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I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right. Part of this was because of failures on the left but I also say Musks buying twitter was a big boost and COVID had a great deal of just be nice to the crazies thru the pandemic. It’s not just Motte going right. Maybe I’m in a bubble but I’m basically expecting as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.
A second point for violent crime isn’t a real risks is it negates all of the costs society bares to mitigate violence in the US. We spend a lot of money on prisons. And a lot of money trying to boost black schools. Chicago’s economics would be a lot different without these costs. You also would not have had the ghettoization of the southside of Chicago. More urbanization does increase agglomeration effects. If America never had slavery I am fairly certain we would have universal health care. I don’t know if on net this would be a good thing because I think we would be less FU capitalist which probably hurts growth in other ways. Without black people American politics would be a lot more like Canada, but a super power.
Anything recent that seems to be the US moving to the right is a special case that bypassed the obstacles that keep the right from gaining any power. Supreme Court rulings are the biggest example, but Musk buying Twitter is another. We never see the US move to the right because those obstacles have actually gotten weaker, so I'd say that they are one-offs and don't mean the US is moving to the right.
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Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).
If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.
If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.
Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.
Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.
Yet, Biden won the 2020 election, did much better in the midterms, the Democrat's have continually won special elections, and so on.
Now, it's true cities have shifted to the right some (even though that's somewhat overindexed by people online). Eric Adams replaced DeBlasio in NY, various other more center-left/centrist Mayor's got elected in Phiadelphia and other major cities. All these people won fairly easy - it was a little tougher for Adams, but RCV is made to create a close final round. In a typical two round system with an actual campaign, he probably wins 55-60% initially.
But, any politicians rightly or wrongly, actually perceived as just Republican's in sheep's clothing will lose. Eric Adams, the woman in Philadelphia who won, etc. were all able to basically run as "Democrat's who understood crime was bad," and had progressive policy positions other than that. Like, Eric Adams has had some wacky ideas and endorsed Bernie in 2016 after all!
On the other hand, in Los Angeles, Rick Caruso was basically a rich centrist who got coded as Republican be he was a developer, was white, and went a little too far on some issues, and also, his opponent, Karen Bass was a normie center-left Democratic congresswoman, which mean she got massive support from every elected Democrat in California.
Then, in Chicago, it was even worse, because Paul Vallas, who worked under Obama and whatever, seemingly got deep in the same pool of stuff that shifted formerly centrist people right, and said a bunch of dumb things on radio shows and in campaigns, that allowed a black self-described socialist to beat him, despite the crime issue htere.
The actual problem for this idea of a right turn in the cities overall is things are worse than say, 2015 by some measures, but in many cities, things are already better than they were in 2020, and nowhere got close to the 80's and 90's numbers that allowed right-leaning Mayor's to actually win power. In 2024, even our criminals are lazy and don't do their jobs.
Plus, there are other factors - the Republican Party is a more conservative party socially, and it's more of a nationalized political space. In 1989, you could be a fairly liberal New Yorker, but throw a vote to Rudy, because hey, he's a prosecutor, but he's socially liberal, etc. Now, any right-leaning candidate has to deal with the fact that his base base of 10-20% Republican's in a major city have been radicalized, the median urban voter simply does not trust Republican's and has never voted for one in their lives, and you not only have to answer for whatever wacky things Republican's do in Alabama or Texas, you have to denounce it, or lose those votes.
So yeah, in 2022, there was a shift in NY & CA, especially among Asian & Latino voters for two reasons - the abortion issue was strongly off the table, and crime was a major issue. In 2024, I question whether we'll see the same shift. Yes, Trump will do better than he did in 2020 because of electoral polarization, but I simply don't buy the polls showing the greatest racial realignment since Civil Rights (I also don't believe Biden is suddenly winning older whites either).
Racial realignment is often swamped statistically by how Hispanics vote, and many Hispanics seem to be swing voters (see huge bush gains between 2000 and 2004, Trump’s fluctuating polling among Hispanics etc).
