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As a Democrat, I hold both views simultaneously. An actually more accurate way to put it for me is: I think he'll probably directly be a threat to democracy if he loses, and probably won't directly be a threat to democracy over the next four years if he wins, but might have already tipped the first domino in a progression that leads to an erosion of democracy and might be able to nudge the next domino (or have his allies do so) based on some of his actions during his next term.
This puts me in mind of people who complain, year after year and project by project, that Alien is ruined as a franchise. Have they been in a coma since 1992?
Democracy is not this thing that will crumble at the actions of one actor, even if that actor is ostensibly the leader of the free world. When democracy falls, it will fall by its own hands, with thunderous applause. Macau recently held an election for their chief executive. He won with 98.5% of the electoral vote, a percentage that even the most credulous among us are considering "maybe sus". Is this "a threat to democracy"?
Democracy, "rule by demos", is a piece of alien technology that serves to allow people to tolerate each other and rule over each other without coming to open warfare, having to resort to the awful work of actually having to try and convince each other. If democracy fails in America, it will not be because Orange Man Bad, it will be because most of America prefers shooting the other half to trying to convince them of anything at all.
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Ok, but can you explain how Trump is more of a furtherance of democratic backsliding than the democrats(who do after all increasingly support things like government censorship, court packing, etc)?
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What erosion of democracy do you believe Donald Trump, avatar of your outgroup, to want?
Steelmanning voting concepts, I have observed that my fellow Americans either want:
Accordingly, I refuse to countenance the strawman of “Republicans just want to suppress the legitimate vote” without the flip strawman, “Democrats just want to stuff the ballot box.”
Actually trying to peer into his mind and speculate exactly what he wants is difficult. I think he likes power and I think it's reasonably probable that if he thought he could do it pretty easily, he'd appoint himself president-for-life. If he does want to do that, I don't think he will try to do it, because he knows he couldn't get away with it. But the thought that he might want it is concerning. (But I only think it's "reasonably probable" he does. I'm definitely not certain.)
What I do know is that if Kamala wins, the following will happen, with the following likelihoods, whether or not there are any credible widespread fraud allegations:
That is not good for democracy. The fact that we all know that Trump will declare victory no matter what happens is not good for democracy.
If there's no substantive evidence to support his claims, we all know that Trump is going to say he won when he lost. This is an absurd state of affairs.
I'm just going to repeat this for emphasis. Everyone reading this knows that Trump is going to say "I won" on November 5/6/7, no matter the circumstances. We all know he's going to do this.
People in the intellectual dark web regularly talk about "sense-making", but they seem to (from what I can tell) avoid the fact that if there can no longer be any common agreement on who won an election, democracy is in jeopardy.
I don't think Republicans, or even Trump, necessarily want to suppress the legitimate vote, per se. I do know that Trump is going to say he won if he lost. Basically everyone knows it. That is an erosion of democracy.
This also gives a blank check to any nefarious enemies of democracy who oppose Trump to pull every dirty trick they can. After all, if the media is set up to whitewash any Trumpian accusations of fraud, now’s their last chance to make ballot printers go brrrr.
The other question is, what happens if Trump wins? Will his enemies’ allegations of fraud be treated as beyond the pale as if he’d made them? Or will they be investigated, be brought with standing before a court, go through the discovery phase, and be adjudicated with possible consequences for election, in the ways the 2020 vote never was?
Is this the chutzpah defence? "We made so many demonstrably false accusations of election rigging that we have no credibility left, which means now the other side can do whatever it wants!"
The boy who cried wolf is like, parables 101.
“The boy who cried wolf” was listened to, at first: “The farmers would all come running only to find out that what the boy said was not true. Then one day there really was a wolf but when the boy shouted, they didn't believe him and no one came to his aid.”
By contrast, Trump’s 2020 claims were poo-poohed by the people who said there really is no reason to believe wolves might ever come near, and the boy is a danger for spreading these false reports with no evidence. Then they did a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
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I agree with everything that you wrote, but I also think that there's plently of evidence that the left is playing dirty. I give Trump about 30% of winning, because the entire game is rigged against him in a way which I consider fraud. In my view, this fraud is possible in the first place because democracy has been undermined.
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These odds seem really badly calibrated. I'm not even directionally against these but putting a 0.1% chance on something Trump does being unsuspected strikes me as madness and I'm not sure what Musk stands to gain from supporting Trump once he's conclusively lost. I'd put up money on any of these rates if you're interested.
