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Notes -
The last few years have been a bit rough for me politically speaking, in that although I have since childhood intellectually understood that most people are unthinking morons when it comes to politics, the last few years have really viscerally made it apparent to me.
I am no Republican, but at this point I also cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat. After the 2020 riots and the way that Democrat supporters ran cover for them, after all their soft-on-crime policies, after their years of childish propagandistic attacks on the right and on Trump... no, can't do it. Obviously the Republicans are also guilty of a lot of bullshit, very much including childish propaganda, but then, I'm not about to vote for them either.
The last few weeks have been sobering for me, I intellectually understood that electoral politics is about optics, not about anything substantial, but it has been rough to see the signs of the vibe shift that you refer to happening on social media. Especially, I am annoyed by the completely blatant astroturfing that both sides engage in. Pretty much every prominent political account on X, for example, is either an astroturf account or is run by someone who is so partisan that their writings are indistinguishable from an astroturf account.
I will echo what @plural said:
I feel much the same way. While Trumpists are guilty of many things, they do currently not worry me on the visceral level that the left does. It is quite likely that part of this is just because the right is not as strong as the left, and if it was, the right would worry me just as much. But for someone who has read as much about history as I have, the hardcore lockstep groupthink of the modern left is very concerning. It raises alarm bells in that it is reminiscent of totalitarian leftist movements from history. Maybe this is just my version of what leftists do when they worry about Trump creating a fascist dictatorship. I am not sure.
Another reason why the left currently worries me more is that their delusions are deeper than the right's delusions. The left tends to believe in grand systemic delusions like "hardcore socialism is a good idea" or "modern America is horrifically racist against black people". The right, on the other hand, tends to believe in more surface-level LARP delusions reminiscent of thriller novel plots, like "the Clintons are running a pedophile organization and Trump is just pretending to spend all his time on Twitter, he is actually leading a secret special ops campaign to round them up" or "Klaus Schwab wants to make us live in pods".
Both of these types of delusions are ludicrous, but the left's delusions actually worry me more. Leftists actually believe their delusions deeply in some important way, whereas the right-wingers who have bought into typical right-wing delusions are largely, I think, just doing it for fun on some level, although most of them are not consciously aware that they are doing it for fun. The way I would put it, and of course these are generalizations: the left think that they are engaged in a deep meaningful struggle against an evil enemy, which has to end with the complete overthrow and eradication of that enemy from the earth - meanwhile, the right think that they are in an X-Files episode about wacky conspiracies. Clearly the former is much more likely to lead people to fight hard politically than the latter.
The right is also easily satisfied. The left is never satisfied, if they win one battle against what in their delusional world-view is the evil oppressor, they immediately find another level of supposed oppression to battle against. The right, on the other hand, is happy any time they get some kind of win, and they immediately start relaxing and celebrating. The left is deeply committed to the fight, they are in it to win it. Their entire perspective of the world is that it is an epic and grueling battle of good against evil, and the evil must be destroyed. The right, on the other hand, kind of just wants to relax and go watch some football, even if the football is interspersed with ads containing left-leaning propaganda. The left is not like this - if they go watch some fun TV show that is interspersed with ads containing right-leaning propaganda, they will form ranks and march on social media against it.
I find it interesting that the entire alt-right, the whole ecosystem ranging from 2016 Trumpist meme populism to hardcore 4chan /pol/ white supremacy, is both notably leftist in some key aspects of its psychology, and also clearly more committed to the fight and in many ways better at fighting it than mainstream right-wingers are. I say leftist because the alt-right, in their populist economics, their sense that they are oppressed by shadowy elites, their obsession with race and sex and the cultural meanings of both, is very reminiscent of a leftist movement. Forgive me Curtis Yarvin! It is too long that I did not understand one of your central points, but I do now, and the point seems to be true - leftism is, simply, politically more effective. Even people with right-wing views become more politically effective if they adopt a leftist psychology and political attitude.
I do not think that either side is currently strong enough to overthrow our liberal, small-r republican system of social organization, but the left currently seems stronger than the right, and both sides are alarming in different ways, so I am currently more alarmed by the left. Also, while I find a large fraction of right-wing policies to be insane or just simply unappealing, the right is currently - and again, this might just be because they are weaker - more open to intellectual dissent than the left is. I find a large fraction of left-wing policies to also be insane or just simply unappealing, but at least on the right there seems to be a bit more room for thought, a bit more space for dissenters, whereas on the left it is "either you are with us, or you are with the enemy".
