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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Since my post last week for which I was explicitly not warned at that time, I thought I would address the particulars of the criticism, mainly that,

your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.

First, there is nothing stopping anyone from disagreeing, but I figure I should present and defend my thesis.

Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Plenty of people commit plenty of crimes, and I'm sure Trump is technically guilty of many things, but the same can be said of Obama, Bush, and Clinton, as well as she-Clinton and VP Biden, though not themselves Presidents. The same can be said of many, many people at all levels of the legislative and executive branches. Presidents are not prosecuted, and for good reason, until now, so the difference cannot be the scale of the crime, but must be some other factor. The obvious and clear factor, judging on the last seven years of evidence, is that Trump is unduly and irrationally hated by the powers that be, and that he is specifically marked for destruction in a way most others are shielded.

From Victor Davis Hansen:

#1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.

#2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

VDH goes on to list six problems with this prosecution, before 20 examples of crimes that have gone unprosecuted, from the people I've mentioned as well as various spooks and spies.

If we look at the indictment itself, and the person responsible for it, Alvin Bragg, you see more evidence of my thesis.

Here's the kind of thing he chooses to prosecute:

A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief at his business was charged with murder after wrestling away the weapon and using it to fire at the suspect.

This is the kind of anarcho-tyranny that one would expect when you view the world through a comprehensive lens that allows for understand my claim. That Alvin Bragg doesn't give a shit about the law, he's just there to settle scores and punish those he can find. The law is powerless to help, but boy can they punish when they get around to it. Alvin Bragg, for what's it worth, is another Soros-funded prosecutor. Soros at least gets his money's worth, as every single DA I've ever seen associated with him and his money is using their discretion is release violent criminals and prosecute normal citizens. The man has a type.

Everything about this perfectly fits the model that I've developed over the last seven years for understand what happens to people when confronted with Donald Trump. Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.

Maybe one day events will not fit this model, but today is not that day.

For those of you who don't share this model, or don't share this view, how can you explain the lack of prosecutions of other executive branch employees in the past? How can you explain the two impeachments and long-lingering investigation? How can you explain the one-sided coverage by once-respectable media outlets? How can you explain anything that's happened since 2016? I didn't use to rely on this explanation, but after a certain amount of time, it becomes the simplest explanation, and I have stopped fighting it.

Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Donald Trump very clearly and purposefully often said outrageous things to get in the news cycle. He intuitively understood the toxoplasma of rage and harnessed it. Other politicians occasionally say the wrong thing and the sound bite follows them around(Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables", Gary Johnson's "What's Aleppo?"), and they're always constantly watching what they say to try to avoid that. Donald Trump put something new out there every week on purpose. A couple of his policies were a bit more extreme than other Republicans(border wall, Muslim ban), but not that much I think, especially when you look at how they were actually implemented. But what makes him different is that he purposefully said things and framed his words in a way to make himself sound outrageous. I think you can only get so upset when you try your best to make half the population outraged, and then they stay angry at you. Personally I think the left should be the bigger person and not prosecute Trump over tiny, irrelevant stuff. But I think it's dumb to pretend it's because Trump just doesn't fit the coastal elite stereotype. It's because he says things in the most inflammatory way possible, and he doesn't stop. Pre-Trump, politicians would insult and mock their opponent a couple times an election cycle. Trump would tweet out some new mean(and funny) nickname every day.

There's a Finnish saying, mostly used in political circles, that translates to "You shouldn't get provoked when being provoked", which basically is like what you are suggesting here. However, thinking about things like this, when someone is provoked all the time purposefully, it's all too natural they get provoked! It's the expected thing! One should at least not be befuddled when that happens. Trump provoked, well, everyone expect his supporters all the time, so people got provoked. Hardly inconceivable.

Exactly. I think trying to come up with strategies about how to behave intelligently even when being provoked, or trying to tell people that the provocations weren't so bad that we should break democratic norms over them, is fine. But acting all confused like "why could liberals possibly hate Trump more than other Republicans?" is just silly.

The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Also don't forget the "classified documents".

No need for scare quotes. There were documents, and they were classified.

Resentment towards Trump may well be the reason for media absolutely running with it where they wouldn’t for Biden. It’s not why the security apparatus got involved in the first place.

No need for scare quotes. There were documents, and they were classified.

You are correct. I should have scare-quoted something like "classified documents crime".

You are correct. I should have scare-quoted something like "classified documents crime"

The crime shouldn't be scare-quoted either. Sandy Berger was prosecuted for mishandling classified documents as Clinton left office - he got a plea deal for a $50k fine plus probation, and lost his security clearance. The Trump case seems analogous. I agree that trying to jail Trump for the document-related crimes would be an escalation, although jailing him if he refuses a plea deal and loses at trial would not.

Here's the kind of thing he chooses to prosecute:

A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief at his business was charged with murder after wrestling away the weapon and using it to fire at the suspect.

This is what one gets when one uncritically relies on media sources, esp from tabloids like the Daily Mail: This guy clearly was never charged by the DA. He was ARRESTED by the POLICE on Saturday, along with assailant, and the very next day the DA said that the police made a mistake and that he would not be charged.

Did this happen before or after the "mistake" drew public scrutiny?

From Victor Davis Hansen:

#1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump.

I don't know if it matters to you or not, but this appears to be a flat out lie. Cheers.

“Promise to indict this guy” is a pretty specific claim, though, and I’d rate it as much more damning than gesturing at “holding people in power accountable.” So would VDH, presumably, since he clearly wants to get his shots in at Pelosi and especially Hillary.

Did you get your quotes from this Examiner article? They follow it up by really assuming the conclusion. Apparently, a “longtime voice in liberal circles” at WaPo tweeted something about this representing “accountability.” The Examiner takes this as proof that “It does not have to involve a specific charge or punishment for a specific act.”

Imagine the bizarro-world where VDH is cheering Hillary’s indictment for e-mail crimes. Might he use words like “accountable,” given that he’s sure she actually did it? Somehow I doubt the Examiner would be holding that up as evidence of systemic bias.

I was looking into this today. I can’t find him saying “he would indict trump”. But he did repeatedly say he’s sued trump numerous times and is proven successful. A different DA or prior DA did specifically use the term indict trump in election material.

So it seems like he wisely didn’t directly declare he would prosecute but did imply he was the best man for the job.

I’d rate “flat out lie” to not be true. It certainly was part of the election.

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/31/alvin-bragg-made-his-tough-trump-record-central-hi/

From direct quotes being able to prosecute Trump was an election issue.

Do you have any evidence for it being a lie, like you can't find it mentioned anywhere, or someone shows that it was quoted out of context, or something like that?

No, Bragg did not specifically pledge, "If elected, I will indict Donald J. Trump." But he promised to pursue Trump and hold him "accountable," which is liberal code for going after Trump in any way possible.

From this article. As with most coverage of this topic, it milks that word “accountable” for all it’s worth. The rest of it is spent explaining the “liberal code.”

For the record, I’m inclined to believe the prosecution is politically motivated. That’s a low bar to clear.

One thing we should have a discussion on is George Soros someday. I’ve read his books, he’s realistically seemed like an untenured professor type who got out of grad school but was not smart enough to get a job. He’s viewed as a financial market genius but to be honest the quality of market participants was far lower back then. There were guys who were plumbers one day and making $50 million the next year after showing up on stock exchange floor.

I have enough respect for Soros mental capabilities that I just don’t understand what he’s doing in politics. Things like bail reform and ending mass incarceration I was reading today that the Koch Brothers funded those activities too. George Mason and the other think tanks funded by the Koch always supported a lot of reforms. But some of the people he’s gotten in bed with like Chesa Boudin makes it feel like he’s literally bored and running social experiments. Perhaps to test his reflexivity theory on markets. That he could go too far and cause a counter and farther reaction the other direction. The Trump prosecution itself feels authoritarian to me and not Democratic and is reasonable justification for a lot on the gop to give up on the system. And yet Soros backed this guy.

Yeah, I feel like I actually know approximately nothing about the guy. My impression has always been, "Well, he's made a bunch of money, and he leans left with that money, so that makes him a boogeyman to the right, but that could be consistent with a variety of pretty milquetoast actual behavior." The only thing that has sort of shocked me on the topic was reading a translation of Chinese-language publication that was presumably written for consumption by Chinese bureaucrat types, and it just very casually threw in something along the lines of, "...and of course, we have a clear example of financial warfare conducted by George Soros..." pretty much without justification, as though that perspective was just a commonly-held belief for, uh, Chinese bureaucrat types. I'd be pretty interested in a deep dive that actually looks at what he's done domestically and internationally and breaks down why people view him the way they do.

and it just very casually threw in something along the lines of, "...and of course, we have a clear example of financial warfare conducted by George Soros..." pretty much without justification, as though that perspective was just a commonly-held belief

It sort of is, even in the west. They're most likely referring to Black Wednesday and it's not that long ago that lefties were seeing the whole episode as a neoliberal plot to force privatization, dismantle welfare, and whatnot. Of course since populists started hating him, they had to cozy up to him.

The most notorious speculator in the world is a hack to you? Seriously?

