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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.
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.
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.
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