I don’t anticipate a black-white realignment for the same reason I don’t anticipate white South Africans suddenly voting for the ANC instead of the DA. Black voters (disproportionately middle aged and older women who are part of established Christian communities in the South) have their political machine, like many other American tribes historically, and it’s part of the Democratic Party. Some edgy black podcast hosts might entertain Trumpism, but young black men are the least likely to vote of any demographic in the US (iirc) and they’re unlikely to start doing so in great numbers soon.
That's the other thing - the most movement is among basically, the exact profile of people most likely to not vote.
As I said, according to Catalist, which is the best voter database showed Biden got 62% in 2020 and Democratic candidates got 62% in 2022 among Hispanics - if that number is 55% or 57% in 2024, would not be a huge shock. I just don't think the polling showing Trump winning Hispanics by 15 or 20 pass the smell test.
But, as been pointed out by many, because of the actual demographic makeup of voters, if Biden does a point better among white voters because college educated whites move even more in his favor as a result of Dobbs and Trump focusing on 1/6 and 2020, that basically evens out, and ironically, probably helps Biden more in the blue wall states of WI, MI, and PA.
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I am in Argentina now for a bit. And being here makes me more racists. Salaries are down like 20% in a few months in real terms and farther away from where I am at I am fairly certain there is real poverty. Yet things feel chill and feel safe. I see far fewer cops than I would in any major city in the states. In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners. It keeps making me think is this what society would be like in a 100% European ancestry country.
From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.
Looking at Argentina homicide rate, 4.62 in 2021, only slightly below pre-Floyd USA.
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Why would this make you specifically racist? To me, this outcome is likely more driven by cultural/racial homogeneity than this homogeneity being of a certain race or not.
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A nice secondary or tertiary benefit about spending time in a LatAm country is experiencing the relative lack of pro-black and pro-latin(x) (ironically enough) propaganda, and relative lack of anti-white and anti-Asian propaganda. It’s a breath of fresh air.
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Buenos Aires had a homicide rate about the same as NYC in 2022 (so post-Floyd).
One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did. Only about half, possibly far fewer, of Italian Argentines were from the South - more than 40% were from the north, 10% from the middle. Meanwhile almost all Italian Americans are from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.
It’s Italian-Americans who, if you look at the regional performance of Italy, should be in the shit. Yet the Italian Argentines, many of whom are descended from northern farmers and merchants who left in the mid-19th century, seem to have been unable to arrest the decline of their country.
The Spanish genetics are also broadly from the highest quality regions of that country (still with the highest incomes), like the Basque Country. Argentina doesn’t merely have mediocre PIGS EU handout genetics, it actually has cradle-of-the-Renaissance, competent-Milanese-industrialist genetics. It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.
HBD starts to quickly break down as a predictive theory once someone tries to use it to make predictions that are anything other than the most basic and obvious, such as "all else being equal, a civilization made up of whites will tend to outperform one made up of sub-Saharan Africans".
HBD doesn't explain, for example, why Northern Europeans went from being primitive forest-dwelling villagers to the world's intellectual elite in only 1500 years. There are some hand-waving theories about Christianity reshaping incest rates and so on, but they all have the feel of someone trying to cherry-pick ideas in order to try to make HBD seem more robust than it deserves.
HBD also doesn't explain why Han Chinese still didn't know that the Earth was round more than 1500 years after Europeans figured that out, even though today they have very similar measured IQs to Europeans.
However, with all that said, the reality is that Argentina is much less white than Italy. The average Argentinian has more non-European blood than the average Italian does, and a lot of the average Italian's non-white blood is probably from various MENA groups that, historically, far outstripped native Americans in terms of technological development.
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They even got a pope out of it! 😀
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And North Korea should be South Korea.
The difference is that NK has been under one management since (effectively) 1945. The East German effect is well known, even if Korea is the most extreme example.
