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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I was curious to read what people were saying as Jan 6th happened, but many comments and threads appear (poorly) removed, with only some contextless responses done as main comments instead of to whatever removed chain they belonged to: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kq3o1s/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_04/

I do like to go back and check my old writing on occasion. Usually I nod along and think "dang I really agree with this guy". Jan 6th is no exception. I didn't write much on the themotte, but I did have a very upvoted comment on theschism (a sister subreddit):

https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/kocsoj/discussion_thread_12_week_of_1_january_2021/gih02cw/

[Jan 6th happened]

The strong reactions have confused me yet again. I have to wonder if my mind is broken, or if I am just so solidly gray tribe that I can't be bothered to care about these things.

To republicans and democrats I wish I could effectively communicate one thing: This is what protests look like from the other side.

It is scary to see lots of your political opponents gathered in one place and very angry about something you think isn't true. You can feel threatened just by the very existence of such mobs. They aren't accountable in the moment, anything could go wrong and they could hurt some innocent person.

And while they are at it protesting something that isn't real, they are also going to violate some things you hold sacred. Interrupt the national anthem, burn some flags, disrupt a legislative session, harass someone at their home, etc.

If I was stupidly optimistic I would have hoped that this event brought about a lot of mutual understanding. A big collective "ooohhh, that is what you were upset about this summer". Instead it has just deepened the divide.

2021 is off to a great start. Guess its gonna be more of the same.

Looking back three and a half years ago I feel that Jan 6th has not gone away. But the dispersed summer riots that resulted in lots of property damage and a few dozen lost lives have been mostly memory holed.

Perhaps the singular date helped, perhaps it was the national politicians being threatened, perhaps it was the ongoing court cases, perhaps it was the involvement of Trump. Those things all probably helped it stay in the public zeitgeist. But mostly its driven me towards a more conspiratorial mindset about the media landscape. They have kept it in the public mind. They could have chosen to cover all the riots for years on end, they chose not to.

I have a few comments there:

January 7, 2021

So what are some material outcomes of yesterday's event? I'm guessing:

*Patriot Act v2, this time we trade even more of our few civil liberties and become even more China-like in our surveillance state to secure ourselves from, "domestic terrorism"

*A possible crackdown on the 2nd amendment?, It doesn't really matter if guns weren't being used by yesterday's mob, but I feel with this emphasis on keeping weapons away from domestic terrorists will be used to justify all sorts of new restriction on guns

Any other effects you all think are plausible?

It will primary be used as a trump card to dismiss the months of violent leftwing violence across the country.

https://archive.is/owXYG

"I never want to hear how horrible and violent antifa or BLM are ever again"

Also to bolster the narrative that white men are the most dangerous element of society.

I think the comment I was replying to was overly hyperbolic. I have a minor quibble with my first claim, as I think democrats largely don't think much nefarious happened during the BLM riots, so January 6 stands alone as an insurrection and an attack on Our Democracy. No need to use January 6 as a counterweight when there's nothing to counter. I didn't anticipate Trump running for president again so that changed the dynamics around the narrative a bit.

January 8, 2021

I know this has been said over and over again but I'll go on the record.

Libertarian thoughts on "public property" and politicians being HVTs quibbles aside; I am not virulently against the norm of shooting people in these types of situation. I am against what I perceive to be a massive double standard. It's super clear that Kyle Rittenhouse is a mass murder, all these police shootings are racist, lives over property. But shooting a rightwing protester crawling through a window is a good shoot.

Norms need to be consistent or... They aren't norms. Ashli Babbitt saw the left violently rioting, looting, committing arson, and occupying government buildings for months without getting shot.

If we're gonna play the game this way, fine. Just as long as everyone knows that the rules are that it's legitimate to shoot you - even if you're protesting - when you start breaking stuff that's not yours or try to go places you're not supposed to go.

I still stand by this but I also acknowledge (and would have at the time) that normies aren't me and will consider attacks on the "Seat of Our Democracy" to be greater than attack's on private civilian property.

I think that if the roles were reversed and the right was destroying and killing what and who BLM killed and the left did a J6 equivalent... it's fair to say that the roles would also be at least partially reversed in how seriously these things were taken by the respective sides.

I'm honestly not sure how the right would react to a left-wing J6 equivalent, but I think it's pretty obvious how the left would react to a right-wing protest that had a similar level of buildings destroyed, areas occupied, etcetera.

I asked my mom and it wasn't a question she had thought to ask herself. People don't understand that... it doesn't make sense to treat bad things your own side does as justified just because your side is the good guys. Because what if everyone thought that way?

Society depends on a consistent set of rules that both sides of a conflict follow. Otherwise it really will be a world humans can't live in.

Democrats do something very similar to January 6, and I think Republican rhetoric is virtually the same (insurrection, overthrow the government, terrorism, etc.) as what the Democrats have been using. Democrats would probably riot over the death of their version of Ashli Babbitt.

BLM protests are difficult because I have a lot of trouble imagining what similar conservative kinetic actions would look like. Maybe it's a massive blind spot, but I just can't picture a realistic scenario. The closest I can think of are small groups or individuals attacking abortion clinics, which are very much affiliated. Or the Murrah building, but again, that was very specifically targeted.

Now, the next take would be that the protesters did very little rioting, but opportunists were attacking random private businesses. So what does a right-wing protest with violent opportunists look like? Probably the right-wingers would try to actively help the police stop the looting.

The point is not to imagine a realistic similar scenario that could happen. The point is to imagine what a similar scenario would be, realistic or not. If there is no realistic equivalent, that reflects well on the people who would not realistically do the bad thing.

I am very confident that Ashli Babitt (D) is a national martyr if roles are reversed. The endless op-eds about gunning down an unarmed woman for disobeying an instruction would be legion.

I thoroughly enjoyed 1/6 and still to this day felt like it had to happen. The right was boiling after years of covid lies etc. They needed to get a good riot in.

I enjoyed watching all the Dems complain about rioting after they had largely backed the summer of Floyd Riots.

As time goes on I have largely moved into the camp that Trump was directionally correct on it being a stolen election.

I’m still a bit pissed that the CIA (former guys) would straight up lie to the American people about Hunters laptop. Sure those guys were not current CIA but they did use their credentials. I think they all knew the laptop was real. I have a friend who had access to the hard drive so I knew it was real and the CIA guys could have investigated. Lying happens in politics but this always felt to me like crossing a line.

Re the laptop they knew. Everyone who looked into at the time knew. Greenwald discussed how you authenticate and he said it checked out at the time.

But worse we now know as early as 2019 the FBI knew it was real and we know the IC attempted to prebunk Hunter’s laptop with SM. So they knew it was real yet did what they could do pre condition SM to prevent it from being spread when it came out. This is evidence it wasn’t a free and fair election. Add in zuckbucks in Wisconsion were illegal. So the weak form of Trump’s claim is true.

But is it really a stretch that people who would do that, or the people who would engage in the current lawfare wouldn’t maybe fake some votes? We’ve learned things like dominion CEO lying about internet connectivity. We’ve learned the Georgia counts weren’t what they appeared. Is there evidence for the strong claim? No. But is it beyond the imagination it occurred? I don’t think so.

I remember within days of the story coming out there was a guy who published a Github verifying that the DKIM signatures on the emails matched. Which means either they were legit, or were forged by someone who was able to steal Google's signing keys from five years prior, or who had the nigh impossible computing power to crack those keys.

What really sold the “six swing states were stolen” narrative for me was that, except for Michigan which was half a million more for Biden, they all had some dozen thousand more Biden votes. Miniscule.

With a margin that razor thin, finding three or four different illicit ways to tip it in those states, each one more feasible in a different set of swing states, is easily within the grasp of a coordinated effort between intelligence agencies, a handful of nonprofits, and the top ranks of real power.

I think that’s a tougher narrative than you think. You don’t know in advance those states will be that tight. So you run into a where and how many votes question for those states. It’s not worth doing 40k fraud votes if you actually lost by 60k. Hence you actually need to cheat a lot to clear the margin in enough states because you don’t know exactly how many you are going to need.

Well the whole “shut down for a few hours” thing could explain that.

I keep coming to a conclusion that Trump has amazing instincts. There are a bunch of areas where he ended up being correct even if he seemed like a no-nothing type. Chinese tariffs, Iran, monetary policy, immigration, German-Russian relations. I’ve gone from somewhat of a hater to now begging for him to be back. Things just work well with Trump in the White House. I’ll vote for him in 2024 and I’ll vote for him again in 2028. (He will just tell his son to run. He’s never leaving).

zoink 37 points 3 years ago*

I'm highly skeptical that this will lead to an equitable crack down on rioting

Give this man a prognostication medal. I enjoy looking at old threads because it becomes obvious who was trying to get at the truth vs shamelessly manipulate people.

I didnt know there were motte mods telling users "I'd put you in a concentration camp if I could"

Give this man a prognostication medal.

I'm not fishing for compliments what is the evidence you see for this being true? The aggressiveness of the prosecution of January 6th rioters, lack of action against Palestine protestors, or... ?

At the time people excusing 2020 were saying things like "let the justice system work, all those people will face charges!"
And a few years later they were all dropped except for that one guy who got time off his sentence for burning a man alive because "his heart was in the right place." Andy Ngo has been showing all the same individuals are part of the intifadah riots too, so none of them have been incapacitated or even discouraged.

Meanwhile old ladies who were wandering outside the capitol building are in their 4th year of pretrial detention.

You were spot on when everyone was insisting the response would be principled.

He said he wasn't going to ban him because he didn't want be like him and did in fact believe in the free exchange of ideas even when he held "the power". The most charitable interpretation of HlynkaCG's post was that we should tolerate everything except intolerance, and those that would call liberalism and free speech bullshit should perhaps experience what it is like to live in a society without those values, such as China, where they would not be allowed to share such views.

What a grotesque thing to say to someone! I wish I could tell lynka that since I care about Classical Liberalism (or whatever it's called, I'm not attached to that label), it's important to me that I try to persuade people of its utility and morality. And the best way to do that is by being considerate of others, both in terms of not saying cruel things to them and in terms of actually considering what they have to say.

Unless that person says that literally if the roles were reversed they would silence you, or worse. Then it is very charitable to only say they won't ban you and maybe you should think about what it would be like to live in a place that didn't have these classical liberal values.

I'm talking about how lynka said the concentration camp thing.

My reading is "you don't believe in free speech, the Chinese dissident does; if we could swap your places, you each would live under a government that matches your stated preferences."

I think the other person is correct. Free speech is only protected when you feel extremely comfortable you have won. If you have an actual threat of a communists takeover or pick your bad ideology I am 100% game for not allowing free speech.

There are reasons why someone would allow free speech in that scenario. Just like there are reasons why someone might follow the Geneva Convention in a war they might lose, and indeed many people and societies have.

For one thing, it would be foolish to try to persuade people and then prohibit them from trying to persuade you. And persuasion does work. People don't like persuasion because it doesn't fit with their worldview of the other side being Chaotic Evil Orcs, and for other reasons. But really, it does work on enough people that it's always worth it. A lot of people who hate persuasion are just really bad at it because they're too mired in their own ideology and all the nuance in their brain has fled.

Persuasion is too harsh a word. People get in the mindset of trying to trick people with weird arguments, and that never works in the long run. Usually not in the short run either.

I got no problem with persuasion. But if it’s going to lose I would rather pick a different strategy that can win.

If I were a Cuban pre-Castro I would move to a strategy that can win and not a debating society. With perfect foresight I would have chopped off the heads of all the communists before they started winning.

I miss HlynkaCG as a mod actually

I do not miss Hlynka as a mod, but I kind of miss him as a poster. I'm a wannabee tough guy and he's start start to wax Soldier of Fortune and I couldn't wait for a take from that perspective and then it was just meandering and the point was really bad.

By sheer effort of will and an abundance of charity, I can go hours (sometimes even days!) without telling people I'm going to put them into camps. It's encouraging when site moderators are held to the same standards as the users.

