“'Orange Man Bad' is the 'Buy index funds' of political commentary.
Any idiot can repeat it, and it beats more sophisticated analysis virtually every time. People who talk themselves into deviating from the simple strategy always looks silly. It's undefeated.” - captured it nicely IMO
Nevertheless, I like this quote from the current essay, which has an insight I haven't seen expressed so nicely: "he brings grifters and opportunists in his wake, he drives out people of character and integrity, and he forces everyone else to twist around his presence."
Of course that leads to the everlasting question of the id-motivated voters. Apparently people who are essentially "honest" but vulnerable to emotional exploitation can also be the target of scams. But it also makes me wonder to what extent this was true of H...r.
It’s incontrovertible that index funds outperform active management _in_the_aggregate_.
What all that research doesn’t take into account is the unreliability of various forms of personal wealth management and insurance vs others.
It’s less “DIY lifehack” and more like “trying to buy a home without a realtor - doable, but difficult, and you can make major pitfalls if you’re just going off some jackass internet article”.
The relationship some people have to trump isn’t really that of a voter to a traditional politician but a lonely kid to an influencer. It’s an obsession born of emptiness and longing. It’s a way for people to belong and to experience the most unifying, terrifying and beautifully tragic of human experiences, the experience of unrequited love.
This is true for his supporters and his most dedicated haters. His triumph in 2016 provided meaning and purpose for the disaffected right and also the disaffected left.
And this is why sports teams like the Dallas Cowboys and Notre Dame football get oodles of prime TV windows regardless of their performance--even more people tune in in hopes of watching them lose.
And the Yankees, Dodgers, UNC Tarheels, and Duke Blue Devils. I don’t know enough about hockey, pro basketball, or soccer to put more names on the list
It's kind of a perfect storm of neediness on his part and the "emptiness and longing" that Bo describes, on both the right and left as you point out. Such a destructive cycle for everyone, including those of us who just want it to be over.
Agreed, as one who just wants it to be over and have some nice normie politics that run smoothly behind the scenes.
Solving the problem of all the lonely people (Tm Paul McCartney) is going to be a tougher lift, but I think, necessary, or we are going to keep getting Trump-like figures and Q cults and other hate groups and leaders who suck in the disaffected. Latter-day Eleanor Rigbys think Trump or someone like him will provide them with the acceptance and belonging they don’t have. Love-bombing by proxy, if you will.
I’m reminded of an article by Michaeleen Doucleff in the latest NPR about dopamine and how it’s not just the feel-good motivation chemical, it can compel us to keep on doing things that make us miserable just for that dopamine hit. Doucleff was talking about things like screen time and cupcakes for her kid, but I think her point could apply to doomscrolling and hate-reading as well. Here is the article: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/12/1180867083/tips-to-outsmart-dopamine-unhook-kids-from-screens-sweets
I'm not sure this exactly correct, or maybe I misunderstand the definitions.
It appears to me that (among liberals) the "disaffected left" are the most positive (least anti?) towards Trump because, to them, the Democratic Party is the main baddy.
Not to say that Trump didn't provide purpose for liberals, but I think it was of the more normie variety.
Among my friends the Elon fans break into two groups -
A. Excited he is owning libs and don’t care about anything else
B. They own TESLA stock and, though they like Elon, are pissed he has gone on this “chose your lib owning adventure” mid life crisis twitter obsession. They want him to go back to core business/engineering stuff, let someone else own the libs.
I'll admit, a part of me thought it would be entertaining to see him "own the libs". I just didn't realize how bad he would be at it. Even the memes and jokes he retweets are terrible.
Yeah, to be honest, MY does a better job of owning the libs on actual matters of substance than many of the esteemed billionaire right wing take havers. Matt actually thinks about problems and how to solve them, that just leads to a better quality of owning.
It's baffling. I know lots and lots of very smart conservative people (mostly fellow engineers) who can speak intelligently on a number of subjects, but who are somehow 100% in the Trump camp.
I think the steady diet of Fox News and having that info reinforced by living around a lot of other conservatives who agree with them is the main culprit. Standard but strong echo chamber.
And this is two-bit psychoanalyzing, so salt required, but most of them are older and generally seem to hold on to the 'I don't recognize my own country any more and I cannot or will not accept that, and I will do whatever I can to fix it' view.
And somehow, through a mechanism I don't understand, that leads them to support the Bad Orange Man.
I think there's an engineering mindset that's maybe a bit neurodivergent, which is intellectually prone to conspiracy theories. It may be related to an over-reliance on scientific reasoning which really isn't quite scientific: applying logic to an accepted premise without being aware of how one's internal biases warp the logic, or even initially being aware of how one's internal biases lead to selecting topics of interest (i.e. certain "attractive" conspiracy theories) in the first place. Also two-bit psychoanalyzing, but based on a recent, rather excruciating friendship.
This is different from normal-IQ, less educated MAGA voters. And then there are also the single-issue voters or those who will hold their noses and vote for whomever can succeed with policies they believe in such, as lowering taxes or abortion. (Individuals of course can display various combinations of these aspects.)
The engineer (n.b., am engineer) is well-trained to identify and then neglect terms that can be neglected, reducing a horribly complex problem to its most salient bits to make it tractable for analysis.
It's not hard to see how, if you squint, you can get into a verrrrry bad habit of seeking out confirmation bias.
This is spot on; I have always thought about it in terms of how many linux programmers seem to be libertarians.
It seems like there is something about the training or work that reinforces strong expectations about coherence and eschews ambiguity, while emphasizing that the only real limitation to anyone is their personal investment in academically understanding of how something works.
Yeah, I think there is something to the engineering mindset, or maybe systems-optimizing mindset, that leads some people into weird places.
I notice it myself sometimes, wherein I may despise many/most of the values of (for example) the CCP, but when I consider the system they are trying to create, it seems like it should work and be fairly durable, so I can accept it as somewhat valid.
Whereas when I consider groups that have more similar values to myself overall, but who are trying to create systems that I don't think would function well or would be unstable, I usually consider them invalid.
I guess maybe some conservative engineering types may see a overall more conservative US as an acceptably functioning system regardless of the president.
So if they think Trump will get the system to where it needs to be, they can accept all the BS that he brings with him and embodies.
But even then, they should be capable of realizing that he cannot get us to that end point. Because he won't win the election. And even if he did, the backlash makes it counterproductive.
We may be talking about different mindsets, with the systems-optimizing mindset being something quite different and possibly even inaccessible to those who somehow see systematic relationships where they can't possibly or very improbably exist (which might in itself be a definition of a "conspiracy.") I wonder if what you consider an "invalid" or "unstable" system is one where people have jumped to conclusions and taken shortcuts in their reasoning since they weren't willing to go through the risk /possible unintended consequence stage. (Which is why we're here: Matt is good at pointing out all the complications and wait-a-minutes.)
I was talking about "an" engineering mindset that I've observed in acquaintances (it extends beyond engineers as well.) I'm also quite familiar with the more generic, flexible engineering mindset, having gained a gene that allows me to recognize it even though I could never be one myself. (The genes: my dad had a Berkeley EE and worked for Hughes, but always said he was a better manager than engineer. I get exactly what he means. Fortunately we make pretty good programmers, not just me but my cousins and nephews.)
I know a lot of people like this among the highly educated right. Interestingly they are often the exact same personalities as those who end up being DSA types, just with a couple different core beliefs that leave them with an essentially opposite utopian belief system
Let me explain the mechanism. Your conservative engineer friends prefer how the country's culture used to be! Let's see what them liking Trump would have to do with that:
1) Trump prefers more controls on immigration. Immigration has made the country "less white." In the old days it was more "white."
2) Trump prefers a society which is "Less Woke." In the old days, the country was "less woke."
3) Trump prefers less "economic globalization." In the old days, the US had a better manufacturing base, before the US oligarchs shipped a lot of the manufacturing jobs overseas.
I could keep adding to the list, but do you see a pattern here?
How do they ignore Jan 6th? For that matter how they ignore the current indictment? Are they just sealed in an j do bubble and willfully ignore all inconvenient truths ?
My understanding is that there is a very solid number of conservatives who either literally don't know than Jan 6th happened, don't believe it really happened, or think it was basically not a big deal and that the liberal media made up all the violence as a takedown of Trump. A lot of right-wing media essentially did not seriously report on the event at all. Remember how many Republicans apparently still believe that Trump won the election.
Some people are fanatics, but most people think that rioting and trying to overthrow the government is bad. If they are told that such a thing happened, they are not going to want to believe that Their Side did it. When the sealed information ecosystem is already established, as it is on the right, it's very easy to convince people that stuff they don't want to believe isn't true.
I have a very strong intuition that it’s a bit more complicated than that, and that people must be *willingly* misleading themselves, to an extent at least. Not sure if that’s a more optimistic or pessimistic idea. In any case I may well be wrong.
I think some probably are. With the sheer number of people we're talking about here it's always more complicated. I have enough anecdotal evidence to know that the sorts of folks I'm talking about exist, but I have no idea how many there are. My own understanding of/interpretation of human psychology probably leads me to think that there are a lot more of them than many people do, but I ultimately don't know!
I think most conservatives think that Jan 6th was spurred on by FBI plants (like Ray Epps, which is factually true he was there spurring them to storm the building). And that Nancy Pelosi denied requests for capitol police backup (which is factually true she did deny backup requests for hours during the fighting outside) in order for the Dems to have a Reichstagg moment to tar the republicans. Theres also the video evidence of police officers letting in many protestors and purposefully guiding Qanon Shaman inside the building and opening doors for him. So most conservatives think it was a manufactured/exacerbated event that Dems allowed on purpose to paint republicans as terrorists so that they could undermine democracy. Thats what the videos seem to display, imo
If you disagree with me thats totally understandable, but if you doubt my claims please look them up and watch the video evidence or the hearings theyve had on capitol hill since then. Its all on C-Span and youtube. Forbes Breaking News is a good youtube to watch capitol hill testimonies/hearings.
I thought the first line positively oozed catharsis (although I would have phrased it "a scumbag" rather than forgoing the second indefinite article :P)
I also don't get why Matt says that "[i]t long ago became 'cringe'", it's long seemed like all the cool kids know and want to say this, and in this case, the cool kids are also the righteous kids.
We may be looking at different Twitters! Weird Twitter, Chapo Trap House, these guys persistently mock the idea that Trump’s personal badness is important and something to get upset about.
Chapo Trap House's entire schtick is appealing to guys who aged out of arguing about atheism on the internet. More than anything, they need to feel smart.
I'm convinced that Trump sincerely believes--that it's the one thing he sincerely believes in--is that life is abuse or be abused. He could have avoided the indictment so easily by playing "Oops, I goofed, I'll return them now." But anything other than complete dominance feels like complete submission to him. I've known people like that, and know what happens when they have power.
Trump's supporters know he's an abuser, and have convinced themselves that he'll only abuse the people they want him to. Even putting the evidence Matt cites aside, he literally put Mike Pence's like in danger!
Very famous economically-anxious Ohio voter in a diner, or whatever, but it's almost verbatim: "The problem is that he's not hurting the right people".
I remember this quote well because I always thought that it perfectly summarizes the motivation of Trump voters. It's not about helping your tribe, it's about hurting the people outside of it.
I knew quite a few people who believed he wouldn't run for president against after 2016, because he was obviously so unsuited to the job and so miserable doing any part of it that wasn't putting on rallies. I always knew that he would run, because to not run would be to admit defeat, and that's unacceptable to him. (I think this is true even without the factor of him wanting to be president to avoid prosecution and prison.)
I assume a lot of Trump voters don’t pay close attention to politics outside the Trump show: even if they followed the midterms they may not have the sense that the GOP should have done much better, or why it didn’t.
I also see a lot of "why would you say Trump did poorly in the midterms, he won over 300 elections!", which is some meme they picked up on about how *technically* Trump endorsed 300-something candidates and only a dozen or so lost.
I don't think you're supposed to count the ones that you endorse after the election is decided. Then again, perhaps that's why I am not winning elections.
I think it's deeply visceral and emotional. If Trump wins that shows that they are God's Righteous People and if Trump loses that shows how dark and demonic the forces arrayed against them are and how they need someone like Trump to keep fighting the holy fight.
A lot of Republicans don’t think that Republicans actually lost. Many of them think that Democrats stuff ballot boxes and make fake vote until they have just enough to win.
When Hillary Clinton lost, Democratic voters accepted that she lost (even if they consoled themselves with the fact that she won the popular vote) and accepted that Democrats would have to do better to win power. But Republicans think the way back to power is exposing the voter fraud conspiracy.
She actually pressured the FBI to launch the fake russiahoax which is now confirmed to be knowingly false and pursued at her specific politic behest. Its in the Durham Report. So she tried to subvert Trumps presidency instead of accepting defeat
To me, the most deranged thing about the Orange Man as a cultural phenomenon is how his followers see him as some kind of epitome of masculinity. It's weird as fuck that at the same time that Josh Hawley is writing books about the need for a positive vision of masculinity, Republicans are slobbering all over this draft-dodging, germaphobic, selfish, vain, status-obsessed whiner---the antithesis of every masculine virtue that our culture has come up with over the last 100 years. Literally the only things about him that code as masculine are that he sexually assaults women and doesn't follow rules. Like what the hell?
They see the “rich, famous, has multiple trophy wives and mistresses, grabs ‘em by the redacted and gets away with it because he’s a star” and forget all the other things. It’s a problem when men (and anyone who wants to help men) latch on to the likes of Trump and Andrew Tate and go “these are role models!” I honestly think it speaks to how isolated people in general have become from each other. If you don’t have a positive role model of whatever sort in your immediate family (and GenZ and younger have been helicopter parented and cocooned into close family circles, without much contact from non-authority-figure adults) or perhaps a favorite teacher, well, who is left but Trump and Tate? I think age segregation does society no favors. I’m not all “pull your tweens and teens out of school and make them work in the salt mines!” But I think we are sorely missing third spaces where teenagers can mingle with unrelated adults as peers and people, and maybe get some real life and non toxic examples of How To Man or How To Woman or How To Functionally Adult.
The funniest thing about the Trump era is the anti-anti-Trump Republicans. People who are furious about the indictment because it makes it more likely Trump wins the nomination -- because GOP primary voters have no agency (or something).
Someday, we'll get a "All the President's Men: Part 2: Electric Boogaloo" that follows around Mike Pence, Lindsay Graham, and Ted Cruz, on all their disparate sycophantic paths, their series of Faustian bargains, and culminating with the January 6 insurrection.
I almost feel bad for these people because in a different political environment they wouldn't be total pariahs---just normal conservative politicians. But after a certain amount of self-debasement in the pursuit of power it is just too disgusting. Also it does seem like they had the perfect chance to end this nightmare after Jan 6 and they just....didn't. Unforgivable IMHO.
And they’re the same people who are best positioned to help take Trump down. They’d rather accuse Bulwarkers of grift and turn it all into a big game of anti-anti 3D chess, than just do the simple thing of opposing Trump.
I'll add that in some ways people like Rich Lowry are the saddest in the way they twist themselves into knots to sort of semi claim they are anti-Trump, but then turnaround and essentially defend almost everything he does.
Like to a degree I get it. Rich is editor of the National Review. He has a certain degree of responsibility to look after the magazine as a business concern. And once he saw what happened to The Weekly Standard, I'm sure that influenced the direction the magazine took post 2016. But man, it's hard not to see the cost to whatever intellectual credibility he (or other individual NR writers) once had.
David Frum, anything else aside, said it perfectly:
Donald Trump is a man of many secrets, but no mysteries.
He's not particularly hard to figure out. If you say nice things about him, he will like you. If you say anything critical of him, he won't. Whether you are are a Saudi prince, a talking head, a journalist, a fry cook, or a meth addict, that rule applies.
I have always thought that the secret of Donald Trump’s appeal isn’t exactly his ruthlessness. Ron DeSantis is ruthless. Ted Cruz is ruthless. Donald Trump is ruthless, but his appeal is a little different.
Apocryphally (?) during the 1936 presidential campaign, a worker was quoted saying that he supported the Democrats because “Franklin Roosevelt is the only president we’ve ever had who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
Likewise, Donald Trump is the only president we’ve ever had who understands that my DEI consultant is a son of a bitch. He seems to feel it in his bones. That’s why his speech is garbled, that’s why he’s mad all the time, that’s why he doesn’t have any serious governing ideas, that’s why he flipped off the DOJ and the National Archives. He’s just *frustrated* like you or me.
My friends who are Republicans cannot see that Trump was the *cause* of the things they dislike. BLM riots, the rise of DEI, more illegal immigration, backlash against policing, etc have all been in reaction to Trump. Get rid of him and the temperature goes down.
Maybe I'm wrong, though, and the temperature will never go down. I don't know if seeing DeSantis is being referred to as a KKK Grand Wizard at the Tony Awards last night is the fire spreading or just some random embers off to the side of the real fire. Regardless, I think Trump's departure is a necessary (and hopefully sufficient) condition for some return to more constructive politics.
I'm not sure if this accurately reflects the secular trends at work at the time. IIRC online social justice ascendancy is usually dated to having gained high salience circa 2014. Also here's the NYT talking about the shift to using "undocumented" rather than "illegal immigrant" from 2013, which is surely of a piece with the leftist mores you're characterizing as reactionary to Trump. At a minimum, the groundwork had been laid.
This sort of presumes that mainstream Democrats were going to tack hard woke absent Trump, and I don't see that. HRC had a reputation for being super liberal leftover from the first Clinton administration, but her coalition was mostly normie Obama Democrats who would have been fine plotting along as before if she had won.
I desperately, desperately hope that you're not wrong. He's pretty old and definitely unhealthy. I do fear some kind of martyr situation, but maybe the whole cult of personality will die with no actual person to fan the flames.
