"They see Trump as an incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad and they can think of nothing more pleasing than to have such a complete bozo in charge of The Regime for four years gumming up the Regime's activities, because The Regime’s activities are completely awful."
The Regime is easier to swallow when the people at least seem to be elite. Passing off the old senile man and the worst woman you know in corporate HR as the defenders of democracy is just too much to swallow.
Great post. I have tried to explain to my left of center relatives, friends, and acquaintances that many Trump supporters have legitimate not-crazy grievances and feel unheard, and the left reinforces that constantly by acting like failing to ratify Dem rule is prima facie evidence of bigotry, low intelligence, etc. They nod and then just carry on treating people with differing viewpoints as pond scum that frankly deserve to be rolled right over by society's most powerful institutions, thus proving that those who squawk most about democracy don't actually believe in it at all.
This gets the lion’s share of the issues right, and it’s nice to see more people talking about the utter irrelevance of the figurehead atop the Regime (Jill Biden, fwiw).
I will quibble with the haphazard use of “globalism”. I think it’s important to distinguish “globalization” - aka free trade - from “globalism”, which is the “one world government” umbrella. Yes, the words are similar, but you lose a lot of people when you act like you can’t have one without the other.
If you want more well-written commentary, you can go to Kipling's "The Peace of Dives", though many prefer "The Gods of the Copybook Headings". It's possible to go wrong with Kipling -- we got the Peace of Dives, and it doesn't work as well as we hoped -- but his head was definitely functioning well.
> That explains the existence of Trump as a political node, but the reason he's so popular depends on which flavor of supporter to which you’re referring.
*tsk*
You missed 4.) Those of us who support Trump because we are the enemies of goodness and joy, who despise happiness and light, we who are truly every bit as racist, sexist, speciesist, and all other sorts of bigoted as claimed. We want to destroy the planet, and worship The Great Orange Hitler for the rest of time. Or at least until we've succeeded in destroying the planet. We're the same people who oppose gun control because we rejoice upon hearing about the deaths of children in school shootings, and the same people who oppose redistributionist economics because we literally hate poor people and want them to suffer.
*ahem*
Sorry, it may be that I've had a shitty week and I'm just feeling extra grouchy today...
"Neoconservative war hawks, the military industrial complex, populist socialism, and a veneer of pop star sparklepuss"
Pretty good but I think the "scientific technological elite" Eisenhower's warned about in his farewell address right after the military industrial complex deserve a spot on that list.
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
Pretty succinct and generally seems to be spot on. I am slightly left-of-center and have often found myself in the position of answering the questions the louder and more liberal people in my circles posed about how *anyone* could support Trump. Regardless of whether it is actually true or not--and I think to some extent it is--Trump represents a huge swath of the country who feel like they did not have a voice in their own governance, and who feel that The Regime believes they are beneath representation and will stop at nothing to prevent them from having it. They don't care what he actually stands for, as much as they care that he is apparently the worst possible thing that can happen as far as The Regime is concerned. Anything he may or may not do to improve their own lot is a bonus. All that really matters is that he says everything is terrible (which it isn't), that the country has never been in a worse state (which it has), and that The Regime is to blame for all of it.... which may actually have a degree of veracity.
My liberal circle-occupiers still struggle to understand why he appeals. I don't. I totally get it, even if the idea of another four years of him as president makes me cringe. Frankly, the idea of four/eight years of Kamala Harris as president doesn't feel much better to me, even though I believe the country will, in fact, be better off. I'm still gonna vote for the gay guy. Not because he's gay, mind... for me he is by far the most articulate candidate and has the best ideas of how to fix the problems we're facing in the long term. He just happens to be gay.
The gay guy? Chase Oliver? why bother? I mean I don't think voting works regardless, but especially why bother voting for someone outside of the two main cesspools of which I don't see anything ever actually changing. I'm not throwing stones. just asking?
Libertarian votes are and always have been a protest vote. "See this vote? You could have earned this vote if your candidates didn't suck. Bye." That's what a libertarian vote is. I have cast that vote many times in the past, knowing exactly what I was doing.
I said why. He actually sounds like a freaking adult when he speaks, unlike the two 'real' candidates, and some of the things he wants to do would, I believe, actually make us better off in the long term.
Yes, he might actually make us better off in the long term. I'm not disagreeing there. All I am saying is the support for him is useless and a time sink. Just like my former support for Ron Paul.
It's not. H Ross Perot ran on a single issue in 1992: deficit spending and the ballooning of the national debt in the 80s. He was never going to actually win, but he garnered almost 20% of the vote (and cost HW Bush a second term) and made both of the major parties, particularly the GOP, realize they needed the votes he got. As a consequence, the Heritage Foundation--of Project 2025 notoriety--included balanced budget proposals in the 1994 Contract With America it wanted GOP legislators to campaign on and enact if they won control. In 1997, Clinton signed the first budget in 25+ years that actually had a surplus.
No, I don't think Chase has even the remotest chance of winning. But that's not why I'm voting for him. Neither Trump nor Harris has earned my vote and I want the two big parties to actually try. Because they both need it.
Which of Chase Oliver's policies are you hoping for the major parties to adopt in order to win his votes over? His promotion of the rainbow mafia agenda is one of the reasons I will be voting for a non-Libertarian candidate for the first time ever.
Balanced budget is the biggest of these. That will entail slashing a lot of departments which shouldn't exist and reforming entitlement programs with the eventual goal of doing away with them altogether, both of which are awesome in my book.
"I suggest going with the flow for now, no matter who wins, and keeping yourself out of The Regime’s crosshairs. That’s what I’m doing."
I dunno... I'm pretty sure that putting "Regime" and "crosshairs" in the same sentence got you on a list. I think me subscribing to your substack got you a list. I bet you're already on the lists.
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- opening lines of 101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution by Claire Wolfe
Great synopsis. As a Never-Trump conservative, it's taken me awhile to grasp the different groups in Trump's constituency but I think you've just about nailed it. I'd add the Evangelicals as a fourth group, unless you think they fit in one of your three?
From my perspective, I sympathize with group 1. Group 2 is what it is. Group 3 (and my Group 4, if that is separate) baffles me from a purely strategic perspective. Setting aside my disagreement with their position(s) (which would take way too long to detail here), even if I agreed with their worldview, I don't see how tying yourself to an "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad" makes any sense in a mid- to long-term perspective. Seems extremely short-sighted.
I don't think the Evangelicals are a reliable block, to be honest, and I think catering to the Moral Minority is largely lost except in state and local red strongholds. They probably matter in state rep elections in Oklahoma.
It would be mind-blowing to me if any appreciable number of evangelicals abandon Trump at this point but maybe the abortion “nuancing” that Trump is attempting could do it? Will be interesting to see.
Perhaps if "conservatives" had managed to conserve one single damned thing in the last 100 years, maybe normie moderates wouldn't be crying out for a Tribune of the Plebs.
Traditionalists always lose on a long enough time scale, if you set "preserve tradition indefinitely" as your bar for success. If, instead, you frame the point of traditionalism as "slowing the progressives down so they don't completely fuck everything up while reengineering society seemingly randomly," then traditionalists can claim a few successes over the last century. But not recently.
I've always preferred a slightly different framework - The role of "progressives" is to try out a lot of stuff that might improve society, the role of "conservatives" is to pick and choose to make sure that only those things that *actually* improve society get pushed through unto greater society. In this framework, it's actually both sides that are kind of failing their duties. First, the naming has completely gone out of whack since many self-ID progressives do nothing but make sure to preserve the current power structure while plenty self-ID conservatives increasingly want to rock the boat. Second, there seems to be little connections between the things that do get pushed through and those that help anyone, if anything the best predictor at the moment seems to be "does this change make me look good at helping some allegedly disadvantaged minority".
That's because they work like an inadequate boat anchor - they get dragged along, slowing the boat down substantially, maybe even stopping it briefly. But they have no direction of their own - they always end up moving in the direction of the boat they are attempting to halt.
As a traditionalist, I disagree that they don't have any real direction. Traditionalists, if useful, are reactionary. They want to reinforce and rebuild the good parts of the old regime. I'm a reactionary monarchist and distributist. Distributism is trying to take the good parts of medieval economies and restore them, without actually creating serfdom. There are many different flavors of traditionalists that have their anchors in different places. If your definition of traditionalism is the position that "nothing ever should ever change", that's not a philosophy that any appreciable number of people actually espouse.
If you measure their "direction" by the position they are at historically at any point and where they are at later, and draw a vector connecting the first to the second, that direction is generally in a progressive direction. The anchor is getting dragged. They may be facing another direction, but that is irrelevant to what I was saying. They are not going the direction they want to, they are going a direction the progressives want to.