He is one of the most respected figures among the best traders in the world. These are people who not only beat the markets, they beat the crap out of them. And I'm not talking about the average Goldman trader. I'm talking about the desks that don't even consider taking your money unless you put 10 million on the table, no questions asked.

Everythin was easier in the old days, yes. That's what a loser would say.

What is characteristic to me about Soros, more than anything else, is that he's funded DAs. Plenty of money gets thrown around for the legislative branch openings, but Soros is synonymous with DA races, and specifically getting DAs elected who then go on to be soft on crime.

It reads to my mind as a market inefficiency he decided to exploit. Better RoI by spending money on the prosecutors so their discretion is your suggestion, rather than trying to fight for lawmakers who then still need to enact the laws you prefer.

This makes him distinct in my mind from other people attempting to spend money to buy results in democratic elections.

Problem with the inefficiency he found is it seems like it’s causing political dysfunction and adding politics into the administrative state.

For markers I believe Millenium and they may have got in from ren tech were Arbing some mutual fund rebalances. Mutual funds lost a little bit everyday. Eventually mutual funds need to prevent that so instead of having a cheap way to do their fund they need add personal to rebalance which just adds an extra costs to system.

One of my casual past time is reading the biographies of famous / wealthy traders and hedge funders. The two major themes I've discovered are first, a lot of these guys (and, as of now, it's only men) are entrepreneurs, meaning that they did something fundamentally different than anyone else. Second is that, failing actual entrepreneurship, they took a massive contrarian position, went all in, and it paid off. You could call the latter group "gamblers" but I don't think that's fair. Warren Buffett - he of the "kindly old man who likes coke" public image - has explicitly said that when you are really convinced of an idea, you should go all in and even borrow money.

It's important to remember that Soros originally wanted to be a philosopher and actually studied under Karl Popper in England. He used a lot of Popper inspired thinking on falsification and applied it to the market. Now, I should point out that this is almost always a stupid idea - trying to transplant an integrated way of thinking from one wholly independent domain to another. But, unfortunately, it sometimes days work incredibly well. Soros' MegaTrade was when he "Broke the Bank of England" in what is now seen as a blindingly obvious opportunity. The Bank of England publicly announced they would buoy the currency vis-a-vis the Deutschmark. What do you do when a sovereign entity announced unlimited support for an asset? You short the shit out of it. That's what Old George did and made about one billion dollars in single day.

I'd argue that, like Buffett, the rest of Soros' success largely came from the fact that he was seen as successful. In public markets, this is especially potent. The Buffett Bounce is a real thing. Also, when you have that much (i.e. billion(s)) of float capital, you have options that other players don't. People don't understand that a "normal" hedge fund cannot simply hold capital out of the market. In a lot of cases, if they don't deploy their capital within a certain timeframe, LPs can take legal action. Soros, Buffet, and a couple others can spend a lot of time hanging out on the sidelines and then bet on the game when its 42-0 in the 4th with 10 seconds left.

On Soros' politics - this is just his billionaire's fantasy. Some rich dudes buy an NFL team because they always wanted to play ball but we're 5'8 and 160 lbs. Soros wanted to be this great philo-political mind, but wasn't, and is now investing in all of the political things! to, in my opinion, brute force his way into that role.

African-Americans found themselves trapped in urban decay rather than a promise of continued economic prosperity.

If Trump's political life survives this prosecution into the next election, I really wonder how the whole thing will play with African-Americans and how he'll try to play it. He had already gone to great lengths in his prior campaigns and presidency, doing everything he could to give the appearance that he was working hard to embrace them as a constituency and draw their votes. Given that a regular concern of the African-American community is something along the lines of, "Vague police powers are abused to target us, suppress us, and keep us out of any sort of 'official' life," doesn't he immediately get to play that up even more? "I understand you; these people wield these laws and powers unjustly, targeting us unfairly just to keep us down, because they don't like us." Maybe it won't end up being effective in pushing numbers, and he'll have to balance it a little bit with the 'law and order' constituency that wants promises that he'll go after actual theft, murder, and rioting... but how does this not shoot up to being one of the top three-or-so issues of his campaign?

Mayor Pete, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris all dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden, right before a primary in which Biden leans heavily upon the vote of what was then termed "low information voters."

Buttigieg dropped out after the SC primary (in which, btw, he got fewer votes than Tom Steyer). Harris dropped out in early December, and did not endorse Biden until after Super Tuesday. Warren dropped out after Super Tuesday.

Bernie Sanders would have been given the exact same treatment as Trump had he reached and been elected in the general.

That sounds very far-fetched.

I find it somewhat plausible.

Normal, centrist voters were definitely more wary of Sanders than of basically any other Dem candidate. That leaves room to scapegoat him.

He doesn’t have nearly as much attack surface on culture/personality, but they’d still hit him on policy. Too radical for major corporate outlets. I’d also expect him to meet massive gridlock, at which point he gets nebulously blamed for not compromising.

It’s possible they’d close ranks anyways, if the ideological bent is stronger than I thought. In that case I’d bet on Fox and Friends to take up the market share. There is definitely a contingent of socialist-skeptics, ones who already pay taxes and own property, who were really receptive to Sanders criticism.

He doesn’t have nearly as much attack surface on culture/personality, but they’d still hit him on policy.

I've heard that he is extremely unpopular amongst people with whom he has direct contact; so unpleasant that he was kicked out of a kibbutz for being generally annoying and not pulling his weight in community work. He and his wife also have some financial issues that are potentially more than just unbecoming of a self-declared socialist. We've never seen a gloves-off campaign against Sanders, because Clinton had the 2016 primary fixed.

Sanders was never going to elicit the same level and type of negative emotional response as Trump.

What you call a conspiracy in the Democratic primaries is called...people of the same general political ideology getting behind whom they believed was the strongest candidate. The moderates actually got along, while Bernie got knifed in the gut by Warren staying in the race. Even though, actual polling showed Biden as the 2nd choice of many Warren voters.

I think there's a normative implication to "conspiracy" that we can't ignore which explains why people duck the term.

Yeah but there isn't another suitable term we could use instead is there? So we're kinda stuck with the ambiguity.

They had principles. And that makes modelling and predicting their behavior by other power brokers effectively impossible, which is anathema to the aforementioned alphabet soup of the world.

Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable? If you have a devout Catholic, then you'll have a good idea of how much fish he consumes. If you have a devout Mormon, then you know not to serve soda at any party he'll be at. If you have a devout Communist, you'll have a good idea of what'll get him quoting from Marx. If you have a Wokist, then you can obviously predict their arguments in advance so long as you're familiar with the egregoric memeplex.

If anything, while Trump was unpredictable, I feel he was also rather unprincipled. The man switched political parties multiple times before he ran as President, and his sustained turn to the right almost feels like an aberration of the pattern. The only principled, predictable thing about the man in office was "if Obama did it, he was gonna try to reverse it." Trump was, and probably still is, a wild card soaked in chlorine trifluoride and gilded with a razor's edge of gold.

Sounds like Russell conjugation to me. I have principles, you have dogmatic identities.

But I think I see what you’re getting at. There’s clearly some trait that makes a motivated outsider hard to control and to read. Maybe a word like “obstinacy” or “agency” fits better?

One of the points made by the book Moral Mazes (also community discussion) is that Moral Mazes (the book is about the management hierarchy at large non-financial companies in the pre-shareholder value era, but the general principles apply to any sufficiently unethical bureaucratic hierarchy) are total institutions, and that anyone who has built a career in one loses the ability to understand people who are motivated by things other than office politics.

(Incidentally, once you understand the concept of a Moral Maze, the term Swamp as used by anti-establishment politicians clearly refers to the coalition of corporate, governmental, and machine-politics Moral Mazes that work well together because they understand each other in a way they don't understand startup founders, family-owned businesses, or charismatic non-machine politicians like Sanders and Trump).

Donald Trump has been a GC in his father's real estate empire, a real estate developer in his own right, a reality TV star, and a charismatic outsider politician. None of these careers involve working in a Moral Maze. If he is ethically compromised (and he probably is), it is about money and/or sex, not office politics. I can absolutely believe that a career bureaucrat or career machine politician would struggle to grok him.

Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable?

Only to people who understand those principles. My read of the political landscape today is that even the possibility of having them is just invisible to a lot of people, much less the details of any particular set.

His crime was winning the 2016 election. It was the crime that prompted two impeachments, and now an indictment. Trump cannot be allowed to get away with it, and so Democrats have overreached at every opportunity, grasping at straws, to get something, anything, to stick to him.

That strikes me as a perverse sort of applause light. It belongs in the same category as "They hated Him because He told the truth": a zinger designed specifically for people who already buy into the premise. I'm sure plenty of readers saw it, immediately thought of examples like you've provided here, upvoted and moved on. Please clap. For those who disagreed with your premise, there wasn't a lot to work with. This version of your argument is way better.


With my whinging out of the way, I want to riff off of @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola. Well, I want to go further than 20%. The vast majority of Trump Derangement Syndrome, political prosecution, Congressional mummery--it can be explained with the phrase "he can't keep getting away with it!"