Fair. I really actually meant 99%, not 99.9%. And sure, I'd be happy to bet you, but I don't have a lot of money spare so we could use a Manifold market (or similar) instead of betting real money. If I had money spare I'd bet you a fair bit of real money. Unless you only want to bet $50 or something, but I don't know if that's worth all the setup. But I'm willing to bet $50 if we can find an easy way to make it work.
I'll change my probabilities to 99%, 90%, 75%, and keep the last at 98%. Skin in the game does indeed help with calibration.
I've frequently seen this sentiment from people - that Musk is supporting Trump purely for selfish and opportunistic reasons and will stop being so vocal and annoying once the election's over. I think this is very likely a complete misunderstanding of him. These are his actual beliefs. I think he's ride-or-die for MAGA, and if Trump loses I think he's very likely going to be making tons of tweets per day either casting FUD about the election or explicitly saying there was fraud and that Trump is the true winner. It's not a matter of what he stands to gain, because that's not his mindset.
I'm afraid the payout ratio for any of these would make the stakes pretty onerous on you, at 99% odds you'd be getting $1 out of a $100 staked bet. I'm willing to escrow some cash or crypto on any of these with a third party or just go off honor. I just made a manifold account, don't see anything exactly right but might be looking in the wrong spot. The 75% musk one would be the most exciting probably if not the most favorable EV to me. I'd be willing to stake up to $200 on that line without demanding an escrow.
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Which major president wouldn’t want to make himself president for life? Surely Obama.
Washington, notoriously - which is why the US doesn’t have Presidents-for-life.
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Bush Jr probably wouldn't. I'm not sure if Obama would or wouldn't, but I'm pretty sure Clinton would and Carter wouldn't.
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I think at least half wouldn't want to. I don't think Obama would want to. If there were no term limits, I don't think he'd run max 2 or 3 total times, and I definitely don't think he'd try to rewrite the constitution to make it so there are no more elections for so long as he's alive.
At the least, I think Trump likely wants to more than all or almost all of the past ones.
The dude decided to hang out in DC and run a shadow presidency during Biden’s admin. I have zero doubt he’d be interested in the lifetime presidency. I do have doubts whether he’d want to run multiple elections.
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding your meaning.
As I read it, your main concern of Trump winning is that if he loses he'll claim he won and Kamala only won via fraud.
My overall concern is that Trump is a threat to democracy. As I stated in my initial post, I think the immediate harmful effects to democracy will be greater if he loses than if he wins, due to his underlying motivations for not caring about democracy (narcissism). It's not "if he wins, he will do this", it's "as a person, he is a force of destruction when it comes to democracy".
As below with "Fascism", can you define what you mean by "democracy" in this context?
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Sounds like it would be best for America if Trump wins then, hey?
It's better for the hostages if we negotiate with the terrorists.
Well yeah, it definitely is -- in this case the hostages are also doing the negotiating, which changes the calculus some.
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Optimizing for defection by caving to the demands of defectors is bad.
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No, that’s precisely why it’s best that he doesn’t win. Trump is a defect bot for elections. He always plays defect, and everyone knows it. It's only rational that “it’s best for America if Trump wins” because the convention is to cooperate, and we know his opponent will cooperate. When defect-bots start winning elections because they only play defect, then all candidates will eventually become defect-bots and we all lose. So the most rational choice is to vote against the defector to ensure only cooperative candidates have a chance to win.
To play devils advocate here, if the system is completely broken and unable to produce a good result on anything that matters, maybe a defect bot is exactly what you need. Cooperation with a system that doesn’t work doesn’t fix that system. I think that our systems are so broken at this point that we either do the major fixes we need or consign ourselves to the scrap heap of history where future civilizations will wonder how we let it all fall apart.
I don’t like Trump at all, I’d very much rather have anyone else. But on the other hand the hour is late and if we wait for something better we might be doing so in a completely failed state instead of merely a failing one. A third of Americans can’t read. We can’t handle disaster recovery, fix potholes, build aircraft, or fix train tracks. Large portions of most cities are no go zones, often featuring open air drug markets. Is Trump or any other “defect bot” going to actually be able to fix that? It’s one in a million. On the other hand the system that you think we should encourage cooperation with has failed in most respects. Risky surgery or slow decline into death?
