the best pathways to that goal are. Especially if the word ‘Bukele’ pops up anywhere in that discussion.

Maybe someone who lies and pays a little lip service to having a border? Even Obama did that!

I fundamentally disagree with a lot of the ideas around the border, but we did, in fact, have someone who paid a little lip service to the border.

His name was Joe Biden.

It notably didn’t work out so great for him. Turns out that when your political opponents are working over time to signal-boost (not to mention help create) a ‘problem’, lip service alone isn’t enough unless you’re willing to loudly, blatantly lie and try to match your opponents noise making with your own. Also probably the future, I fear, if Newsom’s new PR efforts are anything to go by.

Maybe accept people in the party who don't support gay marriage? You know, like Obama!

Fortunately, that ship has already sailed, and homosexual acceptance seems here to stay, despite efforts by conservative influencers to roll back acceptance among Republicans.

Unfortunately, that particular battle being won settled enough lead directly towards the trans panic as the current wedge hysteria, but alas.

Maybe someone who would write some legislation to crack down on a nationwide crime wave like Joe Biden and sign it like Bill Clinton?

Legislation, such as…?

Please, be specific.

There's just nothing to be done! Those wacky Republicans just won't accept anything!

Pretty much, yeah.

Honestly, though, you pretty much answer your own question in your opening paragraph;

Well, I can say I've paid about as much attention to Trump as I have to every other president, including Biden - which is not much. But it's taken significantly more effort to afford Trump the same level of indifference as I have for Biden and other presidents, and that's been true since 2015. I see that as indicative that information I shouldn't trust is being pushed my way, which reinforces my tendency to tune it out.

However, it's the fact that the Republican half of the government (and at least a third of the population) is either doing nothing to stop it, or even actively cheer it on, that really causes me to despair over the situation.

Your response hasn't given any consideration to the mirror image aspect of my original post. I encourage you to try to put aside your preconceptions and consider how the other side might have felt looking at the BLM situation of 2020-2021, and the power that mob mentality held at the time. Can you sympathize with someone else's fear of the lack of checks on that power, the same way you worry that the checks and balances in government won't be enough to stop Trump? Can you see how someone on the other side would have had similar reservations about those in power at the time doing nothing to curb that power, and to the contrary actually cheering it on?

I'm not asking you to agree that those concerns were valid or that the situations are equivalent - I'm asking whether you can see the structural similarity in how both sides experience fear when they perceive threats from power sources they believe lack adequate restraints. If you can only acknowledge that the other side had feelings while maintaining that your fears are categorically different or more legitimate, then you're missing the point about how these dynamics work. Your response kind of proves the point about us trusting different institutional mechanisms without engaging with it.

Your response hasn't given any consideration to the mirror image aspect of my original post. I encourage you to try to put aside your preconceptions and consider how the other side might have felt looking at the BLM situation of 2020-2021, and the power that mob mentality held at the time. Can you sympathize with someone else's fear of the lack of checks on that power, the same way you worry that the checks and balances in government won't be enough to stop Trump? Can you see how someone on the other side would have had similar reservations about those in power at the time doing nothing to curb that power, and to the contrary actually cheering it on?

I'm not asking you to agree that those concerns were valid or that the situations are equivalent - I'm asking whether you can see the structural similarity in how both sides experience fear when they perceive threats from power sources they believe lack adequate restraints.

I’m well aware that the ‘other side’ views the current situation as being a symmetrical response to BLM, the COVID lockdowns, and generally views the Trump Administration’s lawlessness as being a counter-defection preceded by and justified by the left defecting ‘first’.

However, I simply reject that framing, and I very much do not see these situations as being similarly symmetrical to begin with. So while you’re correct to say that

If you can only acknowledge that the other side had feelings while maintaining that your fears are categorically different or more legitimate, then you're missing the point about how these dynamics work. Your response kind of proves the point about us trusting different institutional mechanisms without engaging with it ,

I do not think any of that really matters.

I’m sufficiently burnt out on people trying to play the ‘both sides’ card that I don’t really care to entertain those kinds of arguments anymore, even if they are simply being posed from a pure ‘devils advocate’ position. Both sides are not the same.

But alas, I am a partisan, so I would say that, wouldn’t I.

  • -11

I'd submit an underlying root of the fear Trump inspires for many people is the fear of a lack of control.

This isn't a claim about what those people would claim as their cause of fear. This is more of a claim about a distinction between an artifact-level expression of something, which might have its own rational, and the underlying cultural dynamic that underpins such an expression. In the same way that people don't feel the monsters in horror movies as much as they fear the [primal fear of being hunted], where the monster is merely the artifact to express the underlying fear, people fear the sense of a [lack of control] more than actual policies they don't like.

It's not exactly a novel premise that the fear of losing control is associated with a variety of disorders that generally amount to various expressions of stress, anxiety, and (bad) attempts to compensate. Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by a consistent state of worry, anxiety, and catastrophizing worst-case scenarios. Obsessive compulsive disorder is generally linked to constant intrusive thoughts and the corresponding efforts to mitigate them. Panic disorder goes with the fear of having another panic attack, and 'control' is re-asserted by trying to avoid the triggers that might lead to another panic attack... even though the existing psychological reference of overcoming trauma suggests that avoiding triggers can make issues worse.

Now, there are separate arguments/posts that could be made about whether [current society] dynamics make these sort of things worse. Whether dominant domestic political propaganda narratives by less-than-non-partisan mass media over the last decades might have accidentally encouraged anxieties, catastrophizing, or so on. Whether COVID pandemic policies and lockdown advocacy, which became partisan-coded in the US, might have had unintended consequences for the psychological health of large parts of the population. We've certainly had good effort posts by Motte posters in the past of how social contagion dynamics have shaped or propagated various cultural obsessions, and pathologies, associated with the worst of various culture war elements. Those arguments exist, but they aren't the argument here.

The argument here is that the fear of a loss of control is not just a real fear, but an underlying theme of a lot of fears, and that Trump rides that line in how he breaks people's world views of how the world works, and the sense of control it provides.

This part gets into the overlap of politics and psychology, which can come uncomfortably close to pathologizing your opponents, so please bear with me as I try to make more general points.

One of the individual human psychological needs is a sense of agency / autonomy, which require a degree of control. This is a pretty consistent theme research about how higher employee sense of autonomy correlates with job satisfaction, the esteem stage of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the commercial applications/implications of player agency in video game design. Control is not the same thing as agency or even security, but they are overlapping dynamics. What it boils down to is simple: people don't like feeling helpless, and one of the aspects of being helpless is not having the power to control your context. It's the difference between having to stay put and take abuse, or being able to choose to walk away.

One of the less obvious aspects of this desire for a sense of control is that it does not have to be directly exercised by the individual, but can be 'outsourced' to other people or even other things. This is a function of what we call trust. A child does not need to be strong enough on their own to face the scary thing, but can cry for their parent, whose presence is reassuring despite the child's own agency not increasing. You can feel safer having a drink in public if you can trust that a friend, or even just a taxi driver, will get you home safer. Note this also can work in the inverse- whether you feel safe or uneasy in a neighborhood can come down to social trust.

Where this starts to interface with politics is the now often-underrecognized dynamic between citizens and chosen leaders who represent. This used to be much more explicit in the Roman patria system, which was a cornerstone of roman society and politics alike. Patria was a patron-client relationship in which reciprocal obligations linked the patron and the client, with client's support/subservience being in return for the patron representing their interests in issues ranging from legal courts to career prospects and so on. A key dynamic of this relationship, however, is that while it could be inherited, it could also be changed- the client who was not served by their patron could, in theory, shift to another patron. The reciprocal obligations of patria are long gone, and the premise is often downplayed or reframed in service of egalitarian cultural biases of western democracies, but you can see it in campaigns where candidate vows to fight for you on X issue. This is an appeal for outsourcing your sense of control to your chosen leader. You may not have the agency, but the politician does, and so a [sense of control] can still be maintained.

What is less obvious about this less-obvious political extension outsourcing the sense of control is that it can also extend to hostile actors.

There is plenty of research associating a conspiratorial mindset with a sense of control, which has a long and diverse history of exaggerating the influence and efforts of hated outgroups to frame them as far more powerful than they actually are. This has expressions in things like the joke about the Jew who reads the Nazi news paper to feel good about how powerful they are, but it also has less comical expressions in exaggerating elements of truth into absurdities. To pick an American-salient example, Russia certainly does spy on the US, and Russian troll farms do try to escalate the culture war, but it is more misleading than informative to claim that the Russians are the cause of American political polarization. Sometimes these are done for purposes of cynical deflection- it's easier for the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party to blame Russian interference for losing the 2016 election than Clinton's long history of doing Clinton-like things- but sometimes these sort of explanations go back to the psychological need for a sense of control even when it's clear you aren't the one with it.

Step back to the field of antisemitic conspiracies. This is a very old genre, and occasionally it gets very absurd. There is, for example, a reoccurring minor news story in the arab middle east of birds being detained (arrested, if you will) in rural areas on suspicion of being Israeli spies. While it is true that the Israelis have considerable espionage capabilities- that grain of truth referenced before- to date there is no reporting I am aware of that has ever validated the conspiracy as opposed to the far more mundane explanation. Israeli universities in Israel tag wild animals as part of research, and then release, and then the birds go where they will across the reason, carrying those tags. There is no reason for the birds to be in that particular country where it is detained.

One one hand, this conspiracy is silly. On the other, if we step back to the [sense of control] framing, it makes a fair deal more sense. The arabs in the broader levant are not exactly known for being high agency societies. Many are in uncontested monarchies or functional military dictatorships that are uncontested because of very established, and often very brutal, security apparatus that stamp on the sort of agency that goes against the state. Nor are they exactly in patria relationships with leaders who do have that sort of agency. There are certainly patronage relationships, but if the Arabs had the sort of regional agency and control they wanted, Israel wouldn't exist. They are people without direct or even delegated agency.

In this context, the [Israeli bird] is a demonstration of a lack of control. Despite their inability to impose upon the state of Israel, here is an artifact from Israel that is able to intrude upon them. They did not know it in advance. They were not able to stop it from occurring. And, well, everyone knows what the Israelis can get up to if they want. The [Israeli bird] could be such a thing. It's presence is a demonstration of helplessness and threat.

Except... by being an Israeli spy bird, a sense of control is being re-imposed via framing paradigm. The bird is not an aimless or chaotic event of chance, but an agent. That agent implies agency on the part of its jewish masters. One may not know the insidious jewish plan, but there can still be a plan. One may hate the control of the perfidious jew, but malign Jewish influence means that someone has some control over things. Even if control is held by a hated outgroup, it still validates the sense that there is control. It's just a contest/conflict of who has control, and how to wrest control back.

This is not a novel or Arab-specific issue. The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict. Our departed Hlynka would occasionally write in his inferential difference series about how it manifested in the western enlightenment as part of the philosophical difference of enlightenment thinkers. The distinction between whether the loci of control of society is fundamentally internal or external, deriving from one's self or subject to imposition from outside context which could be controlled. This has longer arguments about how the [post-enlightenment left] tends towards the external locus of control theory which asserts you can control broader context, and the [post-enlightenment right] leans more towards an internal locus of control because you cannot control outside context, but that's non-central to this.

What I want to go back to is that other political conspiracy, and Trump specifically.

I made a point earlier that the Russian interference narrative could be cynically boosted as a means of blame deflection. Clinton and her wing of the party would rather attack her enemies / blame the Russians / hurt Trump than concede that she was a bad candidate. But cynical deflection isn't the only dynamic in play- it can also go back to the point of 'hostile control is better than no control.'

If Trump is an enemy of the nation, after all, by conspiring with Russia- something that the Democratic party convinced about half of Americans about- then control may have been usurped, but it fundamentally still exists and can be regained. Hence the resistance, the mass organized protests of the mostly peaceful variety, and of course The Secret History Of the Shadow Campaign That Saved The 2020 Election. The later was an actual conspiracy- or prospiracy if you will- of government officials, party officials, media interests, protest organizers, NGOs, activists, and more to coordinate efforts to change laws, manage protests, shape media coverage and all the other efforts done to Fortify Democracy and Save the Election. This very classic 'sense of control' mentality, and neatly aligns with the sort of world view that might sincerely believe that Trump conspired with Russia.

By contrast, if Trump did not conspire with Russia- if he literally came down that escalator and then proceeded to demolish a number of nation-dominating political dynasties who people felt had been in control- or nearly in control- for the better part of a quarter century, winning primarily because of how hated the party and political leaders were... and because no one operating within the rules could stop him... even as the Trump administration was an endless cycle of chaos and turnovers and a lack of organizational discipline...

Well, that's a victory of a lack of control.

But- for a time- the sense of control was restored. The election was Fortified. Covid was Locked Down. The Adults were Back in Charge. Trump was impeached (again), in court (again), and more reliable sense-of-control allies were being propped up in the Republican party. Liz Cheney was being set up to try and re-establish control of the Republican Party, so nothing like Trump could happen again, and the experienced hand of Biden meant the US was back in control.

And then everything stopped being under control, and Trump came back and smashed the 2024 election beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the sense of control was loss even more than it was with Trump 2016.

And if there's something people fear in general, it's a lack of control.

A bit long, but well said.

Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely. They threw absolutely everything from the intelligence agencies to the courts to the actual assassins at him, and still got waxed by a lone reality TV star and real-estate mogul. Twice!

to the actual assassins at him

Come on. Do you really think that

(a) the deep state wanted to murder him
(b) that they would wait till election season to off him
(c) that they would decide that a sniper bullet would serve their goals better than, say, heart failure after an overdose of viagra?
(d) that they would be likely to miss?

Now you can add any amounts of epicycles to make all of that plausible. Perhaps the plan was that JD Vance would get elected Americans would vote for him simply because they dislike assassinations. Only Vance was really a democratic operative whose presidency would discredit the GOP for decades, allowing the reptiloids running the Dems to defeat the last Illuminati bastion in the US. But they did not know that the Illuminati had acquired precognition from alien artifacts from Area-51, so they knew precisely how much to adjust the shooter's scope for maximum dramatic effect.

The deep state shouldn't be considered as a rational actor. No reasonable person would think 'OK we've got Biden as our old and withered presidential nominee, we can just run the country while he's out of it. But let's put in Kamala as a talentless, charisma-deficient vice-president and then when 2024 comes around and Biden is predictably incapable... uhhh... well better think up something clever then!' But they did that anyway and fumbled it.

We already know that they don't use optimal strategies, they're not going to do an assassination properly either. If they try to assassinate someone, it'd look like their military campaigns and spending programs. A giant mess.

Personally, I've found the Trump phenomenon encouraging, because it means that the elites who control our government are still too incompetent to resist public input indefinitely.

Or that they had chosen not to do what it took to resist public input indefinitely even though they technically could have if they were willing to burn enough of the commons. That's the main thing I'm worried about here - relations between the left and right aren't great right now but there's room for things to get much, much worse if both sides just keep escalating the way they have been.

I'm not particularly interested in litigating the question of who started it, because I don't think that's likely to be a useful question to ask here. Instead, I wonder what achievable state of relations (and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable) would make each side feel secure enough in their position to stop escalating.

and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable

Why not? Suharto is my immediate go-to example, but there's also the Reconquista and the Edict of Fontainebleau as what comes to my mind next.

(and "complete subjugation of all ideological opponents" is not achievable)

No, there are paths there. They're just terrible paths that amount to Pyrrhic victory, and which we don't want to take. The obvious one is "nuclear war, half of SJers literally die in a fire, the other half get blamed for weakening the West and thus allowing Beijing/Moscow to challenge us".

