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So, the Ontario Reagan ad thing.
As the governor of Ontario, Doug Ford (Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario) produced a 1-minute ad in favor of free trade ad targeted at US residents, with some high-profile airings during some sports events. The ad consists of spliced together sentences of a 1987 Reagan address.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation claims that "the ad misrepresented Reagans address". The reaction of Trump was to suspend trade negotiations with the Carney (Liberal Party) government of Canada:
I watched the original they linked, and I honestly can not see what their problem is. In the original 5 minute version, there was also a message of "we have introduced duties on semiconductors from Japan because their companies were not competing fairly, but we do not want a general trade war". But having watched both the ad and the address, I agree with the fact-checkers that Reagan was not quoted out of context. The ad agency basically took a five minute speech, of which at least three minutes were a spirited defense of free trade as the foundation of prosperity and condensed it into a one minute defense of free trade.
I understand how the ad would annoy Trump. Reagan is a time-honored hero of his party, and his voiced ideals are in stark contrast to Trump's policies. The message "this man is stepping way out of line of the tradition of his political ancestors" certainly seems a good way to persuade traditional conservative demographics to reconsider Trump.
But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy. Even without Citizens United, the US would be the last country in the Americas to have any standing to object to foreigners interfering, especially if the interference is only attack ads and not coups.
And as far as attack ads go, it is incredibly tame. A clear policy message without any ad hominem jabs or name-calling.
This makes Trump's reaction utterly bizarre to me. Diplomacy sometimes means negotiating with people who would love to murder you and dance on your grave, never mind seeing you voted out of office. Then there is the fact that Canada is not an absolute monarchy, and their federal government does not control its provinces. Assuming that PM Carney has control over Ford would be like assuming that Trump has control over Newsom. If you are willing to walk away from negotiations because of that, then either you were not seriously negotiating before or you emotions are making you irrational.
Even if the ad was paid for by Carney, Trump's reaction would not be appropriate for an adult. It seems that he is mentally sorting people into two buckets, the ones who support him and are loyal to him, and the ones who are opposed to him. This is basically the world view of a toddler. Reality is more complex. Of course Canada would love nothing more than the US electing Democrat majorities in the mid-term and them killing Trump's tariffs. Presumably, Trump in turn would love for Canadians to elect a MAGA fan who is willing to bend over backwards and give Trump all the concessions instead of retaliating. But in the likely event that neither side get what they want, it still makes sense to negotiate.
To me, it seems pretty clear that a mass media campaign like this is directed at the electorate. In Trump's mind, it is meant to influence the SCOTUS. This makes me question his world model even more. What is the proposed mechanism of action? A SC justice is watching a sports event on TV, sees the Reagan free trade ad, gets the message 'tariffs bad' into his head, then decides a case which hinges on what powers Congress can delegate to the president purely based on if he likes how the president has used these disputed powers. It seems that Trump is a victim of the typical mind fallacy here -- just because he could persuaded by a TV ad to make unprincipled changes to his policy to get some desired object-level outcome, he assumes that the minds of justices work the same way. At the risk of likewise typical-minding, I think that he is wrong. Perhaps, some judges are partisan hacks who will rule for or against Trump on general principle. But my model of the median SC judge is someone who cares about the long term policy outcomes and making consistent rulings, rather than someone starting by writing "therefore, Trump's tariffs are legal/illegal" at the bottom of the page according to their leanings and then filling the space above with some legal argument. (Which is kinda what Roe v Wade did.)
In short, if Ontario wanted to influence the SCOTUS, TV ads seem like the worst way to go about it. I would recommend they pay high profile legal scholars to publish in academic journals. Or more cynically, invite some justices to an all-expenses-paid retreat.
The Republican Party is the Trump Party now. Using past Republican luminaries to criticize Trump is therefore out of bounds. It's not just an attack against the tribe, it is an attack against the tribe's mythology.
This is the worldview that got him elected. Trump has always been the electorate's id manifest, and in particular plays to a particular kind of impulsive, thin-skinned voter who thinks this is what strong, tough leadership looks like. To ask what his thought process is here is to suppose a kind of analytical mindset Trump very obviously does not have.
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That is true. And Trump is well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him. I think it is absolutely within bounds to require some restrain when it comes to hostile actions and posturing during negotiations. This is negotiation 101 be it nations, companies or individuals - especially if you hold all the cards.
Trump did the same with Zelensky in the past where he also misread the situation. Zelensky was in weak position and came literally to beg for money - but he could not help himself and overplayed his hand. So he got fucked and in turn he fucked his nation - he apparently did not realize that he needs to change his behavior under new administration. Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought his suit.
Now one can still criticize Trump for his style, but it seems to be working. He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan, he managed peace between Israel and Hamas, he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan, he presides over cooling of tensions between Cambodia and Thailand and he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo. It is not as if he is just a buffoon without results.
Also, Trump stops negotiating all the time. It's just a negotiation tactic to keep the other party off balance. Carney will probably have to disparage Ford, and then things will be back on.
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The President isn't supposed to arbitrarily tariff countries actually. If that were the case, Trump needn't have ever provided the fentanyl pretext for tariffing Canada.
Paradoxically president does have right to impose tariffs specifically for National Security reasons. Foreign power meddling in election campaigns counts as such a case as Russia gate showed us before.
All three courts to consider this question and about 2/3 of the individual judges have said the opposite. SCOTUS is considering it.
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I think that the US has sound strategic reasons to supply Ukraine, and that these are orthogonal to how much Zelenskyy is willing to grovel before Trump's throne. I do not think Zelenskyy disrespected Trump in a way that would have harmed him. I can not imagine an opinion piece by the (very pro-Ukraine) liberal media about how Trump was letting Zelenskyy walk all over him by tolerating him wearing his trademark army fatigues.
A typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.
Again, there is an optimal amount of aid the US should be willing to give to Ukraine for strategic reasons, and likely other amounts will be less effective.
I do not think India and Pakistan were that keen on a big nuclear war. The US (which is kinda allied to both) probably helped, but I think this is something which the Biden administration would have done just as well.
Regarding Hamas, his strategy was basically to give Nethanyahu the card blanche. This (questionable) victory is Bibi's, not his.
I remain skeptical if Trump really manages to get China and India to forgo cheap Russian fossil fuels. In general, with Trump, the winning move seems to tell him "yes", and continue as you did. Chances are he will either have another good phone call with Putin or a bad phone call with Zelenskyy and go back to not caring about Russian oil exports.
It's more about bargaining position and how much respect is due to Zelensky. He's a debtor here to beg after his nation's corrupt bullshit caused us (Trump) internal problems; letting him show up in the outfit of a heroic frontline operator sets a very different tone for the discussion.
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I don't think it is about groveling. In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example. I am not even US citizen but I do think that other NATO members really held their noses too high, it was as if they were entitled to everything that USA provides either trade or security wise in exchange of mockery and disrespect. I think demanding respect was absolutely in order.
Paradoxically Euros or other western countries do not have problem groveling before Xi Jinping or Saudis or even before Iranian dictators. But suddenly they are too good to show some respect to USA just because they think they can farm internal US political dispute.
I think the actual motivation was that the European leaders understood that Trump doesn't have any actual, real power over the military industrial complex which decides these things. Trump doesn't have the ability to stop the MIC (hell, they don't even tell him the truth about military operations) so who cares what he thinks? Zelensky knew that no matter what he did the flow of materiel was completely outside Trump's control.
This is conspiracy level thinking. When you say Trump doesn't have "power over" the MIC, what do you mean?
Budgets, which pretty much everything is down stream of, are firmly the responsibility of congress.
Military operations, short of a declaration of war, are 100% an executive branch function with WIDE latitude. Remember, the President is the commander in Chief.
But I feel like what you're trying to hint at is a shady world of lobbyists and backroom deals and executives at Lockheed etc. If this is what you mean a) say it and b) provide some evidence. Because the very, very sad truth of the matter is that most of the companies within the "military industrial complex" are welfare-parasite companies that are reflections of growth (or decline) in Congressional Budgets. The most recent CEO of Raytheon was literally trained as an accountant. These people aren't out there moving and shaking, they're inside (indoor kids) who can stomach the tedium of working budgetary processes and Pentagon PPBE processes over decades. In terms of FMS (Foreign Military Sales), that process is mostly about convincing the State Department that you aren't exporting anything particularly advantageous (the US doesn't let the really good stuff go overseas), and doing all of the paperwork that says your sales team wasn't trying to bribe the foreign government*.
On the Ukraine specific issue, it's hilarious to think that the big players in the MIC really care about arms deals there. Ukraine is dead fucking broke. The US assistance to them, although not insignificant, is not the prize pie for MIC. They're after the multi-decade long domestic deals. The F-35 program, over its entire lifetime, will bring in revenue for Lockheed in excess of $1 trillion. The ground based updates to the Nuclear Triad will get Northrop half a trillion. According to the State Department from this March total US assistance to Ukraine has been about $70bn all in from the start of the war. But wait! that's mostly direct transfers of equipment - i.e. things that the US already purchased (in budgets!) years prior. It's not like that was a $70bn check to Ukraine or even $70bn of new military purchases.
