If the Republican party becomes 100% (not just 80%) America's populist party - then even the left wing populists will end up pulling a Bernie-bro and joining them. This will result in a giant sucking sound as populists in the Democrat party get sucked out into the Republicans and remaining non-populist Republicans get sucked out into the Democrats. Within a few years, both parties will be realigned into populist Republicans and anti-populist Democrats.
With that move, Democrats will be able to fully embrace abundance, trade, immigration, and constitutional protections.
Sounds like an interesting world to me. There's at least a certain clean elegance to it.
There's almost no way this happens. The constituency on the left for less Wokeness and more socialism is tiny. Socialists are incredibly Woke. Bernie memorably stepped aside at his own event to let some angry black women spontaneously take the podium and yell for a while.
Also center-leftists are still sort of cowed by the far left and have a thing about almost never punching left. They respect the far left for its convictions too much -- perhaps seeing some of their younger selves in that passion -- to ever kick them out of the club. They will happily hand them more concessions than they're worth to the coalition. Which largely explains the Biden Administration.
This is a fantasy. You think Matt Bruenig and Sam Seder will become Republicans? Anti-market forces will be a powerful constituency in the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future.
Hanania has a good track record on the direction of the GOP since 2016, so I take him seriously here.
But I do think this sounds "too online."
The median GOP primary voter is like 55-60 years old. They don't know what a Groyper is or who Fuentes is and would probably regard him as a snot-nosed punk if they did know. They think of Bannon as Sloppy Steve, a has-been.
If anyone derails Vance, it's far and away most likely to be Trump. Maybe he decides Vance just doesn't have "it" and he seeks out a better successor. Maybe he gets jealous about the limelight shifting and decides to sabotage Vance just to draw attention back to himself. Or maybe Vance finally decides he does need to break with Trump on some issue or another, whether out of conviction or to position himself better for the general election. Or maybe Trump really does have a scheme to run again.
Hanania really dislikes Vance and that bias leads him to take for granted that Vance is a useless, spineless toad, but people can always surprise you.
And to me, the idea that even a heavily favored candidate still shouldn't be favored much above 50% sounds pretty reasonable. The Republican Party is in a highly dynamic and unsettled state. Old rules like "the outgoing two-term President's VP always wins the nomination" are made to be broken in times such as these.
I agree that this is basically a stochastic process inasmuch as it impossible to predict what happens over the next three years. I think it's reasonable to place probability >.5 on Vance, but, particularly given the unpredictability of Trump so far, I feel like the extent to which people online have already made their minds up that Vance is the nominee in 28, and that Bannon is the challenger, is unreasonable. There's a difference between locking in on the Trump as the nominee bet in 24, since he was then the spearhead of the GOP. What happens in 28 is way less certain, and indexing on Twitter seems silly since 1) the reasons I would've predicted trump winning the nom in 24 have little to do with Twitter, and 2) I don't think it's clear that Twitter is determining the direction of the GOP base going forward as Richard does
Thinking about how Israel could plausibly go from 90% and 60% support among the two parties to 50% and 25% in the course of a decade… If I were a Jew anywhere in the world outside Israel, I would be growing increasingly frustrated with Israeli leadership.
Gaza deserved a good deal of devastation, but thismulti year campaign has worsened the lives of the Jewish diaspora by fomenting antisemitism and has permanently damaged Israel’s standing among the younger half of the US electorate. And there is no reason to believe there is a proportionate benefit to Israel itself. It is not literally going to wipe out Gaza’s population. It will still, after all of this, have a hornets nest on its hands, even if it indefinitely occupies the Strip.
I tend to assume Israel knows what it is doing. Time will tell.
The Israelis know exactly what they're doing, and it doesn't bode well for Diaspora Jews.
The Likud ideology (now prevalent in Israel) doesn't give a shit about Diaspora Jews; it sees them as living in "Galut" (unholy exile), and thinks they all belong in Israel. In a sense, the larger ideology of political Zionism (and the need for a "Jewish State") rests on an underlying belief that outside of Israel, Jews are dependent on a "host country," and that therefore, Jews aren't safe anywhere else.
That ideology is directly antithetical to liberalism, which holds "self-determination" to be an INDIVIDUAL right (whereby the State offers every individual equal protection, regardless of ethnicity).
The most prominent exponent of Israeli-style ethno-nationalism is Yoram Hazony, and he's equally prominent and popular on the overall 'National Conservative" right -- along with Steve Bannon himself! These folks (volks?) don't consider multicultural liberal democracies to be legitimate nations at all; they consider them "empires." In a weird turn, ethno-nationalism is thereby a perverse outgrowth of anti-colonial discourse.
