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I really don't like making grand pronouncements (I think it's a bit narcissistic) but since I seem to have a reputation on The Motte I think it's only fair to take my licks:
Blah blah blah, words words words, excuses excuses, feel free to get your licks in now.
I'm not necessarily sure this is a bad thing: the buildout plans were so large that I didn't really think they were practical anyway. Were we really going to grow grid capacity by 300% in under a decade? I buy that it'll be game changing in lots of ways, but is the demand really there to pay for infinite tokens? The models have gotten both better and more efficient recently, too: do we need as much compute as we thought?
Slowing over-eager investment in boom-bust cycles could be stabilizing, even.
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I think people liked the MAGA parts of Trump’s agenda, but disliked the neocon parts. So “back to the old Republican party” is exactly the wrong takeaway.
Unfortunately I also agree that the unpopularity of the war in iran is basically bullshit, and it was plainly the right thing to do. A full scale invasion would have been a terrible idea but neutering Iran is a positive. I hope we don’t let them off the hook.
Fuentes preached that if you wanted to stop the Israel lobby you had to be willing to hold a gun to the GOP’s head over the issue, even if it meant giving control to the Democrats. Clearly he meant it. I think this is idiotic. Complaining about money or military aid for Israel is one thing, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.
I don't know what Fuentes truly believes, but if I try to reconstruct his theory by reading into his public statements it would be something like this:
The problem is not the money or military aid to Israel, it's the split loyalties, lack of focus, and bad optics caused by Israel-sympathizers in the American right. This problem is not just theoretical, since it is evident that Trump himself, the leader of MAGA, is a huge Israel-supporter. It is impossible to build a successful right-wing populist movement in the US as long as every time it wins power, it immediately disappoints its supporters by using that power to help Israel while neglecting American issues. Even just the appearance that it does this, even if the appearance is inaccurate, is devastating. We see this manifest itself in the midterm election. It is better to have a unified and potent smaller movement than to have a broader movement that does not accomplish the goals. Focused vanguardism is more likely to deliver results than unfocused split-loyalties Trumpist MAGAism that spends its efforts on Israel and ballrooms.
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Obviously this is not the opinion of the electorate. Consider, also, there are probably a dozen single issue issues that have piled up against Trump, creating a new issue - the war, inflation, gas, Ukraine, Israel, corruption, Doge, Musk, immigration, abortion, the ballroom, rhetoric/decorum, … This election was well earned.
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Texas still has a conservative (well, technical split) legislature, so that’s a small glimmer of hope.
Texas Dems flipped the state house.
Yes but Republicans kept the senate. They can still block a lot of bullshit. (And a lot of the “democrats” are conservative on certain things, im pretty sure some of them helped get the abortion ban passed)
Sure, but if you're a local business, you sometimes need things from the state government in a way that you don't from Washington. You need a relationship with your local state rep and your governor/AG/commissioner of such and so, you need a functioning state government to pass laws and do things for you.
Texas business interests can't just sit out the next however many years and wait for Republicans to come back. They're going to have to form relationships with Democrats.
I'm curious how valuable those are in Texas, given that its legislature meets only 6 months every two years (plus whenever the governor calls a special session). Could go either way.
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Alot can change in 2 years but there's not much that businesses will want from the government that the democrats are willing to give, and that the republicans haven't already given.
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There's a real air of unforced error that hangs about Trump. While the voters wanted to punish those previous presidents for failing to live up to their promises, I think they recognized on some level that those presidents were battling forces largely out of their control and trying their best.
With Trump, there's the sense that he kicked several hornet nests for absolutely no reason and he was the direct instigator of their current problems.
Plus while previous presidents may have made a few quiet deals here and there to set themselves up for a comfortable retirement, Trump and his family took things to completely unprecedented levels. Seriously the $100,000 subscription fee to view "Truths" faster? How is that even legal?
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This is an area where number lawyering distorts what's rather straight forward observationally. Cost of living is bad, and constantly getting worse. That it was getting worse at a faster rate eariler, when it wasn't as bad on absolute terms, isn't really a headscratcher.