I think that overlooks the deep cynicism that Trump has cultivated so successfully--in the past many people believed the “system” was rigged but it was only a few fringe types that believed elections were fraudulent (hacked voting machines and all that), now a majority of one of the major parties seems to think that. The whole thing with COVID vaccines is a part of this cynicism/believing the worst of everyone in government, and it is one thing I don’t really blame Trump that much for since he did try (incompetently) to promote vaccination but found his people weren’t buying it. They didn’t need Trump to tell them vaccination was a deep state scam, there was already a whole universe of anti-vaxxers out there on the internet promoting that.
It's always been puzzling and amusing to me that the same people who don't trust government seem to think that corporations can do nothing wrong. (Maybe the Invisible Hand provides universal forgiveness to anyone seeking profit.)
Not exactly. The same people who believe in vaccine and other government conspiracies also hate the Davos crowd and "globalists." They do, however, like small-medium business owners.
I think the fire would spread with DeSantis because he has set himself up as anti-left, and the mutual victim complex feeds off the antagonism. I guess the question is whether regular people buy into it, which may not happen as much as with Trump.
Overall, Trump’s victory— over a moderate liberal opponent and after the presidency of a moderate liberal who disappointed high expectations—validated a lot of extremely pessimistic views of the US and its core institutions, as well as the demographic and occupational groups that supported him. And I think that this sort of deep, intractable pessimism is something that the sorts of left politics that don’t really fit into a constructive political program share.
I don’t realistically expect Republicans to do anything that relieves that sort of pessimism anytime soon. If a Romney or McCain type won the nod, it would help, but Trump will probably win the Republican nomination, and his strongest primary competitor, DeSantis, shares both Trump’s obsession with owning the libs and his general lack of baseline human decency.
Fortunately, though, I think that Joe Biden succeeding at governance and winning re-election probably will help convince more people that it’s possible to remedy and improve society through normal politics and governance. I think that to a certain extent, he’s already enjoyed some success at that.
The reason Trump won is bc most people realized by 2014 that the Democrats hate them and want to destroy America. So I dont think Trump changed anything about the Democrats agenda except for the speed and desperation of their subversive revolution
This may be correct, but immigration was kind of the DEI of its time -- the Overton window (including for the respectable, doesn't-want-to-be-excluded-from-cocktail-parties Republicans, i.e. every serious Republican primary contender other than Trump[1]) had coalesced and was beginning to crystallize (if it hadn't already) around "you can't oppose immigration [legal or otherwise], that makes you a *racist!*". Trump was basically the only R primary candidate who just flat-out did not give a shit about that particular respectability taboo (because he doesn't give a shit about *any* respectability taboo) and thus his capacity to cater to primary voters who cared about the issue but whose other would-be candidates couldn't do better than "illegal immigration is an act of love."
TL;DR: Trump not giving a shit about left-coded speech norms that are at least DEI-*adjacent* really was a comparative advantage in his 2015-2016 primary run.
[1] Just in case there's any doubt, "Donald Trump is a piece of shit and a scumbag" is a statement it would be difficult for me to agree more with.
I'm guessing you were too young to recall it at the time (no offense intended either implicit or explicit, and you probably paid more attention to the news than the average seven(?)-year-old, so maybe I'm wrong.) but Romney was actually *excoriated* for saying this in the mainstream press and media, for reasons that never made a ton of sense to me given that it seemed like a reasonable policy statement. Also note that this is Romney himself trying to tack back after having felt the need to declare that "we're not going to round people up" -- i.e., catering to exactly the respectability taboos I was invoking above.
The Romney saga arguably presages Jeb! et al. basically falling over themselves to try to be the weakest on immigration in 2015-2016. Also these speech norms really were real - see the NYT in 2013 (referring to a position the AP had already taken) on the shift from "illegal" to "undocumented."
But I think Trizzlor’s point is that what you said about Republicans not dating to oppose immigration was incorrect. Sure that was 2012, but you really think we wouldn’t find any anti-illegal immigration stances if we looked over Scott Walker or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaigns?
Rubio at least (whose campaign IIRC had by far the most legs of those three) was dogged by his support for comprehensive immigration reform while in Congress - part of the backdrop to the 2015-2016 Campaign was the series of failed, but bipartisan, attempts to get comprehensive immigration reform (including amnesty) through Congress in the wake of Romney's 2012 crash and burn (their ultimate failure leading to Obama's executive-centric approach to DACA / DAPA).
It's probably fair to say, however, that the rhetorical speech norm explanation is underdetermined inasmuch as (a lot) of Republicans simply didn't actually care about illegal immigration substantively and instead liked the pro-business amnesty proposals -- this, of course, meant that immigration enforcement had no credible Republican champion outside of Trump, but it's a different mechanism than the cocktail parties thing (likewise I think Jeb! probably really believed what he said and wasn't just catering to speech norms and/or the post-Romney Republican terror of antagonizing voters over harsh immigration stances). You're right that I overstated my case with respect to the R's.
"Rounding people up" is an implicit part of the enforcement of compulsory laws. It's literally what law enforcement is for - we just call it an "arrest" when it's one person at a time. The fact that Romney had to say he opposed it is already an implicit concession to the nonenforcement regime -- in principle, "rounding people up an deporting them" is what it means to even make illegal immigration a thing as long as deportation (rather than, like, a fine) is the remedy for it.
Ed.: Also the whole point is that then and now "opposing illegal immigration" actually *was* increasingly an opinion that it was not in vogue to express as everything got lumped under the general umbrella of "immigration" without distinction (sometimes as convenient shorthand, sometimes as a seemingly deliberately-eliding rhetorical choice in left- and center-left publications). Post-Trump it's more of a partisan divide but pre-Trump there's a reason he stood out from the remainder of the R field.
The point isn't DEI specifically, it's the HR-legal-team-consultant-complex that white collar workers hate more than they've ever hated their bosses. Not sure how broad that hate is across all categories of voters, but as far as white collar workers go, it's decent enough idea
Not all DEI is this, but there is a cottage industry of consultants that push alienating messages. One of those notions is that all racism is structural and that racism is inherent to American society. There are mandatory training seminaries to get talked at and told you are inherently a bad person due to immutable characteristics.
In higher ed, DEI seems to be the new greenwashing. More admins, no material change, faculty perform more unpaid labor.
The thing is, the claim that all racism is structural is exactly the sort of claim that *absolves* individuals of being bad people who hate minorities. And yet people hear it and think they are being accused of being bad people who hate minorities.
One of my main critiques of certain forms of CRT is that it robs people both of agency and their own responsibility for racism. Most people observe racism with intentionality and ascribe malice to it. The idea that it can be emergent or the product of social structures can be novel to many people, but it can also be argued for. But then again, many forceful advocates for the absolutist structural position skip the persuasion part and just assert their position is true.
It's a form of revealed truth, with an original sin (slavery), and failure to agree with the message signals one is complicit in perpetuating the original sin. Then again, all this stuff emerges from post-modernist Marxist scholars.
This is true in a logical sense, but actually-existing DEI often tries to have its cake and eat it too - “racism is systemic, and if you don’t agree with the very specific terms by which we articulate that phenomenon, you are a moral pervert.”
It might absolve them in a way, but the next step after that belief is widely accepted is to channel money from them to the minorities, purely on account of them being minorities.
It doesn't seem like the sort of comment/idea that has to be "right" or "wrong". It's quite obviously just a perspective on what's moving a percentage of voters or a portion of DJTs appeal. You don't have to view it as a full explanation for voting patterns that needs to be shot down.
Most of these people never have even encountered DEI training and online testing. Much less have they had to write a DEI statement when applying for a job.
I was perhaps being unclear. I was using DEI as a shorthand for “all that stuff [gestures vaguely] that liberals are doing.”
When I first made this bon mot back in 2018 or so, it was about Colin Kaepernick. Donald Trump is fundamentally and obviously upset about the same things Real Americans are, in a way that Ron DeSantis never could be.
(Or even if he’s not actually, the point is that that’s how it comes across. He’s a masterful showman.)
Maybe recently salient in the popular sense, but "Theory" (Critical Race Theory) in the universities has been growing for awhile. The guilt stuff was there in a diversity training we had in the 1990s (although some of us felt free enough to explicitly challenge some of the trainers' points.)
"PC" to some extent is super old. This includes also e.g. in casting. Most 90s cop shows had a strikingly unrealistically high proporiton of Black female judges, and every Disney channel movie from the periood had a trio of kids, only one of whom was a white male, and at least one of whom (typcialy two) was non-white. Nonetheless, the ideology morphed into something different circa 2015. Mainstream studios started race *swapping* in a systemic and a-symmetric manner, even as whites playing non-white (even in voice acting) became taboo, having non-white replace white became high fashion, including in blatantly anachronistic ways in historical dramas.
In culture and academia the modest AA and a polite PC of a previous era gave way to aggressive DEI bureaucracy and a stifling climate of fear where even opinions that 60+% of Americans agree with can get you fired and ostracized.
It is possible that DEI insanity of 2020 can been argued as the "child" of the 1990s stuff, but only as e.g. fascism of 1930s is the "child" of 18th cent. romanticism or some such, i.e. a "child," but not the same thing at all.
I agree - I think there was a shift from trying to address the issues in more common sense terms (quit discriminating in hiring, watch your language, we need more black people on TV [but only in small roles with authoritative characters]) to the application of late 20th century humanities to social justice ideologies, perhaps via very some fast and loose borrowing, probably because no one understands these thinkers very well. (Deconstructionism, structuralism, post-structuralism - I was out of academics and working real jobs by the time these came around.)
In the meantime, we have one of my favorite "mystery-fantasy" series: Rivers of London about a young, mixed-race police officer, written by an old Jewish guy but narrated for the audio books by a mixed-race Londoner who can do all the accents from various African lilts to old-school posh. Too good for anyone to ever cancel.
I don’t thinks you can describe “postmodernism” as “humanities ideologies” nor do I think that they have much to do with present-day wokery. But I may be wrong. I work in humanities academia and don’t claim to understand any of these (nor care much to either).
Back one million years ago when I was a grad student (okay, it was ca. 2012), my department started a diversity committee which started out innocuously (and it was emphasized to us that there was no proximate precipitating event for its formation). Its membership had been handpicked in a very opaque manner, which was a bit odd, but the first session went fine and it seemed okay.
The next session, though, went off the rails: we were presented with a student’s work (whose consent had not been secured for this purpose) in which the student wrote (specifically responding to a prompt) about observing a Black family purchasing items using food stamps that did not strike the student as particularly necessary. The student wondered if perhaps food stamps aren’t the best way to address poverty. That was it.
Or it should have been; instead, we were invited to ritualistically spit on the student’s work and perform our disgust of it. Very “struggle session in absentia” sort of thing. I take teaching - and respecting students’ intellectual journeys - seriously, so I very publicly and somewhat loudly shit a brick at this behavior. Fortunately, because it was 2012 (or so), I was only subject to some temporary awkwardness / mild shunning and not defenestration (plus, not a few people really agreed with me).
The point is, yes, the “CRT” thing has been around for a while, and at least up until 2016 it was possible, even as a snot-nosed grad student with zero clout, to oppose some of its more egregious applications without permanent damage to one’s reputation. Plus, I just sort of wanted to tell the story.
I don't agree with this characterization of DEI but I think the point about Trump's appeal is fundamentally right: ruthlessness is only part of it, the other part of it is empathy, which any conman knows is central to success. And that's the part that's most evidently missing from other Trump-era Republicans. Ron DeSantis may also delight in owning people you hate but if he doesn't care about you either what's the appeal? Millions of Americans are convinced that Trump cares sincerely about them and their problems, which is not true, but that's the con--he is exceptionally good at making his targets think otherwise.
“ In a video on homelessness released by his campaign, Trump says that "our first consideration should be the rights and safety of the hardworking, law-abiding citizens who make our society function.” And Trump criticized many cities' policies on homelessness for "making many suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few.”
As Matt would say - the normie position.
People don’t want grandma set out on an ice flow and they think they should lock up the crazies.
I think there is something to this. Trump is abnormal in a whole bunch of ways and is certainly millions of miles away from some every man. But he is also normal, or at least able to act normal, and express normal sentiments about various absurdities in our culture that few other politicians seem able to.
I think your reference to the sinister ‘DEI consultant’ is really poignant, because it really is just a grotesque redux of strategies that genuinely challenged oppressive systems. Trump obviously doesn’t care about DEI, but he’s managed to create this bogeyman that taps into a certain population’s existential fear that their place in the hierarchy is at risk or that someone is coming to ‘take what’s theirs’. It’s all nonsense of course, but it’s all oriented toward sustaining hierarchies rather than doing anything that would actually improve folks’ lives.
I'm about as woke as you can get (at one point during my 50th birthday party a couple months ago, I was in the minority due to being cis) and I think that most DEI training is a ridiculous waste of time.
Stop telling people not to sexually harass people and start telling people how the complaints process works and then actually follow it and fire somebody.
The consultants are ridiculous - because their job is fundamentally ridiculous, it's intended not for actually fixing racism and sexism within the company, it's intended to do something so they can say they have done something and to have a defence against lawsuits. So, of course, they are overly-self-confident jackasses, not people interested in a serious analysis of the problems and trying to solve them, but people who think that berating people to be better will fix things.
I find the DEI trainings I am required to do every year exactly as annoying as the trainings I am required to do about not using the department copier for my home lemonade stand, and the trainings I am required to do about not parking a university vehicle at the same strip mall as the porn shop. And I think they all come from the same place.
I retired before it was called "DEI", but yes, irksome: pretending that I haven't been sincerely thinking about racism-and-what-to-do-about-it all my life; trying to make me feel guilty for things I have no control over; and, now that I've studied it a bit, full of cognitive distortions that may actually be contributing to depression among certain sets of young people.
Same. I don't like them. I think they are an overall net negative, and I wouldn't be sad to see them go. However, anyone making them out to be central to today's politics needs to get a grip.
I think there is a use case for DEI trainings, and it's familiarizing people with workplace expectations they may not intuit, like "don't tell racist jokes" and "you can't date subordinates." (You might want people to intuit those norms but they don't always.) And to catch the minority of people who need to be told this explicitly, you need to make everyone do it, even if for most people it's wasteful and annoying.
The problem is when the goal is not just reinforcing the rules but becomes "reducing implicit bias," which there's no reason to think those trainings can do. That stuff is pandering and there's no incentive to do it well even if we knew how, which we don't.
A million years ago, as in, like 2010, we had things like what you describe that we usually called 'compliance' or 'code of conduct' training. They could be a little silly but I think did serve the very limited purpose of useful reminder to those that did not get the memo about appropriate behavior in the modern work place, and as fodder for some limited ass covering by corporate leadership (the existence of these trainings is virtually never determinative in the event of a lawsuit or investigation but it is better to have it than not). Going back to that would probably be fine, but as you note, is not going to advance whatever larger purposes the people who believe in this stuff see in it.
A lot of anti-harassment training is still like that and while I personally find it annoying I think it's probably socially useful.
Sort of in the same vein but with a broader scope, you could imagine workplaces wanting to train employees on things like: this is why some people put pronouns in their signatures and this is what you should do about it; here is how to ensure that your kosher or halal observant coworkers (or clients!) can eat at meals; here is a list of holidays you should check the calendar against when planning something; etc. As concrete and non-metaphysical as possible.
Yep - it's cultural awareness training! We do it before we go to a new country. Probably also a good idea to do it surreptitiously with co-workers from other countries, which might not be kosher in workplace training (don't cause your Korean colleague to lose face by questioning his conclusions directly; stuff about eye contact etc.)
There was one commenter on Alison Green’s Ask A Manager blog a while back who just *could not comprehend* that not everyone knew what many major non-Christian holidays were, or what various dietary laws entailed. “Sophisticated Sue” was all “but everyone knows when Ramadan is, duh! Everyone knows when Rosh Hashanah is, like, DUH! If they don’t, then they’re hicks and rubes and don’t belong in a nice workplace, they should go back to Iowa!” Really, I suspected a troll, because it was just too on the nose Well-Traveled Well-Educated Urban Sophisticate. Whatever, they got roundly smacked down by fellow commenters saying “yes, people need to check the calendar for major holidays, but no, not everyone knows all the major holidays from every religion, so there should be a checklist to refer to.”
Or, tl;dr, what you just said. There is basic concrete stuff that people can be trained on that will build immediate goodwill and won’t involve a whole bunch of exercises or navel-gazing.
So training about unacceptable *behavior* - quite different from training to make you feel a certain way or training that attacks you for being human because you have "implicit biases". (Sorry, I can't reduce them. I can just pay attention to when then become conscious and make sure they don't come out in words and deeds.)
It may be possible to reduce them by immersing oneself in a population for which you have such a bias so that there are many face-to-face, meaningful interactions. I'm an old lady and I have implicit biases against old ladies and old men. But when I talk to someone its influence disappears, because there's a real person across from me. (Sorry - been thinking about this a lot.)
Yeah, contact (and the right kind of contact) is probably the most well-validated way to reduce bias, but you can't make that happen in the workplace with a mandatory employee training program. I don't think DEI programs really intend to attack anyone for being human but people's tendency to perceive them that way is part of why they don't work well and it's the impact that counts here.
Superlike™️, and I wish I could superlike™️ this comment a bunch more times.
I'm not especially woke, though I do subscribe to the "live and let live" ethos discussed here last week. But my experience with HR, especially but not only in the NYC government, has been that they make people spend ridiculous amounts of time on stupid required training sessions - I was required to watch a cosmopolitan.com video about someone's "trans journey" - and they themselves spend zero amount of time actually warning/firing people who weren't doing work (including people literally sleeping onthe job, or in some cases actually breaking laws). Nor did HR, in my experience help people actually being bullied or harassed by more powerful people in the organization (not me, but multiple people I know). Just DEI and CYA all the time. I think the OP is onto something.
