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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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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:

  • Midterms were worse than I thought. I would have guessed 49-53 Senate seats for Dems and 220-230 seats in the House.
  • The collapse is so bad that I think it necessitates some new theories about how American politics works. I.e. I don't think Trump's record right now is worse than Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2010 or Biden in 2022. Voters clearly disagree? Inflation reached 8% in 2022, gas right now is lower adjusted for inflation than it was under Obama.
  • Obviously, Iran is very unpopular. I still accept Trump's judgment that it was the right thing to do and I still believe that the war is (plainly) a military success. (Call me crazy!)
  • Trump is a fighter and is going to strike back. I think all calls for his impeachment or step down are bad politics and also bad reads of Donald Trump.
  • Texas with Blue governance would be worse value than California or Illinois, because you don't even have the nice beaches and beautiful cities. But predictions that Texas is about to precipitously decline are overblown. (Texas has a lot of hot smart and beautiful people.)
  • I think the AI buildout will probably not stop, although it will have to reassess. I maintain that AI is so powerful that it's bad for Democrats to hand it over to Republicans even if it polls extremely well in the short and medium-term. I expect that a lot of AI Pause rhetoric will merely grease the wheels for Dems and tech to come to a new arrangement.
  • A lot of my friends who were loyal Trump guys are crashing out now. I do think it's still too soon to call this the death of MAGA, and there is no going back to the old establishment Republican consensus.
  • We're probably closing the window, globally, on a 10-year exuberance of populism and replacing it with something else. To those inclined to gloat, I suspect that whatever comes next will actually be worse for everybody. (For example, imagine a MAGA-Groyper fusion.) (You're going to miss Trump when he's gone.)
  • I think the Groypers might be earning a place in the future.
  • There have been a lot of predictions about Dems undergoing a realignment 10 years after the Republican realignment. I don't think this will happen at all. DSA and center-lib-left Dems will coexist quite peaceably in the way that only political allies that hate each other can.
  • The results were worse than I expected and losing will carry a lot of political consequences. But I maintain that midterms still matter for very little. The powers that Democrats are unlocking for themselves (such as imperiling the future of a Republican SCOTUS) are weak compared to the powers of the president.
  • I do not believe that Democrats are on the cusp of a permanent one-party state or any other despair narratives I see on the right. I don't think this will be true even if they do win in 2028.

Blah blah blah, words words words, excuses excuses, feel free to get your licks in now.

I just think Trump is too old now. He used to sort of break the rules of conventional politics, and get away with a lot because he was so good at answering opponents with funny retorts and social media. But he now he's just kind of old and grumpy and boring, so all of his controversial opinions come back to bite him and the rest of his party.

Trump in his current form reminds me of Biden 4 years ago. It's just darn hard to even understand what he's saying.

I think it’s familiarity. In 2016, Trump making jokes was a novelty, nobody else in politics was doing what he was doing. He would post a funny or hyperbolic tweet and the media would lose their minds over it. It would be talked about everywhere, by everyone, and his opponents would go crazy and yell about what he said.

In 2026, it doesn’t work because everyone is used to this style of politics. He posts, and everyone is just thinking “he’s just trolling, it doesn’t matter, and not worthy of attention.” So he posts, and thud, nothing happens. So it doesn’t land, and doesn’t help the cause. It’s like going back and listening to an edgy comedian from the 1980s. It’s not that it wasn’t funny, at that time in that cultural context, but that in 2026, our culture and our taboos have shifted and what would have been outrageous in 1986 is tame now. In the late 1980s, there was a show called Murphy Brown, and it attracted attention from politicians because it portrayed a woman giving birth as a single mother. I don’t think anyone would care in 2026. We are used to it. We know how the joke ends, and it’s just not gonna attract attention in 2026.

Trump honestly hasn’t changed much since 2016. But because we are no longer shocked or even surprised by Trump being Trump, it doesn’t land. So what worked in 2016 is boring in 2026. We’ve seen it all before so the novelty of Trump doesn’t work for him anymore.

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