I'm here from the email, so thanks for the clarification. Also, I'm curious if some of the newer populist economic policies on the right help tip the scales in favor of the Democratic party in your view. And Trump getting Republicans on board with the Cares Act, etc.
Oh its the relief aid that people got when their jobs where shut down for covid and therefore didn't have money coming in. Wow, yeah free market where against that weren't they? Yeah I guess many people will just starve. 🤦
I wasn't a fan of lockdowns if the lockdowns happened the aid was needed. Otherwise You're just ruining people's lives
BTW I don't like Trump. I don't think he's where he needs to be but policy wise at least he's better than Richard. Ill give Trump that. I also like how trump is banning toxic ingredients in food which is spitting in the face of the free market types who think its a right to allow companies to poison it's customers 😂
I certainly hope so, JD Vance and Josh Hawley want to turn the Republican party into a worker's party. Both have gone against right to work as republicans. The Republican party has a growing pro Union backing. BTW I totally support that and want people like Richard to be Democrats or go libertarian. I hate free market economics with a passion and without them the Republican party would be pro worker far quicker but I also hate wokeness with passion and mass immigration so I could never be a Democrat. Not to mention social liberalism is a bourgeois vice. The social views of both parties are flipped but slowly things are working themselves out. When they do ill register republican. Till then ill vote For the Vance and Hawley types
Surely the continuance of liberal norms is of more importance than object-level issues? If one party is trying to end democracy, voting for them just because of some better economic policies is a terrible idea; they can always go back on it later, and you won't be able to do anything about it.
They’re not trying to end democracy. They are part of a cult where one man rejects elections and I don’t think that election denial is still a thing after Trump is gone. There is no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene. It’s the combination of a uniquely bad man and his cult like control over the party. But if he wins you don’t have to worry about it because he’ll he term limited and very old afterwards.
“But if he wins you don’t have to worry about it because he’ll he term limited and very old afterwards.”
I used to think this until Ezra Klein pointed out that Trump in 2028 will insist that his Republican successor won the election and do whatever he can (like he did in 2020) to avoid a peaceful transition of power. And that time, he will have far more of his cronies in key positions to actually have a serious chance of success.
I am someone that is more afraid of Trump than most and I don't think this one is plausible. Trump wouldn't take that kind of risk for anyone but himself
No, just that he likes people who are loyal to him and wants those people to remain in power to preserve his legacy. And that he hates people who will talk about undoing what he did and will do everything he can to prevent them from taking the reins again.
I don't know about that. I mean, the limits on Trump's behavior appear to be what he thinks he can actually get away with. If JD Vance has been crazily loyal to Trump, and Trump will think that he can get away with doing this, then why not?
He'll see just how much of a slap on the wrist he got for 2020, so he'll figure that he'll likewise get a slap on the wrist this time around at worst as well.
I do not think Trump will work hard on behalf of anybody but himself. In such a scenario, he would just try to hog the spotlight from whoever he was ostensibly "helping."
He literally can't stay on a teleprompter speech and will go off on rambling tangents the instant somebody pokes a stick through his thin skin. He also gets petulant whenever another Republican gets popular even when they have not been antagonistic to him. He was getting petulant about Ron DeSantis long before DeSantis ran for president. What makes you think he can maintain the discipline necessary to decenter himself enough to help some loyal toady win?
Because it wouldn’t be decentering himself at all. He wouldn’t think or say “They stole the election from him”, it would be “They stole the election from US”.
I think this is very unlikely to happen. Trump cares only about himself, his own power and prestige. If he wins and serves out his second term I don’t think he’ll care much at all about JD following him. He doesn’t care at all about his movement in any idealistic sense, it’s a cult of personality and when he exits the stage he won’t care what comes after.
That’s because he had a higher proportion of establishment Republicans vs populist cronies in his first administration. That ratio has been going towards the latter, especially in his inner circle, over time.
This is something I do believe as a wild-eyed social democrat. Everybody but Kari Lake conceded in 2022, despite lots of election denying talk before hand, even in fairly close races. Now, there'll be the ususal fear mongering there was in every election about dead African-American illegal immigrants voting or whatever, but wide scale, I think Trump specifically refusing to believe he lost is the main issue.
As early as before the 2016 election, chatter was everywhere that Trump would deny losing if he lost that election, simply knowing his personality and how he was setting the goal posts. This story was contemporary with another about naming his son ”Jr” with the primary concern being that the son may turn out to be a real loser. He was unusually obsessed with the word “loser”. It seemed absurd and yet ..
I agree things will probably get better after Trump dies (unless another equally charismatic person emerges to take up the mantle, which is not that unlikely), but that's unlikely to happen in the next 4 years. The existence of a legal term limit doesn't mean much when the man has made clear that he'll happily violate any law he can get away with and millions of people will happily support him in this. If he tries to stay in power after his 4 years are up, this could do massive damage to democratic norms and our institutional capacity to recover, even if he's only in power for an extra few years personally.
There is of course also the matter of the Democratic attacks on free speech, which I don't want to ignore. Free speech is equally if not more important than democracy. But in practice the right seems perfectly happy to censor those they disagree with, so it's just an image issue; the left openly hates free speech, the right pretends to defend it while in reality hating it just as much. So in the absence of any party that seems like they'll actually defend free speech, but one that is trying to overturn elections and another that isn't, the choice seems clear.
There's no underlying necessity for bonobo-ish cultures to ban speech. It's useful for maxxing attention economy, and thus for maxxing material economy, but it's not necessary for the survival of such cultures.
The opposite is true for chimpy cultures, which must lie to pretend virtue and scapegoat others for their own cultures' problems & deadly results. The cultural logic for Project 2025, Russian Orthodox Church, Taliban, etc. is the same. Chimpy culturists chose alpha chimpy cult leaders or dictators. They demand any predecessor, e.g. JD Vance, be like Trump/Putin.
The gop isn’t coming back to any form of Romney centrism once he is gone which is good. They aren’t gonna embrace amnesty or tolerance for lgbt politics: centrists only helped liberals. Trump changed the party and a right wing party should be that , right wing.
The "T" has only been an issue since he started running for 2020 and arguably, not until even later. Wokeness and "triggering" was a wholly new agenda (perhaps invented by his son) which I suspect many people noticed and attributed to him going "all in" on culture war for lack of any new, salient policy issues beyond the anti-immigrant, nativist thing.
You think after having been on board with that kind of power and tasting it Republicans will give it up? They will institutionalize dominance. History shows that once a leader can operate outside the rule of law the successors continue it.
"no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene"? I feel like Venezuela counts!
Also, why do we think Trump would respect term limits?
We saw Trump spend months trying to stay in office, culminating in 1/6, and we *still* feel like this time, he'll have to follow the rules.
People simply aren't able to grasp how outside the normal bounds of behavior Trump is. Our brains are designed for arithmetic processes, not exponential ones.
This is a fairly uninformed take. Donald Trump asked his DOJ to make a statement claiming voter fraud to invalidate the election. What makes you think this won't happen again in another Trump term? What happens if Trump wins, an election happens in 4 years, and Trump's DOJ comes out saying that they have evidence of voter fraud/election interference and the winner of the election is inconclusive until his DOJ finishes "investigating"?
His dad lived into his nineties. And Trump has the best healthcare in the world.
I outlined few ways I can imagine Trump trying elide his term limit in another comment. I think the simplest scenario is he simply drives the car off the cliff. He refuses to let another Republican take the nomination. I don't think there's any requirement that a private party nominate someone who can legally take office. Non citizens run for president and get on the ballot. So GOP primary voters lol and re-nominate him.