People don't like to admit that. They'll prevaricate about eroding norms or unpresidential conduct or reduced credibility abroad. But those are symptoms. Hatred and revulsion are reflexes to the perception that justice was not served. It's not that he won, it's that he won after doing something that was supposed to disqualify him. Something that theoretically would have sunk a less charismatic campaign. There were a lot of "somethings," each an opportunity for political opponents to board that train, and once they were on board, they had a direct route to becoming personal opponents. Trump offends people more than Ted Cruz or Jeb! ever could, because he hits their sense of fairness.

It's important to note that this is near orthogonal to any actual, you know, guilt. People who play the game surely "get away with it" more often than those who don't. I could believe they commit more crime, given their greater means, than normal citizens. How might real estate moguls stack up?

That's all you need to explain the constant baying for Trump's head.

I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them. And I think a lot of it is that he doesn’t really fit the culture of the Washington Elites. He’s a Clampett, more or less. He’s the guy who talks in braggadocio, eats steak with ketchup, and does political theater in burlesque. He’s a White Trash President. He’s supposed to be understated, nuanced, culturally sophisticated, prefer Professional Managerial Class food, clothes, music, and entertainment. He’s not supposed to mock political opponents on Twitter like a 4chan troll, he’s not supposed to openly kill our enemies with drone strikes (although a plausibly deniable death carried out by the CIA that nobody knows about is fine, there are rules to kanly).

Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump. Desantis would have to deal with more quiet opposition, more subtle, and more fitting of another PMC cultured politician. He wouldn’t be investigated with a breathless “is this long nightmare finally over?”

Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump.

The groundwork is being laid to declare that Desantis is Mussolini and will destroy democracy. At least they were able to pick a fascist other than the small mustache fellow from Austria, but I do suspect that the choice of fascist was mostly ethnic.

In my experience, comparing someone to Mussolini is about making them sound more ridiculous than threatening, not about whether they look Italian or not. Trump is Hitler because he is a "fascist" and a winner. De Santis is Mussolini because he is a "fascist" and a cheap Trump knock-off. I don't think that the people writing these pieces know anything about Franco or Salazar, and anything they know about Peron comes from watching Evita.

I do suspect that the choice of fascist was mostly ethnic

Trump is of German extraction, yet the claims re him were also that he was a fascist, rather than a Nazi.

Oh! I meant that the fascist of choice was Mussolini due to him being a co-ethnic of Desantis. Presumably Rubio would be RoboFranco if he ever managed to get near the Presidency.

I'm not disagreeing that it is probably not ethnic. But I don't the think the majority of people making claims that Trump was a fascist or a Nazi make any distinction between the two. It works the same way with people who call the other side communists and socialists. They're just bad words for people they disagree with.

The catch with DeSantis is that he’s angled for overlapping branding to pick up Trump supporters and national attention. Each time he does something that can be pattern-matched to Trump, a few more critics will jump on the Literally Mussolini train. In the hypothetical where Trump hadn’t gotten that train going, I don’t think it’d play out so dramatically.

I agree that his white trash manner is extra inflammatory to the PMC, but I thinking you're only 80% of the way to explaining their hatred. The final bit is that people like him aren't supposed to win. They're supposed to lose, they're relics of a backwards evil bygone era. If people like him win, it could undo all the salami-slicing, Nudges™, and demoralization works that has been wrought upon the plebs. They'll stop seeing the Glorious Technocratic Bugpod Future as an inevitability and maybe even stop feeling powerless, and then maybe they'll even finally try to do something about it all. And so Trump can't be allowed to get away with it, he has to be dealt with like Winston, and the old Party Members -- not martyred, but degraded, hounded, dragged through the mud, abused until he's a shell of his former self, so that everyone else can see that this is what happens to people who oppose Progress, even very rich well connected people who get elected to the most powerful office in the world. Any wealthy conservative considering a future presidential run will now be keenly aware of what happens if he should step outside the controlled opposition pen and will doubtless think twice.

Edit: Re-reading this, it sounds like I'm accusing my outgroup of being part of a vast conspiracy and bent on ruthlessly crushing an enemy for defying their power, but I'm not. Rather they're unwittingly part of an SSC-style prospiracy. The people who feel this way don't consciously think they're channeling O'Brien, they think they're Standing Up for Democratic Norms or whatever rationalization works for them.

Glorious Technocratic Bugpod Future

Re-reading this, it sounds like I'm accusing my outgroup of being part of a vast conspiracy

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Memes about eating bugs and living in pods sound unhinged to normies and non-alt-rightists in the same way and for the same reason that Handmaid's Tale memes sound unhinged to normies and non-wokists - it is a call to resist a non-existent conspiracy.

Re. bugs, I move in circles where people would eat a bug in exchange for a Davos invite, and I haven't met anyone who regularly eats insects, or who lobbies for other people to eat insects. I am aware there was once a WEF panel on the advantages of insect protein, but as of the current year, the "meat is animal cruelty and climate change" crowd are pushing fake-meat products like Beyond Burgers.

Re. pods, it isn't even obvious what this means - there was a long thread on this forum discussing the confusion where it eventually became clear that "living in the pod" meant that WEF elites wanted non-elites to live in much less square footage than American suburbanites would consider acceptable. There are two problems with this one - the first is that if it took a 10+ post forum thread to explain it to a sympathetic audience on this forum, then normies who hear "I will not live in the pod" are just going to be confused. The second is that, although "non-elites should live in something smaller than the cookie-cutter 3000 sq ft suburban McMansion favoured by middle-class Texans" is indeed an idea held by most WEF attendees, the smaller homes they are promoting do not fall within the ordinary English meaning of the word "pod".

If you look at the Tiny House Movement, only one of the pictures on that wiki page is podlike. The Berkeley shared houses where the so-called "Rationalists" have weird sex while reading overlong Harry Potter fanfics are not pods. A 700 sq ft apartment in a converted industrial building is not a pod. A 1500 sq ft New Urbanist rowhouse is definitely not a pod.

I'm not really sure what your point is other than that "Glorious Technocratic Bugpod Future" is a somewhat uncharitable phrasing, which I will concede. Would you prefer "Glorious Technocratic Soyshack Future" instead? I don't want to eat bugs or fake meat, I don't want to live in a pod or in whatever square footage that globalists deem adequate for plebians like me. We can argue over whether the Planet Health Diet must necessarily include insect protein, or where the precise line between "studio" and "pod" lies, but that doesn't seem very productive.

it is a call to resist a non-existent conspiracy

You literally cited the WEF in response to both points, so I think "non-existent" doesn't hold water. And the WEF is not some isolated crackpot think tank, they have many influential members and connections. Do I think that we're all going to be rounded up in FEMA camps next year where we will be forced to live in shipping containers and eat crickets for breakfast lunch and dinner? No. But do I think tha a subset of global elites wants to drastically downgrade my standard of living and my dietary health and, worse yet, feel themselves morally compelled to and fully justified in doing so? Yes, because they say so themselves.

I'm not really sure what your point is

You noticed that your post triggered your own "this is an unhinged conspiracy theory" buttons - I was trying to point out why discussion of bugs and pods triggers those buttons. I only mentioned the WEF because I have spent enough time on this forum to know that the bugpod meme originated with anti-WEF conspiracy theorists.

The socially conservative right in American really does want to roll back certain feminist achievements (notably abortion), and feminists are behaving rationally when they organise against this, but talking about handmaids sounds unhinged.

The establishment left really do want to change the world in ways which mean people eat somewhat less animal meat, and somewhat more people live in dense urban places (which usually implies a consumption bundle including less square feet of housing per person), and the Red Tribe right are behaving rationally when they organise against this, but talking about bugs and pods sounds unhinged, for the reasons I gave in the previous post.

Would you prefer "Glorious Technocratic Soyshack Future" instead?

Part of the point of this forum is that we write like we are having a productive debate (even if we are not) and not like we are having an unhinged vent (even if we are). In the context of your post, "ProgressTM" or "The Arc of the Moral UniverseTM" or "Total Blue Tribe Victory" would have got the point across.

In the context of your post, "ProgressTM" or "The Arc of the Moral UniverseTM" or "Total Blue Tribe Victory" would have got the point across.

This is a fair point.

I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them.

It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection. You think people didn't want Bush that bad? But he had cover from his family and the deep layer of political allies and hangers-on built up over decades.

Remember the people moving behind the scenes are sharks. They don't operate on hate. They are dead eyed U-boat commanders with a battleship in their sights with no anti-sub destroyers getting in the way. Trump is being moved against because it is rationally the best political way to beat him. He loves a close in knife-fight, he has big guns, his populist support gives him armor, but he is weak in real political operative allies. His staff picks turn on him or go down in flames, his lawyers turn against him. His weakness is below the waterline not above it. That is what separates him from other modern presidents.

You don't sink the Tirpitz with another battleship, its too risky. If it lacks cover you send planes or subs. You only need a couple of good hits to take it out with little risk. If you lose a few planes or even a sub, who cares? It's a good trade.

Why move against Trump in ways, you didn't against other presidents? Because you CAN.

Interestingly, a Democratic nominee Trump would have less of this weakness because the DNC is very good at using its connections for the benefit of their candidates while the RNC is either less capable of this, or somewhat ideologically opposed to it overall (or both).

It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection.

