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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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One of the analogies I've had since Trump seriously entered politics is that he's the equivalent of giving the loudmouth on a bar stool actual power. One of the divides between the so-called "elites" in media and politics and everyone else (regardless of political persuasion) is that everyone else says "Why can't we just do x?" and the elites explain that the situation is more complicated than it looks and give them 500 esoteric reasons why it's a bad idea. The biggest of these divides I've found (or at least the most obvious one) from the past 25 years is "Why can't we just bomb Iran?" I've had this exact discussion on actual bar stools dozens of time over the years, and few people making that argument have ever been persuaded by my counterarguments. I've seen that sentiment expressed here countless times as well, since it seems to never die. Well, it might have finally died, as the past month has been an object lesson in why you can't just bomb places, even in conditions as favorable as we had, where the opponent's air defenses are borderline useless and very few of their retaliatory strikes get through. Ditto for why decapitation doesn't work either. Trump seems to have fallen into the same trap where he assumed that there was an obvious solution to the Iran problem and that the only reason previous presidents didn't use it was because they were weak cowards or were too dumb to see what was obvious to everyone else.

This isn't a divide between elites. This is a divide between politicians and the actual public.

The public has a thousand things they want to achieve politically, the vast majority of which are for their own benefit directly or indirectly. The public also has very little experience outside of domains they are familiar with personally.

In many political systems, politicians gain power by promising the public things. Whether those things are achievable is a different matter entirely. You can promise unlimited breadsticks, circuses, free money, free healthcare, free energy, no taxes, high wages and low immigration, ritualized torture of people the public doesn't like. Whether these things are achievable is another question entirely. The Republican position on oil is incoherent, the Democratic position on immigration is incoherent, and neither can get what they want on these issues because what they want is impossible. Political leaders put in power to achieve obviously impossible goals are obviously going to look incompetent.

I don't disagree with what you say of the public, but you're giving politicians/elites far too much credit: they don't secretly know what they are promising is stupid or incoherent. Democracy isn't rival philosopher kings competing with each other trying to modulate the public's dumber passions: it's just stupid all the way up.

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