Argentina has had many governments, many skilled and intelligent senior officials who have genuinely attempted to transition to a prosperous market economy even if stymied by various longstanding political movements and interests. That they’ve all failed to arrest the catastrophe is kind of unique. Everyone knows communism is retarded, the conundrum with Argentina is that even economic mismanagement in the first world (see Greece and Italy pre-Euro) shouldn’t lead to Argentina-esque conditions for 70+ years in a row.
No, they don't. Lots of people think communism is great. Poor people, in general, think Communism is great. Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that). Venezuelans think Communism is great. The big exceptions among the poor are Cubans and many Eastern Europeans, and some right-wing Americans.
Yep. For poor people in societies that have limited social mobility, such as early 20th century Russia, communism actually is kinda great. It's not just a delusion. The reason is that for really poor people, it makes more sense to roll the dice and risk a small chance of getting killed during the revolution and subsequent communist regime, as opposed to just accepting a 99.99% chance that they themselves and their descendants will just continue to indefinitely be really poor.
It's in societies like modern America, where even the poor have it not too bad and social mobility is a bit better than in early 20th century Russia, that one can argue that communism is probably a bad idea even for the poor.
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To your mind, is there no difference between the various flavors of social democracy and communism? Because:
simply isn't true. Most leftist intellectuals would support various levels of welfare, various levels of socialization of the healthcare system and so on but aren't interested in a centrally-planned economy, one-party rule, state-run media, etc.
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Ok, among widely-reputed non-Marxian economists, Argentina is interesting because even bad economic mismanagement, in a market or quasi-market economy, shouldn’t result in a disaster of Argentina’s scale. No mainstream economist is confused as to why Venezuela’s a shithole. Argentina is genuinely a mystery. None of the usual explanations work, even a series of terrible governments shouldn’t do this much damage.
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If Milei ends up building a durable political coalition my guess is the country becomes very talked about in right-wing circles. It’s big weakness is geopolitically its very isolated.
I have been thinking about how would this country develop in the global economy of the 21st century as it is a country that HBD models would predict to be rich but is not. It does fit the communists exception to the model in a lighter firm of Peronism/Kirchnerism.
For what I know about trade economics though it’s not in a good place. They speak the wrong language for entry into the elites of the global market - English. Geographically isolated so it is difficult for them to plug into a larger industrial clusters (Poland entering the German industrial machine). Commodities only get you some wealth and they aren’t as well positioned as Australia to be a Chinese mine. Time zone does seem to be an advantage. Probably not enough true Brahmin types to compete in big tech or chip making which are industries where geographical location matters less (not bulky). Northern Italy does plug into the larger German industrial base and has a lot of machine tooling industry.
The country still feels like it should be carving out niches in the global economy and perhaps this will happen if the politics are truly changing. One or two Skype level tech firms would make a lot of sense. Something like a high-end state consumer good company too. A firm comparable to Sub-Zero.
The isolation is an excuse, come on. Singapore is rich despite being surrounded by much poorer countries, a rich and competent Argentina would have replaced/supplanted Miami as the center of Latin American finance, all global corporations in the region would have their Spanish-world HQs there etc. Uruguay is in a tough spot because it’s small. Argentina is large enough to do well.
Isn't the point that Singapore is the opposite of isolated? It's in one of the most strategic locations on the planet and is a massive shipping hub on the way to very wealthy places. Argentina is on the way to where? Miami is the Latin American finance hub because it's on the way to... in the Estados Unidos.
Miami is the hub because it’s the only Latin American city that’s a nice place to live. It’s actually not geographically more efficient that deals between, say, a Colombian and a Peruvian investment fund needs to be conducted via Miami than that they should be conducted via Buenos Aires. The problem with LatAm is instability and a lack of places the global PMC want to live, which is why Miami is the capital of Latin America. It’s not that it’s in the US except in that the US is safe and stable; if it was about the US market or access to Wall Street they’d be based in NYC, but they’re not. They wanted a Hispanic city that was nice (and Spain was too far).
