laxam
21d ago
Yes, for 60 some years now what people meant when they said 'Conservative Movement' is dead.
laxam
21d ago
History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.
laxam
21d ago
It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s, elected both Bushes four times in total, and won the House nine times (I'll let you guys have 2016, although I think that really was still momentum from the Conservative Movement), the Senate ten times, and brought Republican control of state legislatures and governor's mansions to a numeric height unequaled in a century.
It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.
laxam
21d ago
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves. While Reagan's three legged stool makes clear the neocons weren't the only part of the conservative movement, Trumpism has also abandoned the other two legs: the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
The Old Right/Paleos have essentially entirely won the battle and so the Conservative Movement is dead. The Conservative Movement in America was something that grew out of the collapse of the Old Right in the face of the Eisenhower Presidency as essentially another path for opposing the New Deal Consensus. While the. Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
But the old Movement is 100% gone.
laxam
21d ago
I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
Trump essentially killed the conservative movement. It's not healthy, the old base now hates it and it's institutions have had to choose between sacrificing their souls or irrelevance. Just go to a MAGA space and say the word 'neocon' and see what happens.
MAGA doesn't even trust Conservative intellectual institutions. What progress is still being made (say, what's happening in Florida), is localized, not part of the national movement, which has shattered and died in most places.
laxam
24d ago
Probably tiny. The problem is that, if the polls are accurate, this is a ludicrously close race and tiny errors can have huge effects.
laxam
24d ago
In addition to his general popularity with radical youth, Bernie was a candidate for the very online.
Again, they would have run ads with him calling himself a socialist, all day, every day, for six months before the election and he would have lost by 5+ points.
laxam
24d ago
I'm not saying they weren't arrogant about their odds the other way. But Bernie would have gotten whooped by Trump both times, just from airing commercials with him personally identifying as a socialist between the DNC and Election Day.
There's a reason Democrats pretend very hard to be moderates no matter how left wing they are.
laxam
25d ago
because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".
It's worth calling out that this was the lesson they learned from Obama. Obama campaigned as a moderate then, twice, betrayed the expectations of people who wanted a moderate. He was expected to do things like help heal racial divisions, not just by being a black man in power, but by actively holding the door open to black Americans to enter the political mainstream. Instead he said Trayvon Martin looked like he could be his son. He was expected to reform American healthcare (a very key issue at the time, when lots of people were losing access to employer provided health insurance during the Great Recession) but ended up creating (what was perceived as) a complex and expensive left wing boondoggle.
This pissed a lot of people off, but only people who were paying close attention. Republicans cleaned up in the House in 2010 and in the Senate in 2014 because only the people who care about politics enough to pay attention voted in mid-terms. Democratic strategists noticed and they started to reconsider the Clinton strategy of actually being a moderate and thought about, instead, just looking like a moderate in election season. They felt like the learned the wrong lesson from 1996, where Bill's hard turn right had led to him recovering his popularity and resoundingly beating expectations after becoming the first Democratic President to lose Congress in half a century. Gore, despite his obsession with global warming, was nevertheless one step above a Blue Dog in a lot of ways and Kerry was considering an acceptably moderate alternative to John Edwards. It was only when Obama swept in 2008 and then still won re-election 2012 that it was decided that actually being moderate wasn't what mattered.
laxam
25d ago
Hillary Clinton wasn't woke in the slightest; anyone who could be remotely described as such was already in the tank for Sanders.
This is the opposite of my memory of 2016. Hillary was the candidate of Institutional Woke and Sanders was the last stand of the Old Left fighting to keep the focus on class issues instead of identity politics.
laxam
25d ago
They 'ratfucked' him because they were fully aware a self-identified socialist would get crushed in an American election and stood the chance of poisoning their brand for an extended period of time.
laxam
26d ago
Tariffs are generally a bad idea in the modern world. While consumption taxes in general are good, by applying them only to imports they have to be much higher (and this cause much more dead weight loss) than a general sales tax would.
A lot of the things said about tariffs by the media are stupid and pretty much just campaigning for the Democrats, but that doesn't actually make tariffs good.
laxam
26d ago
Polling aggregators almost invariably create averages for state polling, too. The people giving probabilities, the modelers, also base their modeled outcomes off of state polls, so they're aware the Electoral College exists.
What's the actual record of prediction markets?
laxam
27d ago
While it was normal for communists to call everyone fascists in the 1920's (Social Democrats were 'social fascists'), the earliest I know of was Truman comparing Dewey to Mussolini.
laxam
30d ago
The arrogance: the email server.
For a second I forgot about the specific Hillary context and reacted to this with, "What's wrong with Exchange admins!?"
laxam
30d ago
To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.
Dramatically. The Democrats still win the lowest two income quintiles, it's just by a lot less than it used to be.
laxam
1mo ago
1844 is the one that has to have hurt the most. So close, after so long, but not able to pull it out, once again.
laxam
1mo ago
a rare trait in politicians
It's pretty common in Presidents for the obvious reason that you have to be top 1% in several aspects of politics to get the office. The only modern President I can think of (say, post 1980) who doesn't have a reputation for being personally funny and charming was HW (and, maybe, Biden, although he supposedly had his charms before decline set in).
laxam
1mo ago
Out of your list, I think only Shapiro and Moore are actual national possibilities. The rest are some variation of Blue Scott Walkers or nobodies whose current media attention is pretty much an in-kind campaign contribution.
laxam
1mo ago
Also AIUI cable providers often pool their customers' downlink and provide much less that advertised speeds at peak times; is the FCC looking into this?
Requiring providers to not oversubscribe their link bandwidth would make broadband multiple times more expensive than it currently is and be wildly inefficient.
Because the entire great desideratum is gone.
The one good thing that has come out of it so far is to get you people to admit you're against everything conservatism has stood for since the 1950's.
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