Then he spends 2028 bullying and cajoling GOP lawmakers at the state and federal level to pledge their electors to him, or refuse to certify the election for any other candidate. No legitimate candidate gets 270 EVs. Then it goes to the House, and his craven House lackeys vote him in. Now, he's not allowed to take office, but we're in a constitutional crisis, because the process to produce an executive that meets the other requirements for office has failed.
Or, he spends his entire term trying to call a constitutional convention to repeal the 22nd. There are a lot of barriers here, but he would fight with the same ferocity, creativity, litigiousness, and disrespect for the law until he gets his way, or burn the whole country down trying.
Or! He runs Trump Jr, with the explicit understanding it's still really Trump. In fact, he straight up says so at all the rallies he holds and interviews he does. Trump Jr promises that he will be an empty figurehead.
Obviously I just made these scenarios up. Whatever Trump does will be much stranger and scarier and involve many more lawsuits than my tiny little mind can conceive of. But this seems straightforward enough if you're a malignant narcissist with an entire political party at your beck and call.
It really speaks to normalcy bias that otherwise smart people can look at the lengths Trump went to last time and think there's nothing to worry about, because the rules say Trump has to leave. Turns out this Trump guy doesn't always follow the rules.
"There is no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene."
No one had Trump's levels of power, influence, and charisma--yet. What happens if they will?
"There is no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene."
Kari Lake didn't hold power, but obviously she never conceded.
Things won't be *as* crazy when Trump is gone, but he obviously did massive damage to the GOP and it's not going to just snap back into shape upon his departure. The longer he's around, the more profound and lasting the damage. No other Republican has the charisma to prompt another 1/6, but he's permanently turned many Republicans off of fact-based news.
Presumably he meant the Democrats, not Trump. The Democrats are using lawfare, wanting to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the filibuster, use (illegal) executive orders to do things, attacks on free speech, and so on.
Ending the electoral college and ending the filibuster are obvious improvements to democracy. Adding states and/or new citizens are neutral, those decisions are a normal part of what any country has to do. Packing the court is obviously exploiting a loophole to circumvent the intended process, so bad for democracy.
So you are really worried about "one side ending democracy," but when it comes to the other side openly rigging "democracy" to create a one-party state and exclude the opposition from power as much as possible, you are favorable towards this possibility or at worst neutral. Informative.
All the stuff you mentioned, with the exception of court packing, would create a one-party state for approximately one election cycle. After that the Republicans would figure out how to pitch their message to the newly expanded base and things would go back to normal.
I could retort that likewise Blumpft's antics after the 2020 election could and objectively did backfire on him and his party. Is this an excuse to say that they should be dismissed and paid no mind?
There is a pretty big difference between attempting reforms within established legal, democratic, and constitutional procedures, like filibuster reform, and blatant illegal action like what Trump did. I agree with you about court-packing being bad because it is a legally sketchy idea.
Secondly, Trump's behavior backfired on him, but if Pence hadn't stood up to him the country would, at the very least, been plunged into civil unrest and at worst have a dictator. By contrast, I am saying that stuff like filibuster reform and admitting new states wouldn't work even if the Democrats pulled them off completely successfully. The Republicans would just adapt to them and we'd be back normal soon enough.
(Court packing wouldn't work for long either, as soon as Republicans won an election they'd pack even more judges onto the court. That's another reason I oppose it, not only is it illegal, it would eventually result in a Supreme Court with dozens of members)
Perhaps consider why your view of "democracy" seems to be "50.1% of the population are allowed to totally denigrate the other 49.9% and treat them as insects to be stomped upon."
Who stomped on you? GOPers stomp on themselves, avoiding (meta)cognitive awareness & responsibility, incl. checking facts and predicting & mitigitating risks. Nobody forces you to vote for serial criminals/conmen, shill for a party that increases its own mortality rate, give rapists like Bryan Slaton impunity while criminalizing abortion, become obese or substance-abusing, be gun-nuts or more 'eat lead' than 'abate lead', refuse to update with evidence, believe conspiracy theories, be pro-'plagues as divine punishments', buy houses in flood zones w/out flood insurance, etc. The party for (mental) healthcare; lead abatement; nutrition for children; liberal arts & sciences for updating paradigms; disaster prevention, prep, & relief; and reduction of crimes, plagues, & deaths isn't the stomping-elephants-in-musth party.
and your view of democracy is that 47.9% of the population are allowed to totally denigrate the other 52.1% and treat them as insects to be stomped upon.
I think the economic argument is important for poor countries such as Honduras, where the salience of economic issues is much bigger in principle, not to mention their leftards being much more destructive than American ones (as with their ongoing dismantlement of Próspera). So it's reasonable to support rightoids in those places, despite their religious obscurantism and extremist views on pro-life. However, the relative salience of economics is much lower in already very rich countries such as the US, where hardcore leftists have very little power and influence (bizarre exceptions such as the longshoremen aside - though they are not even so much leftists as pure rent-seekers), and what power and influence they do have is constrained by pro-market norms and institutions.
There's also a non-trivial chance that AGI will be hit within the term of the next US President. An important question to ask is whether you trust Trump or the Democratic establishment to handle it better.
Yeah, I usually think we should emphasise economic arguments, e.g. importance of compounding growth. But the fact that we're less than a decade away from AGI, whether the US has a growth rate of 2 or 3% becomes a rounding error, but whether there's a vaguely sensible party in power, able to push through the necessary difficult and intelligent policy, will be hugely important.
The Democrats are also the more pro-immigration party, which compensates for their more Leftist economic policies. GOP economic policies might be good for existing US citizens, but their immigration policies are terrible for those people who want to immigrate to the US, unless of course perhaps these people are quite literally the best of the best.
The overwhelming majority of Americans apparently wouldn't meet the RAISE Act's criteria if they themselves were aspiring immigrants to the US instead of them already being US citizens. Why should I support a party that would have prevented my family and I from immigrating to the US 23.5 years ago if they would have already existed and fully had their way in regards to this issue back then?
Because policies should benefit citizens, not foreigners who want to become citizens.
Why should citizens of any nation want to bring in people who prioritize foreigners? And if they think like you do, wouldn't this be a great reason to oppose immigration?
The argument is that there should be a noblesse oblige-type feeling on the part of citizens towards foreigners, similar to how the rich should exhibit noblesse oblige towards the poor or how the smart should exhibit noblesse oblige towards the dull.
Using this logic, there should be noblesse oblige toward 8 billion people. A country cannot prioritize the rest of the world. Noblesse oblige toward foreigners who reside in one's nation makes sense, i.e., not mistreating them because they are foreigners and giving them basic rights. That said, they still have to assimilate to local and native norms, culture, etc.
But noblesse oblige toward the vast majority of the world's population out of some misplaced sense of duty toward people who have nothing in common with you? I'll pass.
Latin Americans have been a part of extended Western civilization for half a millennium, so it’s inaccurate to say that Americans have nothing in common with them.
I would love to know what basis this claim has, in your mind: "while Democrats are only small minded, Republicans are both small minded and hateful." I don't think either side is more hateful (or even smarter, at this point) or kinder or any other fuzzily-defined qualifier. I tend to find the Left (not liberals) most hateful but that's probably my own bias. I certainly wouldn't make the claim unsupported. We're talking about groups of 50 million people. It seems like an absurd generalization to make on its face. If you find their messages hateful I suspect that's YOUR bias... but I remain curious.
Let’s say very simplistically that people vote on policies and personal character. It’s my opinion that generally, character arguments hold a bit more mindshare than policy arguments. What this means is that if one candidate is clearly a terrible person, then the other candidate (whoever they are and whatever policies they support) will get an unearned benefit electorally speaking. It’s unearned because it’s more about the other person’s failings than anything about themselves personally.
