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What is the steelman for voting for Trump in the primaries?
He's not a true outsider anymore. He's not an unknown quantity. We know his temperament. We know his governance style. What does he provide over Desantis/Haley/Ramaswamy? He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
I have some ideas, but they're all terrible once you think about them for ten seconds. I am willing to believe that the median voter is unable to think clearly for ten seconds before being hijacked by monkey-brain, but I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.
1. Personal Loyalty: This is close to the Richard Hanania theory. Personal loyalty would make sense if Trump was loyal in turn to his supporters, but he isn't. How many of his lawyers have gone to jail? How many orange-blooded Trump fans lost their jobs or got arrested for believing in him too hard on January 6? He could have pardoned these people, but he didn't. Orange Man good because Orange Man good.
2. Perceived Injustice: Yes, Trump has been treated unfairly by the media and the Washington establishment. Lots of people have been. I can understand why this would be seen as a necessary condition (e.g. "nobody liked by the 'elites' could ever be a good president"), but why would this be a sufficient condition? Surely electability and general competence matter more than an extra standard-deviation worth of grievances against the media.
3. Hatred: I'm not talking about "Hate™". I'm talking about a genuine desire to see one's political enemies suffer. It's not even clear to me that Trump would be better at this than other Republican candidates, but I feel I would be missing something if I didn't put it on the list.
Trump's first presidency was hamstrung by multiple factors, some of them explicit (Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation it turned into) and others less visible (entrenched resistance from the deep state and republican party). The last eight years have seen substantial shifts in the GOP, with many more pro-Trump individuals getting involved in the actual political machinery of the republican party, and he's going to have a lot more leverage in a second term.
The moment Trump pardoned the J6 protestors he would have been impeached by the Republican party - the threat was even made explicitly in the media IIRC.
Every single person who has been trusted and liked by the media/Washington establishment has immediately abandoned the particular policies that Trump-voters want and support once they get into office, and it isn't like this is an accident - the only way to be liked by the media/Washington establishment is to preserve and extend the same policies which they like and the Trump base hates. This is also why Desantis and Nikki Haley were immediately rejected by the base - they're just more representatives of Conservative Inc who want to return things to business as usual, and business as usual has gotten utterly intolerable for a lot of the people supporting Trump.
Have you been paying attention to how much weeping, moaning and gnashing of teeth even the prospect of Trump getting back into power has caused? Nobody's writing lengthy thinkpieces about how the election of Nikki Haley would mean the end of democracy/sunlight/good things in the world.
DeSantis attacked Trump from the right, Trump attacked DeSantis from the left. Trump endorsed the supposed Con. Inc. - Ronna McDaniel, speaker McCarthy, etc.
I don't believe this is meaningful at all when looking at Trump and what he represents. The policies that got him elected and which he tried to implement, are in direct opposition to the bipartisan consensus of more forever wars, more outsourcing, more illegal immigration and more corruption. I don't think that the Left/Right divide is really that useful when you look at Trump's politics and his base. Opposition to or support of the existing elite and their chosen policies is the far more meaningful divide. Desantis and Haley have donors which the Trump base find intolerable, and the Trump base is a big enough constituency in the GOP base to give them effective veto power over future candidates.
Agreed,
...and at the risk sounding like a broken record, there really does seem to be a "leviathan shaped hole" in the discourse. Liberal Domination of Academia and the Media has gotten us to a point today where most liberals simply lack the necessary framework to understand the mindset of someone like Greg Abbott or the median Trump Voter.
Bro, I think you have something here, but do you mind effortposting instead of just going ‘have you considered Hobbes was right?’? Getting a bit tiresome.
I have, multiple times, at length. Though it has been a while so maybe I ought to do some sort of recap/refresher. In any case a bunch of recent posts and comments on multiple topics (be it Trump, the Border, Id Pol, Claudine Gay) are all tickling the same corner of my hind-brain that talking to my humanities professor as a 30 year-old "freshman" did.
I read posts like the OP's I really do think that there is just a fundamental lack of understanding not just on the surface level but on I'm not sure that we share a sufficiently common language for me to even begin explaining it level. Darmok and Jalad on the internet.
I know you’ve made posts about the philosophical underpinnings of the left/right divide in the past.
But when you comment ‘have you considered hobbes?’ without elaborating, well….
And I agree with you; Hobbesian ideas are probably a key to what’s going on with the border. But there tends to be a missing link when you make the comment- humans are inherently bad and all that, but the argument for how that informs recent events/provides a different perspective is one that has to be made.
I’m a classical conservative/reactionary, and not just as a euphemism for ‘racist but I call it something else’. I agree with you- humans are mostly pretty bad and need to be civilized by external influences. But the argument for how this applies in specific situations is an argument that needs to be made instead of ‘refer to post #9999999 and apply’.
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