My deep political offline conversation with the average committed right-winger is kind of like "Hey man, we don't agree but whatever, it's fun talking about this stuff". My deep political offline conversation with the average committed left-winger consists of me trying to get them to question their ideas while gingerly ballet-leaping my way over the various minefields that, if I stepped on, would cause them to classify me as Adolf Hitler. Don't get me wrong, I also often just straightforwardly speak my mind with leftists in the mode of just "chatting about politics for fun", and this has not brought me any harm. Most leftists I know in person are not about to go report me to the thought police, they are not totalitarian. What I mean is that in those occasional really deep political conversations that one engages in, the ones where both people actually care about talking about the politics in a meaningful way rather than doing it just for fun or to vent, I have found that right-wingers are generally more easily accepting of disagreement, whereas with left-wingers you have to slowly seduce them into letting go of their instinct to assume that your disagreements with them mean that you are Hitler.
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan. For all their macho posturing, the reality is that today's right-wing is soft, easily bullied, and unstrategic. Think of when Greg Abbott bussed those migrants to blue cities. Didn't it seem like a brilliant political move? Well, part of why it seemed that way is because that was one of the very few things that any right-wing politician has done in the last few years that actually seemed like a good chess move. It's hard to name any others. Also consider that despite years of bluster about how guns are a bulwark against oppressive government, pretty much nobody on the right who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (which I do not believe, but many do) did anything about it with their guns. The bluff has been called, and I think on some visceral level the left understands that they can push the right a lot harder than they currently are pushing before the right would actually react with anything other than online whining.
Hear, hear. The main question for me in the American politics for the last decade or so was not why Dems do what they do - they are a leftist party moving increasingly to the left, and they do exactly what is expected of them. It's how inept, weak, inconsequential and dumb most Republicans are. They fall in every trap the Left puts behind them, and when there's none, they manufacture their own and fall into those too. They are absolutely incapable of using any of the left's blunders, but are vicious to their own. Despite the common "Republicans pounce", they are really shitty at pouncing, outside couple of internet places. Their treatment on Jan 6 people, for example, is horrendously shameful - pretty much nobody (including, from what I understand, Trump himself) did anything to protect them. While the Left is absolutely openly and shamelessly shields violent Antifa from justice, the establishment Right is largely still afraid to even mumble something in the general direction of Jan 6 not being worse than 9/11. Not that it helps them in any way of course. And there are many other examples. And people notice, you know. The Left knows if they fight for The Party, The Party will take care of them. The Right knows if they do anything even slightly controversial for their cause, or even slightly questionable in the eyes of the New York Times, the establishment Right will make sure to proclaim on every corner that they want nothing to do with those violent extremists, never knew any of them and completely fine with throwing all the books available at them. And also whatever cause it was, they'll betray it anyway at the next budget vote. So who would want to do anything even minimally risky for such people anyway?
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I feel you.
The alt-right is basically "rightism for angry, rebellious young men", as opposed to "rightism for boring normies", and what you're seeing is similarities to "leftism for angry, rebellious young men" which was how the counterculture got started. RfARYM isn't new; it just was a taboo area of politics in the West for 70 years because the last big Western proponent was named Adolf Hitler (note that Nazism hit all three of the points you mention). I suspect part of the reason RfARYM has started being a thing again is because SJ threw the word "Nazi" around so much and so lightly that the taboo got worn down to merely being "edgy".
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Sailerism is not leftism, not in the slightest.
Wanting safe streets and criminals dead or gone is not leftism either.
Sailer’s personal politics are dissident right adjacent but pretty heterodox for the DR in their own right.
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Yes: The left is smart and understands the system and has been re-engineering it for decades. I am far more wary of smart people who know how to accomplish bad things than dumb people who might accidentally break some stuff but don't know how to permanently damage the structure of it. It's a grim choice, and I can't endorse either one, but I know which one is more frightening.
Do you believe the "permanent structure" can survive, say, the next decade, regardless of who wins this election?
