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I guess I'll just use this thread to say: I fucking hate this election.
I hate my choices. I hate having to choose which shitty option might taste slightly less like shit. I hate choosing from two stupid, bumbling mediocre embarrassments and knowing one of them is going to be the fucking President of the United States of America. "Vote for the lesser of two evils" has been a motto representing resigned acceptance of political reality my entire life (I have the Cthulhu for President t-shirt and everything), but never have I felt it so keenly. They're both bad and repulsive, and I honestly don't know which of them will actually be worse for the country because I expect either of them to be terrible. I have said before I probably won't even vote, for the first time since I turned 18. (At least for president; I'll still probably vote for local/state candidates.)
And it's entirely the fault of both parties for putting us here. The Republicans, for letting MAGA cultists take over the party and drive all serious grown-ups out, and the Democrats, for letting bad faith woke identity politics take over everything. And both of them, for turning us into a gerontocracy that very effectively shuts younger candidates out before they can even sniff a primary.
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose, I guess it would be Kamala. But I might take the bullet instead.
I think Trump will be more damaging to the economy, and I think he will epically fuck up what's left of America's standing in the world. I think he will be an embarrassment who fails to accomplish any of the things his followers think he will (just like last time) and what he does accomplish he will fuck up. I think Harris will continue our inflationary money-isn't-real spiral into economic doom, hand out more gobs of cash to whatever identity group is most effective at yelling and screaming, and I think Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will roll her like a floured chicken breast. She's a midwit mediocrity who should never have come within line of sight of the Presidency, and I cannot believe how quickly I watched people in real time shift vibes to Kamala-enthusiasm, Kamalanation, Kamala is brat (W. T. F????) and pretend they had always been enthusiastic about her. Way back in 2019, when she was being floated as a Democratic candidate and I knew little about her, I admit I was tepidly favorable towards her because she seemed like maybe the least bad of a mediocre lot, but nothing she's done since has impressed, and she seems like Generic Extruded Political Product.
But, you know, Trump. I do not have TDS, I do not think he is Literally Hitler, but I do think he's a con, a huckster, an embarrassing buffoon who I believe actually loves America as much as I believe he goes to church on Sunday and has ever read the Bible in his life. I think he totally would become an absolute dictator if he could manage it, but it would require too much effort and political acumen and cunning, which he does not have. He has a huge personality and charisma, and some people think that translates into him being a skilled politician. He's not. He's got performer's instincts and a gift for graft. This doesn't really make him unique among American presidents, but it makes him uniquely bad in this time and place.
This sucks.
So I will repeat what I said a few weeks ago: my only consolation is going to be breaking out the popcorn and watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth post-election night. If Kamala wins, I will read the Motte and other places for the rage, the futile fist-waving, the impotent Internet tough-guy promises to Res1st and Retrn and start a civil war or some shit. If Trump wins, I will read Twitter for the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, and the hordes of smug, self-righteous fucks driven to existential despair, and I will drink their tears.
This is not nice, it is not charitable, it is not noble. It is petty and mean and beneath me. It is my coping mechanism, because this election sucks.
You know, I really do feel bad for you. Moderating this place - hell, any place on the internet that explicitly sets out to encourage free discussion - is a thankless task that saps the goodwill of anyone who does it over enough time and turns them into husks. You're a much nicer and kinder person than I am who has genuine stakes in this election, so I am going to try and give you some advice. Whether you take it or not is up to you.
Don't indulge yourself in the suffering of others. Not because you're better than that, but because doing so is harmful to yourself.
Go outside, visit an old museum, someplace with art and real history. Visit a place where something that mattered happened, not to grifters and conmen but to real, living, breathing people, in a way that lasted. Go marvel at nature, go drink a good coffee made by someone who cares about their craft and think about the effort that went into bringing you that coffee in an easily digestible form, from plant to cup.
Politics is kayfabe, it isn't real. The turning of the gyre comes for everything and everyone. We've done alright so far despite the century of horrors. The moment the kayfabe breaks may be soon, but until then there's dancing, music, and banh mi. We live in the dreamtime. It'll end someday, but I'm not going to poison myself before I am poisoned at gunpoint.
I say this as one of the most blackpilled people I know. Touch grass. There, but for the grace of God, stumbles the broken ape parade.
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This sort of sentiment is the issue with establishment GOP and now the never-Trumper ex-Republicans. Conservatives weren't conserving things, They were bojangling for dollars, courting their internationalist reformers, rolling back hard won wins like Newt Gingritch's welfare reforms, derangedly thinking the federal government could enable no child to be left behind, etc. They needed to be kicked in the teeth.
Trump is that kick. If he didn't exist, some other politician would have eventually discovered Pat Buchanan's writings kicked the tires on it and taken the lane. Both major parties essentially disdaining working white men was never going to be a stable equilibrium in a country that depends on that demographic for almost all of its productivity.
So what needs to happen? Adaptation. Trump wont be around forever, but JD Vance has realized what the coalition is. He knows the other party is the party of the fringes.
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What exactly were the Dems and GOP supposed to do about this? Candidates are selected ~democratically (I suppose it's fair to criticize the Democrats for just...skipping that step this election cycle); Trump developed a huge base in the GOP; "wokeness" has a decent base in the Democrat party. And many GOP "adults in the room" DID criticize Trump, and got ran out of the party for their troubles.
Let me try to answer my own question:
I think the effort to head off Trump needed to happen in the primaries for the 2016, and it needed to take on the form of some of those 1,492 GOP candidates dropping out earlier to consolidate the anti-Trump base of support, and it needed to take on the form of denouncing the foreign policy misadventures of the Bush-Obama years (which were becoming unpopular, but were still often not criticized in the GOP in 2016.) But it's not the fault of "the Republicans" that this happened; they couldn't force candidates to drop out on the optimal timelines any more than they could force Trump not to throw his hat in the ring.
Heading off wokeness, I think, is easier – Democrat elites could have been criticizing wokeness the same way that Republican elites often criticized Trump. But I think this risked seriously weakening the party. We see, now, that the party is critically divided over Israel/Palestine; attacking "wokeness" 4 or 8 years ago (particularly when it was on the ascent) would have run a similar risk, I think.
I guess my point here is that to the extent that it's the fault of "the Republicans" or "the Democrats" it's really just the fault of "the American people" for voting for them. Maybe this is your point.
I'm certainly interested in the potential upsides of RETVRNing to a time when the people didn't have much of a voice in major party's political choices. But until that happens, "the party" will be very much at the mercy of the voters.
What the Dems could have done about it is held their nose and refrained from ratfucking Bernie out of the nomination. But they just couldn’t stand his lukewarm populist vibes so he had to go.
I don't know why this claim keeps coming up, Bernie's path to the nomination required the rest of the pool to cooperate with him to split the vote of the majority position. When it came to having to win one on one he didn't. period. End of story. It's not ratfucking to notice you're splitting a position and stop doing that so someone with minority support who you don't agree with doesn't take the nomination.
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Bernie lost his primaries fair and square. More people simply voted for Hillary, and then Biden. If he couldn’t even win a dem primary he’d been slaughtered in the general anyway.
They were using a mass coordinated media smear campaign against him just like they did with Trump later. And they weaponized the already questionable superdelegate system against him.
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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.
As opposed to:
-The least popular candidate of the last 40 years who was selected entirely due intra-party backstabbing and seniority
-A terminally senile old man who only narrowly won due to a once in century pandemic, and then mentally flamed out so bad he had to drop out of the race
-An incoherent alcoholic apparatchik who somehow manages to be more unpopular than the 2016 candidate, who never won a primary or even placed in the top three, who only has a political career because they are good at giving head.
Gosh, it’s a good thing the Democrats didn’t get Bernie, or their reputation over these last few years might have taken quite a hit!
I would say that Bernie's ideas should have had a chance to be rejected by the electorate and consigned back to the doldrums of obscurity, but now the progressives have a bloody shirt in the form of a stab-in-the back myth that will haunt the Democratic party for generations to come.
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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.
Really? I feel like some people on the SSC subreddit said that, had it been Bernie vs. Trump, Bernie would have cleaned it up.
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.
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There was a very simple way to head Trump off at the pass; say you’re going to do something about illegal immigration, which is wildly unpopular with the body politic, and then fucking do it.
That’s it. That’s the whole game. That would have stopped Trump because he would have never developed his constituency, which wasn’t invented by him but simply ignored by both parties.
There was electoral gold in the streets just waiting to be picked up but a prospiracy driven primarily by rank class hatred blocked it. All it took was one defector.
This comparison may not generalise, but this always makes me think of the first collapse of One Nation over here.
For the unfamiliar, One Nation is/was an anti-immigrant Australian political party. It was founded in the 90s as an expression of protest over immigration, and took some bites out of the ruling centre-right Coalition's right flank. This continued... up until the Coalition adopted a hard-line policy on illegal immigration, communicated that (cf. the Tampa and Children Overboard, both in mid-2001), and by doing so completely smashed One Nation. Without their flagship issue, One Nation's other problems (corruption, incompetence, etc.) became more visible and they declined heavily.
You can defeat the populist/nativist surge - you just have to address the issues that are motivating them.
(One Nation have made a post-2016 comeback, rebranding as a more generic far-right or nationalist party. In the 90s they were basically an anti-immigrant party who worried that Australia was being "swamped by Asians". In the last decade they pivoted to anti-Islam for a bit, and then anti-wokeness, and are generally still flailing boobs. The larger issue remains - One Nation do well when there are issues that large segments of the electorate care about but which the major parties are not responsive to. One Nation are a symptom of political dysfunction. As with most far-right parties, then, it's foolish to try to attack them by attacking the party itself. You have to attack the underlying policy failures that give the party credibility. Once that's done the party's inherent weaknesses tend to come out.)
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I've previously discussed why I'll be voting for Trump, but I want to put forward another reason that I don't believe has been sufficiently discussed here. It rather obviously extends from some rather tired discussion points, but bear with me I promise I'm going somewhere with it.
The Democrats are, in my view at least and without attempting to consensus build, the party of woke both in function and in form. Function is of course, obvious. Democrats are pro Diversity Equity and Inclusion, pro affirmative action, pro reparations, and are at the point where they're just straight up handing out racial spoils in the form of cold hard cash. It's not soft spoils anymore, wherein people are given a leg up at work, or an open door at an elite institution they otherwise may not have qualified for, but literal actual money. Form, equally obvious. Kamala Harris did not become Vice President because after a sober and serious discussion it was believed by the Biden campaign staff that she would be best suited to carry on his vision of the country should anything happen to him. She became Vice President because she's a woman of color to use the same terminology.
Trump is, for whatever reason, the avatar of anti-wokeness. He is where the anti-woke have dug their trenches, and fortified their positions. They are, for lack of a better option, my team. And yes, politics should not be a team based sport. It should be a contest between ideals and views for the future of our country that we want to share together. It should be disagreements about a bright future we both want, and just are uncertain how to achieve. It's not. Or maybe it is and the issue is that the Democrats view of a Bright Future is so radically different from my own that the two can no longer be reconciled. Further ink on this topic should be spilled by those who have the wit and intelligence to do so eloquently, as I unfortunately do not.
The only way, the only way to convince the Democrats that wokeness is Not Okay is to rub their noses in it like a dog. Smack them on the snout with a rolled up newspaper and proclaim "BAD!" in a thunderous shout. In a perfect world this would never have been required. In a better world they would have learned the lesson in 2016. We do not live in those worlds, we live in this one, and in this one they are still on the woke train. So I will vote for the man whose re-election constitutes the philosophical equivalent of smacking the Democratic Party on the nose with a rolled up newspaper before grinding it into the stain on the carpet. I have no other recourse left to me, or at least no other recourse I am willing to take. I do not hold the ear of any DNC staffer, I am not the son of a billionaire who could get a meeting with the President only by asking. I am Joe Schmoe the average voter, and my vote is the only weapon I can wield. So I am going to, or rather already did (thank you mail in ballots), vote for Trump, and I am going to pray that he wins because another four years of wokeness in the White House is only going to further destabilize this country.
If you're worried about wokeness, you should honestly be voting Democrat. When Trump was elected, the idea of wokeness was relatively new and was foreign to much of the Democratic party. By 2020 it had metastasized to become an overarching narrative, even as the party's nominee tried to distance himself from it. I remember on the old SSC board a number of people said they were voting for Trump in 2016 for similar reasons as you outline above, namely that a Trump victory would smack down this nascent wokism once and for all. Of course, it had quite the opposite effect; wokism was much more pervasive and much more mainstream at the end of Trump's term than it was at the beginning. Most of the perceived excesses of the movement, such that it existed, were more a direct reaction to Trump's election than to any overarching policy goals of the Democratic party.
Hillary Clinton wasn't woke in the slightest; anyone who could be remotely described as such was already in the tank for Sanders. Had Clinton won, it would have been a direct repudiation of the more radical elements of the party, and it would be at least 8 years before the wokes would get another crack at mainstream influence, if they still even existed. Trump's victory, however, allowed them to create a narrative that the party's loss was due to Clinton's intransigence when it came to social issues and more radical leftist policy. If Sanders had been the candidate, he would have trounced Trump and led America into a new era of prosperity. But the Democratic party insisted on running as a continuation of an Obama presidency that leftists had soured on and that conservatives had unfairly demonized. Add in the fact that no one really liked Hilary Clinton and Trump's victory seemed inevitable.
So now there is a large contingent of the left that is now stuck living with a Trump administration that, by the day, seems to be trying to outdo itself with how inept it can be, and with a president who is confirming all the suspicions they've had about the latent racism among a large part of the electorate. The presidency is a lost cause, but there are other routes. The Squad comes to power. The non-governmental institutions controlled by the left take a more active stance in promoting their ideology, or at least putting up guardrails against Trump's policies. By the time the absolute explosion in woke rhetoric happens in the summer of 2020 Trump has been in office for four years. His administration had an entire term to prevent what they saw on the horizon in 2016, and they failed absolutely miserably. The thing that irks me the most about right-wing complaints about wokism is that the most egregious examples of it — COVID policy, defund the police, riots, DEI — all happened under Trump's watch.
And then, as soon as Biden was elected, things started to cool down. Two members of The Squad were voted out of office this spring, and AOC has become a mainstream Pelosi acolyte. DEI people are being laid off. Robin D'Angelo is unemployed. Ibram X. Kendi hasn't published anything in years. Kamala Harris still has some vaguely woikish things in her arsenal, but she's backtracked on most of the woke positions she took in 2019. Republicans are criticizing her for this. Republican complaints about wokism seem anachronistic at this point; the only time most of these policies even come up is when Republican candidates mention them.
If Trump gets elected, what do you think is going to happen, that his opponents will just shut up? No, we're going to left-wing opposition to absolutely every one of his policy proposals, regardless of whether these proposals are actually right-wing or not. The entire Democratic apparatus will shift into a mode of limiting the damage as much as possible, and this will include protests, and resistance to policy changes and all the other bullshit that happened during the first Trump term. And Trump will be about as effective in stopping it as he was in his first term, unless he wants to turn the country into a full-on police state. I'm not saying you shouldn't vote what you feel, but if you seriously think that a Trump presidency will put an end to whatever woke bullshit you're concerned about, I have some swamp land in Jersey that's for sale.
