Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Ideological submission as the price of entry is pretty normal in world historical terms
This is a tremendously underwhelming endorsement. Being exploited by brutal overlords who demand sycophantic bootlicking is pretty normal in world historical terms. Being a subsistence farming peasant is pretty normal in world historical terms. Fifty percent child mortality is pretty normal in world historical terms. I have no idea why we would accept "normal in world historical terms" when we're presently doing far better and we know we can do better still.
American conservatism(like most imperial state ideologies) is a big tent that 95% of people can fit into comfortably
In the sense that you can always be a submissive peasant with no rights worth respecting. In the sense that it actually accommodates everyone, no.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed
Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...
I find it largely to defy discussion.
It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.
The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Yes and no. The GFC left a lot of college grads with a mountain of debt, short-circuited career prospects, and a sense that they'd been sold a bill of goods. But this sentiment is not limited to middle class dropouts. It is also widespread among the professionally successful. As has been noted, Mamdani did his best with upper middle class white people. These are not just career NGO types anxious to keep the taps open. They are lawyers, engineers, doctors, etc... They are the sorts of people you would expect to be most "pro-system", but they're not. They're increasingly skeptical of it.
Economic precarity is a factor - most are acutely aware of what falling off the white collar wagon would mean for their lifestyle - but the points of highest contention don't fit this pattern. Rather, you have a collapse of faith in the ability of US political systems to solve important problems in a just manner (if at all).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
The upswing in "socialism"* of late is largely a reaction to the perceived failure of political systems to address socio-economic problems. In particular, the GFC, the failure of the ACA to address the capriciousness of the American healthcare system, climate change, and a general inability to hold economic elites to account for anti-social-but-legal behavior. The price of housing hasn't helped either.
Unfortunately, when people get mad, they often vote for stupid and/or self-destructive policies.
*I use scare quotes because to a large degree modern American socialism is simply a middle class left-populist movement. There are genuine exceptions, but when you press for policy details you'll generally find something that is not in any meaningful sense a break from the past 70 years of left-liberalism. A backlash against decades of "socialism is when the government does stuff" has greatly attenuated the negative connotations of the label.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
If pushback against Trump is so widespread, it should be trivial to demonstrate. Where are the high profile Republicans standing in opposition to Trump? Where is this significant pushback?
one of us is simply wrong in our understanding of reality, there's no other way around it. And I don't think it's me.
Look, I don't know you. I can't speak to your personal experience. All I can observe is that on a national level, every prominent Republican who has stood up to Trump has either been whipped into line or is effectively no longer part of the American conservative coalition. On a personal level, I can observe that family members who were literally Republican party officers for decades were chased out of the party for not being sufficiently deferential to Trumpist conspiracy theories.
Not even close. If the argument was merely "some people really like Trump" vs "some people really liked Obama", sure, but it's not. It is that you cannot criticize Trump and be a member of the GOP in good standing. Musk tried and very rapidly learned that if you tried to break ranks you were going to be whipped into line.
There's no Obama equivalent to cabinet secretaries beginning meetings by verbally fellating Trump. The degree of personal devotion demand and received by Trump from his followers is pretty much without parallel.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump
If you mean literal GEoM memes, perhaps yes. If you mean artwork where Trump is portrayed as a heroic and/or borderline deific figure (often in comical contrast to his actual appearance), no. Maybe it was started by some internet troll, but his base picked it up and ran with it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
To name a few:
- Pushback from conservative Democrats on ACA. Nowadays, it's popular to blame the GOP for the ACA being the watered down version that finally passed, but it faced significant opposition from conservative Democratic senators (most notoriously Lieberman, but he took a lot of the heat for a larger body of centrist Dems).
- Left-wing critiques of Obama foreign policy (and before you suggest it, no, this is not '50 Stalins' criticism), especially re: drone strikes
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership was opposed by both progressive Democrats and more traditional labor Dems
- Joe Manchin openly set himself up in opposition to Obama's policies, especially on the environmental front.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
The cult of personality around Obama didn't hold a candle to Trump's. Obama was regularly attacked from both the left and right within his own party. You could be a Democrat in good standing and also an Obama critic. Meanwhile, in Trump's GOP absolute fealty is the bare minimum. Criticism, where it exists, is either of the 50 Stalins variety or carefully suggesting that perhaps the Tsar is being poorly advised.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
Color me skeptical that there's going to be any direct dynastic successor to Donald Trump. None of his children seem to have his sheer unprincipled audacity, nor will they inherit his cult of personality. I think once Trump himself is out of the picture, the knives are going to come out and the Trump children are going to discover their fellow Republicans don't like them very much.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
Personally, I see this as Mamdani doing much, much better among kitchen-table issues for the median voter. All about affordability. Of course, the merit of his attempt is a separate question. He's pro rent control (economically sketchy but not unheard of), wants to create public supermarkets (horrible idea all around, supermarket margins are very small), taxing the rich (will they flee or not?), and is obviously young and not super experienced.