Next decade, sure, there is enough structure left yet. It'd be a gradual process anyway. If the Dems win, the Left will devour SCOTUS first. That'll take time. Then they'll do immigration amnesty. That'll take time too. Next elections will be likely full mail-in with pretty much zero security, so guess who suddenly gets permanent majority. Then there will be Green New Deal, whatever it will be then, and killing the First Amendment, at least online. Electoral college probably will be done somewhere on the way too. Then the Second Amendment - it's not as big impediment as many think, but it must be done, and it'll take time to do it properly. Then there are no limits, anything goes. May take way longer that a decade overall. If Republicans somehow manage to pull an upset anywhere on the way (though I am not sure how it'd be possible after the amnesty) it may slow it down further. But in two decades, I'm not sure it'll be the same republic - or any republic at all.
The timeline you've laid out seems to presume that the Progressives do as they please, and no real effective response ever emerges. I would hazard a guess that you'd justify this lack of opposition by pointing out that these steps are self-reinforcing, that each step makes the next step much easier and opposition harder. Certainly this seems to be how Progressives see things; they see themselves as snowballing a set of advantages into even greater advantages, with the hope that eventually the snowball gets too big to stop or even slow down, and their opponents simply give up and die off.
The problem with this is that a considerable portion of their opposition will not give up, that escalation can and will invalidate all advantages of the snowball, and that the snowball cannot, in fact, prevent escalation and in fact makes it inevitable. They can absolutely dominate the society we have now, but the society we have now depends on a lack of domination to survive. They are committed to destroying the foundation for their own existence.
Right now there are mainly three venues, as I see, that Republicans can resist. First: SCOTUS, which is the most powerful, even if the slowest and least sure way, and its power means it's going to be destroyed first.
Second: electing Republicans that are capable of blocking Dems in Congress, in numbers that enable that. With filibuster pretty much gone, and Republicans still unable to figure out how to counter things like mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, and completely incapable of handling lawyer superpredators like Elias, this option's time seems to be running out quickly. Oh yes, and if Big Tech keeps its informational war against the Right - and I see no reason why they wouldn't - it means reaching the masses necessary to make cheating impossible, and delivering message consistent enough to entice them, is extremely hard. Not many normies read Gab and TruthSocial (and tbh things happening there aren't always good for convincing normies, either). Musk helps but it won't be enough - and with enough force deployed, Musk will fall too. If 2024 elections would resemble 2020 in any way, this option is out.
Third: red states conducting independent policies and blocking federal Dems. This is also a weak option and becomes weaker once SCOTUS falls, because this means state rights are gone, Constitution is a living document, and Feds can do anything they want. Plus, many states have been long dependent on massive federal funding grants, and threatening to pull those would politically kill any local Republican that becomes too uppity. So yes, these things are reinforcing each other, each of them makes resisting others harder. Please tell me which venues of resistance I am missing.
What kind of escalation you are talking about? Strolling through Capitol again and getting 8 years in jail for that? I am not sure it's as scary for Dems as some may think.
Why didn't Biden use this power against Abbott when Texas defied the federal government on the border?
...It seems to me that many such predictions vastly overestimate Blue Tribe's willingness to actually prosecute a fight, or to enforce their will in the face of significant opposition. They absolutely like dropping the hammer on isolated Red Tribers who they estimate they can destroy without consequence, but they do not actually seem to relish a fight that costs them casualties. Rittenhouse ended the Kenosha riots single-handedly, after all. The ATF will absolutely murder some isolated loner's wife. I doubt they will relish going door-to-door in Texas or Arkansas, and I doubt they can make the locals do it for them.
See here. In short:
Perhaps that seems implausible to you. If you believed it were true, though, would it shift your assessment of the probability of success for the current Blue Tribe snowball approach?
Here's a fresh example of using funding power to coerce a red state to change their policy: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/09/04/scotus-blocks-oklahoma-federal-family-planning-funds-amid-abortion-fight-n2644339
It's a good example too. State-level economic warfare by coalitions of major corporations is a similar problem. I'm just not sure it's actually decisive, whereas the system actually breaking down, whether through durable federalism or legit "things fall apart", seems pretty decisive.
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First of all, Texas didn't really do anything substantial. The border is still largely non-existent and the migrants are still pouring in. Second, SCOTUS and Republican house are still there, for now. Third, Texas is a big state which may be harder to make to bend the knee. Smaller red states could be much easier. Texas would probably be the last to go, and likely will fall from the inside rather than the outside.
Which fight would that be? They don't need to make army to invade Texas. They just need to restructure subsidies and pork spending and Republicans that are too feisty suddenly find themselves unelectable because they can no longer bring home the bacon. No casualties necessary.
He didn't. 1000+ National Guard deployment did.
