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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.
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.
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