You indicate through later context that you're specifically interested in reactions on the Motte, but to take the earlier part of your statement literally, you can't get closer than this:

https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/

Seriously, anyone interested in the topic needs to watch all of this (although it takes hours).

(Parler, a right-wing social media site, got hacked shortly after Jan 6. One of the things done with the data was to filter videos by time and location, and the result is a collection of videos from the event itself. ProPublica has a known but relatively mild left-wing bias, so if - like me - you come out of it thinking "oh, that wasn't so bad, then", it's probably not the result of propaganda.)

(Also I should probably note that yes, I'm aware that anyone present who actually had bad intentions would probably not have been posting videos to a social media site. At least, not if they had half a brain.)

I still stand by the the comments of mine I managed to track down:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kq3o1s/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_04/gic468m/

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kq3o1s/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_04/gicml9z/

Pretty fascinating reading some of those responses. Didn’t age well for some.

  1. You have the now debunked Sicnick lie reported with zero credulity.

  2. You had people saying J6 were treated with kid gloves compared to BLM. List could go on.

Better link here.

I feel like mild facepalm and 'This is going to blow up way out of proportion' were generally the responses, lots of equivocating to the Floyd riots as well.

I'll have to find it later, but SlightlyLessHairyApe complaining that the police were treating the J6 protesters with "far lighter touch", me posting that they were about to get shot in the face, and then one of the protestors getting shot in the throat, all in less than thirty minutes, rather sticks in the mind.

He argued to me that J6 was obviously worse, because the protesters were much, much more violent, killing five people including a police officer. Within a week or two, we knew that the statistic was completely fake, but by the time it was provable, the social consensus was already set. A fantastic example of how the Press manipulates social consensus, and another example of "no matter how much you hate the media, you don't hate them nearly enough."

Man, it’s great that all these posts from back then are still around. It’s not quite as good as your example, but I’m personally partial to the one that says “Nobody’s getting arrested”. Ages like fine wine, if that wine came out from the udder of a cow.

Also a certain amount of “(I warned you that) / (I never thought that) Reds would eventually manage to do organised meatspace resistance.”

So, by now everyone has heard about Biden's lackluster performance in the debate.

I don't want to talk about Biden. I want to talk about the fact that everybody has heard about it. There has been very little effort to suppress it.

If CNN, the NYT, and Time Magazine, and the rest had all held ranks and denied everything, this would probably have blown over. Most people didn't even watch the debate. Those who did could be persuaded to remember it differently. The general public isn't reacting to the debate, they're reacting to the reaction to the debate. Let's face it, this isn't the first time Biden has had a senior moment in public. This was unusually public and unusually difficult to edit around, but it's just a difference in scope, not a difference in kind. The media could easily have put the spotlight on Trump's deranged rambling about abortion clinics murdering babies, or that time he said that under his Presidency America had all the H2O.

Instead, CNN started openly freaking out the moment the debate was over. Prominent Democrats were apparently sending frantic texts to prominent journalists even before it ended. The NYT is openly speculating about replacing Biden. Time Magazine's new cover shows Biden wandering off the page with the caption: 'panic'. They didn't have to do this.

What I find interesting about this isn't the fact that Biden made his biggest gaffe yet. What I find interesting is that everyone broke ranks at once.

That's not necessarily surprising. Nobody wants to be the last person trying to hold the line after everyone else has run away. Still, it was so fast it almost looked coordinated. Were prominent figures prepared for something like this to happen? Were certain powerful individuals thinking to themselves, 'If Biden really acts his age during the debate, we might get the chance to replace him'? Could this perhaps have been the reason that this debate was scheduled unusually early - scheduled, in fact, before the convention where Biden is expected to be formally nominated by the party? Perhaps to give them a reason to nominate someone else?

Even if it wasn't, I think it's obvious that a lot of people have been thinking about this for a long time. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have all suddenly found themselves on the same page.

In my paranoid mind, if we wanted to believe in a conspiracy line of thinking, I think a theory for the surprisingly unified harsh open acknowledgement of the emperor's clothes would be:

a. In the mainstream media's supreme narcissism and entitlement to (attempt) socially engineer, they believe as a gestalt that only they could save the Republic and the Democratic party system (for most of the MSM it's one and the same) by setting the narrative for the Democrats to force them to swap out Biden. In their mind, because the media can shape the public's mind at whim, they can force people to abandon Biden by smearing him, and thus force a swap. So they got in their backroom group chats and all agreed "this is the talking points memo."

b. The American Deep State is genuinely concerned about Trump. Actual, important people, lives are on the line, because if he gets elected he might start putting allies of theirs in legit jail in vengeance. Perhaps he really is a rogue free agent from the usual bread and circuses show with its vetted actors, and that's always been a concern. Similar to point a, but this presumes most of the MSM basically takes marching orders from entrenched shadow elites from the likes of the CIA or whatever. An order was given out that "Biden really can't be the one to win against Trump. We tried our best with him with this performance and it's still not enough. Force a swap now before it's too late - or we are fucked."

As an addition to b. While I don't fully believe it myself, a predictive test of this theory might be that said elite influencers will go full gun blasts against Trump and do something really nutty. Like actually sentence him to prison this coming July criminal trial sentencing. Again I don't believe this will likely happen, I'm betting on a more level headed slap on the wrist since the real goal was the prestige of calling Trump a convicted criminal, but I want to get it in writing for a still "you heard it hear first" rights - just in case.

Either way it's astounding to me this event is what finally made people acknowledge Biden's obvious mental decline. So much so it's weird and suspicious.

I think if they jail him they turn him into a martyr. Everyone would ask what did he do and what was the evidence. It won’t be east to explain.

Also I heard in NY you can basically appeal a jail sentence to a single appellate judge to put the sentence on hold if the judge thinks it’s likely that you win on appeal. You get to hand pick that judge. Trump has a good shot to win that and will then be able to say “see it was a witch hunt.”

No the only reasonable approach is a fine and probation (which of course also underscores the silliness of the whole thing).

I think people like the NYT have been pretty explicit about what happened: Biden's age was a known issue to voters, the media was happy to simply...give him the benefit of the doubt in a variety of ways with the expectation that he'd clean it up at some point. Enough to get over the finish line.

He utterly failed to do that. So the issue blew up beyond anyone's control.

The media can't actually suppress something like this, it's been consistent in the polling. They can delay. They can trim. They can buy the guy time to study and perform so they don't have to deal with it (which is what happened with the State of the Union). But they can't kill the topic.

Biden shitting the bed not only made it impossible for them to do their jobs, it likely triggered a "we were all rooting for you!" frustration. They did their parts, after all.

If CNN, the NYT, and Time Magazine, and the rest had all held ranks and denied everything, this would probably have blown over. Most people didn't even watch the debate.

Even the maestros can't sweep something like this under the carpet. People saw it, those 30 second clips would've circulated around facebook and twitter, not to mention international news media. They can't exactly say it was Russian misinformation. They've tried to reframe it, 'oh it was a cold' 'oh it was because it was late in the day', 'Trump lied'... That's really only damage control. If they directly lied in such a blatant way it would be a major blow to their credibility.

Effective media work maximizes use of the truth. Take Russia Today: they mostly present true events that show them favourably or advance their favoured narratives: 'we dropped a big bomb on the Ukrainian town of New York' 'we blew up this drone' 'former colonial empires are doing stuff in Africa.'

Still, it was so fast it almost looked coordinated. Were prominent figures prepared for something like this to happen? Were certain powerful individuals thinking to themselves, 'If Biden really acts his age during the debate, we might get the chance to replace him'?

Preference cascades often look like coordinated action.

Preference cascades often look like coordinated action.

Another thing that often looks like coordinated action is coordinated action.

I kinda tend to agree with this. I don’t see how anyone in Biden’s orbit would be unaware of his mental state. And if they really wanted to get people behind getting him out, this seems like the best way to do so while maintaining the idea that they had no idea. And it also gives the public sympathy for Biden in a way that him just deciding to drop out would not. And it does protect the person replacing Biden seem less like someone pushing Biden aside and more like someone coming to the rescue.

The republicans need to hit them and say people knew about Biden for a long time but here we have the democrats again using undemocratic means to get what they want.

This will be less obvious as time goes on so it's important to make explicitly clear: the betting markets didn't have Biden's probability of winning the election drop until after the debate.

No? I'm pretty sure it dumped after the, "if... we finally beat Medicare," line.

I read glassnosers comment as meaning "the drop didn't happen before the debate" not the difference between during/after.

I had that idea too, but it didn't seem to make any sense. No one would think the big swing in odds on June 27 occurred before the debate, but it is conceivable that one would think that it happened as a result of the debate reactions, not the debate itself. Indeed, this thread seems to be about the distinction between the debate itself, and the reaction to the debate.

I feel like I've said this before, but it feels like the establishment has just kind of bluntly acknowledged Biden is going to lose and Trump will be presidents #45 and #47. In that context, 'holy shit Biden's too old' is probably just the default response to seeing that debate performance, and these people are both highly conformist and all on groupchats with each other.

What's remarkable in the left wing circles that I frequent is that "70% chance of Trump being President" is not far removed from "government agencies should be able to fine people without trial" and "courts should defer to whatever the appointed heads of federal agencies say".

Is that not just how the federal government operates?

Which one? And not any more.

Not anymore (hypothetically)

What I find interesting is that everyone broke ranks at once.

I don't think it was coordinated. It just seems to be human nature.

These things have happened before. In 1989, the dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was giving a public speech. Suddenly a single person started booing. And then another. Within a day, Romania was in revolt and four days later Ceaușescu had been tried and executed.

Tipping points can happen with staggering speed. Biden was the emperor who had no clothes, and suddenly as of Thursday, it's okay to talk about it.

Suddenly a single person started booing. And then another.

From Romanian Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

The population, however, remained indifferent, only the front rows supporting Ceaușescu with chants and applause. His lack of understanding of events and inability to deal with the situation was again highlighted when, in an act of desperation, he offered to increase workers' wages by 200 lei per month and continued to praise the achievements of the "Socialist Revolution ", not realizing that another revolution was unfolding right in front of him.

"For a long time it was not known who "ruined" Ceaușescu's rally on December 21, 1989. Various characters appeared who claimed this credit. Now it is known that this fact is due to some groups of Timișoara residents who moved to Bucharest." [32]

Sudden movements from the periphery of the gathering and the sound of firecrackers turned the demonstration into chaos. Frightened at first, the crowd tried to disperse. Some of the participants in the meeting regrouped near the Intercontinental Hotel and started a protest demonstration that later became a revolution.

Subsequent attempts by the Ceaușescu couple to regain control of the crowd using formulas like "Hello, hello!" or "Stay quietly in your seats!" they remained without effect. The live television broadcast has been interrupted for the moment. A large part of the crowd went to the streets, the party activists, the members of the patriotic guards, the soldiers in civilian clothes, the most loyal people of the dictator remained in the square. After a few minutes, Ceaușescu was able to continue his speech, promising salary increases and pensions, then returned inside the CC building.

People who left the square were panicked, throwing flags and placards with slogans on the ground. Many of them regrouped in the streets adjacent to Palatului Square and began to shout anti-communist and anti-Austrian slogans

In short, it was all very much coordinated by groups of provocateurs setting off explosives with the specific aim of causing chaos and a general sense of uncertainty in the capital. Which should not be surprising, because in reality the revolution was a coup by the Party leadership in order to dispose of him and his family and seize power, with the help of the regular army, using false flag methods, with (at least) the tacit approval of the American and Soviet intelligence services, as his regime was by that time a nuisance for both superpowers and long outlived whatever usefulness it ever had.

In 1989, the dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was giving a public speech. Suddenly a single person started booing. And then another. Within a day, Romania was in revolt and four days later Ceaușescu had been tried and executed.

The context for that was that the rest of Eastern Europe was already in revolt.

If by 'revolt' you mean objectively peaceful political mass demonstrations, then yes. If we use the word in its normal everyday definition, Romania was the only example of a revolt in Eastern Europe in 1989.

The context for Biden getting shivved is that he was already losing before the debate. If he was polling well the media wouldn’t have broken ranks.