How many locals refused the lockdowns and the mask mandates? That was a trial run. Most complied. Seriously, I've seen people wearing masks on the street as late as 2023, and this is a deep red area. They will comply the next time too.
And btw, if anybody on the right gets some ideas about "shifting the probabilities toward collapse of centralized authority" - that would be the left's wettest dream of all. Now they need to wait for China to make a suitable virus or to invent some bullshit threats involving FBI entrapping a bunch of idiots, but if they get a real, genuine thing... They will use it to scare the population so shitless that they will agree to literally anything just for the nightmare to end. They are good at it, judging by the results. And terrified people are very easy to herd.
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Sure. There's a lot of ruin in a nation. If Trump wins, the Democrats probably stymie him and win in 2028, and assuming they win with a candidate who isn't Harris, we probably continue plodding along the road to serfdom. If Harris wins, we'll speed up that trip, but this nation has more than a decade of ruin remaining regardless. Probably not two decades at Harris pace, but she'll likely overshoot and in reaction the next president will be a plodder.
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2016 wasn't a flash in the pan, it was a brick wall that all the momentum the right had been building since 2010 smashed to pieces against.
There was no momentum in 2010. In fact, there's a pretty clear descending line from 1984 Reagan to 2024 Trump, with lower highs and lower lows each cycle.
The natural constituency of the Republicans is dying of old age and being replaced with immigrants who have fundamentally different values.
In this light, it's a small miracle that the Republican Party even exists at all, let alone is relevant. As much as I hate Trump, I think he's able to reach people that normie Republicans are not.
The post-Trump world will likely look like a permanent blue victory. The Republicans didn't do anything wrong. They just don't have a big enough tribe any more and people are convinced that socialism is the path forward.
The Republicans won the largest seat number in the House they had won since 1946 and the largest individual seat gain for either party since 1948. And, of course, the momentum didn't stop there: They won more seats total in the House in 2014 than they'd had in any year since 1928. The GOP went from controlling 10 state legislatures in 2010 to controlling 25 after the 2016 elections, they took enough individual chambers to drive the Democrats down to unified control of just 5 total state legislatures, and went from occupying 23 to occupying 34 gubernatorial seats. Obama apparently presided over the Democrats losing more than 1000 downballot offices in his two terms.
The Republican Party was at an apex of its power going into 2016 that it hadn't seen in a century. Trump barely squeezed out an EC victory from that and ran behind the rest of the party everywhere, then presided over a Democratic landslide in 2018.
This:
is nonsense. They totally failed to live up to the expectations of a big portion of their base and so they got saddled with Donald Trump, who drives turnout for the Democrats at least as well as he does for Republicans, and dramatically better in midterm years. Had they done something to appease enough of the base that Trump's impact on the 2016 primary was as big as his impact on the 2012 primary and the Party went into the 2016 election with anyone more acceptable to the broader public, we'd be in a wildly different place.
IMO your last paragraph nails the problem, though I'd caution that the 2010-2020 GOP was built on demographic quicksand (because REDMAP was that good, and Democratic gains from '06-08 were reliant on a lot of soon to die blue dog Democrats).
What was the signature accomplishment of the Obama era GOP? Legislatively? I dunno? Shrinking the stimulus a bit? Scuttling the Iran Deal? SCOTUS killed 50 state Medicaid expansion? Meanwhile, the SCOTUS majority that voted liberal against W's signature culture war issue (same-sex marriage, and Trump's justices did the same with Bostock) was 40% Republican appointed. Why lie down and think of the courts when Republican-appointed justices turn liberal almost as quickly as Republicans can appoint them?
Dramatic shrinkage of the deficit, from almost 10% of GDP in 2010 to less than 2.5% of GDP in 2015, was the primary immediate accomplishment.
The Trump judges were coming no matter who the GOP President was after 2016. They were fruits of the Federalist Society cultivating actually philosophically conservative jurists for several generations and were chosen by advisors and movement conservatives. Whoever was formally appointing them after 2016 would be appointing the same people, or similar people.
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Do you remember who was expected to win before Trump showed up? There's no way that Jeb Bush was going to achieve or do anything substantially meaningful if he was elected, and even that's a tall ask - I don't think he beats Clinton in the 2016 election. In the counterfactual world where he takes office the biggest changes I can see are that Russiagate never happens, the Syrian war gets escalated and the Ukraine war kicks off early.