This is a self-created problem, and downstream of his social status. Trump doesn't have useful allies and the political protection they afford because he doesn't know he needs them, he doesn't know how they work, he doesn't know how politics works -- he just knows that as someone of low social status, he's suspicious of how the high-status system work -- and he's disloyal to the allies he has, losing them quickly.

I was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest last night and it dawned on me how much of a McMurphy Trump is. He's a wildly charismatic rule-breaker, but he mistakes his charisma for substance and doesn't really understand why he breaks the rules. He has a child's idea of how things should work. He just has a resistance to the authorities, he gets off on poking them, and he mistakenly thinks he's smarter than them. He makes an instant connection with the discarded people that he thinks have been unfairly beaten down by the authorities, and he lifts their spirits by thumbing his nose at their oppressors... but he never really understands the true dysfunctions of his followers, and as an egotist, he's unconscientious about how he uses them in his own self-service. He also never really understands the system he's bucking, and by the end, he has made vulnerable and destroyed the weakest of his comrades and the system crushes him. He thought he was a righteous agitator, but he made everything much much worse in the short term, and didn't really matter in the long-term.

Of course, OFOTCN was a product of 1960s anti-authoritarianism (young people may not know that Boomers were fleetingly anti-authoritarian before they become the authorities), so we are supposed to view McMurphy as a tragic hero and Nurse Ratched as a fascist monster. We are also supposed to buy in to the popular counter-culture idea that "mental illness" was a social imposition on unfortunate people who are really no less crazy than you or I. But now the OFOTCN dynamics look very different to me: McMurphy is a fool; Ratched has control issues, yes, but she also has the near-impossible job of connecting with severely troubled people who are easily led to extremes by disruptive behavior. Compared to the Titicut Follies, this mental hospital is an ideal of order and serenity before McMurphy shows up. But because of Titicut Follies and OFOTCN, most of the people seen in this movie would soon be living in tents in downtown Portland, shitting on the sidewalk, and randomly attacking passersby. (Fittingly, Oregon, where the movie was set and filmed, recently declared OFOTCN its official state movie.)

There is merit to this analysis. On the other hand, you need some way to distinguish between "hey, it turns out rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable, who knew", and "rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable to the exact extent that my side controls them." The former could conceivably result in a positive outcome. The later cannot.

I'm not optimistic that such a distinction can be drawn, in the present case.

On the other hand, you need some way to distinguish between "hey, it turns out rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable, who knew", and "rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable to the exact extent that my side controls them."

That is always the tension in centrist/civic politics. Trump is not a centrist/civicist though -- and, importantly, neither are many of his opponents; I don't see Trump as wholly unique problem, except for how he doesn't bother to cloak his extremeism -- he's a bull in a china shop that gets cheered by people who resent the mean owners and the social implications of the china shop. Rather than finding some way to ignore or replace the china shop with something more useful, they choose destruction. I have a good friend who, though he has soured a little on Trump recently, loved that about him, loved January 6, loved that he insults Elaine Chao for being Chinese, because he shares Trump's contempt for "the system" and all of the proprieties that make the system work. I don't think anything better than the current system comes out of that style of destructive performance, however.

I'm not an adherent of centrist/civic politics any more, because I've lost faith in the solutions on offer. At some point, you need a positive claim for your program, something beyond "anything else you try will be worse." You need this because politics is, in its most essential nature, about hope, about belief that action can lead to positive outcomes. If you can't offer that hope, if policy starvation has hollowed out your platform's credibility, people will find an alternative to invest their hope in, even if it's as simple and short-sighted as a riot. Even if you're right, they'll prefer learning the hard way to simply giving up without trying.

At the end of the day, it's too easy to claim that what has been delivered is the best possible. It's too easy for the establishment to claim, like an abusive spouse, that their corruption and mendacity, bad faith and petty malice must be eternally overlooked, lest terrible consequences result. At some point, it's on the establishment to either deliver on their promises or get the fuck out of the way. That point, for a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, arrived sometime around 2015. Destruction is costly and wasteful, but sometimes, rarely, it really is the only way forward. Sometimes compromise doesn't work, and you have to fight. And in the present circumstance, what alternative is there? What's the Grand Compromise this time around? What concerns of Trump's supporters or even of his opponents could plausibly be addressed, under the current conditions? What bright future can be plausibly projected?

The best I've ever come up with is that Musk gets Falcon Heavy running, and we get too busy asteroid mining to worry about all this nonsense. Maybe AI and automation materially alter peoples' living conditions for the better?

I mean, the alternative is usually, people die out, and so do their views. Like, there used to be a major Anti-Masonry party in many states in the US. Nothing was really done on a national level to appease those people. It's just that their kids and grandkids didn't really care.

Same thing w/ interracial marriage. Well, there were obviously some shifts by people, if you look at Gallup polling, which goes back to World War II, you see a steady rise until the 80's, then a big jump during that time. Which makes sense - a lot of people who would've been in their 40's by time Civil Rights were a live issue (post-World War II/Humphrey convention speech/Truman desegregation) were dying off, and being replaced by a bunch of Gen Xers who were like 95/5 for interracial marriage.

Ironically, the only issue where the win condition has happened because of actual shifts in people's views, as opposed to generational rollover is gay marriage. Obviously, there was some bit of 85-year old gay marriage opponents being replaced by pro-gay marriage 18 year olds, but the shift happened too quickly to be that.

But yeah, in another generation and a half or so, most of the current Fox News audience/Trump base is going to be worm food. At that point, just like the Right stopped with the overt racism, sexism, etc. in the 70's and 80's to win over younger voters (including winning the youth vote in '84 and '88), the GOP will either have to figure out how to appeal to a largely currently Democratic voting-base (again, yes, Millennial's are voting at lower rates for Democrat's than they did in 2008, but if I remember right, it's about D+8. That's still death for the GOP if the largest voting bloc is even D+4 or D+5, when the smaller, younger voting blocks are even more D-leaning), or they do actually die, outside of the Senate seats they'll hold in depopulating states, and then things get interesting.

It's a nice story, but I think if Blues collectively had the patience and discipline for this strategy, the world would look very different than it does. Also, it would probably help to have kids; I get that this is what big tech, social media and the educational system are for, but... eh. I'm skeptical it plays out the way they're hoping.

The more immediate problem is that Progressives want the future they've been promised, and there is absolutely no way it can be delivered. I think that's going to be a problem for them going forward, and increasingly more so as even their most extreme solutions simply fail. Meanwhile, trust in institutions erodes, and the tighter they squeeze with the consensus machine and social norms, the more society slips through their fingers. Trust in media, academics, elites, Science itself continues to erode, as does social cohesion generally.

In any case, we pays our money and we takes our bets, no? Maybe you're right after all. Time will tell.

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But yeah, in another generation and a half or so, most of the current Fox News audience/Trump base is going to be worm food. At that point, just like the Right stopped with the overt racism, sexism, etc. in the 70's and 80's to win over younger voters (including winning the youth vote in '84 and '88), the GOP will either have to figure out how to appeal to a largely currently Democratic voting-base (again, yes, Millennial's are voting at lower rates for Democrat's than they did in 2008, but if I remember right, it's about D+8. That's still death for the GOP if the largest voting bloc is even D+4 or D+5, when the smaller, younger voting blocks are even more D-leaning), or they do actually die, outside of the Senate seats they'll hold in depopulating states, and then things get interesting.

While white Americans will be a minority then, the remaining ones will be the descendants of the based, unvaccinated alt-righters currently breeding like rabbits.

White liberals are going extinct, one booster, one contraceptive, one HRT pill, one interracial relationship at a time.

Sure, the Indians, the Chinese, the Mexicans are taking over, but they probably won't try to make your kids gay.

Interestingly, a Democratic nominee Trump would have less of this weakness because the DNC is very good at using its connections for the benefit of their candidates while the RNC is either less capable of this, or somewhat ideologically opposed to it overall (or both).

It's a bit of a trade off I think - the RNC don't have the sense of unity (and community) the DNC has, but they also don't have superdelegates confusing and overriding primaries - iirc this was one of the reasons Trump ran as a republican.

His staff picks turn on him or go down in flames, his lawyers turn against him. His weakness is below the waterline not above it. That is what separates him from other modern presidents.

Yeah this was the most demoralising part. It wasn't even that he was shitty at picking staff and counsel - a lot of his picks were great. But they were also targets with massive bullseyes on their backs, and it is a rare politician who doesn't have some skeletons in their closet. Pence was a good vp pick for that reason alone (although his in with the Christians was nothing to scoff at).

I don’t think anyone else at all, trumps social status or not, would be prosecuted for failure to properly record invoicing a hooker. If it made it into court at all it would have been in the context of divorce proceedings.

I think someone who claimed a hooker payoff as a business expense on their taxes would be prosecuted for tax fraud if they had powerful enemies, which Trump does. But that would be a federal charge, and Merrick Garland is playing his cards close to his chest.

This particular indictment is driven by Bragg's ego and desire to advance in NY lefty politics, not by a desire to convict Trump. Hence the weak charges - Trump is guilty of a lot more serious crimes than misrecording the Stormy Daniels hush money, but nothing that is both media-friendly and chargeable in New York state court.

