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Why the Vibe change on Trump?
I think this is a very good marginal revolution posts. My personal journey I never abandoned him after 1/6 but always preferred Desantis. I actually liked 1/6 and thought the right needed a proper riot after the gaslighting on peaceful protests.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/the-changes-in-vibes-why-did-they-happen.html
Read the post but I will add 3 he missed.
Anyone with an ounce of political instincts realized lawfare against Trump meant the GOP needed to unite around Trump. That killed Desantis. Desantis with Trump removed by lawfare without winning at the ballot box would lose the maga vote which meant a Dem landslide.
He’s changed a lot of positions that appeal to median voters. Lighter on abortion and supporting gay rights. Cutting off some Dem attack point.
The Jews. I think I can fairly say they control 35-50% of our media. Political social media influencers on both sides have similar numbers. The pro-Hamas part of the left should scare the shit out of them. And Trump has come out very supportive of the Jewish community. Hannania has it right do you want that 10% of the vote that’s oppressor-oppressed ideologues of the tiny Jewish vote with money and media influence? I would be curious if Cowen sees this but won’t write it or if he has a mind block on these things.
Vibes do matter. People want to fit in with their tribe. If the vibe is Trump bad then they will say Trump bad. If the vibe is Trump good and their suppose to support him they will.
For the GOP the vibes at the convention feels like happy people. The Dems don’t feel like that right now.
As a lesser point Cowen called Trump a comedian and a very good one. It seems like a lot of politicians now are comedians. Milei, Zelensky, Trump, Boris Johnson.
The other very important point is that Trump has convinced large numbers of people that he wasn't in power* between March and November 2020, and therefore should not be blamed for America's buttock-clenchingly pisspoor response to COVID-19 (Americans had more restrictions and more deaths than countries with a competent response like Taiwan, or even a barely adequate response like Germany). This matters, because by far the strongest arguments for "1st-term Trump was an unusually bad President" are the botched COVID-19 response and that he tried to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.
A lot of people voted for Biden (or stayed home despite being natural Republicans) on the basis of "COVID sucks, and it probably sucks more than it needs to because the government screwed up, so vote out the incumbent). The vibes have now changed to "2017-19 were pretty good, so Trump must have been an okay President".
* I can't remember which centre-left memelord said "Who was President in summer 2020 is a key election issue." but the point isn't that people have forgotten who was President, it's that Trump has successfully convinced people that he wasn't making the decisions and the Deep State is to blame for the screw-up.
Wasn't it proven that the vaccine was intentionally delayed to come out after the election in order to spike Trump's chances? Like, Zvi mentioned this, and if anything he's got TDS; he's no Trump shill.
'Proven' is hard, but "One doctor’s campaign to stop a covid-19 vaccine being rushed through before Election Day" comes to mind every time people start drawing really complex theories for the surge in vaccine skepticism on the right. The weird last-minute process change to drop the 32-sample threshold is less well-known, but it's... hard to see the daylight for the official justification.
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It astounds me that this and the stolen election narrative have somehow redounded to Trump's benefit among his supporters. To me, they sound like the plight of someone who is grossly incompetent at understanding and exercising the power he holds as President.
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It’s also worth noting that between May and October 2020, the mob (and mob supporters) were in control of large portions of the country, to the point that the government couldn’t mobilize a proper response to them. Hence the claim about “deep state” holding more water, and that people that originally voted for Trump saw him do nothing about that, so they voted for the mob’s candidate instead.
This didn’t happen in other countries more or less at all.
Are you talking about BLM protests?
Because I don’t think that’s a reasonable description of the scenario at all.
Yes, I'm talking about the BLM riots.
The government arms nominally tasked with quelling them refused to do so; by definition, the government lost control of those areas. The faction responsible for the riots then proceeded to win the election in 2020.
Thus I don't believe it unreasonable to assume the continuity of that faction's governance also includes the summer of 2020 (and the actions of the bureaucracy that specifically enabled them by exempting them from public health orders). The same would not have been true had that faction lost. What supporters of a particular faction do matters to the general public's perception of who's in charge.
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The question is what decision could Trump have made that would’ve resulted in a different outcome?
The only ones were sidelining people like Fauci (which was hard to do). It sucks we didn’t happen to have the Swedish public health minister.
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The worst decisions were mostly made at the state level, where Trump indeed was not in power. Trump made some bad decisions, but the ones Biden would have made (and indeed did make when he had the chance) were worse.