I agree. After McCain and Romney both failed, it's kind of hard for me to believe that any of the other 2016 Republican primary candidates other than Trump would have beaten Hillary. It seemed like the Republicans needed to try something new, because what they had been doing was not working.
To be fair, Hillary is no Obama in terms of charisma - so it would have been easier for a Republican to beat her than for one to beat Obama. But the field was pretty bad. Jeb Bush was dorky and a Bush, Marco Rubio was goofy, Ted Cruz was easily made fun of and memed on by Democrats. Maybe Kasich could have won? I don't remember much about what he seemed like.
There were no great candidates in 2016, but probably any of them but Bush could have beaten Clinton fairly easily. Bush's name would have dragged him down harder with the kinds of voters he needed to make up for the lack of immigration restrictionists that we really got to see when it was just the primaries.
There was a time when people were thinking, "I we really going to end up with Bushes and Clinton's again?!"
Fairly easily? Maybe I'm the one that's off my rocker, but from where I sit, Trump was the only one that even had the chance. The kind of people that vote Republican wouldn't go for another 4 years of the neocon war-globalism machine (there's a reason why Trump swept the primary, and continues to have a stranglehold on the party) and would just stay home, and the kind of people that wouldn't mind would be completely content to vote for Clinton.
Paul? Probably too “radical”
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You are. Clinton was a profoundly weak, unpopular candidate. She had 35 years in the public spotlight and there just was not anything to like there for the majority of Americans. No one running in 2016 could have beaten her in the landslide she deserved, but the 2016 election was Generic, Boring Republican Candidate's to lose.
2016 was a very Republican year and Clinton was a terrible candidate. As it was, Republicans across the country ran ahead of Trump, from House races to Senate, Gubernatorial, and even further downballot. A more boring election where you don't get all the negative partisanship Trump creates that has lower turnout than 2012 instead of higher turnout benefits those other Republicans even more.
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Bush's lead had disappeared by the time Trump started taking off. It was essentially an open race and, to be honest, would probably have ended up being either between Rubio and Cruz or a three way between them and Kasich, depending on if Kasich and Rubio could consolidate. However, Rubio's pro-immigration image would have turned off the people who went for Trump in real life, so I could see it easily going to Cruz.
He's a weak vessel, but we didn't know that in 2016. He could probably handle Clinton fairly easily, especially if he focused on immigration like Trump did.
I was under the impression that this was in no small part due to Trump's attacks on Jeb. Without Trump there's no differentiation among the republican candidates at all, and that means Jeb's structural advantages deliver him the nomination (so he can lose to HRC). As for Cruz, we absolutely knew he was a weak vessel in 2016 - though I'm not sure that becomes as obvious with Trump out of the picture. At the same time, I don't think Cruz would even adopt the positions he did without Trump establishing them as primary-winners first.
I hate to say it because I would prefer that it didn't matter to people, but given how politics actually work, I'm not sure that Ted Cruz has the looks to win the Presidency. Trump looks weird too, but the difference is that Trump has figured out how to own his looks and make them work for himself. Almost everything weird about Trump's looks plays into his "the blue collar man's billionaire" macho persona. His obesity, his cheap-looking spray tan, his thin hair. I don't know if Ted Cruz would have been able to pull off making his looks work in alignment with his persona.
I agree that looks matter, but I think Trump also gets to coast on past glories. He was a big deal in the past, and while his appeal didn't manage to reach me, he was apparently attractive enough to spawn a flood of erotic dreams (https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-always-sex-dreams-160500781.html).
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Bush's lead was already shrinking before Trump came down the escalator. He had an early lead because he started with more name recognition, but he was not a strong candidate along any dimension except that vague sense of competency that came from having done a good job in Florida, which he failed parlay into actual success on the campaign trail.
Immigration was already an issue prior to 2016. The whole reason the autopsy had happened after 2012 was because the Republicans were already tentatively on the restrictionists side of the brewing crisis and had been for a while -- pretty much the entirety of the highly restrictive current legal environment was passed by Republicans in the 90s and 2000s. Unfortunately the only Republican President to serve after those laws came into effect was an immigration booster and Obama was never going to enforce the letter or the spirit of the law, so they never worked.
Cruz came from the right wing of the party on this debate. He may not have made it the center of his campaign -- but he may well have -- without Trump, but he already had the reputation and had already made it a important plank of his platform.
Bush was a terrible candidate, but so was everyone else in the running. What Jeb had on his side was the GOP establishment, and none of his competitors in the non-Trump world had the charisma or popularity among the republican base to overcome that advantage.