I suspect the federal indictments will be less bullshit and will include serious crimes of which Trump is actually guilty.

I think someone who claimed a hooker payoff as a business expense on their taxes would be prosecuted for tax fraud

Interestingly, in the indictment, it says that they plus-up'ed the payment to Cohen in order to cover the additional taxes he'd have to pay on the "income". So, like, weirdly, taxes were paid, probably more than would have been otherwise (he ended up paying $420k for what I guess he could have directly paid for like $130k). And the indictment actually doesn't allege tax fraud stemming from the allegedly fraudulent business records.

When reading the indictment, I couldn't help but think about how dumb/incompetent the whole thing seemed to be. Like, it mentioned how Trump was trying to delay payment until after the election, because then he could just renege on the promise to pay at that point, thinking it wouldn't matter. Honestly, unless there's some other game being played that I'm not aware of (and which is not pointed out in the indictment), almost the only thing I can think of is that he was planning on stiffing Cohen after the election if he had lost. Which is pretty dumb/incompetent. On the one hand, I guess he was purchasing a possible option on saving a couple hundred thousand dollars... and I guess this could have been considered a pretty 'cheap' option, given how strained you have to read the law to try to work your way up to felony charges out of the matter. On the other hand, maybe he just misevaluated where the biggest cost threat was, thinking short term about the primary concern being the election itself rather than any threat of prosecution by overzealous prosecutors with "novel" theories who are so blinkered by Trump-has-to-pay-ism.

Trump didn’t claim a hooker payoff as a business expense though, he’s being prosecuted for claiming it’s a personal expense. I have a hard time seeing anyone getting charged for that.

But that would be a federal charge,

Surely his company also pays state taxes.

If only there were some way to know what sort of taxes he paid!

I was responding specifically to the OP's claim; the reports I have seen have referenced business records, which might be something other than taxes.

I am not convinced that "legal expenses" is technically a false statement. How should he record payments to people when they sign NDAs?

We of course don't know yet precisely what the allegations are, but this does not strike me as particularly convincing. I would think that "legal expenses" are expenses paid for legal services. Why should payment pursuant to an NDA be a "legal expense" if payment pursuant to other contracts are not? Note that I am not arguing that Trump is or is not guilty, nor that the prosecution is or is not legitimate.

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Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.

What's missing from your argument is an explanation of why Trump engenders unprecedented "hatred and revulsion." The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.

The standard pro-Trump explanation for why he's hated is something like "he's the only one who isn't corrupt and won't do what the deep state wants." The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."

It seems like the whole argument pivots around this "why is he hated" question. If Trump is in fact uniquely willing to violate democratic norms, it seems reasonable for his opponents to take issue with that and to argue he has forfeited the right to avail himself of those norms for protection. You and VDH raise good arguments for why the norm of "don't prosecute former presidents" exists, but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists. In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.

The question is not whether Trump is personally corrupt - to be honest, nobody cares much if he took or given a bribe or two. The reason he was elected is not because he's a saint personally, it is to try and break the whole corrupt system - where the problem is not personal corruption, which can be dealt with by replacing the corrupt individual, but systemic perversion of the whole power structure. So, for those who elected him, Trump defecting is exactly why they elected him - because cooperating hasn't been working for them for decades now, and they feel like the other side is already been defecting for a long while, and it's time to respond in kind.

violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged

These are good examples, because neither of them actually violates any democratic norms. It does violate the norms of behavior that the elite political class has set up - mostly not for themselves but for others - but that's, again, why Trump is there in the first place. Whining about elections being rigged is the staple of American politics - but when the Left has been doing it about Bush, that was par for the course. Asking KGB's Andropov to help with fighting Reagan was par for the course. Arranging with Medvedev to be "more flexible after the elections" is par for the course. Getting millions from Russian banks and oligarchs for "charity purposes" is par for the course. It's when the Right is suspected of doing a tiny bit of something similar by themselves - then it's a norm violation, they're not supposed to do it to us, we're supposed to do it to them! That's exactly the norms that the deplorables wanted to be violated.

why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists

But does it really? Maybe the Democrat President did not have to personally challenge the results - he had hundreds of lieutenants to do it for him. The deplorables do not have the army of lieutenants that the systemic president, chosen by the system, has. So they can not rely on a network of proxies to do the job, if anything can lead this on the deplorable side, it's Trump. But the norm of "elections are never questioned" does not exist - it's all pretend. Bush results were questioned all the time, Stacy Abrams still claims her election was stolen and she is not seen as norm violator - I know her title as The President of Earth may not qualify, but she is still quite prominent to illustrate that this supposed "norm" is fake - it works only towards one side and not the other. Such are almost all "norms" that Trump has "violated".

So, for those who elected him, Trump defecting is exactly why they elected him - because cooperating hasn't been working for them for decades now, and they feel like the other side is already been defecting for a long while, and it's time to respond in kind.

Sure, but if this is the case you don't have standing to complain when his opponents adopt the same strategy. Arguing that indicting Trump is norm-breaking rings hollow if Trump himself was elected to break norms.

It's a continuation of the norm-breaking that led to electing Trump. Or, in other words, the supposed "norms" have been norms only to one side, but not the other - and the indictment is added to the long list of these one-sided norms, where Democrats are routinely doing things they claim shouldn't be done because of the "norms". It's not the new complaint, it's the same complaint over and over and over and over.

I think it's important to compare Trump to the two previous Republican presidential candidates, McCain and Romney. In that context, what made him different was not only that he won the election, but also that he actually, you know, made a serious, undeterred attempt to win the election, no matter what crap the hostile media outlets threw at him. He actually competed, and tried to win, unlike those other two losers who tried to live up to their opposition's supposed standards. That explains most of the animosity.

who tried to live up to their opposition's supposed standards

Except it wasn't the opposition's standards - at least not on election denialism. The difference between that and "being racist" by wanting to deport people is vast.

The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.

Hell, the Dominion lawsuit revealed that, even within Fox, people who didn't excoriate him in public were dubious but worried about their audience.

But I guess they were also playing by Democrat standards?

The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.

This seems like a strange claim to me. Would you classify the two-year investigation of "Russian interference" by a Special Prosecutor as "accepting election results"? "Not My President"? Hillary - the actual losing candidate - calling Trump an illegitimate President? Sadly, the civilized norms had already been well eroded by 2020.

The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.

I remember watching a documentary about how Bush stole the election with Diebold voting machines. Do you mean uncontroversial among politicians? I guess not since you mentioned Fox reporters.

Accusations of unfair elections have always been around, but the politicians themselves are supposed to accept defeat. Consider the 2000 presidential election: Al Gore disputed 1 legitimately very close state with sketch election practices, and when he lost the court challenges, that was it. There weren't dozens of lawsuits filed against every state and election official where he lost, alleging far-flung conspiracies. There wasn't a riot at the Capitol. There was definitely a lot of double-think and crappy opinionating from the peanut gallery (e.g. is it a question for Florida state courts or SCOTUS; depends on who everyone thinks they'll side with) but I think overall I think he had a much better case than Trump for losing unfairly and managed to handle it more gracefully.

I could quibble about some details, but I don't really have anything against what you said. It might be a tone thing, but I can understand where someone saying "there was a riot at the capitol, and the way Trump was acting was the most likely cause of it. That's pretty damn bad compared to recent presidential candidates" is coming from, but when someone unironically calls it an insurrection, I check out.

I specifically used the word riot because of how charged "insurrection" is!

The extent to which said riot was even Trump's fault is... eh. I'm personally inclined to blame individuals for their own actions. The 1/6 riot was the fault of the rioters, not Trump. BLM riots were the fault of BLM rioters, not some academic writing a sociology paper on how riots are the voice of the unheard. Mass shootings are the fault of mass shooters, not the NRA. It's not so much that he's mostly to blame as that I think we should have a very high standard when it comes to "are politicians following rules and norms for a peaceful transfer of power." Trump's behavior was a contributing cause, but even if it's only 5% of the cause, it should 0.001% (numbers fabricated).

Do you mean uncontroversial among politicians? I guess not since you mentioned Fox reporters.

Politicians especially are expected to concede publicly but, yes, I cited Fox to say that even they would were dubious about the path they were on. If it was normal why would they be?

But I just looked up that documentary and apparently it was Emmy nominated which is...shocking. Good counterexample.

If it was normal why would they be?

There were stats going around at one point about how the majority of Fox News employees donate to the Democrats, this old reddit post with a dead link is all that I could find about it now, but it could go some way to explaining the crew's selective memory about election legitimacy claims. Also the Republican establishment itself isn't all that hot on Trump either, so there's a potential reason for them to be biased even if they're Republicans.

I managed to find the blogpost, which the reddit post linked.

If the images don't work, they are: one and two.

@Tanista

Thanks

The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."

And this explanation is simply wrong. Trump has not shown a willingness to violate democratic norms. The norm violations were and are against him, starting from before he was elected with the FBI surveillance of his campaign. There's no norm that says "don't call on Russia to release hacked emails". There certainly no norm against complaining that elections are rigged, that's like claiming there's a norm against taking a dive in soccer. He talked big about an actual violation ("lock her up") but he never actually tried to do it.