I press x to doubt on the SJ debate remaining salient in the event of a full nuclear exchange

"Millions die in nuclear fire, women most affected"

Scenario A - Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Trump attempts to assert federal authority. Blue states defy him, and organize around making that defiance as effective as possible. Blue tribe wins an election, and attempts to assert federal authority. Red Tribe states defy them, and organize around making that defiance as effective as possible.

The norm of strong federal control over the states dies. Without a superpowerful federal government to fight over, conflict between the tribes decreases, as each realizes that imposing its will on the other is simply not worth the effort; better to facilitate population transfers of those unsatisfied with their current tribal environment, and let history sort it all out. Legitimate federalism defuses much of the culture war, as people are free to pursue their values in their own regions, and to move if this is impractical.

Scenario B - The Land of Peace and Plenty
One tribe or the other delivers unquestionably effective governance, even by the other tribe's standards; significantly better schooling outcomes even for inner-city black kids, notably effective and just law enforcement, a clear road out of the long-term economic stagnation, an automation revolution leading to an explosion of wealth and dramatically-increased living standards, etc, etc.

Much of the current mess is driven by policy starvation, moderate political approaches chronically unable to deliver the goods, leading to the public turning away to the increasingly radical fringes in search of still-credible policy options. One side or the other actually delivering undeniable policy wins even from the perspective of the opposing tribe could possibly defuse the escalation spiral as people adopt policies that actually work. From the Blues, this might be YIMBYs or the Abundance guys. From the right, it might be things like the Mississippi Miracle or Trump's crime crackdown, which seems to have been drawing support recently even from scattered democrats. Admittedly, this seems like more of a long shot, but there's some evidence that a lot of even our most serious problems might actually be choices, and if that fact could be made stark enough, people might choose differently.

I think your scenario A is off the table for now; even Newsom has not been able to resist Trump's authority.

Scenario B is not happening also. Because even if Trump could deliver that effective governance and to the Democrats it would never be enough. It would be bad because Trump was doing it. And because he can't; e.g. delivering notably better schooling outcomes for inner-city black kids is beyond the President's power. He's doing best on immigration enforcement; despite all the cries, the horror stories are limited. Where's all the brown US citizens black-bagged and dumped in Tijuana? I've heard of one held for 3 days, which is bad but the ordinary sort of bad that happened every day before Trump.

They didn't kill him with a heart attack post-2020 election for reasons I legitimately do not understand. I am not saying they should or shouldn't have done this, I am just confused why they didn't.

Germany must have started stocking up on heart attack guns this early, and there were none left to use on Trump.

Are you referring to those dead AfD people?

Yup, though mostly having fun. I haven't really looked into it, and I don't know if the German establishment would take things that far.

The establishment probably wouldn't, given how risk-averse most Germans are.

The establishment's far-left Handlangers, though...if they actually had the mythical heart attack gun, I'm perfectly sure they'd find someone willing to pull the trigger. Mid-level AfD candidates being the target doesn't strike me as unlikely either, given that those are both soft targets and highly detested by the left.

But that's assuming such a thing exists and somehow found its way into the hands of very discreet extremists.

The online battlefield has shifted though. Would Trump 2016 have happened without Reddit and 4chan? Those don't exist in as usable a form these days. Twitter was a huge coup, but that's still "two steps back, one-and-a-half steps forward".

I'd submit an underlying root of the fear Trump inspires for many people is the fear of a lack of control.

Bingo. We’re on Trump’s Wild ride now, and neither he nor anyone else knows where the fuck it’s going or how much damage he’s going to do along the way, whether in the long-term or short-term, domestically or internationally, politically/economically/militarily or ‘merely’ socially/culturally…

…But what we can be sure of is that there’s basically fuck-all any of us can individually do to try and reassert any semblance of ‘control’ over the situation, and that what happens next, good or bad, will happen regardless.

Which, granted, same as it ever was, but that doesn’t make it any less unnerving.

these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far

I would say the opposite. An escalating purity spiral could result in which people keep one upping each other in how extreme they are and punishing those who don't keep up. Like the worst parts of the Cultural Revolution.

But I suspect OP's wife agrees with these social movements rather than disagrees with them.

Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf. His first administration was a shit show, but besides putting a few migrant kids into cages, he mostly harmed the reputation of the US.

His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Of course, the Democrats reacted with a lot of lawsuits. Some with merit, some pure lawfare. In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas. Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.

The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints.

While I am reluctant to defend the woke mob, I will also notice that government can do a lot of things that most social movements can not do at scale. The BLM riots happened because local governments were willing to turn a blind eye to rioting rather than employ police violence. So the government should at least get half-credit for them. But a bunch of criminals looting is small fries compared to the kind of damage the federal government can do.

Saying that you are less worried about government because it has checks and balances is like saying that you are less worried about nuclear weapons than you are about knives because nukes need a code to activate them while knives let anyone stab people. Sure, the median crazy killer will murder more people with a knife than a nuke, but if the safety mechanism fails the nuke-wielding crazy will be able to do orders of magnitude more damage.

His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Well, I guess the question here is "is it really any worse to try to overturn an election, claiming it was fraudulent, than to agree an election was free/fair and then try to overturn it anyway?"

Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.

It's especially ironic that you mention the phrase "peaceful transfer of power", because I found an interview with one of the organisers of the latter, in which he said:

There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition.

Don't get me wrong; J6 was bad. But to claim it was unprecedented is... inaccurate.

Because, well, after Trump won in 2016 there was a scheme to have the Electoral College throw out the results, and there were riots trying to prevent the inauguration.

From that article, ten electors wanted to defect. Five ended up defecting from Clinton, two from Trump, who had a margin of 37.

Personally, I think that trying to defeat Trump through faithless electors would have been a terrible idea. Still, I think what Trump did was worse. The constitution at least mentions electors, and that attempt to steal an election would have been subject to the SCOTUS oversight. By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol, and it seems unlikely that the SCOTUS would have been in a position to rule against them without the mob interfering.

I do not find your J20 thing convincing in the least. To my knowledge, Legba Carrefour was not a fixture of DC Democrats. Now, if you have evidence of Obama, Clinton, Pelosi or the like telling the disruptJ20 rioters something along the lines of "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore", then I would concede that this is equivalent to J6, but otherwise I do not blame the Democrats more for their fringes than I would blame Trump for the odd Qanan loon.

I think what Trump did was worse. The constitution at least mentions electors, and that attempt to steal an election would have been subject to the SCOTUS oversight. By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol, and it seems unlikely that the SCOTUS would have been in a position to rule against them without the mob interfering.

What, exactly, did Trump do on J6? I'll give you a hint, he didn't tell his supporters to break into the capitol and riot.

Not in these words, directly. Apparently, he was spinning his usual lies about the election being stolen -- a process that would be finalized through the certification of the election -- and told them:

"If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"

What do you think was he anticipating that would happen? Than MAGA would pray for a divine intervention, and get archangel Gabriel appear before Mike Pence and tell him how the Democrats had rigged the election and that he must certify Trump?

If a mafia don is telling his subordinates how an associate has become a thorn in his side and how good he would feel if that guy just dropped dead, and his goons took that as an order to kill himself, would you also claim that the mafia don is innocent of murder because he was never telling anyone to kill the victim in so many words?

  • -10

Sounds like a slam dunk to me.

Right after you prosecute the last fifty Democrats to use similar language. Don't rush, I'll wait.

I eagerly await the prosecution of the organizers of the "Fight for Fifteen" movement; c'mon now...

From the exact same speech:

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

Trump said nothing remotely approaching incitement, legally or morally.

By contrast, the constitution is silent about armed goons breaking into the Capitol

Perhaps my memory is incorrect here, but I thought it was IMHO generally notable that none (or at least very few) of the charges for J6 involved bringing 'arms' into the Capitol. For a crowd of right-wing protesters, there was, if anything, a dearth of guns.

armed goons breaking into the Capitol

Please forgive my provincialism, but I still don't get the precise mechanism by which that was as terrible as it's often treated. Even if they hadn't been thrown out, what would they have done there? Or is it all just symbolism?

Well, I mean, AIUI the mob was chanting "hang Mike Pence", they erected a gallows outside the building in which Mike Pence was, and then they entered said building. It seems pretty plausible that, had the mob captured Mike Pence, he might have been hanged. I don't think a VPOTUS has ever been assassinated, so I don't exactly have examples at hand, but it doesn't sound like that'd've been good for the culture war. At the very least, I imagine Mike Pence would have been rather unhappy with that result.

Okay, but is the possible hanging of Mike Pence, a man I last heard of described as an enemy of modernity and progress and all that is good and moral, really what the left and polite society are so up in arms against?

Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.

All coup attempts seem silly until they succeed. Hitler marching on the Feldherrenhalle was far more silly than J6.

Take the vote for the Enabling Act. I would argue that the presence of the brownshirts during the vote was a clear factor in persuading Zentrum to vote for the act which turned Hitler into a dictator. If anything, the surprising thing was that the SPD showed balls of steel by voting against it.

Is it possible that Mike Pence would have stared down the barrel of a gun and certified Biden? Sure.

Is it possible that the SCOTUS would have overruled a certification for Trump under duress? Sure.

Is it possible that the military leadership would have arrested Trump on the spot? Sure.

So while Trump was unlikely to succeed, I would not claim that his coup attempt was totally absurd -- more like shooting with a handgun at someone 80m away than trying to shoot the Moon.

  • -11

Presumably, their plan was to force Congress to certify Trump as the election winner at gunpoint.

With zero guns? My god man. There's a slight problem with your theory.

Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability.

Errrrrr..... this stuff dates back to at least the Clinton administration, e.g. the Lincoln bedroom affairs, the Chinese campaign funds scandal, and the Marc Rich pardon, inter alia, and likely before - I'm just not as knowledgeable about the Bush I, Reagan, etc. presidencies.

Since many people wrote about all my other thoughts:

J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

J6 showed for the X time that Democrats cry foul when someone else does what they do.

J6 was actually mostly peaceful in a way the BLM riots never were.

Trump mostly told everyone to relax.

This is kind of the point of the post you’re replying to - the truth changes on political perceptions.

The BLM riots were never about challenging the peaceful transfer of power on a national level. The idea of J6 was to "stop the steal".

So the fact that the BLM riots caused a lot more damage than J6 is besides the point I am making.

Trump mostly told everyone to relax.

From WP (which is clearly partisan here, but unlikely to make up fake quotes):

Starting at noon on January 6 at a "Save America" rally on the Ellipse, Trump gave a speech in which he repeated false claims of election irregularities and said "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".

Are you arguing that he expected his followers to fight with prayers and slogans while what they believed to be a hostile coup to remove power from Trump was taking place?

Sure, he told this supporters to stand down eventually, but he had fanned the flames before.

Part of Seattle seceded from the union.

But we did get a great natural experiment in anti-racist policing, which started shooting unarmed black kids in just under two weeks.

The BLM riots were never about challenging the peaceful transfer of power on a national level.

The CHOP/CHAZ incident was pretty openly questioning the sovereignty of the federal and state governments.

So the fact that the BLM riots caused a lot more damage than J6 is besides the point I am making.

If you slice things finely enough it's easy to find some difference between two things which makes their similarity not count.

BLM riots were clearly an attempt to coerce the government through violence, even if the details weren't identical.

The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics.

Really? That's not how I remember things.

In my recollection, each side denies every single election they lose, at least in some respect. Sometimes this is "Obama is a Kenyan", sometimes it's "Hanging Chads", but it is every single election. Sometimes the sitting president sends the FBI to launder oppo research to accuse his replacement of having been elected by Russian election fraud.

Many bitter feelings persisted for years about the Bush Gore election - this isn’t actually all that unreasonable though. The election was genuinely super close, and was in fact decided by the Supreme Court in effect (though Bush did actually most likely win in most permutations of the issue in fact, including Florida overall, we think).

But Gore himself accepted the result, as did most all the prominent Dems. To be more specific it was some variation of “I strongly disagree, but I accept it”. Sending the message similar to “it’s better to be happy/kind than right”. Trump’s message was putting himself above the system so it couldn’t contrast any more clearly (on top of being, you know, factually wrong as well about fraud)

Hiding this difference under the words of “at least in some respect” makes them weasel words, respectfully, despite being facially true.

(And Stacy Abrams is a fucking loser and an embarrassment, but even she kept her criticism to legitimacy, not legality)

Did Trump not accept it and leave office peacefully? I think it is you who is playing word games.

Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf.

Less crying wolf and more underestimating the efficacy of checks in the US political system. It has largely been memoryholed here, but the first Trump admin was constantly going for executive power grabs. He simply had not consolidated power within the GOP to the same degree and was facing a less friendly judicial environment. Likewise, there was an incredible amount of corruption, and while the presidential pardon has never been applied very fairly in practice, Trump was exceptional in the self-serving nature of his pardons.

Unfortunately, it’s clear now that even Trump can learn from his initial mistakes.

But hey, public was dumb enough to vote him in again, so I guess it’s time for us to collectively reap the whirlwind.

  • -14

But hey, public was dumb enough to vote him in again, so I guess it’s time for us to collectively reap the whirlwind.

I'm sorry but as someone else on the left the fault here is entirely that of the Democrats. Kamala Harris was one of the worst candidates I have ever seen, and it looks like Biden did his best to sabotage her as well. Trump didn't even need to bust out the worst of the attack ads because Kamala was so disrespectful and contemptuous of her own base - to say nothing of the genocide she ran on supporting (which multiple post-election studies have claimed was enough to swing the election itself). She hurt her numbers by refusing to go on Joe Rogan, but she was such a charisma void that refusing to go on was actually the right answer - she would have melted down and been unable to respond to basic questions about her past actions or present beliefs.

The problem with that election was not that the public was dumb. The problem was that the DNC ran a candidate that was WORSE than Trump - they ran a terrible campaign for a terrible candidate and got a terrible result. If you actually look at the results of that election in greater detail there's actually a lot to be hopeful for as a left-winger. When they weren't tied to the Democrats, a lot of leftist policy proposals actually went through. Left wing values are generally extremely popular with most people - but the DNC is a terrible expression of those values and so nakedly corrupt that anybody with a soul would find it extremely hard to vote for them in good faith. Remember how Schumer attacked Trump? By calling him a coward who chickened out of starting another war and murdering more people in the middle east. The public was actually doing the right thing in this case by voting for the less bloodthirsty candidate!

I agree that Trump term 2 has been very poor (probably for different reasons) but let's not try and blame the public for this happening. The blame for this result rests squarely on the Democratic party and if the public deserve any blame it is for not recognising that the ghouls in charge of the Democrats needed to be removed from power years ago.

I'm sorry but as someone else on the left the fault here is entirely that of the Democrats.

I’m quite comfortable blaming both the Democratic Party for being an incompetent embarrassment yet again as well as the general public for deciding that Trump’s flaws were somehow less glaring than Kamala.

Kamala was so disrespectful and contemptuous of her own base - to say nothing of the genocide she ran on supporting

Remember how Schumer attacked Trump? By calling him a coward who chickened out of starting another war and murdering more people in the middle east. The public was actually doing the right thing in this case by voting for the less bloodthirsty candidate

Ah yes, let’s stick it to the DNC and those fake lefties who aren’t sufficiently supportive of the Palestinians by… helping the GOP opposition that’s even less sympathetic to the Palestinians win the elections and get into power.

Because surely that’ll help, somehow.

Fucking hell, sometimes I think we lefties deserve to lose for being unable to think strategically.

even less sympathetic to the Palestinians

Trump's policy was explicitly kinder to the Palestinians than Biden (and by extension Harris, who said she supported Biden's position and wouldn't change anything) - Trump at least promised and achieved a minute ceasefire for a day or two. Biden and Harris' position was explicitly that they wouldn't do anything at all to stop the Israelis or hold them back.