Ironically, the one thing that might change this situation (within Israel) might be if a flood of liberal American Jews is forced to flee there.
(With equal [and equally perverse] irony, this scenario would also allow Israel to grant full citizenship to Palestinians living in the Territories, by overcoming the so-called "demographic threat.")
Your criticism of Israel is that it genocided Gaza too hard, and because of that people are turning against the Jews, which is bad because they weren’t able to completely genocide Gaza anyways
My point is that Israel does not seem positioned to permanently resolve its issue in Gaza. I was not stating the view that it would be morally righteous or even strategically appropriate to commit genocide.
So it's become undeniable that we have a problem with Jewish power in America, and your immediate response to that is to evoke the sacred cow of American politics, the holocaust.
Fortunately, people who think like you (boomers) are dying, while younger Americans are becoming increasingly more critical of the Jews and Israel.
“The West” does not really support Israel. The US does, but not to the extent that anti-Zionists think.
Israel could easily wipe out Gaza and the West Bank without US assistance. It does not. The worst atrocity of our time? Africans massacre each other all the time, no one cares.
You seem to be low human capital, so I’ll end my replies with this one.
Israel cannot exist without support form the West. If it weren't being defended by America they would've been wiped off the planet decades ago. Look at what happened with Iran.
I don't care about Africans killing each other. We are talking about our country being used as a tool to systematically genocide millions of people, including women and children, in the interest of a foreign nation which we helped create
Every day, I become more convinced that we should impose an IQ requirement in order to vote. Below 130? Sorry, but you don't get to control the fate of this country.
Take a look at the personal ads for Slate Star Codex readers and get back to me on whether those are the people we want deciding the fate of this country.
I don't think having an IQ requirement means the weirdest SSC readers are going to determine the fate of the country. It just means we'll have more epistemically grounded, better decision-makers in control. Some of them will be weird autists, but they'll be a minority.
> But no one on the right who has a large voice cares that the federal government took a 10% stake in Intel.
Not entirely true. Ben Shapiro closed his podcast yesterday by panning the intel deal.
“Nationalization of American industries is a bad idea. I understand that the Trump administration is trying to do as much as it can from the executive branch of the government. They're doing it on crime.
They're doing it on immigration. On immigration, they have plenary power. On crime, not so much.
Doing it on the economy is not what the executive branch was designed to do. It is not. Congress should step in.
Congress is an independent branch of government. The president of the United States should not unilaterally be making tariff policy. That is not what the system was designed to do.
I don't like it happening, whether it is Democrat or Republican, and the grand centralization of nearly all power in the executive branch as a whole is a massive, massive institutional flaw in our republic right now. It also means that whenever we have a presidential election, it is tooth and nail because I guess if you grab the executive branch, then you basically run everything. And that is a huge systemic problem that the founders never would have tolerated.”
It’s really not true that “you basically run everything” if you hold the Presidency. Trump grabs headlines with his illegal tariff nonsense and ICE raids but the federal government is a vast ship that, even with a trifecta, can only be steered slightly and slowly. You see some evidence for this in the fact that DOGE couldn’t even keep federal spending flat despite stopping everything they possibly could (without regard for the law).
Trump has made that less true, though. Independent agencies are no longer a thing, for one.
The Likud ideology (now prevalent in Israel) doesn't give a shit about Diaspora Jews; it sees them as living in "Galut" (unholy exile), and thinks they all belong in Israel. In a sense, the larger ideology of political Zionism (and the need for a "Jewish State") rests on an underlying belief that outside of Israel, Jews are dependent on a "host country," and that therefore, Jews aren't safe anywhere else.
The most prominent exponent of Israeli-style ethno-nationalism is Yoram Hazony, and he's equally prominent on the 'National Conservtive" right -- along with Steve Bannon himself!
That ideology is directly antithetical to liberalism, which holds "self-determination" to be an INDIVIDUAL right (whereby the State provides every individual with equal protection, regardless of ethnicity).
The Israelis know exactly what they're doing, and it doesn't bode well for Diaspora Jews. Ironically, the one thing that might change this (within Israel) might be if a flood of liberal American Jews is forced to flee there.
No one knows how many illegal/undocumented immigrants that there are in the US. 11 million seemed to be a fixed guesstimate for decades. Bidens open borders regime admitted from 10 to 20 million people. Isit30m?40m?50m?60m? Whatever the true figure employment and welfare schemes means that they're part of " economic activity"and in an economy that has had so many trillions of dollars printed out of thin air in the last few years. Deportations/self deportations will probably fizzle out.