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.
A key HRC quote that was credited with knocking Sanders out of her way
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That is my recollection as well. Bernie was essentially the last gasp of the labour-oriented non-idw left and now the Teamsters are voting Republican.
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I suspect the Mistake Theorem for this is that wokism's flows and ebbs are on a time lag irrespective of who's President.
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This is just the reversed version of arguing that we should vote for Trump because of the possibilty of another Jan 6th type event.
One can't be held hostage. Even if it's utilitarian true it has too much moral hazard.
Utilitarianism doesn't work when you're playing an intelligent opponent.
The better formulation is "utilitarianism doesn't work if you're an idiot, because then you can't properly calculate utility". Second-order effects like this are supposed to be included in utilitarian calculations; the fact that a lot of people are too stupid to do this doesn't make the theory wrong, just a bad fit for them.
True - Utilitarianism doesn't work even in theory, because it instantly succumbs to combinatorial explosion once you have to account for multiple orders of consequence. The way utilitarians get around this in practice is adding greebles and epicycles until they're effectively back to deontology/virtue ethics/common sense with a quantitative flavour.
I was never much concerned with this kind of argument. Make a reasonable attempt to determine outcomes. That does not involve perfect knowledge or unbounded computational problems. Using a small bit of thought and your best understanding of the situation, you can make a reasonable approximation.
OK, but once you abandon the philosophical consistency of the system and the arguments that justify it, you're left with common sense with some inspiration from utilitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, it just means you're not really that much of a utilitarian (and has the amusing corollary that you'll become a better utilitarian by reading Aristotle than you will by reading Bentham). Of course, this is what the most intelligent utilitarian in history (Mill) did pretty much immediately on thinking seriously about the theory, it just took him a nervous breakdown to get there.
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This sounds like 'if you kill your enemies, they win' but for politics.
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If something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims from him about the opposite are concern trolling or motivated reasoning. The straightforward effect of supporting a side that is more woke is to increase wokeness.
This isn't a real argument at all. It's a sop to blue tribe "rationalists" (and others of similar beliefs) who can see all the problems with their preferred team, but cannot bring themself to consider voting for the other team. This kind of argument gives them a "rational" reason to keep voting Democratic. They fall for it every time, because they want to believe it. We saw it pushed for Biden too, where it had a somewhat better fig leaf. It turned out not to be true (right Admiral Levine?), but that doesn't matter; whatever gives permission to keep voting for Democrats is fine.
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Ah, the old "don't try to win because if you win the backlash will be worse" strategy.
By the same token, if you want open borders you should probably vote Republican right? Or does it only work one way?
This line if reasoning about backlash drives me crazy, depending on the speaker it’s inevitably either dishonest or hopelessly misguided.
I voted against Trump in 2016 for reasons they turned out to be false, and for him in 2020 specifically because of the high probability of a horrendous backlash.
I saw his enemies slip the mask after 2016, I wanted much much more of that. I wanted his enemies to reveal how psychotic and narcissistically hateful that I knew they were, for everyone to see. That way when they popped their heads up to scream ghoulishly for blood, the body politic could (rhetorically) bash their fucking skulls in with whatever was handy (in Minecraft).
Sometimes you have to induce a fever to kill a disease.
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Wokeness was on the upswing in Obama’s 2nd term.
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You are looking for a schmuck to play heads I win, tails you lose here.
There really isn't a point with giving in to people who act like this. The correct treatment to people who make such demands is to understand their open hostility and treat people who are hostile to your agenda and try to manipulate you into losing, as people who are in fact hostile to your agenda, and are just using arguments as soldiers and willing to play dirty. The later is important information that justifies a stronger and more decisive reaction.
It is of course insulting. By offering this blatantly bad self destructive advice you are telling the right and the people you are discussing with, not without any reason since this arrogance has been cultivated by much of the political space uselessness and spinelessness against the left, that you think they are enormously gullible.
This escalation is helpful since it helps clarifies even more so the uselessness of appeasement. This tactic of lose, or we will massively overreact and you have to give in, or we will make things far worse, does not work on people who have a modicum of intellectual courage, aren't highly gullible, and so I think you chose a poor strategy. In addition to it being a disreputable tactic. It actually is going to piss off your targets that you think so low of them, that you can manipulate them in this manner.
Yeah, the world doesn't work the way that this poster imagines.
In game theory, if you hurt someone and they continue to support you, then the obvious thing to do is to hurt them even more.
There's even a word that starts with C for people who ingratiate themselves to those who harm them.
I don't know what it is, but this attitude fills me with more contempt than actual woke people. Woke people are pretty upfront about what they want: an explicit hierarchy with white men at the bottom. It's evil, but at least its an ethos.
But white men who support this agenda disgust me. The most contemptible thing a person can do is not defend their own rights. Who would ever want to be brothers or friends with a person who hates themselves? Who would want someone in their tribe who would cry tears for strangers but not for their own family?
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Repetition and italics are no substitute for an argument for a claim as strong as the one you are making here. Not only can't you think of any other way, but you are also convinced that the rolled up newspaper would work? On what basis?
Do you think that with the tables turned, it works on you? Does the cultural strategy run by progressives for the past n years, with your candidates dragged through courts and media, your adherents marginalised from work and education, and your cultural artifacts vandalised, not amount to repeated blows with a rolled-up newspaper to the nose of anti-wokes? I assume that their doing of this is based on a very similar sentiment as yours, so why is it not working for them? Why are you not convinced yet that anti-wokeness is Not Okay?
It has largely worked for the woke. A large portion of the population has gone from fervently supporting color blindness to fervently supporting affirmative action, and so on for every other social issue. It doesn’t convert everyone. It doesn’t have to.
This seems to be saying that beating anti-wokes with a newspaper convinced those who were already members of the progressive coalition to get with the program and update to a different sub-ideology in their camp, not that it had any effect to dissuade those who were targeted by it. You could argue that there was a similar pool of proto-allies that merely needed to be scared into backing a promising new strategy when Trumpism first came around and had to fight against older schools of conservatism in the Republican coalition, but by now that pool seems to have been largely exhausted.
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They did learn a lesson from 2016; Biden the 2020 candidate was considerably more moderate. The problem is that Biden the 2021-2024 President, or rather his administration, wasn't moderate at all, because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".
I think your only hope on this path is that the Democratic machine politicians are pragmatic enough to be willing to appeal to the centre and far-sighted enough to realise that tricking them is not a long-term solution and powerful enough to force the SJer groundswell into line; I'm not rating that very highly.
I think the ultimate way to deal with this has to include shattering all of SJ's walled gardens, so that they get to start seeing rightists first-hand as people, and so that their Authority foundation stops locking onto HR ladies and similar types. This, admittedly, does require power, and lots of it.
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.
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Right, wokeness took the class of credentialed expert Democrats consider suitable for appointment to government positions by storm. Democratic appointees will be woke by default. Having a moderate at the top of the ticket isn't enough to produce a non-woke Democratic administration. You'd need someone at the top of the ticket who understood wokeness and was actively against it.
Even then, against the present backdrop of elite ideological opinion they'd have a very hard time sourcing non-woke appointees and staffers; they'd constantly be fighting woke flareups in their own administration, and the woke are masterful at causing PR nightmares or internal organizational strife when they don't get their way.
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Well, more specifically, Biden couldn’t be moderate because the available people to staff his admin aren’t. For similar reasons republican admins have to be pro-life.
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Hard agree. Everytime my liberal friends get annoyed at me for being less anti-Trump than they are I remind them that as a Republican I have votes against him more than they have. I voted third party in 2016 and held my nose and votes for Biden in 2020. But this time I might vote Trump, mostly because I actually kinda like JD Vance and I think Trump is sufficiently uninterested in actually governing that Vance will get to drive a lot of the actual agenda, and I think there is about a 50/50 chance that Trump drops dead in office and Vance becomes President anyway. If I could vote for any of the four of Trump, Vance, Harris, or Walz it would be Vance by far so that factor might decide the "who is less shitty" contest for me. But how sad is that....
Part of the issue I have with Trump is that if he goes senile or has a stroke, but does not clinically die, he's unlikely to 25A himself and it's not immediately obvious that Vance and his cabinet would dare to invoke 25A section 4 given their voter base's immense personal loyalty to Trump (cf. "Hang Mike Pence").
Of course, this mostly matters to me because my P(WWIII) is high; outside of that scenario, it's not as big a deal.
On the other hand, trump seems uniquely likely to let Vance run everything while only being in charge on paper.
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I felt this way in 2016 and 2020.
I'm libertarian and have never really liked the main two parties.
Trump has oddly grown on me. It might just be my serial contrariasm. The constant hate thrown his way has made me more skeptical of all criticism about him. If they were willing to lie about him being a Russian spy than what else are they saying that is a lie?
His actual governing record was not bad from my perspective. No new wars, a slate of justices that flipped the court, and a government that was mostly focused on fights I didn't care about.
He got rid of the patriot act and seems to have done an OK job getting Europe to help pay for NATO.
It seems that Russia invading Ukraine got Europe to pay for NATO. The Patriot Act is gone, but does anyone think the NSA has curtailed its surveillance since it expired?
Russia invading Ukraine is post Trump and also post the initial increased funding pledges.
Russia invaded, almost certainly, because Biden was perceived as weak.
And were the Russians right?
Yes.
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It's a piece of the puzzle. We've seen courts be more willing to stand up to government agencies lately, so I think the Patriot Act falling at least makes NSA surveillance less legal.
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Stranger still Trump mean tweeted the Patriot Act away. He tweeted that he wouldn't sign an extension. Congressional leaders tweeted back that they would fix it so he could sign it. Then they never followed through and it expired.
He also mean tweeted immigration down.
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Truly modern politics.
If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.
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That's just TDS with extra steps. You think Donald Trump doesn't love America? You think he wants to become a dictator? The man is pretty open and forthcoming in recent podcasts and interviews, he talks about not wanting to charge Hillary for precedent it would set, not wanting to replace the Secret Service with his own bodyguard, how the assassination attempt has made him reconsider his relationship to God, etc.
I cannot possibly imagine what your definition of "skilled politician" would be that completely excludes Donald Trump. Ten years ago the man was a political laughingstock and he now leads one of the most significant political movements in American history.
Before Trump, we were wailing about wokes and the death of civilization and riding the decline. Now a significant part of the country not only believes in Making America Great Again, but Greater Than Ever Before. Trump managed to add to this coalition a literal Kennedy, working class blue collar union workers, tech CEOs, evangelicals, and the long-forgotten spirit of American endeavors.
I can't convince you to believe the things I believe, I guess, but I think it's your attitude that's wrong with America today, not Trump's. Win or lose Trump is doing glorious things and awakening a spirit that wants to build America and make it great again. You will never do anything glorious.
As a place where you can get rich? Sure. But he also seems to sneer at military service. Remember his attacks on McCain? As for being a dictator, depends on your definition of dictator. I think he's used to getting his way, though his wants tend to be more impulsive and pettier than most dictators.
He spent a significant amount of time where he did in fact want to go after Hillary. According to the Mueller report he tried to get Sessions to go after Clinton but Sessions refused (pdf page 319). It would easily fit that he wasn't actually able to go after Hillary and is under investigation himself, so of course now he's going to say investigating former presidents is bad. Similarly he's running as a Republican, so mentioning the assassination and using it to talk about religion is pretty much what I'd expect any politician to do.
Credit where credit is due, few manage to be President. Obama was a politician with barely any record but knew how to give a speech. Trump knew how to channel the sorry state of the Republican field and frame himself as an outsider. Once in office, I think those same Republicans in Congress called the shots and he signed his name on things. Most of the things he tried on his own initiative didn't seem to go anywhere.
Wokeness arguably accelerated in response to Trump. I'm not sure how much of its decline is due to Trump as opposed to the left themselves. And both candidates are arguably among the most disliked in history
Wokeness accelerated before Trump and under actual policies followed by Biden, Harris and the kind of people they promoted and excluded. Trump actually tried to ban DEI ideology in his goverment. Even in terms of the supreme court, the appointments of Trump hasn't been that greatly conservative while Biden's appointments and Harris future appointments would destroy freedom of speech and the first amendment.
There has also been the supreme court decicion against Affirmative Action. Which wouldn't have happened if the supreme court was staffed by the kind of people that are selected by Clinton, Biden and would be selected by Harris.
We have also seen the rise of right wing opposition to wokeness. To be frank some of the people opposing it also agree with elements of it.
Without Trump as a unifying force on the right if instead of him we had someone who compromised (much more) with such policies, the reaction would have been even weaker. An appeasing right would be itself woke. Elon Musk capture of twitter is also an obvious factor in the decline of elements of wokeness although there are elements of cultural far leftism such as mass migration that Elon himself doesn't oppose, although the change in ownership has lead to more speech in that direction too which is a good thing. And Musk does not appease Kamala in the way you suggest he ought to.
And there might also be left wing fatigue.
This idea that people who do X should be appeased while people who sort of oppose X but not sufficiently should be opposed because they are to blame to X has always failed when it comes to the cultural left losing influence and it is is a manipulative argument.
Somehow this bad advice that liberals offer is not given to the left. The self destructive course that you win by losing is freely given to the right.
The answer can be nothing but a No. But also in itself there is something "bellow the belt" in trying to manipulate people to vote against their interests by presenting what is blatantly self destructive course as helping them win on the issue.
The right should oppose more strongly wokeness and keep the politicians they elect more in check because they actually have been appeasing cultural/identity far left, too much and sharing too much of its perspective. No, this doesn't mean they should elect leftists who would be far worse on these issues.
For example, Trump on wokeness is better than Harris, Biden and Clinton would have been, but he is still the guy who promoted the platinum plan which gave specific 500 billion investment to blacks. Like the Biden administration gave disproportionate funds targeting even in general economic help bills, its progressive stack demographics.
And if one examines Bush, Reagan, Nixon, they would find worse examples of this than Trump's platinum plan. So, in addition to this bad advice that is one sidedly given, the part of the problem of rising of wokeness is that the left is in fact extremely biased in favor of its favorite groups and against its hated groups. The right which does sort of oppose this and isn't as bad, often both appeases them and doesn't do enough to oppose them and does some similiar things. And there are also elements within right wing movements who are much more false opposition and on team liberal and are four step back for any limited hangout pretension of opposition. And others who are one step forward, one step back, or two steps forward, one step back.
So, if you got to elect someone else than Trump to oppose wokeness more effectively, it ought to be someone who is more antiwoke than Trump is, not Harris who is far, far more woke. And while electing leftists is a worse option, it is good to criticise those who claim to oppose wokeness but either do not, or are two steps forward, one step back types. That is they compromise too much in certain areas which probably applies to Trump, who is still much better on wokeness than Harris would be, based on what we have seen from their rule.