Because surely that’ll help, somehow.

Yes, it will in fact help. What's the point of voting for the Democrats when there is no functional difference between them and the republicans? Sending a signal that the electorate will not vote for the same old moribund and corrupt geriatrics who have been profiting from business as usual helps to either destroy the party (so it can be replaced) or reform it so that it actually presents a compelling vision for the future. Harris, Schumer, Pelosi - none of these people can inspire the base and every single establishment democrat politician is incapable of creating a compelling vision of the future because their obligations to wealthy donors, lobbyists and interest groups are so strong that they are unable and unwilling to do anything but make existing problems worse.

The only left wing politician in the US right now who is capable of getting people excited is Zohran Mamdani, and the democrats are doing their absolute best to destroy him. Even the "vote blue no matter who" crowd are changing their stripes and doing their best to attack him so the usual sex offenders and genocide-defenders (Cuomo quite literally joined Netanyahu's legal team!) get back into power and keep the gravy train running.

If you actually care about left wing political goals rather than simplistic tribalism the only path forward is to either take a long march through the DNC to realign it with the wills of the left-wing base (which is a path that can most definitely win elections) or completely destroy it and start over, like Mexico did. If you've seen what Morena has done for Mexico, I want that for you in the USA as well - building more hospitals and infrastructure instead of deliberately starving children to death and blowing up Yemeni prayer circles.

I'd quibble whether a ceasefire that quickly ended actually made a meaningful difference, but honestly that's not why I'm responding.

There are centrist Dems and Progressive Dems. Mamdani can excite the progressives and piss off the centrists, even beyond the DNC party figures.

That and even Progressives aren't single issue. Trump is very much not identical to Dems on other issues Progressives care about, such as Ukraine, LGBT, social safety net/homelessness, and so on.

If they were willing to accept Trump to try and force Dems to realign, I suppose that's their choice, but the daily protests suggest that if that's what they were thinking they aren't happy with the result.

Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede

Sigh. My generally reliable long-term memory superpower is kicking in again.

HE LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, MOM:

For instance, Abrams at various times has said the election was “stolen” and even, in a New York Times interview, that “I won.” She suggested that election laws were “rigged” and that it was “not a free or fair election.” She also claimed that voter suppression was to blame for her loss, even though she admitted she could not “empirically” prove that. While she did acknowledged Kemp was the governor, she refused to say he was the “legitimate” governor.

Well, probably not. But he was echoing the same sentiment. And I can reiterate my spiel how the 2018 elections in Florida sure looked like they came close to being 'stolen' too.

In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas.

When almost every single person he appointed to help him due to "traditional political advice" backstabbed him, usually immediately after exiting the administration, why the hell would he repeat that mistake?

Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.

Oh boy, time for my generally reliable medium-term memory superpower.

Remember Biden (or someone using his pen) pardoning his own son for literally ANY criminal acts he might have done "during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024...". Curious that he'd pick that particular period of time.

How fucking "plausible" is that deniability.

I'd love for us to return to a better equilibrium but that requires BOTH sides to agree to such a return.

But if your contention against Trump is that HE broke these particular norms that were up-until-then sacred... well I'm not convinced in the slightest.

For instance, Abrams at various times has said the election was “stolen” and even, in a New York Times interview, that “I won.” She suggested that election laws were “rigged” and that it was “not a free or fair election.” She also claimed that voter suppression was to blame for her loss, even though she admitted she could not “empirically” prove that. While she did acknowledged Kemp was the governor, she refused to say he was the “legitimate” governor.

From that WaPo article, I agree that she sounds just like Trump, and I find her just as terrible for it. Likewise, there is a special place in hell for all the SJ people who claim that Trump and Musk rigged the 2024 election. Still, on the national level, outright election denial was very rare before Trump.

Remember Biden (or someone using his pen) pardoning his own son for literally ANY criminal acts he might have done "during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024...". Curious that he'd pick that particular period of time.

I agree that that was far worse than anything else I can remember from his presidency. That was Biden taking a shit on the oval office carpet on his way out of the door. Especially since the alternative would not have been to just park his son outside the US for the Trump presidency, where he would be safe from any just or unjust prosecution by Trump's DoE -- since Hunter Biden was never Trump's arch-enemy on a level Snowden/Assange were for the US security apparatus.

Still, while Biden was not great (and is reason enough to change how pardons work), Trump is on a whole different level. I vaguely recall a story about some crypto bros who were facing federal charges for one thing or another which went away once they spent a suitable amount of money on Trump's shitcoins. Or him accepting a 200M$ jet from Qatar which will go to his presidential library (how many copies of The Art of the Deal can you fit in a building, anyhow?)

Hillary Clinton concocted an absurd baseless theory about Russia stealing the election that led to a years long witch hunt. She also claimed it made Trump illegitimate. Seems like an order of magnitude worse “election denialism.”

She also claimed it made Trump illegitimate

I don’t think Hilary Clinton ever claimed that Trump was the lawful winner of the 2016 election. She whined a lot about how it was unfair, (which was IMO disgraceful but not as disgraceful as claiming the election was stolen was) but I don’t think she ever claimed that she was actually the real winner.

Am I wrong about that? If so, can you provide any sources?

Election denial of various forms has been a notable and escalating feature of most elections of my adult life. In 2000, Both the Grassroots and elite Blues did not accept the legitimacy of W's victory, and were not shy about saying so; You may have heard of a guy called Michael Moore, he made a documentary alleging (among many other things) that Bush hacked the election. There was less of this in 2004, but it was certainly still present, as was the widespread certainty that Bush would find a way to suspend further elections and rule as a dictator permanently (and no few "just kidding... unless..." references to assassinating him; the inimitable Tim Kreider's "Sic Semper Fuckwads" was a personal favorite, as is 303, a mass-market comic book about how Bush did 9/11 and wouldn't it be neato if a russian spetznaz veteran sniped his head off.)

2008, my side won, but the Reds had the birther conspiracy theory. 2012, I'd mostly checked out on; my side won again, birtherism was spent IIRC, if there was an election meme I wasn't aware of it. 2016, the left went in hard on the election being illegitimate, including through various organs of the federal government coordinating efforts with the media, activist class, and democratic leadership, and 2020 we had "election fortification" and Jan 6th.

I vaguely recall a story about some crypto bros who were facing federal charges for one thing or another which went away once they spent a suitable amount of money on Trump's shitcoins.

To be clear, your claim is that Trump pardoned criminals because they donated to him, and you believe that this is a new low in presidential pardoning?

Still, on the national level, outright election denial was very rare before Trump.

Are we including the hanging Chad conspiracies in this comparison or no? If not, what makes them substantivel different?

What conspiracies are you talking about?

It's been 25 years, but I remember Democrats being quite certain that the governor of Florida pulled a fast one during the recount, and that the supreme court "handed" Bush the presidency. Usually all of this was expressed in conjunction with a belief that the Iraq war was repayment for that gift.

There was a major discussion about this on askreddit within the past few days. They're still on it with the same rhetoric and claims.

The 2000 election process was a disaster, but the Supreme Court did hand Bush the Presidency, although in some senses it was already in Bush's hand.

To recap: the result was razor thin, and an automatic machine recount made it even thinner, with Bush in the lead by 300 or so votes. Florida law provides for manual recounts, but with differing legal standards across counties. Gore's team asked for a narrow recount across four counties that it believed would get them to a win (though, not known at the time, it would have given Bush the win); the Florida Supreme Court ordered a broader statewide recount of all undervotes (that, not known at the time, would have given Gore the win, by a couple dozen votes). To my mind, the fairest recount would have been a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which would have given Bush the win. But the process, such as it was, was headed toward something that would have given Gore the win, though that wasn't known at the time.

A critical issue, though, was the differing standards between different counties. The SCOTUS came in, stayed the recount decision, and then ruled 5-4 that there wasn't enough time to create a fair, uniform standard, and because of that the recount had to be halted entirely, giving the election to Bush.

Didn't Jeb recuse himself from being involved in the recount? And I don't actually understand how the Iraq War would benefit Jeb or the Supreme Court; the conspiracies there were all about Cheney and Halliburton.

The election conspiracy theories I remember all revolved around either "recounting punch cards sucks" (which makes a little sense: you have votes that can be changed by a fingernail, and you're going to get as many grubby hands on them as possible?) or "recounting electronic voting machine records is pointless, and also they suck" (which makes a lot of sense).

Those were all mainstream narratives.

The tinfoil conspiracies involved Bush invading Iraq to steal priceless (and sometimes alien) artifacts on behalf of various shadowy cabals.

Blues generally did not consider the 2000 election victory of George W Bush to be legitimate. Problems with the ballots and voting machines resulted in a protracted and highly contentious recount, ultimately ending with a lawsuit which the Supreme Court decided in favor of George W. Bush. Many, many blues from all strata of Blue culture believed that Gore had won the election, only to have his victory stolen by the Republican machine. This objection was inescapable in popular culture from 2000 to 2008, and I'd imagine that for most people who lived through the era as politically-engaged adults, the event is indelible in the hippocampus.

No less than HRC herself claimed that W Bush was "selected, not elected".

A developer for one of those voting machines testified on record that he was asked to put in a backdoor into one of those machines.

How much stock should we put in that? Plenty of whistleblowers in other contexts have turned out to be shady self-promoters, and I've honestly come to mostly disregard them without further evidence: Rebekah Jones seems to have pretty thoroughly shown herself as untrustworthy. On the other hand, I can think of examples that brought evidence and have demonstrably paid for their choices -- Manning and Snowden come to mind first.

There were enough people who still deny the results of the 2004 election that Politico ran a compare-and-contrast with the Trump 2020 deniers. Doubt in the integrity of the election has been around nearly as long as I've been politically aware.

Most of them don’t get into government buildings while the process is ongoing, do they?

Imagine if Gore had spent Dec. 11 holding speeches on the Mall and telling them to go peacefully protest outside the Supreme Court. If a few hundred of them broke in, demanding a particular verdict, I’d call that categorically different from “doubt in the integrity.”

(I actually don’t know what Gore was personally doing in the weeks after the election. Presumably there were some public appearances.)

Or him accepting a 200M$ jet from Qatar which will go to his presidential library

He did not. The jet was accepted "unconditionally". It's probably a white elephant anyway.

I think this is a fair take. My issue with it is that I have hard time believing a course correction of necessary magnitude can actually be done in another way. Certainly there are a lot of smart people who can theorize and think of good and less messy ways to do it, but there lies in wait an equal or greater number of smart people on the other side who are hellbent on suing, prosecuting, and rhetorizing against those ways who are already embedded within the institutions that need the reform. This system, as I see it now, is designed to do two things simultaneously A) dull any scalpel meant to cut out the bad parts, and/or B) complain that a cleaver was used while saying "A scalpel would have sufficed and done less damage!", knowing full well the scalpel has not been allowed to cut for quite some time.

So, when critics argue that Trump's methods are too messy, I hear "Why don't we try the things that have been proven not to work?"

It's totally understandable to be concerned, but there is critical number of our best and brightest who are all-in when it comes to their secular religion that they see as objective reality. Requesting they renounce it could be temporarily effective, but history is not on the side of people making that request. Better they be reminded that there is a very large portion of the population who do not believe what they believe and that they will wreck shop if necessary to make sure a proper counter balance is put back into place.

If there is a less messy and workable alternative, sign me up.

I understand the logic. My intuition of fascist power grabs is something like... there is a degree of bludgeon where you can break the democratic checks and balances of the country by moving fast enough that they simply cannot keep up with you; you create new institutions faster than they can be found illegitimate, and by the time they would be they have amassed enough power that the old institutions are no longer adequate to contain them.

I agree that "correcting" America, from a right-wing view, requires a bludgeon of a certain size. My worry is that this size exceeds the point where this bludgeon can also be used to abolish America-in-the-constitutional-sense, and if that is the case then this bludgeon must absolutely not be allowed to exist. I understand that right-wingers say "well I don't see how else it can be done", and to be frank, if it's between your political goals and the authority of the constitution, then it should not be done. In a democracy there's things that you just shouldn't get even if you want it and win the presidency, and both new and questionably accountable police and military deployment against internal "enemies" should be very much on that list. This goes triply if you've previously shown a very shaky respect for term limits.

Not to be flippant, but how do you respond to “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”?

Because increasingly to anyone who even has a shade of American nationalism in their body, the actions of the blue tribe writ large are unambiguously suicidal / homocidal (depending on your perspective on who’s included) to the American Nation as traditionally defined up until now or the very recent past.

I think not just that the constitution is a suicide pact, but that every nationstate is a suicide pact practically by definition. That's what it means to hand off the monopoly of force to the state.

This also illustrates that the alternative to law and order is either banditry or civil war.

From the page you linked:

Constitutions are chains with which men bind themselves in their sane moments that they may not die by a suicidal hand in the day of their frenzy.

Senator John Stockton, 1871

The constitution should be treated as much closer to a suicide pact than feels reasonable if you don't think about the long term. It is not a literal suicide pact, but if you want to do something unconstitutional and you also don't have sufficient support for the thing for an amendment, that's a sign that you should perhaps not do the thing, and instead you should do something constitutional, or you should change the amendment until it is popular enough to pass.

His election denial

The democrats literally decided they didn't like democracy so forgoed a primary and that is AFTER stacking the previous primary and fucked Bernie up the ass. These same people used the state to concot a Trump/Russia influence fiasco lied to FISA courts multiple times and spied on trump. These same people used their FBI connections in Twitter to burry the Laptop story. You're just going to have to do better than muh election denial and muh threat to our democracy.

...and that is AFTER stacking the previous primary and fucked Bernie up the ass.

Can you please explain how Bernie received an ass fucking? The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race, not that he was the victim of forced sodomy. I am very curious to know if that was not the case.

The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie was positioned to pull a 'biggest minority in a divided field' win in the Super Tuesday primaries, where he was outpolling most competitors. This was after a strong early showing in contests, where to date Biden had been underperforming. This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority. The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.

In 2020, things might have been different for Bernie since he was posed to do well on Super Tuesday, but do very poorly in later conferences where Biden had strong alliances with the southern black political machine Democratic parties. The Bernie party wing's bet was that they could leverage the momentum in early wins to build endurance and carry the campaign past this predictable barrier, where it might then open back up to a more even primary split once it went to more progressive regions.

The reason this didn't happen wasn't because Bernie's popularity dived, but because nearly all the major Democratic candidates at the time pulled out of the race and endorsed Biden, rather than split the field. Biden didn't get more popular as much as he had less competition for the centrist party vote, and so was able to win these early contests, and then cement victory with the Southern wing conferences, and thus cement the win. This was widely seen at the time as the Democratic establishment, which is to say Obama wing of the party that dominated at the time, pulling strings and applying pressure to the candidates who dropped out in favor of Obama's former VP.

Where the ass fuckery charge comes in is not only the Party establishment coordination in stage-managing the primary pool to shape primary outcomes, but also/especially the caveat of 'most' people pulling out. One of the main candidates who did not pull out at the time was the only one who was splitting Bernie's vote more than Biden's vote. Elizabeth Warren was also running on the progressive/left-wing track, despite herself having no chance to beat Biden either. This was likewise thought to be a quid-pro-quo of sorts between Warren and Biden, with Warren's network getting plenty of key postings in the administration. Had the left united behind Bernie, who was far less of a party man than Warren, it would have been the Bernie wing getting such posting potential during negotiations.

Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.