So you can expect that with the newfound moral high ground, this creates the possibility of having more wiggle room to push bad policies. Not necessarily policies that are worse than the Bad candidate’s policies, just that the Good candidate faces less public scrutiny on their policies, because everyone understands that they are the Good guys going up against the Bad guys.
This implies that poor candidate character can actually degrade the quality of the average policy position supported by the average candidate. I expect that if Trump is replaced with a less toxic candidate that both parties will face more policy pressure.
>This would be like saying a commercial that talked about Jews committing murder, Jews committing theft, and Jews raping women was about crime.
No, it really isn't. In just three years we've had probably 10 million foreign nationals do a complete end run around our immigration system by crossing the border illegally and either disappearing or making false asylum claims. There are all kinds of legitimate reasons to object to that. If it was just racial animus you would not see such high levels of concern across all demographics, including Latinos.
I think illegality is just an excuse to do foreigner bashing. Illegals are the easiest target. Why is hostility to immigration always so closely tied up to hostility to trade? Why do Trump and Vance make immigration/trade their top two issues to “help” people? It would be quite the coincidence. Clearly this is about anti-foreigner animus more generally.
I don't actually think these are tied because all these people hate foreigners as such. They probably do hate foreigners in a macro sense, but the foreigner hating is itself often a result of paranoid/zero-sum thinking.
My very Trumpy dad is this way. I've never seen him have *any* animus towards specific foreigners. He's really chummy with this Asian guy who barely speaks English who runs a rural gas station down the road from his house. Before he retired he also chose to go work in foreign countries as a construction superintendent contractor (Iraq & Columbia) and he tells stories about how much fun he had in both places. He talks with fondness about the guy that was hired to serve as his chaperone in Columbia. He tells funny stories about his Iraqi workers liking him because he let them go swimming in the middle of the work day one time. He talks about how the first thing he did when he got to Iraq was get someone to teach him "manners" so he wouldn't make anybody mad accidentally. He talks about how he chummed it up with some Columbian dudes because he showed them the white boy, redneck way to skin and butcher a hog.
He's also a deeply paranoid, conspiratorial-minded person. He is always worried somebody is cheating him. When someone is doing something weird, he always defaults to an assumption that it's some kind of racket. Long before Trump he had a tendency to be worried about Y2K and solar flares and aliens. He is a Gribble as you put it.
It sucks. He's a very affable guy with many friends who would give you the shirt off his back. He was a great father to me and my sister. He can build anything and is an ass-busting worker despite being 80 years old. He physically maintains 10 acres by himself in the country still. He stills comes hunting with me and helps me haul deer out of the woods. My sister and I bought him a sky-diving pass for his 80th birthday. At peak career, he had 3000 people working for him (building an oil refinery). But he has some brainrot that the instant the world gets more complex than what he can see and touch with his own hands, there must be shoggoths lurking in the darkness or something. "They" are out there conniving and waiting. "Foreigners" are just another in a list of theys.
I don’t know that hostility to illegal immigration is tied to hostility toward trade. Hostility towards immigration in general might be, but I suspect a lot of people dislike illegal immigration but are fine with legal immigration and trade.
What are your thoughts on me supporting Kamala in large part due to the immigration issue? She's the more pro-immigration candidate and being allowed to immigrate to the US and not get deported significantly affects a lot of people's quality of life. I can testify from personal experience as an immigrant to the US myself.
I believe that libertarian law professor Ilya Somin thinks similarly, along with of course him strongly disliking Trump due to Trump's wannabe autocrat and wannabe authoritarian tendencies.
I think they use illegal immigrants most because it is the clearest way to tap into the most salient moral foundations on the right, proportionality and authority (proportionality is ranked above authority). The idea that you get out of something what you put into it including innate traits is central to the rights whole ideology. The reason I believe illegal immigration mobilizes the base more readily than subsidies to underperforming groups or affirmative action (partly because of the SC decision) is because unlike underperforming groups illegal immigrants don’t even play within the rules and laws that other legal immigrants and current citizens’ ancestors have/had to follow in order to be in the country. No doubt many if not most of them do net good for the communities they settle via markets and productivity, but many cannot get that abstract or connect it to their own life. In short the most obvious (even if it is not the most impactful) example of violating proportionality and authority as in illegal immigrants elicit the greatest response from the base that holds these foundations most dear.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is to politics as prostitution has been to an economy.
Over time, anti-immigration/trade is perhaps the oldest, most salient issues to the critical mass of any population that is experiencing either economic expansion or economic contraction. Today, economic expansion is geometrically more conspicuous such that masses feel ever more left behind the more successful that they believe other people are. FOMO has multiple dimensions in full view of the algorithms, ripe for monetization, particularly among children and people of moderate intelligence.
The United States is a good place to live. As Matt Yglesias said, our focus should be on reducing catastrophic risk. Trump is like getting into a car with a blacked out drunk driver versus taking an Uber. You'll probably get home fine, and you'll have saved yourself a few bucks. On the other hand, maybe you'll die.
Harris is going to almost certainly face a GOP Senate. She will struggle to do more than confirm a handful of super moderate judges. She won't have a chance to appoint any USSC justices, which is the other big reason why the presidency matters.
Here, on the other hand, are some things Trump can do. Maybe he won't do horrible things he has promised, because he's dumb and incompetent, but he'll have a better team and more experience this time around, as well as a compliant judiciary.
Trump has executive authority to order mass deportations. He probably won't be able to do more than a few million, but he will absolutely try, and it will be hugely chaotic and horrible.
Similarly, Trump can effectively ban medical abortion nationally with the right FDA chief. Trump does not give two fucks about who runs the FDA. His Talibanical advisors will offer up a name, and in he will go. The FDA director will revoke approval for mifepristone (and possibly other abortifacients). Trump will go on tv and ramble incoherently about how much he disagrees with his own FDA chief, but he won't actually fire him. States will find ways to mitigate the damage, but again, chaos and harm.
Next, Trump has full discretion on tariffs. He will **love** it. Every CEO in America will go hat in hand to him, begging for a dispensation. He will bestow and withhold favor as he pleases.
Tariffs are of course horrible for the economy, so it's not at all clear Trump would be better there either. Economists predict better growth under Harris. Despite the sour mood, the Biden economy is really, really good. Hanania currently has a massive hate boner for unions, and I largely agree, but Trump isn't going to do anything bad to any union willing to bribe him. Unions are not going to cross some unstoppable event horizon in the next four years under Harris.
Finally, Trump may refuse to leave office. We can't count on his age. His father lived into his 90s. Maybe he'll suspend the Constitution. Maybe he'll simply demand to be renominated and spend all of 2028 bribing state legislatures to give him their electoral votes. I can give many other guesses as to how he'll try to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, but I couldn't possibly come up with everything he might try.
Finally, finally, and I really don't understand why people don't worry about this more: Trump can launch nukes. People seem to be under the impression that there's some control process to prevent the president if he goes bananas, but there isn't. He could fall into a dementia-based rage, and end the world in forty minutes. Really. There is nothing stopping him.
TLDR, unless you're under a weird trans panic, there is absolutely no justification for voting for Trump. He's not even likely to be better on the economy, and he's likely to be really bad on things like abortion. And then there is the low, but very real chance that he will do something apocalyptically bad.
If you like Israel, Trump is a better option, but people should care way, way less about I/P. It's 15 million people on the other side of the world. The world has wasted astounding amounts of time trying to resolve the conflict. I'm Jewish, so feel some connection to Israel, but I'm a lot more interested in the 350 million people who live here.
In Latrobe, PA Trump just praised the size of Arnold Palmer's penis. It's not just wacky damaging policies, it's the man himself who is losing self control. Contemplate 4 years of it.