“it's intended not for actually fixing racism and sexism within the company, it's intended to do something so they can say they have done something and to have a defence against lawsuits.”
I don’t disagree with this, but “Capital is just using DEI as a hedge against litigation” is not the argument that the right is putting forward nor is it the reason ‘anti-woke-ism’ resonates with that base. *That* argument (more accurately, I’d suggest) portrayed DEI consultants and bureaucrats as toothless cogs in the profit-seeking machine where the real ‘son of a bitch’ is still the boss who is making empty gestures toward anti-discrimination that are just enough to protect profits without actually protecting people.
Yea but there's also the criticism that virtually every time someone tries to objectively study whether the modern version of DEI works it turns out not to actually be effective at preventing discrimination or discriminatory attitudes and at times makes them worse. Just because the right opposes it for reasons that aren't always sound on the merits doesn't mean liberals need to defend something that on its best days is so flawed that it doesn't even serve its own stated purpose.
I think it’s remarkable that you read a comment that started with ‘I don’t disagree that DEI serves primarily to defend against litigation’ and then interpreted that statement as ‘liberals need to defend it’.
What I'm responding to is your point about the leftist criticism of DEI (i.e. tool of capital for dodging actual accountability) being different from the criticisms from the right, many of which are indeed couched in specifically conservative cultural hang ups and at times outright moral panics. IMO the most sensible criticism is neither of those, but rather that the thing doesn't do what it is supposed to, even with the most generous assumptions about intentions.
Because those DEI guys are obviously phoney bullshit, the easy answer for me is that they are covering the boss's behind. But when you look at obviously phoney bullshit, it's easy to think that there must be something else behind it, and I can see how you go down a conspiracy hole, especially if you're (as a right-winger) not inclined to see business as a profit-seeking machine.
"especially if you're (as a right-winger) not inclined to see business as a profit-seeking machine."
Its not that they don't see businesses as profit-seeking, its just that they don't see that as bad. The general response I've heard is that "I'm profit-seeking, why would I expect my boss to be different."
There are two incredibly frustrating things about DEI to me:
1) its a monumental waste of time and actually does the opposite of what its supposed to do
2) HR is very focused on DEI and such, at the seeming expense of actually disciplining people who are doing shoddy work or not working at all. Have someone do a crappy job, the rest of the team is frustrated they have to carry their under performance, but be told that you have to give them more chances because they are a protected class or the diversity of your group will suffer if we let them go.
Sure, yes absolutely. That said, I think the specific subject matter of the DEI consultants’ “phoney bullshit” and the way it taps into not-so latent prejudice is part of the reason you don’t see the same level of vitriol directed at workplace safety consultants (who for bosses serve the same role as bulwarks against litigation).
You don't? I mean I saw a lot of articles in right-wing papers opposed to oppressive "health and safety" laws here. Seems to have dropped off since covid, but it was certainly part of the right-wing playbook until then.
I like your comment generally, but I'd like to note that your first sentence is rather cringe. It almost smacks of the "I have Jewish friends" apologia. The composition of your friends circle is neither here nor there in terms of your ideology, and your ostensible awareness of it, if anything, points in the other direction...
In my previous incarnation I was deeply involved in training foreign police, customs, and soldiers. I never understood why we professed to believe that training someone in a certain way was the same as them not doing any number of nasty things.
So it’s weird, I’ve always sort of disliked Trump since before his venture into politics. But even though I didn’t vote for him the first time or second time, after he first got elected, I didn’t think he was that bad. I was sort of tired of the typical politician, so I thought the criticism of him was overblown.
Yeah, I was wrong.
As a moderate, I can honestly vote for either party. So I sort of evaluate the person.
And I basically come to the decision that I will 100% base my vote on who I think would be a good boss. And I don’t mean a CEO, I’m talking about my immediate supervisor. That person that I have to directly work with Day after Day.
I would find Biden pretty annoying as a boss, but I could handle it there is no way that I could work for Trump… He is such an obvious bully, Backstabber, and the type of guy that would take credit for your work.
So yeah, orange man bad.
Dictated on my iPhone at a hotel in red deer, Alberta, Canada… Where the weather is Smokey.
This is why I tend to think, when the discussion comes up, that somewhat-right-coded fictional characters like Ron Swanson and Hank Hill would, at least over time, be disgusted with Trump rather than supporting him. (A trivial question but it comes up a lot in social media discussions.)
Obviously Ron and Hank would be never-Trumpers... both written has "principled conservatives" basically libertarians.
I have little hope for the majority of the Republican Party though. Even the somewhat more intelligent hard core Republicans value "owning the libs" or winning over any semblance of principled government.
I truly wonder how many former conservatives like me have become antipathic towards politics. I sort of just stopped following. I'd much rather discuss specific issues that are outside politics as a way of exercising my intellectual cravings.
Perhaps if Tim Scott makes a push in the nomination race I might re-engage, but otherwise... I just don't care.
I'm having trouble imagining a modern TV show writing a sympathetic Trump supporters, and I don't think it's necessarily because the writers are all in a bubble and can't imagine one; I think it's that modern TV shows can't write characters who are ignorant of politics, and the non-crazy Trump supporters I know all fall in that bucket.
I have family in upstate NY who are like that. Couldn't name a single supreme court justice, don't really have a sense of what Roe v. Wade did beyond something something abortion, couldn't explain the two houses of Congress, and don't vote in the midterms. Folks like that don't fit in the TV landscape in 2023.
I think TV shows can write non-political educated people, they just don't have their characters talk or mention anything about politics. The problem is Trump by his nature is political.
Makes me think of Frasier, where even the very few times when characters’ politics were relevant, it was in the vaguest way possible, and the show was the better for it (early on they did an episode where Frasier and Martin back, respectively, a liberal and conservative candidate for Senate, and they wisely did not go back to that well). I really hate this expectation that cultural production *must* be taking a political position in a more or less explicit way in order to be worthwhile (related: the impulse of showrunners to “say something” about the events of 2020, which led to a lot of really dumb TV).
True, but Trump wasn’t/ wouldn’t be your boss. You (we) were (would be) his boss, more or less.Biden (and even DeSantis) is someone I would hire under many circumstances. I would never hire Trump, even as a criminal co-conspirator.
>But for my money, the most morally shocking thing about Trump’s post-presidency is still the extent to which he sullenly refused to be a constructive player in promoting Covid vaccination in 2021.<
Thank you. I've spent countless (fruitless) hours arguing with selective-memory-equipped people on the internet about this. "But Trump once said in a speech that vaccines were good. And at a Mar-a-Lago wedding two years ago he bragged about Operation Warp Speed!"
Sure, once. Or maybe two or three times. Long ago. But after leaving office, he very quickly (and cynically) took to telling his followers what they wanted to hear (namely, antivax quackery). Not what they so desperately needed to hear (and would have followed him on). Dude has more American blood on his hands than anybody since Hồ Chí Minh.
This is why I always say Nixon-Trump comparisons miss something important
Nixon's lineage is the corrupt politician who has a set of sincere policy objectives which he pursues using criminal methods that will also allow him to profit. For Nixon the profit was primarily winning the next election with more side money. Nixon's is a more corrupt, criminal version of the politician LBJ was.
Trump's lineage, as Matt explained well today. is that of the corrupt conman in search of marks whose only objective is personal profit. For Trump that is $$$ and fame. He has no policy objectives. Even when he stumbles on a good one he'll discard it as you pointed out with Operation Warp Speed if he feels it holds back his conning.
I agree with the thrust but I've listened to the Audiobook for "The Path To Power" by Robert Caro (and discussed the content of later volumes with friends who've read them) and I'm pretty sure the "corrupt, criminal" version of LBJ is just....LBJ.
Trump's inconsistencies on COVID notwithstanding, people have agency are responsible for their own decision to become vaccinated or not. To compare tepid support for vaxxing to someone who led an army that killed Americans is wrong.
Yes, people have agency. But when you predictably lead them to harm themselves with that agency you *also* deserve blame. There is no law of conservation of blame that says that blaming one person in a causal chain takes away blame from another person in the same causal chain.
Very true, Kenny. Blame, like credit, has no hard limit at 100%. Trump definitely deserves blame for not doing enough to encourage vaccinations, though the overreachers also deserve some (but less) for exciting the "you can't force me to get vaccinated" part of people's brains.
I still disagree with the Ho Chi Minh comparison, but Trump was not good in this area, as with everything he touches.
John: He doesn't deserve a defense from you. Most human beings who are wronged by others possess agency. That's part of what it means to be human.
I'm not suggesting the following applies to every last Trump voter, but he clearly has a virtually messianic hold on millions of Americans. He could have saved tens of thousands of lives. And for virtually no effort on his part. Do some Zoom calls on Fox and tell people the jabs ("Frankly, my administration was really fantastic on science!") may save their lives. Or those of their parents. Or spouses. Or children. Tell them them Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others like him are peddling fake science. Go on Joe Rogan. Record some public service announcements. Start calling it the TrumpVax.
Tens of thousands of lives.
And one can't help but notice the limited amount he did to promote covid inoculation faded to nothingness after he left the White House. Why, it's almost as if he thought it might benefit him personally if deaths increased—and national conditions failed to improve—now that he was no longer president.
You're right, of course, about the inaptness of the Ho Chi Minh comparison. Ho sincerely believed his was a just war against foreigners. Trump was something far worse.
After WWI an English newspaper held a contest for the most shocking headline imaginable, with the winner being, "Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive; War Fought by Mistake." In our time, the winner would be "Ex-President Trump Joins Jimmy Carter in Building Habitat for Humanity Homes."
Of course he lost interest in promoting shots after he left the White House. What was in it for him?
(Recall that it was reported that he stood with John Kelly at Arlington Cemetery (where the latter's son was buried) and said, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?")
Yeah this repeatedly came up during COVID, the analogy to war. And I thought it was really telling that in the end, a lot of young people joined the initial right-wing protests in defense of their right to associate in public with others, against an uncertain and vague timeline as to when their social liberties would be permitted again. Yes, this took an anti-racist moniker, but I'd argue that race is really all people my age know. They are unaware of any other way to effectively communicate moral authority to a public health official saying it's too dangerous for them to go to a beach with their friends. So that's what they did, and it worked. Public health officials decided you weren't a murderer standing outside in a crowd if you were a young person demanding racial justice as opposed to an Orthodox Jew mourning at a funeral.
Eh, I think that's not an accurate statement about Trump on vaccines. He's still willing to take credit for the COVID vaccine and encouraged supporters to get booster shots:
He mentions it occasionally, but never where it will get too much attention from his base. They don't want to hear it, so he avoids pushing it. I think he'd love to crow about it but has realized that doing so would hurt him with his base.
OK, but that's a different claim than Trump "very quickly" started spewing "antivax quackery" after leaving office, which is what I was responding to. Given that Trump has done literal 180s on plenty of other issues (e.g., abortion), I think it's impressive that he hasn't gone all in on, "I was lied to by the Deep State and tricked into authorizing Project Warp Speed" or something like that?
There were some comments earlier today comparing this to Nixon, when people were dishonestly claiming norms go against prosecuting an ex-president, with others pointing out Nixon was almost certainly going to be prosecuted, which was why the Ford pardon was needed. All fair, but then I had a realization, ask yourself what changes if the following happens:
It's the afternoon of January 20, 2021. Pres. Biden tells an aide: "gimme the damn Trump pardon". Bits are copied word for word from the Nixon one, full immunity from crimes against the United States committed by Trump while President. Biden signs it, happy to put the past four years to bed. The country breathes a sigh of relief.
Except Trump still faces this indictment: he hadn't committed these crimes yet. And he also faces the New York indictment, because that offending predated his presidency, and is being prosecuted under state law. And the Georgia grand jury is still there too. A full Nixon pardon, and it makes absolutely no difference.
Yup and the end of Nixon's criminality coinciding with the end of his political career is not a coincidence. Nixon was an extreme member of the criminal-politician lineage. And that lineage is about committing crimes in the service of political objectives (promoting the party, policy objectives & maintaining power) with profit as a side motive. There have been left politicians in this modeal as well (LBJ) though none extreme as Nixon.
Once his political career was dead the criminality stopped.
Trump by contrast is the career criminal conman who is in search of personal profit. A pardon would encourage future criminality since he would think he was immune from punishment for criminality.
As Matt said GOP put themselves in this place by falling for a criminal
I think this is dead on, and have long believed that the biggest victims of Trump are his most die hard supporters. The deeper question is how does the Republican party fix this? I may not be among their ranks but I'm not so devoted to the Democratics that I can't see we have a two party system that can't function forever with only one that is semi serious about governing. I also think a lot of the odder things that have come out of the left that are the occasional topic at SB are part of a bad feedback loop created by the GOP's apparent inability to reform itself after the disastrous policy failures in the Bush years. All they have left is a media apparatus extracting money from an aging, overly credulous base, and Trump is the ultimate manifestation. As darkly amusing as this can be from a partisan angle, in the American system it inevitably means that some of these conservative celebrity buffoons will occasionally win, which is bad for as all, while also leading to a right wing party incapable of keeping the left wing party honest.
There was a very insightful article written recently about the British media equivalent of the conservative media bubble and how it was convincing politicians that irrelevant issues matter and helping them to drive themselves off a cliff.
Ah, it was in the Statesman and not Jonn's substack, no wonder I had trouble finding it.
The way it typically works when a party goes off the rails is they lose a bunch of elections until they're effectively irrelevant, then they clean house and start over with new leaders and new ideas.
That hasn't happened yet and doesn't seem that close. At this point we're stuck until Trump dies and you better believe we're going to get some weird religious imagery and Trump cults.
And oh btw it seems like there's a significant chance Don Jr will be a relevant political figure in our lifetimes. Because some people just can't get over this guy.
I think one factor keeping this from happening is that in an era of mass and social media the Trump crazy train also drove a bunch of Democrats loudly and visibly crazy. As we move forward, the party and the mainstream center-left seem to be clawing back some ground from that, while the Republicans succumb further to their crazies, so if I had to guess the broad strokes of the next decade, they do indeed look like your first paragraph.
But if Trump scrapes out a victory in 2024 then all bets are off, the IDpol, post-liberal, and economically hard-left factions in the Democrats will again be empowered...
Its likely if Trump wins that Republicans would hold all three chambers. In that case voters would judge Republicans based on what they deliver. And then in 2028 it would probably be either a new era of Democrat or Republican dominance, based on feelings from the 24-28 term. If Biden wins 2024 then I’d apply the same prediction to Democrats, although they probably wont control the senate. Id like either party to have a full sweep in the next election so we can see the actual policies agenda they have
Except we *did* have a full sweep in recent memory - in 2016. And it turned out that the GOP's "actual policy agenda" was what it's been since at least Reagan: cut entitlements and cut taxes for rich people. It turns out that that agenda is wildly unpopular, so it cost the GOP the House in 2018, but there's no evidence so far that given another sweep of the elected branches in 2024, the lesson will be learned (as indeed it was not after 2012).
I mean, the 2018 and 2022 midterms weren’t a wake up call? Trump also could have won 2020 with just a smudge more normalcy (incumbents during Covid tended to do great internationally)
Would really recommend this piece from Rick Perlstein on Romney's lies 2012 (which now seem hilariously banal compared to Trump). Even after seeing all the Trump stuff, the things he discusses here conservative media are shocking https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
The Republican Party was trending toward its current dysfunction well before Trump came down the escalator. Its media ecosystem is optimized to cater to the preferences of the ‘aging, overly credulous base’, and in doing so, tends to take them further and further from reality. Its intelligentsia— especially those under 35— are increasingly captured by weird and alienating ideologies like ultramontane TradCath integralism and Moldbuggian neo-reaction as they try to assemble some sort of intellectual superstructure on top of the Trump personality cult’s unsteady base. Unfortunately, I don’t think they can get out of this without some sort of major realignment event; you can’t change your tack in response to election losses if you can’t acknowledge that you lost.
We will find out via elections. It is factual that the FBI pressured Twitter to censor the Hunter Laptop story. In lieu of that manipulation, Trump couldve certainly won his 30,000 votes across AZ, GA, WI and be president. I think its likely he would win 2024 against Biden. We will find out what the opinions of Americans are based on national elections over time, and it seems that one side will crush the other slowly but soundly over the next decade and a new consensus will be entrenched in Washington. That may be a Left paradigm supported by a growing coalition, or it may be an Anti-Left paradigm supported by a growing coalition. As long as our elections remain fair and free America will work this sclerosis out over the next decade
The Hunter Biden story was still published in the NY Post and reported across a multitude of media organizations. Just because Twitter held off for like, what a few days? based on the warnings of a potential disinformation campaign (which, come on, if Trump's team wanted this to be treated as legitimately sourced data, letting Rudy Giuliani be the figurehead and primary source for handling the materials that also had a kind of smelly origin from a nearly blind Trump supporting Mac repairman for it was a really stupid move - it's not as if it wasn't *also* public information that Rudy was running all over Ukraine trying to purchase exactly this sort of data for the past few years), from promoting the NY Post story Tweet, does not mean there was zero reporting or publicly available information about this story, let alone that's over-inflating how many people actually get their news from Twitter (what is like 1% of the population uses Twitter in the first place?), and that if the story was on Twitter a few days earlier, this would have changed the election. Also, had Rudy provided the data for independent examination instead of holding onto his second hand copy, more news organizations might also been able to report more in depth on the veracity and details of the data, rather from the more skeptical stance they adopted given these facts.