I like this post and think that's a very good read of the situation - but I also think you're leaving out some of the things that got the Bernie base so pissed off. There was real malfeasance on the part of the DNC when it came to Bernie, especially in 2016. Wasserman-Schulz and Donna Brazile were forced to resign from the DNC after Wikileaks released the internal emails showing they were actually conspiring to fuck him over (and then Debbie at least immediately joined the Clinton campaign). The Bernie crowd really were taken for a ride by the DNC and the lawsuit they lost had the party make some really unpleasant (but legally excellent) claims to boot. I am honestly not sure if there was enough support for Bernie to get him elected, but there's no denying that the DNC put a finger on the scale in a way that torched their relationship with his supporters.

Thanks, I appreciate the explanation.

Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.

I think I can understand a feeling of betrayal from the process on an emotional level but I'm not sure I really get it. For instance, I didn't just donate to Amy Klobuchar, I made her tater tot hotdish recipe. It was pretty good. But I didn't feel like her dropping out of the race well before my state's primary represented the DNC betraying me or nefariously preventing me from picking my preferred candidate. Weaker candidates dropping out and consolidating behind a more popular candidate with similar views is just an actual part of the primary process as it exists. It would be interesting to see the effects of switching to some kind of one day primary-palooza where every state votes simultaneously but that is not, and never has been, how the primaries work.

Warren staying in the race through Super Tuesday probably did hurt Bernie. Presumably Sanders was the second choice of some fraction of her voters. But as you note, she represents a more institutional strain of the left and (although we'll never know) it's unlikely that enough of her voters would have gone with him to change the outcome. It's just as likely that the majority of her voters would have gone to Biden.

If primary voters wanted Sanders they could have had him. They did not. The fact that voters picked the more centrist candidate - and that there were other more centrist politicians in the race with non-negligible support in the first place - shows where the actual center of gravity was in the party. Bernie would not have won regardless of what the DNC did.

Bernie would not have won regardless of what the DNC did.

Sure, though whether his wing would have won the nomination is besides the point to whether his wing would have won a stronger and more prominent place in the administration that followed. But there's losing a fair contest, and there's losing a rigged contest, and there's losing a contest the managers swear is fair but then get exposed for rigging. @FirmWeird recalls some additional shenanigans I'd forgotten of exposed DNC issues.

The issue isn't mitigated because 'well, the Bernie wing wouldn't have won the nomination anyway.' That's a results-focused paradigm that only cares about the winner. A large part of the point of democratic contests is to persuade the losers of the election of the legitimacy of their defeat, so that they can work together afterwards. A betrayal of trust that doesn't actually change the results is just as bad for the people it disillusions as a betrayal that does change the results, the only difference is the degree or number of people it disillusions.

Whether Sanders would have built momentum after a better super Tuesday is a fair question. But it was a question that could not be answered because of deliberate efforts to prevent it from being asked.

And preventing it from being asked had tangible and visible effects on the trajectory of the Democratic Party, upto and including how rather than increase the leverage and influence of the economic-left/populist wing of the Party (the Bernie wing), the Biden consolidation then led to Biden compromising with the culture-left wing of the party, such as on DEI and trans-issues. This included manning decisions such as his promise to have a woman as his vice president, which followed progressive stack logic which led to Harris, who was a disaster.

I'm not making a claim that if everyone else had stayed in but Warren dipped out for the good of the populist-left then Bernie Sanders might have become Vice President. But the nature of a proportional representation system is that the people with the bigger proportions of the voter base get more influence in forming the next government, and if you want a coalition of people bought into the premise, conspiracies that their efforts are being conspired against don't exactly lead to inter-party trust, and do lead to the sort of inter-party conflict that followed.

This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority.

The Republican primaries are mostly winner-takes-all outside the early states, so a candidate with a plurality of the vote in a divided field can get a majority of the delegates and the nomination (this is also how McCain won the nomination in 2008). The Democratic primaries are proportional everywhere, so if a candidate is persistently getting a plurality but not a majority of the votes the Dems are headed for a brokered convention. Bernie was not doing well enough to win the nomination on delegate count, and had no plausible route to win it except a deal with Warren. (Either for her support in the primaries, or for her delegates at the convention)

The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.

The is the strategy Hilary Clinton used unsuccessfully against Obama in 2008, whereas Obama focussed on delegate counts all the way back to Iowa and New Hampshire. Bernie had the money, organisation, and name recognition to go all the way to the convention, as did whoever turned out to be the leading establishment candidate. He didn't need attention or endorsements - he needed delegates. And in proportional primaries he gets roughly the same number of delegates regardless of how the anti-Bernie vote is split.

It is not how Trump won 2016. By the start of 2016, it was obvious that (absent some kind of blow-up) Trump, Cruz, and Rubio all had the resources and support to go to the convention, and Cruz and Rubio didn't drop out until they were mathematically eliminated. Once winner-take-all primaries started, Trump was consistently winning 2/3 or more of the delegates available each week. Cruz and Rubio didn't do a deal to stop Trump because they hated each other as much as they hated Trump, and in any case it is unlikely either of them could have delivered enough votes with an endorsement to let the other beat Trump. Trump because his narrow pluralities in winner-take-all states got him delegates, not because they got him headlines.

i guess what happened to Trump with the spying and Russia collusion hoax had plausible deniability so people see it as tolerable whereas because Trump is brutish in the way he acts he doesn't receive the same benefit of the doubt.

Then those people are rewarding effective corruption. Further, how do their opinions change now that more and more of the spying and hoaxing are being revealed with actual documentation?

Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it. There's clearly some objective he's swinging towards, even if he's taking actions that appear stupid.

He did it quite inartfully in the first term. The second term, there's a certain amount of focus and relentlessness that probably scares such people even more. So much happened in just the first 100 days. We're 8 months in, and every week or so another angle of attack is unleashed, and it sure looks like the legs are getting knocked out from under the activist class. Simultaneously too many targets to actually focus on, AND fewer resources to divide amongst the various causes.

I assume it feels like an existential battle for them, whether it really is or is not.

Compare it to a Romney or even Bush-like figure, who are seemingly more content to twist the dials on the administrative state a few degrees here and there and not interfere with their enemy's tactics (or disrupt their funding) so the actual 'balance of power' doesn't shift much.

For better or worse, Trump is taking steps that will actually make it harder for the dems to regroup and mount another offensive, and the one thing that is missing thus far, the one seal that hasn't been broken, is actually prosecuting and jailing the people who are best positioned to thwart his power.

And in a sense, that is the most terrifying thing of all, since that sword of Damocles will hang around for the next couple years, certain people can never feel completely comfortable that the FBI won't be showing up at their door sometime soon.

That's my take, anyway. There's the people with the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome who aren't actually threatened by him, and then there's those whose whole raison d'etre is acquiring and wielding political power, and this current situation is threatening to remove that possibility entirely for them.

This is interesting. The American left controls the establishment and therefore any particular agent wielding power is a threat because it introduces uncertainty in the way power is wielded.

Prior Republicans seemed okay wielding a small defined amount of power that didn’t threaten the establishment

the one seal that hasn't been broken, is actually prosecuting and jailing the people who are best positioned to thwart his power.

Actually this seal has already been broken - but by the democrats when they prosecuted Trump multiple times. I'm on record (though maybe not on this site) saying that these prosecutions were a terrible idea and would be a horrifying weapon in the hands of a vengeful Trump administration. I'd say the DNC were lucky that he's so incredibly merciful, but I think the truth is that actually sending the entire democratic power structure to prison would make the left stronger once all those criminals and shysters were replaced by new blood.

Compare it to a Romney or even Bush-like figure, who are seemingly more content to twist the dials on the administrative state a few degrees here and there and not interfere with their enemy's tactics (or disrupt their funding) so the actual 'balance of power' doesn't shift much.

I would argue that this was a feature. Bush, Obama, McCain, Clinton all had some investment with the status quo. They were playing the game by its written and unwritten rules. If any of them had seen the opportunity to cross the Rubicon and make themselves dictator, they would likely not have taken it, because nobody wanted to go down as that figure in the history books. For all the differences between GWB and Bernie Sanders, neither is willing to throw the democracy experiment under the bus to beat the other.

Not so with Trump. He is acting with a self-interest that would make most kleptocrats blush. He will happily burn 100$ of commons to earn 1$ for himself. He is prizing personal loyalty far beyond qualification.

I am however wondering what will happen to the Trump party once Trump finally croaks. As any player of Crusader Kings can tell you, these systems of personal loyalty are all fine while you are alive, but tend to get very messy on succession.

  • -10

Not so with Trump. He is acting with a self-interest that would make most kleptocrats blush. He will happily burn 100$ of commons to earn 1$ for himself.

This seems silly. Trump almost certainly lost money going into politics, no? What parts of his governance look like that to you? The most obvious ways for politicians to arrange such things are foreign adventurism, warmongering, and massive trillion dollar boondoggle bills for easily embezzled projects, and Trump has been pretty opposed to all of those things.

I notice that some people forget that Trump's Organizations owns or has fingers in real estate all over the planet.

This gives him some pecuniary interest in NOT doing foreign adventurism and warmongering. And avoiding wars involving countries where he has property, at all.

I imagine the thought of big, beautiful buildings getting bombed to rubble causes the guy physical pain.

You'll note that Romney and Bush were not exempt from slanderous character assassination; the only difference between Bush and Hitler were that Hitler was elected. Romney was cruel to animals, had an awful wife, wanted to reintroduce slavery.

Of course Romney genuinely seems to be guilty of nothing more than social awkwardness and Bush had nothing to do with Hitler.

Obama, and in particular Biden, were definitely guilty of targeting their domestic political enemies as well.

Isn't Romney a private equity guy, one of the class of people specializing in what's basically elegant asset stripping?

That’s one way of describing PE but generally seems like a misunderstanding. Does PE cause some businesses to fail by excess debt? Yes. But to succeed, PE generally needs to in the aggregate sell businesses for more than it purchased them for.

Frequently, PE buys distressed businesses to get a good price, tries to turn them around, and sell at a profit.

Sometimes, PE provides liquidity to founders where the company isn’t to the size that would suggest an IPO makes sense at the time. Having this exit option is great for encouraging building companies.

Other times, PE builds companies by acquiring a bunch of small companies, integrating them, and then selling (ie pay 10x EBITDA, get some cost savings combining and sell at 15x EBITDA since the stream of income is a bit more secure).

Again, PE generally doesnt make money from companies failing (one exception is leveraged recaps). They make money by companies succeeding (in ways described above).

But to succeed, PE generally needs to in the aggregate sell businesses for more than it purchased them for.

It doesn't. It just needs to get more money, by say, buying back stock or paying dividends to themselves.

Forgive me for being a bit skeptical. The only time I came across PE was reading about the fate of US gun makers, where the PE invariably made things worse and their business model was basically exploit the good name of a company they bought by lowering quality and then saddle it with debt and finally let it go bankrupt.

E.g. Remington was bought for $360 million, immediately issued a billion $ worth of debt. 10 years later, 700 millions are written off in a bankruptcy, even though they sold off their buildings to a company owned by the PE group so they could rent them back.

https://archive.is/cotTp

This just isn’t the norm. As a general rule, PE buys an entity with debt. Banks don’t permit cash to leave the banking group.

The only time is when banks lend money to an existing PE owned business with the express intention of repatriation cash (ie a levered recap). Most liquidity events aren’t levered recaps. Moreover, banks aren’t interested in lending to businesses that will go bankrupt (ie banks don’t want to equitize their debt; they want to get paid back on the debt). So generally leveraged recaps will only occur when the risk of bankruptcy is remote.

None of this means all PE companies survive, but in generally PEs cannot successful generate returns by bankrupting companies.

I don't remember the "reintroduce slavery" argument. I remember the much-to-do about him traveling with his dog in a crate strapped to the roof (which I can't say I like but doesn't really have anything to do with Presidential qualifications).

But yes, on the left much was made of his job being to buy up a company to saddle it with another company's debt.

That said, Romney's social awkwardness specifically was of the the "What could a banana cost, like $10?" variety. To the left, he was like an out-of-touch manager who couldn't empathize with the working class at all.

I don't remember the "reintroduce slavery" argument.

It is a quote from Biden talking to a crowd of black people saying Romney wants to put them back in chains.

To the left, he was like an out-of-touch manager who couldn't empathize with the working class at all.

The democrats also, in one of the most brazen acts of political gaslighting I think I've ever seen, somehow managed to turn Romney's own efforts at sex-based affirmative action into evidence of his sexism.

Probably one of the worst short-term political play decisions in modern American politics on the part of the Democrats and their allies in the media.

Romney was, and probably will be remembered as, the last major Respectability candidates of the early 21st century Republican party. He was a compromise candidate who was about the best possible synthesis of red tribe considerations and blue tribe value, a Republican who was willing to accept the legitimacy in part of blue tribe framings, and cared about their opinions. He wasn't a perfect candidate for the Republican base, but a man that- outside of a specific election cycle- had a generally consistent reputation as virtuous, even if you disagreed. It was about as close to a synthesis of red tribe and blue tribe as you could hope for, even down to sincerely practicing affirmative action and having an adopted african-american grandson.

The character assassination of Mitt Romney- among which Democratic Senate Majority Harry Reid later defended with "We won, didn't we?"- was probably what I'd point to as the breaking moment where the Republican base revolt that became the Trump-MAGA movement began.

MAGA was in part a revolt against the Republican elite, including significant disatisfaction against Romney for not fighting back. The Republican party's commissioned autopsy that argued the party needed to move decisively to the left made that revolt worse. But almost as importantly the Obama '12 campaign discredited the argument by Republican centrists/moderates, and media commentators more generally, that what the red tribe needed to be treated with respect was to present a respectable candidate.

Romney was the candidate, and was still slandered and jeered. Virtue- and especially virtue as recognized by the media establishment that joined in the jeering- wouldn't be recognized when during an election cycle. And if virtue would not be recognized, nor would it be sufficient to win even if not recognizeed, then appeals to virtue were going to lose support compared to appeals to fight back.

Which, of course, Trump was happy to do... but Trump wouldn't have won without a disillusioned Republican base that no longer responded to appeals to respectability like Romney was willing to.

I remember that. Though I think it was less about sexism and more going back to the sounding like an out-of-touch manager. "How do I talk about women? Talk about binders of resumes!"

It was indeed about Romney's alleged sexism. For example, as the linked Wikipedia states:

The phrase was depicted by Romney's detractors and the Obama campaign as demeaning and insensitive toward women and was widely mocked. This prompted the phrase's use for political attacks on Romney's positions on "women's issues"

Romney was accused of dehumanizing women by using a synecdoche, whether intentionally or not, that related women to a binder of resumes. This was highlighted as evidence of his alleged casual misogyny.

Naturally, neglecting to emphasize the distinct Wonderfulness of each and every woman (only women as a whole) while bragging about how you discriminate against men in favor of women will be held up as evidence of your misogyny. It's not evidence of misandry, however, because giving hiring preferences toward women is the bare minimum in not being a completely awful human being. Plus, he doesn’t deserve credit for the DEI attempt, since everyone knows that hiring more women and non-Asian minorities improves businesses so even a greedy misogynistic pale stale male would prefer hiring women and minorities out of self-interest.

Romney bragging about pro-female affirmative action—and getting hoist by his own petard because of it—provided another amusing example of the epic_handshake.jpg between conservatives and progressives when it comes to women’s Wonderfulness and Lives Mattering More, where they just sometimes haggle over how much more (and in what ways) while conservatives drive the progressive speed limit.

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Kinda, but that itself was viewed as evidence of misogyny. Contemporaneous examples: The Guardian, CNN, Time.