The question of "botching the COVID-19 response" assumes there was a useful response that could have stopped COVID-19. Once the European strain was here, there was not (and it probably was never possible to close the US enough to block that). All the botching, then, was in the direction of "too much response". And while Trump wasn't great on that, he's better on it than any Democrat said to be in the running, unless you count RFK Jr. Biden was terrible, Kamala is part of the Biden administration, and Newsom and Whitmer were worse.
And I think it's easier to remember the lockdown enthusiasts as overreaching than it is the relatively laissez-faire Trump/Republican approach, regardless of whichever was nominally better at addressing whether the local Octogenerians were sent to early graves slightly or moderately faster than usual. Biden's tribe backed a lot of disruptions to average living that seem like an utterly insane void in hindsight, whilst regardless of how much emphasis you put onto Omicron and the Vaccines for the nullification of COVID the red tribe's stance that it was largely nothingburger seems to have born out.
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I think there is a general vibe shift against PMC and woke ideology, but really to me the big factor is economy. Dems oversaw a period of insane housing inflation (other stuff too but housing is just retarded at this point) and people remember the Trump years as pretty damn good in comparison.
Also I really do think Biden as a senile old man is an incredibly weak candidate. If you had an Al Gore or John Edwards type in this election as the Dem nominee I still think they would landslide Trump. I think Biden is just so feeble and weak that the contrast between him and Trump is insurmountable in terms of public perception of strength and competence.
The median voter owns a house with a 3% mortgage.
Housing inflation is a key way republicans try to appeal to the youth vote(because ‘just cut the forest down’ is at least a better response to nimbies than endless lawfare), but the average voter pissed about inflation is pissed about gas and grocery prices because their house payment has not gone up, except a bit in taxes.
Do you have numbers on that?
https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statistics/
Nationally north of 60% of people own a home. That rate is typically higher in swing states.
I couldn't find data on voters vs non-voters, but voting is generally correlated with good outcomes(like owning a home), so we can assume that if there's a mismatch it's in the direction of voters being more likely to own their house. And eyeballing the data it certainly looks like homeowners have generally been there for a while, meaning that their mortgage rate is likely low.
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That’s true, Trump’s vibes are positive. The Dem vibes are schizo fire-and-brimstone. There is confusion about who the candidate will be. Everyone has a different insane conspiracy theory about the shooting. Their rhetoric is focused on 7-8 year old debunked misquotations of Trump. Their messaging and priorities appear utterly confused.
The Dems are supposed to be the party of experts, the ultra competent managerial elite. Schizo is not a good look.
I'm pretty sure by this point, any debunking doesn't matter. Anyone who wasn't already doubtful will either not hear about it, or just say that there's so many other things he said that haven't been debunked, and then eventually to "well, he's still a disgusting, hateful person anyway".
If you are in a heavily left leaning area or social circle it will feel this way. But in more mixed groups, it’s the left leaning people who have been suddenly a lot more quiet. and those who aren’t have self-immolated themselves out of the group. This is just my observation. There has been a massive vibe shift.
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I think Trump has always been a big outlier on gay issues. At least compared to mainstream Republicans.
He sold rainbow merchandise. He waived a rainbow flag. When asked about trans people using restrooms in Trump tower, he says he doesn't care where they go.
Trump is an irreligious life long New York Democrat with pre-NAFTA Democrat values.
It's not clear how much of it's Trump (and co's) doing, but it's worth noticing how different the current GOP platform is on internal culture war stuff than the 2016 one. There's still red meat, most overtly on trans stuff and school vouchers, but it's a very long cry from wanting Windsor overturned. And even the trans stuff is relatively restrained (if, imo, sometimes bad policy!) by the standards of a document that normally tends to be written by the hardest social cons
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He is Mr. Big in Sex and the City in his values. He’s a Nazi without the killing the Jews. A national socialist. I think he is on the path to a VAT in America to support social benefits. For that reason I don’t know if I like him. But national socialism is very popular with the voting base. Value wise he’s Mr. Big with a much bigger personality.
You keep using that phrase. I…don’t think it means what you think it means.
Populism is not nazism.
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What exactly have Nazis done that Trump also has?
The Nazis were not, by the standards of their day, particularly hardline social conservatives. They wanted more heathy aryan children and didn’t care whether those children’s parents were married, and they wanted fewer of every other kind of child, and they took instrumental approaches to getting it done.
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Bro, that's like saying "he's water without being wet". The Holocaust is the biggest defining characteristic of Nazis by a lot.
