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I was recently going through the Archive of Astral Codex Ten content and reread Scott’s post “The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs”. Rereading this post I had a few thoughts: 1) this is the most nakedly partisan Scott-post I can remember, 2) this is the most unqualifiedly confident opinion about the outcome of a political policy I’ve seen Scott express, 3) “Tariffs” seem like an issue from a lifetime ago when it has been less than a year since they were the number one news story.
As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect. DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure. Despite closing the border and significant political capital expended on deporting illegal immigrants, sentiment on the economy is poor, and anecdotally the “Great Replacement” seems to be proceeding at the same pace it was before. The right-wing pundit sphere has largely turned on Trump and anti-Israel sentiment has entered the mainstream.
My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?
Well if you ignore the long running small businesses that say they had to close because of the tariffs, the big industries that still had to pay billions of dollars and the prices increasing (or profits decreasing hurting competition and slowing growth) on many tariff impacted industries like canning, then yeah I guess you could say that nothing has happened. AI is pretty much singlehandedly carrying the American economy in growth now (this single sector making up >50% of GDP expansion) because everything else is struggling.
Even the Trump admin themselves is clearly aware that their tariffs raise prices given that they'll reverse them in more politically price sensitive areas.
If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then where does the tariff lunch come from?
It's hard to buy that DOGE was even a halfway sincere effort when Musk was trawling around disrupting petty and widely considered to be highly successful programs like PEPFAR for pennies while going on Fox News and promising to increase social security one of the very few things anyone with any understanding of government knows is the actual drain on budget now.
To absolutely no one but a bunch of Internet retard's surprise, social security checks did not go up because of DOGE, the deficit is not solved, and one actually smart guy made a massive return on his whole life savings betting on the obvious.
They made the same mistake that the Biden administration and progressives did, they thought being better than the other guy meant they were popular and everything they did justified. That they could ignore the basic fundamentals of politics and public relations in pursuit of their petty culture war grievances.
And because they're selected for the most extremist culture war obsessed retards, they're also all delusional along with that, like Greg Bovino's belief that there are >100 million illegal immigrants. The extremist idiocy combined with the firehouse effect and the average familiarity meme inevitably leads to bad PR moments cause even their best attempts to be moderate might look insane to the general public. They all start to think "Well certainly the general public agrees at least 50 million need to be deported right?"
Trump looks really really cool in the eyes of his base, just like Biden remained so popular among the Dems they couldn't admit his clear and blatant sundowning. But the people who matter in an election aren't the hyperpartisans who will suck your dick even if you slapped them with 1000% inflation, it's the fickle swing voters whose main argument for you is that you're slightly better than the alternative and the fickle partisan voters who can't even decide if they want to turn out to vote to begin with and those guys aren't dick sucking.
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