There's no norm that says "don't call on Russia to release hacked emails".

There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.

I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.

There isn't now though, that's for sure.

There certainly no norm against complaining that elections are rigged

Yet losing candidates are expected to congratulate their opponents and concede (it was noteworthy that Clinton didn't have a concession speech).

Again, less of an expectation with Abrams' thing + Biden pre-complaining about the midterms.

I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.

That was a joke. That was always an obvious joke. Vox even had an article saying it was only a joke in poor taste, and not a serious request, which was memory-holed two or three years later when the first impeachment began.

There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.

The problem with most of these proposed "norms" is they either seem to have been made up entirely after the fact, or they end up being suspiciously gerrymandered to only cover Trump's behavior and not the very similar behavior of other politicians.

Just out of curiosity, which of those two buckets do you feel "don't ask enemies for political help" and "avoid calling elections rigged" each fall into?

Both of those are "made up entirely after the fact". The "don't ask enemies for political help" has the added issue of being obvious rhetorical flourish, not a serious request.

Given that the Russians did in fact hack and leak John Podesta's e-mails on behalf of the Trump campaign, why should I believe people who say he was joking when he asked them to do the same to Hillary Clinton? I think Henry II was probably joking when he said "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" but he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt after Thomas a Becket is murdered.

That's like saying Al-Qaeda did 9/11 on behalf of Bush.

The first can be disregarded, as it was an obvious joke. If he had actually intended to ask a foreign enemy for political help, he would have done it secretly, they way Ted Kennedy did with the Soviet Union in 1984. As for the second, I dispute that "avoid calling elections rigged" has ever been a norm, as you can easily dig up counterexample throughout history. Hillary Clinton herself has repeatedly suggested that Trump's victory was rigged by the Russians, and as was pointed out to you, both of Bush's elections had their authenticity repeatedly and vigorously called into question. Stacy Abrams has practically made a cottage industry out of challenging the legitimacy of her gubernatorial loss, to widespread acclaim and media adulation. So, if one were to posit that such a norm did exist, it would have to be heavily gerrymandered to exclude all these examples.

The actual norm is that losing candidates do not challenge the transition of power with force, but of course Trump didn't do that, so that's not helpful to criticizing him.

Hillary Clinton herself has repeatedly suggested that Trump's victory was rigged by the Russians

This is "words have meanings" pedantry, but Hillary Clinton did not accuse the Russians of rigging the election. A "rigged" election is one where the declared result deliberately does not match the votes cast. The Russians tried to rig the election (by hacking voting machines), but failed - the Clinton campaign and affiliated left-establishment groups had conceded this by the end of November. Other people, notably including Jill Stein, continued to run with the idea after it became clear that it didn't happen, but Clinton did not.

What Hillary said, correctly, was that the Russians improperly helped Trump by hacking and leaking John Podesta's e-mails. This is "interfering" with the election, not "rigging" it. Hillary Clinton and people speaking on her behalf have always been quite careful about this distinction, even if the broader left have not. The distinction matters because calling an election "rigged" is an implicit call to change the official result to match the votes cast, but (at least in the US) a complaint about interference is a call to punish (either judicially or politically) the people responsible without throwing out the validly cast votes.

There was no attempt by the Clinton campaign or anyone affiliated with it to overturn the 2016 election on grounds of Russian interference. Jill Stein requested recounts in several key states in accordance with state law, and they didn't find anything untoward.

The actual norm is that losing candidates do not challenge the transition of power with force, but of course Trump didn't do that, so that's not helpful to criticizing him.

Politics does not work by the rules of criminal trials. In the ordinary English meaning of the word, Trump (among others) incited the Jan 6th riots, which were an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the orderly transition of power by force. He should not have done this, and no other Presidential candidate has continued to publicly challenge an election after exhausting his State-law remedies since Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The fact that we can't prove the causal link between Trump's incitement and the events of Jan 6th 2021 means he probably can't be prosecuted for it (and in any case, he would probably be protected by the 1st amendment), but it doesn't mean that he didn't do it. As I have said elsewhere, if the King says "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" and Thomas a Becket gets murdered, he loses the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, the argument that Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election by force is not restricted to the Jan 6th riot. Per the evidence gathered by the House Select Committee, Trump held a meeting in the Oval Office on 18th December at which he suggested rerunning the election under martial law. Michael Flynn made the same suggestion publicly on multiple occasions, and there is reasonable evidence that he was doing so on behalf of Trump. Again, probably not enough evidence for a criminal conviction, but enough evidence for the establishment to conclude on the balance of probabilities that Trump would have overturned the election by coup if the military had co-operated.

I think "The President does not conduct coup plots in the Oval Office" is, and always has been a norm of American politics that Trump violated.

I think both proposed explanations I gave are wrong, or only partially correct at best. My point is simply that the degree to which hatred of Trump is legitimate, and the degree to which actions taken against Trump, such as this prosecution, are legitimate, in large part depends on the specific explanation for why he is hated and why the actions are being taken. This part of the argument can't simply be ignored or hand-waved.

Well, now that we are actually having a substantive conversation about it:

The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.

I personally think the character of the 2016 election matters a lot to this calculus. Hillary Clinton's election was supposed to not only be a sure thing, but the ushering in of a new era: America's First Woman President. And post-awokening, people didn't just want this to be true (as they perhaps wanted it to be true decades earlier)--a large number of people (especially young, especially female, especially college-educated types) felt entitled to it. When Al Gore lost in 2000, the brouhaha over Florida was wild--and yet there was nothing like this happening, at least not where I could see it.

It made for a sobering contrast with 2008, when America's First Black President won his own anticipated victory. Even country music stars were singing his praises. In a nation that has become culturally obsessed with "firsts," with shattering "glass ceilings," and with otherwise celebrating people not for what they actually contribute, but merely for their membership in politically important minorities, 2016 was not a defeat--it was a heist. No less important a figure than former president Jimmy Carter said:

There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.

The much celebrated congressman from Georgia, John Lewis, skipped the inauguration, saying:

I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president.... I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

No wonder there were peaceful but fiery protests come inauguration time. The list goes on, but the point is that Democrats did not respond to Clinton's loss in a normal way. Florida's 2000 problems were bad, but at least they were Florida's problems--they were not specifically cultural problems, or problems caused by one or both of the candidates seeking victory at any price. There was a legitimate dispute based on plausible evidence. What happened in 2016, though, was a defection; Democrats responded by abandoning even a pretense of respecting the rule of law. For them to lose was no longer a political setback, but a failure of democracy! Catastrophe! Devastation! Revolution!

The parallel case of 2020 simply cannot be understood outside that context. Reactionaries gonna react. When you slap the "defect" button in an iterated game, your opponent is all but guaranteed to follow suit, and in this case I think that is substantially what Republicans did.

Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Clinton had lost instead to Rubio or something. But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else? Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important. So it's difficult to guess how things might have been different, absent Trump.

But it does seem to me that Democrats were much more interested in (and expectant of) a Clinton victory; until he won, Trump was, to them, a joke (at least mostly). Losing the election is one thing; even casting protest votes in Congress against certifying a presidential election has become old hat despite the breathlessness with which the media reported on it in 2020. But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss. It was, one might say, a crime.

Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow.

"Somehow"?

Literally just take out his game of footsy with election denial and I would argue it'd lower the temperature.

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Literally just take out his game of footsy with election denial and I would argue it'd lower the temperature.

This seems like an odd response given my demonstration that it was election denial from the Democrats that was the serious political defection of 2016.

Honestly I think Trump's Twitter belligerence does far more to distinguish him from (most of) his opponents, than his so-called "election denial." I think there's a very real possibility that I'm just wrong about all of this--that my sense of the Democratic revolt of 2016 is pure presentism, that this is all "business as usual" in American politics, and I am caught in the same trap as many of the people I am criticizing: thinking that any of this is really a meaningful departure from business-as-usual. So I have done my best to make the case that the Great Awokening is a meaningful phenomenon, and that the first presidential election post-Awokening is meaningfully different. If it is in fact Trump himself who is meaningfully different, that would be interesting; I really do suspect he's a symptom rather than a cause, but I could be wrong about that, too. It's just that "election denial" does not appear to set him apart from any of his political opposition, as demonstrated with direct quotes in my post.

This seems like an odd response given my demonstration that it was election denial from the Democrats that was the serious political defection of 2016.

Democrats pushed Russiagate after they lost cause they hated Trump. But they hated Trump because...? That is a question people are trying to answer and I was touching on.

Trump offended the sensibilities of left-wingers, obviously - which sometimes gets coded as a "threat to democracy"*. I think though that certain things like asking Russia or especially raising the specter of contesting the election was a red rag.

Trump saying "I'll accept the election...if I win" was probably a funny response to hysterics in his base's eyes. I legitimately think it scared and then enraged Democrats - precisely because there were no consequences.

Honestly I think Trump's Twitter belligerence does far more to distinguish him from (most of) his opponents

It's all of a piece.