I agree with idea of decoupling, but you make a pretty huge leap here saying that the Republicans have good policies and therefore, will produce 'good results' for the economy.
I think your theoretical claim is more apt to something with a more measurable outcome, like sports. Like saying, Aaron Hernandez is a very talented Tight End and an important piece for the NE Patriots to win the Super Bowl, but he's also a murderer and therefore a bad person. But because I am a decoupler, I am OK with him murdering people because he will help the NE Patriots win the Super Bowl. Being a good football player is unrelated to his morality.
I don't think this is the argument with Trump. It is not because he is a bad guy that I think people don't want to vote for him. Him cheating on his wife with a prostitute is not why people don't want him to be president. It is because he is an ineffective leader, corrupt, and by all accounts of what he states publicly, an imbecile. I think people who have worked within any type of businesses or institution have seen how placing someone with these characteristics will in all likelihood, lead to bad results.
I try not to be a ghoul but I am ready for Trump to die or become too senile to function. I don't want him shot. I don't want him to have some excruciating disease. I just hope it doesn't take him until he is 104 to die of a heart attack while eating a triple-decker cheeseburger or whatever. I am a creature of the right and am really tired of the right sucking so much. Maybe this is just how it will be the rest of my life. It's not a very motivating thought. I maintain hope it will get better once he is gone. Probably not good, but better.
Kamala is very much running on wokeness; she just calls it "equity", which refers to discrimination against whites, men, etc. Not to mention Biden has vowed to make Equity part of every federal program and institution, and Harris is totally on board with that.
Right now, she's proposing $20K worth of forgivable loans to black entrepreneurs. And the federal government is suing South Bend, IN., as we speak for hiring too few black and female police officers. And it's not the first city this administration has been suing for this. They're trying to turn the country's PDs into "Reno 911".
Also, Kamala is for "Indigenous Peoples' Day" instead of Columbus, which is Peak Wokeness. Yeah, it's merely symbolic and cultural, but it's a symbol of siding with the bums (pre-Columbian Indians) as opposed to the builders of civilization. Not exactly a pro-economic growth position.
Wokism will be insidiously implemented in any way possible should they win. They just know normal people dislike it so they’re hiding it during the campaign in the same way that Trump tries to downplay/hide his 2020 election stuff. At their core they both still believe these things.
Not really. As Richard says, Wokeness is now an embarrassing impediment on the left.
Wokeness really went off the rails when Trump got elected. Democrats were reeling, and were open to a wide range of suggestions for what went wrong. Trump's re-election will turbocharge it again.
If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Harris so it can continue to quietly wither.
Rank and file Dems still believe this stuff and when the party is in power they will feel emboldened. In 2020 it reached a fever pitch pitch because they felt emboldened by the national horror towards George Floyd, but this stuff is still there. You can say we’re past peak-wokeness but Kamala is still pushing equity as part of her campaign. It’s still a threat. Losing to beat my enemies is not a compelling argument. It’s only embarrassing to them because it doesn’t work for the voters they need right now.
I think you're conflating Wokeness and equity. I'm a mainstream Democrat. While the word "equity" now makes me grind my teeth, I think efforts to, say, make sure that blacks and Hispanics have equal rates of COVID vaccination are fine.
I think I saw you complain about Harris's proposed tax breaks for black business owners. But those aren't race-specific. She emphasizes that they well help black men because she wants to engage that demo. But they'll help any small business, black or white.
Wokeness, in terms of corporate DEI, or saying traffic cams are racist is no longer getting a respectful hearing.
I just find it hard to believe those concepts are going to stay dead. A lot of this radicalism has been inculcated in the base and they’re the ones who choose future candidates. A second Trump admin will roll some of that back on the federal level and by the time 2028 rolls around the GOP will be finally through with Trump and can run a candidate who’s not mired in delusion and can hopeful lead what’s left of the MAGA base to reality. I want to be dead sure that wokism is dead, although it’s not my only reason for (tepidly) supporting Trump this time.
*I* am the base of the party. Well, part of it. Black people are too, but they are the most socially conservative part of the Democratic coalition, and thus the most likely to distrust wokeness.
Cringe Resistance libs are the ones reading the NYT everyday, voting in every special election, and donating to Kamala Harris.
The far left isn't remotely the base. People camping out on university lawns vote Green, if they vote at all. Don't mistake Twitter dominance for real political power.
Wokeness (formerly called political correctness) will probably come around every few decades, because there aren't any new political ideas. But you can already see the self correction, led by the same sources you probably consider perpetrators. The NYT has recently published scathing exposés of Columbia and UMish DEI bureaucracies, and Europe is rolling back its gender affirming guidelines for kids. The US will too.
I wrote a really long comment to respond to this that Substack sadly deleted when it crashed so I’ll keep this simple and just say that many of the Democrats around me do still adhere to these views, and this are the upper crust elite types. People like Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton, both of whom this cycle made it clear that they don’t view free speech the way I do (because muh hate speech, misinformation, or disinformation). Academia is still pretty bleak despite a couple of pieces in the NYT. When I was young I remember Democrats being the free speech party during the conservative 2000s culture; I’m very sympathetic to voting the other way but I need scales to tilt a lot more than they currently do to in order to go that way. None of this is to ignore Trump’s serious flaws, but I just don’t believe that Democrats have genuinely backed off enough from DEI to make their victory not a threat. American culture only ever seems to go one way over time.
Higher taxes aren't an unequivocally bad thing. It depends on what specifically they are used for. If for reparations, then they would probably be a bad thing. If, however, they are used to aggressively subsidize IVF, embryo selection, and surrogacy for low-income, same-sex, and single people, then higher taxes would likely be a huge net positive, especially over the long-run.
"Since World War II, the United States economy has performed significantly better on average under the administration of Democratic presidents than Republican presidents." Wiki
Quality of growth counts too and on that Dem policies have an edge in you think the environment, fairness, public infrastructure are gdp items too.
*Yes before people comment I know I originally switched high and low decouplers a few times, it has been fixed.
I'm here from the email, so thanks for the clarification. Also, I'm curious if some of the newer populist economic policies on the right help tip the scales in favor of the Democratic party in your view. And Trump getting Republicans on board with the Cares Act, etc.
Oh its the relief aid that people got when their jobs where shut down for covid and therefore didn't have money coming in. Wow, yeah free market where against that weren't they? Yeah I guess many people will just starve. 🤦
I wasn't a fan of lockdowns if the lockdowns happened the aid was needed. Otherwise You're just ruining people's lives
BTW I don't like Trump. I don't think he's where he needs to be but policy wise at least he's better than Richard. Ill give Trump that. I also like how trump is banning toxic ingredients in food which is spitting in the face of the free market types who think its a right to allow companies to poison it's customers 😂
BTW what's the cares act?
I certainly hope so, JD Vance and Josh Hawley want to turn the Republican party into a worker's party. Both have gone against right to work as republicans. The Republican party has a growing pro Union backing. BTW I totally support that and want people like Richard to be Democrats or go libertarian. I hate free market economics with a passion and without them the Republican party would be pro worker far quicker but I also hate wokeness with passion and mass immigration so I could never be a Democrat. Not to mention social liberalism is a bourgeois vice. The social views of both parties are flipped but slowly things are working themselves out. When they do ill register republican. Till then ill vote For the Vance and Hawley types
Surely the continuance of liberal norms is of more importance than object-level issues? If one party is trying to end democracy, voting for them just because of some better economic policies is a terrible idea; they can always go back on it later, and you won't be able to do anything about it.