Maybe if the people who demoralize right wingers put effort at demoralizing liberals, cultural leftists, woke types, and joined the rising movement against the cultural and identity left, things would be worse for woke types and we would see stronger decline on policy by organizations and the goverment.
The much advertised decline of wokeness can't be just sentiment change that we ought to be satisfied with but sentiment must be used to change policies.
For one example, to effectively oppose wokeness, if Trump is elected, the Trump administration must use the department of justice to go after companies violating the civil rights of their employees by choosing to discriminate against hiring white employees over blacks and other by default "diverse" demographics, following BLM's direction. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/
Another facet of this can be Soros prosecutors who not only promoted but still promote decriminalization policies.
Exercising power to restrict it rather than electing its supporters who use their power to support it, is the only way for the "woke" agenda to genuinely lose. And since this is a big deal that includes significant violations of the most basic civic rights, especially of nation forming people in their own homeland, and there is also an issue of the criminality involved and further escalation in abuse of rights as those who have been getting away with this get more arrogant, it really is an issue that must be seen from the perspective of criminal and civic rights violations that is a priority to stop people from doing, and to punish.
Same with the moral obligation of prosecutors to prosecute crime. The state and media, corporations can not be run by any sort of ideologue, who does as they please to screw over non progressive favored groups but there are both laws, precedent, the constitution, and certain virtues, moral obligations and even professional traits that must be part of the system. In practice there has been an usurpation of such system by the new left shadow constitution, of which wokeness is a continuation and expansion of, and which has a continuing trajectory towards more South Africa type of polices and governance. Whether we are talking about bureaucrats, journalists, CEO's. These people have a duty not to follow the progressive stack ideology, and it is possible to even interpret laws against the shadow constitution already in the books to go after them. But not reason not to institute new laws and revoke bad past ones where necessary.
The supreme court interpreting disparate impact as unconstitutional which there is no chance happening by Harris appointments can be one way things can move closer to the direction of limiting wokeness. But like the AA decision, which by it self was helpful but not sufficient to stop it, there must be follow through both by the goverment and the development further of real journalists exposing such violations, and a lobby, including law proffessionals willing to sue and go after them. The kind of movement that even wants to do anything like this is is not going to comprise of liberal nevertrumpers.
For context for the low, I consider myself center-left and anti-woke.
I think wokeness is both cultural and political. My starting point I would say is this survey, which I think puts a major shift at around 2014. I do wish there was a more up-to-date chart, but I can't find one. Anyway, I don't think it means that wokeness is defeated if we get a Republican President for 4 years, then a Democrat brings it back. I think it has to be defeated culturally.
I was disappointed in Biden in that he was probably the most centrist of the 2020 candidates, and, well, we see the results. As far as Trump goes, there's a concept called reciprocal radicalization. That is, something that drives recruitment for X also drives recruitment for opposition to X. Trump was also a uniting force on the left. Even as a Dem I'm not excited for a potential Harris win, I simply find Trump's behavior completely disqualifying.
As far as the Supreme Court goes, Barrett has actually been pretty good. As has Jackson overall, even I oppose the reason she was picked. I do support their affirmative action ruling, though that has been overshadowed by my strong dislike of their presidential immunity ruling.
The problem with having the DoJ go after anti-racist companies is the same as the difficulty going after racist companies - dog whistles. They can always just say that promoting diversity is innocuous free speech and that it just happened to work out that the best candidates aligned with their diversity goals. You have to prove something like them saying they're not hiring you because you're white, and no intelligent person would do that.
The polls have noted a dramatic rightward shift for young men. My hope is that Dems will learn from that.
No, this isn't that big of a problem, because they openly say it. Because it was allowed without sufficient backlash, plenty of not very intelligent and intelligent people in journalism, media, politicians, presidents, CEOs, NGO leaders and even people who run corporations and other institutions that are able to bully and nudge people around like Blackrock, openly supported, and continue to support racist discrimination against whites, men, etc. There have also been plenty of intelligent people who haven't been organized and didn't openly oppose it, but will more strongly oppose it with a political environment that is more hostile to this. You could even have some who in the madness of group thing might have went along with it in 2020s and BLM was more active, but now would be enthusiastic in working together with those who wish to crush this. Or do so, because of wanting to raise through the ranks.
Making DIE policies taboo and to be (accurately) treated as racist while making opposing it the non taboo position can be done.
Some have started hiding their power level though after the affirmative action ruling.
There has been no problem in the political establishment to openly condemn pro white discrimination and even exaggerating and making shit up. There is a lot of opportunity to crash those who obviously do antiwhite racism, which is not anti-racism, which requires to just not be guilible.
Forcing companies to fire pro diversity ideologues and to enforce controls to make sure these kind of people don't decide, is something that can be done.
You could even reward whistelblowers and make it open season for people alleging to have been discriminated to sue them. This is already happening with the disparate impact, except people who haven't been discriminated are getting massive payments over nothing. It is feasible to even take into consideration studies evaluating performance, IQ differences, and the specifics in each case, and i am not suggesting we enforce a system that is guilible in any accusation, but one that stops the blatant antiwhtie discrimination happening today.
Much of modern politics is based on the demand for the right and associated ethnic groups to be guilible pushovers in a self destructive manner. When you don't behave in a gullible manner, the possibilities of what can be done open up. They can't get away with it just by pretending they aren't doing so, if there is sufficient effort to keep them accountable.
Why not force companies suspected in engaging in discriminatory practices, such as companies that have engaged with ESG, Woke, policies, or followed AA policies, to demonstrate they have change course. To actually hire people who openly condemn such policies past and present a demosntratable record of taking measures within company to ensure that such practices are condemend and people who support following them and are to violate the law (what will be bolstered with additional legislation too). Suing companies will also helps things. The idea that the company's duty is to its shareholders.
These things can be polled. A field that is very lopsided to the left is going to engage in these because this the ideology of the left today.
I would also add that the agenda that favors massive waves of mass migration that would demographically change the country that makes whites a minority and claims that is a good thing to demographically change the country is another woke policy. One that Biden bragged about before becoming president and executed when he was president. Again, Trump's numbers on mass migration aren't good but Biden's were at least twice as bad, while in terms of rhetoric the first was wishy washy on mass migration and openly opposed illegal migration while the Democrats effectively are for open borders and illegal migration. Trump might also have reduced illegal immigration more if other politicians, judges, etc were more willing to share his vision.
And of course, the policies of the goverment in regards to these issues are enormously influential. It does matter if an administration promotes DEI policies and ideologues as Biden's did and Harris will do. Or if it passes executive orders against it.
It's like dealing with someone who might not be sufficiently effective in fixing a problem but at least tries to fix facets of it, vs those who strongly support making it worse and doubling down on it.
There is no reason to have hope in the Dems changing from their trajectory. The ideologues are running the show and Kamala Harris who is especially woke even for Democrats woke standards is part of that. If someone hopes that Dems learn from that and change and have demonstrated their change in ideology and deserve support, only after they have changed a case can be made.
Since it is their ideology and also they expect to benefit electorally by mass migration and pandering to their progressive identity coalition, they are unlikely to change.
Voting for someone who is super woke today under the hope that they will change is not a wise course to follow.
Jackson has ruled a dissenting opinion in favor of retaining affirmative action. So there would have been a different rulling if the Democrats picked supreme corut justices.
She also responded to the case of the Biden administration pressuring Twitter to censor speech with supporting it and claiming:
snip
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/19/note-ketanji-brown-jackson-first-amendment-should-hamstring-government-thats-entire-point/amp/
The Democrats want to put supreme court justices that would bring hate speech laws. Kamala and her running mate has been pretty outspoken about their view on freedom of speech and misinformation and hate speech. The Democrats flipping the courts will escalate things in a worse direction on such issues.
The evidence is pretty overwhelming that Democrats are far worse on wokeness/intersectional progressive ideology, than Trump. Which is why we observe the very strong trend of supporters of wokeness who care enough about the issue support the Democrats because they see them as woke and opponents of it, who also care about the issue, oppose them. I guess someone could argue that some of supporters of aspects of the general woke ideology tree who genuinely oppose other aspects of wokeness might oppose Democrats, while supporting Trump. But these people, still oppose the Democrats because they are too woke.
Being anti-woke is not consistent with supporting the Democrats on the issue of wokeness over Trump. This inconsistency is there, however someone wishes to identify as.
To be about X you need to have standards about X and follow them through when evaluating when someone passes or doesn't pass standards.
Rather than trying to square a circle, teaching the Democrats a lesson and holding them accountable for being so woke should be the path for the anti-woke to do.
It seems that that among some people here there is some emotional attachment to belonging in the team, and party that isn't associated with being right wing. For people who have voted for them, expecting to be something better, or voted them in the past before they moved as far to the left as they did now, it doesn't mean you need to have as a permanent part of own identity to be a Democrat. Since you consider yourself anti-woke, and they fail the test, you don't need to defend them on this issue. They aren't entitled to your support.
Anti-discrimination laws already forbid basing hiring decisions on race or gender (with exceptions for specific jobs). White is a race and male is a gender. But to have standing you have to have a person who didn't get a job, and you have to prove that person specifically would have been hired if not for DEI.
This can be done culturally, but to attempt legally would be likely illegal (with maybe some exception for state-run universities) and I would never support it. Sorry I'm not up for "government should not exceed its authority, except when I really feel like it." Not having a totalitarian government is more important to me than beating annoying people.
I think you need to get off the internet a bit. Progressives want to help poor people, to the extent that they're willing to let a bunch of people in from other countries, legally or otherwise. You want to think this a bad idea? Absolutely fine. But it is not "We are doing this to ethnically cleanse white people." I oppose illegal immigration (but don't hold it against the kids brought along by their parents) and want people to culturally assimilate, but I'm going to blunt that I don't give a flying fuck what the racial makeup of America is, now or in the future. I want everyone to stop making a big deal over what race someone is.
Fair. I was mostly thinking in overall terms. Jackson has a bent against prosecutor and administration overreach, to the point of ruling in favor of some of the J6 people because the government was taking creative liberties on what to charge them with. I wasn't remembering some of her specific actions.
Welcome to the two party system. I am not a single issue voter and quite frankly, believe Trump should be in jail for election fraud and to a much lesser extent obstructing the return of classified documents. Any chance of me flipping parties was toast the moment he was nominated again. There is no path for me to "follow through" on opposing wokeness without also sabotaging other principles and beliefs I hold more important.
Dems are no more a monolith than Reps. There are plenty of Republicans even here in this thread that despise Trump but are voting for him anyway because to them the alternative is worse. That's me with Kamala. I don't care to dig it up, but I remember an old survey that claimed that progressives were only like 8% of the population. That's a minority even among the Dems, but just big enough that if they don't vote then you end up with a Republican in that seat. And Dems are currently in an awkward position where usually the party supports a first-term President for the renomination. Biden should have dropped out, and had to be forced out too late that the Vice President was the only real pivot they had. And said pivot was a pointless diversity pick because Vice Presidents don't really do anything.
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The guy has done dozens if not hundreds of events with vets and their families, he loves them, they love him, what are you talking about? He got attacked for going to Arlington and all of the vets there defended him. The Atlantic ran that story about Trump refusing to pay for a Mexican soldier's burial and the sister of the guy called it insulting and said that Trump was deeply moved. There are stories like these happening all the time, but these are two from just the last week.
McCain was a horrible person!
The guy has been in business for sixty years, that involves doing a lot of business, a lot of deals. Supposing that Trump is just this manchild-lik baby who is "used to getting his way" is TDS.
Obviously Trump is a political actor so we can't take his word at any sort of face value, but Robert Mueller, the esteemed Robert Mueller, not at all a political actor, his report says that Trump is bad! And we have to believe that.
You sound like someone who hasn't actually watched Trump speak. Go watch any of his recent podcasts or interviews. He talks about it. He feels genuinely saved by God. He talks about religion in terms he didn't talk about before. It's not that cynical.
North Korea, ISIS, border wall, tax cuts, border security, tariffs, NAFTA renegotiations, deregulation. The political class in DC spent years fighting this guy, he got a lot done, and now everything that the politicians spent years kicking and screaming trying to fight gets counted as a flaw of Trump's because we can't admit that Trump was actually competent. You just linked me a document written by Robert Mueller as part of a 3-year hoax meant to completely undermine Trump's presidency, and then rhetorically throw up your hands, gee, boy, Trump couldn't get a lot done, must because he's not a get-a-lot-done kind of guy.
He got attacked for using cemeteries for photo-ops, which is the opposite of respecting the military.
I'm not referring to your or Trump's general impression of McCain as a person. I'm referring to Trump's comments on McCain's military service. Coming from a guy who couldn't serve due to "heel spurs."
I'm not referring to his business deals, I'm referring to the way he treats his staff. Trump is unusually unable to retain staff. And they have a lot to say about him in return. Could they be lying? Sure, but so could Trump. And to me the accusations they are making seem consistent to me with observed behaviors about Trump that I would at least consider them circumstantial evidence.
It sounded to me like you were in fact taking his word at face value. Mueller is a political actor, sure. But this also wasn't something like Mueller giving his opinion. This was Mueller conducting a government investigation and publishing his finding in a report. That comes with penalties for lying. We know that Trump campaigned on "locking up" Hillary. Then after being in office he stopped. We're not in dispute about that, are we? Trump claimed he didn't want to hurt the Clintons, which makes no sense. Was he previously confused about what "locking her up" implied?
Mueller reports allegations that Trump on multiple occasions attempted to persuade Sessions to go after Hillary, and that Trump made several public comments on Twitter and to the New York Times that would align with said attempts. For instance:
breaking up subjects
Trump is good at lying and has speechwriters to help. Religious belief is unfalsifiable and something many politicians who cheat on their wives (including Trump himself) claim.
North Korea I don't think he got anything done. ISIS I don't recall anything but a continuation of government policy and Obama era drone strikes. Border wall I guess some sections were added though if I recall he wanted across the entire 2,000 mile border (which is a stupid idea because that would cost an insane amount of money and getting past a fence with delusions of grandeur is easy). I suppose I'll grant you tax cuts, border bills, tariffs, and USMCA, though I would argue that a lot of that was more due to Republicans in Congress (a.k.a. the elites) than Trump.
You accuse me of TDS and then turn around and definitively state the Mueller report is a hoax. If I have TDS then you have the opposite.
Guy goes to a funeral for families of veterans killed during the current administration. You have to dismiss this as a "photo op" because it's very good evidence that Trump has respect for the military. Oh no, he didn't follow some stupid rules about the correct official procedure for comforting grieving families, he just went to the funeral and spent time with the families, it's just a photo-op.
McCain was a horrible person who used his military service as a rhetorical shield to make war anywhere the MIC could make money. Trump rightly points out that McCain's service wasn't even all that honorable, he was a rat. Insulting McCain as a scumbag is no more disrespecting the military than mocking Rosie O'Donnell is hatred of women.