The GOP did not actually care about immigration - they made noise about it because their base cared, but whenever they were in power they did everything they could to make sure more and more illegal immigrants entered the country. The GOP's wealthy donors wanted to make sure that they could continue to drive up the price of real estate while putting downward pressure on wages. While they made noises about it, Trump was the only person to actually try and do anything about it because he wasn't beholden to those same donors.
Autopsy? I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
Had he? Maybe I'm remembering things wrong but I don't recall Cruz talking seriously about immigration until Trump brought it up. I think in the non-Trump world Cruz just has the same positions on immigration as the GOP consensus and accepts a minor portfolio position in the stillborn Jeb! administration.
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Bush wouldn't have focused on immigration, though, because Bush is pro-immigration (as was his brother, as was his father, as was Reagan) and would rather lose and tank the GOP for a generation with it than run against immigration.
I'm talking about Cruz.
I misread your comment (and extend my apologies). I don't think Cruz wins (He's way creepier than J.D. Vance.), but I misread the comment.
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AAQC'd. This is the best writeup of the past 15 years in American politics I've ever seen.
My girlfriend talks a lot about how the 2016 primary was a ridiculous joke, just a stage full of jokers. The fact that Trump was able to stampede over everyone speaks to how dire the Republican party situation was at the time.
But it also definitely speaks to the contempt that a lot of grassroots Republicans felt, and feel, towards the GOP. There's a feeling, grounded in truth, that the GOP never fights and never wins, they just keep compromising, while the left keeps winning. So Trump stood up and talked tough on immigration, and American greatness, and manufacturing, and even his facile ways of showing affinity for the working man (anyone remember him miming a pickaxe in a miner's cap?) was enough to win the undying loyalty of a lot of people. There's a forgotten America, and they don't want to be forgotten.
This is it. The momentum that @laxam mentions was momentum in favor of the neocon/neoliberal/uniparty faction of the GOP. As someone in the social wing of the party, I'm glad it hit a brick wall and splintered. Better to open the field for some sort of real opposition than to be stuck "voting harder" for Republican swamp creatures and desperately hoping they won't pull the football away at the last second yet again.
I don't know if you remember the era well or not, but I do. The Republican Party of that time wasn't 'neocon' (a term in ridiculously bad odour, something no one wanted to be associated with), this was the TEA Party party. And they delivered, at least partially as a way of being seen as fighting Obama. We got several government shutdowns or near shutdowns, budget fights for the ages, and Sequestration, which included deep cuts into ostensible sacred cows like the defense budget (something I can't imagine the 'neocon' boogiemen ever doing).
Looking back, it's a shame we didn't do more. The Federal fiscal situation is out of control and is on schedule to get worse, not better, as time goes on. I was outright disgusted when the Biden administration bragged about keeping cuts to 1% in 2023 budget negotiations. We'll have a crisis on our hands within the decade because we failed to do enough in the 90s (no balanced budget amendment), we failed to do enough in the 2010s (no path to balance and the tax cuts under Trump), and we're failing to do anything right now.
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I've also noticed this - I don't know how much is really down to right wingers being inherently more accepting of differing POVS as opposed to the fact that in young, educated circles leftism is the default and being willing to share right-views necessarily means having to be able to tolerate aggressive pushback.
TBH I’ve never really had a deep offline conversation about politics that were really about politics and not ultimately vibes. What I mean by that is that left, right or libertarian (have yet to meet a communist) all seem to be picking positions based on “vibes” or “culture” rather than any specific position or set of facts about the outside world. The world of politics isn’t about rubber meets the road issues, but essentially about tribe proxies forming up based on shared cultural norms and interests.
TBH this is why I don’t trust either side completely. Neither one is actually interested in fixing things or building for the future. There’s no real problem solving going on there. I’ve come to the conclusion that whether it’s D or R that eventually pull the trigger, American democracy is essentially already comatose and on life support. Politics is about solving things, filling potholes, teaching kids to be literate, numerate and scientifically literate future citizens, creating a social structure that promotes human thriving, passing real budgets, and making good decisions about how best to protect the people from enemies and keep them healthy. None of that actually seems to happen, and while the government and the parties and the people themselves are distracted by various flavors of vibes-based Kafaybe arguments, our country is rotting from within.