Progressives aren't always wrong about everything. Improving working conditions, ending slavery, protecting the environment (used to be called "conservation" and was a conservative position), etc. So having other fources dragging isn't necessarily a bad thing, if the worst excesses can be curtailed, and society isn't completely upended.
Alas, there aren't enough traditionalists, and zero of them in actual power. So in the context of the US, all politics is fraught. Maybe if Archduke Karl had balls and wanted to work with Orbán to restore his rightful role as Apostolic King of Hungary and then slowly try and rebuild his empire, we'd have a chance somewhere, particularly if the next pope had the balls to convene the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. But that's wishful thinking way outside of my control.
I disagree with the notion that everyone who loses a principled fight should be condemned as worthless. Certainly no one here has seen everything he's ever wanted come to pass.
First, remember that the regime chose Trump as its opponent, and he's the only one it has, so to a large extent supporting him is a default for anti-regime people. Watching the regime lose to its chosen opponent is also tantalizing comeuppance.
Beyond that, regime critics have watched many supposed champions prove beholden to the regime in the end, so Trump gathers support because he's far more certainly "not one of them" than the rest.
Finally, the notion that Trump needs to do anything good or to "save us" comes from few, if any, clear-eyed anti-regime people. He doesn't need to DO anything. He just needs to not be THEM. Simply not rubber-stamping their activities will substantially curb their abuses, and that's a big, big win.
As for "Evangelicals", your need for them to be a whole separate thing strikes me as very odd, and probably betrays assumptions that I won't talk you out of in a single post. Christians can comfortably fit in all three groups, and the only thing noteworthy about them in this conversation is that the regime is very overt about specifically hating them.
Fair enough on your 3 given reasons. Does that really outweigh the implication inherent in hitching one’s wagon to an "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad"? (Namely, that one’s position is the "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad" position.) I guess we’ll soon find out!
The obvious retort is "Kamala Harris is worse by each of those criteria". And she certainly is. Trump has had the competence to make money in large enterprises, while Harris has never administered anything well. She's extremely narcissistic, and Democrats have always epitomized populism even if Republicans are trying a bit of it on for size. Kamala is NOT a midwit, because she's not smart enough to be one.
All the same could be said for Joe Biden, but of course, we've already agreed that for Democrats, the figurehead is meaningless and doesn't actually make any decisions (I believe that was true even of Obama).
The problem is that the people who DO make decisions are collectively as bad, if not worse, and they suffer from the madness of a mob.
I've already explained that I don't want Trump to do anything good, but simply to stop THEM, so his traits are nearly as irrelevant as Kamala's, but if you care to compare them, Donald Trump wins.
You’re resorting to the “lesser of two evils” argument. As I replied earlier to someone else, I don’t think that’s a particularly relevant argument in this discussion. Edited to add: As a conservative, I would actually prefer that the Democrat position be seen as the midwit fuckwad position!
The article topic is "Explaining Trump Support to Liberals".
"Lesser of two evils" is among the best candidates for a one-sentence summary response that there is, particularly when one knows about the Podesta emails.
You asked how someone could vote for a <bad> person, and I responded by saying that he's the least <bad>.
Huh? As opposed to the other "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad"? I'm not sure what you are getting at here? To quote the author "Your actual choice in November, or tomorrow, or years from now, is to go with the flow or not. I suggest going with the flow for now, no matter who wins, and keeping yourself out of The Regime’s crosshairs. That’s what I’m doing. Vote for whoever you think will be more entertaining. I also suggest preparing for a future when the façade fails."
You can think of my critique more from a Republican Primary perspective if that helps. I interpret the article (and this discussion) more about explaining Trump’s actual constituency, not those holding their nose to vote for the lesser of two evils.
I would never attempt to explain support for Trump to people that do not believe in objective reality. If you think men can become women you don't believe in objective reality.
I think you are wrong that it does not matter who wins elections. It's not a coincidence that major wars did not start when Trump was president. He did not try to expand NATO to the suburbs of Moscow. When challenged by Iran, he killed the relevant leaders instead of launching a 20 year war and occupation to try to create parliamentary democracy where it cannot take root.
Sure, Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi are basically the same person. The system servants are interchangeable. Cenk Uygur (founder of The Young Turks) recently recalled his astute observation that the proposed economic policies of Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama were basically identical. Obamacare was simply RomneyCare repackaged for a federal system.
Trump made some flailing efforts to fight back against the system to fulfil his "drain the swamp" slogan. He really had no idea what he was dealing with. DC was built on a swamp, not just physically. The rising stars in the Republican Party seem to understand the system and realize they draw their votes from opposing the system. Many of them will be corrupted by the system over time. Some won't. The more effective politicians there are working against the system, the longer we can delay total system control or your fantasy that American Citizens still have the courage to stage a revolution. Fear of that does temper system behavior, but I don't think any substantial portion of the country has the requisite toughness for such behavior. The half that objects to the system can't be bothered to vote in a primary. They aren't the civil war fighting type. Everyone has fantasies. Mine is that Trump may do something of lasting usefulness while in office, if elected.
Also, Trump talked about running for president while Podesta was still in diapers. If I pray for the sun to rise in the east tomorrow morning, and it happens, I'm not dumb enough to believe it was my prayers that made it happen. Trump had his eye on this prize for a very long time. His greatest skill is in PR. It's made him some unknown amount of money and he has a talent for understanding the big picture. It made him the only Republican that could beat HRC in 2016. It took the full force of the system to beat him by a handful of votes in 2020. The system went "all in" because it genuinely fears any sort of challenge and it understands that destroying a system disrupter discourages other's from trying.
I agree that disagreeing over whether truth is objective or subjective is the epicenter of genuine ideological divide. I appreciate BJ's argument about being "pro-Regime" vs "anti-Regime" transcending ideology for a lot of people; it certainly makes most members of both tribes contradict their stated principles often.
At the same time, as this article alluded to, a sizable chunk of the anti-regime movement opposes it on ideological grounds (cloth masks, et al). This is where the movement gets its heavy hitters like Elon Musk, who are vital to any chance of the movement making progress.
I happen to ideologically believe that powerful regimes inevitably become absurd policy-wise because they become immune to healthy feedback, but successful pushback against the particular nonsense of this regime is still the most important tactic in fighting it. BJ said that voting isn't particularly meaningful as a tactic, and I agree. "Influencing" (even if you hate the word) is where the battle is fought.
Pro-regime or anti-regime may be the relevant question, but most people do not understand that and are on team red/blue. They believe there is a fundamental difference between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell (even though both believe Ukraine is the most important thing happening and neither want to slow down the spending). I think they even look similar
You as an individual voting, do not matter. Influencing other people to vote correctly and subsequently create an incentive structure that rewards decent politicians is useful. It's still the voting that matters. I disagree wholeheartedly that is does not matter who governs. I do think you rarely get a good choice. Ron DeSantis is my proof that it matters. From fixing Florida's voting problems to hurricane response, to telling the longshoreman union they don't get to hold the nation hostage, he has changed Florida for the better. When I lived in NC, I never saw a fundamental difference based on election outcomes. One system servant versus another isn't really a big deal.
Your argument is essentially the explanation of why capitalism/free markets work. When people suffer the consequences/enjoy the benefits of their decisions, they learn to make better decisions.
As a lukewarm Trump supporter, I can understand them. Trump makes the people that love him and hate him behave irrationally. The people that think he's going to fix everything are as irrational as the people the believe he's a dictator (who left office) and is going to set up a dictatorship for life (what 10 years?). Being a dictator is hard work. That's not something you try at 80 years old.
With people that are blinded by love or hate, you have to avoid discussing the personality that causes the blind spot.
Feelings always win arguments with facts, which is why when you recognize that your counterpart is using feelings, you have to counter the feelings, not use facts. One good way of countering them is trolling, which diffuses dumb emotions by making people embarrassed about them.
Have we ever had a presidential candidate who was a good Twitter troll?
Sure. No specific claim is required of those who believe that truth is subjective.
The phrase "The Left eats its own" derives from the fact that different people who believe in using sophistry to empower themselves will inevitably come into conflict with each other, even though they share the methodological foundation.
That is the heart of it, much moreso than most people are willing to say plainly. In the TV show "House", the title character repeatedly asserts that "everybody lies", and because the show is about making him look brilliant, the plots keep proving him right. "Words are power constructs", "History is written by the victors", "Truth is subjective", "X is a social construct" and other phrases common among left-wing people all boil down to asserting that there are no real moral rules and no sincere principles, and that sophistry is just another tool in the pursuit of the only thing that really matters to anyone, which is power.
No wonder they loved Game of Thrones.
I should backtrack to defining "left-wing", though, because at this point it seems more like these are traits that tempt EVERYONE, and I think that's true. People default to tribal, selfish behavior, and the more that dominates, the worse off everyone is. Nobody perfectly, consistently adheres to principles like "property rights", "free speech", et al, but the more we do, the better things get. The problem is that these things are Prisoner's Dilemmas - everyone is individually better off violating them.