That number is less than $5bn (same link). That's the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) number. That is the "help Ukraine pay for stuff" budget. $5bn isn't anything to sneeze at but you have to think - like the MIC does - in terms of ROI and opportunity cost. Do I, Lockheed / Northrop / Raytheon / General Dynamics et al., really care want to do all of the extra and politically fraught work of supplying to Ukraine for a share of $5bn when I can just make more patriot missiles for the Army at home and collect $2.7 bn dollars.
There are several good reasons to not support supporting Ukraine. There's a bunch of threads here on that topic. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing this idea that the MIC "loves war" because it means sales go up and that, furthermore, they're so gifted as to be able to manipulate a whole host of world leaders.
That's not the case. The MIC's wet dream are a bunch of hyper expensive programs, run mostly domestically, that go nowhere. Government IT, for instance, is, annually, on the order of $100 bn. Government IT is also were money goes to commit suicide because it's all horrific mismanagement of dated computer systems that provide no value to the taxpayer but are mandated by Congressional budgets. See where we end back up at? Budgets. American, Congressionally approved budgets. That's where the MIC spends most of its energy. Budgets. And it isn't sexy hollywood lobbying. There are no steak dinners, cigars, and cognac with Senators who give you a wink and a nod so long as you donate to their campaign. No, it's a lot of repetitive zoom calls and in person meetings with the Budgeteers at the Pentagon and staff on Capitol Hill and then hoping that the paperwork shuffle ends up with a single number next to your Program Element Number going up.
On FMS bribery, I should do an effort post but it would be too specific to not be doxx bait. The long and short of it is that every American arms company knows that for close to all foreign governments, bribery is required for a deal to go through. For the Europeans its a lot of soft bribery - fancy dinners, sales meetings at resorts, whatever. All of this can actually get written off totally legally. For those countries with less of a Western sensibility, however, bags of cash, coke, and hookers are often part of the deal. With the State Department going over everything with a fine toothed comb, however, no American firm is going to take a chance. What exists, then, is an actual shadowy network of lawyers and "consultants" based out of places like Switzerland, Barbados, and the like who provide "advisory" services to the American firms, for a fee, and then act as a liaison to the foreign government.
You might think "oh, so it's just pass through bribery!" But, no. There's actually a tremendous amount of risk here. The American firm can't simply say to a foreign government "Hey, here's a bunch of money to help us get the contract. But, it's going to come from Shady-Uncle-Hans over here." That's transparent. The American firms have to have real not just plausible deniability of knowledge of any illegal activities. So, they hire these "consultants" and the consultants go, of their own accord, to the foreign government parties and do whatever they think needs to be done. Then, they send a bill for their service fee to the American firms.
In effect, the American firms are pushing money into a black box and hoping that the magic bribery fairies are on their side. This is often not the case. Anecdotes are crazy - literally comic book levels of fraud. There's a lot of middle manning and skimming off the top. Over promising and then disappearing late in deals etc. Ultimately, the American firms who do FMS hate these people and see them only as a necessary overhead expense. They prefer to work directly with a non "bribe me" government to work out actually good security deals.
But, again, what the MIC firms really want is domestic program dollars. The largest arms deal in history was with the Saudis at $142 bn. That's big money, for sure. But there's no guarantee that it all gets paid out, that there aren't weird changes to the contract, or that it could grow to, I don't know, $1 trillion. In the domestic market, the government always pays (unless you really fuck up), if the contract does change it will do so slowly and, most of the time, it's an opportunity for the contract to charge more and, finally, if it's a big enough program in enough congressional districts it can literally turn into $1 trillion over the course of several decades.
First of all, I'd just like to say that I agree with the vast majority of what you wrote. That's a great takedown of MIC corruption and how the sausage actually gets made in certain sectors.
First of all, I don't think "conspiracy level thinking" is much of an insult. When I look at the Iraq war and try to understand it, I have no problem believing the conspiracy theory that they didn't actually have any WMDs. Similarly, I believed in the conspiracy theory that the NSA was spying on domestic communications even when James Clapper went and said that they weren't doing it to congress. All of the conspiracy theories about Trump being surveilled by the intelligence agencies on false pretexts were completely true as well - and the mainstream, non-conspiratorial theories on these topics are just transparently false. This line of attack probably would have worked in the 90s, but that dog just won't hunt in a world where I can go and read the PRISM documentation or the full story of the Carter Page FISA warrant.
But as for what I mean, I mean exactly what I said - the military-industrial complex has more power over the actions of the US military than Trump himself does. The military directly lied to his face about circumstances on the ground and encouraged him to take actions which he explicitly said he did not want. Trump famously said that to attack Iran would be the mark of an incompetent president with poor negotiation skills, and he relentlessly promised in his campaign that there'd be an end to the pointless foreign wars. Once he got into office, the pointless foreign wars kept on going and nothing changed.
I understand that this may seem a bit trite (of course politicians aren't going to keep all of their campaign promises) but it reflects a serious problem in the mechanism of democracy. A candidate ran promising an end to wasteful foreign wars and military adventurism - only to get the US involved in more wars, bomb additional countries and start getting ready to invade another country for oil (Venezuela). A politician wanted to do something, received a democratic mandate for it... and then absolutely nothing happened. I'm not going to claim to know precisely where the actual decisions are being made, nor do I think there's some shadowy figure behind the throne or learned council of elders deciding everything (my belief is that the US state has multiple competing power groups with divergent interests, and the actual actions taken by the US government emerge from that competition).
What I am claiming is that the actions of the US military/empire are very clearly resistant to the desires and will of the voting public. Maybe Trump is corrupt, maybe the generals are lying to him again, maybe he's being blackmailed by someone with access to the Epstein tapes, maybe the military has gone rogue and explicitly does not answer to civilian leadership - I can't tell, and until the dust settles I don't think anyone will be able to tell. But the fact that I can't explain precisely why the actions of the US war machine grind on regardless of the expressed wishes of the populace doesn't change that reality.
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Except of course when he did in fact shut off the flow of materiel and intelligence for a week and a half to demonstrate his power over Zelensky, and the next time Zelensky visited the US he wore a suit in deference?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93United_States_relations#Second_Trump_presidency_(2025%E2%80%93present)
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The same Canada that got into a diplomatic mess with China because the US wanted to cause an issue Huawei? The lumping is doing a lot of work here.
This seems like a microcosm of a lot of Trumpian foreign policy: it's all a blend of vibes. What all of these groups have in common is uppity vibes, not actions.
Trudeau comes across as an Obama-wannabe -> this naturally means he comes across as the sort of person who would look down on Trump -> when Trump does something totally arbitrary against Canada it's then read through the lens of legitimate vengeance for ?? because the class of people who look like Trudeau/Obama include people who have ignored US strategic interests at some point or been mean to Trump.
Ultimately it just seems like the general grievances of red tribe have just metastasized to the international realm (because Americans are somewhat insulated from global affairs and so can turn foreign policy into a narcissistic affair).
It’s just DeCarlos Brown muttering to himself that the tiny white woman called him a nigger. It isn’t anything unexpected: he was already angry, as many loners are, and was desperately hoping to hurt someone. When he didn’t receive a justification, he manufactured one so he could stab someone anyway.
I actually think the reasons were more prosaic. Trump wanted secure borders and more favorable trade relations with some additional things like increased defense spending as part of NATO pledge etc. Canada dug their heels and decided to go for trade war and insults back. It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent, but the dispute is a real one. Also let's not pretend that the same does not work the other way around as when EU representatives strongarm other countries like Hungary or post Brexit UK or Italy, when elections do not go the way powers that be like.
But in the end it is all besides the point. Canadians may learn the ancient truth of the strong do as they will and weak suffer what they must. USA is not Hungary or some random African nation. Good luck to Canada for next 3 years and potentially number of more years, if some MAGA candidate wins next elections.
When Trump wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and slap his name on it, that happened. The idea that Canada's response is to just never do anything when it comes to US demands doesn't stand up to scrutiny. USMCA also has a mandated renegotiation period coming up so all parties agreed in principle that negotiations are part of the deal, Trump decided to jump the gun and impose tariffs outside of regular order (which is why he had to claim an emergency).
The idea that Canada is the party that "dug their heels in" and threw insults is...Like, I'm legitimately wracking my brain here because it's just so far from my experience of what happened. Trump started the conflict, Trump insisted on the idea of annexing a neighbor in a trade dispute, Trump then said a few times that there was nothing to be done to remove tariffs and Canada should just accept being annexed.
It would be vibes-based idiocy to base trade policy on that in the first place
But this isn't even really consistently true. Starmer is probably worse than Trudeau on all of the major woke indices and he somehow gets along with Trump.
If it is besides the point why bring it up? Why lump it in with legitimate strategic concerns like NS2? Why not just say from the start that the US is just thrashing about for advantage any way it can?
This is another hallmark of this sort of vibes-based, personality-driven "policy": frog-boiling and essentially apathy once it's done (for reasons no one could have predicted beforehand or hell, even articulate consistently today).
It's not a debate that Canada is weaker than the US (in fact, that's my argument against the idea that some meaningful defiance was going on), or that it has behaved in an indolent fashion that makes its dependency worse.
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I kind of hate to use this example, but EY nailed this dynamic in MoR with the clerk who was happy to enforce petty tyranny on the heroes, because they were heroic and would not retaliate, but careful to show respect and deference to the villains because they would retaliate viciously to disrespect. Frankly, I don't feel like Europe and Canada have acted like allies for a long time. They rather act like freeloading "friends" who hate us specifically because we do most of the work and pick up the tab all the time and they can't forgive us for it.
