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Notes -
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.
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.
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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