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I wish to do a follow up. Ignore the following if you do not wish to read a bit of venting.
I am angry. I am actually fucking enraged. It's irrational, but I hope people don't hold it against me. This is the fucking best that the anti-left coalition can do politically when running a Presidential candidate? Really? This fucking idiot whose idea of a good debate performance is acting like a fucking 15 year old who makes really basic mistakes and failed to prepare? If so, we might be fucked and we might need to get the fuck out of these leftist cities before things get worse, well those of us who still live in them, I mean. Not that I ever expected Trump to do much about local leftist politics, but I am worried that a Harris win might energize the left and make things worse.
The current right is kind of fucking useless unless you care about abortion, or about minor wins in things besides abortion.
Curtis Yarvin, for all his faults, such as some of his misunderstandings of history or his overestimation of what his preferred political systems would manage to accomplish, keeps seeming to be proven right in some core ways. The left is structurally stronger, the so-called right focuses on the wrong things. Like when they were overjoyed when Trump won in 2016, but that ended up not necessarily being a bigger win for the anti-left than when Musk bought Twitter, cause when Trump became President he mostly sat around Tweeting and getting blocked in his policy suggestions, whereas when Musk bought Twitter he ripped some new ideas right into the heart of what was largely before a leftist-dominated idea-shaping space.
Trump might win in November, though I do not evaluate his chances as good, but even if he does, what of it? Will he do anything more than he did last time he was President? I want actual wins, not symbolic wins, and I'm not sure I'll even get a symbolic win for the current anti-leftist coalition any time soon. To be fair, it's not like I've been doing much to help other than posting online. But in any case, fuck. From the perspective of my preferred political outcomes, I think there must be a major re-evaluation of strategy - what is going on now does not seem to be working.
Not that I ever liked this anti-left coalition much to begin with. I just want to live in a city that isn't full of insane violent people, and I want to not be censored online. I don't care much about abortion, I'm not religious in the least bit, and I am not a white nationalist, even though I am a race realist.
To get from where we are now to the kinds of policies I want will take some effort and maybe even a bit of higher-dimensional magic, higher-dimensional in the sense meaning that it goes outside the lines of what we typically imagine now as politics and taps into some deeper currents of existence and reality and life.
If Trump had gotten out of the way, Desantis would’ve been up there arguing with Kamala.
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If the room is suicidal, then it takes someone who actively refuses to "read the room," and doesn't give a shit how impolite that is, to reject suicide.
Does that impose selection effects? Oh, yes.
The Bush administration were neither anti-racist enough not to bomb Afghanistan, nor racist enough to conclude that development of Afghanistan would require imposing radical social change, but in an uncanny valley where liberal democracy is perceived as the natural order of the universe, so American interventionism is morally cheap.
Western elites are stuck in group think because, reasonably enough, none of them want to be the guy to break the perceived inter-ethnic peace and cause a massive conflict. To get someone willing to point out that Haiti is a massive ongoing disaster, we had to search very far outside the typical distribution of politicians.
Thus, you are having the undignified experience of being rescued by a professional wrestler.
His intervention is better viewed as a lucky chance, to be exploited, than a done deal.
What we're probably going to have to do is rebuild the philosophical basis for liberalism from a stage 5 (post-formal) moral perspective, focused on epistemic limits and epistemic humility. Conventional philosophical liberals are having trouble explaining why their principles exist.
If there is a stage 5, then what is a description of all the stages? Your notion of reality seems subtle enough to maybe shed more light on what it really is than the typical ideologies do, Please explain further, if you feel like it,.
The different moral development theories as commonly discussed (Kegan, Kohlberg) seem to have some common ground in an arc of { social morality, formal morality, post-formal morality }, usually around stages numbered 3, 4, and 5, depending on how people are charting it out.
You can think of this as team sports morality ("I'm a Democrat, and our good ingroup believe X") which can turn on a dime (social morality), principled morality that's trying to integrate moral intuitions into a formal system (this would be your conventional philosophies like Utilitarianism), and finally a sort of intuitive recognition that low-dimensionality constructs (like Utilitarianism) are insufficient to contain the whole of morality (for post-formalists).
The transition between each stage involves significant intellectual investment. This motion can be painful because it looks like the old principles falling away into meaninglessness and leaving nihilism.
It's not that Democrats didn't believe in free speech at all. Rather, most political types including most Democrats are social moralists, not formal or post-formal moralists, so they take their orders on their appropriate beliefs from those higher up in their social hierarchy, and then attempt to act on them locally.
2008 American liberalism was a fairly well-hedged ideology overall, so when Democratic leaders pushed for principles like free speech and procedural protections for those accused of crimes and so on, and Democratic social moralists embraced these principles locally, the Democrats as a whole looked a lot smarter than they actually are. The quality of their overall thinking has declined significantly due to the much worse epistemics of Social Justice, and many Democrats are wildly miscalibrated right now.
When I say that we should rebuild philosophical or political liberalism from a perspective of epistemic limits, what I mean is that many liberal principles are similar to prohibitions on economic central planning which is practically problematic due to limits on available information and computational power, but most current liberals don't know this and thus lose interpersonal arguments to "care/harm" types (who use conflict theorist epistemology) because their support for freedom seems "arbitrary."
By developing a philosophical framework which roots liberal principles in limits to information and personal morality, a kind of opposition to "cultural central planning," a new generation of intellectuals could be trained and gain an advantage in the coordination for the defense of liberal principles.