As a factual matter, all Democrats did not break ranks at once. The biggest ones have not broken, such as the head of the DNC, either Congressional main leader, etc. Most people saying things were still doing so anonymously. The fact Democrats did not have a plan B was well-known for months. Personally, I think that both the decision not to explore a plan B was both cynical as well as effective. If the whole thing were really planned, at least one major leader would have said something sooner.

As it currently stands, only a select few people can practically change Biden's mind: Harris (maybe), Jill (most effective), a few inner-circle staffers, and that's it. Maybe a larger revolt in the DNC offices.

Have any Democrats actually broken ranks? The only suggestion I've seen that Biden should step down is from the media and one article that cited three big donors (speaking anonymously). I haven't heard calls for him to drop out from anyone who matters.

The interesting thing is that there are people in this very thread who believe that the media will do an about face, fire those responsible, and switch to propping up Biden any day now. It really is two movies, one screen.

I don't know that there's a conspiracy to move the debate earlier. I'm not sure how the sausage is made, but it seems to me that the people setting the date of the debate could probably get Joe to step aside. Instead, some prominent gray eminences (e.g. Obama) continue to support Joe. We may be seeing a kind of power struggle in the party.

This is the first general candidate debate I can ever remember that occured prior to the conventions. This was planned to rally support for removing Biden from the ticket to the rank and file.

The debate was so early because: a) Biden wanted to, related to b) the typical debate committee in charge for years was blown up, leaving both more flexibility and doubt, c) both candidates wrapped up their nominations way earlier than usual, d) mail-in ballots are an ever-growing thing and some states mail them quite early nowadays.

The first reason is the most interesting one, but we still have to take the others into account. This NYT article from May outlines three reasons for part a, Biden's preference. One, Biden was trailing in the polls and wanted to try and change the narrative as soon as possible. Two, they were worried he might have a bad performance and wanted to give him time to recover if so. Three, both Dems and Reps happened to want to make sure RFK Jr was shut out of the debate, and race overall. The earlier the better, for this purpose. This is pretty interesting and speaks to how even the big party leaders in both parties weren't sure if RFK would be a helpful spoiler or not for them.

So yes, it was early, and yes, a bad debate possibility was one of the reasons, but the other reasons are strong enough I could plausibly see the debate being held this early even if that were not a concern.

Limiting the debates to only two, however? That is probably due to Biden's age. Normally the one behind in the polls wants more debates, not less, as a pretty hard rule.

Nate Silver thinks the earliness is also age: give any bad impressions extra time to wear off.

This is pretty interesting and speaks to how even the big party leaders in both parties weren't sure if RFK would be a helpful spoiler or not for them.

Both parties presumably have a shared cartel interest in maintaining a duopoly. They're effective enough in it that people just take it for granted, so it doesn't really come off as a joint mutual operation.

Why would Biden go along with that?

I don't suspect anyone with his own interests has much power left.

I guess he could run as an independent? By my understanding, Biden isn't entitled to the Democratic nomination, so if the party wants him gone, he's gone.

I mean why would Biden agree to debate early if a foreseeable consequence was that he would be couped.

In order to give any bad impressions extra time to wear off.

Biden is an extremely arrogant, compulsive liar. He probably does genuinely think that he is saving democracy, that he is the only person who can beat Trump, that he has some unique geopolitical insight, etc.

Here's a clip from 1988 where Biden is basically just making shit up about his academic credentials and achievements on the fly, as a way to make some guy at a campaign stop look stupid: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D1j0FS0Z6ho

Here's a list of a bunch of things he plagarized, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/trump-campaign-press-release-copy-that-joe-bidens-long-record-plagiarism

There's also the recent amtrack lie.

He's a narcissist. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, thinks he's playing some complex manipulation game, and just makes random shit up all the time. Funnily enough, this is exactly what his compatriots accuse Trump of.

During the 2020 primary season, I was still clinging to my last shreds of belief in the Democratic Party’s ability to steady the ship of state and eject Trump in favor of a staid, professional, competent, technocratic Leader™️. (I was, until her candidacy was unceremoniously double-tapped in the back of the head by shadowy DNC insiders, genuinely feeling the Klomentum.)

So, when Joe Biden was installed as the nominee, I started pointing out to all my liberal friends just how much Biden resembled Trump in several quite unflattering ways. I showed that clip, among others, to people who for some reason had either failed to notice Biden’s tenuous (at times verging on hostile) relationship with the truth, or else misidentified it as the sort of jocular and harmless embellishment you’d expect from Grandpa telling you the fish he reeled in that one time was the size of a Ford Pinto.

No, I said, Joe Biden’s lies are just as often of the maliciously and vindictively self-aggrandizing and ass-covering variety. His ego is, if anything, even more fragile than Trump’s; blame it if you want on his struggles with a stutter growing up, or his insecurity about being a fairly working-class guy forced to deal with effete moneyed DC snobs for fifty years, but the man clearly has a massive chip on his shoulder about his perceived limited intelligence and Springer-esque family scandals, and he’s willing to say anything, no matter how outlandish, to try and pump up his own self-image. Add to that the obvious corruption and influence-peddling his immediate family members are involved in, likely with his direct and explicit involvement, and you’re talking about someone every bit as vulgar and un-Presidential as Trump, albeit with more finely-honed optical instincts and a wider network of enablers/brand managers. He’s Irish Catholic Trump, except rather than slapping his name on chintzy hotels, Biden has just been a stooge for Delaware-based credit card companies for his whole career, with a moonlighting side gig as the central hub of a family grift.

Klobuchar? She would have been awesome. What an alt-reality.

Can you tell me why you think she would've been awesome? This is a genuine question. I definitely preemptively disagree with you, but I'm not going to argue and your posts of the past make me think you're intelligent.

So, again, genuinely want to know.

If he was incompetent, controlled, deceived, or otherwise making a bad decision.

I agree that there's no good reason, but this theory already requires that he's past his prime.

Thursday's Presidential debate revealed to the world that President Biden is mentally incompetent and that an unelected and unaccountable group of people is running the country, and likely has been running the country for some time. This unavoidable truth has likely doomed Biden's 2024 campaign. However, it has likely also struck a crippling blow against the Democrat Party's primary value proposition: "Democracy."

The Democrat's have made "Democracy" the party's core identity, its primary rhetoric, and indeed, its very reason for being. The Democrats insist that the right to vote for one's representatives is sacrosanct, that voting is "Democracy," that the country is "Democracy," and that the Democrats are "Democracy." Directly or indirectly preventing or diminishing the right to vote for the representative of one's own choosing is, according to the party, fundamentally anti-democratic. Moreover, they loudly and repeatedly insist that a vote for the Republicans is a vote "against Democracy" and will "end Democracy" in the United States. The rhetoric is existential, black and white, and leaves no room for maneuver.

Thursday's debate transformed the party's "Democracy" rhetoric into a mortal wound. If Joe Biden is mentally incompetent, then the only value of his candidacy lies in the proposition that the party will wield Biden's executive power without his knowledge or control. But, according to the Democrats, being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests is no vote at all. Indeed, it is anti-democratic according to the party's own terms.

The Democrat's only argument is that "if we don't run the country anti-democratically, it will be the end of Democracy!" This is rhetorical checkmate. The Republicans and left-leaning, dissident democrats will turn the Democrat Party's super-weapon against them and there will be no escape. By jettisoning every other value but "Democracy" from the party, the Democrats have left themselves nowhere to retreat. The Republicans will use the last decade of the Democrat's own histrionic statements against them, rightly painting them as tyrants perpetrating a coup. Dissident, left-leaning Democrats will do the same, and claim the mantle of genuine "Democracy" for themselves.

Its actually, literally Joever.

The Democrats insist that the right to vote for one's representatives is sacrosanct, that voting is "Democracy," that the country is "Democracy," and that the Democrats are "Democracy."

Rhetorically, this might be true, but if you look at the actual comments on the issues, "democracy" seems to get quickly pushed aside in almost every instance I can think of where a democratic vote doesn't lead to the "correct" outcome. Look at the reaction to California's Proposition 8 in 2008 where the state voted to ban same-sex marriage: did Democrats adhere to the will of the people expressed at the ballot box? Or the reaction to Dobbs, which wasn't rallying the democratically-elected (blue!) majority in Congress to pass an abortion rights bill, but to largely rally around the idea that such rights are absolute and don't even deserve codification by the legislature. Or the entire Russia-gate thing, which seems to have been largely based on the idea that a bunch of questionably-funded internet ads might sway naive voters to the extent that we should question the validity of their counted ballots.

But I think it's really only true rhetorically: in practice it seems to be far more pragmatic questions of what power can let them get away with.

I agree that Biden’s in no shape to be president, but you’re catastrophizing. The “unelected and unaccountable group of people running the country” are the west wing staff, same as always. Staffs are elected and accountable as extensions of their respective candidates. Like in this election it’s looking like voters will boot Biden and his people.

The whole defending democracy meme is both an incredibly potent and incredibly sad choice of strategy for Dems. In this age of partisanship, it was entirely predicable that if the Dems become the party of democracy, people on the other side will reflexively drift toward being explicitly against democracy. I find myself going that direction. If the current establishment is synonymous with our new definition of democracy, well, I’m not for that.

Democracy isn’t fundamental to the USA. “Western Liberal Democracy” is only 30 years old. The postwar system is only 70ish years old. And universal sufferage only 100 years old.

They couldn’t resist using it though. And as I said, it seems potent with a certain type of person. I agree with comments here that say that reelecting Biden despite any handicap is consistent with their definition of democracy. They’ve totally redefined the term to be consistent with rule by the “adults in the room”.

And universal sufferage only 100 years old.

Suffrage without respect to class is significantly older in this country and glimmers of it date back through initial settlement.

I've said multiple times on here and the old site that "democracy" is best understood as rule by the managerial elite - if Trump won with a majority of the popular vote, then got disqualified and replaced with the Clinton caretaker government by the CIA, that would count as a victory for democracy as the term is used.

Exactly the same point I keep making as well.

It's kind of like the difference between equality and equity isn't it. Whereas equality means "equality of opportunity", equity means "equality of outcome".

In the current progressive mindset, democracy doesn't necessarily mean every citizen gets a vote and we determine the winner. It means getting the correct result at the end of the process. Voting for Trump is "undemocratic" and therefore unelected leaders must deny people the ability to vote for him by taking him off the ballot.

To be fair, the only time Trump has accepted the outcome of an election he was involved in was when the election went in his favor. Say what you will about HRC, but she did not contest the outcome of the election for the next four years.

I think keeping Trump of the ballot is bad because one of the advantages of democratic elections is that they are a means of avoiding armed confrontations within a country. The deal with democracy is that everyone gets to vote for their guy, and if your guy did not win this time, the best path forward is to try to convince more people of your point of view next time. If your guy is not on the ballot, you might decide that the best way forward is armed resistance, and get utterly crushed by the federal government.

There are situations where it is a good idea to keep an enemy of democracy off the ballot. Kicking the NSDAP off the ballot in 1933 would have been worth however many shootouts with their Sturmabteilung that would have resulted in, because the Weimar republic was fragile, with a lot of the government apparatus not sold on democracy and very willing to help Hitler along.

But Trump 2024 is not Hitler 1933. If he is elected and has a majority in Congress, he will still not be able to transform the US into a Fuehrerstaat. The SCOTUS may be friendly to him, but they are not his minions. And unlike Weimar, the US is full of bureaucrats who are very invested in the status quo. They might gerrymander a bit here and leak a bit of embarrassing info there for partisan reasons, but they will not dismantle democracy.

Say what you will about HRC, but she did not contest the outcome of the election for the next four years

Well, Hillary never stormed the capitol with her army of fanatical HillDawgs(tm), but she (and the mainstream media) did spend four years strongly implying that Russia had rigged the elections in Trump’s favor. An argument that they kept on using until about a day after Biden’s victory in 2020, after which the argument that any American election had ever been stolen immediately became a laughable conspiracy theory. Twenty years of carping about dimpled chads in Miami Dade county also suddenly went down the memory hole.