Name a person you think would not have been fired except for Trump being a manchild. The reason Trump got rid of so many people is that so many of them were horrible. The reason so many of them were horrible is that DC is full of them.
You are naive.
It's also good evidence that a guy running for President is going to go to places that make him look good to a target demographic
There are ways to do that without saying that getting captured as a soldier is worthy of scorn.
I just posted a public tweet where Trump complains about Sessions not investigating Hillary, 2 months before Sessions was out. You know, that thing we were talking about that Trump supposedly dropped the investigation out of the kindness of his heart? Any response to that?
We have years of Trump being in office and speaking with veterans and their families and they all come away talking about how much love Trump gave them. If you aren't familiar with Trump's well-documented love of the average soldier, you are either misinformed or uninformed.
Sure, what's the actual wording of Trump's tweet:
This is not some blanket call to prosecute Hillary: this is the observation that, far from being a Justice Department that claims to be neutral, they are seriously investigating Trump while not touching amyone else. Hillary ran her own classified email server, Trump did not collude with Russia, which did Jeff Session's FBI investigate? Remember that Sessions was coerced into recusing on the logic that since he participated in Trump's campaign he couldn't be a neutral observer. Thankfully, after that, the FBI was totally politically neutral throughout the Trump presidency.
Jeff Sessions recused himself because he's a good man and was following ethical guidelines. He was then replaced in this capacity by Rod Rosenstein, a person who is one of the most conflicted people in the executive branch who was actively involved in the whole ordeal as to be a witness to much of it himself, who then appointed an aging, out-of-it old man Mueller (and, tbh, a scumbag with a history of lying and coverups) who could be made the face of the team for the media to gush over while agenda-driven partisans filled its pews and Andrew Weissman, a Democrat operative, actually controlled the day to day activity of.
Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn were early, blaring warning signs about what was to come, and cowardly actions in both situations by Trump&Co caused enormous damage.
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Yes, and "touching anyone else" in this context meaning investigating Democrats. Such as Hillary Clinton, who is mentioned twice in this tweet ("deleted emails" and "Clinton Foundation"). The same Clinton who he ran on prosecuting. Investigations being the first step of prosecuting, particularly when your boss has already publicly stated the desired outcome. And when Trump did not get what he wanted, Sessions was out. And now that Trump ended up never getting it, he claims he didn't want it in the first place.
The Mueller Report was based on George Papadopoulos letting slip that he had Russian contacts, then lying about it to investigators. He eventually took a plea deal admitting to the above but claiming that he acted alone. But since he lied about it, they had to investigate the people he was in contact with, meaning the Trump campaign. A bunch of other people lied to investigators, including Manafort having a connection to Russia-aligned elements in Ukraine.
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You realize that what you’re describing is marketing right? Maybe the man will surprise me, but I don’t see actions that live up to the hype. He hasn’t cleaned up Washington, he didn’t fix the border problems, he might have gotten lucky that no major wars broke out on his watch, but I didn’t think he was the cause of it. So what I’m left with is an incompetent ruler with excellent branding. Take away the branding, the hats, the merch, the big talk, and he’s really not that much different from GW Bush or Bill Clinton.
Wars aren't an act of God that just happen, the last dozen major wars America has participated in were all designed by politicians. Is Trump "lucky" that he didn't decide to decapitate Gaddafi? Maybe he got lucky that he didn't invade Iraq?
I'm watching the Joe Rogan interview right now and it's fascinating -- Trump talking about political deals, environmental impact, construction, entering the White House, tariffs and the economy, etc. etc. -- and then I go on The Motte and some guy says that Trump is obviously incompetent because he didn't do whatever it is you're personally in favor of.
That's half the point, right? That Trump is a 90's Democrat and the left went crazy and so he became a Republican. But that's also a silly self-limiting frame, because Trump is obviously better than both GW Bush and Clinton. (Ruby Ridge, "Read my lips," etc.)
Wars aren’t an act of God, but at the same time, a lot of the decisions about when to start one hinge more on conditions like military readiness, weather conditions, and the time needed to build up troops and material to carry forward an invasion. China isn’t stay out of Taiwan because Biden is a badass. They simply don’t yet have the assets in place to successfully invade Taiwan.
Biden, to his credit, also didn't start any wars, probably because he is genuinely upset over the pointless loss of his son. That doesn't mean Biden was lucky or had marketing, it means he resisted the strong temptations of the MIC to manufacture new excuses to go to war. Which is Trump's credit! Every prior president going back 40 years started a new war, until Trump. It's not as though we have a sudden shortage of conflicts over which we could have gone to war.
The Biden administration had a significant hand in both creating the conditions for the Ukrainian conflict as well as sustaining it after the fact. If that doesn't count as "starting a war" I'm not sure what does.
I guess you could call it a "police action", which humorously is exactly what the Russians did this time around. Might as well be the Russians' Korean War, honestly.
(Also, why send Hunter to Ukraine in the first place? Getting [them] ready for that war was his fucking job.)
I think the Biden admin gets a lot of (bad) credit for the Ukrainian situation, but I will grant that it's a different category from the kinds of conflicts US presidents have gotten involved in until now. (For one, putting American soldiers in forever wars is extremely unpopular, there's some part of the body politic that thinks it's a great deal for us to only have to fight by proxy.)
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How much can I dislike Trump without it being TDS?
I don't care or expect you to agree with my criticisms of him, but if anyone who thinks he's a con, a huckster, and yes, corrupt enough to become dictator if handed the opportunity has irrational TDS, fine- I can only ask if you have BDS or ODS or CLDS?
I've actually believed in America my entire life. Not without cynicism and skepticism, and I'm not going to give you my credentials to prove myself to an Internet rando (and get doxxed), but I've taken an oath more than once and meant it, and much of my disgust over the Discourse today is that I don't think you guys (and by that I mean partisans on the right and left) do.
Dude, I'm sure you really believe that and having read your posts over the last few months, there isn't much else I can say that would be charitable, but I will say that if Trump becomes president I will genuinely wish for him to prove you right and me wrong.
Maybe not. And what is your glory? Chanting "MAGA" at doubters?
What do you dislike about the man that is original to your person? Your specific and personal preference, informed to the best of your ability from neutral sources? And what do you dislike about the man that actually or effectually originates in those with TDS?
Take my brother. He doesn't have TDS but he has beliefs that come from it via journalists with TDS. He likes Trump-as-the-comedian, but hates the effect he views Trump as having on the degradation and divisiveness in political rhetoric. Degradation maybe, I can't be partial as I'm on record so often talking about my contempt for WASP decorum. Divisiveness no, that causation is backward. They could have taken the constituent concerns behind Trump's success, chiefly economics. "Doesn't matter how outsourcing benefits the wealthy, it hurts domestic jobs." Done. "Racism and xenophobia are bad but it's not racist to understand the basic economic impacts of minimally restricted immigration on the labor pool." Done. Legitimize those concerns, Trump loses issue-level success. Acknowledge voter concerns, Trump loses structural-critical-level success. A pivot, a good economy, they win easily, if not in 2020 then 2024 and beyond. They didn't. They screamed racist and ran hoaxes and every time one failed instead of pausing for contemplation they doubled down. Again and again. We are in Year 8 of them doubling down on Trump. We are in Year 12 of ever-intensifying racial rhetoric.
I could go to other issues but I won't save this. Some of my friends often talk about whatever latest bad story of Elon Musk. I think when I listen to them, how pleasant it must be to live in such a world; that everyone who disagrees with you is incompetent and evil.
There's nothing aligning about acknowledging a person's strengths. I'm a fan of Dropout and especially Brennan Lee Mulligan, and I'm amused, probably in some way like the father is at his four year old being petulant but in a fundamentally innocent and harmless way, when the guy rants about capitalism. His life is the hyper-niche product of the absolutely relentless process of profit-finding in capitalism. He would be nothing without it, or in a communist paradigm, a scarily effective apparatchik. Still, he's brilliant, funny, earnest and full of love, however misguided, and he is just terrifically naive. (As many but not all good artists are.) Liking the guy doesn't mean I agree with him, and that I disagree with him isn't an indict for the many things he's good at. Trump is the living embodiment of "being good at things," that's just first-principle truth as extrapolated from language. To be "effective" is to be described in terms that categorically apply to Trump, so for him to be "not" those things, not competent, not effective, not intelligent, a conman, a huckster, those indict the language rather than the man. You would need to invent new words, and the etymology of those words would just be "Yeah he's competent, but he's an asshole."
Doesn't mean you have to like him, doesn't mean you have to agree with him. The world is as it is and has always been because the groups of people who disagree with each other in and over making the biggest decisions are each very good at what they do. History's decided on the narrow margin between competing competents.
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I feel bad about piling-on here because i feel like this is a legitimate question that deserves a proper long form answer, but i want to contrast it with your statement that
Because to me this is one of the core TDS "tells". Much like some of the arguments about Trump being senile in the comments about his JRE appearance upthread, I find myself wondering if we watched the same podcast. I genuinely have trouble placing myself in the mindset of somone who would believe this.
Rather, while I can see how somone might have believed this back in 2016, I don't understand how someone who has been paying attention to the last 15-20 years of US foreign policy could reasonably conclude that given how Trump's first term went, a second term would be likely to do more damage to the US's standing and long-term interests than say, 4 more years of having somone like Clinton or Blinken as Secretary of State, or a hypothetical second Biden term where he isn't forced out of the race.
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Say you are open borders or some other core policy disagreement with him. Then just leave it at that.
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Yes, thinking that Donald Trump is going to become a dictator is TDS. Likewise, in the fields of construction reality TV politics business and marketing he's probably one of the most successful Americans ever. The guy redefined construction in Manhattan and turned his properties into a billion-dollar empire, spending a life constructing properties and projects all around the world, synonymous with luxury, just the ones in the public consciousness, then he got bored and did reality TV and dated supermodels and became President of the United States in his 70s -- sure, he's a conman because he did Steaks or whatever. Yeah, Trump really didn't do anything all that interesting really, and you're perceptive to see right through his little deception game.
We have rockets that can land on towers in the air now. We are going to build a spirit of building things again, we are going to make America great again, greater than ever before. We have the capacity, we have the smartest people in the world, we have factories lying empty ready to turn on, we have so much potential, nobody has ever had potential like we have. America is the New World, the Classical era and the Renaissance have nothing on what we can do.
My friends and I are some of the smartest people in the world, and some of those people are even here on this forum, and I believe we can all move forward onto great and glorious things.
Fun question: in the hypothetical situation in which it turns out that Trump accomplishes none of the American renaissance you expect, please explain why you were gullible enough to believe this.
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I don't think he's going to become dictator. I think he wouldn't turn it down. I don't think he has a plan to become dictator, because that would be too much planning.
I could possibly be wrong about him, but it's based on what I have seen him do and how he acts. This is not "derangement" or irrational fear or hatred of the man. I don't think he's Hitler. I don't think he's a fascist, and I don't think he wants to kill Group X. I think several other presidents would have been willing to become a dictator if given the opportunity.
Honestly, if there is any Trump-related derangement going on, your hagiographic description of him as if he's one of the greatest Americans to ever live strikes me as far more detached from the reality of the man.
I mean, that's all great, but the "we" that did that is not you, and it's not Trump. I'd love to see Trump bring about this new Golden Age you're smoking, but it's certainly not here. Right now it's words.
Maybe you are the genius you say you are, but bold words are not accomplishments, or glory. It's nice to believe things.
To add on to this for @SlowBoy's benefit: lots of people would take kingship if it were offered. I would, if I were immortal and had some method of avoiding the incentive traps.
Most of them never try to take over a country.
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Go listen to the Joe Rogan interview or something, the career Donald Trump has had requires oodles of planning, the man is simply smart enough that he can plan and improvise on the plans and execute faster than most of the people around him. The idea that Trump can't plan or won't plan out of some personal foible is TDS. The man is one of the most successful people on the planet, that doesn't just happen.
The man took his father's modest real estate business in Queens and turned it into a premire luxury empire in New York. He convinced dozens of successful men to back his moonshot Trump Tower project, which he turned into a symbol of strength that revitalized the entire city. He built a tower at the city at the center of the world and put his name on it. Celebrities lined up to live there. The Trump name became synonymous with luxury all over the world. How many people could do that? There is not a single person having this discussion, here, twitter, TV, cable news, blogging -- capable of doing any of that, and Trump had a big enough vision to see it all from the beginning.
Trump turned that into an incredibly lucrative real estate empire, doing constant deals, being involved in projects all over the world, synonymous with luxury. He dated supermodels, consecutively, raised a family with them. Did business all over the world, went bankrupt a few times, reinvented himself in reality TV, casinos. The man is involved in hundreds of projects that don't reach
Fine, none of that means anything, he's just a businessman at this point, and we have lots of those. But within that world he's been incredibly, exceptionally successful, one of the richest men in the world, objectively loaded with one of the most interesting biographies in American history. His uncle had the Tesla patents and was a professor at MIT. His third wife was a Slovenian supermodel.
Then he gives all that up to run for President, and he runs on the message that the American dream is dead, and nobody believes in it anymore, but that's wrong, we're the greatest country on earth, and we're going to be greater than ever before, we have the people and the factories and the talent and the work, and that's what America is, and it's so easy, I've done it myself and I will teach you.
I don't think this is being hagiographic: The man is so ludicrously competent and successful that few people are even capable of judging it. Nobody wants to believe it, everyone has to be cynical and above-it-all. The man is just constantly working on hundreds of projects that nobody hears about, and so we just hear about Trump steaks or the University or some other silly throwaway remark he didn't consider important at all, and we talk about these trivial nothings. It's so much easier to believe that he's a conman, or that cynicism is warranted and valid and always good -- and it sounds ridiculous to say: Actually, Trump is good, and that doesn't come with qualifications or criticism, because he's right. He's right about everything, we have the capacity to be great and he's done it before and he's going to show us.
Donald Trump is literally rewriting history, this is how people are going to think about it in the future. In 2015 he started the primary with 1%, and he took that and grew it into one of the most successful political movements in American history, he reignited the imagionations of millions of people. Nobody fifty years from now is going to remember Trump Steaks, or Stormy Daniels, or whatever the controversy du jour that cynics are talking about in the corner. People are going to remember that this man saved his country, he got shot in the head and chanted "Fight, fight, fight!," you don't know how to win but I will teach you, we can be greater than ever before, you're not ordinary, we are the greatest people on Earth. We talk like he talks now, we think about him constantly, some of his worst enemies have become his greatest allies. If Naruto Uzumaki was real and in the world, I woudln't sit around saying, gee, this Naruto guy has a lot of flaws, I need to be rationally critical of him, maybe he's done some cool things but he's not that great, really. I would say, wow, amazing, how can I be more like this guy? And this is what Trump is, this is what he does, he's the main character. That's the world he's creating, and instead of sitting on the sidelines scoffing at how at least I'm not a sycophant, I'm rational, look at me, I can say something negative about Trump -- I'm going to admire everything the man is capable of and figure out how to be more and more like him. That's actually the only way to Make America Great Again, to dream bigger than ever before because we are the greatest people of all time, ever, in the whole history of the human race, and it's our task to build the new world.