Trump's supreme court appointees effectively ended the whole abortion issue from inside the Republican party. I suspect that he would like to do something similar on the immigration subject too
Strong analysis Richard. I can't find much to disagree on. I agree Vance is the base case and that a challenger would likely come from a groyper or MAHA-adjacent vector. The boomers are getting older and less relevant, but the grassroots power of the groypers is only growing. As you note, their potential for real world impact should not be underestimated.
I agree with the brunt of this post and admire the fact that you've put money on your predictions, but I think some of the analysis is too online, and, I generally think it is extremely silly to make predictions 3 years before the election. My prior would be that Vance would beat Bannon, but I don't think I wouldve accurately predicted anything in the past decade three years before it happened. In 2021, many people thought trump was out of the game. In 2017, I wouldnt have had a credence higher than .2 that Biden would win. If you bias towards base outcomes, you'll be more correct than not, but with regards to specific predictions about the importance of Groypers and Twitter, for instance, I think your credences should decrease significantly
A very, very, large number of people. Whether Bannon is even considered in 28 is way less certain. I wouldn't give it sub 20 percent odds, but this is clearly an insane equivalence
My point was, that I would predict that probabilities assigned to candidates atp are not worth betting on. That I'd assign Bannon sub 20, as opposed to the much higher probability I would have assigned Trump in 24, was not to say my computation of Bannon's odds differ from yours, but that accuracy re: Trump doesn't predict accuracy re: Bannon
You should be able to square that large numbers of people credibly predicted contradictory outcomes in 20. I think such examples imply that a large amount of variance can compound over three years, particularly w/r/t outcomes less certain than trump's popularity. That anyone predicted trump 24 does not impact my credence here.
This could very well be a good thing.
If the Republican party becomes 100% (not just 80%) America's populist party - then even the left wing populists will end up pulling a Bernie-bro and joining them. This will result in a giant sucking sound as populists in the Democrat party get sucked out into the Republicans and remaining non-populist Republicans get sucked out into the Democrats. Within a few years, both parties will be realigned into populist Republicans and anti-populist Democrats.
With that move, Democrats will be able to fully embrace abundance, trade, immigration, and constitutional protections.
Sounds like an interesting world to me. There's at least a certain clean elegance to it.
There's almost no way this happens. The constituency on the left for less Wokeness and more socialism is tiny. Socialists are incredibly Woke. Bernie memorably stepped aside at his own event to let some angry black women spontaneously take the podium and yell for a while.
Also center-leftists are still sort of cowed by the far left and have a thing about almost never punching left. They respect the far left for its convictions too much -- perhaps seeing some of their younger selves in that passion -- to ever kick them out of the club. They will happily hand them more concessions than they're worth to the coalition. Which largely explains the Biden Administration.
This is a fantasy. You think Matt Bruenig and Sam Seder will become Republicans? Anti-market forces will be a powerful constituency in the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future.
Hanania has a good track record on the direction of the GOP since 2016, so I take him seriously here.
But I do think this sounds "too online."
The median GOP primary voter is like 55-60 years old. They don't know what a Groyper is or who Fuentes is and would probably regard him as a snot-nosed punk if they did know. They think of Bannon as Sloppy Steve, a has-been.
If anyone derails Vance, it's far and away most likely to be Trump. Maybe he decides Vance just doesn't have "it" and he seeks out a better successor. Maybe he gets jealous about the limelight shifting and decides to sabotage Vance just to draw attention back to himself. Or maybe Vance finally decides he does need to break with Trump on some issue or another, whether out of conviction or to position himself better for the general election. Or maybe Trump really does have a scheme to run again.
Hanania really dislikes Vance and that bias leads him to take for granted that Vance is a useless, spineless toad, but people can always surprise you.
And to me, the idea that even a heavily favored candidate still shouldn't be favored much above 50% sounds pretty reasonable. The Republican Party is in a highly dynamic and unsettled state. Old rules like "the outgoing two-term President's VP always wins the nomination" are made to be broken in times such as these.
I agree that this is basically a stochastic process inasmuch as it impossible to predict what happens over the next three years. I think it's reasonable to place probability >.5 on Vance, but, particularly given the unpredictability of Trump so far, I feel like the extent to which people online have already made their minds up that Vance is the nominee in 28, and that Bannon is the challenger, is unreasonable. There's a difference between locking in on the Trump as the nominee bet in 24, since he was then the spearhead of the GOP. What happens in 28 is way less certain, and indexing on Twitter seems silly since 1) the reasons I would've predicted trump winning the nom in 24 have little to do with Twitter, and 2) I don't think it's clear that Twitter is determining the direction of the GOP base going forward as Richard does
Thinking about how Israel could plausibly go from 90% and 60% support among the two parties to 50% and 25% in the course of a decade… If I were a Jew anywhere in the world outside Israel, I would be growing increasingly frustrated with Israeli leadership.