Something I would note is that for all handwringing about socialism*, none of this is particularly atypical of a progressive candidate. Which is not the strongest endorsement, but he seems well within norms for silly-but-popular policies. The public option for Bodegas is the most out there, and even that isn't as out there as people think (it's still a bad idea, but it's a tried and proven bad idea). Some of these things aren't even new polices. NYC has rent control!
This more or less comports with my expectations. To one side, Mamdani seems kind of vacuous - he mostly seems to agree with whoever he's talking to. A useful trait for a politician, but not particularly indicative. To the other side, it's unsurprising mirror of the right-wing. The Right hates the aesthetic of radicalism, and will try to present their policies as common sense even when they're completely bonkers. The Left loves the aesthetic of radicalism, and will try to gloss normal policy as revolutionary.
Aside: Mamdani winning the primary seems to have aroused a spectacularly unhinged fury from certain sectors, e.g. one representative calling for him to be denaturalized and another saying he was the vanguard of an effort to turn NYC into a Shia Caliphate.
*illustrative: I once had an argument with a guy who was stridently advocating for socialism, and when I pressed him for specifics on what that would entail, it basically boiled down to UHC + a sovereign wealth fund.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
Ten years ago, I would have agreed with you, but it's extremely common to see right-wing populists use it as a pejorative as well, targeting people to the left of them economically.
This is not the first time you've gone off on this Mandate of Heaven schtick, and I can't help but feel it relies on creating monarchist fanfic only loosely connected to reality. That or it's a bit. You write like Trump is this massively popular figure instead of an incredibly divisive one. Like, in what world does Trump's popularity keep rising? People love rightful royal power?
Is there a reason we should prefer this narrative over the more boring theory that Trump won because of inflation, immigration, and short memories?
wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor
Or an exceptionally vain toddler. Trump is known to be comically susceptible to flattery, even as the same people shit-talk him behind his back. That is not an indicator of someone who commands respect. I would question the leadership qualities of anyone who wants to be treated in such a manner, and I would question the judgment of anyone who looks at such a figure and sees a worthy leader.
Arguably, the manly dignity and self-reliance aspects were a side effect of feudal Europe, or at least an older, aristocratic way of thinking.
I can't really speak to "manly dignity", since I'm not really sure what that means, but self-reliance was never an aristocratic value. It is an eminently middle-class one. One of the notional justifications for aristocratic arrangements was that it enabled the aristocrat to pursue higher callings without having to be bothered about the sordid necessities of life.
yeoman farmers (landed gentry)
Yeoman farmers are pointedly not landed gentry: they might have farmhands, but they work their own land. In a sense, they are agrarian petit-bourgeoisie. The gentry by contrast, manage estates (or, more likely, have it managed for them) of tenant farmers (or slaves, in the pre-ACW US). The idea of doing their own farming would've been seen as distasteful.
I note this not to be pedantic, but to point out that there is a massive, yawning gulf between a nation of yeomen and shopkeepers on the one hand, and an aristocratic one on the other. The former is one that at least permits the idea of universal dignity; the latter is one that sees dignity as a zero sum affair.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
Proportionality is a principle in the conduct of war, as are injunctions against reprisals and collective punishment.
Israel is not obliged to merely ignore rocket attacks (which in fact they were doing), let alone raids, simply because those attacks do not present an existential threat.
I didn't suggest that they were. I am suggesting that Israel is pursuing what amount to reprisals against Palestinian civilians.
If Hamas was an existential threat to Israel, matters might be different, but Hamas isn't an existential threat and is exceedingly unlikely to become one. (It still wouldn't justify reprisals, but it would at least change the calculations on proportional use of force).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
I think it's fair to say these four belligerents combined constitute an existential threat to Israel.
I think this is true, but only because Iran is on that list. Hamas and Hezbollah are occasionally deadly nuisances, but even that is substantially attributable to Iranian support. The actual existential threat to Israel is a nuclear-armed Iran, and that is not a problem remedied by bombing Gazan apartment buildings.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
I think it's simpler than that even. It just clearly fits the left's fixation on victims.
This is just a less nuanced (and less charitable) articulation of what I said. The Israeli defense of their conduct is, essentially "if the situation was reversed, they'd behave even worse." This is almost certainly true, but also immaterial because the situation isn't reversed and is extraordinarily unlikely to be (and if it is, it will be because Israel systematically alienated every potentially sympathetic party). Which is to say, Israel postures like it is responding to an existential threat, but it isn't. In the here-and-now, the Israeli boot is up the Palestinians' ass and it's pretty clear that a significant share of Israelis are down for ethnic cleansing.