I define the right/left spectrum in terms of what is most meaningful in practice by far, and that is respect for property rights. More of it means further right, and less of it means further left. The GROUP benefits of respecting property rights are astronomical, but the Prisoner's Dilemma always applies; violating others gives you an advantage regardless of what others do.
The people we call "left-wing" don't just "slip up" occasionally with regard to property rights. They openly despise them. They rationalize their disdain in many different ways, including technocracy, utopianism, various bigotries, or the aforementioned "everybody lies" notion that principles are for stupid children. They don't hesitate to take the greedy option in the Prisoner's Dilemma because they are quite sure that everyone else will.
And they're usually right about that last part.
The people we call "right-wing" do not perfectly follow their stated principles, but they actually mean to. They don't justify "breaking a few eggs" to make omelettes that never actually exist. They don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They abhor sophistry. Jon Stewart doesn't make them laugh; he appalls them.
All of these traits exist along bell curves, of course, but the fact that they're not absolute does not mean that they don't matter. A lot.
I go even a bit deeper than 'property rights,' to the level of defense of self and family. My 'test' is pretty much Second Amendment oriented.
If you want to take my most effective tool away for defense of self and family merely because it 'offends your sensibilities,' and you think that removing all firearms from normally law abiding people will cure all crime, then you are a fool, and I will everything in my power to oppose you.
There is a difference between globalism and globalization. The former is support for concentrated supranational authority, the latter is overall support for more international trade. A lot of people don't like either but still conflate them.
Wow. This would make a great conversation over beers. Not so much here in the comments...
As your resident liberal, first I take offense (in a lighthearted way) that you think we don't actually know all this already. It's pretty obvious why people vote for Trump, and my understanding is that it falls more or less along the lines you've stated. I think you've missed one large group - those that think he'll actually achieve the things he promises - but maybe you're right that no one believes him. :shrug:
Your viewpoint is extremely hopeless, and I wonder if you consider yourself a patriot, given that you believe the American system has failed completely. One way I've seen Democrats explicitly differentiate themselves from Republicans is that Dems see a broken system and want to fix it. Republicans want to break it more so we have to dismantle it. Having personally seen places where "rule of law" isn't a thing, I prefer to stay on the side of trying to make things incrementally better (although I do have a vision for what I would consider a radically better way - I just don't think we'll get there through f-you votes).
People on the left have long railed against the military industrial-complex and the forever wars, as one aspect of "The Regime". It's not a MAGA-only concern. We do, however, see in Trump a strong possibility of undoing the things that we consider to be GOOD about America, and prefer The Regime to him, as you stated.
>>As your resident liberal, first I take offense (in a lighthearted way) that you think we don't actually know all this already.<<
I know many highly intelligent liberals who do not know any of this. This article was a synthesis of a two day long Slack "argument" with one such liberal, who still does not understand it, or doesn't seem to believe it.
>> I wonder if you consider yourself a patriot,<<
I'm allergic to indoctrination schemes, be they religious, social, or national.
>>Dems see a broken system and want to fix it. Republicans want to break it more so we have to dismantle it.<<
I too have seen liberals claim this, but this is not what I saw happening in 2020, so I question the veracity of their claims.
>>People on the left have long railed against the military industrial-complex and the forever wars,<<
Ok, I'm probably a pretty high-information (w/r/t politics) person, so it depends on your in-group. Anyone who actually wants to understand has already figured this out.
What did you see happening in 2020?
I guess I you have a point about 2008. At the time, in 2016, the one thing I liked about Trump was that he wasn't into finding new wars.
In 2020 I saw riots, property damage, and death equivalent to approximately a category 2 hurricane that would have gotten worse instead of abated if the liberals didn't win. That's not fixing a broken system.
At any rate, true or not, we're talking about very different things here. Property and protests are not "the system". You could replace the President with a dictator, flush out all resistors from the system, undo all the checks and balances, and not break a single window. I'm sure the protestors would in response, but, ironically, in support of "the system". Until they're no longer allowed to protest.
"Dems see a broken system and want to fix it. Republicans want to break it more so we have to dismantle it."
This is the rhetoric that Democrats use in campaigns, mainly during the 3-4 months prior to elections. The rest of the time, they say America is the worst country in the world and needs to be fundamentally transformed and its Constitution is the problem and so on and so on.
You call yourselves "progressive" (change everything for change's sake) and condemn your opponents as conservatives ("don't change anything").
So no, you are not correctly describing which side wants to fix things and which wants to destroy them. Rather (and I keep meaning to write a large essay on this), your kind think that the secret sauce that makes America great is your bureaucratic regime, while right-wing people think it's the founding principles of the country, including individual liberty, property rights, and free markets. Each side wants to fix/preserve/expand the things that it believes are America's secret sauce, and each view's the other's priorities as grave threats to its own.
I disagree that it's an election-time rhetoric - Reagan's "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" is a decades-old philosophy. Trump explicitly chose heads of departments that completely disagreed with the mission of the department.
I haven't heard Democrats saying the problem with America is the Constitution - we may be talking to different people there. I do believe that we're meant to have a "living Constitution". Progressiveness isn't for its own sake - it's generally a recognition of two things: there are things that need improvement, and we live in a world of constant change. Being conservative isn't inherently bad, either, other than perhaps being inflexibly conservative means you fail to recognize that times change. I'd consider the Democrats the conservatives in terms of the current election: we want to preserve the mechanisms of government to the best we can from the Trump-era erosions.
I also disagree that people on the left don't believe in the founding principles of the country (they're called "Liberals" for a reason, after all). It's just that the interpretation and relative importance of those principles are quite different.
Please reread the last paragraph of the post you're replying to. Each side has a different idea of what America's secret sauce is, and each is trying to preserve/fix/expand that and views the other as tearing it down.
You've responded as though there is universal agreement that the federal bureaucracy IS America and is the only thing that we could possibly expand or "destroy". Once again, this severely undercuts your claim about understanding people who vote differently than you do.
Finally, citing your camp's bastardization of the term "liberal" is as silly as having the hubris to call yourselves "progressive". All of the criticism of America's founding principles that exists in this country is in your camp.
"Trump explicitly chose heads of departments that completely disagreed with the mission of the department."
That is exactly what turned me into a Trump supporter way back in 2017. I don't know if I fit any of the categories here, because my support of Trump is purely policy/results oriented. I'm happy with him to the extent he opposes the administrative state(the letter agencies).
Great! I'm glad when politics takes the form of policy vs. form or tribalism. I can't respect anyone that votes for him because he makes jokes about the libs. I disagree with you, but I can at least respect that you see how things work and want them to change in some way. The rest is for in-depth conversations over beer...
Reagan's words resound today with FEMA telling private volunteers to shut down their rescue operations in western NC due to lack of a permit.
Government was the problem then and is the problem now.
Listen to John Kerry talk about how the first amendment is a roadblock to shutting down information he disagrees with. Find me a Democrat that doesn't want to violate the second amendment. If fact, the Democrat run establishment has violated or attempted to violate all of the bill of rights with the exceptions of amendments 3 and 7.
Don't conflate classical liberalism with the Marxist ideology the current Democrat party represents. Conservatism and Liberalism on this side of the pond represent something much different than in Europe. Conservatism here is not conserving the monarchy, but rather the classical liberalism on which the country was founded.
Democrats do want to conserve something. It's the power structure that benefits them. Are you really claiming they are conserving democratic processes by:
Attempting to jail their opposition
Attempting to remove their opposition from the ballot
Engaging in censorship
Running a shadow government beyond the reach of voters or even identification- if you believe Joe Biden is making decisions, you are insane
Circumventing any pretense of democratic process by selecting a new candidate without any voting. When the nomination occurred, I had received the same number of votes as Kamala in the primary process: 0.
>Attempting to remove their opposition from the ballot
>Engaging in censorship
Interesting. It's pretty incredible the information environment we live in these days. The fact that we can try to run a democracy at all these days looking like a bunch of Spider-Men pointing fingers at each other is tragic. I look forward to a day when we can debate based on shared facts, but until then I don't think we're going to get much done here. Needless to say, I disagree with every one of the points you made above, EXCEPT that Kerry said something VERY STUPID that I would never condone.
So you deny that the FBI showed threatened people to enforce government censorship? Weird that you know more than the people that run social media companies and have had visits from the FBI. You do know that the Biden corruption story was censored by FBI pressure. The FBI had the laptop for a year before the NY Post got the story. They knew it to be genuine and provided propaganda (51 system stooges, er "Intelligence Officers") and a silencing effort (censorship). John Kerry stated the position of the System. "We want to get enough power to crush any dissent."