Well, Hillary never stormed the capitol with her army of fanatical HillDawgs(tm)

The inauguration riots (DisruptJ20, not HillDawgs) have been memory holed by the media.

To be fair, the only time Trump has accepted the outcome of an election he was involved in was when the election went in his favor.

This is probably excessively pedantic, but despite winning several states, he withdrew from the Reform Party primary for president in 2000 with a fair amount of drama, but not denying the outcome of the elections.

This unavoidable truth has likely doomed Biden's 2024 campaign.

I see people saying this, but I don't see it. I don't get why this really makes much of a difference; many of the scenarios I see circulated and speculated about in many of the other places I frequent are of the sort that won't be affected by this.

However, it has likely also struck a crippling blow against the Democrat Party's primary value proposition: "Democracy."

Except, as I've noted before, many on that side tend to define "Democracy" rather differently than what you imply. The people voting for whatever representative they want — whether approved by elites or not — is "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy; "Democracy" meaning rule by an intellectual vanguard party of elite technocrats who are the only people with the smarts to enact the Rousseauan "general will," which is what the masses would vote for were they all properly educated and enlightened enough to know what's truly good for them, instead of being loaded down with ignorant bigots and bitter clingers, vulnerable to exploitation by the next Hitlerian populist demagogue.

But, according to the Democrats, being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests is no vote at all.

Do you have a citation for this, because I've only seen the reverse — people on the left arguing that "being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests" is the very definition of Democracy.

The Democrat's only argument is that "if we don't run the country anti-democratically, it will be the end of Democracy!"

Yes, which, via redefinitions of "Democracy" along the lines of places ranging from Germany to Ukraine to China, will work just fine — because "if we don't run the country anti-democratically insulated from people who vote wrong, it will be the end of Democracy rule by those who know best."

(I can't find it via a quick search, but I remember back in 2016 over at the subreddit linking to a professor who argued for stripping the franchise from Trump voters, on the grounds that it's legitimate — the right thing for democracy, even — to remove the vote from those who've demonstrated that they will misuse it by supporting an unacceptable candidate.)

Again, we saw once and for allwhat happens when you let the people vote for whoever they want — instead of from a carefully-curated menu of elite-acceptable figureheads for the "unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests" — and let said representatives have actual power… in 1930s Germany. "Never again" means never again.

(I can't find it via a quick search, but I remember back in 2016 over at the subreddit linking to a professor who argued for stripping the franchise from Trump voters, on the grounds that it's legitimate — the right thing for democracy, even — to remove the vote from those who've demonstrated that they will misuse it by supporting an unacceptable candidate.)

There are things like that:

https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2024/01/states-are-well-within-their-rights-to-take-trump-off-ballots/

I find it odd how reluctant Democrats are to defend the concept of democracy. Of course they say how important democracy is, but do they ever explain why? Their rhetoric assumes the correctness of democracy, as though it is an end in itself and not simply a means to an end.

Is this cope? Crimestop? Much like other taboo topics, thinking too hard about the issue leads to the possibility that deeply-held convictions could be wrong. You can't build your argument for democracy out of the wisdom of crowds. Half of the population will demonstrably vote for Donald Trump. Either you're wrong about the wisdom of crowds, or you're wrong about Trump. You can make an argument that democracy is good. You can make an argument that Donald Trump is bad. But it is quite hard to make an argument that democracy is good and that Donald Trump is bad at the same time.

It really isn't. Democracy is about letting people have a say. They may be wrong, they may vote for candidates I think are stupid. They may hold ideas I think are harmful. But democracy isn't about making the best decisions. There is no wisdom of crowds in this situation. Thats not why democracy is good.

It's about ensuring everyone has a buy in and a stake in society. Their choices may well be awful. Doesn't matter in the slightest. IQ 90 voters get just as much say as IQ 140 voters. Because they have to live in society too. And giving them a say in how it is run helps societal stability. Whether their choices are good or bad is orthogonal to the value of democracy.

Now I don't think Trump is all that bad really. But even if he were, the fact many people would vote for him doesn't mean democracy is bad. People should be allowed to make bad choices, and those choices should impact the society they live in, if enough people make the same one. If everyone wants to ban cars, we should ban cars, even if objectively it's a stupid idea. We get to decide what is important to us. That is the value of democracy.

It really isn't. Democracy is about letting people have a say. They may be wrong, they may vote for candidates I think are stupid. They may hold ideas I think are harmful. But democracy isn't about making the best decisions. There is no wisdom of crowds in this situation. Thats not why democracy is good.

That's one way of defining democracy. But it's very different from the Rousseauan view (particularly the Jacobin variety), wherein "democracy" becomes about government acting in accord with Rousseau's "General Will" — which is not the same thing as the will of the majority. As you note, the latter can be wrong, while the former is always correct by definition.

Yes but Rousseau seems to be entirely incorrect. His claim basically is that individual men of simplicity will by deliberation in small groups find that the common good will be so obvious that only common sense is required to identify it. Likewise he believes that such simple folk cannot be fooled or confused by stratagems.

Looking around I see that conception to not actually tally with reality. So whether there is such a general will may be irrelevant, even in small groups making the right choices is not clearly obvious. And even if it were it only applies in small groups (groups of peasants making decisions around an oak tree being his rather picturesque vision), given that is not the type of democracy we are operating in even Rousseau wouldn't think it could apply here. The General will is simply not available to us at this scale.

Yes but Rousseau seems to be entirely incorrect.

I agree, but it doesn't stop people from invoking concepts from his work… or, more specifically, Jacobin-derived interpretations thereof.

The General will is simply not available to us at this scale.

Here, the people I've read break from Rousseau, in that it's not the simple peasants who identify the common good. Instead, it is only elite technocratic experts who have the right mix of talent and education to work out the correct choices, and it is by "deliberation in small groups" of these rare people that the General Will can be divined. And thus, "democracy" is when these experts become the intellectual vanguard of the ruling elite, and the greatest threat to "democracy" is the "populist" who would unseat them by appealing to the superstitions and prejudices of the less-enlightened masses.

We're a representative democracy, and the elected officials are to represent the people. Well, to quote from a previous comment of mine:

…consider individuals who need a “representative” to act on their behalf. Children, the senile, the mentally ill, and so on. What makes a parent, a legal guardian, a representative with “power of attorney,” a good representative? Well, one who acts to their own personal benefit, to the expense of the person they’re representing — one who embezzles funds, for example — is definitely a bad one. This is analogous to the “non-democratic elites” outlined above

But consider the opposite end. I’m reminded here of Bill Cosby’s “chocolate cake for breakfast” stand-up routine. If your kids answer the question of what they want for breakfast with chocolate cake, should you give them what they want? If a schizophrenic wants a doctor to open up their skull and remove the CIA mind-control chip beaming thoughts into their head, does a good guardian start looking for a brain surgeon?

No, a good representative acts in the best interest of the person they represent. A good representative respects their clients wishes… so long as it isn’t against their best interests. Here, the analogy to the overly-permissive parent or guardian is the sort of politician people like the essayist denounce as a “populist” (with or without the “authoritarian” modifier), and you or I might call genuinely democratic. Someone who enacts the popular will — which, per Rousseau, is just another “particular will” — instead of the “general will”. (As I once saw it put, the difference is that the “popular will” is the will of The People (plural) while the “general will” is the will of The People (singular).)

Note that there’s not a strict binary. It’s not “let your kids have chocolate cake or ice cream for breakfast” vs. “you dictate entirely what your kids will have for every meal, they get no choice at all.” You can let them pick which breakfast cereal they might want, or between pancakes and waffles, between oatmeal or French toast, and so on. You can give them a constrained choice among a menu of acceptable meal choices. Even an institutionalized schizophrenic, or an elderly person with senile dementia, has rights to some measure of choice around their activities, circumstances, treatment, and so on; but only when it’s not counter to their own best interests.

Hence, a “stage managed” “defensive democracy” with a strictly limited menu of choices for an electorate who, between public choice theory “rational ignorance” and Marxist “false consciousness”, don’t always know what’s in their own best interest, nor which potential representative is most skilled at determining what that societal best interest is.

Generally, it seems to me like many have come to hold two apparently contradictory propositions:

  1. Liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Our governments are democracies, and it is from this that they draw their legitimacy.

  2. The masses are too ignorant, misinformed, bigoted, and superstitious to generally know what's in their own best interest; nor to determine which potential representative would be most skilled at determining what that societal best interest is; and thus the government cannot afford to allow their input much weight on how it governs them.

One way to square these is to simply ditch #1 — this is the Moldbug "formalist" position. Tell people our "Brahmin/Elf" elite caste are legitimate rulers not because of "consent of the governed," but because they're literally the only people with the smarts and know-how to be capable of governing a complex modern society.

Of course, this runs against centuries of deeply-ingrained cultural mythology, particularly in the US. I mean, we're coming up on the 4th of July. Freedom, democracy, the Founding Fathers standing up to King George, et cetera. Many wouldn't take such an ideological u-turn very well (hence Yarvin's cryptographic weapon locks, VR, and so on).

But then, we notice that #1 and #2 are only actually incompatible if we define "democracy" in #1 to mean something that includes "the masses having significant input on how they are governed." And, like Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty noted, definitions are flexible; modern academia has made an artform of playing games with the definitions of words. Thus, one can resolve the paradox by adopting a definition of "democracy" wherein the influence of the electorate plays little role, a “stage managed” “defensive democracy” where the voters are free to choose… among a strictly-limited menu of elite-acceptable choices. And if you look at the methodologies used by many of the "democracy indices" that purport to measure how "democratic" various countries are, you'll see something that puts a lot more weight on 'does it have these various things left-leaning technocrats like?' and less on 'how responsive to the electorate is it?'

In short, we're definitely still a democracy… where "democracy" means whatever our unaccountable elites say it does.

I can see, perhaps, an argument for benefit to social stability by everyone having buy in. "Stupid, terrible things will happen if enough people can be convinced they should happen, and that's the value of democracy," seems like the strongest argument against democracy.

That being said, it seems like the trend line for social stability is pointed in only one direction, so the argument that we should have democracy to keep things stable is looking pretty weak these days as well.

"Stupid, terrible things will happen if enough people can be convinced they should happen, and that's the value of democracy,"

Contrarily of course, "Amazing, great things will happen if enough people can be convinced they should happen" would then be the strongest argument for democracy no?

And whatever the trend line of democracies might be, communism, feudalism and the like appear to be worse. We are not in a vacuum here, some kind of method of governance will be in place.

What's disturbing me is that the conversation around this isn't "is Biden fit to lead" it's "does Biden look presidential enough?" Competence at the top of a ticket should pale in comparison to competence as President. The country should be considering the 25th Amendment, not just the ballot. The punditry seems more concerned with the appearance of the thing than the thing itself, and that thing is that Biden maybe shouldn't continue to serve in the current moment - far less the next four years.

Competence at the top of a ticket should pale in comparison to competence as President.

What constitutes "competence" for a president? How much does he need? How much "competence" does King Charles III need to do his job?

and that thing is that Biden maybe shouldn't continue to serve in the current moment

Why not? He seems to be doing his job quite well — said job being a powerless figurehead while the unelected "deep state" permanent bureaucracy does all the actual governing.

How much "competence" does King Charles III need to do his job?

More than you’d think. We’ve had bad kings before. Bad princes too (looking at you, Harry).

We’ve had bad kings before.

Sure, but how much more power did the monarch wield back then?

I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdication_of_Edward_VIII

Who was basically forced to resign (so not much power) but like Harry was incapable of keeping it in his pants when confronted with beautiful American divorcees.

What constitutes "competence" for a president?

Ironically, the ability to convince people that he's in charge even though he is not.

The kayfabe is the thing in itself.

However, it has likely also struck a crippling blow against the Democrat Party's primary value proposition: "Democracy."

I doubt it. The central thrust of the "Donald Trump wants to destroy democracy" critique is that Donald Trump tried to seize power when he lost in 2020, and nothing has changed on that front.