Many such cases!
Yep, many people view kindness and benevolence as stupidity and weakness bordering on entitlement to it. It reminds me an old joke about a businessman and a beggar:
Businessman sees a beggar and takes pity on him as he reminds him of his own turbulent past. So he gives him $100. The beggar is happy and thanks profusely. Next day the situation repeats and beggar is absolutely besides himself. This goes on for several days but then the businessman does not come anymore. After a month the businessman suddenly appears again with $100 bill in his hand and the beggar asks: Where were you last month? The businessman answers - Oh, I was on a vacation with my wife and my kids. The beggar then mutters: I guess it had to be a very nice vacation given all my money you spent.
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What exactly is the US national interest in a foreign leader's dress sense? To people who don't have Trump Hagiography Syndrome, there seems to be a pattern where Trump deploys tough negotiation tactics most successfully where the goal is to get people to flatter him personally, not to advance US national interests.
Lolwut
A ceasefire, not peace. There have been lots of those. Trump's one lasted less time than most.
The complete military defeat of Armenia by Azerbaijan (backed by Turkey) predates Trump's second inauguration. He turned up to take credit for the surrender negotiations.
Has he? The oil markets haven't moved.
And that those tactics aren't actually workable in the most intractable cases and thus only really fall hard on US allies.
Those tactics don't work on Putin and Kim Jong Un, but neither did anything else. Whether they help with Xi is still in question, but if they don't, the same thing applies.
It's obviously a problem because his theory of the case is that he can solve disputes with Xi and Putin by doing this...to US allies.
His strategy with Ukraine appeared to be to soften the USs pro-Ukraine position enough that the US could reasonably act as a third party to the negotiation. This naturally involved becoming harsher towards Ukraine. It didn't work, because Putin was intransigent and possibly took this (as many of Trump's opponents seem to have) as Trump being a pushover. But it's certainly a strategy that had a chance for success. It even seemed to have worked in Gaza, where the ceasefire came right after the Trump administration got publicly pissy at Israel over attacking in Qatar.
A risk raised by his domestic opponents when he suggested his solutions.
Well Israel, the stronger party here, is closer to Ukraine than to Russia so it isn't really the exact same problem (putting aside whether Trump's vocal support emboldened Israel into that blunder or if the later apology was all theater)
No, his domestic opponents didn't stop with saying that Putin would think he was a pushover. They said he WAS a pushover and was going to give Ukraine away. He did not. The negotiation failed, but so had all previous attempts.
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This codes to me as very similar to the atheist quoting the bible meme. Does anyone really think Doug Ford is a huge Reagan fan?
Different intentions.
The main purpose of quoting the Bible to religious conservatives is to needle them over their hypocrisy. This is not especially productive, but it is satisfying for the people doing it. Watching them get huffy is the point. Only the most naive people expect it to actually change minds.
This ad is pretty clear aimed at persuasion, or at least raising the salience of the issue. It doesn't directly attack anyone, it appeals to a well-liked American leader, etc... The question of whether or not Ford personally likes Reagan is immaterial. If I'm trying to persuade someone, I'm going to try to appeal to their values and preferences, not mine.
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Well, from browsing through his WP page, it seems that he is sorta libertarian-conservative. As he is not the at the head of a nation state, it is hard to judge how committed to free trade he is. I think that it is very possible that he really believes that free trade is a good Schelling point to strive for, even if he does not have a picture of Reagan in his bedroom.
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Doug Ford is a conservative who leads the main right-wing party in the Ontario provincial Parliament, so I would very surprised if he wasn't a Reagan fan.
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Of course not, but Ford might well concede that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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What else should the atheist quote when arguing that some Christian is a hypocrite?
"Of course this argument wouldn't work on me. But just maybe it will make you do what I want."
Accusations of hypocrisy tend to be failures in recognizing nuance, different factions or different situations and context. I would put very little stock in accusations of hypocrisy from someone hostile to my views.
There is nothing in the Christian faith, to my knowledge, stating that you are allowed to not follow it just because your atheist interlocutor isn't. It is all good and well to be a conflict theorist and to refuse to submit to your enemies, but doing that and still claiming to follow a faith that might require you to submit to your enemies sometimes will be rightfully called hypocrisy.
The religion claims it's true. If I make an argument from what is, from your perspective, truth, then either my argument is faulty, you agree with me despite me not accepting your axioms, or your axioms aren't as axiomatic as you claim and are closer to "never do what my enemies want".
If we were competing mathematicians, where you believed 1+1=2, and I believed something else, then suppose I ask you to make some sort of a tangible bet based on your belief that 1+1=2. Will you go "but you don't even believe that 1+1=2"?
All good points.
My issue is the common trend of people asserting what the views of their opponents should be and declaring them hypocrites based on a simplistic understanding of their views. Attempting to assign ideological positions to someone and then hold them accountable, rather than asking and listening to their actual views.
There are of course actual hypocrites and valid accusations of hypocrisy. But culture war accusations of hypocrisy tend not to be that. They are instead extreme extrapolations from vague sentiments.
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I've always taken the point of that pithy line in that comic to be making the point that someone who lacks the faith in the religion and uses the belief as a tool to manipulate others into doing what they want is someone who likely doesn't understand the thinking of someone of the faith, to such an extent that their arguments based on the religion are faulty. In a Dunning-Krueger way, someone who believes he knows enough about a religion he has no faith in to manipulate believers into doing things based on their faith in the religion is someone who doesn't understand what he doesn't understand.
"You simply don't understand how it works until you actually start believing it yourself" is also the go-to line of many obviously malicious cult leaders. (Some cynically assume the major church leadership counts, too.)
Indeed, it is. And by many people's lights, including mine, basically every major religion is isomorphic to a malicious cult. That's a completely irrelevant point to the one that's being made in that comic, though.
What is the actual comic you're talking about, by the way?
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If trying to point out they are a hypocrite, perhaps. But that is not what is happening here, or Trump is not Reagan and isn't being a hypocrite.
In addition, the average use of bible quotes against Christians usually just shows a misunderstanding of that text, but that isn't really worth getting into at this time.
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That is a good question, but in my experience such disingenuous motivated reasonings are always discounted with an eye roll. Intuitively I would say only another ingroup-member (who also wants the ingroup to succeeed) can credibly criticize the ingroup.
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The ultimate problem is, Reagan and the free traders were just wrong. Free trade destroyed our ability to manufacture physical goods, offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world and making software far more attractive since software companies can hire thousands of Indians to work for pennies.
Ultimately I think Trump should just accept that fact and say hey Reagan was wrong. But then again I'm not a politician.
Also the context of that Reagan radio address was his justification for applying tariffs against Japan. "Of course we all know tariffs are bad, but..."
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It didn't. For one: the US still manufactures physical goods. The value of the US manufacturing sector is second only to China. It outstrips the combined output of the European Union.
What happened was that the US went from a position of absolute dominance in manufacturing in the late 70s to having a wide range of competitors today (most prominently China). Short of bombing China, however, this was pretty much unavoidable. It hasn't helped that the US pursued soft deindustrialization policies domestically while the tech sector hoovered up human and financial capital, but US manufacturing supremacy was unlikely to last even with a more favorable legal/financial environment.
Unavoidable long-term yes, but short and medium term?: Quite preventable. The US rolled over to China and allowed IP theft on industrial scale, strategic acquisitions of US and global companies in key industries, ignored blatant limitations on foreign companies within China, ignored massive targeted state subsidies, and failed to support manufacturing in other more friendly and allied low-labor-cost countries, all because US companies were convinced that they could double their profits by getting access to the Chinese market - which, and the real kicker of it all, obviously did not work in any way, shape, or form for anyone in the West, at least beyond a decade or two. Sadly nothing too new; I still regularly curse Nixon's name to this day over leaving us with the Taiwan shitstorm because he was too busy trying to reap short-term political benefit at home - sound familiar?
There's an alternate world where Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, etc. (possibly India but that's a different can of worms) all picked up significant amounts of manufacturing slack which we could play off of each other, and China's technological acceleration was delayed by a full additional decade (and thus also their military, political, and economic clout). China really backstabbed us when it came to the "promises" made on joining the WTO in the leadup to 2001, Bush should have taken action by the mid-2000s to give them a warning, and Obama shouldn't have taken so long to bring about the TPP (2016!) which ended up both shitty and even worse, sailing without us. Even worse, especially under Obama's watch, the forced technology transfer, ownership restrictions, and outright theft reached critical proportions with essentially zero real response. I personally think that will go down in history as one of the worst economic blunders of all time.
What hath this wrought? There's a strong chance we're war with China over Taiwan within two years after Trump leaves office, and if so we will lose. Badly. It won't even be all that close.
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I would argue that free trade made the US the economic superpower it is today. Of course, there is such a thing as being a victim of your own success. To bring back low-margin manufacturing, one would need to crash the US dollar. If the dollar is low, US products will be cheap on the world market, while Americans will have a hard time paying for international alternatives. However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.
While some people care about the US manufacturing physical goods, very few want to work in manufacturing. The fraction of Americans who are envious of the job and life quality of an Indian working in plastics manufacturing is basically zero.
I think protectionism makes sense for supply chains which are of strategic importance. But that only covers a small fraction of products. Raising tariffs on USB cables until people will start to manufacture them domestically will not help your economy.
