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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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As someone with mild technocratic leanings, I think there's a pretty good case to be made that establishment figures do "do things", but the timescales of these actions don't fit with what the populace idealizes them to be. Trump is in this sense accurately depicted as a monkey who wants what he wants right now, and commits stupid mistakes due to this impatience, which is not a virtue but a weakness. And catnip to GOP voters, I think, that they will regret. Most politicians aren't willing to make stupid decisions for temporary electoral success and that's a good thing.

As an example, inflation and housing costs which you brought up. These things very patently cannot be driven down by quick actions, try as you might. One of the most effective tools according to many is zoning policy, and zoning policy has a very strong inbuilt "lag" in how it affects things. For example, a bureaucrat in Florida where I used to live made a law that any apartment building over 3 stories must have an elevator. Notably, any apartment building two stories or less also doesn't require fancy fire-suppression systems. Small rules! Not one that the electorate notice! But fast-forward a decade or two and there is a very characteristic and specific mix and ratio of designs and setups for 2- and 3-story apartment buildings that anyone will notice and has a massive impact you cannot possibly understate on housing affordability and living patterns.

As a trivial and overdone example but one that is nonetheless true, Trump has probably singlehandedly and directly contributed to inflation I suspect on a similar order as the first Covid bailout bill simply due to rising gas prices and their knock-on effects attributable to his Iran adventure. If this is "doing things" I don't want it and I suspect the general populace won't either. I absolutely hate the popular idea of "low-information voters" (I think people are way smarter than they are given credit for even if some of this processing is subconscious and shows up in aggregate only) but in this limited sense I kind of do think it applies to GOP primary voters who are temporarily and aberrantly distracted by shiny "does things" that they might not (yet) realize the backside of it.

Maybe I'm provably wrong here but the upshot of the comments here seems to me to be something along those lines. I guess a somewhat testable point is maybe the next cycle of primaries in 2 years, if not the current generals, but we'll see.