Let alone, people voting for Biden/against Trump - I don't know of too many who would have changed their vote to Trump based on Biden's son's peccadillos - and analysis of what is on the laptop has not been the smoking gun at all about some nefarious Joe Biden activities that would have likely changed many votes at that point. I mean at some point the right needs to maybe come to terms with the fact that the Hunter Biden laptop is not nearly the scandal or rises to the level of interest in the average voter that it does for extremely online politically Republicans/Trump supporters.
Additionally, I've always been a bit perplexed about how Trump supporters don't expect any sort of nepotism/profiting from office "scandal" involving the Bidens wouldn't just blow back on how the Trump family - where his daughter and son in law were actual Administration "officials" conducting actual domestic and foreign policy, and who profited *massively* from their connections, let alone the issues surrounding Trump DC Hotel that was a hub for foreign and domestic "lobbyists" paying essentially patronage to Trump for their interests, and the ways in which he practically bankrupted the Secret Service budget with how he was (over) charging the Secret Service to accompany him on his frequent trips to his own resorts. And why that wouldn't just come up again in his campaign where Trump is directly doing business with a lot of Saudi and Middle Eastern governments and financiers.
It seems to me that there are quite a few conservatives in this country who do not really care that much about conservative policy per se. They simply get much more utility out of owning the libs: offending them, making them unhappy, and ruining their days. Conservative policy may be a means to those ends, but does not have much value in and of itself, and there are other means to those ends that may be more effective. They are also short-term thinkers: it's better to ruin a lib's day today and potentially lose an election tomorrow, than to refrain from ruining a lib's day today and increase the odds of winning an election tomorrow - a bird in the hand, after all.
One of Matt’s recurring points is that there are a similar number of people on the left who think it’s more important to call out racism and prejudice than to work to mitigate and eliminate it.
There's no doubt those people exist (and are extremely annoying), but I would dispute that there are a "similar number" of them, and I don't think Matt thinks that either. You see those people a lot on social media and even regular media, but they don't show up in actual votes to anywhere near the same degree.
They are definitely disproportionately on social media. And many have the mindset that “calling out” on social media IS “working to mitigate and end” racism or sexism or whatever. They feel like their tweet or their “don’t read this book or listen to this singer or appreciate this artist because they are BAD” call for action *is* somehow “at least I made a little bit of difference.” Or their being against “bad fanfiction” because “fiction affects reality and people will get Bad Ideas” (about what? Casting love spells? Falling in love with your half brother who is really your cousin and rightful king of Westeros? Sure, Jan, that’s gonna happen in real life) is somehow “at least my teeny tiny speaking out will Make A Difference.”
The Make A Difference By Obnoxious Social Media Presence people are annoying and not actually making any difference. Thankfully they are a very small slice of the left. Most are working quietly behind the scenes, oh, and are against banning any kind of books or reading material (Illinois just passed an anti-book-banning law!).
I agree that there are a lot more well, "haters" on the right than on the left, but it's interesting and significant to me that the psycho-social phenomenon exists in both cases. And of course it's manifested itself historically in both leftist and rightist political/revolutionary movements.
Eh. There will always be bad human beings, in every society across all of time for the rest of humanity. That doesn't mean they have to win political office! I disagree with chunks of this piece because it makes it sound like Trump seized power almost illegitimately. Like, this piece is a little vague on how this bad guy became President of the United States. It was due to the voters!! Lots of human beings- voters- are dumb, cruel, and open to a strongman leader, and Trump won a democratic election specifically because of them.
If I had my own Substack, I would be braver than Matt and write 'many voters are in fact bad', which is how we ended up here and how Orban wins in Hungary, Bolsanaro won in Brazil, and so on. It's OK to be a little pessimistic about human nature- it's OK to be a bit of a misanthrope, especially when you're engineering political systems. Humans are deeply receptive to a charismatic strongman. The solution to this problem is
1. Don't be a presidential system
2. If you have to have a presidency, for God's sake, *control who runs for your party's nomination and limit the candidates. Don't do open primaries. Don't allow every random guy to run for your nomination who wants to. Gatekeep. Make it less democratic.*
The real One Weird Old Trick to beating demagogues is to prevent them from getting on the ballot in the first place, which involves some elite gatekeeping, which is a good thing. Mob rule is bad. The median voter is kinda dumb. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
Netanyahu became Israel's Prime Minister running during a massive criminal trial.
Parliamtentary systems are better but you really overstate their ability to gatekeep. And to get the level of elite gatekeeping to really block criminals from power you basically need to end democracy.
"The amendment would make unconstitutional [...] racist ideas by public officials (with 'racist ideas' and 'public official' clearly defined)."
The lack of clear definitions for those phrases in that page is jarring.
"It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees."
So who gets to decide who those experts are? As evan bear alludes to below, I'm sure Kendi would want to be that decider.
And also, DOA is a really, really unfortunate acronym to use here--and yet also accurate as to the fate of this amendment.
I definitely think that for a lot of Trump’s diehard supporters, being an asshole is a significant part of the appeal, but I don’t think that he provides great evidence for the anti-democratic view— he’s never been a popular vote winner, and both he and the Republican Party as a whole are only consistently nationally competitive because of anti-majoritarian political institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College.
Not sure what this has to do with anything? If anything the mandate is all easier in a parliamentary system where people are voting for party with the PM at the top and couldn't care less who their actual MP is.
Just look at Berlusconi in Italy for the modern blueprint for this.
1. Not every country necessarily makes the head of the largest party the PM. More importantly, the cabinet is appointed by parliament and not the PM, removing this crucial power from just man or woman as we do in presidential systems
2. The parties can remove the PM if their behavior is unacceptable! Look at Boris Johnson- when it became clear he was breaking the law, they ruthlessly removed him, and it's not like BoJo had a mob of followers behind him. Most Tory voters were fine with the decision. The key is that the Brits have a transactional relationship with politicians, which is how it should be- like any other at-will job, you're in office until you're no longer holding your employer's confidence, in which case you get the boot
Basing your understanding of how parliamentary systems could work off the UK is perhaps not the best model. Just because the British have a large unwritten constitution and tradition doesn't mean the parliamentary system isn't easier to jimmy.
I'd put it differently. It's not that some voters are bad, but that the pablum about how we all want the same thing at the end of the day is not true. We want different things. The only way to claim we want the same things is to abstract to such a level as to be meaningless (we all want freedom, safety, opportunity, etc.).
The trick - which Trump made easier in some ways and more difficult in others - is stripping away the layers of self-delusion we all wear and determining what people actually want, and how many of them want it. Whether it's a presidential or parliamentary system, you have to build that coalition, and there's no good way to stop a strongman from doing it.
Yes, absolutely "many voters are in fact bad" but I will still regard the "badness" as a form of unintentional vulnerability in people who are otherwise decent, honest, charitable (i.e. "good") in their communities and personal lives. (This keeps us cautious with regard to our own unintentional vulnerabilities)
Indirect elections would be a reasonable system if we had proportional representation, but combined with the existing geographic district-based system it would be worse than the status quo.
Nah, I actually like state legislature elections being about state issues, not whose going to the Senate, putting aside the democratic reasons we probably fundamentally disagree on.
On a completely unrelated note, whatever happened to dysphemistic treadmill? I haven't seen his comments for a couple of weeks now. I hope he's all right. He always had such witty comments.
Could just be taking a break. I find SB to be a genuinely constructive oasis on the often-horrible internet, but I sometimes find myself spending too much time here to the detriment of other things that need doing, and so I take breaks myself.
“The way you practice ruthless partisanship is to conduct yourself with a lot of integrity because that helps your allies.”
Serious question: did this work for Obama?
I’d argue he’s the political figure with the most integrity that almost anyone alive can remember - and yet he got massacred in the 2010 midterms and never had a House majority afterward.
I really enjoyed this piece, but I’m not sure this is the right take.
Obama won a landslide majority in 2008 and comfortably won re-election in 2012. He still enjoys relatively good net approvals today, and that residual goodwill probably helped his vice President win the 2020 primary decisively and collect a solid popular vote margin in the general— despite a relatively tepid economic recovery and some significant foreign policy blunders. I think the balance of the evidence points to Obama being good at messaging and electoral politics, and his personal integrity probably helped with that.
"I think the balance of the evidence points to Obama being good at messaging and electoral politics, and his personal integrity probably helped with that."
I wish, really, really wish that was true. But Clinton was popular at the end of his term, enjoys relatively good net approval today, and his lack of personal integrity didn't get in the way of being great at messaging and electoral success.
Sure— there are multiple viable strategies for being popular. (Being president during a long above-trend economic expansion and a countrywide decrease in violent crime rates certainly helps.) But ceteris paribus, not having a ton of scandals seems to help. Do you think that the counterfactual scandal-free Clinton would have a lower approval rating?
I would hope the counterfactual wouldn't be true, but I'm not certain of it. I know people who felt like Clinton's scandals made him more approachable and human in some of the same ways that I think that's true for Trump as well.
I mean, I think the fact that he stayed relatively popular despite ISIS and a relatively slow recovery shows significant messaging skill. Joe Biden has gotten dragged a lot harder by public opinion for similar issues even though his admin has handled both the economy and foreign policy a lot more effectively.
Obama was both not very ruthless and not very "partisan" in the sense that he didn't always have much interest in strengthening the Democratic Party as a whole. But the more important point is that, to the extent the Democrats did worse in 2010 than you might have expected given the state of the economy (which was very bad), the reason was that Congress passed highly consequential controversial legislation on partisan lines and there was backlash. That's what dedicated partisans do, they spend political capital on stuff at the core of party priorities, which is very different from Trump whose influence has led Republicans to lose multiple winnable races for no policy gain. (SCOTUS overruling Roe is a real example of this but Trump didn't do anything special to achieve this; the principal actors were McConnell tanking Garland, Justice Kennedy deciding that partisanship trumped preserving Roe, and RBG failing to retire in 2014.)
People forget that the goal is to implement good policy, not just get re-elected. Obama passed the PPACA and lost the Congress as a result. That was a good trade.
This is exactly my point! Obama wasn’t really “ruthless”, and the quality of having integrity - which Obama does in spades - is not how one becomes ruthless or helps one’s political allies.
I don't think Matt is saying that having integrity translates into being ruthless. I think Matt is saying that a genuine ruthless partisan has integrity because integrity serves partisan ends, which I think really is true to an extent (scandals hurt, particularly scandals like Trump's that are about ego and selfishness) though only to an extent (Harry Reid was a very effective ruthless partisan and not exactly a paragon of integrity).
I think this is probably the basic problem that Matt's piece runs into - he's basically claiming that integrity is instrumentally useful to political parties, and that *voters* should recognize that and not vote for conmen. But that's only half the equation: if you're an aspiring politician of few ideological scruples (say, Vance) how do you get away from the fact that someone who wouldn't know integrity if it punched him in his fucking face nevertheless won the primary and then the presidency?
Yes, a big part of the problem the Republicans face is that individual Republican politicians have incentives not to rock the Trump boat, which is incompatible with having integrity.
Well said - but again what is the evidence that conducting oneself with integrity actually helps one’s allies? The example of arguably the most integrity-having president of all time suggests it makes no real difference in outcomes.
That's fair that Matt may be overstating the returns to integrity. I personally think Trump might be a stronger general election candidate than DeSantis because it's easier for him to discard unpopular Republican stances on abortion and federal social spending (and on the margin, because he is likelier to successfully pull off stealing it if it's a close thing, though the results in 2022 make that a lot harder). But it's "might be" now instead of "would be" because he's going to be running with four indictments over his head.
Obama was arrogant and inexperienced and couldn't handle the congressional GOP to save his life. His handling of Putin wasn't much better. He is a brilliant orator and a mediocre politician and statesman. As for his character, to my mind his choice to have an extravagent 60th Birthday party in the height of COVID, and to disinvite all those who worked so hard to make him presidency, and make his administration a successs , in favor of random celebrities with 3 brain cells between them - speaks volumes as to his character.
Avoiding scandals doesn’t mean you automatically always win. Other factors matter too. In Obama’s case, a backlash to the first black President was probably unfortunately inevitable.
I'm not saying that no one voted on this basis, but it's always struck me as potentially lacking explanatory power - partially because Obama himself was extremely circumspect about raising the salience of racial issues (except for those instances where they exogenously rose to national prominence like Trayvon Martin), but more significantly because the guy did win a second term, after all. Is the idea that Trump drove far more reactionary turnout in 2016 than Romney did in 2012?
There was tons of moderate to conservative (mostly white) Democratic state legislators in the South who'd won reelection in places like Mississippi or Arkansas year after year, despite the GOP dominating everywhere else in the state to tons of those legislative seats being lost, because for the first time, GOP admakers could put those people in an ad next to Obama.
There was a whole slew of white, working class (heavily Scotch-Irish) precincts running down the spine of the Appalachians from Maine to Alabama where votes dipped for Obama in 2008 vs. Kerry in 2004. Hard to explain such an outcome (I mean, in 2008 the economy was literally collapsing—not exactly a great development for the GOP brand that cycle) except for the issue of race. Obama was also the first president in living memory to win reelection with a reduced popular and Electoral vote share. Maybe that's just the economy, or the tone of our politics these days. Maybe. But maybe not.
I'm not saying that Obama's race can't have had a measurable factor in vote counts for him (for example, there's no contradiction implied by the dip relative to Kerry), I'm observing that the explanatory power specifically of "a backlash to the first Black president" has to account for his successful reelection bid in 2012, which would have been the only place a backlash to said Black president (as opposed to the successor white Democratic candidate) would have actually tangibly affected the skin color of the person in the White house. It's the delta between the electoral clout of "racially reactionary voters" in 2016 versus 2008 or 2012 [particularly when accounting for the actuarial weighting of voters tending to suggest that this cohort probably saw a disproportionate amount of deaths during that span] that warrants explanation as being a backlash, rather than the mere existence of voters who don't like Obama for being Black -- presumably those folks were also around in 2008 and 2012. It sounds like this might have had some effect in 2012, but in a non-dispositive way despite despite it being the only real point at which racist preferences for president could actually have been effectuated.
I entirely agree with you! But with that line Matt suggests otherwise, which is what I wanted to call out.
And I mean sure, if Obama had less integrity, things probably would have been worse for him (especially as the first Black president) - but if all integrity gets you is “not negative” instead of “positive”, that’s not saying much for the value of integrity.
20 House seats is pretty self-evidently material. That difference may or may not take you over the tipping point depending on whatever other factors are in play in a given election, but that is irrelevant to materiality.
Eh, it is immaterial if the only outcomes that matter are binary.
It’s the same logic Democrats used for redistricting in states like NV and NM. They’ll lose a couple more seats than they otherwise might have in a GOP wave, but absent a wave it makes them more likely to eke out a majority, which is what they really care about.
“'Orange Man Bad' is the 'Buy index funds' of political commentary.
Any idiot can repeat it, and it beats more sophisticated analysis virtually every time. People who talk themselves into deviating from the simple strategy always looks silly. It's undefeated.” - captured it nicely IMO
https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1667278450367905795?s=20
Nevertheless, I like this quote from the current essay, which has an insight I haven't seen expressed so nicely: "he brings grifters and opportunists in his wake, he drives out people of character and integrity, and he forces everyone else to twist around his presence."
Of course that leads to the everlasting question of the id-motivated voters. Apparently people who are essentially "honest" but vulnerable to emotional exploitation can also be the target of scams. But it also makes me wonder to what extent this was true of H...r.
Not sure what your broader point is... I’m EXTREMELY sympathetic to mocking JBIF, but not sure you’ve connected with anything more meaningful here.
I’m not mocking JBIF
I wasn’t trying to talk about your personal failings, though... 😜
But you’ve at least clarified your position.
Some day later we'll have to hear more about your position here, given that you've gone over the term vs. whole conversation in exhausting detail.
I need a downvote button.
Sorry--I'm in complete agreement with you, and now I realize I may be tempting fate...
The “just” part.
It’s incontrovertible that index funds outperform active management _in_the_aggregate_.
What all that research doesn’t take into account is the unreliability of various forms of personal wealth management and insurance vs others.
It’s less “DIY lifehack” and more like “trying to buy a home without a realtor - doable, but difficult, and you can make major pitfalls if you’re just going off some jackass internet article”.
BIF is fine. It’s the J that can get you.
Maybe Matt’s just doing performance art of himself as David Brooks.
People are saying!
I usually avoid this topic, but this was great. How do they not get it?!
I hope it was as cathartic to write as it was satisfying to read.
The relationship some people have to trump isn’t really that of a voter to a traditional politician but a lonely kid to an influencer. It’s an obsession born of emptiness and longing. It’s a way for people to belong and to experience the most unifying, terrifying and beautifully tragic of human experiences, the experience of unrequited love.
This is true for his supporters and his most dedicated haters. His triumph in 2016 provided meaning and purpose for the disaffected right and also the disaffected left.
Haters are just another kind of fan
A hate-watch is monetized in the same way as a like-watch.
And this is why sports teams like the Dallas Cowboys and Notre Dame football get oodles of prime TV windows regardless of their performance--even more people tune in in hopes of watching them lose.
And the Yankees, Dodgers, UNC Tarheels, and Duke Blue Devils. I don’t know enough about hockey, pro basketball, or soccer to put more names on the list
The word “fan” comes from “fanatic” - fanatic love and hate are two sides of the same coin
It's kind of a perfect storm of neediness on his part and the "emptiness and longing" that Bo describes, on both the right and left as you point out. Such a destructive cycle for everyone, including those of us who just want it to be over.
Agreed, as one who just wants it to be over and have some nice normie politics that run smoothly behind the scenes.