USB cables contain microprocessors and are a security risk, I would absolutely prefer not to use ones manufactured by a hostile state.
I admit that I was thinking of USB-A to USB-B cables, which are supposed to be completely passive.
Also, I think that that level of paranoia is going to be prohibitively expensive if you want to protect the US public at large from supply chain attacks.
The compromise would be to have a process to manufacture USB cables in the US using vetted companies which employ vetted citizens for 100$ apiece to supply the needs of the NSA and the Pentagon (where BYOD is presumably forbidden), and let the rest of the US buy 5$ cables from China and risk supply chain attacks which spy on their printer communication.
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The US was already an economic powerhouse by the start of WWII, before free trade. After WWII, it was absolutely dominant. Free trade was good, but it wasn't the making of the superpower status.
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Certainly of a lot of voters. But some countries run on intentionally-devalued currencies --- China has been accused of this before. It doesn't drastically change the balance of internal trade, but makes your products more competitive globally for export, presumably allowing investment at scale for a longer-term payoff. The pluses of a valuable currency only show up if you're buying global commodities (oil prices), imported luxury goods, or taking international vacations (which is favorable only to the monied fraction that is going on those vacations). It need not directly hit anything valued in terms of "hours of domestic labor", like construction.
ETA: you're probably right about USB cables, but I'm not convinced about phones and computers, which are mostly automated production lines.
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I strongly urge you to read this article by Hanania. It's a stock narrative in American populism that neoliberal policies in general (and NAFTA in particular) resulted in all of the manufacturing jobs being offshored and the demise of the Midwest, but Hanania quite rightly points out that, as a consequence of more efficient technologies, the proportion of the US population employed in manufacturing had been in steady decline for decades prior to Reagan's election. The graph illustrating this is really striking (Ctrl-F "continuation of a long run process"): there are literally no shocks, spikes or sudden drops visible from about 1977 onwards, it's a smooth, continuous decline.
If an Indian can do the same job as an American for half the price, it would be foolish not to hire the Indian. This is also known as "economic efficiency".
If you want a job as a cashier that will pay €75k a year, no one would hire you. If you whined that you can't get a job because of all the scab workers/immigrants who'll work for peanuts (i.e. €25k a year), everyone would laugh at you. I truthfully do not understand why this complaint is illegitimate for an unemployed cashier with delusions of grandeur, but why I'm supposed to take it seriously when an unemployed software dev makes it. Because software dev is "skilled labour"? Too bad: your salary is in part a reflection of your skillset's scarcity in the jobs market. If lots of people invested in learning the same skillset as you, and some of them want to live within their means, you will be outcompeted. Better luck next time.
I for one don't want to get into a race to the bottom against the poorest people on Earth. They'll win and I'll be dragged most the way down to their economic level.
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That argument shouldn't apply unless the US has full control over the other country's government. Otherwise the other country's government can mismanage it in such ways that people there are willing to work for very low wages, and then those people will work for low wages in our country and drive our salaries down. On the level of each individual laborer the laborer is working for peanuts in the US voluntarily, but on a level of incentives, most of them would not have done so if the other country's government had not made their country so poor.
And the other country's government, of course, is a government and as such not subject to market forces or economic efficiency.
Also, this assumes some sort of weird EA-variant. If it's economic efficiency to not hire Americans, I don't want economic efficiency. Why would I hold economic efficiency as an end in itself without regard of who gets to benefit from it? I don't treat all humans alike.
Is your claim then that you would rather American firms hire mediocre American programmers over talented Indian ones?
It depends on the value of "mediocre". "Mediocre" could, for instance, mean "does equally good work, but demands an American salary", in which case yes. It could also mean "is slightly less efficient and the amount by which he is less efficient doesn't matter", in which case, also yes.
Who would you rather an American firm hire: a talented Indian programmer, or an American programmer who is less efficient to the degree that it matters?
The answer is tautologically the Indian programmer because of the phrase "to the degree that it matters". It is possible to think the Indian programmer should never be hired and still agree with that (the degree that it matters would then be zero).
I don't know if that answer is tautologically true: I think there are quite a number of nativists who think the number of Indian programmers getting hired by American companies on H1B visas ought to be zero, regardless of how talented they are.
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One thing that always interests me with these takes is why the other countries engage in counter tariffs. If tariff-free trade relations are such an amazing boon, why even engage in such a retaliation? If US wants to produce cheap aluminum and cars and timber and brandy then why did let's say Canada impose tariffs as some part of trade war? Are they not foolish for not taking nicely subsidized goods for cheap from USA and just produce something else?
This is something free-traders often point out, and it's true to an extent. The payoffs aren't like prisoners dilemma for the nation -- "co-operate" (no tariffs) while the other side defects is better for both sides than defect-defect, unlike Prisoners Dilemma where co-operate/defect is worse for the co-operator.
However, there are two other issues. One is that co-operate/co-operate is better for both, so engaging in a little spite (harming yourself in order to harm the other guy) to push the irrational counterparty back to that position may make sense. And the other is the nation has subdivisions, and some are hurt by the tariffs more than others. Canada may not want to allow the US to hurt its maple syrup producers with impunity even if that helps other Canadians.
And USA may not want to allow Canada to hurt its lumber producers or car producers with impunity, even if it helps other Americans. It's the same logic, the only thing remaining is chicken-egg issue of who has the original blame, which in the end is not really that interesting.
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Cooperate-cooperate is better for everyone, but if one party defects, the other party must punish them by defecting in turn. Tit-for-tat outcompetes DefectBot and CooperateBot.
That is not the claim of anti-tariff people. Their claim is that tariffs damage local economy. Unless they have some savior complex where they enact tariffs in order to save poor people of country they are in trade war with? It does not make sense.
Also where is the limit, what is the end game? Free trade is not truly free and effective unless literally every single country on planet Earth including Iran, Russia and North Korea "cooperates" - and until such a time we need harsh regime of aggressive trade wars to the last man? There is a list of countries by tariff rate here - USA with 3.3% is among the best - better than Canada or Switzerland or Norway and much better than almost any African countries. Why focus on USA and not some other much more "unfree" country?
Certainly it is. No tariff/no tariff is the best, followed by tariff/no-tariff -- which is worse for both sides, but more worse for the tariffing side, followed by tariff/tariff, which is worse than tariff/no-tariff for both sides. This is not a prisoner's dilemma payoff, and the per-round rational strategy is clearly "no tariff" in all cases. But that's not the end of it, because a rational party will also want to get the other party to not tariff, and if the other party erroneously thinks it's in a prisoners dilemma, some tariffing makes sense to do this.
This game doesn't seem to have a name at least on Wikipedia. The payoffs are like Chicken except the mixed case is reversed (that is, going straight is lower-payoff than chickening out when only one player chickens). It's not a very interesting game because the best move is obvious; it only comes up because the players think they're playing something different, or because of the payoffs being uneven within the countries as I mentioned above.
So given that America’s average tariff rate is 1.49%, and Canada’s is 2.35%, isn’t Canada being the defect-bot here?
I don't think you can determine who is a "defect bot" based on tariff rates. Probably neither is a defect-bot; it's just that both are sometimes tariffing (and Canada for more and/or larger, if those figures are accurate and current).
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Oh, so tariffs are bad for target of tariffs. And maybe some nations with large economies that are not as exposed to international trade are to large extent immunized to impact of counter tariffs. It almost seems as if tariffs are quite a nice tool to threaten or even enact in order to bring the other side to the table and make some diplomatic concessions and maybe sometimes it is actually good to experience some pain in order to gain even more good. I'd say Trump would wholeheartedly agree.
I agree with Trump that it could sometimes be good to impose tariffs to get the other guy to back down on their trade barriers. I disagree that this is all that he has been doing. Trump seems to think that overall having some tariffs is better than having no tariffs (hence the 10% global tariff); free trade is not his goal.
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Unless you actually care about the American people and giving Americans jobs? Protectionism in economics is not "foolish" it's a strategic decision to promote your own people's economic interests over others.
I don't believe in the economic vision of "comparative advantage," it seems to be obviously riddled with holes at this point. Like, for instance, lacking strategic manufacture of key military tech and medicines. Not to mention hundreds of other issues.
American people have jobs. Prime age LFPR is as high as its ever been
Protectionism is about allowed favored groups to exploit the rest of the population. If the USG wants specific domestic capabilities, it should pay for them directly rather than grant some firms a license for rent-seeking and hoping they do what we want.
I think you should be careful just using the 25-54 age range, as that excludes any trends for early retirement and delayed starts. It would show the same rate for a society where people work from 25-54 exactly the same as one where people work from 18-65, despite the latter having 18 more years of productivity (47 vs 29).
The trends across different demographics and age groups all tell different angles of the story, enough that I do not think it is simple to say labor participation doing just fine. I would not go so far as to say it is dire, but there are troubling signs when you look across the whole age range. Going from a high of 67% participation to 62% drops the ratio of participants to non-participants from just over 2 to 1.63. Unlike earlier decades, there is a smaller ratio of children to adults to explain the lower rate. Perhaps it will level out as the boomer generation starts to pass away, but I can understand why people are troubled looking at these numbers.
That's the point of the prime age rate. A society where people live longer in retirement and stay in school longer is not without tradeoffs, but it is not indicative of a society dealing with large scale unemployment due to outsourcing.