Gaza deserved a good deal of devastation, but thismulti year campaign has worsened the lives of the Jewish diaspora by fomenting antisemitism and has permanently damaged Israel’s standing among the younger half of the US electorate. And there is no reason to believe there is a proportionate benefit to Israel itself. It is not literally going to wipe out Gaza’s population. It will still, after all of this, have a hornets nest on its hands, even if it indefinitely occupies the Strip.
I tend to assume Israel knows what it is doing. Time will tell.
The Israelis know exactly what they're doing, and it doesn't bode well for Diaspora Jews.
The Likud ideology (now prevalent in Israel) doesn't give a shit about Diaspora Jews; it sees them as living in "Galut" (unholy exile), and thinks they all belong in Israel. In a sense, the larger ideology of political Zionism (and the need for a "Jewish State") rests on an underlying belief that outside of Israel, Jews are dependent on a "host country," and that therefore, Jews aren't safe anywhere else.
That ideology is directly antithetical to liberalism, which holds "self-determination" to be an INDIVIDUAL right (whereby the State offers every individual equal protection, regardless of ethnicity).
The most prominent exponent of Israeli-style ethno-nationalism is Yoram Hazony, and he's equally prominent and popular on the overall 'National Conservative" right -- along with Steve Bannon himself! These folks (volks?) don't consider multicultural liberal democracies to be legitimate nations at all; they consider them "empires." In a weird turn, ethno-nationalism is thereby a perverse outgrowth of anti-colonial discourse.
Ironically, the one thing that might change this situation (within Israel) might be if a flood of liberal American Jews is forced to flee there.
(With equal [and equally perverse] irony, this scenario would also allow Israel to grant full citizenship to Palestinians living in the Territories, by overcoming the so-called "demographic threat.")
Your criticism of Israel is that it genocided Gaza too hard, and because of that people are turning against the Jews, which is bad because they weren’t able to completely genocide Gaza anyways
My point is that Israel does not seem positioned to permanently resolve its issue in Gaza. I was not stating the view that it would be morally righteous or even strategically appropriate to commit genocide.
Israel can only commit this genocide with Western support
The West supports Israel because of Jewish overrepresentation in our most important institutions
In other words, the Jewish diaspora is using their influence in Western nations to facilitate the worst atrocity of our time
Why wouldn’t this foment more anti semitism? This is clearly a Jewish problem
And what's your "Solution" to the "Jewish Problem"?
So it's become undeniable that we have a problem with Jewish power in America, and your immediate response to that is to evoke the sacred cow of American politics, the holocaust.
Fortunately, people who think like you (boomers) are dying, while younger Americans are becoming increasingly more critical of the Jews and Israel.
“The West” does not really support Israel. The US does, but not to the extent that anti-Zionists think.
Israel could easily wipe out Gaza and the West Bank without US assistance. It does not. The worst atrocity of our time? Africans massacre each other all the time, no one cares.
You seem to be low human capital, so I’ll end my replies with this one.
Israel cannot exist without support form the West. If it weren't being defended by America they would've been wiped off the planet decades ago. Look at what happened with Iran.
I don't care about Africans killing each other. We are talking about our country being used as a tool to systematically genocide millions of people, including women and children, in the interest of a foreign nation which we helped create
Isn’t Newsom the Groyper candidate? xD
Every day, I become more convinced that we should impose an IQ requirement in order to vote. Below 130? Sorry, but you don't get to control the fate of this country.
Take a look at the personal ads for Slate Star Codex readers and get back to me on whether those are the people we want deciding the fate of this country.
I don't think having an IQ requirement means the weirdest SSC readers are going to determine the fate of the country. It just means we'll have more epistemically grounded, better decision-makers in control. Some of them will be weird autists, but they'll be a minority.
> But no one on the right who has a large voice cares that the federal government took a 10% stake in Intel.
Not entirely true. Ben Shapiro closed his podcast yesterday by panning the intel deal.
“Nationalization of American industries is a bad idea. I understand that the Trump administration is trying to do as much as it can from the executive branch of the government. They're doing it on crime.
They're doing it on immigration. On immigration, they have plenary power. On crime, not so much.
Doing it on the economy is not what the executive branch was designed to do. It is not. Congress should step in.
Congress is an independent branch of government. The president of the United States should not unilaterally be making tariff policy. That is not what the system was designed to do.