The central thrust of the "Donald Trump wants to destroy democracy" critique is that Donald Trump tried to seize power when he lost in 2020, and nothing has changed on that front.

I mean, Trump hasn't, but the alternative to him at least somewhat has. Trump did lawfare to try to overturn an election. Colorado did lawfare to try to fix an election. So, well, okay, Trump wants to destroy democracy*, but if the alternative to him also wants to destroy democracy*, that's not really much incentive to vote against Trump, is it? It's just, shit, guess democracy's getting destroyed.

*Both Trump and the Democrats legitimately believe their antidemocratic actions are justified attempts to save democracy. They are both wrong. I wouldn't use the phrase "wants to destroy democracy" to describe that state of mind, but I'll echo your word choice for now.

Donald Trump tried to seize power

Can we please stop with this? This type of claim is just absurdly bad faith.

Trump attempted to use some esoteric lawfare to force a debate about the merits of election interference claims.

Until such time as Trump's supporters unstorm the capitol and Trump didn't try to have his VP declare him the winner despite losing, it seems entirely reasonable to say that Trump tried to seize power. "It was to force a debate" is just another flavor of Trumpist cope deploy to reconcile the gap between their self-image as patriotic Americans and the reality that they prioritize loyalty to their wannabe caudillo.

Trump did not try to have Pence declare him the winner.

John Eastman may have suggested to Pence that he had the authority to do this (although as far as I can tell this is hearsay), but the plan was to have Pence reject some of the electoral slates, and force a debate within the house over the merits of the fraud claims.

It has been nearly FOUR YEARS since this happened. The evidence for this is well documented, and the plan has internal coherence.

Please just spend a few minutes reading about this and try to read it with the context that the people involved aren’t stupid, and their plan wasn’t lifted from a children’s cartoon.

but the plan was to have Pence reject some of the electoral slates, and force a debate within the house over the merits of the fraud claims.

If the election is thrown into the House because neither side gets a majority in the Electoral College, that is the opposite of "forcing a debate over the merits of the fraud claims". The process for forcing a debate over the fraud claims is an objection to a State certificate under the rules set out in the Electoral Count Act. Such objections were made, in the cases of AZ and PA debated, and rejected in Congress on January 6/7 2021. (It was during the AZ debate that the rioters entered the Capitol building and forced an adjournment.)

The contingent election that Eastman was trying to use isn't a procedure for debating who won the Electoral College vote - it is an alternative procedure specified by the Constitution for use when it is clear that no-one won the Electoral College vote. Consistently with most of Trump's strategy, it isn't an attempt to litigate the counting of the votes cast in November, it is an attempt to throw them all out and decide the election without reference to them. (In this case, a party-line House vote with unequal weighting of votes). In fact, the simple, obvious reading of the Constitution is that it doesn't even allow a debate - the Constitution says that the House should vote "immediately".

What should I read?

He was aiming for more than a debate, I think. He wanted to overturn the election because he thought it was stolen from him. If it was, that is a reasonable position to hold!

But saying he just wanted to force a debate seems to ignore his own words. That's not how Trump operates. He is pretty straightforward on things like this. Thats why he put pressure on Georgia and Pence. To recognize the election was stolen and act accordingly.

Calling him a danger to democracy is hyperbole, but claiming he just wanted to force a debate on the merits, seems plainly wrong. He didn't want a debate, he wanted action.

The difference between “Jack slandered Jill” and “Jack warned the community about Jill” is evidence of Jill’s misdeeds.

The difference between “Don stole the election” and “Don rescued the rigged election” is evidence that the election was rigged.

Claiming the election had been stolen would’ve been reasonable if there’d been compelling evidence for it. Doing so without evidence is the same thing as trying to stealing the election. If Trump had succeeded in overturning the election, it would’ve been stolen. Like if Jack’s convinced everyone that Jill is wicked without evidence, he’s slandered her.

Sure, I don't believe Trump is correct. Which is why I said "if it was".

I'd say the real intent on J6 was to deliberately engineer a constitutional crisis, the Capitol mob was just a convenient, possibly useful tool Trump didn't intend (but also didn't have strong feelings about, thus sitting back and letting it play out until it failed). The original effort, we must recall, was this: pressure directly from Trump and abetted by what courts have determined to be lies, onto Mike Pence, to take what scholars also consider a plainly illegal action, which pressure was cynical and self-serving. For what it's worth, I happen to think that this effort would fail. Most Dems seem to think that the SC would obviously side with Trump, against the law, simply because they were selected by him, but I don't think this would have been the case. However, triggering a constitutional crisis on purpose is, in a word, bad. Especially the reason why. It was not some big important issue worth fighting for... it was just self-interest, pure and unadulterated.

But yes, Democrats making it about "democracy" is also a little bit cynical, and a bit misleading. The core message is actually "We can't trust Trump's morality with power". Said morality might threaten democracy. Probably does. Just not as directly. The other parallel that needs to be mentioning is the view that Republicans have been trying to subvert the actual election mechanics as well, via gerrymandering, VRA-violating discriminatory efforts, and general denialism to question turnout. I think the objective record of Republicans on this front is mixed. I don't think it's an existential-type threat.

Thus, the calculation to call it an attack on democracy itself is a political ploy, and somewhat dangerous. On balance, I'd rate it as less dangerous than election denialism (one of the worst poison pills), but still dangerous in practice to the stated goal of actually preserving democracy. Now, part of this rests on a key assumption: Would the SC actually have sided with Trump? If yes, the concern is at least logical/understandable but you can also see how the seeds of devaluing the system in a misguided attempt to defend it are laid.

Most Dems seem to think that the SC would obviously side with Trump, against the law, simply because they were selected by him, but I don't think this would have been the case.

Indeed, the supreme court chose not to when Trump's favorite state AG sued Pennsylvania over allegations they were certifying a fraudulent election.

The esoteric legal theories were one thing.

The actual evacuation of Congress during the process was another, and you can't possibly call that lawfare.

Notably J6 harmed his esoteric legal theories. Now maybe you think Trump is a dumb dumb. But if his lawfare had any chance of working, J6 riot killed it.

That's the other half of the statement: I can very easily deny that "Donald Trump tried..." to do that.

He's not a charismatic genius that can manipulate a crowd into doing his bidding with veiled statements and subtle insinuations. He didn't ask for people to storm the capital, so I have a hard time believing that he tried to get people to storm the capital.

Oh I agree. I don't think he asked for anyone to storm the capital.

Then again, Biden and Bernie didn't ask anyone to try to torch a Federal Courthouse.

I happen to think we ought to hold we hold political leaders responsible for their factions. It is their job not only to represent, but also to channel and restrain, their supporters. And I think the left should have done much more do during BLM and the right should have done much more so than 1/6.

That all said, a consistent belief that political leaders aren't responsible in such a way is palatable too. But after all all the ink spilled on why the Dems wouldn't take responsible for BLM, I'm skeptical.

The actual evacuation of Congress during the process was another, and you can't possibly call that lawfare.

Trump had literally nothing to do with that.

You can describe almost any attempt to seize power this way. The Reichstag Fire Decree was just some esoteric lawfare to force a debate about the dangers of communists. Nobody thought the 12th amendment was vague prior to 2020.

You can go both ways. My tax deductions are an attempt to topple the united states government by depriving them of necessary capital to fund the work they are doing.

Driving to the grocery store in my ICE vehicle is an attempt to melt the polar ice caps and flood the coastal cities and cause massive deaths.

Golf is me trying to kill all of the bald eagles by hitting them with golf balls.

etc.

I mean, yes, obviously. But so what? In a weeks time everyone will have selective amnesia about what they saw. Come November there will have been enough sparse yet selective Biden encounters where he appears at least as lucid as he has minus the debate that people will find convenient rationales to ignore it. There have been dozens of "surely normies and partisans will wake up now" moments in the last 7 years, and yet nothing ever changes. The crimes against our republic, our nation, and our civilization which the uniparty has wraught are too terrifying to contemplate. So they largely continue with broad support.

In a weeks time everyone will have selective amnesia about what they saw.

I'm not so sure. The NYT editorial board has pulled out the knives.

And next month those editors could have lost their jobs for their hateful and agist rhetoric. Thats what happened after an editor was foolish enough to publish the Tom Cotton piece. Or they could recant and grovel and publish 3x the editorials about how wrong they were.

The entire editorial board?

Probably not, but they could pick a scapegoat. I suspect more likely that if Biden isn't replaced they'll just pretend it never happened, when they endorse him.

For once I agree with you- the NYT editorial board in October will endorse Biden on the groups of Trump being the kind of maniac he wasn't last election.

Happy to make a bet if you really think that checks notes the entire editorial board of the NYT is going to lose their jobs over writing this editorial.

Or they could recant and grovel and publish 3x the editorials about how wrong they were.

Why would i take that bet when my assertion wasn't that some specific event would happen, but that a multitude of possible events could rendering this "normies wake up" editorial utterly meaningless.

Happy to make a bet about the NYT editorial board recanting this oped as well.

Of the major Democratic candidates waiting in the wings, it seems clear that Newsom is the only viable candidate. And if you’re Newsom, why would you possibly replace Biden now?

  1. This is likely the only shot at President the candidate that (theoretically) replaces Biden has. If Trump wins, the loss against such a villain will serve as the ultimate embarrassment and humiliation for the Dem nominee. Even if they argue that it was Biden’s fault, the base is unlikely to buy it and the attack that the candidate “let Trump win” will be difficult to shake off. This is particularly relevant as the white man quotient in the Dem party continues to decline, raising ever more questions about why the party for which only a (shrinking) minority of white men vote and which is predominantly PoC and female should again elect a white male candidate, especially a loser, over a woman and/or minority who doesn’t have the black mark of “letting trump win” on her resume.

  2. The polls are not favorable to the Democratic Party for now. Even though the economy is arguably fine, people don’t believe it’s fine, housing costs are increasingly unaffordable for many people etc. Newsom would find himself running a campaign built around defending the unpopular record of a mediocre president, including possibly an ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah depending on how that pans out by November. If Newsom runs against a Republican President or a Republican candidate after a GOP presidency, he can sell a purely optimistic vision without having to defend Biden’s record (he might have to defend his record in California, but most voters won’t care).

  3. Trump still hasn’t built Trumpism into an actual movement that extends far beyond the personality cult when it comes to generating political figures who can take over his legacy. There are people who believe strongly in MAGA, certainly, but there are no incredible GOP candidates waiting for 2028. The non-Trump primary candidates this year were poor. Carlson probably won’t want to run and in any case still has a certain East Coast boarding school effete intellectual vibe to him, even with the log cabin studio. DeSantis is uncharismatic and greasy. There are options, but none of them seem likely to be close to as popular as Trump - certainly they are unlikely to have his pre-existing celebrity, wealth and talent for self-promotion. It wouldn’t even surprise me to see a Rubio return wrapped in a MAGA package, and that would be pretty dire. Gavin is stupid, but with enough training he would be fine against most likely GOP options in 2028.

  4. The public’s desire for continuity often expires at the 8 year mark (if it does not do so earlier). A Democratic nominee who pulls off an upset and wins this year is going to be campaigning on 12 years of blue government in 2028, a proposal that hasn’t won in 70 years. The glory of a two-term presidency is much more easily attainable after the opposition is in power.

Amusingly, the only scenario in which Newsom would be smart to take over Biden’s candidacy would be if he genuinely believed that Biden was going to win. In that case, the 2028 race would be much harder for a Democratic candidate; Kamala would likely be the default pick for it’s her turn reasons and because Trump would have been safely defeated and probably too old and beleaguered to run again (allowing ideology to take precedence over raw candidate strength) and 16 straight years of Democratic control of the presidency seems very unlikely. If Biden wins, Newsom’s next good opportunity might be 2032 or even 2036, in which case he’d be 77 upon leaving office after 2 terms, and that seems like a slog.

I know it's a running meme here at this point that Gavin is an idiot, but is there any media documentation of that? I've never followed the guy closely so maybe I just haven't noticed. All I really know about him is he's a pretty standard California democrat and bears more than a passing resemblance to Patrick Bateman.

it seems clear that Newsom is the only viable candidate

Newsom seems like the least viable candidate, being a California politician with the aesthetics of an 80s movie villain.

