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From the last few years of Motte and Twitter discourse, I think the answer you will get is obvious:
His supporters don't care. He fights, he makes libs cry, and traditional, "respectable" conservatives are now seen as cucks who conserved nothing and are committed only to losing politely. MAGA cares absolutely nothing about propriety or decorum, because that's a chump's game, and any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever, and only after we crush them and make them lick the soles of our boots might they learn to behave and restore a kind of equilibrium.
I don't think the analysis is correct, but I can see the crude, vitalist appeal of President Shitpoaster. What I think will actually happen is one of two things: (1) The darker suspicions of Trump's foes are true, and MAGA really does think it's going to remain in power permanently, one way or the other. (2) The Democrats will return to power eventually, this will be remembered, and yes, it will be tit-for-tat and we spiral into ever-worse decay.
Either way, I foresee no positive endgame.
Yep, this basically sums up discussion of this on TheMotte. It saddens me but this is just one of those things where people are just so solidified in their opinion there is really no new argument or event that could change it.
If you wish to argue by appealing to a general principle, what is the proper way to rebut such an argument if one disagrees that the principle is generally held?
I too am saddened when people are so solidified in their opinion that there is really no new argument or event that could change it. I am more saddened, however, when I see people who appear to believe that mountains of evidence they don't like and can't meaningfully respond to should spontaneously evaporate so that it can stop impeding the arguments they would prefer to present unchallenged.
On this subject in particular, a few others have offered the best insight available, and I'll reiterate it in my own words:
People who are upset by this appear to want the old sociopolitical system, wherein there was a strict division of labor between the people who cranked out images of shit being dumped on the hated outgroup by laughing cartoons of tribal champions, and the actual tribal champions who directly benefited from those images while standing solemnly before a podium in a very expensive suit extruding the blandest possible word-product into an array of very official microphones. If one is going to argue for this previous system, one should argue for it as it actually was, not as it might be imagined to be, particularly in the imagination of the side employing a large majority of the old shit-pouring cartoon experts.
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, there was an article I read that offered an interesting nugget; the author, a professional journalist, had of course heard (and only heard!) about the shooting the day it happened. When her kids got home from school, she went to talk to them about it. By that point, of course, her kids had not only heard about it, but had already spent the day watching close-up slo-mo video of the moment of impact, the spattering fountain of blood, the crimson-soaked security detail struggling to load his body into a vehicle... she described a fundamental generation gap, where the experience of the event was sanitized on her end and far more visceral for her children, simply through their respective approaches to media technology, in a way that she probably should have seen coming, and maybe should have done something to prevent...
Food for thought.
Nigga, this is just going through the exact motions Amadan outlined. I get it, libtards started it by employing legions of late night comedians and entertainers to metaphorically pour shit on Republicans for years except (duplicitous as always) they his behind a veneer of civility while their Hollywood Jews did the dirty work for them. Trump isn’t doing anything fundamentally different, he’s just more crass and if anything the crassness and directness of it is a virtue, there’s an honesty to the directness of it.
My point as always is that there is value to norms. Even if the norms seem paper thin or hypocritical I believe they are better than nothing. There are just proper ways a president should behave. I believe there is serious value in having a degree of ritual and civic religion. It is always possible to construct a plausible sounding reason why your enemies really started it, your enemies are actually so much worse than this, blah blah blah. It has to stop somewhere else escalation begets escalation. I know everyone will tell me this isn’t an escalation because libtards have already done a million worse things, but that’s exactly how escalation works and can always be justified
I think the problem here is that your (possibly yours personally, but definitely my political opponents) ritual and civic religion is directly contradictory to mine and so why should I not want to tear it down and replace it with my own?
Yes. When one side or the other is so beaten down they accept defeat. That’s when it will stop. That’s how wars, even culture wars, work. And then it will start again at some point in the future, either near or far, about the same or different things.
Or we’ll all be AI serfs. I guess that might be enough to finally beat that dawg out of humanity.
Because while you're in the process of attempting to do this (poorly, not because you're bad at it, but because the other side will try and stop you) China builds the factories that build more factories and then drone-spams so hard you lose naval control over the key shipping lanes and then lose power projection abilities and then lose status as the world's reserve currency and then get to live without all the fun benefits of being the world's sole superpower.
Also there's no guarantee your system won't also be full of problems once it's settled and starts rotting, as all systems exposed to entropy and human nature do.
"You should go commit suicide, or let us shoot you in the head if we get particularly bored, because if you don't America Will Be Destroyed!" isn't nearly as compelling an argument as you seem to think it is.
(Alternating between "America must be destroyed!" and "you're going to destroy America!" is even less compelling—but that's neither here nor there...)
That isn't my argument? I wouldn't even vote Dem if I was American.
My argument is both sides of America have gone full retard, are ripping eachother apart myopically while the credible threat of losing global hegemony looms.
My further argument is "nuh uh they started it/are worse/make me really mad" may be true but fundamentally don't matter in the broader context, which exists regardless of your feelings towards it.
It's literally the definition of re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it sinks, and not only is everyone focused on the chairs, they're screaming that half the crew are worse than you while everyone works together to unlock as many water tight bulkheads as they can. Maybe you're right about them, but you're still sinking!
I have actual, literal, in-real-life dead friends driven to suicide in this mess. "Loss of hegemony" is way down the list. I'll worry about sinking once I'm not drowning.
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