The coordinated effort by DOJ staff and the WH to prosecute Donald Trump because the system did not think their candidate could defeat him electorally is obvious. Why did they wait until the election cycle to attempt to start 4 trials?
I live in one of the states that attempted to remove him from the ballot, for an alleged crime he had never been charged with. Based on that, I feel comfortable having you deprived of your rights due to my charge that you have engaged in child trafficking. Unfair because you haven't even been charged, much less convicted? True. Effective? Also true.
Trump is not the sole target of the System for selective punishment. Eric Adams (who I don't care for) is being punished for relatively minor corruption charges (especially for NYC) because he spoke out against the system regarding illegal immigration. The message is clear- Get in line or we will punish you. Joe Biden has been recorded telling well documented stories of improper use of power that happened to benefit his business enterprise.
How many votes did Kamala receive in the primary process? 0. Same as me. You can deny reality all you want. It still exists. I have to admit I stole that line from Cenk Uygur and modified it for my purposes. His original line was, "I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris and I'm not legally qualified for the position."
Glad to hear you don't condone what John Kerry said. What are your thoughts on thinking it and acting on it like the rest of the System?
I could point out much more malfeasance on the Trump side, but it's not worth the time. The bottom line that we should agree on is that politicians are corrupt. The more we can do to strengthen it, the better.
Republicans go on and on about "the deep state". It's "the deep state", i.e. people that show principles above party affiliation, that stopped Trump corruption efforts in the past. Republicans are doing their best to replace them with party sycophants so they can erode those checks much more effectively if he gets back into power.
I'm all for sending to jail anyone if the accusations can be proven in front of a jury. Unlike the cult of personality that is Trump, Democrats would have NO problem sending Biden or anyone else to jail if they're proven corrupt: Menendez and Adams can go to hell, or jail, for all we care. If you think Republicans are the party of truth and righteousness, look at how they treated Santos.
You say the prosecution is selective, and I know to some degree it is (there is prosecutorial discretion, at a minimum), but the argument is for MORE prosecution of corruption, not less. Meanwhile Trump's Supreme Court just said bribery is ok, and the President is free to commit crimes - how's that for sticking to founding principles?
Re: Kamala Harris, party candidate choices were never required to be democratic. They slowly evolved that way over time. Personally, I'm glad it worked out the way it did because there was no time for costly in-fighting, but I can see why other people might be pissed. Republicans scream "anti-democratic" while picking their own voters via MASSIVE gerrymandering (yes, Democrats play at that game too, but historically much less so), a practice fully sanctioned by once again the Republican Supreme Court. Republicans have played so many anti-democratic games with voting in the last 8 years (and beyond) that this complaint about Harris is almost quaint. She still has to win the national vote, but guess what? There's a plan by Republicans, as there was in 2020, to toss the decision to the House, where Trump will win by NUMBER of states that support him, not by population represented. How's that for democratic?
Update, one of my very smart liberal friends posted my article on his Facebook wall and none of his liberal friends could even engage in the topic meaningfully. All they did was fingers-in-their-ears the entire thing. So seriously, no, I don't think the liberals know any of this.
I'm not sure that we're talking about the same thing. Changing the rules to benefit one group over another is just part of the process, and I'm all for it, assuming it's done on good faith. Defunding the EPA, removing regulations just because "regulation = bad", eliminating the Department of Education entirely without any evidence something better will take its place are examples of "breaking it more", and not really so that the system works better for another group. It looks to me like a Reaganesque "government is bad" approach that begs the question of why you want to be there in the first place. To contrast, Democratic regulation has aggravated the housing situation in a way that can't be ignored - it's a problem that needs to be solved, probably by removing certain Democratic regulations. Government should be an iterative process of problems and solutions, not one that we give up on entirely.
"eliminating the Department of Education entirely without any evidence something better will take its place are examples of "breaking it more""
The DoE has had nothing but negative impact since it began operating in 1980. Nothing "better" needs to "take its place". It's a bad thing, and removing it is addition by subtraction.
You claimed in your initial post that "It's pretty obvious why people vote for Trump", but every Democrat I ever hear does nothing but get it wrong.
I shouldn't have used the DoE as an example, since it's a subject I honestly don't know enough about to debate. The U.S. should be better on world rankings than it is, but it's not a complete disaster. I'd be interested to hear how getting rid of the department would fix things, as opposed to fixing its current problems.
The US was #1 in all of those rankings at the time that the DoE was created, so a low-effort analysis could conclude that undoing the change would restore that ranking.
A higher-effort analysis would note that the DoE has never attempted to do anything that improves averages in math, reading, science, etc, as it has only ever had left-wing ideological objectives, and those objectives represent trade-offs vis-a-vis traditional educational goals. It should be obvious that adding new content to curricula would have to displace something, and that something is classical education.
There are a lot of areas of life where the best bang-for-buck path to improvement is not addition, but subtraction.
"eliminating the Department of Education entirely without any evidence something better will take its place"
Nothing needs to take it's place. It's been around for 40 years and education has not improved. It is completely unnecessary, thus an easy department to axe.
It dis-incentivizes education. There are more nefarious reasons, but the easiest one to understand is because if education improves, they get less in their budget (less problem, less funding).
This is because the first and only real purpose of a bureaucracy is to insure the existence of itself, job security for it's staff, and an expanding scope and power.
Have you read Peter Turchin on elite overproduction? Our university system has expanded well beyond the capacity of the market to supply graduates with the types of jobs they were promised. Besides, there is also the lipstick on a pig issue- whilst I am sure that Scott Galloway is right in his belief that elite universities should expand the horizons of the less an extraordinary, this generosity becomes insanity when extended to 50% of the population.
Anyway, Peter Turchin expected a high degree of polarisation. Some would benignly believe they wanted more government to help people, when the real motive is/was jobs with 'impact' for themselves, or people like them. The second group would want less government in a period of scarcity- although this anti-establishment ethos doesn't apply to healthcare, direct transfers, resource reallocation in the event of national emergencies, or (oddly) programs where the government worker serves the public, rather than deigning to reign over them (meals on wheels are popular, even in the reddest of states).
The proletariat are correct on this one. The Left should want something along the lines of Australia- with ample social safety nets and universal healthcare, but with significantly lower levels of public employment than America, once federal, state and local are accounted for. The mistake is thinking that the haemorrhaging of blue collar support for the Democrats is inevitable. A plan to cut government bureaucracy as a means of extending public healthcare on issues like EMT funding could quite easily give one party a twenty year monopoly on power. Nobody should have to pay 3,000 dollars for a potentially life-saving ambulance, and if it means sacrificing a few paper pushers and rubber stampers then it's probably worth it.
Lots to argue with, fact-wise, but great presentation of the thinking processes. My side very much frames things in terms of saving democracy (as you might have noticed!) which seems like a good goal, although maybe not from others' (including your) perspective. That's the hard thing for us to understand: why would people risk an autocracy? Authoritarian upbringing?
(Added to the fact that Trump is a doddering fool, of course.)
I will just add that underlying this difference of viewpoints is the rise of financial inequality and the status competition that comes with it. But that's a topic for another time.
I mean I have heard all about Biden's diabolical dictatorship from my Republican friend (is referring to "my Republican friend" as cringe as talking about "my black friend?")
No, I don't think so. Maybe if you're a fire-breathing militant leftist, it is, but I don't curate my friend groups based on their political beliefs and I don't think anyone else should either. That is to say, I don't keep people around just because I agree with them, so I also don't feel the need to cut them off just because they said something I don't agree with. If that's what a person's friendships and social interactions are based on, I'd tell them they need some actual friends of substance. Having other people in your life who see things differently than you do is important. It keeps you intellectually honest, and it reminds you that we all have much more in common than not, at the end of the day.
Totally agree. I have a few friends who are Not-Republicans in name only. They like to call themselves Independents. I call them conservative fellow travelers. I consider myself lucky to have found some people with different views here in the SF Bay Area. Some of my liberal friends are quite puzzled that I want to interact with a Trump supporter.
"They see Trump as an incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad and they can think of nothing more pleasing than to have such a complete bozo in charge of The Regime for four years gumming up the Regime's activities, because The Regime’s activities are completely awful."
The Regime is easier to swallow when the people at least seem to be elite. Passing off the old senile man and the worst woman you know in corporate HR as the defenders of democracy is just too much to swallow.
"The worst woman you know in corporate HR" made me literally LOL. That's so perfect.
Great post. I have tried to explain to my left of center relatives, friends, and acquaintances that many Trump supporters have legitimate not-crazy grievances and feel unheard, and the left reinforces that constantly by acting like failing to ratify Dem rule is prima facie evidence of bigotry, low intelligence, etc. They nod and then just carry on treating people with differing viewpoints as pond scum that frankly deserve to be rolled right over by society's most powerful institutions, thus proving that those who squawk most about democracy don't actually believe in it at all.