Overall LFPR excludes people younger than 16. The proportion of 16-17 year olds working has declined. This is generally seen as a positive, and regardless of where you stand on its moral valence, it is indicative of a society that doesn't feel a lot of pressure to push older minors into the workforce, not a society struggling to find employment opportunities for its people.
I agree that living longer will definitely skew the LFPR, but I think it definitely introduces blindspots into the data to set the cutoffs at 25 and 54. A 55 year-old, more than anytime in the past, still has many productive years ahead of them. If those people are retiring earlier because of strong entitlement programs, real estate bubbles in their favor, credentialism/ageism pushing them out of the work-force, etc. I would think we'd want those numbers to be involved in the conversation.
Living longer to enjoy retirement, taking it earlier, and spending more time in school learning are good things, so long as the cost of those benefits are accounted for. One of those costs includes having fewer people creating resources while still consuming resources.
I puts a finger on the scale to set the age range to 25-54 when talking about gainful employment of the overall populace. It masks some of the problems of credentialism hitting the young and hides the effects of detrimental policies pushing out the old. Having said that, increasing the age range to, say, 18-65 would not be the end-all-be-all of labor statistics either, but another hand to feel for the shape of the metaphorical elephant.
Here's 20-54. Was higher in the late 1980s-90s, but still quite high.
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I'm not as sure; I think it's both. That's why the warehousing exists the way it does; it adds pressure to keep the under-18 set (and under-25 set with respect to college for the white-collar professions) out of the workforce.
There's not enough economic opportunity to employ them sustainably. There used to be, which is why their workforce participation was higher in days when there was more economic opportunity for that (and is part of why society tolerates the credentialism spiral that normally consumes the objectively best days of one's life, that being your early twenties).
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That's why the prime age LFPR is used. Americans getting so rich they can retire early is a good thing. The low end is more of a mixed bag as it mixes people staying in education voluntarily longer with lack of opportunity at entry level.
Agreed, although we would need some way to sort between voluntary vs involuntary retirements vs "voluntary" retirements. Although it is probably another spectrum, so we're looking at marginal changes that could be pushing people to retire early, some positive and some negative: High 401K returns & buy-out deals vs poorly timed layoffs & onerous regulations.
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But by your own admission, you don't care about giving Americans jobs. You want to give Americans jobs at vastly inflated salaries relative to their market worth without their creating any additional value i.e. rent-seeking. If you just wanted to give American software devs jobs, you would tell them to either:
Option 1 is not a facile or rhetorical suggestion: it might well be the case that the modal American software dev is more productive than the modal Indian. Maybe a native English speaker will have an easier time understanding and being understood than someone speaking English as a second language with a heavy accent, which will be more efficient (hence cheaper) in the long run. Maybe the modal Indian coder is more prone than his American equivalent to writing sloppy code which works in the short-term but creates technical debt over time. (These are toy examples: I don't believe that the latter is the case.)
But an American software dev who acknowledges that he is no better than his Indian equivalent but demands to be paid double his salary anyway (because he's an aMurrican, dammit!) inspires no emotions in me other than disgust and contempt. This sort of whiny entitlement actually strikes me as profoundly un-American, in the McCarthyist sense of the term.
I would even be open to being persuaded on the grounds that, while hiring a talented Indian programmer on a H1B at $70k/year is cheaper and more efficient in the short-term, in the long-term high levels of migration from overseas might impose negative externalities (in the form of community cohesion etc.) on society as a whole. But when I hear someone moaning "it's not fair — I'm just as good at my job as he is, but he'll work for cheaper!", all I can think is "oh, well then he deserves the job more than you."
Ok I regret my previous response, I wrote it in anger.
I do think you can make an extremely compelling and true case that overseas employees are often much less productive than American employees, even if only because of a shared culture. However, unfortunately much of our economy is geared towards short term juicing of numbers, instead of long term genuine value creation. This means offshoring is naturally incentivized.
I'd also say that I don't think there is anything wrong with protectionism, and I don't think it's unamerican. Early Americans were extremely patriotic and judgmental of others countries. I highly doubt the founding fathers would've been in favor of the massive globalist free trade economies we have today, in large part because they considered their nation morally superior to the rest of the world.
No hard feelings. I understand where you're coming from, and I agree that protectionism may have some extremely limited use cases (mainly that outlined by Scott here).
For me, the destruction of rural America's prosperity and selling out these people for globalism hit very close to home. My father died when I was young, in large part because he was committing to keeping a rural family business alive that his grandfather built, and he had to compete with overseas manufacturers. There are real costs to these economic plans, and I genuinely don't give a shit about the economic efficiency of competing with people in other countries if it's at the cost of my fellow Americans livelihoods.
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Yes, I want Americans to enjoy the wealth our ancestors created and be exclusionary and rent seeking to the rest of the world. I have no problem with that, to a certain degree.
I'm sorry you have contempt for the country that built the modern internet, and much of the modern world, wanting to have a higher status than other countries that are mostly along for the ride.
Patriotic nitpick: the modern internet (hypertext, URLs, HTTP) was built by a Brit in Geneva: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee. Although I'm pretty sure America gets the credit for Usenet.
Otherwise agreed.
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Bro if I paid indian prices for housing and every other good and indian tax rates I could afford to work for indian wages too.
You seem to fail to understand that american companies make america-sized profits by selling in america at american prices - prices that are only affordable to americans because of america-sized wages. If no company pays american wages anymore the whole edifice collapses. It's literally textbook tragedy of the commons here. An individual company thinks they're super smart offshoring, but if every company does it congrats we've achieved total parity with the indian standard of living.
See my reply here. I'm not talking about Indian coders working remotely from India.
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I'm not saying this is always wrong, but it is the incantation that summons Moloch.
Elsewhere on this site, we have @faceh lamenting that every tech product eventually enshittifies and tech innovators build Skinner boxes rather than finding a way to monetize that doesn't wreck user experience. And one of the primary reasons this happens is that people expect a reasonably complete product with a certain amount of polish these days, and the moment you start looking for funding to do so you meet a VC who say, "well, I could fund you, or I could fund one of the 10,000 startups who aren't pre-committing to leave money on the floor". (There are other reasons, including the fact that every founder believes they should be a multi-millionaire if their startup is successful).
And this attitude is slowly poisoning the entire tech market. Customers are skeptical about trying new products, expecting the rug to be pulled from under them. Entrepreneurs are pressured to only start buzzworld-laden unicorns (because that's all that gets funded) and pass over serious attempts to build useful things. There is no slack to take risks, and quality slowly declines as more and more individually-ok but collectively-damning savings are made. It's not just that outsourcing leads to cultural externalities, or even that these devs are necessarily worse. But the attitude of "I can find someone cheaper than you" undermines the spirit that is needed to produce genuinely high-quality products.
There is also the more hard-edged point that paying American salaries is (or should be) the price of having access to the rich American market to sell your product, which is sustained by American workers living in America paying American prices. If you want to situate your company in Vietnam, hire only Vietnamese workers and sell only in Vietnam for Vietnamese prices, nobody will stop you.
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Purchasing power is the missing link here. Stuff in India is cheaper. It's not that the American software dev demands a higher living standard than the Indian ones settle for, it's that rent, taxes, etc. are more expensive for the American one than the Indian one, so if he settled for the same gross wages he'd wind up much worse off. The only way for him to compete would be to move to India as well.
I'm not talking about Indians working remotely from India, but Indians moving to the US for work (e.g. the ongoing debate about H1B visas).
I'm marginally more sympathetic to an American coder who complains about being undercut by an Indian in Mumbai who can live like a king on US minimum wage. An American coder who lives in SF who complains about being undercut by an Indian coder who also lives in SF? Sorry, don't care. Either git gud or adjust your salary expectations.
The indian coder in SF sends back remittances to his family to live like kings and has the full possibility of returning with whatever savings they have which will go far further in India than the US. It's not a different situation at all. Yes, I too would be willing to work for less if I knew it was purchasing my family a mansion back in my hometown that I can return to as a conquering hero.
Also, yeah, before you even bring it up - people are also willing to work for less in worse conditions when they have a deportation hanging over their head. For that matter, they'd probably be willing to work for even less if we pointed a gun at their head and told em to get cracking or else. I don't want to compete with slaves for wages either - guess I need to adjust my salary expectations.
When you allow people with massively different and negative externalities driving their wage acceptance criteria down to compete with people who don't have the same externalities hanging over their head, you are transferring the consequences of those horsehair swords onto others. Surely the people who didn't previously have to compete with the sword of damocles can at least ask you to stop doing that?
Stop, please.
How many coders in the US have lost their jobs to people in the US illegally, a fact which was known to their employers, and which their employers used as leverage with which to pay them subsistence wages? I'd be amazed if it was triple digits. How many coders in the US have lost their jobs to literal slaves or indentured servants? I mean, has it ever happened?
Arguing about trees when the forest is burning down, or are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?
And yes, the fact is that US companies using offshored sweatshop slavery destroyed much of the US factory labor class. This is terrible in its own right -I shouldn't need to connect it to coders for you to care - but yes, this depresses coding wages too. The economy is interconnected and the general state of labor prices affects wages everywhere.
