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Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!
Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.
This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.
Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.
Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?
In part, it’s something like the narcissism of small differences, but more specifically it’s the nature of coalitions and the big-tent two party system.
When out of power (or at risk of losing power), the optimal move is to rally around a unifying platform or candidate who can both rally the base and bring in independent/non-aligned voters. Typically this involves sweeping major differences in ideology, policy, and values under the rug for the sake of winning the next election. Strange bedfellows and all that.
When in power, the optimal move is to fight and horse-trade for your niche, sectional interests, in the hopes that the aforementioned bedfellows just don’t care as much as you do, or are willing to compromise for something else in return.
The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.
The unstated irony in all of this, funny enough, is when all the major parties talk of unity and coming together to defeat the other side, you’re still mandated to follow rank and file under their banner. “Everyone has to be united under my way of thinking. I’m not budging for anyone else!” Nick Fuentes can make the same argument. Is the Republican Party going to move in his direction? That was always the clearest admission to me of the gatekeeping of the party duopoly.
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Yeah unfortunately this seems to be the case. The dynamics of the two party system are screwed. There are issues with other setups like Kingmakers, but still. I wish their stranglehold would drop...
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Also everyone has 2028 in the back of their mind, and the various sub-groups of the Trump coalition are starting to jockey for pole-position in the post-Trump vacuum. And given the possibility that the Democratic might actually just collapse (the recent races were promising for them but it’s no guarantee of survival), it makes seizing control of the GOP especially important.
I was recently watching a new TV miniseries, Death by Lighting it’s about President Garfield’s assassination. This was during the Reconstruction era when America was basically a one-party Republican state. One thing that struck me was how vicious the intra-party jockeying was back then in the absence of a robust opposing political party.
I don't know that this is a great analogue, but I'm reminded of around 2008-2012 when all the people with basic human decency - like me, at the time - were excited about the prospect of a permanent Democratic majority in the USA due to demographics and such. It's hard to parse out the causal factors, but one possible effect was that the most extreme factions saw this as an opportunity to push their ideology to the top, and one of the more extreme factions - what is generally known as CRT/identity politics/social justice/woke-ism/postmodern neo-Marxism/the ideology that shall refuse to be named/basic human decency - had positioned itself over the course of half a century to be in that sweet spot of being extreme enough to make partisans feel like they're righteous freedom fighters but not so extreme or personally costly as to turn them off.
I'm not alone as a Democrat who thinks this has been disastrous for the world, for America, for American society, and also for Democrats specifically. But there's potentially some good that did come out of it, such as catching predators like Cosby & Weinstein during the #METOO fervor of the late 2010s, or bodycams becoming far more common in police. Arguably, these would have happened anyway, but also arguably, this ideology helped make these happen more quickly, which matters. Which makes me think of what good could come out if, say, the Groypers were to prove to be the successful right-wing analog to the successful left-wing "woke-ism?" The first thought that comes to mind is widespread knowledge and acceptance of HBD could be a positive consequence, for helping us to build better policies, because a more accurate model of the world should allow us to better design policies for accomplishing the goals they are ostensibly meant to accomplish.
Isn't that effectively part of the game-theoretic stability of the two-party system? If you assume voters can be mapped to a normal distribution on a single axis (a poor model, but probably serviceable here) and have democratic selection within the parties, the left half of a left party claiming 60% of the total would get better representation for their views if they shifted the center of "left" towards their side, and dropped to 51% of the total but still winning the overall. The same applies in reverse for the right side.
I think you're right. Back then, I stupidly believed that the left, as the side that represents actually getting things correct rather than getting things according to our preferences, would properly moderate the ideology of the Democratic party, in order to actually get things correct (which necessarily means giving more leeway and charity to one's ideological opponents than to one's allies) and thus keep holding onto power. What I stupidly didn't notice was that the left half of the left half were actually at least as religiously and arbitrary-preference-motivated as the right half of the right half, and they had spent decades from well before my birth laying down the groundwork to manipulate people like me to believing that there was any there there. When you're naive and looking from the top, turtles all the way down can be confused for a really tall tower of turtles.