You're comparing rate of inflation, but sentiment is accounted for by looking at cumulative effect. Inflation is a rate of change number. Inflation was bad under Biden, it ate away a lot of slack in the system; now under Trump inflation is still too high even if it's eating cost of living at a lower rate of increase.
Now this is a different conversation than laying blame, but it helps udnerstand why comparing raw inflation rate is not as straightforward when translating it into felt effects.
Imagine you're speeding toward a cliff and accelerating. Now we swap drivers, and not only does that driver maintain the speed, but he continues accelerating! only not accelerating as quickly as driver 1.
Does it really make sense to be confused that the second driver is met with more panic than the first?
Inflation only goes one way. We're not getting deflation without a recession.
I hope there aren't too many people under the delusion that 2019 prices can come back
uhhh... yes. I was going to add an aside but deleted it because I guess I wrongly assumed it was understood in the frame. That was implicit in the 'cumulative effects' point.
I had a point about building a bridge over the cliff faster than the car was accelerating, but deleted it because it didn't add to the illustration.
Deflation is irrelevant to my point about why a blank 8% was more than 6% doesn't tell the story about cost of living pain.
We came of a decade of very low inflation and a rapidly expanding economy. Then in the first part of this decade, we felt that expansion slow down combined with extremely high inflation. This ate up a lot of the slack in the system. Now under Trump 2, inflation is still too high, and the increase in earnings isn't being felt by the people. So depsite it being less 'too hihg' than under Biden, it can still hurt more. None of this requires expectations of deflation to explain why comparing Biden's highest high to trumps high doesn't tell the story or produce a conundrum
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In 2020 the frog got told to stay home from his job at the frog soup factory, and after he came back he suddenly freaked out about how hot the water is.
Now the factory is not going to stop making frog soup, but it's gonna take either a while or a big world event to convince the frog that the water's just fine.
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Good on you, brother. I broadly agree with a lot of your points here.
Accepting that you aren't crazy and that it was the right thing to do and is a military success, how do you feel about the procedural aspects of how the war was started? The war effort lacked a congressional declaration or any kind of approval, but even writing that off because we don't declare anything anymore, it lacked a significant public effort to sell the war to the public in advance. Maybe I'm an optimist about the voting public's sophistication, but I think that some of the disapproval of the war stems from the failure to seek even a fig leaf of any kind of democratic legitimacy and approval. Which raises my question to you, as an intelligent pro-war interlocutor: if a successful morally correct war is launched in a way that is illegitimate, what is the correct punishment to inflict on those who started it? If it's "Nothing, it worked out" then the idea of democratic legitimacy is a dead letter and the president has plenary power to declare war, that seems untenable.
I don't think people think through those procedural questions, but I do think the way the war was started and executed ("We won!" "we're about to make a deal" "We're about to end Iranian civilization forever") left a lot of people confused and maybe a little miffed, and dragged down the approval rating. You appear to be correct at this point that the strait of Hormuz is mostly useable for commercial traffic, with a mildly increased risk tolerance. But the repeated announcements have ruined presidential credibility.
A good guide here is the trajectory of GWOT-PATRIOT Act-Neocon consensus between 2006-2008. Everyone said that the voters rejected Dubya and the wars, but Obama kept most of it in place, and it became part of core American governance. Elections have consequences. A lot of MAGA is going to absorbed into the core American synthesis, for both parties. MAGA might die, the same way "Hipsters" aren't around anymore. But MAGA stuff is everywhere, like how I can go to a local microbrewery on my way home and pick up beer.
Voters feel betrayed. I don't know that there is any procedural difference that would have mattered. I don't know that a different explanation would have solved what is perhaps an emotional problem. Perhaps more salesmanship on the war would have been more offensive, felt like an even bigger betrayal.
I think there is something deeper afoot than a communications problem.
It is my observation that leaders in a Democracy have a ten-year lifespan. I mean this in the sense that your dog lives a dozen years, a man has a natural lifespan of something like eighty years. A natural lifespan can be extended but it's more often a ceiling. Most leaders don't even last ten years. Those who do are epoch-defining. Thatcher was kicked out after ten years by her own party, not even for good reasons, almost like an impulse. French presidents get two terms of five years in a system designed to make the presidency akin to a monarchy. Merkel lasted longer than ten, and her tenure defined an entire era of European politics. Trump, likewise, enters this pantheon by virtue of Biden's term, and yet having been a leader for the Republicans the entire time. Ten years or thereabouts seems to me like something of a rule and not a coincidence and I think it merits explaining.