In 1960, the median family could afford a modest home, a car, and a local road trip vacation. That same median household probably could walk around town without worry about crime. Homelessness and drug use were fairly rare. Most kids, even without college (which was, at the time, fairly affordable) could read and write on grade level. Attacking a teacher was absolutely unheard of, and school shooters were rare enough that schools allowed kids to keep hunting rifles in their cars. Every single one of these QOL indicators has gone down quite a lot since then, and all we have from our leaders, the parties, and “political groups” is Kafaybe and Vibes.
A quality post, but I would caution you not to fall into Baby Boomer sunny day nostalgia.
In 1960, the median family was smoking, drinking, and physically fighting more. A lot of the "social order" that we yearn for today was at the expense of a lot of behind-closed-doors domestic abuse and built on the back of what was a fundamentally racist society. Furthermore, the American West was still "frontier" enough even then that if you were just kind of a trouble maker, you hopped on a train to California and, I don't know, go found Apple Computers or some shit.
Please also remember that In 1960, the median family that was black or living in greater Appalachia wasn't living that much better than the 1860 median family.
I am 100% behind the idea that a lot of social and political (and economic) ills today are because of social dysfunction. I am at the level of "As soon as you stop hearing "sir" and "ma'am" the rest is sure to follow." I think you should hold open doors for women, and that guys should pay on the first date. I will call the police on you for loud music after 9pm. My lawn need gettin' off of.
But, at the same time, fuck 1960.
We're not going back.Ah, fuck! Look what you made me do.Uh, no. I'm from greater Appalachia, TVA country. If you'd said 1920 or 1930 (I chose those dates deliberately because IMO given the choice contemporary neoliberals would've never electrified the South.) I might've agreed with you but rural white Southerners wouldn't have worshipped FDR/Truman and the Democrats 50 years past their terms if things hadn't gotten better when they were in office.
My Silent Gen grandparents were lucky to have 8th grade educations, worked in the fields as children, and went hungry such that they hoarded canned goods in their old age. My Gen X parents had 12th grade educations, didn't starve, and didn't endure child labor. People are nostalgic for the mid 20th century not just because of social mores but because we had incredible economic growth that we haven't come close to matching in the 21st century even with a giant immigration wave (Keep in mind that all that mid 20th century economic growth happened with de facto closed borders.).
Yep. My Cajun great-grandfather literally slept in a barn for years at a time. His son grew up in a house with (non-central)air conditioning.
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I'd love to believe that my fellow travelers are amazing at tolerance, but I honestly believe it's the second one. For educated people, progressivism is the default. If you're going to be educated and not progressive, you need to develop your ideas and hone your beliefs, because everything and everyone around you is going to try and push you into being a progressive. If you're a young, educated conservative -- or even a moderate -- it means you're already not the kind of person who allows the Overton window to set your political beliefs. You arrived, or maintained, your conclusions in spite of the social consensus. You're a maverick.
There are definitely circles where the polarity is reversed, but for the most part you have to seek them out.
But also political liberals are more likely to report mental health problems like depression and I can't help but believe that part of it is just that political conservatives are more comfortable in their skin than progressives. And that progressives have a lot of intense fear about what conservatives might do that is shaped by an overall negative impression of the world. Which is food for thought -- progressives are often described as the bright cheery optimistic idealists, and conservatives the dark brooding fearful X-phobes... but I think the reality is much more complicated.
I think at least some of the differences in mental health are caused by the nature of the movements. Liberals tend to move further left and tear down anyone who doesn’t go along completely on everything they believe. If you take the liberal positions of 2004, you are on the far right to most social liberals. And the same group is not shy about using their power over institutions to massively punish people for pretty small transgressions. The bleeding edge of social liberalism wants Harris gone for daring to say that what Hamas did on October 7 was bad. It’s a massive purity spiral that’s easy to fall off of requiring adherents to live in a 1984 world where you have to change your views on a dime and pretend that Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.
Conservatives are much more chill about the whole thing. If you’re conservative, you are allowed to have beliefs outside of that. As long as you’re generally conservative on most things, they don’t really care. If I’m in favor of gay marriage and my more conservative friends are not, my friends will not scream at me, nor will the more conservative kids decide that my political beliefs warrent ruining thanksgiving dinner when they throw a fit and leave. If I work for a conservative, my job isn’t in jeopardy if he finds out I’m not super conservative. There’s not really a purity spiral either. If I stand still, I’m not going to find that the party as a whole finds my views abhorrent.