Solving the problem of all the lonely people (Tm Paul McCartney) is going to be a tougher lift, but I think, necessary, or we are going to keep getting Trump-like figures and Q cults and other hate groups and leaders who suck in the disaffected. Latter-day Eleanor Rigbys think Trump or someone like him will provide them with the acceptance and belonging they don’t have. Love-bombing by proxy, if you will.
I’m reminded of an article by Michaeleen Doucleff in the latest NPR about dopamine and how it’s not just the feel-good motivation chemical, it can compel us to keep on doing things that make us miserable just for that dopamine hit. Doucleff was talking about things like screen time and cupcakes for her kid, but I think her point could apply to doomscrolling and hate-reading as well. Here is the article: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/12/1180867083/tips-to-outsmart-dopamine-unhook-kids-from-screens-sweets
I'm not sure this exactly correct, or maybe I misunderstand the definitions.
It appears to me that (among liberals) the "disaffected left" are the most positive (least anti?) towards Trump because, to them, the Democratic Party is the main baddy.
Not to say that Trump didn't provide purpose for liberals, but I think it was of the more normie variety.
I will be repeating this to people I know.
Oh, should add that a lot of people on Twitter have exactly this relationship with Elon Musk.
Among my friends the Elon fans break into two groups -
A. Excited he is owning libs and don’t care about anything else
B. They own TESLA stock and, though they like Elon, are pissed he has gone on this “chose your lib owning adventure” mid life crisis twitter obsession. They want him to go back to core business/engineering stuff, let someone else own the libs.
I'll admit, a part of me thought it would be entertaining to see him "own the libs". I just didn't realize how bad he would be at it. Even the memes and jokes he retweets are terrible.
Yeah, to be honest, MY does a better job of owning the libs on actual matters of substance than many of the esteemed billionaire right wing take havers. Matt actually thinks about problems and how to solve them, that just leads to a better quality of owning.
Which, I think, raises the question of whether the goal should be “owning” anyone or actually saying why bad ideas are bad.
It's baffling. I know lots and lots of very smart conservative people (mostly fellow engineers) who can speak intelligently on a number of subjects, but who are somehow 100% in the Trump camp.
I think the steady diet of Fox News and having that info reinforced by living around a lot of other conservatives who agree with them is the main culprit. Standard but strong echo chamber.
And this is two-bit psychoanalyzing, so salt required, but most of them are older and generally seem to hold on to the 'I don't recognize my own country any more and I cannot or will not accept that, and I will do whatever I can to fix it' view.
And somehow, through a mechanism I don't understand, that leads them to support the Bad Orange Man.
I think there's an engineering mindset that's maybe a bit neurodivergent, which is intellectually prone to conspiracy theories. It may be related to an over-reliance on scientific reasoning which really isn't quite scientific: applying logic to an accepted premise without being aware of how one's internal biases warp the logic, or even initially being aware of how one's internal biases lead to selecting topics of interest (i.e. certain "attractive" conspiracy theories) in the first place. Also two-bit psychoanalyzing, but based on a recent, rather excruciating friendship.
This is different from normal-IQ, less educated MAGA voters. And then there are also the single-issue voters or those who will hold their noses and vote for whomever can succeed with policies they believe in such, as lowering taxes or abortion. (Individuals of course can display various combinations of these aspects.)
The engineer (n.b., am engineer) is well-trained to identify and then neglect terms that can be neglected, reducing a horribly complex problem to its most salient bits to make it tractable for analysis.
It's not hard to see how, if you squint, you can get into a verrrrry bad habit of seeking out confirmation bias.
This is spot on; I have always thought about it in terms of how many linux programmers seem to be libertarians.
It seems like there is something about the training or work that reinforces strong expectations about coherence and eschews ambiguity, while emphasizing that the only real limitation to anyone is their personal investment in academically understanding of how something works.
Yeah, I think there is something to the engineering mindset, or maybe systems-optimizing mindset, that leads some people into weird places.
I notice it myself sometimes, wherein I may despise many/most of the values of (for example) the CCP, but when I consider the system they are trying to create, it seems like it should work and be fairly durable, so I can accept it as somewhat valid.
Whereas when I consider groups that have more similar values to myself overall, but who are trying to create systems that I don't think would function well or would be unstable, I usually consider them invalid.
I guess maybe some conservative engineering types may see a overall more conservative US as an acceptably functioning system regardless of the president.
So if they think Trump will get the system to where it needs to be, they can accept all the BS that he brings with him and embodies.
But even then, they should be capable of realizing that he cannot get us to that end point. Because he won't win the election. And even if he did, the backlash makes it counterproductive.
We may be talking about different mindsets, with the systems-optimizing mindset being something quite different and possibly even inaccessible to those who somehow see systematic relationships where they can't possibly or very improbably exist (which might in itself be a definition of a "conspiracy.") I wonder if what you consider an "invalid" or "unstable" system is one where people have jumped to conclusions and taken shortcuts in their reasoning since they weren't willing to go through the risk /possible unintended consequence stage. (Which is why we're here: Matt is good at pointing out all the complications and wait-a-minutes.)
I was talking about "an" engineering mindset that I've observed in acquaintances (it extends beyond engineers as well.) I'm also quite familiar with the more generic, flexible engineering mindset, having gained a gene that allows me to recognize it even though I could never be one myself. (The genes: my dad had a Berkeley EE and worked for Hughes, but always said he was a better manager than engineer. I get exactly what he means. Fortunately we make pretty good programmers, not just me but my cousins and nephews.)
I know a lot of people like this among the highly educated right. Interestingly they are often the exact same personalities as those who end up being DSA types, just with a couple different core beliefs that leave them with an essentially opposite utopian belief system
Let me explain the mechanism. Your conservative engineer friends prefer how the country's culture used to be! Let's see what them liking Trump would have to do with that:
1) Trump prefers more controls on immigration. Immigration has made the country "less white." In the old days it was more "white."
2) Trump prefers a society which is "Less Woke." In the old days, the country was "less woke."
3) Trump prefers less "economic globalization." In the old days, the US had a better manufacturing base, before the US oligarchs shipped a lot of the manufacturing jobs overseas.
I could keep adding to the list, but do you see a pattern here?
But all of the Republican candidates do that now.
So why is the obviously-flawed Trump preferred?
Exactly. They've passed on opportunity after opportunity to get rid of the guy.
We need a guest post by a therapist to explain this co-dependency to us.
Because the libs hate him the most.
Why buy the knock off when the original is still available for the same price?
How do they ignore Jan 6th? For that matter how they ignore the current indictment? Are they just sealed in an j do bubble and willfully ignore all inconvenient truths ?
My understanding is that there is a very solid number of conservatives who either literally don't know than Jan 6th happened, don't believe it really happened, or think it was basically not a big deal and that the liberal media made up all the violence as a takedown of Trump. A lot of right-wing media essentially did not seriously report on the event at all. Remember how many Republicans apparently still believe that Trump won the election.
Some people are fanatics, but most people think that rioting and trying to overthrow the government is bad. If they are told that such a thing happened, they are not going to want to believe that Their Side did it. When the sealed information ecosystem is already established, as it is on the right, it's very easy to convince people that stuff they don't want to believe isn't true.
I have a very strong intuition that it’s a bit more complicated than that, and that people must be *willingly* misleading themselves, to an extent at least. Not sure if that’s a more optimistic or pessimistic idea. In any case I may well be wrong.
I think some probably are. With the sheer number of people we're talking about here it's always more complicated. I have enough anecdotal evidence to know that the sorts of folks I'm talking about exist, but I have no idea how many there are. My own understanding of/interpretation of human psychology probably leads me to think that there are a lot more of them than many people do, but I ultimately don't know!
I think most conservatives think that Jan 6th was spurred on by FBI plants (like Ray Epps, which is factually true he was there spurring them to storm the building). And that Nancy Pelosi denied requests for capitol police backup (which is factually true she did deny backup requests for hours during the fighting outside) in order for the Dems to have a Reichstagg moment to tar the republicans. Theres also the video evidence of police officers letting in many protestors and purposefully guiding Qanon Shaman inside the building and opening doors for him. So most conservatives think it was a manufactured/exacerbated event that Dems allowed on purpose to paint republicans as terrorists so that they could undermine democracy. Thats what the videos seem to display, imo
If you disagree with me thats totally understandable, but if you doubt my claims please look them up and watch the video evidence or the hearings theyve had on capitol hill since then. Its all on C-Span and youtube. Forbes Breaking News is a good youtube to watch capitol hill testimonies/hearings.
I thought the first line positively oozed catharsis (although I would have phrased it "a scumbag" rather than forgoing the second indefinite article :P)
Oh they get it. It’s a mix of cowardice, laziness, and the sunk cost fallacy.
I also don't get why Matt says that "[i]t long ago became 'cringe'", it's long seemed like all the cool kids know and want to say this, and in this case, the cool kids are also the righteous kids.
We may be looking at different Twitters! Weird Twitter, Chapo Trap House, these guys persistently mock the idea that Trump’s personal badness is important and something to get upset about.
Chapo Trap House's entire schtick is appealing to guys who aged out of arguing about atheism on the internet. More than anything, they need to feel smart.
Yeah, I very much avoid those Twitter corners--and Matt didn't even specify Twitter in this case.
I'm convinced that Trump sincerely believes--that it's the one thing he sincerely believes in--is that life is abuse or be abused. He could have avoided the indictment so easily by playing "Oops, I goofed, I'll return them now." But anything other than complete dominance feels like complete submission to him. I've known people like that, and know what happens when they have power.
Trump's supporters know he's an abuser, and have convinced themselves that he'll only abuse the people they want him to. Even putting the evidence Matt cites aside, he literally put Mike Pence's like in danger!
Very famous economically-anxious Ohio voter in a diner, or whatever, but it's almost verbatim: "The problem is that he's not hurting the right people".
The quote was "He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting", and its from this Florida woman:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html
I remember this quote well because I always thought that it perfectly summarizes the motivation of Trump voters. It's not about helping your tribe, it's about hurting the people outside of it.
Ah, what is Florida but Gulf Ohio, and what is Ohio but Rust Florida.
It's also perfectly possible that some guy in a random Ohio diner said the exact same shit
*cue mirthless laughter*
I'm going off of memory here, but I think it was. Could have been Iowa. You know the pattern.
I knew quite a few people who believed he wouldn't run for president against after 2016, because he was obviously so unsuited to the job and so miserable doing any part of it that wasn't putting on rallies. I always knew that he would run, because to not run would be to admit defeat, and that's unacceptable to him. (I think this is true even without the factor of him wanting to be president to avoid prosecution and prison.)
I assume a lot of Trump voters don’t pay close attention to politics outside the Trump show: even if they followed the midterms they may not have the sense that the GOP should have done much better, or why it didn’t.
I also see a lot of "why would you say Trump did poorly in the midterms, he won over 300 elections!", which is some meme they picked up on about how *technically* Trump endorsed 300-something candidates and only a dozen or so lost.
I don't think you're supposed to count the ones that you endorse after the election is decided. Then again, perhaps that's why I am not winning elections.
I think it's deeply visceral and emotional. If Trump wins that shows that they are God's Righteous People and if Trump loses that shows how dark and demonic the forces arrayed against them are and how they need someone like Trump to keep fighting the holy fight.
A lot of Republicans don’t think that Republicans actually lost. Many of them think that Democrats stuff ballot boxes and make fake vote until they have just enough to win.
When Hillary Clinton lost, Democratic voters accepted that she lost (even if they consoled themselves with the fact that she won the popular vote) and accepted that Democrats would have to do better to win power. But Republicans think the way back to power is exposing the voter fraud conspiracy.
She actually pressured the FBI to launch the fake russiahoax which is now confirmed to be knowingly false and pursued at her specific politic behest. Its in the Durham Report. So she tried to subvert Trumps presidency instead of accepting defeat
To me, the most deranged thing about the Orange Man as a cultural phenomenon is how his followers see him as some kind of epitome of masculinity. It's weird as fuck that at the same time that Josh Hawley is writing books about the need for a positive vision of masculinity, Republicans are slobbering all over this draft-dodging, germaphobic, selfish, vain, status-obsessed whiner---the antithesis of every masculine virtue that our culture has come up with over the last 100 years. Literally the only things about him that code as masculine are that he sexually assaults women and doesn't follow rules. Like what the hell?
They see the “rich, famous, has multiple trophy wives and mistresses, grabs ‘em by the redacted and gets away with it because he’s a star” and forget all the other things. It’s a problem when men (and anyone who wants to help men) latch on to the likes of Trump and Andrew Tate and go “these are role models!” I honestly think it speaks to how isolated people in general have become from each other. If you don’t have a positive role model of whatever sort in your immediate family (and GenZ and younger have been helicopter parented and cocooned into close family circles, without much contact from non-authority-figure adults) or perhaps a favorite teacher, well, who is left but Trump and Tate? I think age segregation does society no favors. I’m not all “pull your tweens and teens out of school and make them work in the salt mines!” But I think we are sorely missing third spaces where teenagers can mingle with unrelated adults as peers and people, and maybe get some real life and non toxic examples of How To Man or How To Woman or How To Functionally Adult.
Superlike™️
The funniest thing about the Trump era is the anti-anti-Trump Republicans. People who are furious about the indictment because it makes it more likely Trump wins the nomination -- because GOP primary voters have no agency (or something).
Someday, we'll get a "All the President's Men: Part 2: Electric Boogaloo" that follows around Mike Pence, Lindsay Graham, and Ted Cruz, on all their disparate sycophantic paths, their series of Faustian bargains, and culminating with the January 6 insurrection.
I almost feel bad for these people because in a different political environment they wouldn't be total pariahs---just normal conservative politicians. But after a certain amount of self-debasement in the pursuit of power it is just too disgusting. Also it does seem like they had the perfect chance to end this nightmare after Jan 6 and they just....didn't. Unforgivable IMHO.
But wait, in our actual political environment, they aren't total pariahs.
They are normal conservative politicians. So far, the Faustian bargain has paid off.
Depressingly true.
And they’re the same people who are best positioned to help take Trump down. They’d rather accuse Bulwarkers of grift and turn it all into a big game of anti-anti 3D chess, than just do the simple thing of opposing Trump.
I'll add that in some ways people like Rich Lowry are the saddest in the way they twist themselves into knots to sort of semi claim they are anti-Trump, but then turnaround and essentially defend almost everything he does.
Like to a degree I get it. Rich is editor of the National Review. He has a certain degree of responsibility to look after the magazine as a business concern. And once he saw what happened to The Weekly Standard, I'm sure that influenced the direction the magazine took post 2016. But man, it's hard not to see the cost to whatever intellectual credibility he (or other individual NR writers) once had.
I saw someone say that Biden engineered the indictment to assure Trump’s renomination, which…
Is this anti-anti or anti-anti-anti?
David Frum, anything else aside, said it perfectly:
Donald Trump is a man of many secrets, but no mysteries.
He's not particularly hard to figure out. If you say nice things about him, he will like you. If you say anything critical of him, he won't. Whether you are are a Saudi prince, a talking head, a journalist, a fry cook, or a meth addict, that rule applies.
I have always thought that the secret of Donald Trump’s appeal isn’t exactly his ruthlessness. Ron DeSantis is ruthless. Ted Cruz is ruthless. Donald Trump is ruthless, but his appeal is a little different.
Apocryphally (?) during the 1936 presidential campaign, a worker was quoted saying that he supported the Democrats because “Franklin Roosevelt is the only president we’ve ever had who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
Likewise, Donald Trump is the only president we’ve ever had who understands that my DEI consultant is a son of a bitch. He seems to feel it in his bones. That’s why his speech is garbled, that’s why he’s mad all the time, that’s why he doesn’t have any serious governing ideas, that’s why he flipped off the DOJ and the National Archives. He’s just *frustrated* like you or me.
The problem with this theory is that all of this DEI stuff is a *reaction* to Trump. DEI wasn't salient at all in 2015-2016; immigration was.
My friends who are Republicans cannot see that Trump was the *cause* of the things they dislike. BLM riots, the rise of DEI, more illegal immigration, backlash against policing, etc have all been in reaction to Trump. Get rid of him and the temperature goes down.
Maybe I'm wrong, though, and the temperature will never go down. I don't know if seeing DeSantis is being referred to as a KKK Grand Wizard at the Tony Awards last night is the fire spreading or just some random embers off to the side of the real fire. Regardless, I think Trump's departure is a necessary (and hopefully sufficient) condition for some return to more constructive politics.
I'm not sure if this accurately reflects the secular trends at work at the time. IIRC online social justice ascendancy is usually dated to having gained high salience circa 2014. Also here's the NYT talking about the shift to using "undocumented" rather than "illegal immigrant" from 2013, which is surely of a piece with the leftist mores you're characterizing as reactionary to Trump. At a minimum, the groundwork had been laid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/business/media/the-times-shifts-on-illegal-immigrant-but-doesnt-ban-the-use.html
Trends become movements and waves of change in the presence of an accelerator. My view is that Trump was the accelerator.
This sort of presumes that mainstream Democrats were going to tack hard woke absent Trump, and I don't see that. HRC had a reputation for being super liberal leftover from the first Clinton administration, but her coalition was mostly normie Obama Democrats who would have been fine plotting along as before if she had won.
Just the opposite. I think it would have remained on the fringe absent the Trump accelerator.
A lot of people on all sides of the political world believe that anger is the fitting reaction to certain injustices, even if it worsens them.
I desperately, desperately hope that you're not wrong. He's pretty old and definitely unhealthy. I do fear some kind of martyr situation, but maybe the whole cult of personality will die with no actual person to fan the flames.
I think that overlooks the deep cynicism that Trump has cultivated so successfully--in the past many people believed the “system” was rigged but it was only a few fringe types that believed elections were fraudulent (hacked voting machines and all that), now a majority of one of the major parties seems to think that. The whole thing with COVID vaccines is a part of this cynicism/believing the worst of everyone in government, and it is one thing I don’t really blame Trump that much for since he did try (incompetently) to promote vaccination but found his people weren’t buying it. They didn’t need Trump to tell them vaccination was a deep state scam, there was already a whole universe of anti-vaxxers out there on the internet promoting that.