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Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Piagetian_theories_of_cognitive_development or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development ?
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From the outside, the problem is all the supposedly "better" right-wing candidates fail more spectacularly, at least in the US in elections that aren't in blood-red areas.
Or at least ones that people of your political persuasion would agree with.
But J.D. Vance underran the entire Republican ticket in Ohio in 2022. Blake Masters lost a winnable Senate race. All of the other politicians somewhat friendly to your sort of arguments are in deep red seats a corpse could win reelection too. Hell, I wouldn't say Mark Robinson is on your side, but he's a populist right-winger of a sort and he's losing by 10 in North Carolina. Maybe I can give you DeSantis, but he fell on his face on the national stage.
Obviously, this would not be the real result, but they polled a Harris-Vance race, and it was 59-37 Harris. That's with the guy among current politicians, I'd argue, is the most normie-friendly of your set.
Trump's celebrity + Hillary running + COVID helping Trump like it did every other incumbent politician (only he was incompetent enough to blow the COVID boost basically all incumbents got worldwide) gave a sheen on Trump's political popularity that gave you guys the idea that people liked your ideas than they really did.
If the choice for the median voter is an HR lady stomping on their face forever telling them to put their gender in their bio and calling people by their chosen name or whatever you guys are selling, until you find somebody far better at selling yourself to normies, not online weirdos (I say this as an online weirdo of another political ideology), the HR ladies are going to keep winning, at least in the US.
Yes, with a dip in the economy, a Brian Kemp/Joni Ernest ticket in 2028 could totally win if Trump eats one too many Big Mac's, but that's not what the online right want
Blake Masters and JD Vance sound like fucking nerds. Masters especially looked and sounded like a geek who needed rectangle glasses and a job locked in the basement server room of a nondescript midwestern company.
The right desperately needs a handsome, happily married, tall, moderately successful 40-50 year old man who is very good at public speaking and who can persuasively impart a conservative populist message without scaring the hoes. Fifty such men surely aren’t impossible to find in a country of 330 million people. It’s an extraordinary failure that they can’t find them, which really means they just don’t care to look.
Is there that sort of person really, though?
Or, maybe to put it more accurately, is there anybody who can appease this website, the Daily Wire/Federalist/etc. types, and also not cause non-colleged educate pro-choice women in Wisconsin to get, 'ewww.' Like, it may be true there's not a majority of liberal wokeism, but there's even less of a majority of conservative populism. Especially among people under 50.
I know there's this view it's all about optics and charisma, but if you throw 1997 George Clooney up there and start talking about it's OK if states are banning abortions, you're going to have issues. Like, Obama rolled a natural 20 on charisma, but even he had issues in 2012 because things weren't great and the ACA wasn't popular yet. Hell, Reagan had a massive mid-term loss in 1982, and then had another in 1986 due to unpopularity.
I disagree. Some message discipline is necessary, but you put Trumpism in the body of 1997 Clooney and they’d steamroll this election.
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I’m glad you said this, because it confirms my perception that Masters has terrible physiognomy. To me he always seemed to have (as Shakespeare’s Caesar said of Cassius) “a lean and hungry look.” Very untrustworthy face. I say this as someone whose physiognomy would likely trigger mostly the same reaction in voters; at least I know I’m unelectable.
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The problem with this line of argument is that if you directly, anonymously ask normal people about their preferences, many of the answers are so far right that they couldn't be stated in polite society. Especially on the topic of enforcing borders or trans ideology. Compare to, say, libertarianism or any other possible political ideology, which are generally speaking not supported even when you ask people directly (which, I'm sad to say, includes many of my own preferences). So something else seems to be happening than just right-wing ideas being unpopular.
My impression is that if you're successful, it's just stupid to not make yourself part of the international elite. And that international elite has a particular set of values, which from the american perspective might as well be "agree on everything with the democrats". For a simple personal example, as an academic almost any enforcement of borders is a hassle to me, and living in the (expensive) university district myself, I'm fully insulated from perceiving any of the costs, at least in the short-term. Not only that, but many friends of mine are from across the world and they would suffer even more from the borders being enforced. So, from a purely egoistic perspective I should want the borders to be as open as possible. And this is the de-facto only acceptable position here; Being in favor of any border enforcement whatsoever puts you basically outside the overton window of the international elite.
So in turn any person in favor of these topics can't be part of the international elite, which means they're either not really all that successful, or stupid, or extremely disagreeable. So these are the people you're stuck with. Normies notice this, and the situation hasn't deteriorated enough yet in their perception that they're willing to vote for "this kind of person" just to get a change they desire. So they suck it up and consider it the cost of doing business.
This just isn't true, at least in the United States. Even in polling that shows support for harsh measures, there's also still strong support for amnesty for a number of current undocumented and stuff like the DREAM Act. On the transgender issue, the vast majority of people don't care, think it's at best an issue for their school boards or local government to deal with when it comes to kids, but there's the general American-speciifc libertarian view on it when it comes to adults.
If that was the message from the GOP, they could win on this, and indeed they did when that was the message combined with general worry over school closings. But, as we're seeing, even in places like Florida, the Mom's for Liberty types go off the rails and then lose elections, and when the GOP tries to run ads in abortion referendums about how this actually means something something transgenders will take your kids, they lose on that too.
Yes, the median American is to the right of the median Democrat politician on immigration and transgenderism. In both cases, they're to the left of the median Republican politician and they don't really care about the latter, so they find it, "weird", when GOP politicians and media obsess over it.
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