They’re not trying to end democracy. They are part of a cult where one man rejects elections and I don’t think that election denial is still a thing after Trump is gone. There is no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene. It’s the combination of a uniquely bad man and his cult like control over the party. But if he wins you don’t have to worry about it because he’ll he term limited and very old afterwards.
“But if he wins you don’t have to worry about it because he’ll he term limited and very old afterwards.”
I used to think this until Ezra Klein pointed out that Trump in 2028 will insist that his Republican successor won the election and do whatever he can (like he did in 2020) to avoid a peaceful transition of power. And that time, he will have far more of his cronies in key positions to actually have a serious chance of success.
I am someone that is more afraid of Trump than most and I don't think this one is plausible. Trump wouldn't take that kind of risk for anyone but himself
The way I would expect Trump’s brain to work in that situation would be something like:
“I want this guy to win. He’s had my back and he will continue my legacy.”
“What do you mean he lost? Of course he won. The Dems must have cheated again.”
“Find me those votes. We need to make sure the Dems don’t get away with this time.”
This model of Trump's mind assumes he feels some sort of gratitude and duty of reciprocity towards anyone whatsoever. A notion that I am skeptical of.
No, just that he likes people who are loyal to him and wants those people to remain in power to preserve his legacy. And that he hates people who will talk about undoing what he did and will do everything he can to prevent them from taking the reins again.
And that time they will find the votes.
I don't know about that. I mean, the limits on Trump's behavior appear to be what he thinks he can actually get away with. If JD Vance has been crazily loyal to Trump, and Trump will think that he can get away with doing this, then why not?
He'll see just how much of a slap on the wrist he got for 2020, so he'll figure that he'll likewise get a slap on the wrist this time around at worst as well.
I do not think Trump will work hard on behalf of anybody but himself. In such a scenario, he would just try to hog the spotlight from whoever he was ostensibly "helping."
Ensuring his chosen successor takes over instead of his enemies is absolutely something he will do on behalf of himself.
He literally can't stay on a teleprompter speech and will go off on rambling tangents the instant somebody pokes a stick through his thin skin. He also gets petulant whenever another Republican gets popular even when they have not been antagonistic to him. He was getting petulant about Ron DeSantis long before DeSantis ran for president. What makes you think he can maintain the discipline necessary to decenter himself enough to help some loyal toady win?
Because it wouldn’t be decentering himself at all. He wouldn’t think or say “They stole the election from him”, it would be “They stole the election from US”.
I think this is very unlikely to happen. Trump cares only about himself, his own power and prestige. If he wins and serves out his second term I don’t think he’ll care much at all about JD following him. He doesn’t care at all about his movement in any idealistic sense, it’s a cult of personality and when he exits the stage he won’t care what comes after.
Trump has a terrible track record of hiring people loyal to him. You'll notice he's not running with Mike Pence this time.
That’s because he had a higher proportion of establishment Republicans vs populist cronies in his first administration. That ratio has been going towards the latter, especially in his inner circle, over time.
He hires people loyal to him.
They just become "disloyal", later.
He's not even good at selecting for initial loyalty.
Loyalty tests will certainly come for Don Jr.
This is something I do believe as a wild-eyed social democrat. Everybody but Kari Lake conceded in 2022, despite lots of election denying talk before hand, even in fairly close races. Now, there'll be the ususal fear mongering there was in every election about dead African-American illegal immigrants voting or whatever, but wide scale, I think Trump specifically refusing to believe he lost is the main issue.
As early as before the 2016 election, chatter was everywhere that Trump would deny losing if he lost that election, simply knowing his personality and how he was setting the goal posts. This story was contemporary with another about naming his son ”Jr” with the primary concern being that the son may turn out to be a real loser. He was unusually obsessed with the word “loser”. It seemed absurd and yet ..
I agree things will probably get better after Trump dies (unless another equally charismatic person emerges to take up the mantle, which is not that unlikely), but that's unlikely to happen in the next 4 years. The existence of a legal term limit doesn't mean much when the man has made clear that he'll happily violate any law he can get away with and millions of people will happily support him in this. If he tries to stay in power after his 4 years are up, this could do massive damage to democratic norms and our institutional capacity to recover, even if he's only in power for an extra few years personally.
There is of course also the matter of the Democratic attacks on free speech, which I don't want to ignore. Free speech is equally if not more important than democracy. But in practice the right seems perfectly happy to censor those they disagree with, so it's just an image issue; the left openly hates free speech, the right pretends to defend it while in reality hating it just as much. So in the absence of any party that seems like they'll actually defend free speech, but one that is trying to overturn elections and another that isn't, the choice seems clear.
There's no underlying necessity for bonobo-ish cultures to ban speech. It's useful for maxxing attention economy, and thus for maxxing material economy, but it's not necessary for the survival of such cultures.
The opposite is true for chimpy cultures, which must lie to pretend virtue and scapegoat others for their own cultures' problems & deadly results. The cultural logic for Project 2025, Russian Orthodox Church, Taliban, etc. is the same. Chimpy culturists chose alpha chimpy cult leaders or dictators. They demand any predecessor, e.g. JD Vance, be like Trump/Putin.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna175337
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/will-trumps-anti-abortion-geneva-consensus-fall-apart/
https://slate.com/technology/2017/03/is-white-mortality-rising-not-really.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-republican-counties-have-higher-death-rates-than-those-in-democratic-counties/
The gop isn’t coming back to any form of Romney centrism once he is gone which is good. They aren’t gonna embrace amnesty or tolerance for lgbt politics: centrists only helped liberals. Trump changed the party and a right wing party should be that , right wing.
Republicans have already mostly embraced LGB politics. It's just the T where they are putting up a fight.
The "T" has only been an issue since he started running for 2020 and arguably, not until even later. Wokeness and "triggering" was a wholly new agenda (perhaps invented by his son) which I suspect many people noticed and attributed to him going "all in" on culture war for lack of any new, salient policy issues beyond the anti-immigrant, nativist thing.
You think after having been on board with that kind of power and tasting it Republicans will give it up? They will institutionalize dominance. History shows that once a leader can operate outside the rule of law the successors continue it.
"no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene"? I feel like Venezuela counts!
Also, why do we think Trump would respect term limits?
Because we lack imagination.
We saw Trump spend months trying to stay in office, culminating in 1/6, and we *still* feel like this time, he'll have to follow the rules.
People simply aren't able to grasp how outside the normal bounds of behavior Trump is. Our brains are designed for arithmetic processes, not exponential ones.
This is a fairly uninformed take. Donald Trump asked his DOJ to make a statement claiming voter fraud to invalidate the election. What makes you think this won't happen again in another Trump term? What happens if Trump wins, an election happens in 4 years, and Trump's DOJ comes out saying that they have evidence of voter fraud/election interference and the winner of the election is inconclusive until his DOJ finishes "investigating"?
His dad lived into his nineties. And Trump has the best healthcare in the world.
I outlined few ways I can imagine Trump trying elide his term limit in another comment. I think the simplest scenario is he simply drives the car off the cliff. He refuses to let another Republican take the nomination. I don't think there's any requirement that a private party nominate someone who can legally take office. Non citizens run for president and get on the ballot. So GOP primary voters lol and re-nominate him.
Then he spends 2028 bullying and cajoling GOP lawmakers at the state and federal level to pledge their electors to him, or refuse to certify the election for any other candidate. No legitimate candidate gets 270 EVs. Then it goes to the House, and his craven House lackeys vote him in. Now, he's not allowed to take office, but we're in a constitutional crisis, because the process to produce an executive that meets the other requirements for office has failed.
Or, he spends his entire term trying to call a constitutional convention to repeal the 22nd. There are a lot of barriers here, but he would fight with the same ferocity, creativity, litigiousness, and disrespect for the law until he gets his way, or burn the whole country down trying.