Don't forget that he had the Getty Billionaire heir help him secure the funding so Newsom could found a fucking wine company.

Newsom has the very real baggage of being the governor of California. My impression is that among many Americans, California is disliked, at least on the level of politics, and seen as a model of bad state government. I'm open to being corrected.

How many of those would vote democrat anyways?

Gavin Newsom? How the hell is he a viable candidate, let alone the only viable candidate? What exactly does Gavin Newsom bring to the table? Does he help retain the non-college whites who voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020? Does he appeal to black or Hispanic voters? Suburban women? The kids protesting the Israel war? Moderates who don't want either party to go too far? He's a replacement-level California Democrat who some people think is a viable candidate because he goes around telling people he is. His backstory is that he's the son of an appeals court judge and Getty family attorney who was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, got divorced, and started dating a woman half his age. The only reason he's even in the conversation is because the kind of journalists who will vote for any Democrat recognize his name as the Governor of California. To everyone else, he's the kind of effete, sleazy, West Coast liberal who might hit on your wife, if she's hot. Kamala Harris would be a better candidate. The only reason he may be pulling strings behind the scense to make this happen is because he knows he has no chance in hell of ever winning in the primaries.

Gavin Newsom? How the hell is he a viable candidate, let alone the only viable candidate?

This is a sign of how shallow the Dem bench has become. What do they have lining up? Pritzker? Warren (lol)? Mayor freaking Pete? Not Harris for sure. I did say I like Gretch because she ties up MI and isn't otherwise disqualified.

I'd take Roy Cooper again any of them, but really the story here is that the Dems need to spend some effort on the bench and they need to elevate more swing-state folks.

how shallow the Dem bench has become.

My favourite conspiratorial explanation for this is that the HRC team knew that she was such an unlikeable and unpopular candidate they went and kneecapped all her prospective challengers to make sure she'd have an easy time getting the nomination.

I think it's most likely that Dems just don't have enough people to run every institution they've seized, and the old political office pipelines look unappealing relative to, say, chairing a billion-dollar NGO you can use as a personal slush fund.

Whereas Republicans who didn't go the federalist society judge route are pretty much stuck with starting a political career as mayor of Cowpatsie, Idaho. They don't even get defense contractor work now; it all goes to regime-friendly guys like the motte's Netscape or whatever.

Like, a Democrat Thomas Massie would have gone a very different direction after MIT, and reached a much more profitable office than junior representative in charge of sponsoring DOA livestock bills.

But there's definitely a crab bucket effect too, made stronger by the party's power over the bureaucracy. Much easier to sabotage a potential competitor when you can literally order their subordinates to undermine them.

I think Pritzker is probably their best choice now. He’s very bland. He did an ok job in Illinois. You can just run the election on Trump bad again. Illinois seems to be a better spot for the left to find their candidates than the coast.

That being said Newsome is running if he can get the nomination. You don’t pass up a chance to run when it comes even if it’s not an ideal time. I think he has a lot of personal characteristics that won’t play well in battle ground states.

A fat man cannot be prez.

My prediction anyway.

Trump is fat, he is the third heaviest president ever, I think he lost some weight since he was president though. William Howard Taft was famously rotund. Grover Cleveland was fat. More Americans, and especially republicans, are fat, and would identify with a fat candidate. I wouldn't say it improves anyone's chances. But the fact that Chris Christy even took a stab at it shows it isn't outside the overton window these days.

Kimberly Guilfoyle

Oh wow. I didn't know that. So Gavin Newsom's ex is engaged to Donald Trump Jr.

That's a spicy meatball indeed.

From Guilfoyle’s Wikipedia page:

In December 2001, Guilfoyle married politician Gavin Newsom, then a San Francisco city supervisor. Newsom was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2003. While married to Newsom, she used the name Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom. The couple appeared in the September 2004 issue of Harper's Bazaar ; the spread had them posed at the Getty Villa, and they were referred to in the title as the "New Kennedys".[49] In January 2005, citing the strain of a bicoastal marriage, Guilfoyle and Newsom jointly filed for divorce.[50] Their divorce was final on February 28, 2006.[51] It later emerged that Newsom, then 39, was having an affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of his then-campaign manager and former deputy chief of staff, Alex Tourk.[52] It is unclear if Guilfoyle knew about the affair before the scandal broke in 2007.[52]

On May 27, 2006, in Barbados, Guilfoyle married furniture heir Eric Villency.[53] On October 4, 2006, Guilfoyle gave birth to their son.[54] Guilfoyle and Villency divorced in November 2009.[55] In June 2018, Vanessa Trump, who had filed for divorce from Donald Trump Jr. three months earlier, confirmed that Guilfoyle was dating Donald Trump Jr.[56]

10-8 Newsom, Trump. From Newsom's current wife's Wikipedia page:

Siebel Newsom was one of several accusers against Harvey Weinstein in his 2022 Los Angeles criminal rape and sexual assault trial.[32] In November 2022, Siebel Newsom testified in court that, in 2005, Weinstein had raped her in a hotel room, having lured her there under the pretenses of holding a professional discussion about film projects.[33] Weinstein's attorney claimed what took place was "consensual, transactional sex".[34] The jury was unable to reach a verdict on Newsom's accusation and that of one of his other accusers. A mistrial was declared on those charges.

Weinstein hit it first. 10-9 Weinstein, Newsom. It'd be easily 10-8 if not for the possible ambiguity as to what took place. #BelieveWomen charity operating on overdrive.

There's also footage of Newsom playing basketball in China with some schoolchildren. Newsome was a bit reckless, lost his dribble and charged into a boy who had his feet set, followed up with some friendly butt-slaps upon the boy (you know, as one does, when trying to recover from an awkward situation where you just plowed over an eight or so year-old).

10-9 random Chinese boy, Newsom.

I can only conclude that Weinstein ~= random Chinese boy > Newsom >> Trump Jr.

However, more seriously, I think Newsom would be a pretty good candidate. To the extent that's he's merely a "replacement-level" candidate for the Democratic Party, that could be a feature rather than a bug. Biden was mostly just there as a non-offensive candidate (from the Democrat perspective) and to be Not Trump; Newsom could do that but better.

He looks young compared to Trump and Biden (because he is, relatively-speaking) and is tall, has a good haircut, and has good teeth. For better or worse, those are quite important criteria.

I don't see him losing support relative to Biden when it comes to women. If anything, for aforementioned reasons, Newsome would do better; his tabloid-worthy history when it comes to banging younger women only benefits him. I also don't see him being less appealing to blacks or latinos, either, compared to Biden. Perhaps even more appealing.

The photoshoot makes it even better

Trump would have been safely defeated and probably too old and beleaguered to run again

And imprisoned. I think, if Trump loses, there's a very high chance he's found guilty in the Smith case and he goes to prison. That hanging over his head is probably a big reason he's so willing to listen to campaign advisors on so many things.

Worth noting that personally, I think he should be imprisoned, and for about one year, because he literally did do exactly what they are saying he did, with full knowledge that it was bad. Would be, I think, a great inspiration for holding people in power accountable for their actions.

As a practical matter, I probably would have preferred letting sleeping dogs lie, but once you start a case like that you might as well finish it? Does raise the possibility that it might have been smarter for Biden to pardon Trump for that case specifically. Actually, now that I think about it, that would have been a genius political move. And probably healthy for the country.

Worth noting that personally, I think he should be imprisoned, and for about one year, because he literally did do exactly what they are saying he did, with full knowledge that it was bad. Would be, I think, a great inspiration for holding people in power accountable for their actions.

As someone who is on the record as being relatively pro Trump, I could get behind this as long as it was the cherry on top of a series of good-faith prosecutions of political officials who mishandled classified documents in order of severity... which means that Trump would be coming well after HRC, Biden and a few other people. You'd also have to get the FBI agents who fucked around with the classified documents in question to boot. But absent that actual prosecution of people who did far worse than Trump (there was SAP material on the Clinton email server!), you're not going to get the red tribe to agree to this.

Committing a fraud on the US? I’m not so sure (and SCOTUS has read fraud narrowly). With Fischer gutting most of that indictment I think Trump is innocent in that case. Of course he was innocent in NY and we saw what happened there.

The [Jack] Smith case I assume was being referred to is the Florida classified info case, which by all accounts appears to be pretty open and shut. You only really need the recording where Trump shows the classified doc to an author, acknowledges it's highly classified, and how he can't declassify it any longer. Boom, done. Like, if you had to come up with a recording that contained literally every single allegation all in a two minute span, and proved them all, it would be this recording. On top of the willful retention stuff, and the hiding evidence stuff, which is not as ironclad but likely still supremely provable.

I thought OP was referencing the Smith case in DC. I concur that Trump appears to be guilty in Florida but that is the one case where you honestly might get jury nullification given the treatment of other high profile politicians not being tried on similarish fact patterns.

Of the major Democratic candidates waiting in the wings, it seems clear that Newsom is the only viable candidate. And if you’re Newsom, why would you possibly replace Biden now?

The only answer I can think of is "for the same reasons Biden isn't dropping out."

Newsom seems to view high political office as his manifest destiny. At that level of politics, maybe most of them view things that way; you'd almost have to, I think, to run in the first place. If Biden and his handlers were even halfway humane, he would have retired years ago (same goes for Trump). There is something deeply narcissistic about believing that you, and you alone, can effectively steer the community/state/nation at this particular time--but if you didn't believe that, why would you run for office? I'd love to hear "a keen sense of civic duty responding to the insistence of one's fellow-citizens regarding one's merits as a leader" but I know that kind of idealism just gets me laughed out of the room.

It's really something to imagine Newsom or DeSantis in place of Biden or Trump at the CNN fiasco. This year's presidential race is a textbook-crafted thought experiment on inadequate equilibria in political contexts, brought to painful life.

Some presidential candidates do run because people around them recommended they do it enough. Most of the truly unwilling are from farther back in American history, however. Including at least one former president!

The more practical answer is the desire and ambition to run for president needs to be there as a prerequisite, but actually doing it and also the crucial question of timing actually does depend a great deal on the advice and wishes of people around you, as well as sometimes popular appeal. Obama was one of these! He wanted to wait a few more years (remember, his time as Senator was actually pretty paltry, traditional wisdom definitely said to wait). But a few things pushed him to do so sooner. For one, actually a bunch of Senate leaders said he should run, and might win, even if they weren't willing to endorse him because they didn't want to cross the Clintons. He had done a few events and saw how enthusiastic people were about him. Even got feted on a trip to Nigeria. So popular support does enter into the conversation.

I could go on. There's a long list of people who wanted to run, but only actually did so because of the people in their orbit. Jeb Bush was one. Of course, manifest destiny thinking and raw ambition is still more common. But it isn't universal. And in some ways, the idea that it's either-or is inherently contradictory. How do you think some of these politicians gain such egos? It isn't all inherent. If you go to enough campaign events and enough of what (to you, selection bias!!) seem to be random people tell you how much they love you, that does something. So yeah, in a sense, fellow citizens do play a role. See for example Biden's decision to run in 2020 was shaped by ego and manifest destiny thinking, but you can also see the role of random advisors and event attendees saying their piece too. He mistakenly started taking credit for Obama's wins as well.

And to be fair, voters deserve some of the blame. After all, Biden did not end up committing to a single term in 2020! Bet the party bigwigs wish they had extracted this concession, somehow.

How do you think some of these politicians gain such egos? It isn't all inherent. If you go to enough campaign events and enough of what (to you, selection bias!!) seem to be random people tell you how much they love you, that does something.

I’d never thought about it in precisely those terms before but this has to be true. Having crowds of strangers tell me that they love and admire me would break my brain. It’s the ultimate superstimulus for a social species.

I will dispute 3). Greg Abbott is not personally very charismatic but has an incredible amount of support among red voters on the basis of his record, is good at politics, and can stand on what's more than likely to be twelve years of a well-managed economy and relative racial peace. His weak spot is abortion but that issue is probably about as prominent as it's ever going to be. He's among Trump's favorites right now and all he has to do is maintain that spot to get the backing of Trump personally in 2028. It's unlikely that there's any kind of major scandal still undiscovered about him, either.