I mean like, it's not. The jews and various leftoids want you to think that. But by far the germans didn't think of it that way. Most of the civilians were perfectly fine with a house, husband-and-wife-son-and-a-dog styled national socialism. The jews weren't the raison d'etre, they were just an obstacle to the real goal.
I mean, we do think of it that way now. During the regime, aiui Germans mostly tried pretty hard to not think about it at all.
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Ehhhh, Jew-hate was pretty central. It wasn't everything but it was a lot. It's underplaying it to say "they were just an obstacle to the real goal" when the real goal was racial supremacy.
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The virulent anti-semitism was a major and defining aspect of Nazism, true. But there were other significant and distinctive aspects of their ideology such that I think it can be meaningful to describe someone as Nazi-without-the-Jew-killing. I don't think that label describes Trump well though. For instance:
Trump has many flaws, but he ain't a Nazi.
Yes, I think the key distinguishing factor between Nazism specifically vs. nationalism or fascism generally is the belief in social Darwinism and eugenics at the volk-scale. They genuinely believed that a glorious future awaits, when the best and brightest and strongest dominate the world and mold it for the betterment of all. It's one reason so many killed themselves at the end: they had fully internalized that in losing, their inferiority was manifest, and so suicide was not just practical, but a moral duty to humanity.
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Trump is of course not a national socialist in his politics. He is insufficiently nationalist, insufficiently conservative and insufficiently socialist. His republicans pander to minorities without even directly naming white people to appeal to. His current manifestation probably isn't sufficiently nativist and natioanlist for moderate nationalism. His policies on economic sphere weren't even moderate politically and fit more with Koch agenda, even if he isn't as orthodox in his rhetoric as they would like.
The social democrats of Denmark who are a moderate nationalist party and quite more socialistic than Trump would also be defamatory to call them national socialists. There have been plenty of political parties that are moderate nationalist through modern history in european societies, where it used to be either the default or what people assumed these parties to be and there is definitely a significant qualitative difference between what I would categorize as moderate nationalism vs what I would consider extreme nationalism. And I tend to consider something to be moderate only if it is sufficiently hardcore to qualify at such. Moderate doesn't mean weak to me.
Even though we live in an age where anti european antinaivists who actually have an extreme agenda see all moderate nationalism for Europeans as extremist and try to associate it with nazism. In an age where moderate nationalism in favor of Europeans is under attack by a movement which is tolerant or supportive of quite stronger nationalism for other groups, hence their opposition to the national rights of their ethnic outgroup, and it is actually an extreme condition for a people to not have a collective community and breaking their roots from the past. This isn't to say that everyone who does this understands the doublethink and the inconsistency, but it exists as part of the movement. You seem like a right winger of sorts so I don't understand your point.
Also, the dominant tradition outside of actual socialists combined some level of socialism with capitalism. The idea of a third way between socialism and capitalism, did not just originate with fascist types or nazis, who were more socialistic than most.
The libertarian meme I have seen about statists and collectivists and calling everything fascists is wildly propagandistic. There have been a lot of non fascists who (maybe even share some influence with each other) promoted such model. Post war occupied Germany for example followed such a model of trying to make a deal between capitalists and workers. This kind of thinking also attracted people who have might have been influenced by fascism, had some ideological crossover in regards to economics, but weren't fascists. Including people who were anti-parliamentarians and believing that a dictatorship was a better way to rule.
Both some level of socialism and nationalism has been quite widespread and it simply ahistorical to be calling it national socialism when that regime was more infamous about occupation of european countries which includes atrocities and imperialistic conquest. While they deserve some bad reputation, they are a beaten dead horse with exaggerated negative attention for propagandistic purposes. Like the trope of a a shit politician who sucks at ruling blaming everything on his predecessor, but much worse since this is an 80 years old defeated group. But an even bigger problem of such propaganda is bad unsuitable comparisons.
The Democrats are quite more socialist although also compromising with establishment capitalism. Trump's politics are not even of a social democrat moderate nationalist. He seems to be more on the hardcore big donor corporatism capitalism side. I doubt he would introduce a VAT. Nor is a VAT an example of someone being a socialist since a VAT exists in a huge amount of countries which aren't run by socialists. Although, of course you can oppose it as bad policy, or too socialistic.
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...with some sopps to American exceptionalism and being pro capital.
Which makes him "far right" relative to the managerial class of current year. But in truth he's a 90s-era centerist.
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