What are the investments to make if one believes that Trumpworld will arrive in 50 years? Given that few seem to really believe it, it should make bank if true.
Probably some of the tech visionaries, if Elon comes anywhere close to Mars then his companies, some of the most valuable anywhere in the world, would be currently dramatically undervalued. Trump wants to dramatically expand energy and construction and those are good bets. Tariffs are intended as a policy to increase American manufacturing, which could imply a genre of good investments. If RFK is able to effectuate change at FDA it'd be good to bet on the health of the average person, and maybe against the worst excesses of big pharma.
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If he sold said business and put the money into the market, or indeed just handed it to any of the major other family owned real estate companies in that region (the Dursts, the Kushners, whatever) he’d have made more money (so much more that he could build the Trump tower and not have to lease out a single floor), I don’t know that that reflects well on him.
I think this was a made-up attack line from cynics right when Trump ran, it's very obviously not true, very silly, and reflects badly on the people who believe it. It doesn't work like that, you can't just liquidate your whole net worth and invest in stocks and sit around earning money.
https://fortune.com/2015/08/20/donald-trump-index-funds/
Here's one estimate from 2015. They claim that Trump would have made money if he'd invested everything after 1988 -- yeah no, that's silly, he'd already turned his father's business into a major real-estate empire by then. You can't just play this game by picking any arbitrary year. Now that you've been massively, phenomonally, unbelievably successful, you're really a failure because the stock market beats you after this arbitrary date.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2021/10/11/its-official-trump-would-be-richer-if-he-had-just-invested-his-inheritance-into-the-sp500/
Here's one where Forbes concludes that Trump had beaten the market significantly, up until corona. Which means, at this point, we get to point and laugh at the failure of Donald Trump: haha, you lost valuation while you were president of the United States. You shluld have cashed it all in and bet on black Donald.
Since 2015 the market has 3x’d though, so you can likely push the 1988 date back significantly. In addition, Trump was in NYC real estate, which from the nadir in the 1970s has seen valuation growth far exceed equities. The fact remains that his business performance is pretty poor, everyone in NYC real estate made huge money because valuations have in many cases risen 40x or more since the trough.
Yes you can, especially in a relatively liquid market like NYC real estate. Investments are always judged against the broader market, what’s your point?
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The returns of S&P 500 over decades have been huge and are based on owning some of the best businesses and also some business with deep state and goverment connections. You can't use this argument to argue against people who manage to be very successful because they did not perform to the level of S&P 500.
Also, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Maybe it will be more impressive than the market over 40 years.
I dunno how successful Trump has been, but the skill set to grew successful business is one that can't be so easily dismissed by the alternative of just putting your money towards an index. You actually need people who do the work to benefit from owning a small slice of the top 500 businesses.
Handing out his money to the Kushners if by these you mean the family that includes Jared Kushner whose father was a con man, wouldn't have made Trump much money, because he would have just given them his money. And dealing with them otherwise from a weaker spot and giving them money expecting a return, if that is what you mean, might have ended with them conning Trump or giving him a bad deal.
And as per the quote, they have been already successful apparently while Trump build more generational wealth from a lower base if indeed he is as successful as Slowboy portrays.
You can't just be the son of Kushner dynasty by being Trump. Just like Trump's own rise isn't the same as more self made men who started from a lower spot. It is good for people outside the biggest dynasties to also work to build bigger generational wealth. Just like you can't just dismiss success by pointing at putting the money at S&P 500.
Although they did join together eventually. Plus, you haven't provided any evidence that the Kushners could use the same money by Trump, from the same point (modest real estate business claimed by Slowboy), to be more successful.
I doubt you have really investigated the issue in the depth it requires and made the calculations.
And of course Charles Kushner tried to screw over his brother in law. https://eu.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2020/12/23/prosecuted-chris-christie-charles-kushner-pardoned-donald-trump/4034767001/
However, since the Kushner family and Trump family joined together and he pardoned Charles maybe this episode does reveal something negative about Trump too.
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Naruto? Really?
Why don't you just compare him to Superman and ask if I'd dare to be skeptical of the Man of Steel?
This much apple-polishing would make the scriptwriters of The Apprentice blush. But hey, I hope you're right and Trump proves to be the God-King we need and not the God-King we deserve.
You're too jaded to see what's right in front of you. The billionaire rocket space man sees it. A Kennedy sees it. Vivek, JD Vance, Tulsi, etc. The Trump coalition is made up of many of Trump's worst former enemies, because he's a literal anime hero. This is why America is the greatest country on earth, because we believe in the power of friendship, we're going to fix the entire world, it's cringe all the way down. Trump started a movement and this is how the future will remember us: the Trump Era. The Trump Era was when we had Michael Jackson and Muhammed Ali and the internet and Trump. The Trump Era was either the era where Elon Musk brought mankind to Mars, or the last era where people dreamed big enough to believe it was possible. They had coca-cola, and big macs, and monster trucks, and guns. They were the fattest, loudest, dumbest, sickest, most foolish, most gullible, most annoying people on Earth. They did the most important things that have ever been done. They were the greatest people on Earth.
I agree with this Trump as embodiment of America thing, but it’s too early to say for sure that that’s how he’ll be remembered.
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People said this in 2016 too. Not saying you are wrong, but it's ascribes too much power to him or the wrong motives. Trump was constantly tweeting about the stock market and the strength of the US economy during his first term ,so it's evident the economy is important to him and he's not going to fuck it up if he can prevent it. Also, I am skeptical at how can he simultaneously fail to accomplish anything but also fuck things up or irreparably ruin America' standing. Even during Covid, America led the world in developing a vaccine, and then Trump stimulus programs engendered a rapid economic recovery as other countries stalled out with endless lockdowns and relapses.
Given how well the stock market has done in recent months in light of the >50% prospect of a Trump victory, I think market participants are optimistic, as am I. He will pass stimulus, tax cuts...typical stuff. Inflation and debt will keep going but but it won't lead to crisis, just more of the same stuff we've become accustomed to over the past 12 years. The tariffs will not do much either, similar to his first term.
The election process sucks in that America will be more divided regardless of the outcome . Instead of elections being discreate events, they are merged into continuous events where the campaigning begins at the end of the present cycle. If it's close then there may be a repeat of 2020, but it will not lead to crisis, but it will be another slog. Elections have become too high stakes, and it would be nice to see a return to the 80s, 90s, or 2000s when there was not so much at stake or such a big deal.
The only way to actually do that though is to disempower the state to do those things. It’s important because it’s everywhere doing everything and therefore you either take it over and use it to devour your enemies or you get devoured yourself. Taking for example LGBTQ issues. In 1990, the big issue was basically state recognition of gay marriages. This actually (on paper) affected maybe 3% of the us population and the wedding industry. Fast forward 30 years and now the issues of LGBTQ touch everything from education and child protection to medical care to sports and restrooms. The government controls very much more just on this set of issues alone. Go on to environmental issues and it’s now things like the car you drive, the kinds of appliances you own, the cost of electricity and fuel, getting roads built and so on. Given just how intrusive the government is over the government of Bill Clinton in 1992, it’s not much of a wonder that a much more powerful state is a much bigger prize that the elites of all stripes are eager to control. If the survival of an industry depends on the outcome of an election, or your right to know if your child has a gender identity issue hinges on the results of an election, elections become extremely important.
Drain the government of power over people and industries and nobody would care. If I could simply choose my school board and know they would not insert their political beliefs into the classrooms, I wouldn’t be super worried. People in 1900 barely knew who was running the central government because it didn’t actually touch them personally.
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Well, if he wins, I'd honestly love to say in four years "I was wrong, Trump was great." I am not putting any money on that bet, though.
Probably for the best, give how likely you would be to lose that bet. It's not like Trump has to do 'great' to not 'epically fuck up,' which was the bar you set.
From your post, you'd be wrong if Trump just did as well as last time. Heck, you'd still be wrong if he did worse than he did last time.
Okay, well, if he's elected and he doesn't epically fuck up and we're no worse off than before, I'll be wrong.
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It feels like a race between the Antichrist and the Whore Of Babylon.
If the seven-headed beast makes an appearance, we can say the plural community has gone too far.
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This is basically where I'm at. My vote doesn't matter, but it's going to Kamala (unless I get particularly annoyed at something in the next week). Regardless, it's a bad sign for our institutions that these are the choices we've been given.
My personal wish casting is Republicans take the legislative branch, to make all of her policy platform stillborn. And she wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote (appearing slightly more likely in recent polls). The wailing and gnashing of teeth from everyone would be amazing.
This doesn't work. The permanent staff in the executive branch like her agenda, so they will implement it. As seen with Biden's ability to massively increase immigration admittance with a few EOs. For your alleged preference, you want the opposite, Trump in the White House (stymied at every turn by his employees he cant fire) and a Democrat congress (further frustrating his purposes). A Democrat executive can enact almost everything they want solo except for increased welfare policies.
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If the last few presidential terms have taught us anything, it's that the executive branch retains extremely significant discretion to remake policy without legislative say so, precisely because the legislature has been asleep at the switch for a generation. The courts have clawed back some of that power, but the Biden immigration influx was a policy choice implemented solely by executive fiat, as was student loan debt relief (which was reimplemented in a lesser form after Scotus struck it down the first time), as was the seeding of the "whole of government" with DEI practices and racial set-asides.
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Politicians have always been underwhelming though, and Trump IMHO at least is a departure from that.
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I wouldn't count on it. The Republicans in the legislative branch have purposely thrown away their majority, and caved on every significant issue the Uniparty truly wanted. FISA courts stayed, endless money for foreign wars stayed.
I wouldn't count on them to serve as any significant check in Kamala's agenda, especially the worst parts of that the Uniparty clearly wants. "Misinformation" and "Hate speech" laws, further weaponization of the DOJ against political opponents like Musk, endless wars, a "path to citizenship" for all the illegals they've shipped to battleground states and/or quietly allowing illegals to vote by making it impossible to check the citizenship status of voters or coercing Soros DA's from prosecuting them.
They only way to block a Kamala/Uniparty agenda is if Trump is butt in seat in the Oval Office.
So you're annoyed Republicans have not used their legislative power to vote against the policies initiated by the Republican Party under GWB in the 2000s? Why exactly did you expect them to do so?
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I agree that all of those things are bad, and I suspect some of them will be worse 4 years from now even in my "ideal" scenario.
What I don't see is Trump effectively pushing back against them. His election will cause a refocusing of the progressive movement, who will make effective state-level efforts and sabotage his leadership of the federal government. But they'll barely need to do anything to sabotage Trump, since he's pretty much self-sabotaging: he's lazy and erratic, and although he has all the right enemies, he has all the wrong enemies too.
I don't know. Look at the number of people who came into the country from 2016-2020 vs 2021-2024.
Trump isn't going to fix problems, but he's not going destroy the country with open borders and amnesties.
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Why not? Look at the four years we already had with him. Yes, the generals rolled Trump and lied to him or sabotaged pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan. But they weren't able to talk him into new wars. Try as they might to stop it, Trump successfully fixed the border. Even without a full wall, the remain in Mexico policy was an enormous success getting numbers down and discouraging the attempt. There was relative peace in the Middle East, and Trump's executive actions kept Iran boxed in and without funds to create proxy wars all around Israel.
No, we didn't get the CIA shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered in the wind. I think we can largely blame Pompeo for that, and Trump will have better people around him this time. Yeah, we still got massive deep state censorship in violation of the 1st amendment. But that was before Elon bought Twitter.
We may not get mass deportations in another Trump admin. But I'd expect him to fix the border same as he did before. I'd expect Iran will be boxed in again as best as can be done, denying them assets to fund proxy wars. I'd expect no new wars, and maybe even having one or two buttoned up. Might look similar to Biden's pullout from Afghanistan, but I'll take what I can get. That's on the generals IMHO.
I think this is a weird expectation because, frankly, whether or not there is a new war isn't entirely up to US decisions. A foreign actor may, potentially, act in such a way such that the correct response is (unfortunately) military action back against them. You can't expect, necessarily, that any President won't be sitting in the Oval Office when that happens.
That's not to say that the President doesn't have a lot of agency here.
What I'd expect in the best light from any Presidency is not to instigate or embroil us in conflicts without very good reason but, if necessary, to respond in the way most likely to advance our interests.
In some cases that will be ending a war. In some (rare) cases that will be starting or joining or escalating a war.
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Compare where we were in 2017 to where we were in 2021. Was the state more or less intrusive into our lives?
Now, you might say that's unfair, and there were new circumstances that gave the state more opportunities to seize control that Trump was unable to effectively push against. And yes: that's exactly my point. Even his greatest success during the pandemic (getting the vaccine developed ASAP) was seized from him by bureaucrats who delayed its release until after the election for the sake of "political neutrality."
Inevitably, there will be new circumstances that arise from now until 2028. The state will maneuver around him, and he'll just flail around at best. War with China? We need copious controls to make sure no one is misled by misinformation. New pandemic? Now we know better how to do a real shutdown for public health. Etc.
That trend is inevitable, regardless of who's in office. My belief is that Trump's flailing will likelier hurt the market and my 401k worse than Kamala's empty suit.
Somehow I don’t see Trump taxing unrealized gains. So that’s one mark against your 401k
Trump undoing this terrible, actually destructive tax on theoretical non-real numbers would be worth the entire 4 years. And I'm not just talking about proposed future taxes. I mean the CAMT that was baked into the IRA of 2022. It's brain-dead tax policy and will make America a worse place to live.
I said the same thing about the Trump tax cuts the first time around: it was worth it all.
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I will admit, one of my reasons for wanting trump to win is not wanting to have the motte obsessed with unfalsifiable theories about voter fraud for 6 straight weeks.
But I have to ask- what economic mismanagement do you expect from trump? He’ll fuck the budget up, but fiscal sanity is too much to expect from the US government.
2 for 1 if he gets a filibuster proof senate and pushes through the civil service reforms! The FBI might start securing elections in the future.
The odds of that are very slim, right?
Yes. 60 Vote Republican Senate is basically impossible right now.
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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.
Tariffs aren’t a great idea, but the US economy is undertaxed and putting a consumption tax on manufactured goods(which is what tariffs would amount to in practice) is a great way to fix that. Trump will simply balloon the deficit rather than have tariffs high enough to cause damage.
Now taxing unrealized gains, on the other hand….
Undertaxed? I was unaware that economists agreed on some optimal non-zero amount of taxation for purely economic reasons.
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Trump has been a bit inconsistent about tariffs. Sometimes he has talked about them being solely protectionist; other times he has talked about using them to force other countries to bring down their trade barriers (leading to less tariffs). I’m not sure where exactly he will come out.