It's always been puzzling and amusing to me that the same people who don't trust government seem to think that corporations can do nothing wrong. (Maybe the Invisible Hand provides universal forgiveness to anyone seeking profit.)
Not exactly. The same people who believe in vaccine and other government conspiracies also hate the Davos crowd and "globalists." They do, however, like small-medium business owners.
I think the fire would spread with DeSantis because he has set himself up as anti-left, and the mutual victim complex feeds off the antagonism. I guess the question is whether regular people buy into it, which may not happen as much as with Trump.
Overall, Trump’s victory— over a moderate liberal opponent and after the presidency of a moderate liberal who disappointed high expectations—validated a lot of extremely pessimistic views of the US and its core institutions, as well as the demographic and occupational groups that supported him. And I think that this sort of deep, intractable pessimism is something that the sorts of left politics that don’t really fit into a constructive political program share.
I don’t realistically expect Republicans to do anything that relieves that sort of pessimism anytime soon. If a Romney or McCain type won the nod, it would help, but Trump will probably win the Republican nomination, and his strongest primary competitor, DeSantis, shares both Trump’s obsession with owning the libs and his general lack of baseline human decency.
Fortunately, though, I think that Joe Biden succeeding at governance and winning re-election probably will help convince more people that it’s possible to remedy and improve society through normal politics and governance. I think that to a certain extent, he’s already enjoyed some success at that.
The reason Trump won is bc most people realized by 2014 that the Democrats hate them and want to destroy America. So I dont think Trump changed anything about the Democrats agenda except for the speed and desperation of their subversive revolution
This may be correct, but immigration was kind of the DEI of its time -- the Overton window (including for the respectable, doesn't-want-to-be-excluded-from-cocktail-parties Republicans, i.e. every serious Republican primary contender other than Trump[1]) had coalesced and was beginning to crystallize (if it hadn't already) around "you can't oppose immigration [legal or otherwise], that makes you a *racist!*". Trump was basically the only R primary candidate who just flat-out did not give a shit about that particular respectability taboo (because he doesn't give a shit about *any* respectability taboo) and thus his capacity to cater to primary voters who cared about the issue but whose other would-be candidates couldn't do better than "illegal immigration is an act of love."
TL;DR: Trump not giving a shit about left-coded speech norms that are at least DEI-*adjacent* really was a comparative advantage in his 2015-2016 primary run.
[1] Just in case there's any doubt, "Donald Trump is a piece of shit and a scumbag" is a statement it would be difficult for me to agree more with.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/romney-on-immigration-im-for-self-deportation/
I'm guessing you were too young to recall it at the time (no offense intended either implicit or explicit, and you probably paid more attention to the news than the average seven(?)-year-old, so maybe I'm wrong.) but Romney was actually *excoriated* for saying this in the mainstream press and media, for reasons that never made a ton of sense to me given that it seemed like a reasonable policy statement. Also note that this is Romney himself trying to tack back after having felt the need to declare that "we're not going to round people up" -- i.e., catering to exactly the respectability taboos I was invoking above.
The Romney saga arguably presages Jeb! et al. basically falling over themselves to try to be the weakest on immigration in 2015-2016. Also these speech norms really were real - see the NYT in 2013 (referring to a position the AP had already taken) on the shift from "illegal" to "undocumented."
But I think Trizzlor’s point is that what you said about Republicans not dating to oppose immigration was incorrect. Sure that was 2012, but you really think we wouldn’t find any anti-illegal immigration stances if we looked over Scott Walker or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaigns?
Rubio at least (whose campaign IIRC had by far the most legs of those three) was dogged by his support for comprehensive immigration reform while in Congress - part of the backdrop to the 2015-2016 Campaign was the series of failed, but bipartisan, attempts to get comprehensive immigration reform (including amnesty) through Congress in the wake of Romney's 2012 crash and burn (their ultimate failure leading to Obama's executive-centric approach to DACA / DAPA).
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/marco-rubio-2016-immigration-116926
It's probably fair to say, however, that the rhetorical speech norm explanation is underdetermined inasmuch as (a lot) of Republicans simply didn't actually care about illegal immigration substantively and instead liked the pro-business amnesty proposals -- this, of course, meant that immigration enforcement had no credible Republican champion outside of Trump, but it's a different mechanism than the cocktail parties thing (likewise I think Jeb! probably really believed what he said and wasn't just catering to speech norms and/or the post-Romney Republican terror of antagonizing voters over harsh immigration stances). You're right that I overstated my case with respect to the R's.
"Rounding people up" is an implicit part of the enforcement of compulsory laws. It's literally what law enforcement is for - we just call it an "arrest" when it's one person at a time. The fact that Romney had to say he opposed it is already an implicit concession to the nonenforcement regime -- in principle, "rounding people up an deporting them" is what it means to even make illegal immigration a thing as long as deportation (rather than, like, a fine) is the remedy for it.
Ed.: Also the whole point is that then and now "opposing illegal immigration" actually *was* increasingly an opinion that it was not in vogue to express as everything got lumped under the general umbrella of "immigration" without distinction (sometimes as convenient shorthand, sometimes as a seemingly deliberately-eliding rhetorical choice in left- and center-left publications). Post-Trump it's more of a partisan divide but pre-Trump there's a reason he stood out from the remainder of the R field.
The point isn't DEI specifically, it's the HR-legal-team-consultant-complex that white collar workers hate more than they've ever hated their bosses. Not sure how broad that hate is across all categories of voters, but as far as white collar workers go, it's decent enough idea
That makes even less sense: white-collar workers have shifted left since Trump came on the scene.
Not all DEI is this, but there is a cottage industry of consultants that push alienating messages. One of those notions is that all racism is structural and that racism is inherent to American society. There are mandatory training seminaries to get talked at and told you are inherently a bad person due to immutable characteristics.
In higher ed, DEI seems to be the new greenwashing. More admins, no material change, faculty perform more unpaid labor.
The thing is, the claim that all racism is structural is exactly the sort of claim that *absolves* individuals of being bad people who hate minorities. And yet people hear it and think they are being accused of being bad people who hate minorities.
One of my main critiques of certain forms of CRT is that it robs people both of agency and their own responsibility for racism. Most people observe racism with intentionality and ascribe malice to it. The idea that it can be emergent or the product of social structures can be novel to many people, but it can also be argued for. But then again, many forceful advocates for the absolutist structural position skip the persuasion part and just assert their position is true.
It's a form of revealed truth, with an original sin (slavery), and failure to agree with the message signals one is complicit in perpetuating the original sin. Then again, all this stuff emerges from post-modernist Marxist scholars.
This is true in a logical sense, but actually-existing DEI often tries to have its cake and eat it too - “racism is systemic, and if you don’t agree with the very specific terms by which we articulate that phenomenon, you are a moral pervert.”
The strong implication of “all racism is structural” is that the only reason to oppose changes to the structure is racism.
That only makes it worse, of course, not better.
It might absolve them in a way, but the next step after that belief is widely accepted is to channel money from them to the minorities, purely on account of them being minorities.
And they probably don't like that.
It doesn't seem like the sort of comment/idea that has to be "right" or "wrong". It's quite obviously just a perspective on what's moving a percentage of voters or a portion of DJTs appeal. You don't have to view it as a full explanation for voting patterns that needs to be shot down.
Most of these people never have even encountered DEI training and online testing. Much less have they had to write a DEI statement when applying for a job.
Probably true. But they intuitively know that if that nonsense isn't opposed strenuously, it will come for them eventually
I was perhaps being unclear. I was using DEI as a shorthand for “all that stuff [gestures vaguely] that liberals are doing.”
When I first made this bon mot back in 2018 or so, it was about Colin Kaepernick. Donald Trump is fundamentally and obviously upset about the same things Real Americans are, in a way that Ron DeSantis never could be.
(Or even if he’s not actually, the point is that that’s how it comes across. He’s a masterful showman.)
In 2016 he was talking about the libs trying to cancel Christmas
Maybe recently salient in the popular sense, but "Theory" (Critical Race Theory) in the universities has been growing for awhile. The guilt stuff was there in a diversity training we had in the 1990s (although some of us felt free enough to explicitly challenge some of the trainers' points.)
"PC" to some extent is super old. This includes also e.g. in casting. Most 90s cop shows had a strikingly unrealistically high proporiton of Black female judges, and every Disney channel movie from the periood had a trio of kids, only one of whom was a white male, and at least one of whom (typcialy two) was non-white. Nonetheless, the ideology morphed into something different circa 2015. Mainstream studios started race *swapping* in a systemic and a-symmetric manner, even as whites playing non-white (even in voice acting) became taboo, having non-white replace white became high fashion, including in blatantly anachronistic ways in historical dramas.
In culture and academia the modest AA and a polite PC of a previous era gave way to aggressive DEI bureaucracy and a stifling climate of fear where even opinions that 60+% of Americans agree with can get you fired and ostracized.
It is possible that DEI insanity of 2020 can been argued as the "child" of the 1990s stuff, but only as e.g. fascism of 1930s is the "child" of 18th cent. romanticism or some such, i.e. a "child," but not the same thing at all.
I agree - I think there was a shift from trying to address the issues in more common sense terms (quit discriminating in hiring, watch your language, we need more black people on TV [but only in small roles with authoritative characters]) to the application of late 20th century humanities to social justice ideologies, perhaps via very some fast and loose borrowing, probably because no one understands these thinkers very well. (Deconstructionism, structuralism, post-structuralism - I was out of academics and working real jobs by the time these came around.)
In the meantime, we have one of my favorite "mystery-fantasy" series: Rivers of London about a young, mixed-race police officer, written by an old Jewish guy but narrated for the audio books by a mixed-race Londoner who can do all the accents from various African lilts to old-school posh. Too good for anyone to ever cancel.
I don’t thinks you can describe “postmodernism” as “humanities ideologies” nor do I think that they have much to do with present-day wokery. But I may be wrong. I work in humanities academia and don’t claim to understand any of these (nor care much to either).
Back one million years ago when I was a grad student (okay, it was ca. 2012), my department started a diversity committee which started out innocuously (and it was emphasized to us that there was no proximate precipitating event for its formation). Its membership had been handpicked in a very opaque manner, which was a bit odd, but the first session went fine and it seemed okay.
The next session, though, went off the rails: we were presented with a student’s work (whose consent had not been secured for this purpose) in which the student wrote (specifically responding to a prompt) about observing a Black family purchasing items using food stamps that did not strike the student as particularly necessary. The student wondered if perhaps food stamps aren’t the best way to address poverty. That was it.
Or it should have been; instead, we were invited to ritualistically spit on the student’s work and perform our disgust of it. Very “struggle session in absentia” sort of thing. I take teaching - and respecting students’ intellectual journeys - seriously, so I very publicly and somewhat loudly shit a brick at this behavior. Fortunately, because it was 2012 (or so), I was only subject to some temporary awkwardness / mild shunning and not defenestration (plus, not a few people really agreed with me).
The point is, yes, the “CRT” thing has been around for a while, and at least up until 2016 it was possible, even as a snot-nosed grad student with zero clout, to oppose some of its more egregious applications without permanent damage to one’s reputation. Plus, I just sort of wanted to tell the story.
Thank you, was just about to point that out.
I don't agree with this characterization of DEI but I think the point about Trump's appeal is fundamentally right: ruthlessness is only part of it, the other part of it is empathy, which any conman knows is central to success. And that's the part that's most evidently missing from other Trump-era Republicans. Ron DeSantis may also delight in owning people you hate but if he doesn't care about you either what's the appeal? Millions of Americans are convinced that Trump cares sincerely about them and their problems, which is not true, but that's the con--he is exceptionally good at making his targets think otherwise.
“ In a video on homelessness released by his campaign, Trump says that "our first consideration should be the rights and safety of the hardworking, law-abiding citizens who make our society function.” And Trump criticized many cities' policies on homelessness for "making many suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few.”
As Matt would say - the normie position.
People don’t want grandma set out on an ice flow and they think they should lock up the crazies.
Meh, stick a microphone in front of the guy and he’ll end up advocating nuking San Francisco in like 3 moves.
Also a populist position in todays america
I think there is something to this. Trump is abnormal in a whole bunch of ways and is certainly millions of miles away from some every man. But he is also normal, or at least able to act normal, and express normal sentiments about various absurdities in our culture that few other politicians seem able to.
I don't know, Desantis literally doesn't talk about anything else.
I think your reference to the sinister ‘DEI consultant’ is really poignant, because it really is just a grotesque redux of strategies that genuinely challenged oppressive systems. Trump obviously doesn’t care about DEI, but he’s managed to create this bogeyman that taps into a certain population’s existential fear that their place in the hierarchy is at risk or that someone is coming to ‘take what’s theirs’. It’s all nonsense of course, but it’s all oriented toward sustaining hierarchies rather than doing anything that would actually improve folks’ lives.
I'm about as woke as you can get (at one point during my 50th birthday party a couple months ago, I was in the minority due to being cis) and I think that most DEI training is a ridiculous waste of time.
Stop telling people not to sexually harass people and start telling people how the complaints process works and then actually follow it and fire somebody.
The consultants are ridiculous - because their job is fundamentally ridiculous, it's intended not for actually fixing racism and sexism within the company, it's intended to do something so they can say they have done something and to have a defence against lawsuits. So, of course, they are overly-self-confident jackasses, not people interested in a serious analysis of the problems and trying to solve them, but people who think that berating people to be better will fix things.
I find the DEI trainings I am required to do every year exactly as annoying as the trainings I am required to do about not using the department copier for my home lemonade stand, and the trainings I am required to do about not parking a university vehicle at the same strip mall as the porn shop. And I think they all come from the same place.
Yes, but the DEI stuff is ideological in a way that some find more irksome.
I retired before it was called "DEI", but yes, irksome: pretending that I haven't been sincerely thinking about racism-and-what-to-do-about-it all my life; trying to make me feel guilty for things I have no control over; and, now that I've studied it a bit, full of cognitive distortions that may actually be contributing to depression among certain sets of young people.
Same. I don't like them. I think they are an overall net negative, and I wouldn't be sad to see them go. However, anyone making them out to be central to today's politics needs to get a grip.
I suspect that DEI is a make work initiative and rent seeking by certain types of liberal arts graduates.
I think there is a use case for DEI trainings, and it's familiarizing people with workplace expectations they may not intuit, like "don't tell racist jokes" and "you can't date subordinates." (You might want people to intuit those norms but they don't always.) And to catch the minority of people who need to be told this explicitly, you need to make everyone do it, even if for most people it's wasteful and annoying.
The problem is when the goal is not just reinforcing the rules but becomes "reducing implicit bias," which there's no reason to think those trainings can do. That stuff is pandering and there's no incentive to do it well even if we knew how, which we don't.
A million years ago, as in, like 2010, we had things like what you describe that we usually called 'compliance' or 'code of conduct' training. They could be a little silly but I think did serve the very limited purpose of useful reminder to those that did not get the memo about appropriate behavior in the modern work place, and as fodder for some limited ass covering by corporate leadership (the existence of these trainings is virtually never determinative in the event of a lawsuit or investigation but it is better to have it than not). Going back to that would probably be fine, but as you note, is not going to advance whatever larger purposes the people who believe in this stuff see in it.
A lot of anti-harassment training is still like that and while I personally find it annoying I think it's probably socially useful.
Sort of in the same vein but with a broader scope, you could imagine workplaces wanting to train employees on things like: this is why some people put pronouns in their signatures and this is what you should do about it; here is how to ensure that your kosher or halal observant coworkers (or clients!) can eat at meals; here is a list of holidays you should check the calendar against when planning something; etc. As concrete and non-metaphysical as possible.
Yep - it's cultural awareness training! We do it before we go to a new country. Probably also a good idea to do it surreptitiously with co-workers from other countries, which might not be kosher in workplace training (don't cause your Korean colleague to lose face by questioning his conclusions directly; stuff about eye contact etc.)
There was one commenter on Alison Green’s Ask A Manager blog a while back who just *could not comprehend* that not everyone knew what many major non-Christian holidays were, or what various dietary laws entailed. “Sophisticated Sue” was all “but everyone knows when Ramadan is, duh! Everyone knows when Rosh Hashanah is, like, DUH! If they don’t, then they’re hicks and rubes and don’t belong in a nice workplace, they should go back to Iowa!” Really, I suspected a troll, because it was just too on the nose Well-Traveled Well-Educated Urban Sophisticate. Whatever, they got roundly smacked down by fellow commenters saying “yes, people need to check the calendar for major holidays, but no, not everyone knows all the major holidays from every religion, so there should be a checklist to refer to.”
Or, tl;dr, what you just said. There is basic concrete stuff that people can be trained on that will build immediate goodwill and won’t involve a whole bunch of exercises or navel-gazing.
Generally agree. I don't think that sort of thing is hurting anyone and there can be some upsides as long as no one expects too much.
So training about unacceptable *behavior* - quite different from training to make you feel a certain way or training that attacks you for being human because you have "implicit biases". (Sorry, I can't reduce them. I can just pay attention to when then become conscious and make sure they don't come out in words and deeds.)
It may be possible to reduce them by immersing oneself in a population for which you have such a bias so that there are many face-to-face, meaningful interactions. I'm an old lady and I have implicit biases against old ladies and old men. But when I talk to someone its influence disappears, because there's a real person across from me. (Sorry - been thinking about this a lot.)