Or! He runs Trump Jr, with the explicit understanding it's still really Trump. In fact, he straight up says so at all the rallies he holds and interviews he does. Trump Jr promises that he will be an empty figurehead.
Obviously I just made these scenarios up. Whatever Trump does will be much stranger and scarier and involve many more lawsuits than my tiny little mind can conceive of. But this seems straightforward enough if you're a malignant narcissist with an entire political party at your beck and call.
It really speaks to normalcy bias that otherwise smart people can look at the lengths Trump went to last time and think there's nothing to worry about, because the rules say Trump has to leave. Turns out this Trump guy doesn't always follow the rules.
"There is no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene."
No one had Trump's levels of power, influence, and charisma--yet. What happens if they will?
"There is no instance of any other politician anywhere making a serious effort to stay in power after losing an election since Trump came on the scene."
Perhaps not *domestically*. Yet.
what are you talking about? Kari Lake in Arizona and Trump's kids are going to start running for office ive heard after Donald steps down.
Kari Lake didn't hold power, but obviously she never conceded.
Things won't be *as* crazy when Trump is gone, but he obviously did massive damage to the GOP and it's not going to just snap back into shape upon his departure. The longer he's around, the more profound and lasting the damage. No other Republican has the charisma to prompt another 1/6, but he's permanently turned many Republicans off of fact-based news.
Presumably he meant the Democrats, not Trump. The Democrats are using lawfare, wanting to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the filibuster, use (illegal) executive orders to do things, attacks on free speech, and so on.
This sums up my stance perfectly
Suppose that Democrats were to do any or all of the following:
End the electoral college, turning presidential elections into a matter of the popular vote
Admit DC and Puerto Rico as states
Grant amnesty, citizenship (and thus voting rights) to millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal
Pack the Supreme Court, for instance by increasing the number of justices to 11 (or even more) and immediately nominating liberals to those seats
End the filibuster
Would any of these things "threaten liberal norms?" What about all of them done in combination?
Ending the electoral college and ending the filibuster are obvious improvements to democracy. Adding states and/or new citizens are neutral, those decisions are a normal part of what any country has to do. Packing the court is obviously exploiting a loophole to circumvent the intended process, so bad for democracy.
So you are really worried about "one side ending democracy," but when it comes to the other side openly rigging "democracy" to create a one-party state and exclude the opposition from power as much as possible, you are favorable towards this possibility or at worst neutral. Informative.
All the stuff you mentioned, with the exception of court packing, would create a one-party state for approximately one election cycle. After that the Republicans would figure out how to pitch their message to the newly expanded base and things would go back to normal.
I could retort that likewise Blumpft's antics after the 2020 election could and objectively did backfire on him and his party. Is this an excuse to say that they should be dismissed and paid no mind?
There is a pretty big difference between attempting reforms within established legal, democratic, and constitutional procedures, like filibuster reform, and blatant illegal action like what Trump did. I agree with you about court-packing being bad because it is a legally sketchy idea.
Secondly, Trump's behavior backfired on him, but if Pence hadn't stood up to him the country would, at the very least, been plunged into civil unrest and at worst have a dictator. By contrast, I am saying that stuff like filibuster reform and admitting new states wouldn't work even if the Democrats pulled them off completely successfully. The Republicans would just adapt to them and we'd be back normal soon enough.
(Court packing wouldn't work for long either, as soon as Republicans won an election they'd pack even more judges onto the court. That's another reason I oppose it, not only is it illegal, it would eventually result in a Supreme Court with dozens of members)
Perhaps consider why you see the removal of a system that gives some people's votes more power than others as a form of "rigging democracy".
Perhaps consider why your view of "democracy" seems to be "50.1% of the population are allowed to totally denigrate the other 49.9% and treat them as insects to be stomped upon."
Who stomped on you? GOPers stomp on themselves, avoiding (meta)cognitive awareness & responsibility, incl. checking facts and predicting & mitigitating risks. Nobody forces you to vote for serial criminals/conmen, shill for a party that increases its own mortality rate, give rapists like Bryan Slaton impunity while criminalizing abortion, become obese or substance-abusing, be gun-nuts or more 'eat lead' than 'abate lead', refuse to update with evidence, believe conspiracy theories, be pro-'plagues as divine punishments', buy houses in flood zones w/out flood insurance, etc. The party for (mental) healthcare; lead abatement; nutrition for children; liberal arts & sciences for updating paradigms; disaster prevention, prep, & relief; and reduction of crimes, plagues, & deaths isn't the stomping-elephants-in-musth party.
scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-republican-counties-have-higher-death-rates-than-those-in-democratic-counties/
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/the-politics-of-lead-poisoning-a-long-ugly-history
brown.edu/news/2024-03-01/firearms-lead
finance.yahoo.com/news/column-republican-states-rather-keep-042514247.html
bbcearth.com/news/teenage-elephants-need-a-father-figure
and your view of democracy is that 47.9% of the population are allowed to totally denigrate the other 52.1% and treat them as insects to be stomped upon.
So you also want to end the bicameral legislature too? That’s totally fine because it rigs democracy too.
Democrats will be lucky to appoint a dozen centrist judges to the appellate courts. That's assuming Harris wins, of course.
Democrats are going to lose the Senate.
I think the economic argument is important for poor countries such as Honduras, where the salience of economic issues is much bigger in principle, not to mention their leftards being much more destructive than American ones (as with their ongoing dismantlement of Próspera). So it's reasonable to support rightoids in those places, despite their religious obscurantism and extremist views on pro-life. However, the relative salience of economics is much lower in already very rich countries such as the US, where hardcore leftists have very little power and influence (bizarre exceptions such as the longshoremen aside - though they are not even so much leftists as pure rent-seekers), and what power and influence they do have is constrained by pro-market norms and institutions.
There's also a non-trivial chance that AGI will be hit within the term of the next US President. An important question to ask is whether you trust Trump or the Democratic establishment to handle it better.
Yeah, I usually think we should emphasise economic arguments, e.g. importance of compounding growth. But the fact that we're less than a decade away from AGI, whether the US has a growth rate of 2 or 3% becomes a rounding error, but whether there's a vaguely sensible party in power, able to push through the necessary difficult and intelligent policy, will be hugely important.
The Democrats are also the more pro-immigration party, which compensates for their more Leftist economic policies. GOP economic policies might be good for existing US citizens, but their immigration policies are terrible for those people who want to immigrate to the US, unless of course perhaps these people are quite literally the best of the best.
The overwhelming majority of Americans apparently wouldn't meet the RAISE Act's criteria if they themselves were aspiring immigrants to the US instead of them already being US citizens. Why should I support a party that would have prevented my family and I from immigrating to the US 23.5 years ago if they would have already existed and fully had their way in regards to this issue back then?
Because policies should benefit citizens, not foreigners who want to become citizens.
Why should citizens of any nation want to bring in people who prioritize foreigners? And if they think like you do, wouldn't this be a great reason to oppose immigration?
The argument is that there should be a noblesse oblige-type feeling on the part of citizens towards foreigners, similar to how the rich should exhibit noblesse oblige towards the poor or how the smart should exhibit noblesse oblige towards the dull.
Using this logic, there should be noblesse oblige toward 8 billion people. A country cannot prioritize the rest of the world. Noblesse oblige toward foreigners who reside in one's nation makes sense, i.e., not mistreating them because they are foreigners and giving them basic rights. That said, they still have to assimilate to local and native norms, culture, etc.
But noblesse oblige toward the vast majority of the world's population out of some misplaced sense of duty toward people who have nothing in common with you? I'll pass.