(It's different in monarchical and dictatorial systems but I think a similar constraint is at play. Generally ministers change over more frequently than every ten years. Bismarck, who lasted as Chancellor for about twenty years, formed a cabinet that basically totally changed over ten years in. The Chinese were operating on ten-year leadership cycles until Xi Jinping. Putin has had to shuffle around his government quite a few times now. And frequently those systems that don't make this kind of shuffle blow up in revolution, or completely stagnate.)
My theory is that ten years is roughly the amount of time it takes for people to totally change into a new phase of life. Kids become teenagers, teenagers become adults, adults reach middle-age, then age. Individuals pass through markers at different times but within a population changes averages out to about ten years.
One of the key markers of Trump's success has been his total dominance of media. He essentially invented twitter for politics. His mastery of the rally as a genre gave him a direct connection to his base, which always gave him better instincts than even his smartest advisers. He fundamentally re-ordered the news cycle as such, entire media ecosystems emerged downstream of the changes he wrought in how people consume news.
It's been ten years now since Trump worked through the system and people do consume news differently now. The Democrats are not the same shrill resistance libs they used to be. Trump's rally base isn't a wire directly to the American psyche anymore, the people who still go are a particular kind of people. Media patterns are different. This is why I'm hesitant to say Trump just needed to sell the war better: Trump did give speeches justifying the war, nobody watched them. I don't think it's simple Trump fatigue either (although that's what everybody will say). I think it's more a fundamental shift in how people live, which implies a fundamental shift in how they think of Trump, which, honestly, at this point, is not much at all.
Yes, this is essentially my thesis. This is what happened with, e.g., pardon the grandiosity, Napoleon and Alexander. I suspect that part of MAGA is going to be absorbed into the system and assimilated in ways that would be even surprising to MAGA itself, let alone Democrats. There is another part of MAGA that will refuse to assimilate and possibly fuse with the Groypers, or be scapegoated for Trump's sins, or whatever. I use the comparison to Napoleon especially because it's possible that this all goes "South" and Trump and MAGA suffer bigger losses than anyone can even imagine right now. At what point would you have abandoned Napoleon? And yet, essentially, Napoleon won in a much bigger sense because the political order that defeated him had to accommodate itself to him after all. This is one extremely plausible theory for what happens next (although not the only one -- Republicans could just win in 2028 and then we go back to the seesaw).
Yeah, personally when I hear people say he should have tried to sell the war to the American people, I'm just reminded that GWB burned that card with Iraq.
People forgave the Venezuela raid because it was over quickly, so if it had to be done Trump's best bet was to make Iran topple quickly, and once that failed the best alternative was to make it barely a war by turning it into a blocade, but it's the awkward period in between before they settled on the blocade that made him and his supporters who were confident they had voted for the "no foreign wars" candidate look foolish.
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What I hope is that this doesn't cool down the window of opportunity in Europe for change. It might give right-wing people outside the US, even if they don't particularly care about Trump or US Republicans, the impression that the arc of history is no longer bending towards their side and cool some off. On the other hand, I don't see this stopping the immigration related debacles there, US Democrats winning the senate is not going to stop France's "diverse youth" from burning irreplacable historical buildings as a diversion to loot sneaker stores, or Morrocans youth from storming Spanish beaches.
Europe has a lot of problems that go beyond immigration. Look at the mounting French debt crisis. They do not have the money to continue to live in the manner in which they have become accustomed. Macron has been unable to do much of anything about it. The French do not seem to want to do anything about it. Le Pen wants to address it with a modest savings package that can not go far enough. Melechon wants to default (lol).
My experience dealing with Europeans is that they are unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to sustain their sovereignty. They are very confused when America does, and in fact use America as an example of what not to do. This has burned them on Russia, gas prices, Chinese imports, tech, SpaceX, etc. etc.
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