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Goodguy  17hr ago (text post)   Edited 14hr ago   5280 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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Trump has always been a good candidate, but sucked at being the president. Trump I was Trump being restrained by the GOP and pissing the electorate off in four years. Trump II managed to convince everyone the restraints were the problem and speedran the process in two years.

Inb4 people explain to me the attack on Iran was instigated by the neocons, not the magahats. Yes, and Trump still fucked it up worse than Dubya ever could.

It really does just seem like Iran to me (and secondarily Israel).

A big part of his campaign was no foreign wars and lower prices.

God emperor 5D chess move: What if I can do the opposite of both at the same time?

There is just very little ability to operate anymore as POTUS and contrarian and flakiness is high.

Trump is the only POTUS I’ve loved and it’s now apparent that America can’t be governed. He’s largely delivered on campaign promises and got crushed.

Yeah, turns out sometimes people like hearing your promises but don't like the reality you deliver. His whole immigration approach was maximum spectacle to rev up his base while not pissing off business. Turned out nobody liked the combination of lots of tear-jerker moments, maximal chaos, and minimal improvement. And the Iran War was just not a campaign promise. He very clearly did not follow through on his proposed foreign policy there. There's no possible way to spin that fiasco as america-first, the electorate isn't interested.

Americans have much too short of attention spans. The idea of re-onshoring ultimately would have paid dividends for America, but changing the business environment such that people would choose to make things in America is probably a decades long process. He couldn’t have possibly done it in 2 years.

Likewise fixing international issues. Asserting and projecting power is not an overnight thing. Again, you need at least a little time to fix the problem.

Americans didn't want international issues fixed. Anything other than a Venezuela resolution would have been a negative, and Iran was a dumb own goal.

And if you want to make big long term changes, well, you should probably either avoid starting contentious foreign wars, or achieve some sort of buy-in from most of the country. Trump had a very limited mandate, he did a lot outside that mandate, and handled that mandate in a dumb way, and this is not a shocking result.

But also there are visible costs in the short term that the government seems to have had no interest in, and resultant long-term problems that the government doesn't seem to have had any interest in mitigating. For example, hobbyists can no longer legally buy drones from China, or which use Chinese parts.

In theory, this is the first step in creating a big beautiful American drone industry. However, the replacement American manufacturer is shoddy, way more expensive, and focused on military use. It is also part-owned by Trump's son. And it uses American labour, so even in the best case scenario the prices are never going to be as good again. Even in the best case scenario, hobbyists (plus photographers etc.) aren't going to be able to buy DJI-quality drones for years.

Yes, it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But for this group something they liked has got suddenly worse, it's going to be worse for a while, and there is no guarantee it's going to get better. Scale that up 100x and you have a lot of annoyed people.

I think it comes down to how he made Republicans feel about themselves. Democrats had had been playing a wrong tape since Bush and Republican voters felt good about proving them wrong: Dems were saying "Republicans are Bush's party, they're warmongerers". Trump 1 having been notably less warmongering than Obama before him, Republicans felt good about Trump. Now Trump 2 in half his term became notably more warmongering than Biden, even just starting with Venezuela, and Republicans feel like they were taken for fools when Dems tell them "What did you expect? You voted for warmongerers!". The political realities and world events around are immaterial, they voted for the guy they thought didn't start wars and got wars and feel dumb and betrayed.

The highest value lesson the Republicans need to learn from this election is one of the oldest ones in the book, and one that we thought they had learned after GW Bush.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

No worries there. It’s not like we’re not just as bad at diplomacy. Americans negotiate to ‘dictate’ their own views to the other side. We don’t negotiate to understand one another or to exchange ideas. When it comes to Iran, we get most of our knowledge from a handful of dissidents from the country who become paid operatives of the American political class, which fully explains why we’re so ignorant of what goes on over there and why we can’t understand how our military escapades aren’t generating the payoff we keep expecting it to.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Somehow the past couple administrations got away with a few: there were literal boots on the ground in Syria, for example, and in Iraq against ISIS after we otherwise withdrew. But for that one pilot rescue mission, that is more than we have in Iran, for example. Reagan bombed Iran (and sold them weapons under the table, it was a different time), and the Gulf War is generally considered a win.

Of course the point of the rule isn't that it bites you every time ("unless you are the Mongols"), but that it can.

But they didn't! The war is being fought in the air.

that we thought they had learned after GW Bush.

You can say that again. I was losing my mind here, reading all the Iran war apologia, when it was kicking off.

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

B... but we have Google Maps now!

And we've renamed everything "America" for convenience. Gulfs, lakes, you name it.

People were saying word for word talking points from 2003.

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