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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
Not really, because we didn't actually get the generation being "radicalized by Trump being a bad president", we just got them radicalized by Trump being president, despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.
What I want doesn't really matter in any material sense, but I'm not going to base electoral politics on how whiny the loser will be about. I want Trump to win because I think he'll do some of the things I want a President to do and few of the things I don't want a President to do. My top priority by quite a bit is reducing the role of the federal administrative state in everyday life, which Trump's leanings and setup with groups like Project 2025 seem likely to do. His judicial appointments will also assist with deregulation and disempowering the discretion of petty bureaucrats. My other top priority is stanching the flow of immigrants, which Trump seems likely to do.
If you disagree with those positions, that's fine, but being willing to sign up for federal policies that you disagree with so that political obsessives whine less just seems kind of cowardly to me. You're getting crybullied!
Well, consider "whiny" is perhaps an understatement, or a proxy for other things. What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality? As an example, I really can't trust any news source for anything that is said about Trump. They can basically say whatever they want, because half the country is ready to believe it, and they have tons of precedent to draw on from other new sources doing the same thing.
And the same thing happens in my everyday life, too, when dealing with all my friends and loved ones. It's a complete uphill battle for me to try to communicate to anyone that they're being a conspiracy theorist crazy person, and ultimately I end up sounding like the conspiracy theorist because I'm going against the grain. It's hard enough to argue against a Gish gallop, but even worse when there's precedent for the Gish gallop, and everyone dogpiles on board, and there's a whole industry devoted to that one Gish gallop.
edit: I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.
That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.
Thanks! I kept thinking of The Pyramid and the Garden and kept combing through it to try to find it, but it is funny that it's actually from Scott's post about this exact topic!
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