He does care about manufacturing. The single best way for him to influence manufacturing is making energy cheap in America. He and Vance seems to support nuclear among others. He can directly help shepherd these things via EPA. Question is how quickly can you get these programs off the ground. The manufacturing jobs probably would t be during his term but the building of plants etc would be so he could point to an employment benefit to make the case for a Vance presidency.
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Tariffs would be much better received by the D faction if they were packaged as a carbon/global environmental-and-worker-protection tax, which is a big part of why manufacturing moved to China in the first place.
Of course, because the Ds benefit the most from dodging those taxes (in the same way, and for the same reasons, that they benefit from open borders- they suddenly stop being so generous with other peoples' money once it starts costing them directly), you can expect them to pivot away from environmentalism if such a pricing scheme were to be implemented.
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I don’t get this. I’ve heard people repeat it a lot. People respect and like countries that have a high quality of life. They want to move to countries that have high earnings potential and safety. They also like cultural products. America’s cultural products aren’t going away, so what we are left with is QoL, earnings, and safety. Is the candidate who supports DEI and more immigration going to increase QoL and safety?
But also, why the hell would you even care about what someone in Kurdistan, or China, or Bangladesh thinks about you? During the Cold War, much of the world hated America for propaganda reasons, and who cares? Lots of the Middle East hated us because of our wars, and yet… it doesn’t matter. I don’t think people should care about how “popular” their country is on the world stage. We should care about how popular it is among our citizens, which would involve not incessantly telling about racism, slavery, and oppressive institutions.
Agree. What does this even mean. America has always been blamed on a lot of ill in the world . This didn't change under Trump. The fact so many people want to come to America, not just for benefits, but for jobs and to attend universities , shows it cannot be that bad. The leadership of Germany, UK, France, Japan, etc. may not have liked Trump or would preferred someone else, but they were more than willing to work with him and respected the office.
I think it literally just means that lib aligned PMC will be embarrassed at cocktail parties.
If that sounds uncharitable, I’m quite serious. “Global Standing” is what a tiny percentage of the international elite feel about the USA, not the unwashed public at large.
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Why though? You could say the same about any level of geography. "I don't think people should care how "popular" their town is on the national stage" etc.
“your town is unpopular” may mean that the quality of life of your family is negatively affected, as there is fewer investment in your town. It may also mean you’re individually doing something wrong, because you could be part of the problem of your town. But this doesn’t apply cross-nationally. Countries that are regionally unpopular (Israel) may still have high QoL. It’s only an issue if their safety is affected, which is distinct from whether the proles of Honduras have a distaste for your country.
I don't know what to say, I think Israel suffers terribly from being so unpopular on the global stage.
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Would you have been happier with Desantis against Kalama, or Trump against Newsom?
My general feelings are the same as his, and I would have quite happily voted for Desantis in the first Newsom and Newsom in the second - preferably Desantis first, but Newsom at least can tell which way the wind is blowing on the occasional issue, while Harris seems happy to roll the 2020 tape until it runs out beneath her.
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I'd rather rewind to 2016 and pit Sanders against Rand Paul. Whichever won, it would have been pretty interesting!
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DeSantis against Newsom would have been a fun election, honestly.
They want it and are I presume prepping for 2028.
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Maybe very slightly, but I'd still have been pretty unhappy. It's within the realm of possibility, though unlikely, that DeSantis could convince me to vote for him. Newsom I hold in about as much contempt as I hold Harris.
Then I don’t know what you are asking for. DeSantis is quite clearly an exceptional governor. He doesn’t just mouth certain positions but excels at running government and was tested under extreme pressures during covid era and came through with flying colors. He is pretty much the definition of “serious politician.” So if the complaint is “we don’t have serious politicians” why sour on DeSantis?
Well, I do have criteria beyond seriousness. Like I'd actually like to be ideologically aligned with them. Obviously I'm unlikely to vote for a right-winger unless he's just that awesome or his opponent is just that terrible.
Sure. But RDS is that awesome and Harris is just that terrible. It seems your concern isn’t really about Trump; it is about Harris.
It's both. Honestly kind of baffling to me that I wrote a long, admittedly heated post about how much I dislike both of them, and because my disdain is not 100% perfectly balanced (or, let's be real, because I have any disdain at all for your candidate), the conclusion is that I don't have real concerns.
RDS awesome? I agree that he's serious and capable; that doesn't mean I agree with his politics. A smart and capable politician can still be working towards ends I disagree with.
No I’m calling out your fake both sides here. You would generally hate anyone on the R side. But yet your post was basically “both candidates suck because they aren’t serious.” But when you peel the onion back a bit it isn’t the seriousness that you object to on the R side; it is the policies. Which of course that’s reasonable! But say that—don’t complain about candidate quality.
You're wrong. I don't generally hate everyone on the R side. Don't know what else to tell you, since you clearly prefer to construct an imaginary opponent who believes what you say they believe and not what they say they believe.
If it were DeSantis vs. Harris, my post would not be "both sides suck because they aren't serious." I'd be unhappy about the unserious, woke, midwit Harris vs. a right wing candidate who will enact other policies I don't like.
I don't hate Desantis. Really, I don't hate Trump, at least not in a personal way. I hate very few people. Even the people who make it clear how much they'd like to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick.
Conflict theory has its uses and I understand why people find it comforting and affirming, but it often fails as an accurate model of your opponents.
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So when it comes down to it, all the nonsense about Trump's particular badness is irrelevant. It's "vote blue no matter who". You blame the MAGA people for driving the grownups out, but you'd take a Democrat over a Republican "grownup" anyway, so there's no reason a Republican should care about your ranking between MAGA and grownups.
Do you even read before you start banging your keyboard? No. I have voted for Republicans in the past (not often, but occasionally) and I just said I could be persuaded to vote for DeSantis. (In a DeSantis vs. Newsom match, for example, or DeSantis vs. Harris, I might hold my nose and vote for DeSantis.) I wrote a lengthy post about how I am not "voting blue no matter who."
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Sorry I was unclear. It was an either question between the two, not whether you'd prefer either two to the current slate. But still, you've kind of answered what I was trying to get out. You go through such a long rant about how uniquely bad these two candidates are; but the next two most likely are 'maybe very slightly' better?
Well, not sure how to quantify "very slightly better." Yes, I think the entire slate of both parties has been pretty shitty for the past few years, but Trump and Harris are pretty much the nadir, IMO.
Actually, Nader’s last run for president was in 2008.
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Don't forget the millions on millions of unvetted foreigners allowed in, allowed to stay, and who will drop anchor babies. Just look at this. It's obscene. One candidate is very clearly trying to ethnically cleanse me, my family, and my children. The other one isn't, and is instead saying "send them back." Mass deportations are a topic of conversation. As dumb as the talking point is, one wants sex changes for male prisoners paid for by the state, and the other doesn't. One wants boys in girls sports and men in women's sports, and the other doesn't.
I think you're wrong about this. He's been clear for decades that, if not loving America, he identifies with it and takes it personally when we are taken advantage of (trade, NATO) and made the fool.
I've never before voted for either major party in a Presidential election, but I am this year, and it's an easy choice, and I feel better about that I do about Jorgensen or Johnson or Stein. I'm still partial to my Nader vote, though.
This isn’t ethnic cleansing. She’s not deporting white Americans. She’s not forbidding white Americans from marrying other whites. She’s just importing lots of people for deficit financed cheap labor. This is bad, but words have meanings.
If the Plantation of Ulster (where my ancestors on my Dad's side were sent to settle North Ireland to displace my ancestors on my mother's side) is widely considered ethnic cleansing then this sure as hell is. Unless you think the Paddies were just being a bunch of whiny babies.
As an Ulsterman myself, you do have to point out that this was a forcible relocation though as in the locals where literally forced off the prime land and onto less desirable land so that my ancestors could take it. In Springfield 30% of the population had gone for entirely unrelated reasons prior to the later immigration.
Even if we consider the Plantation of Ulster as ethnic cleansing (and we probably should) it is very very different than what is happening with immigration now. No-one external is forcing America to take immigrants and put them in places that have been depopulated by de-industrialization, they are doing so of their own free will because they think it has benefits to them.
Now not all Americans want them, but that still doesn't make it ethnic cleansing, any more than me immigrating to the US from Northern Ireland was, or lots of Irish people who moved to England were ethnically cleansing the English in vengeance.
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Calling that ethnic cleansing is similarly wrong, and for what it's worth the Wikipedia article on it does not seem to contain the word "cleansing". I googled for the combination of the two terms, and the first two relevant-seeming hits I found are from Quora and some book on Amazon containing wording such as
and
If anyone thinks that it was ethnic cleansing on the basis that the Irish were forced out of the most desirable locations in favour of the Britons (so it was... ethnically cleansing the best parts of Ireland only?), I guess that's fair, but this is a premise that is also not present in the US immigration case - there is no forcing of the current population to relocate to less desirable areas, and in fact the new immigrants tend to cluster in the least desirable ones.
Most of the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia was similarly just forced relocations (deaths were in the tens of thousands vs. over a million forcibly relocated).
State-subsidized relocations into areas drive housing prices up and wages down (along with all sorts of other first and second order effects) and the state subsidized part makes it literally impossible for the native population to compete. Coupled with refusals to enforce the law against the new population, and an overbearing willingness to enforce it against the native population if they try to fight against the resettlements, makes it very much done under the threat of violence and actual violence from the state and the migrants.
The stories that are commonly related as evidence of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans all involve mass murder, though (Srebrenica etc.); the usability of Yugoslavia as evidence for natural usage of the term is also further complicated by a fat US foreign policy goal thumb on the scale (compare to how the media would even have evacuation of orphaned children from captured parts of Ukraine by Russia count as genocide).
What's a concrete example of an area that you believe was ethnically cleansed in this fashion?
Brampton, ON? So far as I can tell, the place seems to be 100% Indian nowadays.
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In the adjacent district to my part of London (and I won’t tell you which bit sorry) all the street signs are now in Arabic. I walked through and didn’t see a single white person.
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Springfield, OH is one of the more obvious ones. Rotherham in the UK is another. The process is still ongoing in both of those locations though.
From a quick look, Springfield, OH housing prices look about the same as those in any small northeast US metro area I've seen, and well within the margin of what one can afford with a $20-30k/year salary.
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Deliberately working to reduce the White share of the population is called...what exactly? I like my words, what words do you use?
“Replacing” you? It’s a traditional complaint, even.
I guess I wouldn’t mind “supplementing,” either. It’s more accurate.
Foreigners drive down native birth rates. Diversity drives down White birth rates. It is replacement, and it's genocide, and it's ethnic cleansing.
Supplements are not the majority, and if they are, they are no longer supplementing. It's less accurate, but it's more palatable to your sensibilities.
I wouldn't be saying this if it were truly supplemental, and the nation were 85% White, 10% Black, and 5% Supplements. Did you notice that the numbers are far from that? Or are you just ignoring it?
Dandelions aren't supplementing my lawn any more than grass is supplementing my flower beds. And Morning Glory, no matter the location, needs to be uprooted in any civilized
stateyard.Actually, in the US, white birth rates are highest in three areas- those with high percentages of religious minorities(ex Amish country), deep rural areas, and heavily Hispanic areas.
Not foreign, few foreigners, and are the Hispanics counted as White? I would bet on it.
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[citation needed]
The lowest birth rates are found in very homogeneous countries such as South Korea and Japan. In spite of all its diversity, the US white (non-hispanic) birth rate is still greater than that of comparatively homogeneous countries like (much richer) Norway or (barely) (much poorer) Hungary. What gives?
"Diluting" seems like a more accurate and value-neutral verb.
Multiple factors?
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Number 1 result when I searched that exact phrase, which references this study.
Now that I've cited it, you'll concede the point, right? Otherwise what is the point of asking for the citation?
Thanks for the citation. It's a bit of a rough read, being a working paper (which also means it has not fully gone through peer review), but if I read it correctly, Table 5 suggests that with sufficient controls, diversity drives down other races' birth rates by at least about as much and in many cases more (Blacks, East Asians) than those of Whites. This makes your gloss of it rather tendentious. Who is being genocided here again?
(Assuming the rest of the paper is sound, I would take it as evidence for a more general point along the lines of "diversity drives down birthrates".)
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If these people weren't "deficit financed" maybe. But that's not the situation. There is no level playing field here. There is a scheme to undercut the labor market of legacy Americans, so that the company no longer needs to pay a living wage, and the government subsidizes these people to live there.
So you lose your job because these people can be paid less. Your taxes go to paying for them. All your institutions (schools, hospitals, policing) are overrun by them such that the services you can derive from them are greatly diminished. Landlords kick out their tenants because why rent to 1 legacy American family when you can collect welfare checks from 5 third world families.
Yes, they are replacing white Americans. This isn't just a "git gud" or "sucks to suck" argument where Whites have sour grapes about foreigners outcompeting them. The thumb is on the scale so fucking hard it's impossible to survive, except to accept living in third world conditions or leaving.
Or being killed in the ongoing pogrom.
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"supplant", possibly. Increase the supply of workers and the mid-to-high iq whites are forced to move to lower crime and higher-pay, yet lower birth-rate cultural and physical zones.
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In 20 years we can check back in on these towns that had 50-100% of their existing population in "deficit financed cheap labor" airdropped on them. Assuming the <70 IQ third worlders stay, I'm pretty sure with the crime and destruction of institutions, along with the total deafness the political class has towards the legacy population's suffering, the area will be 75-99% ethnically cleansed.
And yes, words do have meaning. This is every bit an ethnic cleansing as the Jewish Pogroms in Russia, as the Goths or the Huns invading the late Roman Empire and pillaging the provinces (often under a fictitious appellation from the Emperor as the new "protector" of that province, even as they pillaged it and put it's natives to the sword or torch). It's every bit an ethnic cleansing as the "illegal settlements" in Gaza or the West Bank.
There are ways to remove populations from their ancestral ground short of putting them on trains and gassing them. Or putting them on a death march to a reservation. Just because it falls narrowly short of the worst ethnic cleansings in history doesn't mean it's not at least meeting the standard of several others which are widely considered ethnic cleansings.
Name them.
I’ve said before that I don’t like Haitians, if they were dumped in my neighborhood I would call my reps to demand that El transportador moved them somewhere nonspecific. But moving them in is just retarded, not ethnic cleansing.
The Plantation of Ulster
Thank you, that seems to fit.
As an Ulsterman I would say it does not fit, because while that was an ethnic cleansing (in my view) that is because the locals were forcibly removed from their land and forced into the worst areas with significant violence. In Springfield and other areas 30% or so of the population had left prior to any immigration, and weren't forced from their land as happened when my ancestors colonized Ulster. If anything it is the other way round, where they are being put in the undesirable areas, rather than taking the prime land forcibly from Americans.
Thank you for the context. I’m more or less unfamiliar with the history except for ulster as where the scots-Irish came from.