No, it was sexism. "Binders" was used to imply that he wants to "bind" women.

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I don't remember the "reintroduce slavery" argument.

In 2012, then-VP Biden told a largely-Black crowd in Danville, Virginia that "They're [Republicans] going to put y'all back in chains".

The last sentence in the linked article seems a bit prescient for 2024, though:

Mr. Biden also told the crowd that if they get out the vote, "we can win North Carolina again." Danville is close to the North Carolina border, but it is in fact in Virginia.

Ah. Though from the sound of it that sounds more like Biden making a stupid remark, and alluding more to the sort of Cyberpunk-style "Megacorps make the rules" than literally sending people back to the plantations.

If any of them had seen the opportunity to cross the Rubicon and make themselves dictator, they would likely not have taken it, because nobody wanted to go down as that figure in the history books.

Taking this analogy more literally, none of them faced the sort of ultimatum that Caesar did. They weren't seen as overly popular and powerful and thus a danger to the status quo in and of themselves if they returned to the public sphere.

They enjoyed the mutually agreeable reassurance that if they gracefully retire they can live out their days in ease.

Trump's Rubicon moment was probably in the vein of "If you keep up this election denialism and run again we'll burn down your entire life." Maybe he sincerely truly believed that the election was stolen from him, or he just really hates losing, or he does legitimately think he's uniquely qualified to get the country back on track, but for whatever reason he called that bluff and then survived the onslaught. Where's that leave him now?

I am however wondering what will happen to the Trump party once Trump finally croaks. As any player of Crusader Kings can tell you, these systems of personal loyalty are all fine while you are alive, but tend to get very messy on succession.

Very curious too. How much of the coalition is genuinely tied into Trump the man. There's some who buy into "MAGA" as a broader idea, or "America First," but if Trump does die or, hell, even retires and endorses a successor, what portion of the current GOP will just stop participating for want of an inspiring leader?

Vance is positioned as a legitimate successor, but Trump could throw him under a bus too before going out. Succession fights get ugly. And a decent number of people, on both sides of the aisle, have their careers/livelihoods pinned on Trump's activities and they'll have to re-align quickly if they can't hook on to his train any longer.

Very curious too. How much of the coalition is genuinely tied into Trump the man.

I was a pretty early adopter for Trump, and my thought process went something along the lines of "There's no way the usual gang of Republican candidates are going to be anything other than (leftist-overrun) Politics As Usual, what I want is someone who'll tear up the floorboards and burn out the shit down to the foundation. Who's got the moxie to do it and the money to not be bought away from it? Trump's run before, I've kinda laughed at him running for years, but he's kinda my best bet. Plus shitposting a president into power would be an even better prank than putting dear old mootykins on top of the Time 100 poll, and it'd be a great kick of the tires to see if it's possible to get a president that isn't in The Usual Gang Of D/R Career Candidates."

So, at least for me, it's not that it's Trump the man, it's that it's /ourguy/. Which includes Vance, Elon (and I was not expecting that 12 years ago), DeSantis somewhat, and the people that are willing to play ball. Which does include some of the members of The Usual Gang, but I can work with that.

Hilariously, if you ascribe Trump's victory in 2016 in some major part to 4chan's initial interest in and support of his campaign, Moot was, in fact, the most influential person of 2009... it just wouldn't become clear why for a bit longer.

They enjoyed the mutually agreeable reassurance that if they gracefully retire they can live out their days in ease.

See also how the dems started to gargle Bush's balls for some unknown to me reason that one time.

Seven years ago, I saved this @JTarrou comment, for the purpose of remembering to monitor future developments:

The current Republican president is always the worst person in history. The last one is always surprisingly human. The one before that is always a pretty decent dude.

The current Democratic president is Star Trek Jesus with sprinkles, the last one was a corrupt liar who wasted his vast potential, and the one before that was a Republican.

I'd say that Obama is probably still well-regarded, possibly having something to do with some people thinking that he was pulling the strings during the Biden Administration. I'll be interested to watch his future trajectory as years continue to pass, but I do think it might be hard for people who lean left to say much that is negative about the first black president. I suppose I've heard some criticisms from the left that he "was a Republican" in terms of his national security policies, but I certainly don't think I've seen him go through a "corrupt liar" phase. At least not as of yet.

The Republican one seems to me to have the ring of truth to it, but this one:

The current Democratic president is Star Trek Jesus with sprinkles, the last one was a corrupt liar who wasted his vast potential, and the one before that was a Republican.

does not.

The Dems were fortunate to have two very popular, charismatic presidents in Clinton and Obama, but I don’t think anyone would use terms like “Star Trek Jesus” when talking about Biden or Carter. Likewise, I’ve never heard anyone say anything remotely bad about Carter as a person or call him a Republican in disguise. Before that you’ve got LBJ (a charming scoundrel, but no Republican), JFK (a different type of charming scoundrel, still deified by Democrats today), Truman (who’s too forgettable to engender any strong feelings one way or the other), and FDR (who is of course the OG Star Trek Jesus).

JFK (a different type of charming scoundrel, still deified by Democrats today)

Which is odd, considering that JFK's main political policies were cutting taxes on the rich, beefing up military spending based on lies, and bungling regime-change adventurism.

Contrastingly, JFK's main rival, Richard Nixon, re-instituted wage and price controls and founded the EPA.

Ah, but he was sexy and had lots of sex. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be him.

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How would we prove if Republican presidents have in fact been getting worse by this metric? The comment kinda only applies if there isn't a trend.

That's a fair point, but I think the pure contempt with which I remember people speaking about Bush, compared with the number of times I've heard similar people point to him as a surprisingly human decent dude in the past 10 years makes me really skeptical. If he was truly so awful back then, he wouldn't be forgiven and nostolgized so easily, even if someone worse came along, at least not by an intellectually honest person.

I don't think Biden ever had the "Jesus with Sprinkles" phase?

Maybe Biden was never truly president in anything more than a ceremonial sense, and was essentially understood consiously or not, as simply giving executive power back to the administrative state that the Obama administration installed.

The going joke is always the "strange newfound respect" for someone that they had maligned as hitleresque before.

I am just barely old enough to remember how vicious the attacks on Bush II were (and hell, I think some was justifiable!), but hey, the guy paints now, how endearing!

Even fuckin' CHENEY gets a pass now. Probably helps that his daughter is quite Anti-Trump (which could be a bit of a tell, no?)

And I do truly believe that even Trump will be seen with some level of nostalgia once he's gone.

Seems pretty natural to think that 'man in office' is bad and 'man out of office' is decent. I mean, it was never about a judgement of innate evilness. Once you're president the judgements on you are also about the machine you stand atop of and how your personal sensibility interacts with the forces flowing through the country and world.

I actually think it's a good lesson to learn that psycho and even genocidal world leaders could be generally okay to hang out with absent their official role, and therefore not very surprising that opinions on them alter later. Just like one can be charismatic not as a result of your innate characteristics but because of your position in a society (see Randall Collins for details).

It's being in power that magnifies flaws, eccentricities or even charming character traits into problems for others.

If it is any consolation, I was perhaps 16 in 2001 and now that I am 40 I can say that my anger at W has solidified rather than evaporated. For me he will always be the president who made torture official US policy and managed to start not one but two large scale wars which the US ultimately lost. His stupid stunt on that aircraft carrier. Mission accomplished my ass. From US-internal perspective, he was mostly fine, but his foreign policy was quite the disaster, and Trump will be hard-pressed to cause a similar loss of utility even if he decides to invade Greenland.

He was and is an idiot and the people who caused these wars went on to become the only faction that matters in foreign policy circles,with the Ukraine war being their crowning achievement.

Their crowning achievement is something Russia did?

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From US-internal perspective, he was mostly fine, but his foreign policy was quite the disaster, and Trump will be hard-pressed to cause a similar loss of utility even if he decides to invade Greenland.

That's about the sum of it.

Domestically he did introduce a lot of programs for spying and policing that I CONTINUE to disagree with, but foreign policy was, as you say, disastrous, and while I think Obama had a horrible foreign policy record as well, its hard to quantify just how much damage the warmongering did in sheer human lives cost on top of the economics of it. I look back and I cannot think of a SINGULAR positive thing that came out of it.

Okay, we unseated Hussein, but that led to the rise of ISIS (man, haven't thought about them in a while) and a general upswell of sectarian violence in the region. And they can barely hold their official government together. I genuinely appreciate that Trump made his campaign to squash ISIS as limited in scope as he did. EVERY instinct in me assumed he's put boots on the ground and pull us into another boondoggle because that seemed to be SOP by that point.

The Taliban instantly taking back Afghanistan was quite the cherry on top.

If it wasn't for the destruction of libya and the spurning of Erdogan I wouldn't think the current "migrant crisis" would have happened in the EU quite the way it did, with that no rise of nationalistic parties either. They really fucked up the internationalist global consensus they had going on.

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Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it.

I've talked multiple times over on Tumblr — particularly this longer post about how modern liberalism (or at least the strain typified by Michael Munger in the interview linked at that post) is about opposition to exactly that. To quote Munger:

Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.

And as I put it in my post:

…so much of the West has so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, and are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership.

And I'd argue it's why so many opponents of Trump, right and left, struggle to find any vocabulary to describe why people follow Trump beyond "cult of personality" — because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.

they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.

Yeah, I don't think that's it, unless "actual human leadership" is code for "personalist strongman". Trump is the argument by demonstration against charismatic leadership, but left-of-center people have their own favored leadership figures as well. Obama was and is highly admired, Sanders has his own faction of die hard, etc... Any argument that rounds off to "they're intimidated by how cool we are" is probably wrong.

Where they recoil from Trump is his staggering lack of character combined with his rejection of limits or accountability. It doesn't help that his loudest supporters tend to be quite reactionary and openly cheer for authoritarianism.

I feel like I'd appreciate this argument more if I hadn't lived through electing a "Constitutional law professor" who proceeded to approve of wholesale spying on the contents of almost everyone's Internet traffic --- see Snowden, et al, and Clapper lying to Congress about it. Or approving extrajudicial drone strikes on underage American citizens in foreign countries.

If anything, I don't like much about the Trump administration, but I feel like "the system" is doing a much better job making known and criticizing his actions.

wholesale spying on the contents of almost everyone's Internet traffic --- see Snowden, et al

That's not what Snowden showed. Like, not even close.

Clapper lying to Congress about it

Clapper gave the correct, classified answer to Congress after the unclassified, televised to the public, hearing was completed.

Clapper gave the correct, classified answer to Congress after the unclassified, televised to the public, hearing was completed.

To one Congressman, anyway, indirectly, probably. He said his staff gave Senator Wyden's staff the correct answer afterward. But, the next time I can find that he talked about it to anyone else in Congress was in an apology letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee a few months later, a couple weeks after Snowden's revelations.

This seems both still-damning (Yeah, I lied to Congress, but I did tell the truth to a staff member who said they told another staff member who should have told their boss who should have told everybody else purple monkey dishwasher!) and yet partially-exculpatory (why didn't Wyden just report the corrected answer himself, if he was confident that its classification was invalid, except that it only felt safe to get someone else to put their reputation on the line in that way?).

Senate Intelligence Committee

It's good that you're aware of who this was. Now think about it for a minute. Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence. In that role, he would have routinely given classified briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee. I don't believe that anyone has ever claimed that he ever lied to them in any of those briefings. Those classified briefings are for the purpose of informing SSCI on what's actually going on.

This briefing was different. It was an unclassified, public briefing. The purpose was not to inform SSCI, especially not to inform them about classified matters. One might honestly wonder what the point of it even was... or whether it's even almost a contradiction in terms to have an unclassified, public briefing on covert intelligence programs. So when you think about it, you realize that the point of this briefing was not to inform SSCI about what's going on; the point of it was for the government to sort of get together and try to somewhat inform the public about what's going on. Doing so on a covert intelligence program sort of requires that everyone plays well together to inform on the things that "should" be publicly revealed, while avoiding things that "should" stay classified and secret.

Of course, the rub is that folks might have different perspectives on "should". Perhaps Wyden genuinely thought that it "should" become public. But the fact of the matter is, from Clapper's seat, it was classified. I think almost no theory of how the government should operate is such that it should be really relying on him to make that determination on his own. Yes, he has Original Classification Authority, but in reality, that's still pretty limited. For matters concerning significant programs like this, frankly, he shouldn't be out on his own in up and deciding to declassify it in the middle of a random briefing. That sorta thing should mostly be a matter for the President, possibly in consultation with folks like SSCI, with plenty of secret deliberation before pulling the trigger.

As such, Wyden was basically the turd in the punchbowl, preferring to pursue his own vision of "should" over the purpose of what those sorts of hearings are about. That's fair enough; he's a Senator. But it makes it more difficult for future such hearings to do the job as intended; if there's a real concern that even a single Senator will go rogue, I imagine they're probably going to pull back and be less informative generally.

I think the follow-on of what happened afterward is mostly just noise; again, there's no doubt that SSCI received the correct answer, both before and after this one briefing. They certainly already knew exactly what these programs were doing; they certainly had already gotten classified briefings telling them such; afterward, I highly doubt anyone had any real claim to having been misled... except of course, if you're a Senator talking the press, trying to drum up votes for yourself or trying to make something that is classified unclassified. Wyden even gave up the game with responding to it with a request for DNI to officially correct the public record (that is, put classified information in the public record).

It's hard to tell if Wyden genuinely thought it should be public, but didn't want to take the hit of actually revealing it himself... or if he was just trying to figure out a way to drum up more votes by playing the anti-SIGINT character. Whereas it's much easier to figure out that Clapper was just trying to keep classified stuff classified, play along with the supposed point of such an unclassified briefing, and then ultimately end up scrambling to perform damage control from such a bizarro event.

I can't help feeling that once you get to the point where you're telling clear, absolutely 100% barefaced lies to public representatives in public on a question of massive public interest, you're reaching 'Here be Dragons' on the map of morals. "If such programs existed, they would be classified and I would be unable to discuss the subject" is about as far as I think you can go before you're in serious danger of losing your soul.

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Clapper lying to Congress about it

Clapper gave the correct, classified answer to Congress after the unclassified, televised to the public, hearing was completed.

The correct answer in the unclassified hearing then was "I cannot answer that.", citing the relevant classification statutes, not lying to Congress under oath like he did.

Do you beat your wife? Is the correct answer to that, "I cannot answer that"?

lying to Congress

This is pretty loaded terminology. Is it "lying to Congress" to say one thing about a classified program in a public Congressional forum and then give to Congress the correct, classified answer thereafter? Has Congress been lied to? Like, I get it. You're wanting to say that he lied to the public, and that may be true and scandalous, but it still doesn't sound as bad, so you have to juice it up a bit.

under oath

As I wrote here, when I tried to trace back this claim, I couldn't find good evidence for it. TBH, I think it would be kind of unusual for people to be under oath in those types of hearings.

Do you beat your wife? Is the correct answer to that, "I cannot answer that"?

He was legally restricted from answering questions that reveal classified information in open hearings. I'm not aware of any laws typically preventing someone from answering the question "Do you beat your wife?".

This is pretty loaded terminology. Is it "lying to Congress" to say one thing about a classified program in a public Congressional forum and then give to Congress the correct, classified answer thereafter? Has Congress been lied to? Like, I get it. You're wanting to say that he lied to the public, and that may be true and scandalous, but it still doesn't sound as bad, so you have to juice it up a bit.