You will have to disambiguate this. I think I presented a convincing case that, if you look at the decline in total inflation-adjusted wages in the manufacturing sector in the US over time (as opposed to wages per employee), most of that decline is attributable to automation and mechanisation. This is also true of agriculture, for much the same reasons. If you look at all American employees who don't work in agriculture, in 1945, 37% of them worked in manufacturing: by 1977, this figure had fallen to 22%. This is before any of Reagan's neoliberal policies and nearly twenty years before NAFTA. Perhaps if there had been no offshoring and less immigration in the decades to come, the decline over the following fifty years wouldn't have been quite as steep, but I still find it hard to envision a scenario in which more than 10% of the American non-farm workforce works in manufacturing.
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Ah. In that case I don't entirely disagree (though you could still gesture at citizens having to pay taxes etc. that non-naturalized immigrants don't have to deal with), but I hope you understand the confusion given that you were making this argument seemingly in reply to a sentence which began with "offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world".
Yeah, that's a fair point.
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No, environmental law, labor law, product liability law, and other regulations did that. Free trade just saved us from some of the consequences of all that. With consequences which mainly fell on the "beneficiaries" of some of that law.
Software engineers are still paid an enormous amount of money, probably the best you can do without being a politician, an MBA, or having an advanced professional degree. It's true Indian labor has knocked the lower end out of the market for Americans, though that's mostly H-1bs rather than offshoring (offshore Indian programmers are so terrible even compared to bottom-tier H-1Bs I wouldn't be surprised if they're worse than useless), but the software market has expanded so much it's really hard to call this a net negative.
Fair points I do agree that over regulation was another part of the death knell of local manufacturing. Offshoring was part of it as well though.
Indian programmers are really not that terrible. I work at a bigcorp and our whole team is Indian. The bad ones get fired and over time the remaining team is decent.
Helps that our manager over here is Indian too though, I suppose.
Indian programmers (or other tech employees) aren't necessarily worse than their counterparts here. It's just that they, like skilled workers anywhere else, cost more money than their peers. And since most companies outsourcing to India are cheap bastards, they pay peanuts and so they get bottom of the barrel employees.
In addition to the normal race-to-the-bottom and lemon problems, there's also uniquely severe incentives toward fraud. Once you tell a lie, the truth will forever be your enemy, and there's a lot of reasons for low-tier immigrant-focused employers to have to lie. And since a few particularly scammy businesses make up the majority of H1-B applications in a few fields, there's a lot of potential to run into hilariously-incompetent people even where the median option would have been meh or even good.
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Most people are familiar with body-shop Indian programmers. All body shops use the same tricks: staff the teams with people that are tolerably underqualified and rotate them out as soon as they show promise. Indian body shops are simply big enough, cheap enough and remote enough that they can do this brazenly.
If a local body shop tried to rotate one of the devs that I actually liked, I would just have a coffee with the guy to confirm it wasn't a personal reason and bully the account manager into keeping him on my team. Worst case scenario, he tries to fire the dev for cooperating with me and I get to poach him with clear conscience.
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I think if you consider the Canadian politics angle, some pieces fall into place:
I'm not saying this is a perfect explanation. I have doubts about whether Ford or whoever was thinking about this stuff, but it would make a certain kind of sense.
Given the way Canadian politics works, this is extremely unlikely. National and provincial political parties are separate institutions and National and provincial politics are effectively separate career tracks.
That Ford has no brief to help Carney is nevertheless a valid point.
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On an unrelated note, I'm guessing the Republican reevaluation and demythologization of his legacy is something that is bound to happen at some point.
Its been a long running trend among younger generation Republicans that Reagan was tricked by Democrats on numerous issues, particularly immigration and balancing the budget.
Also general amnesty in return for securing the border.
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Also: abortion, the Long March through the institutions.
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But will Democrats become double-negative-polarized in his favor then?
I can see it, especially with the Abundance bros.
Dankest timeline, etc...
Is it really even worth giving that brainfart a capital letter? That ironically named "movement" is already dead and has no popular appeal at all on the left.
I'm not sure why would you be antipathetic towards the only part of the Dem apparatus that produces something least resembling nonsense? What purpose could that possibly serve? To elevate the AOC weirdos?
Have you seen the polling results? The "abundance" doctrine has no purchase in the left-wing base at all. Even without going into the issues with their actual ideas, there's simply no viable path to victory for them. If you think the abundance platform is good, you should go work with the party that actually supports them - which is the Republican party.
As for AOC, I don't actually like her either - and I think she's done enough damage to her reputation with the left that she's going to have a very hard time getting the top job even when the current crop of ghouls in the DNC gracelessly expire.
Oh I agree, I'm not particularly partisan anyway. But Republicans (or conservatives generally) should probably root for the wing of the Democrats (or liberals generally) that are somewhat less than completely insane.
Even if they are rooting for them quietly.
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Probably yes.
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... after the demythologization of FDR, by the Democrats. Reagan was mythologized, to begin with, because the last good Republican president was Eisenhower. Trumpists obviously don't parrot the party line about Reagan, but I'm guessing the median and modal Republican's image of Reagan is about what it was in 2015.
Apples and oranges. The demythologization of FDR would necessarily entail the demythologization of the American role in WW2, and I wonder if Democrat-aligned normies are ready for that. In Reagan’s case there’s no such taboo present.
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My completely arbitrary vibe as just another post-liberal shitlord floating around the internet is that boomers and dorks love Reagan but based chuds think he was a cuck on guns and immigration, if they think of him at all.
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I've mentioned this before, but I return to it because it remains true.
Circa 2016, when we were starting to realize that Trump was a real candidate, I attended a lunch talk with the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is a brilliant scholar, whatever you think of his political opinions. One of his core arguments that day in 2016 was that Barack Obama was about to become what he labeled at the time a "Turning Point President." His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established. So if Clinton had won in 2016, Obama would have been a bona-fide turning point, and we would be operating under the Obama paradigm today. It's a Hegelian triad, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, kind of system; a turning point president represents a new Synthesis that becomes the next Thesis.
But the upshot of this logic is that we are currently operating under the Reagan paradigm. Developed and attenuated, altered with each passing presidency, but we're still within that paradigm. When Reagan came into office, the last president to achieve this feat was FDR, and between FDR and Reagan we were operating within FDR's New Deal paradigm. The Democrats during that time tried to expand the New Deal, the Great Society and whatnot. Even Republican presidents during that period, Eisenhower and Nixon, were operating within the New Deal. Eisenhower adjusted the New Deal to make it more conservative, and Nixon signed a lot of liberal legislation but otherwise tried to reign in the New Deal and not to overturn it.
Reagan overturned the New Deal paradigm. He struck a fresh synthesis, of social conservatism that would manage change, pushing family values while mostly surrendering on race issues and the sexual revolution. Free market capitalism, free trade, race neutral corporate meritocratic success, these were the core values of the Reagan Revolution. An assertive foreign policy that brushed off post-Vietnam malaise with short and sharp foreign interventions that did the job and left town.
And we've operated under that ever since. Clinton's third way Dems were an adaptation to that paradigm, an effort to soften it and move it left. Dubya operated within that paradigm, dominated by the overseas interventions of his term. Obama said forthrightly that Republicans had been the party of ideas since the 1980s*, and sought to change that, but he still operated within a corporatist, capitalist, free trade, Washington-Consensus paradigm, with a foreign policy built around assertive American exceptionalism and short sharp interventions. Perhaps Obama thought he could establish a new paradigm, but he didn't, and I debated with Amar at the time if he even could claim one regardless of HRC's results.
If you hate the status quo, you have to hate Reagan as he actually existed. You can, of course, revise Reagan to make a myth of something you do support, but you can't love Reagan and hate the world we live in today. It's his world, it's his America.
*"I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom," Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.
That doesn’t seem right.
Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq. Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008. Obama hollowed out the Democrat apparatus; now Trump’s completed his own skin suit. The Tea Party was completely suborned. Identity politics got a second, third and fourth wind. American exceptionalism shares space with a multipolar model.
Whatever we’re in, it’s not the same paradigm as Reagan.
Were there any short, sharp and successful interventions besides Grenada and Panama?
Kuwait in 1991? Arguably Operations Praying Mantis and El Dorado Canyon, too.
Some might consider Kosovo / bombing Yugoslavia to have been successful, too.
The obvious problem with the Kuwaiti, Iranian and Libyan examples, as opposed to the interventions in Panama and Grenada, is that the military operation, no matter how splendid, did not result in the long-term political settlement of the crisis that prompted the invasion in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario after all where the 1991 Gulf War is not followed by another Gulf War eventually. Also, the Libyan regime stayed in power and kept supporting terrorist groups after 1986 as well (I suppose). In the case of Kosovo I think the long-term negative repercussions are too palpable. The ‘rule-based international order’ might have worked in another scenario but surely was never going to work after Kosovo.
It's very easy. If the US doesn't start the 2nd Gulf War, there isn't a 2nd Gulf War. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours in 2003 and his WMD programme was kayfabe to deter an Iranian invasion. The only terrorism he was sponsoring was Palestinian terrorism against Israel, which the West was and is comfortable tolerating in countries they don't have any other beefs against. Israel and Saudi Arabia both wanted Saddam gone, but by 2003 both saw Iran as the real threat, which means that the most likely outcome of a 2nd Gulf War (a Shia-dominated government inclined not to oppose Iran) is net negative for them.
There are good reasons for thinking that the world would have been better off without Saddam if he could have been removed by someone competent, but nobody had to remove him. There is no credible scenario where Saddam starts a 2nd Gulf War from his side.