Yeah, contact (and the right kind of contact) is probably the most well-validated way to reduce bias, but you can't make that happen in the workplace with a mandatory employee training program. I don't think DEI programs really intend to attack anyone for being human but people's tendency to perceive them that way is part of why they don't work well and it's the impact that counts here.
Superlike™️, and I wish I could superlike™️ this comment a bunch more times.
I'm not especially woke, though I do subscribe to the "live and let live" ethos discussed here last week. But my experience with HR, especially but not only in the NYC government, has been that they make people spend ridiculous amounts of time on stupid required training sessions - I was required to watch a cosmopolitan.com video about someone's "trans journey" - and they themselves spend zero amount of time actually warning/firing people who weren't doing work (including people literally sleeping onthe job, or in some cases actually breaking laws). Nor did HR, in my experience help people actually being bullied or harassed by more powerful people in the organization (not me, but multiple people I know). Just DEI and CYA all the time. I think the OP is onto something.
“it's intended not for actually fixing racism and sexism within the company, it's intended to do something so they can say they have done something and to have a defence against lawsuits.”
I don’t disagree with this, but “Capital is just using DEI as a hedge against litigation” is not the argument that the right is putting forward nor is it the reason ‘anti-woke-ism’ resonates with that base. *That* argument (more accurately, I’d suggest) portrayed DEI consultants and bureaucrats as toothless cogs in the profit-seeking machine where the real ‘son of a bitch’ is still the boss who is making empty gestures toward anti-discrimination that are just enough to protect profits without actually protecting people.
Yea but there's also the criticism that virtually every time someone tries to objectively study whether the modern version of DEI works it turns out not to actually be effective at preventing discrimination or discriminatory attitudes and at times makes them worse. Just because the right opposes it for reasons that aren't always sound on the merits doesn't mean liberals need to defend something that on its best days is so flawed that it doesn't even serve its own stated purpose.
I think it’s remarkable that you read a comment that started with ‘I don’t disagree that DEI serves primarily to defend against litigation’ and then interpreted that statement as ‘liberals need to defend it’.
What I'm responding to is your point about the leftist criticism of DEI (i.e. tool of capital for dodging actual accountability) being different from the criticisms from the right, many of which are indeed couched in specifically conservative cultural hang ups and at times outright moral panics. IMO the most sensible criticism is neither of those, but rather that the thing doesn't do what it is supposed to, even with the most generous assumptions about intentions.
Because those DEI guys are obviously phoney bullshit, the easy answer for me is that they are covering the boss's behind. But when you look at obviously phoney bullshit, it's easy to think that there must be something else behind it, and I can see how you go down a conspiracy hole, especially if you're (as a right-winger) not inclined to see business as a profit-seeking machine.
"especially if you're (as a right-winger) not inclined to see business as a profit-seeking machine."
Its not that they don't see businesses as profit-seeking, its just that they don't see that as bad. The general response I've heard is that "I'm profit-seeking, why would I expect my boss to be different."
There are two incredibly frustrating things about DEI to me:
1) its a monumental waste of time and actually does the opposite of what its supposed to do
2) HR is very focused on DEI and such, at the seeming expense of actually disciplining people who are doing shoddy work or not working at all. Have someone do a crappy job, the rest of the team is frustrated they have to carry their under performance, but be told that you have to give them more chances because they are a protected class or the diversity of your group will suffer if we let them go.
Sure, yes absolutely. That said, I think the specific subject matter of the DEI consultants’ “phoney bullshit” and the way it taps into not-so latent prejudice is part of the reason you don’t see the same level of vitriol directed at workplace safety consultants (who for bosses serve the same role as bulwarks against litigation).
You don't? I mean I saw a lot of articles in right-wing papers opposed to oppressive "health and safety" laws here. Seems to have dropped off since covid, but it was certainly part of the right-wing playbook until then.
I like your comment generally, but I'd like to note that your first sentence is rather cringe. It almost smacks of the "I have Jewish friends" apologia. The composition of your friends circle is neither here nor there in terms of your ideology, and your ostensible awareness of it, if anything, points in the other direction...
In my previous incarnation I was deeply involved in training foreign police, customs, and soldiers. I never understood why we professed to believe that training someone in a certain way was the same as them not doing any number of nasty things.
So it’s weird, I’ve always sort of disliked Trump since before his venture into politics. But even though I didn’t vote for him the first time or second time, after he first got elected, I didn’t think he was that bad. I was sort of tired of the typical politician, so I thought the criticism of him was overblown.
Yeah, I was wrong.
As a moderate, I can honestly vote for either party. So I sort of evaluate the person.
And I basically come to the decision that I will 100% base my vote on who I think would be a good boss. And I don’t mean a CEO, I’m talking about my immediate supervisor. That person that I have to directly work with Day after Day.
I would find Biden pretty annoying as a boss, but I could handle it there is no way that I could work for Trump… He is such an obvious bully, Backstabber, and the type of guy that would take credit for your work.
So yeah, orange man bad.
Dictated on my iPhone at a hotel in red deer, Alberta, Canada… Where the weather is Smokey.
This is why I tend to think, when the discussion comes up, that somewhat-right-coded fictional characters like Ron Swanson and Hank Hill would, at least over time, be disgusted with Trump rather than supporting him. (A trivial question but it comes up a lot in social media discussions.)
Obviously Ron and Hank would be never-Trumpers... both written has "principled conservatives" basically libertarians.
I have little hope for the majority of the Republican Party though. Even the somewhat more intelligent hard core Republicans value "owning the libs" or winning over any semblance of principled government.
I truly wonder how many former conservatives like me have become antipathic towards politics. I sort of just stopped following. I'd much rather discuss specific issues that are outside politics as a way of exercising my intellectual cravings.
Perhaps if Tim Scott makes a push in the nomination race I might re-engage, but otherwise... I just don't care.
I'm having trouble imagining a modern TV show writing a sympathetic Trump supporters, and I don't think it's necessarily because the writers are all in a bubble and can't imagine one; I think it's that modern TV shows can't write characters who are ignorant of politics, and the non-crazy Trump supporters I know all fall in that bucket.
I have family in upstate NY who are like that. Couldn't name a single supreme court justice, don't really have a sense of what Roe v. Wade did beyond something something abortion, couldn't explain the two houses of Congress, and don't vote in the midterms. Folks like that don't fit in the TV landscape in 2023.
I think TV shows can write non-political educated people, they just don't have their characters talk or mention anything about politics. The problem is Trump by his nature is political.
That's not really what I meant, but I take your point.
I more meant that writers just *wouldn't* write non-political but educated people in this zeitgeist because that script wouldn't get *made*.
Makes me think of Frasier, where even the very few times when characters’ politics were relevant, it was in the vaguest way possible, and the show was the better for it (early on they did an episode where Frasier and Martin back, respectively, a liberal and conservative candidate for Senate, and they wisely did not go back to that well). I really hate this expectation that cultural production *must* be taking a political position in a more or less explicit way in order to be worthwhile (related: the impulse of showrunners to “say something” about the events of 2020, which led to a lot of really dumb TV).
Exactly...
True, but Trump wasn’t/ wouldn’t be your boss. You (we) were (would be) his boss, more or less.Biden (and even DeSantis) is someone I would hire under many circumstances. I would never hire Trump, even as a criminal co-conspirator.
Hiring is a great way to look at it as well, and leads to the same results.
A good boss is normally a good employee.
>But for my money, the most morally shocking thing about Trump’s post-presidency is still the extent to which he sullenly refused to be a constructive player in promoting Covid vaccination in 2021.<
Thank you. I've spent countless (fruitless) hours arguing with selective-memory-equipped people on the internet about this. "But Trump once said in a speech that vaccines were good. And at a Mar-a-Lago wedding two years ago he bragged about Operation Warp Speed!"
Sure, once. Or maybe two or three times. Long ago. But after leaving office, he very quickly (and cynically) took to telling his followers what they wanted to hear (namely, antivax quackery). Not what they so desperately needed to hear (and would have followed him on). Dude has more American blood on his hands than anybody since Hồ Chí Minh.
This is why I always say Nixon-Trump comparisons miss something important
Nixon's lineage is the corrupt politician who has a set of sincere policy objectives which he pursues using criminal methods that will also allow him to profit. For Nixon the profit was primarily winning the next election with more side money. Nixon's is a more corrupt, criminal version of the politician LBJ was.
Trump's lineage, as Matt explained well today. is that of the corrupt conman in search of marks whose only objective is personal profit. For Trump that is $$$ and fame. He has no policy objectives. Even when he stumbles on a good one he'll discard it as you pointed out with Operation Warp Speed if he feels it holds back his conning.
A thousand times that last paragraph.
The second paragraph is just as smart
I agree with the thrust but I've listened to the Audiobook for "The Path To Power" by Robert Caro (and discussed the content of later volumes with friends who've read them) and I'm pretty sure the "corrupt, criminal" version of LBJ is just....LBJ.
My mother took to calling Trump Harold Hill (from The Music Man) back in 2016 and I still think there is no more apt description.
Trump's inconsistencies on COVID notwithstanding, people have agency are responsible for their own decision to become vaccinated or not. To compare tepid support for vaxxing to someone who led an army that killed Americans is wrong.
Yes, people have agency. But when you predictably lead them to harm themselves with that agency you *also* deserve blame. There is no law of conservation of blame that says that blaming one person in a causal chain takes away blame from another person in the same causal chain.
Very true, Kenny. Blame, like credit, has no hard limit at 100%. Trump definitely deserves blame for not doing enough to encourage vaccinations, though the overreachers also deserve some (but less) for exciting the "you can't force me to get vaccinated" part of people's brains.
I still disagree with the Ho Chi Minh comparison, but Trump was not good in this area, as with everything he touches.
John: He doesn't deserve a defense from you. Most human beings who are wronged by others possess agency. That's part of what it means to be human.
I'm not suggesting the following applies to every last Trump voter, but he clearly has a virtually messianic hold on millions of Americans. He could have saved tens of thousands of lives. And for virtually no effort on his part. Do some Zoom calls on Fox and tell people the jabs ("Frankly, my administration was really fantastic on science!") may save their lives. Or those of their parents. Or spouses. Or children. Tell them them Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others like him are peddling fake science. Go on Joe Rogan. Record some public service announcements. Start calling it the TrumpVax.
Tens of thousands of lives.
And one can't help but notice the limited amount he did to promote covid inoculation faded to nothingness after he left the White House. Why, it's almost as if he thought it might benefit him personally if deaths increased—and national conditions failed to improve—now that he was no longer president.
You're right, of course, about the inaptness of the Ho Chi Minh comparison. Ho sincerely believed his was a just war against foreigners. Trump was something far worse.
After WWI an English newspaper held a contest for the most shocking headline imaginable, with the winner being, "Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive; War Fought by Mistake." In our time, the winner would be "Ex-President Trump Joins Jimmy Carter in Building Habitat for Humanity Homes."
Of course he lost interest in promoting shots after he left the White House. What was in it for him?
(Recall that it was reported that he stood with John Kelly at Arlington Cemetery (where the latter's son was buried) and said, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?")
Yeah this repeatedly came up during COVID, the analogy to war. And I thought it was really telling that in the end, a lot of young people joined the initial right-wing protests in defense of their right to associate in public with others, against an uncertain and vague timeline as to when their social liberties would be permitted again. Yes, this took an anti-racist moniker, but I'd argue that race is really all people my age know. They are unaware of any other way to effectively communicate moral authority to a public health official saying it's too dangerous for them to go to a beach with their friends. So that's what they did, and it worked. Public health officials decided you weren't a murderer standing outside in a crowd if you were a young person demanding racial justice as opposed to an Orthodox Jew mourning at a funeral.
'Led an army that killed Americans' is one way to describe it I suppose.
Eh, I think that's not an accurate statement about Trump on vaccines. He's still willing to take credit for the COVID vaccine and encouraged supporters to get booster shots:
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/24/1067775038/ex-president-trump-pushes-back-on-anti-vaccine-talking-points
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-slams-desantis-over-covid-vaccine-booster-shot-why-could-ncna1287445
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-he-saved-100-million-lives-covid-vaccines-1774178
He mentions it occasionally, but never where it will get too much attention from his base. They don't want to hear it, so he avoids pushing it. I think he'd love to crow about it but has realized that doing so would hurt him with his base.
OK, but that's a different claim than Trump "very quickly" started spewing "antivax quackery" after leaving office, which is what I was responding to. Given that Trump has done literal 180s on plenty of other issues (e.g., abortion), I think it's impressive that he hasn't gone all in on, "I was lied to by the Deep State and tricked into authorizing Project Warp Speed" or something like that?
“ The central political fact of our era is that Donald Trump is a total piece of shit and scumbag.”
This is eloquent in its directness.
Sometimes it is refreshing for someone to just state the obvious.
There were some comments earlier today comparing this to Nixon, when people were dishonestly claiming norms go against prosecuting an ex-president, with others pointing out Nixon was almost certainly going to be prosecuted, which was why the Ford pardon was needed. All fair, but then I had a realization, ask yourself what changes if the following happens:
It's the afternoon of January 20, 2021. Pres. Biden tells an aide: "gimme the damn Trump pardon". Bits are copied word for word from the Nixon one, full immunity from crimes against the United States committed by Trump while President. Biden signs it, happy to put the past four years to bed. The country breathes a sigh of relief.
Except Trump still faces this indictment: he hadn't committed these crimes yet. And he also faces the New York indictment, because that offending predated his presidency, and is being prosecuted under state law. And the Georgia grand jury is still there too. A full Nixon pardon, and it makes absolutely no difference.
Yup and the end of Nixon's criminality coinciding with the end of his political career is not a coincidence. Nixon was an extreme member of the criminal-politician lineage. And that lineage is about committing crimes in the service of political objectives (promoting the party, policy objectives & maintaining power) with profit as a side motive. There have been left politicians in this modeal as well (LBJ) though none extreme as Nixon.
Once his political career was dead the criminality stopped.
Trump by contrast is the career criminal conman who is in search of personal profit. A pardon would encourage future criminality since he would think he was immune from punishment for criminality.
As Matt said GOP put themselves in this place by falling for a criminal
I think this is dead on, and have long believed that the biggest victims of Trump are his most die hard supporters. The deeper question is how does the Republican party fix this? I may not be among their ranks but I'm not so devoted to the Democratics that I can't see we have a two party system that can't function forever with only one that is semi serious about governing. I also think a lot of the odder things that have come out of the left that are the occasional topic at SB are part of a bad feedback loop created by the GOP's apparent inability to reform itself after the disastrous policy failures in the Bush years. All they have left is a media apparatus extracting money from an aging, overly credulous base, and Trump is the ultimate manifestation. As darkly amusing as this can be from a partisan angle, in the American system it inevitably means that some of these conservative celebrity buffoons will occasionally win, which is bad for as all, while also leading to a right wing party incapable of keeping the left wing party honest.
There was a very insightful article written recently about the British media equivalent of the conservative media bubble and how it was convincing politicians that irrelevant issues matter and helping them to drive themselves off a cliff.
Ah, it was in the Statesman and not Jonn's substack, no wonder I had trouble finding it.
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/02/right-wing-newspapers-killing-tories-with-kindness
The way it typically works when a party goes off the rails is they lose a bunch of elections until they're effectively irrelevant, then they clean house and start over with new leaders and new ideas.
That hasn't happened yet and doesn't seem that close. At this point we're stuck until Trump dies and you better believe we're going to get some weird religious imagery and Trump cults.
And oh btw it seems like there's a significant chance Don Jr will be a relevant political figure in our lifetimes. Because some people just can't get over this guy.
I think one factor keeping this from happening is that in an era of mass and social media the Trump crazy train also drove a bunch of Democrats loudly and visibly crazy. As we move forward, the party and the mainstream center-left seem to be clawing back some ground from that, while the Republicans succumb further to their crazies, so if I had to guess the broad strokes of the next decade, they do indeed look like your first paragraph.
But if Trump scrapes out a victory in 2024 then all bets are off, the IDpol, post-liberal, and economically hard-left factions in the Democrats will again be empowered...
Its likely if Trump wins that Republicans would hold all three chambers. In that case voters would judge Republicans based on what they deliver. And then in 2028 it would probably be either a new era of Democrat or Republican dominance, based on feelings from the 24-28 term. If Biden wins 2024 then I’d apply the same prediction to Democrats, although they probably wont control the senate. Id like either party to have a full sweep in the next election so we can see the actual policies agenda they have
Except we *did* have a full sweep in recent memory - in 2016. And it turned out that the GOP's "actual policy agenda" was what it's been since at least Reagan: cut entitlements and cut taxes for rich people. It turns out that that agenda is wildly unpopular, so it cost the GOP the House in 2018, but there's no evidence so far that given another sweep of the elected branches in 2024, the lesson will be learned (as indeed it was not after 2012).
At least the Kennedy cult had two actual martyrs.
... even if the Republicans could figure out how to do so kind of widespread covert social "cult" deprogramming it would take years.
I mean, the 2018 and 2022 midterms weren’t a wake up call? Trump also could have won 2020 with just a smudge more normalcy (incumbents during Covid tended to do great internationally)
Would really recommend this piece from Rick Perlstein on Romney's lies 2012 (which now seem hilariously banal compared to Trump). Even after seeing all the Trump stuff, the things he discusses here conservative media are shocking https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
I had no idea newsmax existed in 2007...
The Republican Party was trending toward its current dysfunction well before Trump came down the escalator. Its media ecosystem is optimized to cater to the preferences of the ‘aging, overly credulous base’, and in doing so, tends to take them further and further from reality. Its intelligentsia— especially those under 35— are increasingly captured by weird and alienating ideologies like ultramontane TradCath integralism and Moldbuggian neo-reaction as they try to assemble some sort of intellectual superstructure on top of the Trump personality cult’s unsteady base. Unfortunately, I don’t think they can get out of this without some sort of major realignment event; you can’t change your tack in response to election losses if you can’t acknowledge that you lost.