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Argentina has so mismanaged its economy for structural reasons that it cancels the whole thing out, though.
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Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.
Honestly, that was a bit of a culture shock when I went there; I wasn't expecting to see someone standing around with a rifle at what I'd consider low-ready in the tube stations or just casually walking around, but the English and the French (at least; I'm pretty sure this is normal for everywhere inland) are armed to the fucking teeth. Some of them are subtle, like "this person isn't distinguishable from a normal guard, but the gun she's carrying was never made only in semi-auto... so what the fuck's so important back there?".
It's kind of disingenuous to say "yeah, British cops don't have guns" to New World audiences, because New World countries don't have soldiers on the streets whereas they're so common in Old World countries that their residents find it completely beneath notice.
Maybe I draw more of a distinction on the presence of pistols vs. rifles; pistols are defensive weapons that aren't front and center in any interaction you have with someone carrying one (there's an assumed continuum of escalation there where the cop has to pull it out first), rifles are very much not (they can't be carried in as neutral a manner). Serve and protect vs. seek and destroy.
In the British police, firearms units are seen as a plum job because you don’t have to spend as much time dealing with the public and doing shitty regular policing. In London there are hundreds (if major event) or dozens of police who sit around in vans with machine guns 24/7 so that in the event of a ‘marauding firearms’ (the official term) terror attack they can have a sub-7-minute response time for a unit whose entire training revolves around killing terrorists.
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Honestly it’s a totally different mentality. In the vast majority of the USA I can walk around with a pistol on my hip after a greater or lesser degree of paperwork; the same thing the cops carry quite literally if I desired to do so. We’re simply much less used to the idea that the cops are armed and we aren’t- sure, the police have ar-15s and shotguns in their squad cars and there’s special squads with machine guns, but when you see police working security or standing about on the street they’re usually not much more heavily armed than the civilians can theoretically be.
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It's more remind and dissuade.
With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.
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Which is not a landslide at all. Trump's cap is at best 322, realistically 312 (MN the difference), hardly above Biden's 2020 result. To go any higher he'd have to start pulling some pretty preposterous states out of the bag. In any case, Trump's polling margin even in true swing states is low single digits, the economy has 6 months to get even better and Trump still has his trials to contend with. It's way, way too early to predict a 'landslide'. A week is a long time in politics, six months is an eternity.
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Hijacking latest comment to repost the deleted comment from nowimjustcurious:
Observation: TheMotte is considerably more rightwing than it was on Reddit.
A couple of three recent comments serve as a demonstration.
Several days ago, I wrote a post summarising an essay in a leading white nationalist magazine. Replies were relatively diverse, but the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically. To wit, the most upvoted comments argue that "Americans" should not include non-white people, and that desegregation was a mistake, and that you shouldn't let black people watch your children (really?).
Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply! I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals, like the fact that crime is overwhelmingly interracial, that far more black and white people get along than hurt one another, that your chance of dying from a homicide is statistically negligible, and that the solution obviously can't be segregation. Conversely, replies suggesting that the history of slavery and Jim Crow might have something to do with black underperformance are sitting below zero votes.
I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?
“Where are the liberals at” The liberals are on the entire rest of the internet. The whole reason it’s the Motte and not R/the Motte is that R/the Motte was worried about getting banned off of Reddit. If someone’s opinions are broadly in line with the liberal consensus there’s a million other places they could discuss things instead. We’re like the American colonies during the English Civil War: People come here because they risk getting beheaded elsewhere.
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I wonder if there should be a formal mechanism for preserving top level posts, or other important contextual bits.
On a slightly related note, what is the preferred way to request the mods to check an account for suspicious activity? It seems like there have been an unusually large number of new accounts dropping in, concern trolling/making low effort posts, then ghosting recently. Though brigading or getting linked from somewhere else seems plausible as well.
Report the post. That said, we notice more than you think we do and it's likely we have already noticed and/or are discussing a suspicious-looking poster.
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