It is lying to Congress to knowingly give a false answer to a direct question by a Congressman in a Congressional hearing. It does not matter if the lie was attempting to hide classified information. It does not matter if the truth is later revealed in a classified briefing. It does not matter if the lie was intended to be theater for the plebes. It is still lying to Congress. He could have refused to answer as I described, which would have been both legal and true.

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Clapper was under oath, and had been given the question in advance by Ron Wyden's office, and asked very deliberately about "any type of data at all". It's a joke that Clapper is allowed to work for think tanks and CNN as a "respectable" expert.

Clapper was under oath

I tried to follow this claim back when the event happened. I couldn't find any authoritative source that actually claims it. I even went back and watched the CSPAN feed of the event, and there was no oath taken or shown. But it's sort of meaningless, anyway. He also took an oath to not divulge classified information outside of narrow circumstances.

Clapper is a clown, and I don't care about him generally, but it's a stupid stupid hill to die on to claim that anyone should be put in that situation. Frankly, that's Wyden's fault, and he should know better.

wholesale spying on the contents of almost everyone's Internet traffic --- see Snowden, et al

That's not what Snowden showed. Like, not even close.

That is certainly what Snowden showed. The usual sternlightian argument is to point out that they only collected it wholesale, they didn't actually look at it except through their keyword system. I do not find that particularly reassuring.

Nope. Still wrong. Please just educate yourself on this. I've been over this with you before. There's a nice PCLOB report and everything that detailed how it actually worked. You just need to read it. As a quick check to see if you have read enough to have any idea how any of it works, what is the meaning of "specific selection term" and what role does it play in this supposed "wholesale collection"?

Nothing, because "specific selection term" was about call data record collection, which they were doing wholesale (the "Pre-2015 Bulk Collection Program"). The PCLOB report claims that they've stopped doing that wholesale as of June 2, 2015, instead requiring only CDRs up to two hops of a "specific selection term".

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This depends on a very narrow reading of "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures ... but upon probable cause" that, to my knowledge, hasn't seen any precedent at the Supreme Court level. In fact, the secrecy of the entire apparatus seems largely to exist to circumvent judicial and democratic review.

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Yep.

This is also what the "Deep State" represents, and why liberals can regard the concept with fondness. The thought that there's a whole passel of administrators with specific 'expertise' (lol) in certain governmental functions who are able to act independently of the actual elected Executive is comforting to them. It means the government will putter along on a particular course even if there's a raving lunatic at the helm, they know when to ignore him, when to humor him, and when to take steps to reign him in. It represents the inversion of the hierarchy as it is supposed to exist (i.e. President is the plenary ruler of the executive branch itself) while diffusing responsibility enough that nobody needs to be punished for any given mistake. You all know my thoughts on that.

No leaders needed, just the abstract forces of 'good people' making decisions en masse without being beholden to the fickle, stupid electorate.

Vague guess is that Clinton was the apotheosis of this mindset. She would (intentionally) make very few actual decisions, but would be happy as a figurehead of the ship of state, and would get credit for good things that happen and could generally avoid blame if bad things happened (Goddamn, I STILL remember the Benghazi hearings, she really pretended like her position as SoS did NOT make her accountable for people dying on her watch). They did it with Biden but... well, you need your figurehead to at least look like he's in charge for it to work.

Their honest mistake WAS turning that machinery into a tool for directly resisting Trump 1. That made it way more legible and marked it as an enemy. Whoops.

No leaders needed, just the abstract forces of 'good people' making decisions en masse without being beholden to the fickle, stupid electorate.

It's funny that you say this because this is basically a complete misunderstanding and, really, the exact opposite of the classical liberal worldview that Munger endorses. From another interview:

Michael Munger: Yeah. 'That's not real capitalism. But, what if it's true that, as industries mature, they find that crony capitalism is more profitable in an accounting sense than playing it straight? Then I do this thing that I would criticize in other people. What I will say is, 'Oh, we need better people. All we need is better politicians that don't engage, don't allow this rent seeking.' Or, 'We need better CEOs [Chief Executive Officers].' That's the one thing, Russ, that you know that I cannot say--

Russ Roberts: it's against the rules--

Michael Munger: because the premise is: You cannot say, 'Good people.'

Russ Roberts: Right. 'We need'--our premise, our team, is that incentives matter, institutions matter. And with bad incentives, the best people become corrupted. And with good incentives, not-so-great people do the right thing. So, that's the--right. So you can't say that... Before we go on, I want to read the Milton Friedman quote that came to mind a minute ago, that I think deep and important. He says,

It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

So, the point there is that--the counterpoint to that is that, eventually, the political system is going to be structured by capitalist influence to give out those goodies, so that even good people do the wrong thing.

The classical liberals emphatically do not think that if you just put the right people in the right place then everything will be OK. This is, in fact, the contrary perspective they are arguing against and that you are implicitly defending- that if you just install /ourguy/ in the oval office or as permanent secretary of the department of administrative affairs, or, worst case, if we could just fill the deep state with /ourguy/s then finally we would retvrn to the vaunted glory days.

It's remarkable that 250 years after Adam Smith, the classical liberal worldview is so hard to understand and so easy to round off to the complete opposite. Perhaps this is due to its great success turning it into the water we swim in.

I mean, what's the actual disagreement?

The fact that there are no persons who can be held to account for any given decision benefits the entire structure, and makes it easier to pull off graft and rig things for the outcomes that they find preferable. Get the incentives aligned towards your preferred goals, even if it means that you have to tolerate a few bad actors in the mix.

I'd argue the main difference in view would be whether its appropriate for these people to receive rewards for their successful service to the regime/cause. Amorally, if a bad person does the 'right' things during their tenure and we get good outcomes, then letting them earn a few million buckaroos off their public office is not a big deal. But if it is generally known that you can earn millions via graft if you attain public office, you will attract a lot of people who might not do the 'right' things.

From whence should the 'rewards' for good service come?

Anyhow, my point is that the thought of a 'deep state' made up of your ideological bedfellows is comforting to liberals, not that it actually is made up of such folks.

It's remarkable that 250 years after Adam Smith, the classical liberal worldview is so hard to understand and so easy to round off to the complete opposite.

I'm definitely NOT talking about "Classical" libs when I say this, in point of fact.

The fact that there are no persons who can be held to account for any given decision benefits the entire structure, and makes it easier to pull off graft and rig things for the outcomes that they find preferable.

Who said anything about nobody being held accountable?

But if it is generally known that you can earn millions via graft if you attain public office, you will attract a lot of people who might not do the 'right' things.

Who said anything about allowing graft in public office?

I'm definitely NOT talking about "Classical" libs when I say this, in point of fact.

That's strange considering that the guy you responded to was talking about exactly this particular classical lib.

I have to say this conversation is very bewildering. The poster you responded to made a specific claim about a specific guy, you responded saying that people like that guy all think that we just need good people running the show for everything to be OK. I point out that this is exactly the opposite of what that guy thinks and you respond with a bunch of non sequiturs that seem to have no relation to anything I said, and then deny that you're talking about that guy at all.

Who said anything about nobody being held accountable?

Me, for one.

The poster you responded to made a specific claim about a specific guy, you responded saying that people like that guy all think that we just need good people running the show for everything to be OK.

No, I was saying that Liberals, not the 'classical liberals' but the ones that vote Dem and are very performatively anti-Trump for reasons independent of his actual policies, find it comforting to believe that the government is run by "good people" in the 'deep state' of interconnected administrative agencies, and the fact that Trump is tearing up the machinery of said deep state is part of what would terrify them about him.

The quote in particular I tried to address was:

because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.

Leadership tends to imply accountability. But the issue now is that they don't want any one person acting as 'leader' and the person who tries to act as a leader (in opposition to the amorphous blob of administrative bureaucrats just 'following incentives') scares them.

And from the longer post linked up there:

So, when modernity and Liberalism came along, the outsourcing strategy was that outlined by Weber: “rationalization” — the replacement of human judgement, now deemed too terrible and corruptible to ever be trusted, by rules and procedure; that is, by algorithms. In Weber’s day, implementing them still required human bureaucrats in all cases, but nowadays, ever more of them can be done by our machines — “software eating the world.”

So I pointed out that Clinton winning in 2016 would have enabled a government almost completely divorced from its leader. The Bureaucracy (and later, machines) would do all the work of making the state function, and let her take credit for it, she wouldn't have to exercise agentic 'leadership' (an in return, would never be 'accountable.') and from the Liberals' point of view this is nearly ideal.

Instead, we have Trump who is taking the reins and making decisions for himself, and now going through the process of 'bullying' the bureaucracy into actually carrying them out for him. He's substituting his will for the 'processes' that used to underpin the state's behavior.

No, I was saying that Liberals, not the 'classical liberals' but the ones that vote Dem and are very performatively anti-Trump for reasons independent of his actual policies

This is why I make a point of calling them progressives. It's more true and causes less confusion when there are libertarians about.

People love the king. For unlimited loyalty, declare yourself supreme leader.

There needs to be a differentiation between the regime and then nation. The country can continue on with a new regime, the regime can't survive without the nation. Lots of countries have changed regime. The US can survive with a different form of government.

The US needs to avoid going bankrupt. It needs to avoid being over-run by migrants. The US should worry less about institutional restraints and realize that the US needs to reform radically to survive. The checks and balances arguments are like people in Russia in 1912 and France in 1785 talking about the need to respect the old ways. If France had been able to overcome people worrying about formal procedures in 1785 they could very well have avoided the revolution.

The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.

If France had been able to overcome people worrying about formal procedures in 1785 they could very well have avoided the revolution.

This...does not accord with really anything I've read on the early French Revolution, and I would be very interested to hear what you mean by this.

The checks and balances arguments are like people in Russia in 1912 and France in 1785 talking about the need to respect the old ways.

Even if the US debt is unsustainable, I do not think that it puts the US into a similar situation as Tsarist Russia or the French monarchy where it is unavoidable that the streets will run red with the blood of millions.

Not every financial crisis leads to Hitler, the last one only lead to Schaeuble. While being on the receiving end of his troika was certainly unpleasant for some Eurozone countries, it also was not the Holodomor.

If the market does not feel that US$ are a good investment, it will let the US know, and their policy of borrowing to give the voters expensive gifts will stop working, even with all the checks and balances. It will certainly be painful, dropping from being #9 of PPP GDP per capita to German or Greek levels would not be fun (though the US might rank higher than either even if it's currency was not in demand, simply from tech and natural resources), but it would also not lead to a Mad Max apocalypse where gangs of cannibals roam the countryside.

If France had been able to overcome people worrying about formal procedures in 1785 they could very well have avoided the revolution.

I am definitely the wrong person to give a lecture on the reasons for the French revolution, but from what I recall from school, there was a conflict between the king (Luis XVI?) and some sort of proto-parliament (which WP calls Estates General). I think at some point the King decided to leave the country incognito and his countrymen took that poorly and turned him into a more portable version.

While I think it is possible that a king might have kept his head (but probably not his office), I think a reading of history where the Jacobins and sans-culottes would have been satisfied with the king just suspending a few formal procedures is likely wrong.

The French revolution happened when the king decided to call the parliament in session to address bread riots in Paris during a fiscal crisis; the parliament had so long been disused that the arguing about voting procedure spiraled into the French revolution.

Not just about voting procedure - that argument was itself a proxy for a large number of other policy fights over, e.g. getting rid of the nobility's exemption from most taxes, reform of the Gabelle and internal trade barriers, abolishment of mandatory tithes to the church/forced labor on church lands, conspiracizing about food hoarding, proto-socialistic agitators in Paris, etc.

You mean the Estates General, right? That's the assembly that hadn't happened for a century and a half and squabbled about procedures and then split apart so the Third Estate could found the National Assembly. The Revolt of the Parliaments was a year or two earlier, and the problem there wasn't that the parliaments' judges couldn't agree with each other, it was that they could agree that even impending bankruptcy wasn't a reason to approve new taxes.

(This is confusing as hell because as far as I can tell neither the "parliaments" nor the "Estates General" assembly were actually what modern English would refer to as a "parliament", a legislative body; they were just there to give either a judicial or "popular" stamp of approval to laws that the King made?)

The US can survive with a different form of government.

I know a lot of people — including plenty on the Right — who would deny it, because they'd argue that the United States is its form of government. "Proposition nation" and all that. America is the Constitution; America is the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Wherever those ideals exist, there is America. Whoever believes in those ideals, they are the American People. If maintaining "all procedures and checks and balances" means economic collapse, so be it. If it means entire replacing the "legacy" population with a newly imported one, so be it. If the system of government is at odds with the people living under it, then too bad for the people. The Constitution cannot fail, it can only be failed. "America" the ideal is perfect (some even argue the Founders were divinely-inspired when they wrote the Constitution).

Whether you think "America is the Constitution" or not, that the US is the Constitution is obvious - the United States of America is literally a legal person created by the Constitution, and the natural persons who act in its name are required to swear oaths to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. If the land between Mexico and Canada has a sufficiently different form of government in 2030, it will still be America as a geographical fact, but it won't meaningfully be the USA.

If the change in government is a MAGA autogolpe, is more likely than not that the new government will use the legal identity (including the name, symbols, and paper Constitution) of the USA as a skinsuit in the same way that the Principiate used the Roman Republic as a skinsuit, or the current non-executive ceremonial Head of State of the UK uses the title, formal powers, and regalia of Charles II as a skinsuit. But the people who call it the USA will be lying.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Counter-argument to that is the U.S. has weathered a good number of major crises over the years without drastically changing its system of government, or at least, not permanently doing so. Civil War was obviously very bad, but things recovered and the nation got stronger over the next 50 years.

I'd agree that stuff like Wickard v. Filburn and the 19th Amendment were certain inflection points. Honestly, though, I don't think political crises are what will kill the current setup, it'll have to be something larger, and probably external in nature.

Perhaps the question is whether, if the crisis becomes deep enough, the appropriate people will actually decide to invoke the tools that the Constitution has built in or, as you suggest, chuck out procedures and checks and balances to save the Republic, even at the cost of the Republic.

Civil War was obviously very bad, but things recovered and the nation got stronger over the next 50 years.

I mean, kinda? The south went from one of the richest regions in the world with major influence over the federal government to basically being an internal colony which was systematically shut out of power until the Wilson administration.

You can argue that this was a good thing, or necessary in order to expunge slavery, but there's no denying that it happened.

the U.S. has weathered a good number of major crises over the years without drastically changing its system of government, or at least, not permanently doing so.

(emphasis in the original)

Hard disagree; the Progressive era and, especially, FDR’s presidency ratcheted up the scope of federal government intervention in everyday life, with tortured readings of the Constitution (courtesy of the Supreme Court) providing only the tiniest fig leaf over what was really going on: a radical break with the Constitution as it had previously been understood, and its replacement by a qualitatively different system of government—one in which the unelected federal bureaucracy had theretofore unimaginable powers to regulate all manner of activity.

I’m not saying that this was good or bad, necessary or unnecessary, historically inevitable or historically contingent. All I’m saying is that it happened, and the Republic has never been the same since.

The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.

Ok but Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand of economics whatsoever. The old ways made us the richest nation earth has ever seen. I certainly favor some reforms, and even some stuff the Trump admin has done, but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.

Be that as it may, the literal only cuts that would make a difference would have to be to entitlements. Slice the defense budget to ZERO and it wouldn't actually fix the issue.

And reducing entitlements is the political equivalent of navigating a field of nuclear landmines.

And for this same reason, raising taxes would directly imply taking money from productive sectors of the economy to give to the nonproductive sectors. Which is not exactly a formula for growth.

So if you think Trump is not doing enough, please, PLEASE specify exactly which programs he should start making drastic cuts to, and then go and explain to the voters who will see their benefits reduced why this is important and necessary and they SHOULDN'T revolt at the ballot box.

Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.

Simple problem to solve, I'm sure.

(Incidentally, I suspect that part of the plan RE: Tariffs is to help spread around the tax burden in a way that most Americans won't see as a direct extraction from their wallet, so as to avoid the outrage that would come with congress passing an actual income tax hike)

Tariffs are functionally a sales tax, and sales taxes are a common revenue workhorse even if economists hate them. I suspect they won't actually make a dent in the debt. But if they do it's a lot easier to justify than reforming the income tax again(and Trump's base would defect if he took away the breadwinner-favoring provisions that hit revenue hard) or introducing a VAT or the other usual options.

My read is that the goal is to settle into an equilibrium where the Tariffs other countries have against the U.S. are reduced or eliminated, and the U.S. keeps tariffs low but in place on certain 'critical' goods, and sees some revenue from these that doesn't piss off too many people.

Add in steps like securing deals for resources on foreign soil, or taxing remittances, or even acquiring stakes in U.S. companies.. These seem like semi-stealthy ways to try and squeeze some money out of the economy that doesn't show up on the voters' annual tax return.

Also they tried to sell off some Federal Lands but people pitched a fit.

Do I like all this? NO.

But it looks intentional, not just arbitrary steps to enrich Trump and his cronies with no larger strategy at work.

The position I'm responding to is that Trump cracking a few eggs of norms is worth it if that's what it takes to get the debt under control I'm pointing out that we're getting eggs cracked and the debt is not being taken under control. I'm sure we could have some debate about how best to get the debt under control, I agree some reductions in entitlements, particularly the absurd wealth transfer from the young to the old that is medicare and to a slightly less absurd degree social security come to mind. But as far as I can tell we have a bunch of cracked eggs and rather than a balanced budget omelet we have nothing to show for it. Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.

Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.

I would like the extra costs to be put towards paying down the debt, having a lower debt burden is in fact a way us tax payers are benefiting.

The way deficit hawking works is tax increases are proposed and accepted "to reduce the deficit". Myriad other interests smell the new money (whether it actually materializes or not) and make a play for it. Many of them succeed. Net result: more taxes, more entitlements, deficit goes higher. That's why there are very few deficit hawks left.

Then I guess it cannot, even in principle, be done so I would like to not hear about it as a problem and we shouldn't bonk down norms in order to fail to solve it.

Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.

having a lower debt burden is in fact a way us tax payers are benefiting.

Yeah, so tying tax increases with actual entitlement spending cuts would in theory be palatable. But you're going to piss off the groups who rely on that spending, who can then vote for people who promise to restore the spending and keep the taxes high.

So the promise of "I'm raising your taxes, but don't worry I'm only using it to decrease the debt" is not intrinsically reliable.

That's the Gordian knot, as it were.

You don't have to actually cut entitlements at all. You can just raise taxes and use that money to pay down the debt(or at least close the deficit so you aren't creating more debt). The guy in the the white house can make that call. My point is we're currently breaking eggs and receiving no omelet.

I think various high-tax European countries are showing how that process doesn't really work.

Doubly so if your country's entitlements can be hijacked by racially-motivated interest groups.

Entitlements tend to be 'nonproductive' spending. Taking money out of productive investments to spend on nonproductive ends is... not going to grow GDP, which is going to hurt tax revenues over the longer term.

Don't the very high tax European countries generally have balanced budgets- it's the Latins with their more moderate tax rates that have ridiculous spiraling debt levels?

Europe's problem is strangulating regulation. I should note that I don't love taxes and prefer they be low. My only point is that you can't forgo tax revenue and then bemoan the national debt. You pay for the debt with taxes.

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Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.

Wasn't that an extension of the previous tax cuts? After which tax revenues went up, suggesting we were on the good side of the Laffer curve? Were there different cuts, or do you have a reason to expect no negative consequences to tax hikes?

Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are. They are not justified as a means to maximize tax revenue, only on the grounds that people like to have more money and they will if they are taxed less. A position I think is reasonable but it's at direct odds with a desire to pay off the national debt. If we're serious about paying down the national debt we have to raise taxes and there is no real alternative, even if you cut entitlements to the bone.

Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are.

It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted. The thing about the Laffer curve is that it's only ever a post-hoc explanation. You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?

It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted.

revenue was already trending up due to a market boom. Classic economics would say that you should pay down your debts during a market boom, but we opted to run the market even hotter. An argument can be made for this, but not one that pretends to be concerned with government debt load. but this is a slightly different question. It would probably be helpful to look at an actual chart of US tax receipts and a chart of US GDP around the time of the DJT tax cuts(Jan 1 2018) you can see that GDP continue to trend up and the tax receipts stayed stagnant. The GDP trend really doesn't seem to react much if at all to the tax cuts indicating we're not really touching that laffer curve at all.

You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?

Tax hikes do slow the economy, no one really contests that. The question is does it slow it down so much that they actually lower tax receipts, which just there is no real indication of this happening and places with much higher taxes don't really even see this happening. The laffer curve is a theoretical thing and there is no reason to believe we're on the edge of it.

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Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue.

...If tax receipts did in fact increase, how is this a straightforward reduction in revenue?

There are many more factors that go into tax receipts than just the tax rate. The economy itself was booming, a trend that predated the tax cuts, and inflation juiced the nominal rate. The straightforward reduction in revenue is that we would have collected substantially more revenue without the cuts to the tune of trillions of dollars.

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This is just a motte and bailey, right?

Bailey: The US needs to avoid going bankrupt. We (well, not we, since functor is not an American) need Trump to take extraordinary measures to achieve this and should trust the plan.

Counter: Trump is only making the debt crisis worse.

Motte: It's actually impossible to address the debt crisis.

Wait a minute, why are we trusting the plan again?

You won't find me saying "Trust the plan" at any point.

I do think Trump acts more strategically than virutally any of his detractors give him credit for, though.

But if the complaint is that Trump hasn't taken a chainsaw to entitlements (which, for example, Milei has actually done in Argentina! Well okay, stopping them from increasing is not quite the same thing), stating:

Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand (sic) of economics whatsoever.

and

but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.

I think its worth considering that Trump may be aware of the fact that this current situation is unsustainable AND that making the needed cuts is going to be exceptionally politically unpopular, and that his ultimate approach to addressing this might be something people haven't considered yet.

Otherwise, what exactly do you think his motivations are? Just ignore the debt issue entirely and try to kick the can until he leaves office in a few years? I'm trying to understand the mindset that suggests that Trump acts at semi-random or that he is SOLELY self-interested and doesn't have any goal other than wealth accumulation.

I think its worth considering that Trump may be aware of the fact that this current situation is unsustainable AND that making the needed cuts is going to be exceptionally politically unpopular, and that his ultimate approach to addressing this might be something people haven't considered yet.

I mean, yeah, you're not saying "trust the plan", you're merely saying "it's worth considering if we should trust the plan". I don't know that this is a major distinction.

What is the behavior of Trump we would expect to see in the world where:

  1. He has a secret weapon for addressing the debt crisis, versus

  2. He has no secret weapon

And does the Trump of our reality behave more similarly to Trump 1 or Trump 2? Well, the most basic graph would suggest Trump 2. Yes, perhaps there are some epicycles that can be added, but where's the payoff? Shall we make a bet about what this graph is going to look like when Trump leaves office and see which one of our theories is a better predictor of reality?

Otherwise, what exactly do you think his motivations are? Just ignore the debt issue entirely and try to kick the can until he leaves office in a few years? I'm trying to understand the mindset that suggests that Trump acts at semi-random or that he is SOLELY self-interested and doesn't have any goal other than wealth accumulation.

I don't know that his goal is wealth accumulation, I suspect he has already accumulated enough, or at least, it's not his primary goal. I think Trump's primary goal is something like status. He wants people to think that he's the best, that he's the Big Guy. That's why so much of his politics seem to revolve around the respect and deference that he receives, or does not receive, from the people at the other end of the table ("did you say, 'thank you, Mr President'?"). I don't think that the debt crisis is that important to him, and kicking that particular can down the road is a time honored bipartisan tradition at this point. Why not him too?

I mean, yeah, you're not saying "trust the plan", you're merely saying "it's worth considering if we should trust the plan". I don't know that this is a major distinction.

I would narrow it to "Consider that perhaps a plan exists rather than think he's flailing around and screwing with things for no reason." You can't trust OR distrust the plan if you don't think there's one in the first place. If you don't think there's a plan, then what exactly are we seeing? And why does it often seem to work out for him?

What is the behavior of Trump we would expect to see in the world where: He has a secret weapon for addressing the debt crisis, versus He has no secret weapon

There is no 'secret weapon.' You can either reduce spending, or increase tax revenues... or both.

Reducing spending is a minefield. Increasing tax revenues can work via either economic growth or strategic tax increases (see the Laffer curve for why you might not want to push this very far).

I'm guessing that he's aiming/hoping for unleashed economic growth AND a combination of very gradual tax increases (especially indirect ones) and some monetization of the debt, which is why he's hammering away at the Federal Reserve right now, hoping to get them to reduce interest rates. IF he's going to propose spending cuts, I'd guess that comes after the midterms... which explains why he's expending so much capital to shore up more republican seats (see the current redistricting fight, and preventing mail-in voting and other election fraud issues) in 2026.

If he has any 'secret weapon' at all, it is that he can perhaps convince people to accept a series of individual steps that all seem odd on their own but push us to a 'better' equilibrium in the long run. I think that is EXPLICITLY his goal with negotiating new trade deals that force other countries to reduce tariffs on the U.S.... which can assist with that 'unleashed economic growth' point, up there.

I think Trump's primary goal is something like status. He wants people to think that he's the best, that he's the Big Guy. That's why so much of his politics seem to revolve around the respect and deference that he receives, or does not receive, from the people at the other end of the table ("did you say, 'thank you, Mr President'?").

You know, I agree there's a narcissism in what he does. But I don't think he takes himself NEARLY so seriously as you're contending here. Personally, I think he really, genuinely enjoys 'doing deals' and almost everything else about his personality is in service of his negotiation tactics when trying to make such deals happen. "Did you say thank you" is a tactic for putting the other party on the defensive by reminding them how much they've already gotten.

Like, what 'status' did it win him to go walking along the Roof of the White House and to scream at reporters from 100 yards away?. I pretty much believe his explanation that he was just surveying things to help plan out his White House expansions. Sometimes he just does things because... he can.

I would narrow it to "Consider that perhaps a plan exists rather than think he's flailing around and screwing with things for no reason.

Talking about Trump doing things for "no reason" is basically a strawman of the anti-Trump position. If I ended up in a situation where I found myself trying to land a 747, I wouldn't be doing things for "no reason" in the cockpit, but it would be a mistake to think that I had a coherent plan to land the plane except to the extent that I'm aware that landing the plane requires reducing speed and reducing altitude.

And as I mentioned, it's not a given that Trump is actually trying to land the plane at all. He may be content to let the next guy try to land it instead.

If you don't think there's a plan, then what exactly are we seeing? And why does it often seem to work out for him?

Very astute, and this ties in to your final point. "The plan," to the extent that it exists, is mostly around Trump increasing his status and self image rather than helping the country. And I think that works perfectly - Trump is certainly better off than he was before he took office. Is the country? Not so sure about that.

I'm guessing that he's aiming/hoping for unleashed economic growth

Yeah, sure, everyone loves economic growth, or at least, they say they do. However, the problem is that not every policy actually increases economic growth, and for people like Trump who have a multi-decade bee in their bonnet about certain policies (like tariffs), it's implementing the policy that's the focus rather than achieving economic growth.

Let's get down to brass tacks here. Do you actually think that Trump is going to make a dent in the debt crisis? Or is this all just playing devil's advocate? Because if you really do think that he's going to make an impact, I'm much less interested in discussing the 4D chess moves that may or may not suddenly come down the pipe without warning and much more interested in putting down some actual predictions about the debt to GDP ratio and seeing who's right in three years, because I don't think that either of us is going to convince the other.

And if you don't actually believe, then this whole conversation is pointless.

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There are a lot of reasons why some people are horrified by Trump but I think an under-explored angle is the attitude that different groups of people have towards society as something that can be managed, tinkered with and engineered. This might have no bearing on your wife's feelings towards him but it's been in my head for a while so I thought I'd share.

Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be manipulated at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.

This difference also reveals itself when it comes to how these different groups understand the nature of societal problems and the sorts of solutions they favour. Conservatives will see things like crime and illegal immigration as the inevitable consequences of living in a chaotic world and consequently favour relatively blunt approaches: arresting more people or physically preventing migrants from entering. Liberals OTOH see such issues as evidence of subtle bugs in the code somewhere, or some poorly chosen initial conditions (see the focus many liberals place on "root causes" of crime). Doing something as basic as throwing more criminals in prison is both an admission that they can't "solve" the problem of crime and an abandonment of the project of a perfect society where everyone is happy.

When thought of from this perspective, the antipathy that Trump provokes in many liberals makes a lot of sense: his chaotic and anti-intellectual nature represents a complete repudiation of their philosophy. Even those that agree that problems like crime need to be taken seriously tend to view the damage he's causing to their project of a perfectly designed society as outweighing any benefit he might bring about. They're building beautiful sandcastles on the beach while conservatives tell them there's a tidal wave approaching. Even the liberals that concede that they need to do something about this are convinced there has to be way to keep everyone safe that doesn't destroy the intricate work they've devoted years to. They'll recoil from anyone who suggests sprinting to higher ground if that means knocking over their sculptures.

Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be tinkered with and engineered at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people, tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives, OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.

Brilliant! This delineates the concept of "microagression" beautifully -- basically a foreign concept to a conservative, who can be very focused on macro-aggressions like crime, terrorism, breakdown of rule of law and order, riots, etc.

Uh, did you just clankerpost?

Ha, definitely not. But I'll take it as a compliment.

my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it

This is a very 2018 opinion. We live in a different world now. The problem is that the legal "check" against the president using executive authority to consolidate power is impeachment and removal. This would require support for Trump to collapse from among the Republican base itself. In 2025, what red line exists that would cause Trump's Republican support to collapse? Maybe if he gave a speach from the oval office announcing his personal surrender to Soros and the indefinite suspension of all border and ICE enforcement. I don't think there's much on the right-wing authoritarian side Trump could do to get impeached. Stringing prominent Democrats from lampposts might even turn out to be surprisingly popular.

The Republican Party is full of people who 100% know they’re next in a Trump-base backed campaign of repression. Republican politicians will not go along with that to save their own skins.

A prominent example of an issue thé Republican base refused to back Trump over was the Covid vaccine. It is possible.

I think one faulty assumption in your logic is that entities which Trump acts unlawfully and adversely against will always press their legal claims. Take Intel's recent announcement about them giving the US government a 10% stake in the company in exchange for grants in the CHIPS Act. There is nothing in the actual law passed by Congress that permits the executive to withhold these grants or condition their distribution on an exchange of equity. The Trump administration's actions are 100% unlawful. Yet, Intel did it anyway. Unlawful actions can create a lot of short term pain for a company such that they may decide it is better to eat the cost than press their claims. That does not mean the action was lawful.

The Trump administration's actions are 100% unlawful. Yet, Intel did it anyway. Unlawful actions can create a lot of short term pain for a company such that they may decide it is better to eat the cost than press their claims. That does not mean the action was lawful.

Re: lawlessness. Who is the plaintiff here? Intel took the deal. There's some presumed upside for having the government truly in your corner now as a stakeholder. The funds were authorized. Taxpayers presumably got more for it as well. They got equity. The executive had some authority to administer the deal.