This gets the lion’s share of the issues right, and it’s nice to see more people talking about the utter irrelevance of the figurehead atop the Regime (Jill Biden, fwiw).
I will quibble with the haphazard use of “globalism”. I think it’s important to distinguish “globalization” - aka free trade - from “globalism”, which is the “one world government” umbrella. Yes, the words are similar, but you lose a lot of people when you act like you can’t have one without the other.
EDIT: I've gotten enough engagement on the "globalization" subject lately that I've decided to write a bit on it: https://principlesvstribes.substack.com/p/tariffs-are-sanctions
If you want more well-written commentary, you can go to Kipling's "The Peace of Dives", though many prefer "The Gods of the Copybook Headings". It's possible to go wrong with Kipling -- we got the Peace of Dives, and it doesn't work as well as we hoped -- but his head was definitely functioning well.
> That explains the existence of Trump as a political node, but the reason he's so popular depends on which flavor of supporter to which you’re referring.
*tsk*
You missed 4.) Those of us who support Trump because we are the enemies of goodness and joy, who despise happiness and light, we who are truly every bit as racist, sexist, speciesist, and all other sorts of bigoted as claimed. We want to destroy the planet, and worship The Great Orange Hitler for the rest of time. Or at least until we've succeeded in destroying the planet. We're the same people who oppose gun control because we rejoice upon hearing about the deaths of children in school shootings, and the same people who oppose redistributionist economics because we literally hate poor people and want them to suffer.
*ahem*
Sorry, it may be that I've had a shitty week and I'm just feeling extra grouchy today...
winner ^
"Neoconservative war hawks, the military industrial complex, populist socialism, and a veneer of pop star sparklepuss"
Pretty good but I think the "scientific technological elite" Eisenhower's warned about in his farewell address right after the military industrial complex deserve a spot on that list.
"Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
You don't have to like Trump to vote against the Deep State and the Military-Industrial Complex.
Pretty succinct and generally seems to be spot on. I am slightly left-of-center and have often found myself in the position of answering the questions the louder and more liberal people in my circles posed about how *anyone* could support Trump. Regardless of whether it is actually true or not--and I think to some extent it is--Trump represents a huge swath of the country who feel like they did not have a voice in their own governance, and who feel that The Regime believes they are beneath representation and will stop at nothing to prevent them from having it. They don't care what he actually stands for, as much as they care that he is apparently the worst possible thing that can happen as far as The Regime is concerned. Anything he may or may not do to improve their own lot is a bonus. All that really matters is that he says everything is terrible (which it isn't), that the country has never been in a worse state (which it has), and that The Regime is to blame for all of it.... which may actually have a degree of veracity.
My liberal circle-occupiers still struggle to understand why he appeals. I don't. I totally get it, even if the idea of another four years of him as president makes me cringe. Frankly, the idea of four/eight years of Kamala Harris as president doesn't feel much better to me, even though I believe the country will, in fact, be better off. I'm still gonna vote for the gay guy. Not because he's gay, mind... for me he is by far the most articulate candidate and has the best ideas of how to fix the problems we're facing in the long term. He just happens to be gay.
The gay guy? Chase Oliver? why bother? I mean I don't think voting works regardless, but especially why bother voting for someone outside of the two main cesspools of which I don't see anything ever actually changing. I'm not throwing stones. just asking?
Libertarian votes are and always have been a protest vote. "See this vote? You could have earned this vote if your candidates didn't suck. Bye." That's what a libertarian vote is. I have cast that vote many times in the past, knowing exactly what I was doing.
Sure, and everyone who sees the public record of your personal vote that totally exists gets the message.
#Metoo
I said why. He actually sounds like a freaking adult when he speaks, unlike the two 'real' candidates, and some of the things he wants to do would, I believe, actually make us better off in the long term.
Yes, he might actually make us better off in the long term. I'm not disagreeing there. All I am saying is the support for him is useless and a time sink. Just like my former support for Ron Paul.
It's not. H Ross Perot ran on a single issue in 1992: deficit spending and the ballooning of the national debt in the 80s. He was never going to actually win, but he garnered almost 20% of the vote (and cost HW Bush a second term) and made both of the major parties, particularly the GOP, realize they needed the votes he got. As a consequence, the Heritage Foundation--of Project 2025 notoriety--included balanced budget proposals in the 1994 Contract With America it wanted GOP legislators to campaign on and enact if they won control. In 1997, Clinton signed the first budget in 25+ years that actually had a surplus.
No, I don't think Chase has even the remotest chance of winning. But that's not why I'm voting for him. Neither Trump nor Harris has earned my vote and I want the two big parties to actually try. Because they both need it.
Which of Chase Oliver's policies are you hoping for the major parties to adopt in order to win his votes over? His promotion of the rainbow mafia agenda is one of the reasons I will be voting for a non-Libertarian candidate for the first time ever.
Balanced budget is the biggest of these. That will entail slashing a lot of departments which shouldn't exist and reforming entitlement programs with the eventual goal of doing away with them altogether, both of which are awesome in my book.
Fair enough. I guess.
"I suggest going with the flow for now, no matter who wins, and keeping yourself out of The Regime’s crosshairs. That’s what I’m doing."
I dunno... I'm pretty sure that putting "Regime" and "crosshairs" in the same sentence got you on a list. I think me subscribing to your substack got you a list. I bet you're already on the lists.
I've been on the lists since 2018. You've been on the lists since at least (checks google) 2013. :)
Your comments reminded me of this:
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- opening lines of 101 Things To Do 'Til The Revolution by Claire Wolfe
Great synopsis. As a Never-Trump conservative, it's taken me awhile to grasp the different groups in Trump's constituency but I think you've just about nailed it. I'd add the Evangelicals as a fourth group, unless you think they fit in one of your three?
From my perspective, I sympathize with group 1. Group 2 is what it is. Group 3 (and my Group 4, if that is separate) baffles me from a purely strategic perspective. Setting aside my disagreement with their position(s) (which would take way too long to detail here), even if I agreed with their worldview, I don't see how tying yourself to an "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad" makes any sense in a mid- to long-term perspective. Seems extremely short-sighted.
I don't think the Evangelicals are a reliable block, to be honest, and I think catering to the Moral Minority is largely lost except in state and local red strongholds. They probably matter in state rep elections in Oklahoma.
It would be mind-blowing to me if any appreciable number of evangelicals abandon Trump at this point but maybe the abortion “nuancing” that Trump is attempting could do it? Will be interesting to see.
Perhaps if "conservatives" had managed to conserve one single damned thing in the last 100 years, maybe normie moderates wouldn't be crying out for a Tribune of the Plebs.
Traditionalists always lose on a long enough time scale, if you set "preserve tradition indefinitely" as your bar for success. If, instead, you frame the point of traditionalism as "slowing the progressives down so they don't completely fuck everything up while reengineering society seemingly randomly," then traditionalists can claim a few successes over the last century. But not recently.
I've always preferred a slightly different framework - The role of "progressives" is to try out a lot of stuff that might improve society, the role of "conservatives" is to pick and choose to make sure that only those things that *actually* improve society get pushed through unto greater society. In this framework, it's actually both sides that are kind of failing their duties. First, the naming has completely gone out of whack since many self-ID progressives do nothing but make sure to preserve the current power structure while plenty self-ID conservatives increasingly want to rock the boat. Second, there seems to be little connections between the things that do get pushed through and those that help anyone, if anything the best predictor at the moment seems to be "does this change make me look good at helping some allegedly disadvantaged minority".
That's because they work like an inadequate boat anchor - they get dragged along, slowing the boat down substantially, maybe even stopping it briefly. But they have no direction of their own - they always end up moving in the direction of the boat they are attempting to halt.
As a traditionalist, I disagree that they don't have any real direction. Traditionalists, if useful, are reactionary. They want to reinforce and rebuild the good parts of the old regime. I'm a reactionary monarchist and distributist. Distributism is trying to take the good parts of medieval economies and restore them, without actually creating serfdom. There are many different flavors of traditionalists that have their anchors in different places. If your definition of traditionalism is the position that "nothing ever should ever change", that's not a philosophy that any appreciable number of people actually espouse.
If you measure their "direction" by the position they are at historically at any point and where they are at later, and draw a vector connecting the first to the second, that direction is generally in a progressive direction. The anchor is getting dragged. They may be facing another direction, but that is irrelevant to what I was saying. They are not going the direction they want to, they are going a direction the progressives want to.
Progressives aren't always wrong about everything. Improving working conditions, ending slavery, protecting the environment (used to be called "conservation" and was a conservative position), etc. So having other fources dragging isn't necessarily a bad thing, if the worst excesses can be curtailed, and society isn't completely upended.