Latin Americans have been a part of extended Western civilization for half a millennium, so it’s inaccurate to say that Americans have nothing in common with them.
For Muslims, though, it might be more accurate.
I should have said "little in common." But yeah, there are worse immigrant groups to bring to America for sure.
Salience is subjective.
I would love to know what basis this claim has, in your mind: "while Democrats are only small minded, Republicans are both small minded and hateful." I don't think either side is more hateful (or even smarter, at this point) or kinder or any other fuzzily-defined qualifier. I tend to find the Left (not liberals) most hateful but that's probably my own bias. I certainly wouldn't make the claim unsupported. We're talking about groups of 50 million people. It seems like an absurd generalization to make on its face. If you find their messages hateful I suspect that's YOUR bias... but I remain curious.
He might be focusing too much on online "influencers" rather than surveys of attitudes in different groups.
Let’s say very simplistically that people vote on policies and personal character. It’s my opinion that generally, character arguments hold a bit more mindshare than policy arguments. What this means is that if one candidate is clearly a terrible person, then the other candidate (whoever they are and whatever policies they support) will get an unearned benefit electorally speaking. It’s unearned because it’s more about the other person’s failings than anything about themselves personally.
So you can expect that with the newfound moral high ground, this creates the possibility of having more wiggle room to push bad policies. Not necessarily policies that are worse than the Bad candidate’s policies, just that the Good candidate faces less public scrutiny on their policies, because everyone understands that they are the Good guys going up against the Bad guys.
This implies that poor candidate character can actually degrade the quality of the average policy position supported by the average candidate. I expect that if Trump is replaced with a less toxic candidate that both parties will face more policy pressure.
>This would be like saying a commercial that talked about Jews committing murder, Jews committing theft, and Jews raping women was about crime.
No, it really isn't. In just three years we've had probably 10 million foreign nationals do a complete end run around our immigration system by crossing the border illegally and either disappearing or making false asylum claims. There are all kinds of legitimate reasons to object to that. If it was just racial animus you would not see such high levels of concern across all demographics, including Latinos.
I think illegality is just an excuse to do foreigner bashing. Illegals are the easiest target. Why is hostility to immigration always so closely tied up to hostility to trade? Why do Trump and Vance make immigration/trade their top two issues to “help” people? It would be quite the coincidence. Clearly this is about anti-foreigner animus more generally.
I don't actually think these are tied because all these people hate foreigners as such. They probably do hate foreigners in a macro sense, but the foreigner hating is itself often a result of paranoid/zero-sum thinking.
My very Trumpy dad is this way. I've never seen him have *any* animus towards specific foreigners. He's really chummy with this Asian guy who barely speaks English who runs a rural gas station down the road from his house. Before he retired he also chose to go work in foreign countries as a construction superintendent contractor (Iraq & Columbia) and he tells stories about how much fun he had in both places. He talks with fondness about the guy that was hired to serve as his chaperone in Columbia. He tells funny stories about his Iraqi workers liking him because he let them go swimming in the middle of the work day one time. He talks about how the first thing he did when he got to Iraq was get someone to teach him "manners" so he wouldn't make anybody mad accidentally. He talks about how he chummed it up with some Columbian dudes because he showed them the white boy, redneck way to skin and butcher a hog.
He's also a deeply paranoid, conspiratorial-minded person. He is always worried somebody is cheating him. When someone is doing something weird, he always defaults to an assumption that it's some kind of racket. Long before Trump he had a tendency to be worried about Y2K and solar flares and aliens. He is a Gribble as you put it.
It sucks. He's a very affable guy with many friends who would give you the shirt off his back. He was a great father to me and my sister. He can build anything and is an ass-busting worker despite being 80 years old. He physically maintains 10 acres by himself in the country still. He stills comes hunting with me and helps me haul deer out of the woods. My sister and I bought him a sky-diving pass for his 80th birthday. At peak career, he had 3000 people working for him (building an oil refinery). But he has some brainrot that the instant the world gets more complex than what he can see and touch with his own hands, there must be shoggoths lurking in the darkness or something. "They" are out there conniving and waiting. "Foreigners" are just another in a list of theys.
That's a shame. Any chance it's because of Fox News?
I don’t know that hostility to illegal immigration is tied to hostility toward trade. Hostility towards immigration in general might be, but I suspect a lot of people dislike illegal immigration but are fine with legal immigration and trade.
John Howard Australia cut tariffs while running zero tolerance illegal immigration, and high levels of legal migration.
I don’t think it’s guaranteed that post-Trump the Republicans remain the tariff party.
Hostility to illegal immigration doesn't require any advocacy of change to the law, it fits with status quo bias.
What are your thoughts on me supporting Kamala in large part due to the immigration issue? She's the more pro-immigration candidate and being allowed to immigrate to the US and not get deported significantly affects a lot of people's quality of life. I can testify from personal experience as an immigrant to the US myself.
I believe that libertarian law professor Ilya Somin thinks similarly, along with of course him strongly disliking Trump due to Trump's wannabe autocrat and wannabe authoritarian tendencies.
I think they use illegal immigrants most because it is the clearest way to tap into the most salient moral foundations on the right, proportionality and authority (proportionality is ranked above authority). The idea that you get out of something what you put into it including innate traits is central to the rights whole ideology. The reason I believe illegal immigration mobilizes the base more readily than subsidies to underperforming groups or affirmative action (partly because of the SC decision) is because unlike underperforming groups illegal immigrants don’t even play within the rules and laws that other legal immigrants and current citizens’ ancestors have/had to follow in order to be in the country. No doubt many if not most of them do net good for the communities they settle via markets and productivity, but many cannot get that abstract or connect it to their own life. In short the most obvious (even if it is not the most impactful) example of violating proportionality and authority as in illegal immigrants elicit the greatest response from the base that holds these foundations most dear.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is to politics as prostitution has been to an economy.
Over time, anti-immigration/trade is perhaps the oldest, most salient issues to the critical mass of any population that is experiencing either economic expansion or economic contraction. Today, economic expansion is geometrically more conspicuous such that masses feel ever more left behind the more successful that they believe other people are. FOMO has multiple dimensions in full view of the algorithms, ripe for monetization, particularly among children and people of moderate intelligence.
The United States is a good place to live. As Matt Yglesias said, our focus should be on reducing catastrophic risk. Trump is like getting into a car with a blacked out drunk driver versus taking an Uber. You'll probably get home fine, and you'll have saved yourself a few bucks. On the other hand, maybe you'll die.
Harris is going to almost certainly face a GOP Senate. She will struggle to do more than confirm a handful of super moderate judges. She won't have a chance to appoint any USSC justices, which is the other big reason why the presidency matters.
Here, on the other hand, are some things Trump can do. Maybe he won't do horrible things he has promised, because he's dumb and incompetent, but he'll have a better team and more experience this time around, as well as a compliant judiciary.
Trump has executive authority to order mass deportations. He probably won't be able to do more than a few million, but he will absolutely try, and it will be hugely chaotic and horrible.
Similarly, Trump can effectively ban medical abortion nationally with the right FDA chief. Trump does not give two fucks about who runs the FDA. His Talibanical advisors will offer up a name, and in he will go. The FDA director will revoke approval for mifepristone (and possibly other abortifacients). Trump will go on tv and ramble incoherently about how much he disagrees with his own FDA chief, but he won't actually fire him. States will find ways to mitigate the damage, but again, chaos and harm.
Next, Trump has full discretion on tariffs. He will **love** it. Every CEO in America will go hat in hand to him, begging for a dispensation. He will bestow and withhold favor as he pleases.