It remains to be seen if backing from Trump is even an asset in 2028. Trump kiss-asses don't have a great track record in elections, and while Abbot is certainly much more savvy than someone like Kris Kobach, if Trump loses this year it remains to be seen if Republicans continue to ride the Trump Train. Actually, if Trump loses this year it remains to be seen whether he can be persuaded to sit out in 2028. Yeah, he'll be 82 but he'll continue to talk about what great shape he's in, and he never gave a fuck about any Republican Party that he wasn't at the center of, so it's not like he'll be persuaded not to run. His own base is so dedicated that he'll suck up a large percentage of primary votes just by being in the race and any contender will need to stand head and shoulders above the crowd to have any kind of chance.

In general, I think it's premature to start talking about who the next big contenders will be. It wasn't that long ago that everyone thought Ron DeSantis was the future of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, he didn't kiss Trump's ring because he thought it would hurt his chances in Florida, ending any chance of being the heir apparent, and then compounded the error by running against Trump directly but refusing to criticize him. I outlined the challenges DeSantis faced here on several occasions and I remember getting heavily downvoted by merely suggesting that he wasn't all he was cracked up to be. Maybe it looks like Abbot is making all the right moves from where we sit now, but in four years those could easily turn out to have been the wrong moves.

Abbott has enough distance from Trump that he won't go down with the ship when Trump predictably fails to solve the US's biggest problems. Ensuring that is probably the main reason he turned down Trump's veepspot on live TV.

I don't see that Gretch isn't viable for no other reason that she gets home state advantage in a critical swing state. She's charted a decent course as governor, no major disasters.

I still don't think it's likely for anyone to swap in, but conditional on a swap, my money is on Gretch over Gavin.

Non-sequitur, but how fucked is Michigan right now?

The population hasn't grown in 30 years, and the pension crisis looms. The state's premier institution, the University of Michigan, only serves to hoover up any local talent and send it to the coasts. And 90% black Detroit is an absolute anchor around the state's neck.

But what's coming is worse. The Detroit auto industry is about to get obliterated. They have 120 years of expertise in building internal combustion engines. All those factories, all that human capital, is going to zero within 20 years. The Big 3 lose gobs of money on every EV they sell. On a level playing field they simply can't compete with China. Not when Detroit workers make 5x what Chinese workers do and are far inferior. Even with 100% tariffs, it's not clear how Detroit can win.

On a level playing field they simply can't compete with China.

The right tarrif level on Chinese imported cars will fix this problem.

Tarriff's can potentially fix the problem for the domestic market (though economists look at the gains to auto-workers, and losses to car buyers, buying expensive American cars to avoid tariffs, and declare the loss greater than the gain)

But Americans have traditionally made fat profits and high wages from exporting cars. They cannot expect foreign countries to tax Chinese EVs but not American EVs, for the sake of American workers, at the expense of their own people. Losing export markets will hurt.

Tesla pays California salaries for the workers in Fremont and has a high margin.

Tesla executed amazingly. But their margins were an artifact of first-mover advantage, massive subsidies, and the Covid stimulus. Elon played it perfectly, but it's not sustainable.

Elon now sees EVs as commoditized and therefore a dead end. That's why Tesla is pivoting towards autonomous driving and robots. A couple months ago they fired their entire supercharger team.

Tesla won't beat China on cost either. But as a luxury carmaker, Tesla will do better than the Big 3. Luxury has been one of the few things able to withstand Chinese competition.

Again, I plead for Jero-Bloomberg coverage of energy markets.

The Detroit auto industry is about to get obliterated. They have 120 years of expertise in building internal combustion engines. All those factories, all that human capital, is going to zero within 20 years. The Big 3 lose gobs of money on every EV they sell. On a level playing field they simply can't compete with China. Not when Detroit workers make 5x what Chinese workers do and are far inferior. Even with 100% tariffs, it's not clear how Detroit can win.

I don't buy that this is going to happen any time soon. There's almost zero overlap between the products GM and Ford sell and the products a Chinese company like BYD sells, even accounting for the fact that the Americans are mostly ICE cars. GM and Ford no longer sell regular sedans in the US because all their customers want is large trucks and SUVs. BYD's products aren't merely sedans, but small sedans and hatchbacks. Every time someone sounds the alarm bells about some foreign company that's making cars incredibly cheaply forgets that Americans don't want cheap cars, they want some semblance of luxury. There was a period in the 1980s when Japanese manufacturers made huge inroads into the American market, but there were two factors involved that don't apply here. First, there were oil shocks the likes of which hadn't been seen before, and the Japanese offered fuel-efficient products that the Americans weren't producing. These days, efficiency gains have made it so the marginal advantage of having a more efficient car is lowered, and we're more used to occasional price spikes, so that isn't really in play. Maybe there's a chance for a huge spike that would be a shock, but I wouldn't bet on the Chinese until something like that actually happens. And even then, there are still plenty of efficient Japanese and Korean cars on the market that already have that segment cornered.

The second factor is that, by the 1980s, Japanese manufacturers were making vehicles of much higher quality and reliability than American manufacturers. The Americans are much more competitive on that front now (though still not at the top), and the best I've heard about Chines brands is that they're approaching the American brands in quality, so not exactly a ringing endorsement. Aside from that, you can sell a subcompact for $10,000 but that doesn't mean anyone is going to want to buy it. This is a country where poor people buy SUVs. When I was a kid, it seemed like every working-class dad had a compact "getting around town" car with a standard transmission and no options, but it seems that most of these guys drive decked-out pickup trucks now. I used to have a Saturn. It was a great car, but even in the 2000s, no one wanted a great car as boring as a Saturn. Scion tried the same thing and failed.

The reason Tesla succeeded where EV manufacturers had failed for so many years is that they understood that marketing a vehicle based on efficiency wasn't going to cut it. So they played up the EV's performance advantages and marketed it as a sports car, and then as a luxury car, and now they're slowly making the transition to mass-market vehicles, though they're still a status symbol. The Chinese can't compete in this market because it would mean making an entire line of America-centric products that would be too big a gamble.

Swing state, if they have to ban Chinese (or indeed all third world) car imports they will.

Of course, abandoning the “ban all cars that aren’t pure EV” plan will handily accomplish this without the need for tariffs simply because pure EVs are inferior to everything else.

Doesn’t matter, Chinese EVs at $6000 new would still dominate among the bottom 50% of Americans by income when US built cars are $30k+.

If and only if a dealership keeps them in stock and offers financing for those suffering from irregular income and limited credit, that is. And that probably means they're $12k, not six, at a minimum.

The American poor don't know how to order a car from China. They won't sit and wait on one. And they need financing to spend thousands of dollars, even six thousand.

There's ways to do this without a dealership (see Tesla).

It still involves a middleman to make it doable for the American poor, who are broadly not great at planning or coming up with six thousand dollars. That middleman is going to drive costs up because that’s what middlemen do.

Selling the same used car more than once is a lucrative business. Replacing them with electric cars is a risk, albeit one that could easily pay off, but it’s going to double costs to where it’s not actually that much cheaper than used ICE cars(which is what poor people drive today).

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If only the 7500-dollar Elio had not been a scam…

As one of those sub-normal poors, can confirm I've actually been looking at $5k electric kit cars on Alibaba, but no way I'm pushing that button without a test drive.

I mostly think the Dems won't attempt a Hot-Swap for all the reasons you outline for why Newsom wouldn't do it. The candidate is likely doomed. That said, I think your analysis misses a bunch of key points that need to be considered, and if there was a Hot-Swap I wouldn't be surprised to see Newsom placed in the candidate slot.

Newsom would get to run for President against Donald Trump. That's a huge advantage being handed to him. The campaign so far has had the feeling of one of those extra inning baseball games where nobody seems to want to win, and both teams seem unable to string together any hits. Rat race for last place vibes. Trump's support is terry cloth soft among a large part of the suburban Republican base. This is hard to see on the internet, the left wants to paint every Republican as a MAGAtard and the online right is largely running Trump for GEOM. But day to day, it's different. Going door-to-door for local candidates, you run into a lot more of "I'm a registered Republican but I haven't voted Republican in years" or "I'm a Republican but I'm embarrassed about it." Nikki Haley continued to get 20% of the vote in states where she was on the ballot, even after she dropped out and stopped campaigning. His favorability is 11% underwater among the general population. He could literally end up with a prison sentence!

Anecdotally, I'm not seeing the same enthusiasm for Trump I saw in prior years. Fewer Trump flags, fewer red hats that aren't for the Phillies, a lack of homemade Trump signs, less outre Trump memorabilia. It's early yet, and I didn't keep records, but at this time in 2016 and 2020 it felt like every road trip through the country was filled with homemade Trump signage and billboards and barn paintings. This year, it mostly falls flat. Even at the beach, even in North Carolina, the novelty shops aren't stocking Trump-joke T shirts and knick-knacks the way they did before. There was a Trump rally in my town, and my whole family planned our day around it, basically planning on avoiding leaving the house for fear of traffic/disruptions; this was based on prior experience of Trump visits. Nothing really happened, the turnout numbers are always fake and gay, but there wasn't even really a profusion of signs on the route for Trump, just for other Republican primary candidates who wanted to piggy-back on him. A lot of Republicans want to be rid of Trump, even if it cashes out to just a few percentage points it makes a big difference on election day.

But the biggest weakness for Trump isn't the Republicans who lack enthusiasm, it's the die-hards who have too much enthusiasm for Trump and who they are. This is why I'm still expecting Dem victories in November despite the headwinds, what Trump supporters might do (and/or be baited into doing by November. I fully expect someone in a red hat to shoot a cop by October, and for that to be treated as the number one issue on the news for weeks. The other thing you run into when you go door-to-door is people who scare you. Guys adjacent to this aren't all that rare and a lot of them have Trump flags outside their home. Does Trump actually control their actions in any reasonable way? No, but when you lie down with dogs you get fleas, and the media certainly isn't going to be hesitant to tie them together.

Newsom also gets the nomination handed to him in a way where California is massively valuable, having a huge mass of delegates and a font of fundraising, rather than a liability in a primary campaign where significant numbers of Democratic primary voters might not like the place. Which isn't a small thing, many cognoscenti anointed candidates have fallen apart in the primaries, from Mario Cuomo to Ron Desantis. You might get unlucky like Hillary in '08 or Huntsman in '12 and run a good campaign but run into a better talent on the other side that you don't even know about yet and can't beat. If you get on the ballot with a major party nomination, you at least get a puncher's chance.

In sports, I frequently talk about how we underrate runners-up, second place finishers. The Reid-McNabb Eagles teams I grew up with are always considered bridesmaids, teams that were good but never quite made it, because they never won the Super Bowl. But if, say, Tom Brady tears his ACL in the playoffs in 2005, we're talking about them as the first Eagles team to win the Super Bowl. And you can never know when someone will tear their ACL. Boxing and MMA are littered with examples of guys who were considered routine title fights for dominant champions, or guys who never should have gotten title shots at all, and got lucky. Chris Weidman won his first shot against Anderson Silva because Silva got cocky and lazy, and won the rematch against Silva because Silva's leg just kind of did that. Matt Serra and Buster Douglas were both lucky enough to get shots at dominant champions when those champions were partying too hard. My point being, if you get a title shot you should take it, because you might get lucky.

Because everything worth doing is worth doing with fake math, let's play with the numbers a bit. Assuming that we're only modeling odds of becoming POTUS, other goals are diffuse enough and unpredictable enough that they may be served better or worse by either course.

I think the puncher's chance for any candidate of a major party is never below 15%, because something horrendous can always happen to the other candidate. Plus whatever the chance is that everything goes right for both teams and Newsom and the Dems still win. FiveThirtyEight currently gives Biden a 51/49 edge in odds to win the presidency, while Manifold gives Biden+Harris+Newsom 37% odds. Let's take the Manifold number for a Dem winning is a good conservative estimate: Newsom gets somewhere between a 15% and a 37% chance of winning the presidency if he accepts the nomination.

