Brazil as a Warning

Further considerations on the 2024 race

I’ve had a few good responses to my piece on supporting Trump. See Jeff Maurer (and podcast), Bentham (and podcast), and Cathy Young. They all make important points. I feel like I’m in an awkward situation here as I don’t really like making the case for Trump. There are many positions I argue for that I feel 90% or 95% certain about. This presidential election is closer to a 55/45 thing.

Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to affect the outcome. Let’s say through my writing, I can change the votes of 20% of my Twitter followers, which seems to me a ridiculously high estimate. That means I’d switch 23,000 votes from Harris to Trump.

Assume that in 2024 things are as close as they were in 2020, when the election was decided by about 43,000 votes. I could theoretically be responsible for the outcome in this cycle, since 23,000 votes going from Harris to Trump would cause a net gain of 46,000 for the Republican ticket. But it’s unlikely it will be that close, and basically all of the people whose votes I change would need to happen to live in the swing states that determine the outcome. And as I’ve said, the idea that I could change the votes of 20% of my X followers seems fanciful.

On the other hand, when I write about public policy or ideas, I don’t have to reach large numbers of people. My audience is disproportionately made up of the most influential members of society, like government bureaucrats, journalists, law clerks, and public interest lawyers. Here, one well-placed individual can make a large difference, and I’ve had direct conversations about policy issues with many of this class, in addition to those who are major donors to political causes. Spreading ideas can also influence other intellectuals, creating a kind of chain reaction. Granted, the same might be true when I endorse a candidate, but the likelihood that this would influence the outcome of a presidential election seems much lower than me changing how a few elites think about a topic.

All of this is to say that when I write about the 2024 election, I am, relative to other things I could be writing about, both less certain about my position and less likely to make a difference. Why do it at all then? Well, for someone who writes about politics all the time, it feels like a kind of abdication to say nothing. And maybe it’s valuable to think about how someone with my general outlook should balance different concerns. I feel as if I’ve made an intellectual contribution, as demonstrated by Maurer saying that I wrote the only non-stupid case for Trump he’s come across. I’m not surprised, as it is now rare to find a right-wing intellectual who does not accept some aspect of the cult – and I consider even putting Trump in the same moral universe as other public figures to be so detached from reality that it counts as cult-like behavior.

That said, instead of talking about how my views towards Trump and Harris have shifted and saying that I’m now 53% in favor of Trump or 47% Trump or whatever, here I’m just going to note two recent considerations that have influenced my thinking. The first cuts in the pro-Trump direction, and the second is an argument for Kamala.

The recent news out of Brazil, where a judge has banned X, officially for not appointing a business representative but in effect for not doing enough to restrict speech, serves as a reminder of how bad the modern left tends to be on censorship. In my previous article, I said that Substack and Musk buying Twitter had practically solved the free speech problem. But I think that might have been too complacent. Abigail Shrier recently wrote about how extreme Kamala Harris’ position on censorship was in 2020, and how much the Biden administration did to pressure tech companies to take down alleged misinformation during covid. She also notes that Elon Musk has faced eleven lawsuits or regulatory conflicts across seven different government agencies since buying Twitter. Now you might feel the urge to respond, “A-ha! You’re worried about government being weaponized against people, and say that cuts in the direction of supporting Trump!” Yes, yes, Trump has the worst intentions imaginable, and anyone who even makes a comparison between his ethical standards and those of anyone else in politics is out of their mind.

But leftist censorship is a machine, supported by armies of bureaucrats, judges, journalists, intellectuals, and lawyers. We’ve even seen the emergence of an entire academic discipline centered around the need to censor. When a Democratic president attacks speech that liberal elites do not like, supposedly objective reporters will either ignore the story or portray it in the light most favorable to the authorities. Major civil liberties organizations like the ACLU will at worst support their actions or at best express concern but not prioritize pushing back on them. Government bureaucrats will all assume that those being censored or the companies resisting the White House are bad people with something to hide, and find a thousand ways to make their life more difficult.