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Eh, there’s a quintile on both sides where most people hold outside the Overton window political beliefs. There are very definitely filter bubbles situated in the rightmost quintile which you can just wind up in. I live in one.
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Indeed (progressive thought is designed by and for these people). It's worth noting that this also applies to conservatives, but the tension comes from most of the problems they solve not being fake [in the sense that their usefulness/worth/meal ticket doesn't tend to come from artificial structures (regulatory compliance, education, management, bureaucracy)].
It takes a rather unusual kind of person to notice that and reject it, though I think the rejection comes first and the noticing second (I think educated conservatives are most likely to believe their underlying skills will allow them to succeed even if the number of bullshit jobs fell by 90%, and it's more common for men to think this than women). And fixing it is not going to make you money anyway.
If I had the sense that my entire sociopolitical salary was built on a house of cards that specifically depends on the welfare of not-my-political class to sustain (and when my meal ticket comes from taxing them, and when new positions open up for my talents it's funded by/in the service of yet another new tax) I'd be utterly terrified too. I think progressives have an innate sense of this (hence the need for the hostility and the suppression); though the capacity for resistance ironically might be conservative propaganda that progressives are buying into.
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I’d need a more careful analysis to ascertain whose delusions are more delusional. In terms of harmful narratives, the notion that we could round up over ten million people, deport them, and we’d like the result is on top of the list. I’d consider that equally harmful to forgiving all student debt or further expanded entitlements when the current ones are insolvent.
In terms of party cohesion, the left is very strongly aligned against Trump but is split hard on Gaza (not in numbers but in terms of unwillingness to compromise). Once again, we could use some charts I think.
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Thank you for this comment! Really sums up my exact political experience. Although I have been radicalized enough to vote for the right, sadly.
The ballet-dancing around land mines was a perfect metaphor for my experience in these convos. Also
YES! It's so incredibly frustrating. The right is so pessimistic and honestly nihilistic for what's supposed to be the party of God and goodness and strength and masculinity. The presented optics are just very different from the reality, it's annoying as heck. I feel like I've been sold a false bill of goods at times.
But as you say, my reading of history meant that after the Covid lockdowns and mass censorship campaigns, I became extremely wary, and have only had my hackles raised more since.
I think that demoralization and stigmatization have just been that effective. It's hard for me to imagine creating a political organization that champions God, virtue, and masculinity that wouldn't immediately be tarred as anachronistic, hokey, and LARP-y not only by the unfriendly omnipresent progressive media machine, but worse still by conservatives themselves who, having been raised by that media machine, instinctively and reflexively cringe at any overt, unironic celebrations of their own values. It's a problem that I've been wrestling with solving for a while. For now, the only solution I can think of is to first have one's target audience unplug from the machine long enough to recover from irony poisoning before trying to pitch such an organization. But that's a tall order -- you'd have to replace it with something else, but large-scale dissident media efforts are not tolerated by the machine, and so you'd have to do stuff in meatspace, which essentially mean's you'd have to first create a physical intentional community. "Just start your own
banknation, bro."Learning a second language seems to help. A lot of the brainwashing / cringe reflex is associated with particular turns of phrase, and I've found that expressing the same sentiment in a language you learned as an adult doesn't trip the same wires.
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I want to know how the libertarians managed to have zero presence even when the race was Trump and Biden. Can’t have childish propaganda without any propaganda, maybe?
I had to look the guy up! At least people recognized Gary Johnson!
Because all the "good" libertarian stuff is taken up by one of the two parties - Trump pretends to be anti-war and pro-gun, Democrat's are pro-LGBT, pro-abortion, and pro-weed, and nobody outside of rich people and dorks actually like libertarian economics. So, the libertarian party becomes a breeding ground for weirdos complaining about having to have driver license's, legalizing heroin and selling it at 7/11, and knowing way too much about age of consent laws.
As pointed out, their nominee is actually a consistent libertarian, which means the weirdo culture war libertarian types don't like him, but also any left-leaning people upset with Kamala over foreign policy would be turned off by his economic standards.
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Summary from Reason
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The wing of the libertarian party that's closer to the conservatives doesn't like their nominee, I think.
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I honestly thought RFK was the libertarian party candidate.
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The libertarian party is in the process of being torn apart by conflicts within the party between the Gary-Johnson pragmatist wing, and the hard right Mises Caucus. This Judean People's Front conflict has pretty much stymied any possibility of an effective campaign.
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