I don't like it happening, whether it is Democrat or Republican, and the grand centralization of nearly all power in the executive branch as a whole is a massive, massive institutional flaw in our republic right now. It also means that whenever we have a presidential election, it is tooth and nail because I guess if you grab the executive branch, then you basically run everything. And that is a huge systemic problem that the founders never would have tolerated.”
It’s really not true that “you basically run everything” if you hold the Presidency. Trump grabs headlines with his illegal tariff nonsense and ICE raids but the federal government is a vast ship that, even with a trifecta, can only be steered slightly and slowly. You see some evidence for this in the fact that DOGE couldn’t even keep federal spending flat despite stopping everything they possibly could (without regard for the law).
Trump has made that less true, though. Independent agencies are no longer a thing, for one.
You forgot Walter Mondale. Easy to do, I know, but he won his party’s nomination. And managed to lose 49 states.
At first, I thought of Mondale, too -- but Carter hadn't been a two-term President. :-)
Hanania misses the most likely outcome of the schism he envisions -- the coronation of MAGA's unstoppable "compromise" candidate -- Donald Trump, Jr.!
The Likud ideology (now prevalent in Israel) doesn't give a shit about Diaspora Jews; it sees them as living in "Galut" (unholy exile), and thinks they all belong in Israel. In a sense, the larger ideology of political Zionism (and the need for a "Jewish State") rests on an underlying belief that outside of Israel, Jews are dependent on a "host country," and that therefore, Jews aren't safe anywhere else.
The most prominent exponent of Israeli-style ethno-nationalism is Yoram Hazony, and he's equally prominent on the 'National Conservtive" right -- along with Steve Bannon himself!
That ideology is directly antithetical to liberalism, which holds "self-determination" to be an INDIVIDUAL right (whereby the State provides every individual with equal protection, regardless of ethnicity).
The Israelis know exactly what they're doing, and it doesn't bode well for Diaspora Jews. Ironically, the one thing that might change this (within Israel) might be if a flood of liberal American Jews is forced to flee there.
Bannon's doing the "mutliracial working-trash populism" thing, while Fuentes has a much more jaundiced view of muh salt of the earth masses.
https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1908187813117411525
The 2028 GOP nominee will be Trump.
No one knows how many illegal/undocumented immigrants that there are in the US. 11 million seemed to be a fixed guesstimate for decades. Bidens open borders regime admitted from 10 to 20 million people. Isit30m?40m?50m?60m? Whatever the true figure employment and welfare schemes means that they're part of " economic activity"and in an economy that has had so many trillions of dollars printed out of thin air in the last few years. Deportations/self deportations will probably fizzle out.
Trump's supreme court appointees effectively ended the whole abortion issue from inside the Republican party. I suspect that he would like to do something similar on the immigration subject too
Strong analysis Richard. I can't find much to disagree on. I agree Vance is the base case and that a challenger would likely come from a groyper or MAHA-adjacent vector. The boomers are getting older and less relevant, but the grassroots power of the groypers is only growing. As you note, their potential for real world impact should not be underestimated.
I agree with the brunt of this post and admire the fact that you've put money on your predictions, but I think some of the analysis is too online, and, I generally think it is extremely silly to make predictions 3 years before the election. My prior would be that Vance would beat Bannon, but I don't think I wouldve accurately predicted anything in the past decade three years before it happened. In 2021, many people thought trump was out of the game. In 2017, I wouldnt have had a credence higher than .2 that Biden would win. If you bias towards base outcomes, you'll be more correct than not, but with regards to specific predictions about the importance of Groypers and Twitter, for instance, I think your credences should decrease significantly
You know who predicted that Trump would walk to the nomination in 2024 back in 2021?
Jonathan Last at the Bulwark predicted this in October 2020.
A very, very, large number of people. Whether Bannon is even considered in 28 is way less certain. I wouldn't give it sub 20 percent odds, but this is clearly an insane equivalence
I gave Bannon around 3 percent in the post.
My point was, that I would predict that probabilities assigned to candidates atp are not worth betting on. That I'd assign Bannon sub 20, as opposed to the much higher probability I would have assigned Trump in 24, was not to say my computation of Bannon's odds differ from yours, but that accuracy re: Trump doesn't predict accuracy re: Bannon
You should be able to square that large numbers of people credibly predicted contradictory outcomes in 20. I think such examples imply that a large amount of variance can compound over three years, particularly w/r/t outcomes less certain than trump's popularity. That anyone predicted trump 24 does not impact my credence here.
Why do we assume Trump won’t try to run again?