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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.
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
I think your point is probably right that that would reduce tension, though in all likelihood that would just shift elsewhere (e.g. economic policy). But I think your specific policy suggestions are pretty bad.
I'm definitely more sympathetic to this than many other conservatives, at least in the sense that I do think that taking cross-sex hormones has appreciable effects putting people into something of a tertium quid. But I don't think this is good policy. The trans movement on the whole seems pretty clearly deleterious to people: giving people costly treatments, making them dependent on hormones for the rest of their lives, now they probably can't fit in with either gender too well, can't have children, they have higher rates of suicide, etc. Since it seems clearly to be the case that it's in part a social contagion, that's a really bad contagion to have and normalize. It's possible that normalizing it could decrease rates of trans-ness—not sure that I have an opinion on that—but I think it should be unequivocally the case that we should want fewer people to transition. So because I think this has fairly large social harms, I think it might be a mistake to just let it be.
Moreover, I think this is something that seems weirder to many normies than gay marriage does.
I think the current affirmative action regime is bad in a whole bunch of ways. For one, it's the product in a bunch of cases of regulations: the disparate impact standard makes everything possibly illegal, because nothing you do will be without an impact, so you have to play by the rules the agency in question sets, as well as that all government contractors, which is a quarter of the economy, have to follow rules that are definitely (ha!) not quotas. This sort of regulation seems clearly bad to me, and is one thing that I'd want to roll back. It's bad because I don't think that the skill distribution matches the racial distribution, meaning it distorts things away from what's economically efficient. It also leads to attacks on meritocracy, because any attempt at choosing better employees has to be racially equitable if you don't want to be sued, and ability is not evenly distributed across the buckets that the US government tracks. I also think the principle of colorblindness and individualism is admirable, and don't like the identitarianism.
Because efficiency results in racial gaps, and we're trying to adjust everything to fix racial gaps (at least, at some levels of society), we lose out on much of the efficiency.
I have no problem with black CEOs, I just want them to be the most capable man for their job.
Further, racial discrimination is not something that's popular, and is something that's already prohibited by the statutes if people would just interpret them in the manner that they were obviously intended to be interpreted, so it seems like a fairly low-cost, high-reward thing to try to fix.
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