Alas, there aren't enough traditionalists, and zero of them in actual power. So in the context of the US, all politics is fraught. Maybe if Archduke Karl had balls and wanted to work with Orbán to restore his rightful role as Apostolic King of Hungary and then slowly try and rebuild his empire, we'd have a chance somewhere, particularly if the next pope had the balls to convene the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. But that's wishful thinking way outside of my control.
I disagree with the notion that everyone who loses a principled fight should be condemned as worthless. Certainly no one here has seen everything he's ever wanted come to pass.
Sure. But if you lose _every_ fight, you're not a fighter you're a heel.
First, remember that the regime chose Trump as its opponent, and he's the only one it has, so to a large extent supporting him is a default for anti-regime people. Watching the regime lose to its chosen opponent is also tantalizing comeuppance.
Beyond that, regime critics have watched many supposed champions prove beholden to the regime in the end, so Trump gathers support because he's far more certainly "not one of them" than the rest.
Finally, the notion that Trump needs to do anything good or to "save us" comes from few, if any, clear-eyed anti-regime people. He doesn't need to DO anything. He just needs to not be THEM. Simply not rubber-stamping their activities will substantially curb their abuses, and that's a big, big win.
As for "Evangelicals", your need for them to be a whole separate thing strikes me as very odd, and probably betrays assumptions that I won't talk you out of in a single post. Christians can comfortably fit in all three groups, and the only thing noteworthy about them in this conversation is that the regime is very overt about specifically hating them.
Fair enough on your 3 given reasons. Does that really outweigh the implication inherent in hitching one’s wagon to an "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad"? (Namely, that one’s position is the "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad" position.) I guess we’ll soon find out!
The obvious retort is "Kamala Harris is worse by each of those criteria". And she certainly is. Trump has had the competence to make money in large enterprises, while Harris has never administered anything well. She's extremely narcissistic, and Democrats have always epitomized populism even if Republicans are trying a bit of it on for size. Kamala is NOT a midwit, because she's not smart enough to be one.
All the same could be said for Joe Biden, but of course, we've already agreed that for Democrats, the figurehead is meaningless and doesn't actually make any decisions (I believe that was true even of Obama).
The problem is that the people who DO make decisions are collectively as bad, if not worse, and they suffer from the madness of a mob.
I've already explained that I don't want Trump to do anything good, but simply to stop THEM, so his traits are nearly as irrelevant as Kamala's, but if you care to compare them, Donald Trump wins.
You’re resorting to the “lesser of two evils” argument. As I replied earlier to someone else, I don’t think that’s a particularly relevant argument in this discussion. Edited to add: As a conservative, I would actually prefer that the Democrat position be seen as the midwit fuckwad position!
How is it not?
The article topic is "Explaining Trump Support to Liberals".
"Lesser of two evils" is among the best candidates for a one-sentence summary response that there is, particularly when one knows about the Podesta emails.
You asked how someone could vote for a <bad> person, and I responded by saying that he's the least <bad>.
It seems pretty clear to me that this category of “support” is not what the article is about but you may disagree.
Huh? As opposed to the other "incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad"? I'm not sure what you are getting at here? To quote the author "Your actual choice in November, or tomorrow, or years from now, is to go with the flow or not. I suggest going with the flow for now, no matter who wins, and keeping yourself out of The Regime’s crosshairs. That’s what I’m doing. Vote for whoever you think will be more entertaining. I also suggest preparing for a future when the façade fails."
You can think of my critique more from a Republican Primary perspective if that helps. I interpret the article (and this discussion) more about explaining Trump’s actual constituency, not those holding their nose to vote for the lesser of two evils.
I would never attempt to explain support for Trump to people that do not believe in objective reality. If you think men can become women you don't believe in objective reality.
I think you are wrong that it does not matter who wins elections. It's not a coincidence that major wars did not start when Trump was president. He did not try to expand NATO to the suburbs of Moscow. When challenged by Iran, he killed the relevant leaders instead of launching a 20 year war and occupation to try to create parliamentary democracy where it cannot take root.
Sure, Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi are basically the same person. The system servants are interchangeable. Cenk Uygur (founder of The Young Turks) recently recalled his astute observation that the proposed economic policies of Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama were basically identical. Obamacare was simply RomneyCare repackaged for a federal system.
Trump made some flailing efforts to fight back against the system to fulfil his "drain the swamp" slogan. He really had no idea what he was dealing with. DC was built on a swamp, not just physically. The rising stars in the Republican Party seem to understand the system and realize they draw their votes from opposing the system. Many of them will be corrupted by the system over time. Some won't. The more effective politicians there are working against the system, the longer we can delay total system control or your fantasy that American Citizens still have the courage to stage a revolution. Fear of that does temper system behavior, but I don't think any substantial portion of the country has the requisite toughness for such behavior. The half that objects to the system can't be bothered to vote in a primary. They aren't the civil war fighting type. Everyone has fantasies. Mine is that Trump may do something of lasting usefulness while in office, if elected.
Also, Trump talked about running for president while Podesta was still in diapers. If I pray for the sun to rise in the east tomorrow morning, and it happens, I'm not dumb enough to believe it was my prayers that made it happen. Trump had his eye on this prize for a very long time. His greatest skill is in PR. It's made him some unknown amount of money and he has a talent for understanding the big picture. It made him the only Republican that could beat HRC in 2016. It took the full force of the system to beat him by a handful of votes in 2020. The system went "all in" because it genuinely fears any sort of challenge and it understands that destroying a system disrupter discourages other's from trying.
I agree that disagreeing over whether truth is objective or subjective is the epicenter of genuine ideological divide. I appreciate BJ's argument about being "pro-Regime" vs "anti-Regime" transcending ideology for a lot of people; it certainly makes most members of both tribes contradict their stated principles often.
At the same time, as this article alluded to, a sizable chunk of the anti-regime movement opposes it on ideological grounds (cloth masks, et al). This is where the movement gets its heavy hitters like Elon Musk, who are vital to any chance of the movement making progress.
I happen to ideologically believe that powerful regimes inevitably become absurd policy-wise because they become immune to healthy feedback, but successful pushback against the particular nonsense of this regime is still the most important tactic in fighting it. BJ said that voting isn't particularly meaningful as a tactic, and I agree. "Influencing" (even if you hate the word) is where the battle is fought.
Pro-regime or anti-regime may be the relevant question, but most people do not understand that and are on team red/blue. They believe there is a fundamental difference between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell (even though both believe Ukraine is the most important thing happening and neither want to slow down the spending). I think they even look similar
You as an individual voting, do not matter. Influencing other people to vote correctly and subsequently create an incentive structure that rewards decent politicians is useful. It's still the voting that matters. I disagree wholeheartedly that is does not matter who governs. I do think you rarely get a good choice. Ron DeSantis is my proof that it matters. From fixing Florida's voting problems to hurricane response, to telling the longshoreman union they don't get to hold the nation hostage, he has changed Florida for the better. When I lived in NC, I never saw a fundamental difference based on election outcomes. One system servant versus another isn't really a big deal.
Your argument is essentially the explanation of why capitalism/free markets work. When people suffer the consequences/enjoy the benefits of their decisions, they learn to make better decisions.
I know people who do NOT think men can become women; but who nevertheless harbor intense, seemingly irrational hatred for Trump.
As a lukewarm Trump supporter, I can understand them. Trump makes the people that love him and hate him behave irrationally. The people that think he's going to fix everything are as irrational as the people the believe he's a dictator (who left office) and is going to set up a dictatorship for life (what 10 years?). Being a dictator is hard work. That's not something you try at 80 years old.
With people that are blinded by love or hate, you have to avoid discussing the personality that causes the blind spot.
"Feelings don't trump facts" says Ben Shapiro.
He couldn't be more wrong.
Feelings always win arguments with facts, which is why when you recognize that your counterpart is using feelings, you have to counter the feelings, not use facts. One good way of countering them is trolling, which diffuses dumb emotions by making people embarrassed about them.
Have we ever had a presidential candidate who was a good Twitter troll?
Sure. No specific claim is required of those who believe that truth is subjective.
The phrase "The Left eats its own" derives from the fact that different people who believe in using sophistry to empower themselves will inevitably come into conflict with each other, even though they share the methodological foundation.
Yes. Because leftism is an ideology that revolves around obtaining political power.
That is the heart of it, much moreso than most people are willing to say plainly. In the TV show "House", the title character repeatedly asserts that "everybody lies", and because the show is about making him look brilliant, the plots keep proving him right. "Words are power constructs", "History is written by the victors", "Truth is subjective", "X is a social construct" and other phrases common among left-wing people all boil down to asserting that there are no real moral rules and no sincere principles, and that sophistry is just another tool in the pursuit of the only thing that really matters to anyone, which is power.