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If the Left would call the same thing an ethnic cleansing if it were anyone but them perpetrating it, I think calling it an ethnic cleansing is justified.
But it’s all just who/whom at this point. The intent is the same in either case; and is ignoring what the people responsible say openly.
They cry and scream about it all the time when China imports Han Chinese into Xianjang to displace the local minorities there. Or when Israel does it in the West Bank.
I, uh, think there’s some other stuff going on in Xinjiang.
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Jesus I thought I did.
All of those examples involve people literally getting expelled from their homes and forced to leave. There is basically none of that in the idiotic open borders policy.
White flight? Sure it’s “voluntary” but it’s still coerced expulsion
If you look at the national level, it would seem that white emigration from Zimbabwe and South Africa fits this description, but I doubt anyone would describe it as such in polite company.
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Read about the Jewish Pogroms in Russia. There was no program to forcibly expel them. Rather the government plugged up their ears and closed their eyes when a smattering of Jews got assaulted or sometimes murdered, and the Jews self-deported fearing for their lives and sensing which way the wind was blowing.
What is happening to towns across America is absolutely as bad, if not worse, than the Jewish Pogroms in Russia.
I’m sure you can point to pogroms in the heartland? Like there is a problem with undocumented immigrant crime but as far as I can tell they’re not particularly more likely to get off than native citizens.
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Also essentially what happened in the Rhineland Massacres. Yeah, sure, the Church and local nobility said it was bad for the crusaders to kill a bunch of Jews on their way to the holy land, but they didn't do anything to stop it (and the call to join the crusade is what created the conditions for the massacres in the first place).
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If I actually believed Trump would or could accomplish any of the things he says he will (from calling up Vlad and "ending the war with one phone call" to deporting all the illegal aliens), I would consider voting for him. Since we saw how well he did as President already, I have no reason to think this is the case. (And no, I don't buy "That's because the Deep State was against him but this time he'll know how to fight them.") I think his followers who expect This Time It Will Be Different are being taken for a ride, like last time.
You don't have to believe he'll accomplish them to be able to tell that one person says "mass deportations now" and the other has let it happen.
I'm not holding my breath that we'll get the necessary 10 million foreigners per year deported, but I know which one will move the needle more. Also, just look at the graph. Obama had the uptick, Trump was a reversion to form, and then Biden opened the floodgates. He doesn't have to deliver on much to be better than the worst President of all time, who has enabled the likes of Cuban-born Jew Mayorkas to facilitate an invasion of my homeland, and who thinks an unrelenting stream of immigration is a good thing.
I've said recently there's only one difference in politics today, and that's the issue of migration. We at least have two people on opposite sides of that issue, and I'm voting for the one who is on my side, and hoping for the best.
We haven't even mentioned RFK, or any potential role for him in the administration. The same man who, in an open convention, could very well have been on the top of the ticket today. The man who I would have been voting for, maintaining my third-party voting streak, if he had not endorsed Trump.
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Amusingly, this is pretty much the one thing that I think could happen (which is not a claim that it will). We frequently reference a left/right divide on "violence as a continuum/switch", and the piecemeal "escalation" we've seen from the Biden administration is very much on the continuum side and pretty clearly doesn't really scare totalitarian despots. Viewing it as a switch, and then credibly threatening to throw the switch if necessary seems like it would be more convincing: "Come to the negotiating table and accept my minimal terms, or I pull out the Gulf War playbook and destroy all your remaining Soviet stockpile. Tanks are already staging in Poland."
Is there a danger of nuclear war there? Maybe. But if you let that spectre drive all your decisionmaking, you'll find yourself cosplaying Neville Chamberlain in pursuit of "peace" all the way to a world war. I don't like war. It's terrible. Always has been. Always will be. But eternally shying away from it has its costs too.
The problem is that the United States and NATO armies are in shambles already, and wouldn’t be able to credibly threaten that kind of conventional war. Hell, I doubt the US has the ability to do a 2003-style thunder run against a country like Iraq anymore. Ashton Carter absolutely gutted the military under his watch. He got high on Francis Fukuyama and assumed that the United States was the one remaining superpower and would only be doing goat herder wars for the next fifty years. So he got rid of all the programs that would allow the United States to fight conflicts against peers and went all in on COIN stuff. A NATO expeditionary force in Europe would have enough shells to last for about three days. And modern air defenses are outpacing offensive air capabilities, so the Air Force probably wouldn’t be able to get level of air superiority that NATO combat methods require. Which would mean Ukraine war style meat wave offensives with insufficient artillery support. How are the American people going to react to taking 19,000 casualties in two weeks? Because that’s what the the Army War College is estimating. How is the army going to replace one fifth of it’s combat troops in that time frame? What happens when China and North Korea take the opportunity to go for it the second America is tied down elsewhere?
NATO is even worse. Poland ran the numbers, and their war games estimate that the nation would last about 48 hours in the event of a war with Russia, which is why their bellicose rhetoric suddenly got real quite about a year ago. Britain would have serious problems getting even a single combat deployable division ready, and that would probably take months.
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Which candidate is mostly like to effect the end result of deporting aliens? The one who talks about how terrible mass migration is, or the child-of-immigrants who celebrates indigenous peoples’ day by talking about how America was founded on genocide?
If you genuinely care about effecting an end to illegal migration, then there’s an obligation to vote for whoever moves the needle on effecting that change. Trump didn’t succeed in building a border wall but he did smash the borders of acceptable speech on illegal migration.
As long as birthright citizenship exists illegal immigration will continue without clear end. Since there is no viable plan to end birthright citizenship none of this really matters at all.
The viable plan to ending birthright citizenship is to reexamine the legal definition of natural born citizen in light of earlier British jurisprudence which, in some cases, mentiins that the father must also be a natural born citizen. This is the kind of originalist legal argumentation that we find among Heritage Foundation guys and their SC picks.
We can do that, and then we can just restrict how many people can come in. Do a pregnancy test on women who come in. Lots of simple stuff. This issue is a failure of political will, not political thought.
There's no need to have motivated semantic arguments about what is a "natural birth" and what isn't (what about those born via Cesarean section??) because it's totally irrelevant to the constitutional language. The fourteenth amendment is extremely clear and unambiguous:
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How many members of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court do you believe would vote categorically against birthright citizenship?
If they can be persuaded that what the founders intended precluded the children of non citizen fathers, then maybe all of them, why not?
The whole point of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship to the freedmen, who had no legitimate descent from any US citizen. (Slaves not being citizens, as an obvious statement of fact). If a citizen parent was a requirement to benefit from the 14th, then it wouldn't have done what it was supposed to do.
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Is that like, whoever raises the birthrate the most gets to become a citizen? That’s certainly one plan for dealing with the problem.
Yeah I’m just mildly dyslexic, sadly. I edit a lot of ‘writes’.
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I don't have an obligation to be a single-issue voter, nor do I have an obligation to vote for anyone.
Why would you consider voting for him if he 100% ended illegal immigration, but not if he merely increased the chance of ending it? This applies to your other issue (ending war in Ukraine).
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This is uncharitable, boo-outgroup Trump-sneering thinly disguised as "both sides suck" complaining. You should be ashamed of this comment and go vent your spleen some other place rather than bringing down the level of discourse here, especially given that you are a mod.
Uncharitable I'll give you (I said as much) but if you feel I booed Trump very slightly more than I booed Kamala, well, too bad. Sometimes both sides really do suck.
I am not ashamed of this comment, merely disgruntled that I am unable to achieve perfect indifference to outcomes. I would not mod it if it came from someone else. We are obligated to be even handed and civil, not pretend to be objective on all political matters.
I'm in a pretty similar boat of "how much worse can our political candidates get (vivek and warren poke their heads out)", and I'll applaud putting any words on that marker. I think from a conservative dimension it gets frustrating that people tend to stop at her 'just' being a liar and a fool, without mention of the many many many other ways that Harris is also a mirror to Trump's other failings than being a liar or a moron, but it's not an election that's left me happy.
For all my general support of Trump as a non-citizen, I will admit that he is more of a fireship and a reactionary than a purely positive political candidate.
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I’m curious why you think Trump would damage American standing compared to Harris? Strikes me more that Trump would reduce American standing against fashionable Euros but fashionable euros aren’t the world
The idea of “Trump damaging our standing globally” to me is always 100% tied up into class anxiety amongst the PMC.
Trump is popular, and not just in the USA. He has rapport with and the respect of many world leaders and their respective publics; just not the ones that the cosmopolitan upper PMC consider their “equals”.
I see this very plainly. So many blue tribers of this type simply can’t be seen, even to themselves, to be “one of those people”. They’ll complain about the “excesses” of the Democratic Party until they’re blue in the face but are basically never going to actually do anything to push back against it.
The chapo types, rarely right about anything (pun intended), were 100% right about the libs.
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Ya know, people like to mock "fashionable Euros" like our relationship with NATO and European trading partners is a fake Gay EuroVision contest, but Europe (and the Commonwealth) is actually still pretty damned important - more important (at least to us) than the rest of the world, I would argue. I do not think Putin actually respects Trump and I think Trump is too susceptible to flattery. Do we think China, and our Japanese and Korean allies, respect Trump more?
Africa and MENA might or might not like Trump more (Harris they will probably see, correctly, as an easy mark for more American largesse). I guess you could say that Iran and the Arabs and North Korea are more afraid of just how crazy Trump might be. It's somewhat of a toss-up but on the international front I think Harris is very marginally better for us. I think world leaders will mostly roll their eyes behind her back but carry on business. Trump throwing a monkey wrench into everything may be a feature and not a bug to his supporters, but I don't think that actually helps us. All his promises about tariffs evening the playing field and "making NATO pay its fair share" are going to be either empty, or disastrous, and "make them believe you are crazy enough to start a war" is not, IMO, actually a good strategy for preventing wars.
I think this is a narrow perspective on the effect Trump has on the Iranians and their proxies (which is what I assume you meant by Arabs, as most other Arab states are at least nominally allied with the US). He's a more effective deterrent not simply because they think he's crazy, but to a large extent because they know he's not likely to try to restrain Israel in their response to Iranian aggression the same way the Democrats do/will.
This IMO is one of the best reasons to vote for Trump (and I say that as a non-Trump voter) - not because I think the humanitarian concerns raised by Democrats are meaningless, but because I think the ME is dramatically less likely to go nuclear if Iran feels less empowered to constantly be belligerent.
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Trump got along just fine with Theresa May, as I recall. But in general, the Euros will be happy with any Democrat and dislike any Republican, regardless of anything; this is a group which includes those gave Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush.
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But you didn't argue that. You didn't even claim that. Your argument was scoped to 'the world,' not 'the pretty damned important (at least to us) Europeans.'
That is a common eurocentric tendency, and eurocentricism is as defensible a geopolitical bias as any other, but while Europe may be a peninsula was an ego problem, it is certainly not the world. It's not even the most important part of the world to the US- and that's a point of US bipartisan consensus for nearly the last 25 years.
This is without touching on whether the Europeans should be 'more important' is a prescriptive argument, not a descriptive argument, and one where a lot of lobbying occurs precisely to shape your perception in that direction. You later arguments in this very post reflect the narrative priorities of non-American states whose objections are grounded in zero-sum interest differences (such as how the relative tariff advantages should be between the European Union negotiating block and the US economy, and whether European non-investment in defense spending should shape American security commitments to the Europeans).
Sure. Why not- it's not like they have any particular respect for Harris (whose start as a girlfriend of a connected politician is not exactly secret), or Biden (probably the most credible madman-theory nuclear leader in a generation), or even Obama (whose own susceptibility to flattery was well known and for whom the derogatory comics abroad would generally not be printed in any reputable American media).
But it's also irrelevant on two fronts.
First, as a matter of argument, because you've shifted your goal posts to 'respect Trump' from 'America's standing.' This is a fine motte to retreat to, but it's still an abandonment of the bailey.
Second, America's standing on the global stage doesn't derive from personal respect for the President of the United States as a person. It derives from the fact that the Americans have a lot of money, a lot of military logistical power, and a government able (and willing) to use them. The opposition to Trump in many cases does more to harm American standing than Trump himself, because it gets in the way of what the US government could do for them in any quid-pro-quo.
Is your opinion on global politics or good strategy well informed enough to be worth valuing?
You've given a lot of tropes here, but please believe me when I say that not going through them line by line is a courtesy to forum standards. Suffice to say, it's a classic ethnocentric American perspective with many of the classic American tells (poor latin america, unworthy of American attention as ever), and lacking any significant demonstration of awareness of how American presidents actually impact other country's politics. In so much that it reflects a foreign perspective, it's an obviously European-based foreign perspective... which is to say, one of the most compromised by American political feedback loops in the world, which frequently blends American and European ethnocentric narratives, and a dynamic completely non-generalizable to the world as a whole.
While European-American political overlap (and contamnination, if one prefers) is certainly a valid topic of discussion, it's not a particularly relevant one to the world that doesn't share major American-centric media constellations or have as active an effort of purposely shaping and influencing American political-elite opinions through major media organization relationships.
Obviously the president is not the nation, but I think the regard with which other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects the regard they hold America (and specifically, America's likelihood to take action in its best interests). I'm not sure what your grievance here is; you share the silly belief that I'm concerned whether State Department officials will be welcomed at European wine and cheese parties, or you think I dramatically underestimate how well Trump can play other world leaders and not be played by them? (I have already said I think Harris will absolutely be played by them.)
I think very few people here have opinions worth valuing. I didn't ask you to value mine. (I do value yours on global politics and strategy, fwiw.) I confess I am not sure what exactly you think I am wrong about, other than apparently not having a high enough opinion of Trump, and overestimating Europe's importance? I am willing to be persuaded on the latter point (and maybe on the former, but you haven't really tried).
I dispute that the regard other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects American standing, and think you are falling victim to the classic conflation of being popular with being influential while tethering yourself to a stunted view of who the audience that matters is.
In diplomatic contexts, a classic basis of leveraging/manipulating people is to go after those whose self-image is centered on being perceived well. If specific person(s) can convince you that your reputation depends on their approval, you will not only prioritize their interests over your own (because you will rationalize that their good opinion is your interest), but also their views over the views of other observers. Because 'they' are/should be the more important partner, 'their' opinion matters more, and 'they' can speak for the rest of the partner-population because they are more important.
Which is how you get the Europeans/Americans conflating 'Europe/America' and 'the west' and 'the world' depending on whose gravitas they want to speak with.
The issue being, of course, that the interlocuter whose good opinion you want does not represent more than themselves, and their interests are not your own, and when you start changing yourself for their regard you are giving them power over you to the detriment of not only yourself, but your own power base.
In the domestic American political context, this dynamic is analogous to the (now former) Republican elites who were more interested in Democratic-aligned media respectability than in the issues Republican voters cared about. Republican party elites who were concerned about respectability politics routinely made observable concessions on party base priorities while seeking accolades from respectable media. They did so despite even though increasing majorities of those interlocuters sympathized with, were members of, or actively cooperated with the Democratic party against the Republican party positions.