The mere fact that there's a power asymmetry is not sufficient - historically, Palestinians have struggled to win western support, and this was in large part because they've historically made poor victims while Israel could tout being the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. However, the recent war has completely eclipsed prior phases of the conflict in terms of both overall casualties and the general lopsidedness of outcomes, badly eroding any sense of moral high ground. The personage of Benjamin Netanyahu hasn't helped in this regard either.
The basic reality is that Israel is fighting an uphill battle on the PR front, given the raw optics of the current conflict, and zoomers don't have the entrenched preferences of older generations.
On the right it's like a reverse of that, they're anti-idpol
The right is not anti-idpol, so I don't think anti-idpol explains right-wing views on Israel. White identitarians tend to have conflicted views because they tend to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic/anti-Arab. Old school conservatives tend to be uncritically pro-Israel both for some of the same reasons old school liberals do, as well as weirder reasons like millenarianism .
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
I'm not sure those positions really square with each other.
They don't really have to. Public and private solutions can fail for different reasons (though worth noting that both education and healthcare in the US are, like most developed countries, hybrid systems).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine.
This is not a huge mystery. If you're a left-leaning zoomer, you've spent most of your adult life watching right-wing Israeli governments take advantage of the US government to commit human rights violations while aggressively snubbing the Democrats and boosting the Republicans. You can invoke the history of the conflict or the gruesome spectre of a Hamas victory all you like, but you're contrasting ancient history* and lurid hypotheticals to current reality. If Israel had pursued a measured response to the Oct. 7th attacks (and especially if they weren't also constantly nibbling away at Palestinian territory), they would have been able to garner a lot of sympathy. Not from everyone - there are indeed people who think Israel can do no right - but from most. After all, it seemed like a vindication of the aforementioned lurid hypotheticals. Israel, however, does not do measured responses. And if the IDF's conduct isn't quite the war of annihilation their most vocal critics claim, it's still increasingly hard to argue that Israel isn't waging a war against the Palestinian people rather than simply going after Islamic terrorists.
Even if you're not left-leaning or otherwise sympathetic to the Palestinians, it's easy to feel like this is an incredibly one-sided relationship.
*which is not always especially favorable to the Israelis in any event.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
20d ago
This seems to be built into the system from the start
A necessity of elected political leadership is that they are elected, which is going to tend to select for electability rather than expertise. With appointees one expects a measure of expertise (and you even get it occasionally), but people like senators or the president are necessarily going to be amateurs and generalists. They have staffers and career civil servants to provide them with expert advice.
Perhaps it's just another sign of how completely warped the federal government has become compared to what the Founding Fathers had in mind.
The first cabinet was full of talented amateurs. The first Senate was basically a collection of lawyers and planters/rich farmers.
The basic answer is that this is just not a big or influential constituency. No ladder pulling required. Neolibs with a YIMBY flavor don't run for office, and when they do they tend to lose because boring technocratic policymaking isn't just boring, it also tends to slaughter a lot of sacred cows (one of the characteristics of this faction is a disdain for interest groups, which is not a great feature for endearing yourself to interest groups).
There's some hints of this changing, but most of the people who would fit this bill are still working at the state or municipal level. Buttigieg arguably lucked out, leveraging a failed presidential primary run to vault from mayor of a small city to cabinet secretary.
Their mortal enemies, the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi)
None of these people are neolibs (at least assuming that by 'neolib' you mean technocratically inclined center-left, as seems to be implied by earlier remarks) except maybe Blinken, who, rather prominently, is a career functionary rather than a politician. There's no particular reason for anyone of them to care about raising up the next generation of neolibs.
Likewise "less progressive" democrats tend to be almost the polar opposite of neoliberals: moderate to conservative-ish socially, economically populist. Or just normie libs.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
so they can be more easily doxed and their families threatened
So when they violate peoples' civil rights they can be identified and held legally accountable. The general public has an interest in government officers being identifiable and accountable for their actions. If people are threatening them (actually threatening them) for doing their jobs, there are laws for that already.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
I truly don't understand how everyone hates immigrants and not also the traitorous Americans who enable them??
The business gentry is the heart of the GOP and has zero interest in immigration enforcement via cracking down on employers. Enough politicians are uninterested in dealing with political fallout from the economic shock of rapidly expelling ten million workers. The average nativist voter doesn't think about this that hard.
The economy is not a particular sector. Improvements in agricultural productivity freed up labor to do things besides subsistence farming; productivity was not improved by removing labor. Ceterus paribus it may be beneficial for a particular group to constrain access/production in their field, but that's just rent-seeking.
Losing a white collar professional job at the wrong time can make it very hard to get back your career back on track. Far less of an issue for doctors than most, but most white collar jobs don't have the same level of stability.
Regardless, my point was the opposite: that by and large economic precarity doesn't explain the growth of left-wing populism amongst college grads. In many respects it is a mirror of Trumpism, being driven largely by cultural grievances around the distribution of prestige and a general lack of faith in the political system (albeit without quite the same degree of authoritarian propensities).
Neurotic strivers don't think about you at all.
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