Tariffs are of course horrible for the economy, so it's not at all clear Trump would be better there either. Economists predict better growth under Harris. Despite the sour mood, the Biden economy is really, really good. Hanania currently has a massive hate boner for unions, and I largely agree, but Trump isn't going to do anything bad to any union willing to bribe him. Unions are not going to cross some unstoppable event horizon in the next four years under Harris.
Finally, Trump may refuse to leave office. We can't count on his age. His father lived into his 90s. Maybe he'll suspend the Constitution. Maybe he'll simply demand to be renominated and spend all of 2028 bribing state legislatures to give him their electoral votes. I can give many other guesses as to how he'll try to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, but I couldn't possibly come up with everything he might try.
Finally, finally, and I really don't understand why people don't worry about this more: Trump can launch nukes. People seem to be under the impression that there's some control process to prevent the president if he goes bananas, but there isn't. He could fall into a dementia-based rage, and end the world in forty minutes. Really. There is nothing stopping him.
TLDR, unless you're under a weird trans panic, there is absolutely no justification for voting for Trump. He's not even likely to be better on the economy, and he's likely to be really bad on things like abortion. And then there is the low, but very real chance that he will do something apocalyptically bad.
If you like Israel, Trump is a better option, but people should care way, way less about I/P. It's 15 million people on the other side of the world. The world has wasted astounding amounts of time trying to resolve the conflict. I'm Jewish, so feel some connection to Israel, but I'm a lot more interested in the 350 million people who live here.
In Latrobe, PA Trump just praised the size of Arnold Palmer's penis. It's not just wacky damaging policies, it's the man himself who is losing self control. Contemplate 4 years of it.
I agree with idea of decoupling, but you make a pretty huge leap here saying that the Republicans have good policies and therefore, will produce 'good results' for the economy.
I think your theoretical claim is more apt to something with a more measurable outcome, like sports. Like saying, Aaron Hernandez is a very talented Tight End and an important piece for the NE Patriots to win the Super Bowl, but he's also a murderer and therefore a bad person. But because I am a decoupler, I am OK with him murdering people because he will help the NE Patriots win the Super Bowl. Being a good football player is unrelated to his morality.
I don't think this is the argument with Trump. It is not because he is a bad guy that I think people don't want to vote for him. Him cheating on his wife with a prostitute is not why people don't want him to be president. It is because he is an ineffective leader, corrupt, and by all accounts of what he states publicly, an imbecile. I think people who have worked within any type of businesses or institution have seen how placing someone with these characteristics will in all likelihood, lead to bad results.
I try not to be a ghoul but I am ready for Trump to die or become too senile to function. I don't want him shot. I don't want him to have some excruciating disease. I just hope it doesn't take him until he is 104 to die of a heart attack while eating a triple-decker cheeseburger or whatever. I am a creature of the right and am really tired of the right sucking so much. Maybe this is just how it will be the rest of my life. It's not a very motivating thought. I maintain hope it will get better once he is gone. Probably not good, but better.
Kamala is very much running on wokeness; she just calls it "equity", which refers to discrimination against whites, men, etc. Not to mention Biden has vowed to make Equity part of every federal program and institution, and Harris is totally on board with that.
Right now, she's proposing $20K worth of forgivable loans to black entrepreneurs. And the federal government is suing South Bend, IN., as we speak for hiring too few black and female police officers. And it's not the first city this administration has been suing for this. They're trying to turn the country's PDs into "Reno 911".
Also, Kamala is for "Indigenous Peoples' Day" instead of Columbus, which is Peak Wokeness. Yeah, it's merely symbolic and cultural, but it's a symbol of siding with the bums (pre-Columbian Indians) as opposed to the builders of civilization. Not exactly a pro-economic growth position.
Agreed. RNC does have racists in it, DNC has racists in it. DNC has racist policies.
Wokism will be insidiously implemented in any way possible should they win. They just know normal people dislike it so they’re hiding it during the campaign in the same way that Trump tries to downplay/hide his 2020 election stuff. At their core they both still believe these things.
Not really. As Richard says, Wokeness is now an embarrassing impediment on the left.
Wokeness really went off the rails when Trump got elected. Democrats were reeling, and were open to a wide range of suggestions for what went wrong. Trump's re-election will turbocharge it again.
If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Harris so it can continue to quietly wither.
Rank and file Dems still believe this stuff and when the party is in power they will feel emboldened. In 2020 it reached a fever pitch pitch because they felt emboldened by the national horror towards George Floyd, but this stuff is still there. You can say we’re past peak-wokeness but Kamala is still pushing equity as part of her campaign. It’s still a threat. Losing to beat my enemies is not a compelling argument. It’s only embarrassing to them because it doesn’t work for the voters they need right now.
I think you're conflating Wokeness and equity. I'm a mainstream Democrat. While the word "equity" now makes me grind my teeth, I think efforts to, say, make sure that blacks and Hispanics have equal rates of COVID vaccination are fine.
I think I saw you complain about Harris's proposed tax breaks for black business owners. But those aren't race-specific. She emphasizes that they well help black men because she wants to engage that demo. But they'll help any small business, black or white.
Wokeness, in terms of corporate DEI, or saying traffic cams are racist is no longer getting a respectful hearing.
I just find it hard to believe those concepts are going to stay dead. A lot of this radicalism has been inculcated in the base and they’re the ones who choose future candidates. A second Trump admin will roll some of that back on the federal level and by the time 2028 rolls around the GOP will be finally through with Trump and can run a candidate who’s not mired in delusion and can hopeful lead what’s left of the MAGA base to reality. I want to be dead sure that wokism is dead, although it’s not my only reason for (tepidly) supporting Trump this time.
*I* am the base of the party. Well, part of it. Black people are too, but they are the most socially conservative part of the Democratic coalition, and thus the most likely to distrust wokeness.
Cringe Resistance libs are the ones reading the NYT everyday, voting in every special election, and donating to Kamala Harris.
The far left isn't remotely the base. People camping out on university lawns vote Green, if they vote at all. Don't mistake Twitter dominance for real political power.
Wokeness (formerly called political correctness) will probably come around every few decades, because there aren't any new political ideas. But you can already see the self correction, led by the same sources you probably consider perpetrators. The NYT has recently published scathing exposés of Columbia and UMish DEI bureaucracies, and Europe is rolling back its gender affirming guidelines for kids. The US will too.
I wrote a really long comment to respond to this that Substack sadly deleted when it crashed so I’ll keep this simple and just say that many of the Democrats around me do still adhere to these views, and this are the upper crust elite types. People like Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton, both of whom this cycle made it clear that they don’t view free speech the way I do (because muh hate speech, misinformation, or disinformation). Academia is still pretty bleak despite a couple of pieces in the NYT. When I was young I remember Democrats being the free speech party during the conservative 2000s culture; I’m very sympathetic to voting the other way but I need scales to tilt a lot more than they currently do to in order to go that way. None of this is to ignore Trump’s serious flaws, but I just don’t believe that Democrats have genuinely backed off enough from DEI to make their victory not a threat. American culture only ever seems to go one way over time.
> I think Republican policies are better for economic growth, and economic growth is what matters
Out of curiosity, what Trump policies do you think are better for economic growth?
I would not play Russian roulette with democracy.
Higher taxes aren't an unequivocally bad thing. It depends on what specifically they are used for. If for reparations, then they would probably be a bad thing. If, however, they are used to aggressively subsidize IVF, embryo selection, and surrogacy for low-income, same-sex, and single people, then higher taxes would likely be a huge net positive, especially over the long-run.
"Since World War II, the United States economy has performed significantly better on average under the administration of Democratic presidents than Republican presidents." Wiki
Quality of growth counts too and on that Dem policies have an edge in you think the environment, fairness, public infrastructure are gdp items too.