Who is going to sue over it? What does it look like? This is an example of Trump just doing things that violate norms but might not be that illegal.

If Intel did sue to get the grants I predict a ~100% chance of success. Of course, Trump and the administration could try and punish them in other ways. "A party chose not to press their claims" is not identical with "an action was lawful."

Agreed, it's not lawful, but it isn't exactly completely outside of the spirit of the matter either.

Right, this may or may not be unlawful, as with the Nvidia export tax. But Trump is taking a page from his opponent's playbook and doing it better -- no one with an interest in making a case actually has standing.

When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it

I've noticed that the people in my life who are most distressed by Trump are the people who seem to have the least faith in the American system. For whatever reason, they don't think that a government designed to prevent runaway unitary power can actually accomplish that task.

It's fascinating to discuss. When they see Congress flailing around and failing to advance Trump's agenda, for example, they don't see it as a designed-in firebreak that policy should be hard to enact. They see it as two distinct problems - policy is hard to enact and it's policy they don't like.

This pattern seems to hold on the left and the right. The topics that cause their dismay change, but the fundamental mechanism does not.

Adding to this, (some of) the people who react this way are also ones who feel upset and betrayed when their side has power and doesn’t achieve every possible goal, often against predictable and legible opposition from the other party, the centrists, and the other branches of government. Is it possible that some of our civic dysfunction rests on the back of sheer misconceptions about how a republic is intended to operate…?

I will say as a former democrat (and now republican), that the left wing does get screwed by their party. It seems likely that if their party didn’t have a super delegate system, (ie more democratic) they would get much more economically populist candidates. Instead they just get socially extreme candidates with a sprinkling of economic populism.

While I disagree with the kind of policies such a candidate would bring, I think it would actually be much better for the country if these issues are actually litigated in an election.

A good example of this is the student loan cancellation issue. While I think it would have been a disastrous policy it’s something that the majority of democratic voters clearly supported. The party had a congressional super majority and could have passed something through congress. Instead they waited until after they had lost that majority and “tried” to do it through blatantly illegal executive action.

Biden was to the democratic base as trump would be to the republican base if he hadn’t done anything about immigration or trade.

At some point, student loans are mostly bad debt and bad debt does have to be dealt with. I'm curious what makes student loan forgiveness a 'disastrous' as opposed to merely sub-optimal policy.

At some point, student loans are mostly bad debt and bad debt does have to be dealt with. I'm curious what makes student loan forgiveness a 'disastrous' as opposed to merely sub-optimal policy.

Expected downstream effects. After the first round of forgiveness, universities will jack tuition prices at an even more exhorbitant rate than the last 50 years, blow the money on stupid amenities and inspid activism, while telling every potential student "It's free money! Just don't pay it back and tthe next time a Dem is in office it'll be forgiven!"

This is roughly correct. For the debt reform to work without a moral hazard, the part(ies) who profited most from the debt must be heavily punished.

One way to accomplish this would be to, instead of debt forgiveness, to allow former students to settle their debt with the proceeds of a lawsuit against their alma mater at the cost of their degree. Think your degree wasn’t worth the cost? Just return the defective goods…

Is it possible that some of our civic dysfunction rests on the back of sheer misconceptions about how a republic is intended to operate…?

Probably. There's a definite overlap between the degree of distress and how often I hear catch-phrases like "Our Democracy".

Ok, let me steelman TDS. Note that this is a steelman again.

Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.

Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.

But enacting your agenda second hand is, well, the other side of the coin of authoritarianism. Literally, thé definition of authoritarianism is when non-state actors cooperate with the government to shut down the democratic process(the government taking direct control is instead totalitarianism). Like when FDR did it.

Do I believe this? Not really, maybe I hope for it a bit. But do I understand the concern among liberal journalists? Yeah, although I point to their open hypocrisy if they expect me to have much sympathy. After all, taking control of the media secondhand is sine qua non of successful authoritarian takeovers. Trump has X and now meta, thé Washington post- it’s not like you can’t point to examples here. News media is just not a profitable enough business for it to be not owned by someone else who can be pressured by the government.

I feel bad for this dunk, because you went to so much effort to steelman it, but it has to be said - political hysteria when your opposition tries effective means to enact their agenda is fundamentally silly. Did they, like, just get used to the ineffectual opposition so much that it became a norm? The sort of wink-wink, nudge nudge 'we won't actually try and get what our voters want while you get to make all the reforms you like?'

They called Bush a fascist, they called McCain a fascist, they called Romney, of all people, a fascist.

So I'm not inclined to believe that Trump is a fascist, or that those previous figures are suddenly bipartisan magnates of genteel character. The left will always smear their enemies as fascists. Fair enough. If they're going to give you the time, you might as well do the crime. Actions have consequences.

Eh? You don’t believe he’s a fascist, but also he might as well do the crime?

Nothing in my post disagrees with what you’re saying. Most cases of TDS are hypocrites who are mainly just upset that the arc of history is not real. This was explicitly a steelman; thé concern is reasonable, directing it mostly at republicans gives the lie to it.

thé medieval church

thé Washington Post

thé concern

Is there a bit you're doing that I'm missing, or has your spellcheck just gone rogue?

With respect, and since I generally enjoy reading what you have to say, I don’t think this is a very good take. In fact, it seems more accurately to be a description of how a government will always act with private organizations: it will, in one way or another, become influenced by them or try to tell them what to do. Only in rare circumstances can they be persuaded to leave one another alone.

This is because the government in question is not totalitarian; that is, society is ordered in some manner by organizations that are outside of the government. Nominally their spheres of influence do not overlap, but practically, they almost always do. This problem gets worse the more powerful the private organizations get, and the more they disconnect from either the implicit organization of the government or the roots of its power. In cases where the government and organizations see eye to eye with one another and with the power base, disagreements can be managed with a simple request or negotiation. When they cannot, the government will try to coerce the organizations, and the organizations will try to subvert the government. These are nothing more than the straight-line solutions to the inevitable conflicts which arise, much in the same vein as war.

Of course, it is possible to define areas of responsibility and depend on the good character of leaders on both sides of the divide, which results in a better society. But I won’t beat on the drum of culture this very second.

So what characterizes an authoritarian government, or organization? Simply that people low on the totem pole have few avenues for independent action or redress. This has a very limited relationship to collusion between private and public parties; correlation, not identity. (The army has always been authoritarian, even in very free societies.)

Now, what I think is really wrong with your post is that it sparks a comparison with the Obama presidency, like an allergic reaction. So instead of talking about Trump, now this forum is back to relitigating how awful Hillary was. That’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t be stuck in a cycle of petty chuddery over past resentments. I don’t think this was intentional, but it’s a pretty bad outcome regardless.

Moreover, on the logical front, it’s temporally fraught. This is responding to Trump 2, but TDS began before Trump was even inaugurated, before he was even elected. And - I’m not sure about everyone else, but TDS feels a lot calmer this time around, people talk about the guy less. So this doesn’t work as an explanation.

If we’re just talking TDS, the most charitable explanation has to include the fact that it is clearly deranged, that its worst predictions have not come true. The basic claims, back from 2016, are that Trump would set himself up as dictator (didn’t happen, made a half-baked attempt that actually set much of the country firmly against him, and he’s looking too old for a second shot now), and that he was a pawn of Russia (in reality he’s just a little naive about Putin, like some other right-wingers are, but hasn’t conceded anything major). The evidence then was weak, but the certainty was absolute. I believe it to have been a simple translation of the underlying sentiment of shock when Trump won. It meant that victory in elections was not assured, when all their information had told them it was. The support for Trump had come from somewhere totally illegible, which is why they could not foresee it. These emotions should rightly have been translated into a new awareness, a new zeitgeist, in which the challenges of America under globalization took the forefront, where previously the meaning-making institutions of left and right had made their existence impossible (to understand). But this was too much for almost anyone to handle. Instead, the emotions got repressed into insane but still easier to manage forms: it’s not Americans, it’s Russians; also this elected official is undemocratic and authoritarian. Now it’s safe. The move on the right, FWIW, was more cynical: “oh, these are the new wacky Christians, just say the right things and they won’t pay attention to the more complicated parts of policy, like tax breaks.” And, from what I can tell, they were totally right, so one point to them.

Anyway, people have had a lot more time to digest, and developments under Biden have made the anti-globalist complaints way more legible, so there’s less TDS this time. And the current complaints are about what he IS DOING (usually: playing really fast and loose with the law; ignoring second-order consequences), and while these are sometimes factually a little shaky, they’re not nearly as crazy as hypothesizing wildly about what he MIGHT DO. So I’m not sure I’d describe it as a major force in America any longer, if that means anything.

Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.

This might be true, but I have trouble believing this to be an even-handed critique of government actions, and not just "Fascism is when the government does things I don't like". If so, we should consider things like Obama's Operation Choke Point, where the DOJ pressured businesses like firearms dealers that were engaging in "high-risk", if otherwise-legal activities. I'm not sure I'm actually upset by all the categories targeted there, but if you're concerned about this definition of "authoritarianism", it's been going on well over a decade at this point, arguably at least back to Congress pressuring states to adopt speed limits and drunk driving laws.

Of course it's not evenhanded. There are figures like Ross Douthat who criticize both sides- and they do not have TDS.

Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.

Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.

This to me reads like a steelman of moderate's and right winger's description of the Democrat party. This is exactly what the left and Democrats have done. Now they're getting a taste of their own medicine and half of them act like it is the most authoritarian thing they've seen in modern history. All they really see is the reckless nature in which Trump and crew try to pull it off, and I will definitely concede that part to the left; Trump and his people are not nearly as good at hiding their intentions or authoritarian tendencies. The primary difference is that the Democrats have been very successful at the "We're not doing the thing we're doing." for about 10-15 years. It's easy to pull that kind of thing off when nearly all Western mainstream media outlets will eloquently argue your position for you, and when you can completely ostracize other schools of thought by calling all of their believers "bigots." It has been incredibly successful. That is until the receipts started piling up.

The primary difference is that the Democrats have been very successful at the "We're not doing the thing we're doing." for about 10-15 years

I would argue that the primary difference is that Trump is evil. (From a left-wing perspective)

Left-wingers very rarely come out and say it, because it's a difficult thing to admit out loud, but one cannot have a sensible conversation about the "hypocritical" responses without taking morality into account. Left-wingers are not mysteriously unable to notice the Dems' underhanded tactics. Nor do they necessarily approve of them. But whether or not you approve, unethical shortcuts are much more forgivable when wielded towards mostly-good aims than when wielded towards evil aims. It's the difference between your properly corrupt cop who's covering for a gang boss in exchange for cash, and your archetypal cop-show "loose cannon" who ignores protocol & anti-entrapment laws in his quest to fuck the bastards back. They may violate exactly the same laws on paper, but one is obviously rotten, while the other should probably be tolerated. There's no hypocrisy here, just an underlying values difference which is rarely admitted to in plain English because "it's okay when our guys do it" sounds hypocritical.

Left-wingers are not mysteriously unable to notice the Dems' underhanded tactics.

I think you are brutally underestimating the power of media bubbles and the Two Screens hypothesis. My Republican father and Democrat mother dragged me into a discussion yesterday because dad was just astounded that mom had never heard a single rumbling that suggested that the Russia Collusion Incident might be flawed (much less a deliberate hoax).

My mother spends a great deal of time on social media mainlining Democrat narratives. When would she ever hear about an underhanded tactic from her own side?

Nor do they necessarily approve of them. But whether or not you approve, unethical shortcuts are much more forgivable when wielded towards mostly-good aims than when wielded towards evil aims. It's the difference between your properly corrupt cop who's covering for a gang boss in exchange for cash, and your archetypal cop-show "loose cannon" who ignores protocol & anti-entrapment laws in his quest to fuck the bastards back. They may violate exactly the same laws on paper, but one is obviously rotten, while the other should probably be tolerated. There's no hypocrisy here, just an underlying values difference which is rarely admitted to in plain English because "it's okay when our guys do it" sounds hypocritical.

This is just Russell's conjugation.

This is just Russell's conjugation.

Not exactly. Russell's conjugation is a form of sheer hypocrisy - describing the same bad behavior differently based purely on whether you're unrelatedly biased in favor of the person who's doing it. Crucially, if you had perfect information about the facts of each case, and passed judgement under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you would regard the misdeeds as morally equivalent.

Whereas, in the case of Blues who are aware of Democratic wrongdoing (and granted, that isn't all of them; in the quoted sentence, "Left-wingers" implicitly referred to the kinds of left-wingers who argue about politics online, not to random normies) but largely ignore it while clutching pearls whenever Trump puts a foot wrong, I believe that they do sincerely believe Democrats' bad behavior is more excusable. They won't admit that to a political opponent mid-debate, but they'd defend it before God Himself with a clear conscience. "You're a murderous psycho, he saved an innocent victim's life" is not a Russell conjugation if you actually believe that A committed murder for personal gain while B was trying to save a third party.

Hence "He will stop at nothing to destroy Our Democracy, they took a few dubious shortcuts to try and save it", which I contend is subject to value disagreements and factual disputes, but not inherently an incoherent/hypocritical sentence.

Yep, this is the base of it as always. Humans gonna human. Not even sure it's a bad thing per se.

And I totally acknowledged that in my post! 100% of the people complaining about this are giant, raging hypocrites who believe arc-of-history triumphalist nonsense gives them the right to use these tactics and not have them used against them.

Yeah, I guess you kind of did, and to your point I also see their concerns.

Trump gives anti-Trumpers reasonable cause for concern, but it reminds me of the tit-for-tat discussion that happened here last week. Trump and his crew are probably overreaching, and there is also counter culture that supports it. In that regard, there is plenty of reasonable criticism going on. It just comes from a camp who have unintentionally shown their ass when it comes to their inability to see outside of their own ideology.

If the exercise was to come up with steelman arguments without the "yeah, but the otherside..." then I failed and that's my bad. I will say that, within their moral framework, it's easy to see where people are coming from with their concerns and why it is so significant to them.

I feel similarly. I was most politically concerned about a BLM protest happening across the street from me in 2020 not really because of the movement itself but because of rioting and looting that would typically happen afterwards (perhaps by people completely unrelated to the protests). It drove me towards gun ownership, in fact.

I was also just in general taken aback by reports of people walking into businesses demanding they put up BLM signs, or intimidating people at restaurants demanding to know why they're eating instead of protesting with them.

To me, this stuff seems like lawlessness that doesn't have a sufficient remedy. The riots may be quelled and the harassment by mobs may die down but in the interim you can come fairly close to being terrorized.

Stuff that Trump does feels fairly abstract and easy to undo it it is in fact lawless. Though I recognize that if I were a lawful US Hispanic citizen I'd probably feel pretty on edge from potentially getting caught in a bureaucratic tangle that would feel terrorizing because they thought I was an illegal.

I was also just in general taken aback by reports of people walking into businesses demanding they put up BLM signs, or intimidating people at restaurants demanding to know why they're eating instead of protesting with them.

To me, this stuff seems like lawlessness that doesn't have a sufficient remedy. The riots may be quelled and the harassment by mobs may die down but in the interim you can come fairly close to being terrorized.

This isn't lawlessness. This is the government outright taking the mob's side. In a well-governed place, such thugs get jailed. In an actually lawless place that still manages to have restaurants, the restaurant owners will have their own thugs who will physically remove BLM thugs trying to intimidate them or their patrons. (and said patrons may have their own thugs as well). You only get BLM thugs acting with both impunity and lack of private opposition when government is on their side.

Is the government taking the mob's side if it's too intimidated to act?

Mu. The government is not too intimidated to act, not in the US. If it were, that would be a failed state.

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