Those are all good points, but I was referring to US domestic politics.
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Obama did... not run a noninterventionist foreign policy. Nor was there a major move away from neoliberal economics until very recently.
I didn’t say noninterventionist. More… disillusioned with the pretense of shortness and sharpness.
Maybe I’m applying too much hindsight. We did get out of Libya pretty fast, and the we didn’t know at the time that it would slump back into civil war. But the Afghanistan slog continued. We waffled on Syria. It’s not entirely pur fault, but it’s just not what I’d call short and sharp.
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No, we just argue about making them shorter and sharper, but we still haven't moved into another paradigm. Obama's foreign policy operated within the same system as Dubya's, the Reagan paradigm, but trying to keep it to drones and special forces instead of heavy ground troops. Obama's interventions in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen were all built around the same foreign interventionist playbook. Trump made lots of noise about being an isolationist, and at times I've applauded him for it, but he kept up drone and special forces campaigns begun by Obama in his first term, including the strike against Abu Bakr and Suleimani, and in his even-more-schizo second term he's bombed Iran in the shortest and sharpest way he could. Trump is trying to break the paradigm, but he hasn't yet constructed a cohesive edifice that shows what he actually wants to do: he talks America First then acts Israel-only. Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.
People are dissatisfied with neoliberal economics on both sides of the aisle, neither side has constructed an alternative. Our economy still functions as a neoliberal Washington consensus corporate financial system. The big banks are still big and still bailed out by the government, the big insurance companies are still causing the same problems as before the ACA, outsourcing and deindustrialization continued apace. Have corporations been pushed from power in any way since 2008, have admins since 2008 been any less in bed with corporations? Sure we've swapped General Motors and General Electric and IBM for Nvidia and Oracle and Meta, but the economy is still built around corporate profits and the stock market. The way it has been since Reagan.
Obama and Trump both talked about moving past the current paradigm into new territory, nobody has done it yet. Trump has yet to build a cohesive economic model or foreign policy. He gestures in new directions, he has not yet completed the change. Maybe President Vance will.
Your general point is correct, but every time this comes up I feel compelled to point out that it's the one thing I have and will always unequivocally praise Biden for. I've had some interesting debates with @Dean on the subject.
Biden's pullout was also executing a deal made by the 1st Trump administration which the Deep State were trying to manipulate Biden into ratting out of.
I tease "Trump makes us stronk" MAGA supporters about the fact that Trump surrendered to the Taliban, but under the circumstances it was clearly the right call for Trump to surrender and clearly the right call for Biden to implement the surrender agreement. The war had ceased to be winnable long ago.
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I dont recall if you have addressed this point in the past, but given what appear to be tactical blunders on just about every level, how do you defend Biden's failure to fire multiple Generals and other high level commanding officers that participated in the withdrawal?
The same way I defend Trump's failure to fire the generals who admitted to lying to him to prevent his lawful orders from being carried out. My assessment is that the Bureaucratic layer is out of control, and I'm much more worried about getting it back under control than I am about ensuring that the Executive is giving maximally-good orders. Given the choice between assigning blame to the bureaucratic layer and assigning it to the executive for failing to punish the bureaucratic layer... If we punish the executive, how does this translate to the bureaucratic layer receiving accountability for their fuckups?
Perhaps more firings?
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I'm kind of excluding you and me from the category "everyone" here. I guess "everyone relevant on the political spectrum" would be more accurate, but less felicitous.
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The right wing critique of Reagan would be that he was a Judas goat who created the strong appearance of rolling back Johnson’s Great Society program while actually solidifying and entrenching it. Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.
"Clinton and Gingrich actually did more to roll back the welfare state and control spending in general" is very much a valid criticism of Reagan. Empirically, the US is only fiscally responsible when there is a Democratic President and a Republican deficit hawk leads at least one house of Congress.
"Starve the beast" is a failed Reagan policy - it turns out that if you cut taxes while promising to protect popular spending, you don't force your political opponents to cut spending when they get in, you just blow out the deficit. The reason why Reagan still has a good reputation on tax is that most of what he did to the tax code was fiscally neutral simplification (lower rates, fewer loopholes).
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The Soviet Bloc was a spent force by the time he assumed office. Their best available future option was ongoing stagnation followed by limited market reforms that end up preserving the political system while abandoning the Cold War, as in the case of Cuba and Vietnam.
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The timing doesn't line up. In 1991, China was still sorting itself out while the US had emerged from the Cold War wealthier, more powerful, and more unchallenged than ever. It wasn't like the US exhausted itself crushing the USSR. You could compellingly argue that the US fumbled its post-Cold War international supremacy through a combination of complacency, arrogance, and sheer stupidity, but that's a matter quite separate from China winning the Cold War.
That won't necessarily stop people from re-imagining Reagan as the guy who sold the world to China, but they'll be wrong.
@anon_ I’m not saying Reagan personally whiffed it. That’s mostly on the people that came after him. I mean that with hindsight it starts to seem less and less like a grand achievement, which is going to tarnish his reputation even if that part of it wasn’t his fault. Ozymandias built a pretty amazing temple and monument complex, but all I’m seeing at the moment is a disembodied stone foot sticking out of the trackless desert and it’s hard to be impressed.
One of my favorite random facts is that after Shelley wrote the poem, the mummy of Ramses II (in Greek, Ozymandias) was discovered and is currently in a museum in Cairo.
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Oh come on. China ended 1988 with a GDP of $325B as compared to the US $5.XT
Almost all of China's growth and power has accrued after 2000.
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Exactly. If you don't like the America we live in today, you can't love Ronald Reagan. He compromised with the New Deal, he made Social Security and Medicare understood as permanent entitlements for "hard working" old people, even as he tried to roll back welfare benefits for working age young people. Reagan brought on The End of History, but maybe that wasn't such a good thing after all for conservatives.
I don't know where the saying originates, but I've heard many times that Athens recovered from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War very quickly, while Sparta never recovered from its victory. America may never recover from what it did to win the Cold War.
The Christian Right also supported him in the belief that he'll help them advance their goals. In fact, the opposite happened. At the same time, the Left largely completed the Long March through the institutions with most distracted Reagan supporters not even noticing.
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For over a decade at least I've seen the right blame Reagan's amnesty for turning California from deep red to deep blue. And also the reason to never believe in another amnesty deal every again.
I think for the longest time the GOP loved Reagan almost just because he won 49/50 states. He won the cold war, and there are still a terrifying number of unreformed cold warriors in and around Washington dictating increasingly deranged policy.
But it's also easy to forget that Reagan was a Hollywood liberal until he reinvented himself as a conservative. Liberals flocked to the GOP under his banner, and this weird combination of pro-interventionist, pro big spending liberals with pro free trade conservatives birthed the Neoconservative movement, which has been hated my entire life. Neocon was a meaningless smear word the entirety of my childhood and early adulthood.
But the lived experience of the Reagan years were amazing. My father until the day he died talked about what a relief it was to just survive in America under Reagan. The way he remembered it, taxes and cost of living was destroying everyone in America until Reagan came along and finally fixed everything. Reagan was elected in 80, my dad got married, bought a house and had a kid (me) shortly after. I can't speak to the accuracy of how he remembered things, but his actions certainly speak to some faith that it felt that way to him at the time at least.
Actually kind of reminds me of the trajectory of my own life with respect to Trump getting elected. The tax cuts were among the best raises I ever got, and my investments went through the roof. Made me feel good enough about my life after too long feeling like I was barely treading water, unable to keep up with a constantly shifting goalpost, that I got married, bought a house and had a kid.
I did the math about a year ago and guess what? At least if we're talking about amnesty creating eventual citizens who eventually vote and vote Democratic at disproportionate rates, the numbers simply don't work and would have had only a minor impact at best in turning California blue. So, I'm sorry if that's a long held belief of yours but it doesn't seem true.
It's probably more a mix of tech boom + urbanization + marginal changes in demographic makeup + a few more local concerns + national trends. It's worth noting how fast this was, though, and that makes me suspect the last two especially: +16 R for Reagan in the 1984 wave, to +3.5 R for Bush Sr 1988, to a total collapse to -13.5 (Ross Perot shenanigans though) as Clinton took the state for good in 1992 with about the same margin again in 1996. A bungled post-Reagan, post-amnesty GOP push for a 1994 anti-immigrant bill is often cited... but that post-dates the first massive swing against Bush and Republicans. So unless you mean that somehow that amnesty almost singlehandedly turned pre-existing Reagan fans against Bush Sr, I don't see it. California only went about 2 to 3 points more Democratic than expected (the 4-year swing as compared to national trends) in 1988, the closest election after the 1986 amnesty. Even if you think that "unique" delta is purely the result of amnesty, it's still only a drop in the pond compared the overall swing and certainly wasn't the sole difference even remotely. An easier holistic explanation is right there: Bush was an East Coast insider. And you probably had some early stirrings of social liberalism gaining ground. Looking again at the numbers, it seems to me that a mix of Bush Sr's weaknesses plus the Clinton era is more responsible than anything else (in 1996, actually, since Clinton did better than 1992 generally, you could actually characterize it as a small amount of backsliding, but 2000 seemed to cement the vote differential as noticeably Democratic).
