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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.
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.
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:
And as I put it in my post:
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.
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.
That's not what Snowden showed. Like, not even close.
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?).
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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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"?
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.
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.
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?".
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.
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.
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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.
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,
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.
I'm definitely NOT talking about "Classical" libs when I say this, in point of fact.
Who said anything about nobody being held accountable?
Who said anything about allowing graft in public office?
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.
Me, for one.
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:
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 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.
This is why I make a point of calling them progressives. It's more true and causes less confusion when there are libertarians about.
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People love the king. For unlimited loyalty, declare yourself supreme leader.
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