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I think this was actually plausible, it’s just that Democratic strategists badly misread the thesis of The Emerging Democratic Majority and so they fumbled the ball. The thesis was that if Democrats could maintain the Obama coalition of minority voters and college educated suburban white voters and white working class voters, they would have an unassailable majority. The party seems to have misread this as “minority voters=win” and told the rest of that potential coalition to go to hell.
Texiera (author of The Emerging Democratic Majority) and on a meta level Fukuyama assumed the Obama ascension was a teleological endpoint: the old order of stale white christians is over, we have in our unconstrained state decided that a young charismatic black man with 00s liberal sensibilities and economic acceptance of "help us to help you" support. These commentators failed to predict that the neoliberal equilibrium would be actively disrupted from within by insurgents looking to seize the spoils for themselves. Texiera was sounding the alarm by the end of Obamas second term about the social justice movement cannibalizing public patience, and now Texiera is considered a nazi by whatever progressive commentariat exists.
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I don't think that's quite what happened. The Democratic party as it exists today is essentially a high-low alliance between affluent (predominantly white) liberals and the (predominantly black) urban underclass. This transition started under Clinton and was cemented under Obama. The problem this coalition presents from the perspective of establishing a "permanent Democratic majority" is that the only things these two groups share culturally are an affinity for identity politics and an animosity towards members of the working class.
The under-employed college grad saddled with debt resents the high school grad who's making more money than they are managing a Gas Station. The urban underclass hates the manager of the gas station for chasing them off his corner, and being "pro-cop".
Keeping the working class inside the Democratic Party coalition was never a realistic ask, it just took half a generation for the new coalitions to shake themselves out.
Just pointing out, the stereotypical gas station owner is a minority immigrant who almost certainly votes D, and both Trump voters hate him(for not assimilating) and lower class minorities(for making them miss the white owner-men), but the hyper-educated parts of the democrat base do not hate the middleman minorities that own gas stations.
The stereotypical Gas Station owner is either a local, or they are a Christian refugee from someplace like Syria or Nigeria. In my experience the locals are too "pro cop" to vote D in a post BLM environment and I don't think those refugees are voting D either. I think that if the hyper-educated parts of the democrat base were to talk to them for more than thirty seconds and become aware of their opinions on things like Israel Vs Palestine (the problem with HAMAS is that the Jews haven't killed enough of them) or illegal immigration (I did it the right way why cant they?) they would learn to hate "the middleman minorities that own gas stations" very quickly.
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At the time the democratic supermajority was pronounced it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to somewhat nod your head and think the case they were making had a logic foundation to it. I remember sort of nodding my head slightly but still not abandoning the general pendulum effect politics has. I was never in doubt that their hubris was going to cause them to eventually eat shit after sniffing each other’s ass so much.
Two things the democrats missed. One was a fairly well known fact people didn’t attach significant weight to that they should have, namely that minority immigrants are some of the most staunch supports of pulling up the ladder after themselves once they’ve made it, and many of them are often highly racist against other demographic minorities or subcultures in their original country. These are not people who are going to be sympathetic to your liberal idealistic wishlist. On that point the ball is in the Republican’s court with their responsibility not to fumble the advantage they have.
The second point was the less well known but later empirically adduced Cultural Backlash thesis by Norris and Inglehart. The nativist reaction to systemic cultural, demographic and social changes greatly empowered a political hiccup like Trump to gather as much appeal as he did. A lot of people initially were in denial that this was ever a factor because they see America as a post-racial, post-identity country when it isn’t. We faire a lot better and are more progressive than Europe is historically, but just because these issues are taboo in society doesn’t make them go away in the minds of most people. You see it embodied in debates between people like Mearsheimer and Pinker. I think Mearsheimer is completely right and Pinker always struck me as the quintessential Shitlib Intellectual.
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