I'm sure you could do more analysis with more local knowledge and county data, not just presidential numbers, but I'm pretty sure the explanatory power of the lazy equation above is pretty high, and doesn't leave much room for a uniquely amnesty blame-game.
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Vietnam has low taxes, social conservatism and super business friendly policies while having hammer and sickle flags along the streets and a political system that celebrates Lenin. The republicans are going to talk about how great Reagan was while under no circumstances wanting to talk about his policies since Reagan's agenda are pretty much the opposite of MAGA. Republicans will like the aesthetic while refusing to even acknowledge the ideas.
Reagan's big thing -- building up the military in opposition to the USSR -- is no longer relevant.
Reagan was big on the War On Drugs. So is Trump.
Reagan liked lower taxes. So does Trump.
Reagan made a deal for immigration amnesty. Trump saw the results of this deal and won't. So not really a conflict.
Reagan talked big about free trade, which Trump doesn't. But despite that he did engage in trade warring, including YUGE tariffs on agricultural goods.
They aren't the same, but they aren't "the opposite" either.
Reagan liked cutting rates (and in particular top rates which were far too high at the time) while closing loopholes and simplifying the tax code. Trump likes opening new loopholes and making the tax code more complex.
Arguably, the huge increase in the standard deduction is the biggest simplification of the tax code since Reagan. After the 2018 (Trump administration) changes there, the number of filings taking the standard deduction went up from 70 to 90 percent.
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Reagan was a neocon globalist. A strong focus on military interventionism, free trade and shipping jobs abroad. He didn't really focus on America but a globalized American empire.
Military interventionism during his presidency was rather limited in scope though.
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What actually is the opinion of Republican voters toward Reagan nowadays? Do they even care? AFAICT among Democrats his name is still mud--HIV, the homeless, the decline of unions, and rise of inequality are all his fault--to the extent that even Bush Jr. seems to have a better reputation nowadays. But I don't see Republicans on the Internet referencing him much, for good or ill.
What exactly should he have done? Closed down gay bathhouses, interned and tested every patron and resettled the HIV-infected ones on Angel Island?
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I don't think this is true, except in the sense that he is a conservative Republican and therefore the enemy. He tends to score well in polls of academic historians, for example, who are 80-90% Democrats. It is (and was at the time) mud among leftists, who resent the fact that he successfully deprived their beloved USSR of the moral high ground. Most Democrats are not leftists, although for most of the last decade this hasn't been obvious because the non-leftist Democrats were afraid of the leftists calling them racist.
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I think it's worth considering that our current Vice President is not old enough to remember Reagan being in office.
That said, this Millennial Republican voter's opinion is that Reagan is both overrated and over-hated. Why? Because he was mostly a continuation of Carter's neoliberal agenda with a more optimistic presentation. Good or bad, neoliberalism should be understood not as something imposed by the GOP (who, let us remember, never controlled Congress during Reagan or H.W. Bush's Presidencies) but also as a change in elite consensus within the Democratic Party. Pick something that Reagan is blamed or credited for and odds are that Carter really started it. Union busting? Carter appointed Volker whose interest rate hikes wrecked the sort of private sector jobs that were heavily unionized. That big military buildup? Also started under Carter, and for all his peacenik vibes post-Presidency he took a more confrontational tone toward the USSR (compare Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski to Nixon's Henry Kissinger) than Nixon. Maybe we buy the idea that Reagan didn't care much about AIDS but I've yet to see a convincing argument that the US handled it radically worse than the rest of the developed world. Most Democrats voted for Reagan's tax cuts. As Governor of California Reagan was hardly a conservative firebrand. He signed off on tax increases while legalizing abortion (and he'd go on to screw over the pro-lifers again by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court) and no-fault divorce. Free trade and immigration? The Democrats have been free traders more or less continuously for the party's entire existence, and Congressional Democrats were more likely to vote for Reagan's amnesty than members of his own party.
IMO his legacy is outsized for both sides because it allows a certain brand of Republicans to act as if they had more to do with the good things that happened than is arguably the case and a certain brand of Democrats to avoid facing the fact that they'd largely been betrayed by their own party's politicians. Amusingly, certain right-wing ideologues figured it out first, which is why both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan ran campaigns against Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.
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That's a good question. His final approval poll was 63-29, at the higher end of a presidency that went up and down around an average of 53. His retroactive approval went as high as 73-22 in 2002, and as of a couple years ago it was still 69-28, 2nd only to JFK among the 9 recent presidents Gallup asked about. The left-wing opinion still seems to be "Reagan screwed up the AIDS epidemic" so I'd have to assume that his support still leans right and he's at 70+ among Republican voters.
But this might be just one of those things that's uselessly sensitive to poll wording (YouGov says 44-29! Is that just because they emphasize their "neutral" option more?) or to poll methodology (Gallup says 90-8 for JFK!? Is it just getting harder and harder to correct for "only boomers answer the phone for pollsters" effects?).
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It has been my experience that Bush II has a better reputation among the "respectability" wing of the GOP, who seem to sincerely believe that if only Trump had been more like Romney in 2020, the loss would have been closer, and they could have lost again in 2024, instead of being saddled with a GOP president in the current year.
Among the rank and file of "occasional voters" that form a lot of Trump's base, Reagan is a remote, vague, yet positive figure who hearkens back to a time when America Still Had Balls.
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You may have recently heard of a certain slogan of his, though -- 'Make American Great Again'.
Democrats always hated him, as much as they hated anyone up until Trump.
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As a three-time Trump voter, I just have to say - the man needs to be put out to pasture. By all accounts you are correct when you posit that his emotions are making him irrational. I personally believe that he was originally quite an impressive and intuitive leader, but the stress and partisanship of the last ten years appear to have degraded any nuance in his personality and thinking. We are swiftly approaching Joe Biden territory. I just wish he were being stage-managed as well as Joe was.
Can you give some examples of Trump not being a petty little bitch protecting his own ego and emotions?
I'll grant you "impressive and intuitive" politician, based on his commandeering of the Republican party, but leader is a bit of a stretch.
... I don't like the man, but you may have missed a picture.
Are you saying the "assassination attempt" was staged?
In seriousness, I didn't say he's a pussy (not that letting the Secret Service move you however they think best would make anyone a pussy, of course), I said he's a petty little bitch who protects his ego and emotions. The photo is consistent with putting ego and emotions first.
Hm....
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And the US is well within its rights to set trade policy however it likes. The government of Ontario clearly has the money to spend on foreign propaganda so clearly they're not suffering too badly.
It probably wasn't (considering the incentives at play, I think the corresponding denouncement was genuine), and that's actually kind of a big deal. Individual provinces have been more effective at influencing foreign trade policy than the Federal government is, for better (Smith) or for worse (Ford). What good's the Federal government if it won't do this, and has revealed to instead be too weak to enforce message discipline on its constituents?
This is a negotiation- the corporate arm of the people of Ontario being one of the interested parties. The fact that those people still see fit to go out of its way to shitpost is actually relevant; I wouldn't want to do business with them either.
And sure, maybe the Supreme Court rules it all illegal and everything goes back to normal, in which case Ford can take a win back to his most elderly, jingoistic supporters and not spend much goodwill on the people who had to pay for them. That's the gamble he's taking here; perhaps it'll pay off, perhaps it won't.
You're assuming the average American knows or cares about Canadian political structure? Canada is a monolith to Americans, especially those living in the East (that's why the meme is '51st' and not '51 to 55'). But then again, I think this makes more sense if understood as an intra-Canadian political slapfight that more tangentially happens to involve the US.
I would not characterize the ad as 'shitposting'. Also, the relative strength of both parties will likely be reflected in how the gains from a deal are distributed among them. If the US is in a stronger position, it also has more to lose on not making a deal.
Of course, it could be that a trade deal is so insignificant that it is simply not worth the president's time. If it was a negotiation between the US and Madagascar, saying "screw you, try again in a year" at the slightest offense might be acceptable. But with Canada, not having a trade deal is leaving quite a bit of money on the table, I imagine.
Shitposting, saber-rattling, attempting to propagandize a foreign nation/people your economic future depends on for ego reasons...
For the Canadians, yes, which is the point of Trump loudly turning 360 degrees and walking away. Not really as much for the Americans.
It's actually kind of a paradox, where American foreign policy is designed to encourage a more pro-business/pro-reality elite in other countries, which then results in a stronger country that's then more able to tell the Americans 'no'.
Naturally, the hyper-conservative elite [this can also be voter blocs if political representation is sufficiently slanted in their favor, and the Canadian political system is this way by design] hates that idea, especially because the last few administrations were happy to both let them free trade their way to prosperity so long as they threw Pride parades and DEId. Thanks in great part to the US having kept this up for so long, these ideas are now the baseline conservative position, which is part of why conservative elites like them (the other reason is because it's a way to pretend they're on the side of the young).
Now that a liberal has taken power the elite in those countries feel empowered to keep on keeping on. They aren't as capable of rapid change as the Americans are, mainly because the people who were capable of that emigrated to the US a long time ago (or who never reproduced due to the deaths of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the Great European Mass Suicides of the 1910s and 1940s).
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Trump's behavior is kinda lame here, I tend to be of the "just fucking own in" school, but I suppose that's why I'm not a politician.
This on the other hand is more debatable. Wasn't there an entire drama about some pittance that Russia spent on Facebook ads during Trump's first run?
It was the motte for a bailey of election interference and (sigh) cybercrime claims, yes.
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