Now, what if he runs in '28? I don't give any candidate a better than 50% chance of winning a national primary. Too many other candidates, too many variables. You might have a great campaign lined up and run into a junior senator from Illinois or a short-fingered vulgarian with his finger on the pulse of the nation. HRC in '16 was the best primary campaign ever run, having spent years putting the entire party apparatus behind her, and she only narrowly won. Then you have the odds that Dems win in '28. Obviously that depends on who wins in '24, and what happens to different political movements in between. If Biden wins on that 1/7-1/3 chance in '24, 12 years of Democratic rule seems unlikely, and if Harris or Whitmer win after a Hot-Swap then Newsom probably doesn't even get to run. Who emerges in the meantime on the R side, at this time in '04 Barack Obama hadn't even given his keynote speech at the DNC that catapulted him to fame; and at this time in '12 Trump was a punchline arguably at the nadir of his fame, with the Apprentice dropping from top-ten television to out of the top 100. Newsom himself will have significant weaknesses that grow between '24 and '28. But let's just call it 50% odds at this point, naively. That gives Newsom a 25% chance at POTUS if he runs in '28 or '32 instead, adjusted up or down for a number of other factors.

But we're probably modeling Newsom's decision making all wrong here. Maybe you know him personally, but my impression of him generally is a great haircut looking for a policy position. Nobody other than poor old uncle Claudius finds themselves in that kind of political power without a great deal of self belief. You don't survive multiple elections without self confidence, without thinking that maybe you're the best to ever do it. Newsom won't turn down the nomination if it is offered to him, because he's an optimist and an arrogant ambitious prick. He's likely to overrate his chances in '24 if he accepts the nomination. He's not a utility-maximizing computer program, he's not a timid investor carefully husbanding capital, he's an ambitious Governor, with only one brass-ring still to grasp, who got here taking chances and will keep taking them. Dangle it in front of him, and he's going to take it.

Further, theMotte has a noted weakness in always modeling institutional actors as cynical fakers. A lot of Catholic Church politics and policy, a lot of PRC politics and policy, makes more sense if you assume that a great many potentates within those institutions actually believe in what they are saying. Similarly, it is likely that Newsom rates the odds of Democratic victory a lot higher than we do, because he actually believes in Democratic policies, and thinks that the public does as well if only they had the right salesman. He likely believes in the Democrats' message, and if that message isn't reaching the public across the nation, he likely blames the messenger before he blames the message. With the right candidate, surely the people will see the light. Newsom likely doesn't believe that there's a huge backlash to woke/trans/BLM/LGBTQWERTY, or if he does believe that such a thing exists he believes that it is the result of misinformation, or a lack of zeal and skill on the part of the Biden admin. Put him, Gavin, and his haircut and his tasteful mild cosmetic surgery in charge of things and he'll roll up the deplorables and the bitter clingers.

So, that's my call: if Newsom were offered the job, he'd probably take it. And he'd probably be smart to take it.

Enthusiasm for Trump isn't what it was, but he's been in the sphere for close to 10 years, lessened excitement is to be expected. There was the euphoria among Obama supporters in 2008 that felt entirely gone by 2012. Disillusionment is some of it, but a rounding error is people flipping, a lot of it is going to be people who have become apathetic about politics or who have more immediate concerns in their life, but most in the right are the people who became disillusioned with the government. They hoped Trump was redress, everything got worse, now they want an open radical. A Tucker with Vivek's platform amped to 11: Garrote by XO the major alphabet agencies, fire everyone employed at the pleasure of the Executive including most of the military officership and start over. A tidier candidate with Trump's charisma--so easy--with that platform would do extremely well, especially in 2028.

That platform is the key, it's why I say Trump will win in a landslide. It's not him drawing a second wind in voter enthusiasm but the Michael Moore factor, the "Molotov at the establishment." A million if not millions will vote in November for Trump even as they dislike him or even hate him because they hate the establishment more. Trump's a lot of things, but for politics, the thing that matters more than all else is that he embodies being the anti-establishment, and it doesn't even have to be anything he's done, it's everybody who's against him. His haters are the cred.

On real issues, the price of milk and eggs should have the DNC in an endless waking panic, nothing should matter more. I'm a conscientious shopper with a damn near eidetic memory for grocery prices, I cook a lot, and I'm good with my money, but that's me. The people making less, worse with their money, less interested and capable in cooking, who now have to spend another $50 every trip, every week or every other week, what are they not buying? What are they delaying that they need or not paying off? There's a torrent of negative effects from decreased purchasing power and nothing causes regime change like economic instability. A lot of people experience this most viscerally in the checkout line gut punch, then they look at what the left is championing. I know there might be a million women who vote this fall for the sole reason of keeping abortion lines open, that's a "valid" insofar as it's an effective political platform, it's also grotesque. They can say it's not that, it is, its presence at all necessarily means it is, but also they should, because couching it? Yeah, in what? Doomsday climate change while opposing nuclear power? Increasing welfare? Not prosecuting violent criminals? Keeping the borders wide open? Classroom proselytizing of the queer religion? These people get the same say as me, I say keep it to abortion. Better insouciant than imbecilic.

But for all this, for an election scenario the DNC should be existentially incapable of winning because of the nature of the average voter's day-to-day experience with buying anything, the discussion here is the presidential prospects of the governor of the state most representative of the failures of establishment doctrine. Newsom is actually incapable of winning a national election unless he breaks his ankles pivoting so hard from the reasoning and politics of the decisions that ruined California, and that's 2028. Trump would slaughter him on the topic of the state, the state would become the topic of the election, and I bet Trump would, he certainly could do it while praising everything the state once was. It's wonderful even still, I'd love to live in California if I had a way to dodge the Big One, but it's so far from its past glory because of people who are selectively blind about what is and tragically govern on what ought to be.

fewer red hats that aren't for the Phillies

Bryce Harper for President! I’d say Rob Thomson, but he’s Canadian.

My pick would be Trevor Bauer for maximum seethe. He currently wears a red hat for the Diablos Rojos del México.

It’s interesting how so many fans in baseball still don’t want him on their team even if he was good. There basically is no evidence some people will accept to exonerate someone accused of sexual assault.

He was guilty.

Guilty of providing the sexual violence that a woman craved, and standing up for himself instead of Believing Women when they say he's wronged them, accepting a plea bargain, compen$ating the victims, promising to be better, and seeking therapy. Cheap bastard even only gave a queen thousands of dollars instead of the $1 million she deserved:

Esemonu sued Bauer in 2023, alleging he raped and impregnated her, and demanded he pay her more than $1 million to terminate the pregnancy.

He eventually paid her “thousands of dollars” that Esemonu used for an “all-expense paid” trip to Philadelphia to get LASIK surgery, his lawyers claimed in a countersuit.

True. Funny thing is these very same people would tell people not to kink shame.

There’s always an unholy alliance of conservatives and progressives eager to punish and villify men for women’s coffee moments, rather than consider if they should update their priors as to women’s Wonderfulness.

Men will continue to be confused and angry until they realize casual sex never existed and never will.

Maybe gay marriage got you turned around. The institution has a role beyond some legal conveniences and small tax advantages. There are some rules about it written down somewhere.

What happened to Bauer is obviously an outrage, but there were cultural protections that he didn’t feel like he needed for one night of fun.

Got into the league too young, he's still only 31.

Chase Utley, these days, is perfectly suited to be America's dad, having a catch. Utley/Howard '24? Pennsylvania is the Keystone.

A Democratic nominee who pulls off an upset and wins this year is going to be campaigning on 12 years of blue government in 2028, a proposal that hasn’t won in 70 years.

That's not as meaningful as it sounds. We only have presidential elections every four years, so 70 years is 17.5 election cycles. And during that time Democrats have only lost the Presidency four times. This is a pattern based on four data points.

Hypothetically, if every election were a 50/50 chance, you would only expect Democrats to extend their hold on the White House to three terms one in four times, so they haven't done significantly worse than chance in that respect.

Newsom would be dumb not to take the opportunity now. There's no guarantee of coronation as candidate in 2028, just ask 2008 Hillary.

The flip side was RDS. He was in a tough spot. If he waited until 2028 and Trump won, then he is going against Trump’s VP. If he ran with Trump and Trump lost, then he is done. If he ran against Trump and loses, then he also is probably done. He choose the last option. People will blame RDS for running a bad campaign but once the indictments hit the election was over. Indeed RDS still had pretty high favorables amongst republicans (including trump voters); they just preferred Trump.

Timing a run for president is basically really hard. Sometimes going too early is a problem. Other times waiting is also a problem. Sometimes the stars simply don’t align.

Desantis lost because he was too much of a coward to actually run against Trump. He was facing an uphill battle anyway, but his plan of tickling Trump's balls was always guaranteed to fail. He never answered the question of why MAGA voters should support him instead of Trump when he should have been slamming Trump for being a fat old man, a puppet of his advisors, a sore loser, a man who fundamentally did not have the right stuff to Make America Great Again.

You’re not wrong but I also think DeSantis lost because anyone running against Trump was suspected of being a spoiler candidate. Trump’s unique asset is that he is obviously and viscerally loathed by the Cathedral / rich donors and got to the top through TV fame so he is felt to be uniquely independent. The more respectable people pushed DeSantis as being ‘Trump but respectable’, the less popular he became.

Trump's unique asset is that he is deeply and irrationally loved by a significant body of low-IQ conservatives who will rabidly attack anyone who challenges him. As such, he can threaten to spoil any Republican strategy that doesn't elevate him. The point the strategy outlined above is to try and break his hold on these people because insofar as they are responsive to anything, it's to vulgar social dominance. You're never going to win them over by arguing that you're better qualified or more competent, because they don't care. Nor can you win them over by appealing to principles, because they don't have any. You have to simultaneously tear Trump down as a weakling and present yourself as a better vessel for their inchoate rage.

Insofar as Desantis had a plan, it was hope that Trump was too old or too imprisoned to run.

There are genuinely smart people who genuinely love Trump above Desantis and Nikki Hailey. They point to his regulation cuts, relative isolationism, and that he says exactly what he’s going to do.

You have to simultaneously tear Trump down as a weakling and present yourself as a better vessel for their inchoate rage.

The Trump base might not be the most articulate but there are absolutely smart people in their orbit who understand their grievances and why they're so angry. You can win them over to someone who isn't Trump - but you need to understand why they went for him in the first place, and if you're going to claim that was because of vulgar social dominance you're going to fail each and every time. If you're interested in a good article that explains what attracted those voters to him, I recommend https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

The Trump base might not be the most articulate but there are absolutely smart people in their orbit who understand their grievances and why they're so angry.

I didn't say every Trump supporter is stupid. I said that he has a dedicated core of supporters who are very loyal but not very bright or discerning, which I will stand by because I think it goes an enormous way towards explaining the durability of his support in particular despite losing as an incumbent and because it conforms to the general pattern with populist politicians more generally.

I recommend https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

I've read it before. I'm not impressed. Many of its factual claims are tendentious or more reflective of self-image than reality (e.g. the persistent efforts to paint Trumpism as the voice of the working class). Much of it boils down to saying "liberals don't like conservatives and say mean things about them." Conservatives don't like liberals either and say mean things about them, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from that, other than that maybe conservatives care more about what liberals think of them than vice versa.

Once we cut past that, it is essentially a more sympathetic framing of my claim that Trump functions as an empty vessel for the nebulous fury of his supporters. The difference is that Greer thinks they are basically justified on grounds of economic neglect while I think the economic anxiety narrative is bullshit and they are attracted to Trump because he promises to vicariously remediate their sense of humiliation.

This is leaning way too heavily into "boo outgroup." Let's not start the "low information voters" and "NPC" discourse here. You're free to argue that a specific group behaves a certain way or that a specific position or belief is uninformed, but just labeling all your opponent's supporters "low IQ" ain't it.

but just labeling all your opponent's supporters "low IQ" ain't it.

I don't think Skibboleth did?


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