No wonder they loved Game of Thrones.
I should backtrack to defining "left-wing", though, because at this point it seems more like these are traits that tempt EVERYONE, and I think that's true. People default to tribal, selfish behavior, and the more that dominates, the worse off everyone is. Nobody perfectly, consistently adheres to principles like "property rights", "free speech", et al, but the more we do, the better things get. The problem is that these things are Prisoner's Dilemmas - everyone is individually better off violating them.
I define the right/left spectrum in terms of what is most meaningful in practice by far, and that is respect for property rights. More of it means further right, and less of it means further left. The GROUP benefits of respecting property rights are astronomical, but the Prisoner's Dilemma always applies; violating others gives you an advantage regardless of what others do.
The people we call "left-wing" don't just "slip up" occasionally with regard to property rights. They openly despise them. They rationalize their disdain in many different ways, including technocracy, utopianism, various bigotries, or the aforementioned "everybody lies" notion that principles are for stupid children. They don't hesitate to take the greedy option in the Prisoner's Dilemma because they are quite sure that everyone else will.
And they're usually right about that last part.
The people we call "right-wing" do not perfectly follow their stated principles, but they actually mean to. They don't justify "breaking a few eggs" to make omelettes that never actually exist. They don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They abhor sophistry. Jon Stewart doesn't make them laugh; he appalls them.
All of these traits exist along bell curves, of course, but the fact that they're not absolute does not mean that they don't matter. A lot.
I go even a bit deeper than 'property rights,' to the level of defense of self and family. My 'test' is pretty much Second Amendment oriented.
If you want to take my most effective tool away for defense of self and family merely because it 'offends your sensibilities,' and you think that removing all firearms from normally law abiding people will cure all crime, then you are a fool, and I will everything in my power to oppose you.
There is a difference between globalism and globalization. The former is support for concentrated supranational authority, the latter is overall support for more international trade. A lot of people don't like either but still conflate them.
Wow. This would make a great conversation over beers. Not so much here in the comments...
As your resident liberal, first I take offense (in a lighthearted way) that you think we don't actually know all this already. It's pretty obvious why people vote for Trump, and my understanding is that it falls more or less along the lines you've stated. I think you've missed one large group - those that think he'll actually achieve the things he promises - but maybe you're right that no one believes him. :shrug:
Your viewpoint is extremely hopeless, and I wonder if you consider yourself a patriot, given that you believe the American system has failed completely. One way I've seen Democrats explicitly differentiate themselves from Republicans is that Dems see a broken system and want to fix it. Republicans want to break it more so we have to dismantle it. Having personally seen places where "rule of law" isn't a thing, I prefer to stay on the side of trying to make things incrementally better (although I do have a vision for what I would consider a radically better way - I just don't think we'll get there through f-you votes).
People on the left have long railed against the military industrial-complex and the forever wars, as one aspect of "The Regime". It's not a MAGA-only concern. We do, however, see in Trump a strong possibility of undoing the things that we consider to be GOOD about America, and prefer The Regime to him, as you stated.
>>As your resident liberal, first I take offense (in a lighthearted way) that you think we don't actually know all this already.<<
I know many highly intelligent liberals who do not know any of this. This article was a synthesis of a two day long Slack "argument" with one such liberal, who still does not understand it, or doesn't seem to believe it.
>> I wonder if you consider yourself a patriot,<<
I'm allergic to indoctrination schemes, be they religious, social, or national.
>>Dems see a broken system and want to fix it. Republicans want to break it more so we have to dismantle it.<<
I too have seen liberals claim this, but this is not what I saw happening in 2020, so I question the veracity of their claims.
>>People on the left have long railed against the military industrial-complex and the forever wars,<<
This ended sometime around 2008.
Ok, I'm probably a pretty high-information (w/r/t politics) person, so it depends on your in-group. Anyone who actually wants to understand has already figured this out.
What did you see happening in 2020?
I guess I you have a point about 2008. At the time, in 2016, the one thing I liked about Trump was that he wasn't into finding new wars.
In 2020 I saw riots, property damage, and death equivalent to approximately a category 2 hurricane that would have gotten worse instead of abated if the liberals didn't win. That's not fixing a broken system.
At any rate, true or not, we're talking about very different things here. Property and protests are not "the system". You could replace the President with a dictator, flush out all resistors from the system, undo all the checks and balances, and not break a single window. I'm sure the protestors would in response, but, ironically, in support of "the system". Until they're no longer allowed to protest.
Please explain.
"Dems see a broken system and want to fix it. Republicans want to break it more so we have to dismantle it."
This is the rhetoric that Democrats use in campaigns, mainly during the 3-4 months prior to elections. The rest of the time, they say America is the worst country in the world and needs to be fundamentally transformed and its Constitution is the problem and so on and so on.
You call yourselves "progressive" (change everything for change's sake) and condemn your opponents as conservatives ("don't change anything").
So no, you are not correctly describing which side wants to fix things and which wants to destroy them. Rather (and I keep meaning to write a large essay on this), your kind think that the secret sauce that makes America great is your bureaucratic regime, while right-wing people think it's the founding principles of the country, including individual liberty, property rights, and free markets. Each side wants to fix/preserve/expand the things that it believes are America's secret sauce, and each view's the other's priorities as grave threats to its own.
I disagree that it's an election-time rhetoric - Reagan's "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" is a decades-old philosophy. Trump explicitly chose heads of departments that completely disagreed with the mission of the department.
I haven't heard Democrats saying the problem with America is the Constitution - we may be talking to different people there. I do believe that we're meant to have a "living Constitution". Progressiveness isn't for its own sake - it's generally a recognition of two things: there are things that need improvement, and we live in a world of constant change. Being conservative isn't inherently bad, either, other than perhaps being inflexibly conservative means you fail to recognize that times change. I'd consider the Democrats the conservatives in terms of the current election: we want to preserve the mechanisms of government to the best we can from the Trump-era erosions.
I also disagree that people on the left don't believe in the founding principles of the country (they're called "Liberals" for a reason, after all). It's just that the interpretation and relative importance of those principles are quite different.
Please reread the last paragraph of the post you're replying to. Each side has a different idea of what America's secret sauce is, and each is trying to preserve/fix/expand that and views the other as tearing it down.
You've responded as though there is universal agreement that the federal bureaucracy IS America and is the only thing that we could possibly expand or "destroy". Once again, this severely undercuts your claim about understanding people who vote differently than you do.
Finally, citing your camp's bastardization of the term "liberal" is as silly as having the hubris to call yourselves "progressive". All of the criticism of America's founding principles that exists in this country is in your camp.
"Trump explicitly chose heads of departments that completely disagreed with the mission of the department."
That is exactly what turned me into a Trump supporter way back in 2017. I don't know if I fit any of the categories here, because my support of Trump is purely policy/results oriented. I'm happy with him to the extent he opposes the administrative state(the letter agencies).
Great! I'm glad when politics takes the form of policy vs. form or tribalism. I can't respect anyone that votes for him because he makes jokes about the libs. I disagree with you, but I can at least respect that you see how things work and want them to change in some way. The rest is for in-depth conversations over beer...
Reagan's words resound today with FEMA telling private volunteers to shut down their rescue operations in western NC due to lack of a permit.
Government was the problem then and is the problem now.
Listen to John Kerry talk about how the first amendment is a roadblock to shutting down information he disagrees with. Find me a Democrat that doesn't want to violate the second amendment. If fact, the Democrat run establishment has violated or attempted to violate all of the bill of rights with the exceptions of amendments 3 and 7.
Don't conflate classical liberalism with the Marxist ideology the current Democrat party represents. Conservatism and Liberalism on this side of the pond represent something much different than in Europe. Conservatism here is not conserving the monarchy, but rather the classical liberalism on which the country was founded.
Democrats do want to conserve something. It's the power structure that benefits them. Are you really claiming they are conserving democratic processes by:
Attempting to jail their opposition
Attempting to remove their opposition from the ballot
Engaging in censorship
Running a shadow government beyond the reach of voters or even identification- if you believe Joe Biden is making decisions, you are insane
Circumventing any pretense of democratic process by selecting a new candidate without any voting. When the nomination occurred, I had received the same number of votes as Kamala in the primary process: 0.
>Attempting to jail their opposition
>Attempting to remove their opposition from the ballot
>Engaging in censorship
Interesting. It's pretty incredible the information environment we live in these days. The fact that we can try to run a democracy at all these days looking like a bunch of Spider-Men pointing fingers at each other is tragic. I look forward to a day when we can debate based on shared facts, but until then I don't think we're going to get much done here. Needless to say, I disagree with every one of the points you made above, EXCEPT that Kerry said something VERY STUPID that I would never condone.
