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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.
My political positions are ... on the same side as conservatism, at least. I think you're right, at least, that the 'culture war sticking points' aren't really moving anyone towards conservative norms - banning drag queens, not allowing gay marriage, banning abortions for poor black women, this doesn't really move us towards a more conservative society.
I think it's bad, on an individual level, for anyone who transitions. Meaningful desires aligned with their outcomes (desire for sex/romantic relationship that produces kids) are replaced with confused simulacra. And actual children (pretty important! whether you're a radical inegalitarian or a sum of hedonic state utilitarian, more people existing is good) fail to be produced.
But if you actually try to consistently pursue the underlying values that generate something like 'trans is bad', the harm actually has to come from 'not having children' - and 'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families, or those that do deciding to have 2 children. I do think that conservatives should focus on the latter, and not the former.
Unfortunately, I'm not having a rational conversation with "conservatives", the conservative movement is a huge mass of a hundred million people that hypes itself up about a whole bunch of nonsense. Just like progressives. So, idk. Maybe the only way to change things is elite persuasion, even more likely there's just not enough time to change things too much until AGI is too big of an issue.
I will say that one outcome of normalizing trans people that I would love to see, and find plausible to expect, is more effort put into helping trans people have kids.
For MtF you can freeze sperm before beginning treatment, and help pay for IVF. For FtM you can normalize a focus on top surgery and social transition in the early years. For everyone you can further normalize the use of sperm donors and make access to IVF and adoption easier.
Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.
Honestly as time passes and things get more normalized, I would expect the rates of same-sex and trans-including couples having kids to converge on those for cis straight relationships. There's no a priori reason those people would want kids less, and a mixture of IVF and adoption and various other social maneuvers can make it possible. The only barrier is cost and access to those things, and taboos against them, all of which we can work to remove.
I mean, the a priori reason is that straight sex naturally creates children and gay/lesbian/trans sex (usually) doesn't. Not in a 'natural morality' sense, just it's a lot easier to have a 'happy accident' than to have a series of medical appointments over a year. I doubt it'll converge. (I mean, in principle, future technological developments make predicting the future on current trends ... questionable)
I was saying there's no a priori reason they would want kids less, not no a priori reason we would expect them to have less kids.
I guess my point can be restated as 'I would expect all types of couples to want the same number of kids on average, and I would expect the number of kids a couple have to converge towards the number they want over time as technology and society improves and barriers to having kids/accidental ways of getting kids are removed/mitigated.'
Also this is 'converging in the infinite limit', not making a confident claim about how fast they will converge because yeah, this is partially an argument based on extrapolating future technology and social change, which is hard/impossible.
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