As Cathy Young notes, those in Trump’s orbit seem to be setting the intellectual foundations for a kind of strongman government and as president he is going to be picking top officials based on how personally loyal they will be to him over any other criteria. At the same time, Trump will be trying to weaponize a government in which 90%+ of its agents will be opposed to what he is doing, and the mainstream press will be united in denouncing his actions as threats to democracy. The vast majority of powerful forces throughout society will be mobilized against him, from wealthy non-profits to the entertainment industry.

A pretty scary guy

I am usually suspicious of conservatives talking about the totalitarian things liberals would do if they had the power. I find that this is usually paranoid talk. But in the case of free speech, we have a consistent body of evidence that people who identify with the modern left are not big fans of it. Practically all other Western countries have authoritarian hate speech laws, we all know about college campuses, and we have direct experience with speech suppression coming from the Democratic administration that is now in power. Leftists are of course limited in how far they can go because First Amendment jurisprudence is strong, and conservatives have stacked the courts. But as we all know, presidents appoint judges, and there is nothing to indicate that our rights would be secure if and when the left achieves control over the judicial branch.

I’ve become a bit more ambivalent towards free speech in recent years, as I’ve seen what kinds of ideas win in a free marketplace of ideas on the right. Given the proliferation of anti-vaxx, conspiracy theories, and overall stupidity, liberals who thought conservatives could not be trusted to participate on their own terms in the democratic process have a right to feel vindicated. Even relatively high-brow conservative discourse about this topic platforms people with questionable judgment and journalistic standards like Michael Shellenberger.

Yet societies practically always and everywhere err on the side of too much rather than too little speech suppression, and the elite that we have today is particularly neurotic, making it especially untrustworthy when it comes to deciding which ideas to censor. I have little doubt that removing anti-vaxxers and anti-surrogacy advocates from the public square would improve our discourse, but I’ve seen little evidence that you can do that and not also scoop up a lot of ideas that deserve to get a hearing. Anti-vaxx has killed a lot of people, but the costs of that phenomenon have been low compared to non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates, which I consider the greatest policy blunders of our generation. And it’s not as if censorship destroyed anti-vaxx sentiment anyway, though I guess someone could argue we didn’t go far enough to stamp it out.

The danger the modern left poses to free speech is something I unfortunately downplayed in my original article, and this was based on my distaste towards modern rightists and the types of ideas they tend to promote. The ban in Brazil, and not seeing much of an outcry in response among American elites, led me to reflect and realize that our own civil liberties are not as safe as they may appear to be at the moment. Plus, Republicans with power in Washington might actually try to nudge other countries to be less authoritarian on these issues.

Pushing in the pro-Kamala direction are two recent articles by Josh Barro and Ilya Somin that make a very interesting point, which is that the kinds of bad things that Trump wants to do on the economy are much more likely to be accomplished through the executive branch alone. The president needs Congress to raise taxes, but he can slow down immigration or impose tariffs practically unilaterally. I already knew about immigration, but wasn’t aware beforehand that executive branch authority over tariffs is that expansive, so this changed my thinking a bit. Of course, I did take the feasibility of different policy proposals into account in my original article. I didn’t even mention labor unions, which I think is an issue that is absolutely vital for economic growth. Here, the executive branch also matters a lot, and the Democrats are clearly worse.

That said, the losses to societal welfare from immigration and trade restrictions are, as Matt Darling pointed out to me, potentially massive. I’d add that they are likely to be extremely popular, even more so than any bag of goodies that Kamala can provide. Americans are ambivalent and only mildly supportive of welfare policies, but much more united when it comes to foreigner-bashing. Trump appears to have single-handedly shifted the center of American opinion on trade, and we are now a long way away from the time when Obama and his Republican opponents in Congress both supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

With the rise of Trumpism, there is now no comfortable home for classical liberals. They have to choose their poison. Let me note that the things that are uniquely bad about Trump don’t apply to state and local races, where immigration and foreign trade are not relevant issues and everyone but the most extreme MAGAs accepts election results. I consider the case for voting Republicans strong in everything that doesn’t involve national politics or Trump. Congress is sort of in-between, because a Republican majority can enable him in accomplishing the uniquely damaging things he wants to do. But when it comes to the presidential race, I think reasonable minds can disagree, even when they have similar values and ways of seeing the world. Hopefully Trump goes away and decisions in future elections become easier, and more normal Republican politicians can defeat the menace of post-Trump Gribblism.