So you deny that the FBI showed threatened people to enforce government censorship? Weird that you know more than the people that run social media companies and have had visits from the FBI. You do know that the Biden corruption story was censored by FBI pressure. The FBI had the laptop for a year before the NY Post got the story. They knew it to be genuine and provided propaganda (51 system stooges, er "Intelligence Officers") and a silencing effort (censorship). John Kerry stated the position of the System. "We want to get enough power to crush any dissent."
The coordinated effort by DOJ staff and the WH to prosecute Donald Trump because the system did not think their candidate could defeat him electorally is obvious. Why did they wait until the election cycle to attempt to start 4 trials?
I live in one of the states that attempted to remove him from the ballot, for an alleged crime he had never been charged with. Based on that, I feel comfortable having you deprived of your rights due to my charge that you have engaged in child trafficking. Unfair because you haven't even been charged, much less convicted? True. Effective? Also true.
Trump is not the sole target of the System for selective punishment. Eric Adams (who I don't care for) is being punished for relatively minor corruption charges (especially for NYC) because he spoke out against the system regarding illegal immigration. The message is clear- Get in line or we will punish you. Joe Biden has been recorded telling well documented stories of improper use of power that happened to benefit his business enterprise.
How many votes did Kamala receive in the primary process? 0. Same as me. You can deny reality all you want. It still exists. I have to admit I stole that line from Cenk Uygur and modified it for my purposes. His original line was, "I have more votes for president than Kamala Harris and I'm not legally qualified for the position."
Glad to hear you don't condone what John Kerry said. What are your thoughts on thinking it and acting on it like the rest of the System?
I could point out much more malfeasance on the Trump side, but it's not worth the time. The bottom line that we should agree on is that politicians are corrupt. The more we can do to strengthen it, the better.
Republicans go on and on about "the deep state". It's "the deep state", i.e. people that show principles above party affiliation, that stopped Trump corruption efforts in the past. Republicans are doing their best to replace them with party sycophants so they can erode those checks much more effectively if he gets back into power.
I'm all for sending to jail anyone if the accusations can be proven in front of a jury. Unlike the cult of personality that is Trump, Democrats would have NO problem sending Biden or anyone else to jail if they're proven corrupt: Menendez and Adams can go to hell, or jail, for all we care. If you think Republicans are the party of truth and righteousness, look at how they treated Santos.
You say the prosecution is selective, and I know to some degree it is (there is prosecutorial discretion, at a minimum), but the argument is for MORE prosecution of corruption, not less. Meanwhile Trump's Supreme Court just said bribery is ok, and the President is free to commit crimes - how's that for sticking to founding principles?
Re: Kamala Harris, party candidate choices were never required to be democratic. They slowly evolved that way over time. Personally, I'm glad it worked out the way it did because there was no time for costly in-fighting, but I can see why other people might be pissed. Republicans scream "anti-democratic" while picking their own voters via MASSIVE gerrymandering (yes, Democrats play at that game too, but historically much less so), a practice fully sanctioned by once again the Republican Supreme Court. Republicans have played so many anti-democratic games with voting in the last 8 years (and beyond) that this complaint about Harris is almost quaint. She still has to win the national vote, but guess what? There's a plan by Republicans, as there was in 2020, to toss the decision to the House, where Trump will win by NUMBER of states that support him, not by population represented. How's that for democratic?
Update, one of my very smart liberal friends posted my article on his Facebook wall and none of his liberal friends could even engage in the topic meaningfully. All they did was fingers-in-their-ears the entire thing. So seriously, no, I don't think the liberals know any of this.
Lol
I want the system to work for me. You want the system to work for you. From your perspective, I want to "break it more".
I'm not sure that we're talking about the same thing. Changing the rules to benefit one group over another is just part of the process, and I'm all for it, assuming it's done on good faith. Defunding the EPA, removing regulations just because "regulation = bad", eliminating the Department of Education entirely without any evidence something better will take its place are examples of "breaking it more", and not really so that the system works better for another group. It looks to me like a Reaganesque "government is bad" approach that begs the question of why you want to be there in the first place. To contrast, Democratic regulation has aggravated the housing situation in a way that can't be ignored - it's a problem that needs to be solved, probably by removing certain Democratic regulations. Government should be an iterative process of problems and solutions, not one that we give up on entirely.
"eliminating the Department of Education entirely without any evidence something better will take its place are examples of "breaking it more""
The DoE has had nothing but negative impact since it began operating in 1980. Nothing "better" needs to "take its place". It's a bad thing, and removing it is addition by subtraction.
You claimed in your initial post that "It's pretty obvious why people vote for Trump", but every Democrat I ever hear does nothing but get it wrong.
I shouldn't have used the DoE as an example, since it's a subject I honestly don't know enough about to debate. The U.S. should be better on world rankings than it is, but it's not a complete disaster. I'd be interested to hear how getting rid of the department would fix things, as opposed to fixing its current problems.
The US was #1 in all of those rankings at the time that the DoE was created, so a low-effort analysis could conclude that undoing the change would restore that ranking.
A higher-effort analysis would note that the DoE has never attempted to do anything that improves averages in math, reading, science, etc, as it has only ever had left-wing ideological objectives, and those objectives represent trade-offs vis-a-vis traditional educational goals. It should be obvious that adding new content to curricula would have to displace something, and that something is classical education.
There are a lot of areas of life where the best bang-for-buck path to improvement is not addition, but subtraction.
Like... bureaucracy.
"eliminating the Department of Education entirely without any evidence something better will take its place"
Nothing needs to take it's place. It's been around for 40 years and education has not improved. It is completely unnecessary, thus an easy department to axe.
What does the DoE do?
It dis-incentivizes education. There are more nefarious reasons, but the easiest one to understand is because if education improves, they get less in their budget (less problem, less funding).
This is because the first and only real purpose of a bureaucracy is to insure the existence of itself, job security for it's staff, and an expanding scope and power.
This applies to every bureaucracy.
Have you read Peter Turchin on elite overproduction? Our university system has expanded well beyond the capacity of the market to supply graduates with the types of jobs they were promised. Besides, there is also the lipstick on a pig issue- whilst I am sure that Scott Galloway is right in his belief that elite universities should expand the horizons of the less an extraordinary, this generosity becomes insanity when extended to 50% of the population.
Anyway, Peter Turchin expected a high degree of polarisation. Some would benignly believe they wanted more government to help people, when the real motive is/was jobs with 'impact' for themselves, or people like them. The second group would want less government in a period of scarcity- although this anti-establishment ethos doesn't apply to healthcare, direct transfers, resource reallocation in the event of national emergencies, or (oddly) programs where the government worker serves the public, rather than deigning to reign over them (meals on wheels are popular, even in the reddest of states).
The proletariat are correct on this one. The Left should want something along the lines of Australia- with ample social safety nets and universal healthcare, but with significantly lower levels of public employment than America, once federal, state and local are accounted for. The mistake is thinking that the haemorrhaging of blue collar support for the Democrats is inevitable. A plan to cut government bureaucracy as a means of extending public healthcare on issues like EMT funding could quite easily give one party a twenty year monopoly on power. Nobody should have to pay 3,000 dollars for a potentially life-saving ambulance, and if it means sacrificing a few paper pushers and rubber stampers then it's probably worth it.
"Vote for whoever you think will be more entertaining. I also suggest preparing for a future when the façade fails." < like how?
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical
Build anything that you think you might want in the future.
Find a neighbor that has a food supply, and hates guns.
Lots to argue with, fact-wise, but great presentation of the thinking processes. My side very much frames things in terms of saving democracy (as you might have noticed!) which seems like a good goal, although maybe not from others' (including your) perspective. That's the hard thing for us to understand: why would people risk an autocracy? Authoritarian upbringing?
(Added to the fact that Trump is a doddering fool, of course.)
I will just add that underlying this difference of viewpoints is the rise of financial inequality and the status competition that comes with it. But that's a topic for another time.
I mean I have heard all about Biden's diabolical dictatorship from my Republican friend (is referring to "my Republican friend" as cringe as talking about "my black friend?")
No, I don't think so. Maybe if you're a fire-breathing militant leftist, it is, but I don't curate my friend groups based on their political beliefs and I don't think anyone else should either. That is to say, I don't keep people around just because I agree with them, so I also don't feel the need to cut them off just because they said something I don't agree with. If that's what a person's friendships and social interactions are based on, I'd tell them they need some actual friends of substance. Having other people in your life who see things differently than you do is important. It keeps you intellectually honest, and it reminds you that we all have much more in common than not, at the end of the day.
Totally agree. I have a few friends who are Not-Republicans in name only. They like to call themselves Independents. I call them conservative fellow travelers. I consider myself lucky to have found some people with different views here in the SF Bay Area. Some of my liberal friends are quite puzzled that I want to interact with a Trump supporter.