Trump's narcissism is why he can't stay off Twitter and be "dignified" (which offends sensibilities) but also why he can't just take the loss (any loss - which leads to problematic places)

I really do suspect he's a symptom rather than a cause

I tend not to believe in Great Man theory but Trump is the biggest counter-example that gives me pause. I do think a lot of the situation (e.g. polarization and the risk that a radical can capture the party as a result of combining that with primaries, discontent with the economic and cultural consensus) were built in but Trump's particular character and nature shapes how everything turned out.

For example: a different candidate might have just folded and went into obscurity when they lost, especially if pressured by power players (look at how Ted Cruz couldn't make even a token stand against Trump).

A political entrepreneur might have realized that they could push the issue and win points from their base eventually but it feels like Trump has the exact right personality type to push things past what even his fellow Republicans thought he can get away with it (they criticized him for a lot of moves that either worked or at least weren't fatal). Either he's a political savant (of the idiot variety or not) or his narcissism dovetails really well with the polarized climate.

* See anything smeared as "populist".

If any other Republican nominee had beat Clinton, they would have been hated, as Obama was, as Bush was, and perhaps even more due to social media turning up the temperature. But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.

But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.

Maybe! There were efforts to impeach Bush; probably depending on what you count as "efforts" there have been at least some efforts to impeach many U.S. presidents. I still see occasional digs from the American Left to the effect of "here's your periodic reminder that Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes and should be in prison." So what gets us across the threshold of "generic anti-opposition talk" to "concrete action," at this point?

The threshold does seem to be lower, now. It seems to me that, compared to 30 or 40 years ago, we spend a lot less time talking about what would actually be good for the country, policy-wise, and a lot more time insisting that the opposition's plans are actually illegal, that the opposition belongs in jail, etc. Trump certainly played his own part in that ("lock her up!") but he backed away from it after election. We're now more than halfway through his successor's first term and Democrats in power in New York (not coincidentally, I think, the state that elected Hillary Clinton as Senator!) are actually carrying through efforts to jail Trump on what so far appear to be exaggerated charges. Can a kangaroo court be far behind?

Watching the news media take shots at DeSantis in advance of his anticipated run at the White House, with headlines like "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Far More Dangerous Politician than Donald Trump" is interesting. Discussions of a national divorce are also not entirely novel in American political history. My worry is that the Left, which has for most of the 21st century been warning America of encroaching fascism, has decided to beat its opponents to the punch on the matter.

"Trumped-up charges" is looking to become the most consequential case of nominative determinism in American history.

I mean, I highly doubt Marco Rubio would've tried to pay off porn stars, talk the governor of Georgia into finding some votes, or instigating an insurrection after he narrowly lost Arizona in 2020.

Why do you doubt it? Paying off hookers is probably the most archetypical thing a politician could do (and that's when they're being nice), and BLM shows insurrections are pretty common.

If anything, this shows Trump must really be quite clean, if this is all they can throw at him.

After all, he was a real estate developer in New York in the 1970s and 80s. I would have expected way worse.

Either he's super clean or the real charges would implicate people that no New York prosecutor wants to implicate.

It does feel like Trump might have been one of the first modern candidates that had a seething hatred aimed at him from both the base and the DC political class of the opposite party. Bush and Obama seemed hated by the bases, but it didn't seem like it was anything more than "well, your turn to lead for now and we'll be the opposition" other than that.

I am leaning in this direction that the biggest difference is the left changed after the 2016 election combined with Trump being especially good at owning the libs.

Why the left changed? Who knows. Maybe it was progressivism running about hard biological limits. They took over every major institution and still couldn’t solve things like low black academic performance. Unable to compete on substance they needed to find someone to personify why they were failing which fit perfectly for Trumps entrance. And a role he was perfectly happy to fill.

I'd also remind you of OWS, the Trayvon Martin scandal and the Michael Brown scandal between 2011-14. From a leftist point of view, these were all obvious political flops. That must have felt deeply frustrating. There was also Gamergate, which must've generated enormous leftist resentment and bitterness.

The left changed because they couldn’t understand the reaction to Obama.

Obama said things like ‘people in rural areas clinging to their guns and religion’ ‘I support abortion because I wouldn’t want my daughter to be punished with a baby if made a mistake’ ‘if I had a son he would have looked a bit like Trayvon’ etc, etc. these things are obviously horrible things to say to the red tribe; to blue tribers they might be things that you shouldn’t say on national television, but it’s inconceivable that someone could find them offensive or wrong. And so the red tribe reaction to Obama’s culture warring got interpreted as personal animus because he’s black, which meant that republicans needed a massive reaction because they’re all evil. And, what do you know, you have a Republican nominee that the blue tribe portions of the party are obviously uncomfortable with who routinely says boorish or offensive things.

One could argue that, before Trump, Obama inspired an unusual amount of resistance and hostility from the Right. You have the above-mentioned culture-war items, paired with slightly-less-culture-war things like the ACA, and the Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown. I find it hard to say why or how things got this heated after Bush II--buried culture war from Bush II finally coming home to roost, the simple fact of Obama being a progressive Black man, the Republican coalition starting to fracture at its seams, economic strain turning up the temperature of social conflicts, social media polarization already taking effect as far back as 2008, or some or all of the above.

All I can say is that it definitely laid the ground for what happened in 2016, and large segments of the left and center-left were wholly unprepared.

Well yeah, there was an unusual amount of resistance from the right, and the GOP grassroots was so in favor of it because Obama kept saying quiet-part-out-loud blue tribe sentiments that progressives aren’t good enough at the ideological Turing test to realize would come off as callous and hideous to the red tribe. It doesn’t help that Obama decided to play hardball with the GOP in Congress early on and they returned the favor when he lost his supermajority.

If he’d delivered Clinton-level economic growth he might have gotten away with it, but he didn’t, and it was probably beyond his ability to do(objectively, fast and furious and the irs targeting conservatives weren’t as big a deal as ruby ridge, after all) so it blew up in his face.

Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown.

Govt was shutdown for 27 days under Clinton (2 separate shutdowns), 16 under Obama, and 38 days under Trump (also 2 shutdowns). Clinton was impeached, Bush was not (in spite of many calls to "Chimpeach the Chimperor"), Trump was impeached, Obama was not. I'm not sure that things did get more heated under Obama - it's not like Bush Derangement Syndrome wasn't a thing prior to that.

Isn’t government shutdown just normal politics? I don’t see how that’s anything like what’s going on now. It was a thing voted on in congress and ended up with a negotiated political deal. A lot like the Supreme Court striking down roe. We politicked to win a branch of government so now we use that power. It’s not like Capitol riots or arresting the other sides like Presidential nominee to stop him from running.

would Clinton have lost, to anyone else?

It seems so, because it looks from the vote totals in swing states that Trump’s victories there were driven more by antipathy for Clinton than by affinity for him. In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2). In MI, the D vote dropped 7.2 pts (54.2 to 47), but the R vote rose only 2.6 pts (44.7 to 47.3). In WI, the D vote dropped 6.3 pts (52.8 to 46.5), but the R vote rose only 1.3 pts (45.9 to 47.2). And, in FL, the D vote dropped 2.2 pts (50 to 47.8), while the R vote was essentially unchanged (49.1 to 49).

Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important.

I don't know that there is much evidence that he had a particular ability to increase the R share of the black and Hispanic vote in 2016. According to the American Enterprise Institute, in 2016 Trump’s 8 percent of the black vote was rather low compared to previous elections in which there was no black guy on the ballot. Nor was his 29 pct of the Hispanic vote particularly impressive – it was less than Bush and McCain, for example. So, there is no reason to think that a generic R would not have done just as well among black and Hispanic voters.

In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2).

Also, for illustration, Trump underperformed state and Federal House Republican candidates in PA by 10,000 or 100,000 votes, respectively. To the extent you can talk about the 'generic Republican' candidate, it actually did outperform Trump.

While Toomey did underperform Trump in raw numbers, it was only a by 20,000 votes and 100,000 fewer votes were cast in the Senate race. Toomey actually beat his opponent by a larger percentage than Trump beat Clinton.

Probably any of the decent choices in 2016 would have beaten Clinton in PA and, thus, the race.

AAQC’d.

Please avoid low effort comments - you can just submit the AAQC without announcing it.

But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else?

Yes, the fundamentals indicate that after a two term Democratic president with a not great economy and not great ending polls, the Republicans SHOULD have won. A generic Republican Candidate would have I think beaten a generic Democratic candidate all else being equal. Both Hillary and Trump were I think below par candidates. There's a universe where Trump never entered and X beats Hillary in a landslide I think.

Yeah, this is a neglected point. FYI, every election the journal PS reviews the predictions of elections models. Their summary chart for 2016 is here:

/images/16805601089851074.webp Note that some of the models actually favored the Dem candidate.

But I am not sure which of those is a pure fundamentals model

This is an interesting take. I've stopped trying to understand the why, since it never made much sense to me in the first place. Furthermore, I don't think I do need to explain why he's hated in order to take it as a given, and use that hatred as the basis for explaining behavior.

While I can't answer why, I have some theories. First, he's a genuine outsider that has resisted cooption. Second, he's personally repugnant due to manners and demeanor. Third, he's politically repugnant, and his pet issues (immigration, mostly) mark him as low-status or otherwise 'other.' Fourth, he's a genuine threat to the status quo (similar to #1) is ways that triggers reactions from those inside the system (deep state, anyone?). Fifth, the normal demonization of Republicans, but enhanced due to #2.