We will find out via elections. It is factual that the FBI pressured Twitter to censor the Hunter Laptop story. In lieu of that manipulation, Trump couldve certainly won his 30,000 votes across AZ, GA, WI and be president. I think its likely he would win 2024 against Biden. We will find out what the opinions of Americans are based on national elections over time, and it seems that one side will crush the other slowly but soundly over the next decade and a new consensus will be entrenched in Washington. That may be a Left paradigm supported by a growing coalition, or it may be an Anti-Left paradigm supported by a growing coalition. As long as our elections remain fair and free America will work this sclerosis out over the next decade
The Hunter Biden story was still published in the NY Post and reported across a multitude of media organizations. Just because Twitter held off for like, what a few days? based on the warnings of a potential disinformation campaign (which, come on, if Trump's team wanted this to be treated as legitimately sourced data, letting Rudy Giuliani be the figurehead and primary source for handling the materials that also had a kind of smelly origin from a nearly blind Trump supporting Mac repairman for it was a really stupid move - it's not as if it wasn't *also* public information that Rudy was running all over Ukraine trying to purchase exactly this sort of data for the past few years), from promoting the NY Post story Tweet, does not mean there was zero reporting or publicly available information about this story, let alone that's over-inflating how many people actually get their news from Twitter (what is like 1% of the population uses Twitter in the first place?), and that if the story was on Twitter a few days earlier, this would have changed the election. Also, had Rudy provided the data for independent examination instead of holding onto his second hand copy, more news organizations might also been able to report more in depth on the veracity and details of the data, rather from the more skeptical stance they adopted given these facts.
Let alone, people voting for Biden/against Trump - I don't know of too many who would have changed their vote to Trump based on Biden's son's peccadillos - and analysis of what is on the laptop has not been the smoking gun at all about some nefarious Joe Biden activities that would have likely changed many votes at that point. I mean at some point the right needs to maybe come to terms with the fact that the Hunter Biden laptop is not nearly the scandal or rises to the level of interest in the average voter that it does for extremely online politically Republicans/Trump supporters.
Additionally, I've always been a bit perplexed about how Trump supporters don't expect any sort of nepotism/profiting from office "scandal" involving the Bidens wouldn't just blow back on how the Trump family - where his daughter and son in law were actual Administration "officials" conducting actual domestic and foreign policy, and who profited *massively* from their connections, let alone the issues surrounding Trump DC Hotel that was a hub for foreign and domestic "lobbyists" paying essentially patronage to Trump for their interests, and the ways in which he practically bankrupted the Secret Service budget with how he was (over) charging the Secret Service to accompany him on his frequent trips to his own resorts. And why that wouldn't just come up again in his campaign where Trump is directly doing business with a lot of Saudi and Middle Eastern governments and financiers.
It seems to me that there are quite a few conservatives in this country who do not really care that much about conservative policy per se. They simply get much more utility out of owning the libs: offending them, making them unhappy, and ruining their days. Conservative policy may be a means to those ends, but does not have much value in and of itself, and there are other means to those ends that may be more effective. They are also short-term thinkers: it's better to ruin a lib's day today and potentially lose an election tomorrow, than to refrain from ruining a lib's day today and increase the odds of winning an election tomorrow - a bird in the hand, after all.
Call it revealed preference.
One of Matt’s recurring points is that there are a similar number of people on the left who think it’s more important to call out racism and prejudice than to work to mitigate and eliminate it.
There's no doubt those people exist (and are extremely annoying), but I would dispute that there are a "similar number" of them, and I don't think Matt thinks that either. You see those people a lot on social media and even regular media, but they don't show up in actual votes to anywhere near the same degree.
Good point. It’s a smaller number of people, who feel much more prominent because they are all over the media (especially social media).
They are definitely disproportionately on social media. And many have the mindset that “calling out” on social media IS “working to mitigate and end” racism or sexism or whatever. They feel like their tweet or their “don’t read this book or listen to this singer or appreciate this artist because they are BAD” call for action *is* somehow “at least I made a little bit of difference.” Or their being against “bad fanfiction” because “fiction affects reality and people will get Bad Ideas” (about what? Casting love spells? Falling in love with your half brother who is really your cousin and rightful king of Westeros? Sure, Jan, that’s gonna happen in real life) is somehow “at least my teeny tiny speaking out will Make A Difference.”
The Make A Difference By Obnoxious Social Media Presence people are annoying and not actually making any difference. Thankfully they are a very small slice of the left. Most are working quietly behind the scenes, oh, and are against banning any kind of books or reading material (Illinois just passed an anti-book-banning law!).
I agree that there are a lot more well, "haters" on the right than on the left, but it's interesting and significant to me that the psycho-social phenomenon exists in both cases. And of course it's manifested itself historically in both leftist and rightist political/revolutionary movements.
Eh. There will always be bad human beings, in every society across all of time for the rest of humanity. That doesn't mean they have to win political office! I disagree with chunks of this piece because it makes it sound like Trump seized power almost illegitimately. Like, this piece is a little vague on how this bad guy became President of the United States. It was due to the voters!! Lots of human beings- voters- are dumb, cruel, and open to a strongman leader, and Trump won a democratic election specifically because of them.
If I had my own Substack, I would be braver than Matt and write 'many voters are in fact bad', which is how we ended up here and how Orban wins in Hungary, Bolsanaro won in Brazil, and so on. It's OK to be a little pessimistic about human nature- it's OK to be a bit of a misanthrope, especially when you're engineering political systems. Humans are deeply receptive to a charismatic strongman. The solution to this problem is
1. Don't be a presidential system
2. If you have to have a presidency, for God's sake, *control who runs for your party's nomination and limit the candidates. Don't do open primaries. Don't allow every random guy to run for your nomination who wants to. Gatekeep. Make it less democratic.*
The real One Weird Old Trick to beating demagogues is to prevent them from getting on the ballot in the first place, which involves some elite gatekeeping, which is a good thing. Mob rule is bad. The median voter is kinda dumb. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
Netanyahu became Israel's Prime Minister running during a massive criminal trial.
Parliamtentary systems are better but you really overstate their ability to gatekeep. And to get the level of elite gatekeeping to really block criminals from power you basically need to end democracy.
I would simply limit the franchise to smart people who agree with me.
We need the Iranian system. Anyone should be able to run for office, as long as the Supreme Council says they're OK.
"The amendment would make unconstitutional [...] racist ideas by public officials (with 'racist ideas' and 'public official' clearly defined)."
The lack of clear definitions for those phrases in that page is jarring.
"It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees."
So who gets to decide who those experts are? As evan bear alludes to below, I'm sure Kendi would want to be that decider.
And also, DOA is a really, really unfortunate acronym to use here--and yet also accurate as to the fate of this amendment.
jfc I'm pulling this car over until you kids get ahold of yourselves
Supreme Council should be Kendi, Taylor Swift, and Shaq.
Same in Italy with Berlusconi.
I definitely think that for a lot of Trump’s diehard supporters, being an asshole is a significant part of the appeal, but I don’t think that he provides great evidence for the anti-democratic view— he’s never been a popular vote winner, and both he and the Republican Party as a whole are only consistently nationally competitive because of anti-majoritarian political institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College.
"1. Don't be a presidential system"
Not sure what this has to do with anything? If anything the mandate is all easier in a parliamentary system where people are voting for party with the PM at the top and couldn't care less who their actual MP is.
Just look at Berlusconi in Italy for the modern blueprint for this.
1. Not every country necessarily makes the head of the largest party the PM. More importantly, the cabinet is appointed by parliament and not the PM, removing this crucial power from just man or woman as we do in presidential systems
2. The parties can remove the PM if their behavior is unacceptable! Look at Boris Johnson- when it became clear he was breaking the law, they ruthlessly removed him, and it's not like BoJo had a mob of followers behind him. Most Tory voters were fine with the decision. The key is that the Brits have a transactional relationship with politicians, which is how it should be- like any other at-will job, you're in office until you're no longer holding your employer's confidence, in which case you get the boot
Basing your understanding of how parliamentary systems could work off the UK is perhaps not the best model. Just because the British have a large unwritten constitution and tradition doesn't mean the parliamentary system isn't easier to jimmy.
I invite you to read this list of PMs from every parliamentary country on Earth, who were defeated by a no confidence vote and so removed- I'd put it at over a hundred https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_defeated_by_votes_of_no_confidence
"1. Don't be a presidential system"
I dunno. Yes, we got Trump. We also got Lincoln and FDR. I'd say the jury is still out on the presidential system.
I'd put it differently. It's not that some voters are bad, but that the pablum about how we all want the same thing at the end of the day is not true. We want different things. The only way to claim we want the same things is to abstract to such a level as to be meaningless (we all want freedom, safety, opportunity, etc.).
The trick - which Trump made easier in some ways and more difficult in others - is stripping away the layers of self-delusion we all wear and determining what people actually want, and how many of them want it. Whether it's a presidential or parliamentary system, you have to build that coalition, and there's no good way to stop a strongman from doing it.
Yes, absolutely "many voters are in fact bad" but I will still regard the "badness" as a form of unintentional vulnerability in people who are otherwise decent, honest, charitable (i.e. "good") in their communities and personal lives. (This keeps us cautious with regard to our own unintentional vulnerabilities)
The problem with democracy is always the demos.
We had a better system before the 17th Amendment was passed.
Indirect elections would be a reasonable system if we had proportional representation, but combined with the existing geographic district-based system it would be worse than the status quo.
Nah, I actually like state legislature elections being about state issues, not whose going to the Senate, putting aside the democratic reasons we probably fundamentally disagree on.
‘many voters are in fact bad'
You mean the basket of deplorables”?
On a completely unrelated note, whatever happened to dysphemistic treadmill? I haven't seen his comments for a couple of weeks now. I hope he's all right. He always had such witty comments.
Could just be taking a break. I find SB to be a genuinely constructive oasis on the often-horrible internet, but I sometimes find myself spending too much time here to the detriment of other things that need doing, and so I take breaks myself.
“The way you practice ruthless partisanship is to conduct yourself with a lot of integrity because that helps your allies.”
Serious question: did this work for Obama?
I’d argue he’s the political figure with the most integrity that almost anyone alive can remember - and yet he got massacred in the 2010 midterms and never had a House majority afterward.
I really enjoyed this piece, but I’m not sure this is the right take.
Obama won a landslide majority in 2008 and comfortably won re-election in 2012. He still enjoys relatively good net approvals today, and that residual goodwill probably helped his vice President win the 2020 primary decisively and collect a solid popular vote margin in the general— despite a relatively tepid economic recovery and some significant foreign policy blunders. I think the balance of the evidence points to Obama being good at messaging and electoral politics, and his personal integrity probably helped with that.
"I think the balance of the evidence points to Obama being good at messaging and electoral politics, and his personal integrity probably helped with that."
I wish, really, really wish that was true. But Clinton was popular at the end of his term, enjoys relatively good net approval today, and his lack of personal integrity didn't get in the way of being great at messaging and electoral success.
Sure— there are multiple viable strategies for being popular. (Being president during a long above-trend economic expansion and a countrywide decrease in violent crime rates certainly helps.) But ceteris paribus, not having a ton of scandals seems to help. Do you think that the counterfactual scandal-free Clinton would have a lower approval rating?
I would hope the counterfactual wouldn't be true, but I'm not certain of it. I know people who felt like Clinton's scandals made him more approachable and human in some of the same ways that I think that's true for Trump as well.
I mean, I think the fact that he stayed relatively popular despite ISIS and a relatively slow recovery shows significant messaging skill. Joe Biden has gotten dragged a lot harder by public opinion for similar issues even though his admin has handled both the economy and foreign policy a lot more effectively.
Obama was both not very ruthless and not very "partisan" in the sense that he didn't always have much interest in strengthening the Democratic Party as a whole. But the more important point is that, to the extent the Democrats did worse in 2010 than you might have expected given the state of the economy (which was very bad), the reason was that Congress passed highly consequential controversial legislation on partisan lines and there was backlash. That's what dedicated partisans do, they spend political capital on stuff at the core of party priorities, which is very different from Trump whose influence has led Republicans to lose multiple winnable races for no policy gain. (SCOTUS overruling Roe is a real example of this but Trump didn't do anything special to achieve this; the principal actors were McConnell tanking Garland, Justice Kennedy deciding that partisanship trumped preserving Roe, and RBG failing to retire in 2014.)
People forget that the goal is to implement good policy, not just get re-elected. Obama passed the PPACA and lost the Congress as a result. That was a good trade.
This is exactly my point! Obama wasn’t really “ruthless”, and the quality of having integrity - which Obama does in spades - is not how one becomes ruthless or helps one’s political allies.
It’s a weird claim for Matt to make.
I don't think Matt is saying that having integrity translates into being ruthless. I think Matt is saying that a genuine ruthless partisan has integrity because integrity serves partisan ends, which I think really is true to an extent (scandals hurt, particularly scandals like Trump's that are about ego and selfishness) though only to an extent (Harry Reid was a very effective ruthless partisan and not exactly a paragon of integrity).
I think this is probably the basic problem that Matt's piece runs into - he's basically claiming that integrity is instrumentally useful to political parties, and that *voters* should recognize that and not vote for conmen. But that's only half the equation: if you're an aspiring politician of few ideological scruples (say, Vance) how do you get away from the fact that someone who wouldn't know integrity if it punched him in his fucking face nevertheless won the primary and then the presidency?
Yes, a big part of the problem the Republicans face is that individual Republican politicians have incentives not to rock the Trump boat, which is incompatible with having integrity.
Well said - but again what is the evidence that conducting oneself with integrity actually helps one’s allies? The example of arguably the most integrity-having president of all time suggests it makes no real difference in outcomes.
That's fair that Matt may be overstating the returns to integrity. I personally think Trump might be a stronger general election candidate than DeSantis because it's easier for him to discard unpopular Republican stances on abortion and federal social spending (and on the margin, because he is likelier to successfully pull off stealing it if it's a close thing, though the results in 2022 make that a lot harder). But it's "might be" now instead of "would be" because he's going to be running with four indictments over his head.
Obama was arrogant and inexperienced and couldn't handle the congressional GOP to save his life. His handling of Putin wasn't much better. He is a brilliant orator and a mediocre politician and statesman. As for his character, to my mind his choice to have an extravagent 60th Birthday party in the height of COVID, and to disinvite all those who worked so hard to make him presidency, and make his administration a successs , in favor of random celebrities with 3 brain cells between them - speaks volumes as to his character.
Avoiding scandals doesn’t mean you automatically always win. Other factors matter too. In Obama’s case, a backlash to the first black President was probably unfortunately inevitable.
I'm not saying that no one voted on this basis, but it's always struck me as potentially lacking explanatory power - partially because Obama himself was extremely circumspect about raising the salience of racial issues (except for those instances where they exogenously rose to national prominence like Trayvon Martin), but more significantly because the guy did win a second term, after all. Is the idea that Trump drove far more reactionary turnout in 2016 than Romney did in 2012?
There was tons of moderate to conservative (mostly white) Democratic state legislators in the South who'd won reelection in places like Mississippi or Arkansas year after year, despite the GOP dominating everywhere else in the state to tons of those legislative seats being lost, because for the first time, GOP admakers could put those people in an ad next to Obama.
Makes sense. I had been thinking specifically of the presidency here.
There was a whole slew of white, working class (heavily Scotch-Irish) precincts running down the spine of the Appalachians from Maine to Alabama where votes dipped for Obama in 2008 vs. Kerry in 2004. Hard to explain such an outcome (I mean, in 2008 the economy was literally collapsing—not exactly a great development for the GOP brand that cycle) except for the issue of race. Obama was also the first president in living memory to win reelection with a reduced popular and Electoral vote share. Maybe that's just the economy, or the tone of our politics these days. Maybe. But maybe not.
I'm not saying that Obama's race can't have had a measurable factor in vote counts for him (for example, there's no contradiction implied by the dip relative to Kerry), I'm observing that the explanatory power specifically of "a backlash to the first Black president" has to account for his successful reelection bid in 2012, which would have been the only place a backlash to said Black president (as opposed to the successor white Democratic candidate) would have actually tangibly affected the skin color of the person in the White house. It's the delta between the electoral clout of "racially reactionary voters" in 2016 versus 2008 or 2012 [particularly when accounting for the actuarial weighting of voters tending to suggest that this cohort probably saw a disproportionate amount of deaths during that span] that warrants explanation as being a backlash, rather than the mere existence of voters who don't like Obama for being Black -- presumably those folks were also around in 2008 and 2012. It sounds like this might have had some effect in 2012, but in a non-dispositive way despite despite it being the only real point at which racist preferences for president could actually have been effectuated.
I entirely agree with you! But with that line Matt suggests otherwise, which is what I wanted to call out.
And I mean sure, if Obama had less integrity, things probably would have been worse for him (especially as the first Black president) - but if all integrity gets you is “not negative” instead of “positive”, that’s not saying much for the value of integrity.
If things would have been worse had Obama had less integrity, then that by definition means the integrity was a positive, not merely "not negative."
Fair! But if the difference is losing 90 house seats vs 70 I’m not sure that’s hugely material. It’s not like it got Obama a House majority.
20 House seats is pretty self-evidently material. That difference may or may not take you over the tipping point depending on whatever other factors are in play in a given election, but that is irrelevant to materiality.
Eh, it is immaterial if the only outcomes that matter are binary.
It’s the same logic Democrats used for redistricting in states like NV and NM. They’ll lose a couple more seats than they otherwise might have in a GOP wave, but absent a wave it makes them more likely to eke out a majority, which is what they really care about.
Still got reelected.