This parallel's implications should not be subtle, because they are not unique.
My 'grievance' is that you are raising a concern of a situation you were already happy with. You've already had a president who was played and flattered to- that was Barrack Obama.
In a geopolitical sense, Obama was an exceptionally vain president whose primary theme was wanting to be seen as historic and symbolic and appreciated for his ideas, and Obama's focus-zones-of-choice were those that played to glowing coverage. As Obama was more or less a Eurocentric Atlanticist by instinct, and the Europeans were very happy to flatter that, that's where he spent most of his time (and where he spent a good part of his initial retirement). In areas far more removed from American political sensibilities and where the coverage was less consistently glowing- such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia- Obama was far more distant after the initial honey moon and usual requirements.
This might be fine if Obama's popularity in Europe actually translated into major policy wins in Europe, in using increased popularity to shift the Europeans in more advantageous ways, but not only did this not happen, but Obama was instead lobbied into European-favored paths to American and even his own detriment.
Not only were longstanding American grievances not resolved by the EUropeans (NATO underinvestment, growing Russian gas-dependency, increasing Chinese network/infrastructure access, asymmetric protectionism by the Europeans), but the Europeans alternatively were able to lobby the Obama administration into, among other things,
-The Russian Reset (part of the German-preference for prioritizing Russian economic engagements over more pro-US eastern european partner security concerns; the aftermath of this helped lead to the Democratic over-compensation and russia-gate scandals)
-Brexit campaign lobbying (which was not only likely detrimental to the intended effect, but cultivated a higher level of partisan-driven political influence efforts)
-The Libya intervention (which was European grudge match against a former cold war foe who actually acceded to major US demands in the previous decade)
-The Syria Red Line debacle (a product, and then consequence, of Franco-British intervention partnership)
-The Iran Deal (a Congressionally-unpassable arrangement which offered major economic opportunities for the Europeans)
-The Paris Climate Accords (another Congressionally-unpassable arrangement which furthered anticipated EU-protection policies but which contributed to American political polarization due to its adoption into EPA regulation and following court cases)
These are not things that are in and of themselves 'bad' or indefensible in why they were approached, but rather indicative of high-profile ways in which the Europeans were able to assert more influence on how the US approached certain issues than vice versa, in ways more clearly beneficial to European than American-consensus interests (not least because many were beyond any American consensus but hoping to create new fait accompli).
Sometimes this is fine, quid-pro-quos are often one-sided in isolation, but the failure-state of pursuing regard (which Obama got quite a bit of for agreeing with what the Europeans wanted) and falling to flattery (clearly the Europeans were quite convinced by Obama's high-intelligence rationales).
To return to the grievance- your complaint, even when shadowed in both-sidisms, has already come to pass. The most recent well-regarded president is a president who was so routinely flattered for his wit and charisma that it generally isn't even recognized as flattery. This has already happened. It was not an objection at the time. It is not a credible objection now.
I did not claim you did. I will now ask why you made an argument based off of your opinion, if you don't think it's well informed enough to be worth valuing.
It's the same sort of self-negation that accompanies several of your criticisms and predictions. 'Everything Trump does will be terrible and fail, unless it succeeds in which case it was/will be worthless.' 'My opinion is strong and argued at length, but I won't claim it has worth worth defending.'
Well, which is it- is your opinion strong, worthless, or both?
I am poking you in the eye on this because part of the derangement in TDS comes from the totalizing mix of simultaneously asserting 'worst thing ever' and accompanying 'can't possibly be good' when worst thing ever doesn't occur. Not only is this contradictory in its own right, but it's a form of patronizing dismissal of the opinions of others by dismissing the relevance of the not-failures others may value as successes... which goes to part of why Trump is simultaneously successful and so triggering to PMC types with TDS, because Trump champions issues that are/were dismissed as unimportant, and disregards things claimed to be important.
Hence the blunt challenge on if you think your opinion on Trump foreign affairs is worth valuing. If you do, it's fine to say so and we can go into challenging that basis- but if you don't, but you are making strong claims anyway, that is itself unsound / not logical / the D in TDS.
And I shall probably not, since I just lost a bloody lot of effort trying to put together an effort response, including a post on issues with your previous post. That was lost for good, but here is try two for your question on overestimating Europe's importance.
/// Trump's Effectiveness Abroad ///
On Trump's effectiveness abroad, the short version is that unless you have a second language skill I'm not aware of, your impression of how effective Trump was and how he was perceived is shaped by the Atlanticist-dominated media coverage of international relations, i.e. Western European and State Department liberal types (many of whom are reading western european media company coverage) who are the prime targets of TDS. This is not an unbiased or objective audience. Outside of Europe, Trump's reception was 'normal.' Lower general opinion than Obama, who was and cultivated a rockstar popularity, but Obama was also rarely willing to press issues at the cost of his popularity.
Trump acceptance in turn followed from that he was generally willing to let partners focus on what they wanted without 'usual' levels of US interference (read: Trump was willing to buck the local ambassador and not make issues of things the local embassy might ask for government pressure on), as long as he got some signature concession. Mexico got substantial lack of pushback on its internal reform priorities (including rolling back the Mexican oil industry liberalization) after it supported NAFTA renegotiation and did Remain in Mexico, Japan got to play a leading role in the Quad and facilitation in Philippine influence and access after its own trade agreement, Korea got to pursue sunshine policy 2.0 with American facilitation (including the Trump-KJU summit, which was a South Korean success that tends to get ignored), and the Israeli-Arab normalization had a bunch of different angles of who got what for what.
When you (sarcastically) claim you are accused of not having a high enough opinion of Trump, this is true, but not because you should have a high opinion of him. Trump's effectiveness abroad was quote / unquote 'normal.' It was not terrible, it was within historical norms. Trump was a transactional president who did far less to meddle in some places than other presidents have in the past, and while that may seem a low bar to clear that is a still a bar many American presidents failed at.
/// The Europe Exception ///
The only place Trump was particularly 'bad' at was Europe, which is also by design the part of the world with the most reverse media influence back to the US (because when your national security for 50 years depends on American opinion, you invest in shaping American opinion).
There's plenty to be said about the extension of US politics into European political thought (such as how BLM protests of the Obama administration were echoed in European countries without the issues), and how the Obama administration tried to subvert Trump (at the same time the Obama administration was locking in the Russia-gate narrative domestically, Obama in his farewells to Merkel more or less encouraged her to consider herself the leader of the free world- imagine what your perspective is if the American president says 'don't trust my successor' even as American intelligence leaks are insinuating a Russian stooge), but the crux of the policy differences between Trump and Europe was the already emerging breakdown of the strategic logic of the cold war-originated alliance.
During the Cold War, the US granted European countries systemic economic advantages vis-a-vis US industry in exchange for strategic deference. Sometimes this was for things like the Marshal Plan, but it was also done to help other parts of the US alliance, such as trading concessions to American markets for letting Korea get access to European markets. The EU, when it was forming in its current form in the late 1990s/early 200s, inherited many of these concessions, even as EU collective bargaining had an often explicit purpose of improving European negotiating positions against the US.
This was because European and American competition is an explicit policy consideration of the relationship. Again, the stated purpose of the EU common market is to get better deals (for Europe) at the expense of others (the US). A united European polity was considered a way for the Europeans to compete with the US in the post-cold war, and there's no shortage of international relations scholarship about how European rule-making would restrain and shape others (including the US) to European benefit. European centralization and unification has been a common idea and explicit goal of many relevant European elites involved in EU politics. However, during the post-9-11 Iraq War, the Bush Administration broke the back on European solidarity when the Franco-German attempt at a pan-European objection to the Iraq War (in part because of their particular bilateral interests in Iraq) was undercut by the UK and coalition of the willing who supported the US invasion of Iraq. While this broke the attempt at a European common position, you will also note that this effort was breaking the core logic of the alliance- an inherited economic incentive for Europe, but not a deferential strategic asset for the Americans.
This was the start of the 'modern' call for European strategic autonomy from the US- the notion that an autonomous Europe is needed to not get into American wars 'it' didn't want to get involved with. Given that the coalition of the willing and American coalitions in general are voluntary, the primary way to advance European strategic autonomy and not get involved in an American conflict was to... not spend more on NATO, which would bring into conflict with Russia, at a time that the Franco-German consensus was that Russia was a critical economic partner and also a counter-balance to American influence in Europe (and also extending that peace dividend could help prop up the post-financial crisis challenges to the governments).
The Trump-Europe issue, for all its messiness and propaganda, basically revolves around the context that a critical mass of the European elites wanted the benefits of an inherited economic-concessions-for-military-deference bargain, except to cut out the military or deference requirement and disagreement of who the threat actually was.
If this doesn't seem unreasonable, consider why typically states pay mercenaries, and not the other way around.
Put another way- in so much that trade concessions are a form of payment for future services, the Americans are not the mercenary in the US-Euro security relationship: the Europeans are.
/// How Much Would You Pay For European Allies? ///
The strategic value issue, in turn- the 'why is Europe important to the US'- is that Europe simply can't offer much value as a military asset, even if it wanted to.
Europe is a critical enabler for the US to fight against Russia, but the primary reason (besides morality) to fight Russia is if you are allied with the Europeans who Russia's revanchism threatens. There are separate issues of what Russia would do to prolong conflict with the US for ideological/revanchist/other mockable reasons if the US did pull out of Europe, but fundamentally there is no need to fight the Russians over Europe if you don't consider Europe worth fighting for. Europe helping the US ability to fight Russia is an advantage for the Europeans, not the Americans, and in so much that there is a cost saving here, it is enjoyed by the Europeans, not the US, who would be avoiding far greater costs by simply not being obliged to fight.
The challenger the Americans care about, on the other hand, is China. This is one of the few bipartisan consensus points for the US over the last 25 years. Russia can break itself and half of Europe apart, and the US would be fine. China is the only power with the mass and industrial capacity and- critically- naval potential to threaten not only the American ability to go where it chooses, but to reach back to the US.
The things is, all the reasons that applied to the Europeans not wanting to align with Trump against Russia apply even more so to China. China is not a military threat to Europe per see. Unlike Russia, there are not territorial conflicts or near-term revanchism. China is a major potential market (that Germany is hooked on), China is a major potential investor (that post-financial crisis Europe is struggling to find sources of). China is a very clear advocate for a multipolar world order, and while China would prefer to be the biggest pole it's also not exactly going to be competing for Europe, so a Chinese multipolar order has overlap with a European multipolar order.
When the Europeans say they don't want to get roped into an American conflict, the American conflict they're thinking of is typically going to be the US-China conflict.
And here the value of the Europeans as military allies is dismal. Not only has NATO underinvestment crippled European military in general, but the Europeans haven't had the right kind of capabilities. A US-China war is functionally a naval war, and the European armies undercut by decades of underinvestment are far easier to fix than navies with the same restraints. There's a reason when there's talk of European Indo-Pacific power, they are talking about small islands on the wrong sides of the Pacific.
Now, this doesn't mean that the Europeans can't contribute anything to the US in a china conflict. However, the most valuable things the Europeans bring to the table is not their military support, but other things. Like... money and trade flows.
Which is the conflict that the US and Europeans have over NATO costs. And trade relations. And which the Europeans with significant China exposure threaten to lose quite a bit of if they side with the US over China in a US-China conflict. And which competes with the strategic logic of who is paying who for their geopolitical support.
Good post, pokes in the eye notwithstanding. There is a lot to think about. You have not convinced me that Trump was or will be a good president, but I do see what you are getting at about my overvaluing Europe, and I will try to adjust my position going forward.
This was much better than "Trump is Naruto and we should worship him," though I still disagree about "TDS," though maybe that's term slippage.
So assuming a second Trump term, do you expect him to actually be good on foreign policy? What is he going to do about Ukraine, about Israel, about Iran, and about China?
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I've felt this way since 2012, at least. But that's more a reflection of my age than anything.
I am also now convinced that the 1 year+ campaigning season is mostly unneeded, to boot.
Sure looks like we could do things on a truncated timeline.. Start 'election season' in June of the election year. All candidates have about a month to campaign as hard as they can, hold a couple debates in there. Put ALL primaries on the same day in July. Winning candidate has a few weeks to pick a VP. Then, starting August, the winning candidates can make their case for election in earnest for 3 months, which is ample time to get to know them.
So much more efficient, and in the modern era of information technology, I don't think we're losing any value to the average voter.
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Sometimes I wish I could vote in American elections, for how much they shape the world, and how significant they are even for us.
I don't wish that for this one.
If I had to, I would feel genuinely awful and miserable voting for either of those candidates. As it is, I'm going to watch from the other side of the ocean and hope that whoever gets elected doesn't screw everything up too much. It's a bad time to be American; it's a bad time to be an American client state.
The degree to and way in which they shape the world is also mediated by your own country's government. You could vote for a government that would show transatlanticists the door, which would significantly reduce American influence over your life, or for one that is willing to play hardball with them and extract concessions rather than being completely deferential, which may give you more influence over American governance than a vote in the US would (especially if you live in a small but important country with a more representative political system).
To some extent, I agree with you, and I’m frustrated by my government’s tendency to roll over the moment that America clicks its fingers. The less American values us, the more desperately we throw away any possible basis for independent foreign policy in an attempt to please it. (Granted the alternatives are the EU / Russia / China none of which are great choices, but we should play the field a lot more than we do).
But still, if you come home and find a bear in your apartment, whether you play hardball with the bear or feed it all your biscuits, your life is now going to revolve around the bear.
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Transpacificist, in my case. I'm writing from Australia.
We do have some options in the relationship with America, but the most America-critical voices in our domestic politics tend to be pro-China, and whatever bad things I may say about America, I much prefer the United States as an ally to China.
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I think you're spot on here, with the one caveat that this pattern matches a lot of stuff that people say about every election.
So when the Republicans put forward someone like J.D. Vance or Ron Desantis in the next election, I expect to hear the same howling in the media. But I'll be disappointed if I hear it coming from people who should know better.
To a degree, this is true (I remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth and "America is Dead" from my liberal friends when Bush was reelected in 2004 -- and even then I was a heterodox centrist who got hate for not thinking Bush was Literally Hitler), but I genuinely do think it has become worse in my lifetime, and we're at a local minimum if not a historical one now.
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The phrases "Worse than Trump" and "Like Trump but worse" are going to be VERY common in 2028. And you will disappointed.
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You should save some hatred for the "serious grown-ups" of the Republican party, who were both unable to defeat Democrats and also unable to maintain the respectability of the Republican party, leaving Trump's "fuck respectability" minimax strategy the only way to keep the party viable at all.
Sure, I hate them too. All of them. I blame your Republicans more for where we are now, but I've got plenty of hate to go around.
Considering who owns the most megaphones and controls their content, I find this opinion absolutely astounding.
I have a memory that goes back more than one election cycle.
That makes it worse. A longer time span gives more evidence to come to the opposite conclusion, not less.
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