Of these, I learn towards #4. I think some people are afraid of him, afraid of his appeal, afraid of the way he acts and speaks, and their fear easily turns towards hatred and hyperbole.

I don't have a good reason why he's so hated. Trump Derangement Syndrome was coined for a reason, and I think it explains plenty even when it itself is unexplained.

but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists.

He was hated, and persecuted, before he contested the 2020 election. He was already impeached once and the entirety of the bureaucratic class was opposed to him by the time he walked in the door. It was this antipathy that caused the groups described in the famous Time article to collectively 'fortify' the election in advance. So I think this causation is backwards.

I don't think I do need to explain why he's hated in order to take it as a given, and use that hatred as the basis for explaining behavior.

"Hatred for Trump is a significant motivating factor in these prosecutions" is I think an almost trivially true statement. The question is whether the hatred is justified and leading to socially desirable outcomes. Hatred for rapists is a major factor in why rape is criminally prosecuted, that doesn't make it illegitimate or inappropriate to prosecute rapists.

While I can't answer why, I have some theories. First, he's a genuine outsider that has resisted cooption. Second, he's personally repugnant due to manners and demeanor. Third, he's politically repugnant, and his pet issues (immigration, mostly) mark him as low-status or otherwise 'other.' Fourth, he's a genuine threat to the status quo (similar to #1) is ways that triggers reactions from those inside the system (deep state, anyone?). Fifth, the normal demonization of Republicans, but enhanced due to #2.

I would say a combination of your second, third, and fifth explanation, combined with the fact that many of Trump's detractors legitimately believe he has violated democratic norms. Putting aside whether he has or hasn't, I do think they sincerely believe this and are motivated by it.

He was hated, and persecuted, before he contested the 2020 election. He was already impeached once and the entirety of the bureaucratic class was opposed to him by the time he walked in the door. It was this antipathy that caused the groups described in the famous Time article to collectively 'fortify' the election in advance. So I think this causation is backwards.

There are many pre-2016 election examples of behavior that one could believe in good faith violates democratic norms. For example, calling on Russia to release one's opponent's hacked emails and threatening to "lock up" one's electoral opponent.

It’s worth noting that Clinton crazies were very much a thing, there was a definite bush derangement syndrome, and a decent percentage of the country literally believed Obama was born in another country.

Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.

Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.

The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy

Oh come on, tone down the drama. Such claims existed long before. Exhibit 1: https://www.sethkaller.com/item/1415-23425-Claims-that-First-Republican-Presidential-Candidate-is-Foreign-Born-&-Ineligible&from=12

Important! to the Public ... The Republican Candidate for the Presidency, John C. Fremont, of Foreign Birth

That's 1856. Somehow, the American Democracy (R) (TM) has survived this attack, which can't be called the worse since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War only because it predates both.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics

So, he behaves as if what significant part of his electorate believes and observes is true - is true? What a scoundrel! The norm for a candidate is to pretend he cares about his electorate, and then once elected, wear a nice tuxedo or dress, show up at gala receptions, get the appropriate pork allocations from taxpayer's money and otherwise not rock the boat.

which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise

Now you're starting to get it. This franchise is no longer serving the people that are supposedly their clients (an apt metaphor, because most entertainment franchises, such as ones of Hollywood, also moved on from serving the people to serving a tiny sliver of increasingly bizarre elite critics) - so it's time to break some things.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy.

This is begging the question. The only way to determine the truth of the claim is to make the challenge. McCain's eligibility was challenged, falsely as it turns out, and Democracy seemed to survive.

Obama published a certified copy of his birth certificate, authenticated by the State of Hawaii, in 2008. Trump was pushing birtherism in 2011-2, when "falsely" is appropriate.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it.

It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.

It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site and if we left a lot of left-wingers back on Reddit.

It's not just that "Trump wasn't supposed to win". He violated a lot of norms - not just red and blue norms like unconditional support for the nominee - starting with not releasing his taxes and escalating to things like playing footsie with not acknowledging the outcome of the election.

THIS was the particular red rag that was theoretically avoidable by a generic GOP candidate (as opposed to being anti-immigration - or rather: anti-some immigration)

There is obviously a thing where liberals (this can be of the left AND right variety - especially if you look at Europe) conflate their particular politics with democracy and freedom as such - which is how things like populism, Brexit, being anti-immigrant all end up being marked as "dangerous" or threats to freedom - but, in this case, Trump tied the connection himself.

We don't even need to look at the lib reaction - look at some of Tucker's leaked texts from the Dominion case if you think this reaction is purely lib derangement at a "blue collar billionaire".

It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.

There aren't very many Democrats or progressives on this forum and I'd hazard to guess most of them view trying to push back to be a waste of time - most of these arguments have been re-litigated dozens of times since Trump's presidency and the assumptions gap has been found to be unbridgeable.

There aren't very many Democrats or progressives on this forum and I'd hazard to guess most of them view trying to push back to be a waste of time

This is likely true. But as a progressive Democrat myself, I wonder how many people here are like me in that I don't particularly want to push back but rather read and learn. It's pretty easy to see countless arguments that Donald Trump is a particularly norm-breaking POTUS practically everywhere I look, but it's harder to see arguments of the "sore loser" theory, especially any good or strong versions of those arguments. A large part of my motivation in reading posts in this forum is to see such things in the hopes that they actually challenge my biased perspective on various CW issues including Donald Trump, in the hopes that I can form a more accurate view of them.

For this particular issue, what I'd most prefer to see is a progressive Democrat make a case for the "sore loser" theory and a MAGA Republican make a case for the "Trump was a particularly norm-breaking POTUS in a way that was genuinely dangerous to democracy" theory, not out of charity but out of genuine, heartfelt belief. Because those are the arguments that I would find the most credible and most valuable for triangulating the actual truth of the matter. Unfortunately, such people don't seem to be particularly available, and so I want to see the strongest version of the theory I personally find distasteful or wrong on a visceral level, which is the "sore loser" theory.

I am a progressive Democrat myself, and I feel similar to you in terms of reading and learning. I myself have very little interest in “pushing back”; I find it would be absolute waste of time, and likely why you won’t find the discourse you are looking for. In my opinion, the value of a forum like this is that it allows progressives, at least such as myself, to observe a rich diversity of right-winged thinking to identify the more insidious and subtle dogwhistles indicating the traits of a conservative, so one may steer clear of them in IRL interactions.

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I didn’t want to litigate all the reasons I think he’s a defector, a criminal, and personally disagreeable. Partly because it’s very clear that the OP starts from different axioms. Partly because I wanted to talk about what happens after someone is convinced that he’s a personal enemy.

It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site.

Why? What's so worrying about it?

Also, how do you maintain your faith in democracy in the light of all the madness we could observe over the last 10 years?

Why? What's so worrying about it?

Because I don't want to be in an echo chamber - which splinter-sites of witches like this can be. It felt like the original motte was skeptical of a lot of woke points (since naturally wokes had a billion subreddits to hang around out) but you still got a pushback and back and forth. It is concerning if we've lost a lot of those people in the move.

Here we have a question of "why was Trump - the most polarizing figure in recent memory - hated?" and most of the answers seem to flow in one direction, as if it's obvious.

It's quite possible I'm just wrong and it is obvious. But it's concerning that something so divisive seems to swing in one direction.

EDIT: And yes, the fact that it's cutting against me may play a role. It's natural to not want to be outnumbered.

Also, how do you maintain your faith in democracy in the light of all the madness we could observe over the last 10 years?

Easy: I don't.

I think most of the main points are still present. Perhaps in a more autistic neutral way.

The big difference is on Reddit you would have one conservative and one leftist debate for 30 replies on whether Trump was serious or joking when he said Russia should release Clinton emails. Intent will never be settled. The big difference would be fighting over tone with depending on who you’re speaking with a greater emphasis on when Trump did x,y,z and it was really bad. Then a reply leftist did x,y,z on these occasions.

You would probably get some reply on HRC being the chosen one. I’ve never actually seen a leftist give that opinion but seems to pop up on right coded places.

Because I don't want to be in an echo chamber

EDIT: And yes, the fact that it's cutting against me may play a role. It's natural to not want to be outnumbered.

But it makes it all the more important to not be so worried. By being here and arguing against us, you're playing an important role in not making this place an echo chamber. Thank you for your service!

Easy: I don't.

Damn.

On reddit the participation of progressives largely felt like folks dropping by to sneer on themotte for a few comments rather than actual engagement. It felt as if a good number of them wouldn't have minded if themotte got hit by the banhammer.

That said, preaching to the choir on themotte while feeling nice doesn't give you much. But I do not have any ideas for how to improve upon that. People like places that echo their views back at them and enforce the ideological conformity for their worldview. For this use case reddit is strictly better especially if your views are aligned with the current zeitgeist.

A lot of people on themotte may want to convince progressives that their positions are not logically consistent and patently unfair. But progressives have no incentive to engage with you to be convinced or to try to convince you. Their views are already mainstream and platformed by institutions.

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In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.

Seems like the best play is to defect while making it look like cooperation.