I think this only applies if you believe the status quo will cause the society to invariably decline, I don’t believe that. And even if the US does decline in next four years under Kamala Harris, maybe the next president will be able to turn it around. In my head, it certainly beats the 1 in a million chance given to us by Trump.
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There's no way to even tell if Trump is a "defect bot", because the defection against him started early. The New York Times declared they'd only cover his candidacy in the entertainment section (a declaration they did not follow). Democrats rioted on election day. They proclaimed him #NotMyPresident and declared #Resistance. They rioted again on Inauguration Day. They started trying to impeach him in 2017. They did impeach him in 2019. There's no way you could distinguish between defectbot and tit-for-tat under these circumstances.
Are these yokels from Trump Country, or products of our Democratically-controlled urban school systems?
Ron DeSantis can.
I doubt either party could fix Boeing.
Most of the things you've mentioned are locally controlled, and Trump can't fix them. But on the other hand, most of those cities are Democratically controlled and the Democrats are the party of "defund the police".
Democratic politicians and Clinton didn't, and I believe almost all of the protests on 2016 election day were peaceful and didn't involve any rioting. Look at what Republican politicians and Trump did on and after election day. Not to mention general Trump voters.
Look at what Republicans did when Obama or particularly Biden won.
Compare the top-down leaders and the rabble. Hillary Clinton, although publicly claiming Russia helped increase Trump's odds (which is plausibly true, even if it seems more likely than not he still would've won without the DNC hacking and social media influence schemes from Russia), publicly and privately accepted the election results within hours. No high-level Democratic leaders advocated any tricks to try to keep Trump from being inaugurated. A few very left-leaning journalists suggested such things, and some Democratic voters did, but it was fringe. I'm not going to even bother to contrast with what happened from the other side.
Red MAGA is much less tethered to reality than Blue MAGA is, Red MAGA is a much greater proportion of Red Team than Blue MAGA is of Blue Team, and Red MAGA includes most of the current Republican leadership while Blue MAGA contains little of the Democratic leadership.
This is an inaccurate history. The democratic controlled government launched project crossfire hurricane based on known Clinton oppo research that the FBI had determined was bogus and the Obama admin took steps to ensure it would continue after the admin changed. They did this to cripple the incoming Trump admin.
They then used the investigation to paint his regime as-if controlled by Russia to the point many dem voters are totally unaware of the fabricated source of the story. These media stories were then used to say “where there is smoke there is fire” which led to more investigations.
The Dems played very dirty. They prima facie accepted the results of the election but through dirty IC related shenanigans substantively did not accept the election results.
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It's not an iterated game though -- the guy's not going to try hanging around for three terms and he'll be insufferable (as will all his supporters) if he doesn't get a second.
Just get it over with man.
I understand your point, but I wish you could see your posts here from a God's-eye view right now. How is it that this is the state of America and so many of us are just speaking of it in banal terms? Do you and others in this thread recognize why so many people on the left conclude Trump is an unprecedented threat to democracy, and why it's so irritating that Trump fans call that stochastic terrorism?
You may even be objectively correct, but the whole situation is ridiculous and abominable.
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It is an iterated game, maybe not with Trump, but with future candidates who might think to pull the same thing if the strategy works out for him.
If you vote for him and he wins, he will never know that his strategy was working -- he will just think that America loves him, and you will avoid whatever hassles you are expecting in the case that he loses very neatly.
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How are you getting to "always" from an n=1?
N does not equal to 1. He’s done the same thing for his primary losses in 2016, and he refused to say he’d accept the loss in 2016 if he did lose. Also, whether n=1 is not important, unless you believe he’ll accept the loss gracefully this time around?
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But that presumes the other side isn’t defect bot. Look at what they did during the Trump Presidency (effectively subverting the peaceful transfer of power through BS like the Russia story). That was much more undermining democracy compared to anything Trump has done. Then add in the other shenanigans by the IC community, NGOs that are cut outs for the deep state, etc that undermine free and fair elections coupled with Dems open embrace of censorship.
None of that is to praise Trump. No, I have not come to praise Trump but to bury him. Yet like Shakespeare’s Mark Antony I cannot help but note Trump’s adversaries are worse by pretty much any measure.
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It depends. The health of the state is so bad at this point that I think keeping the status quo might be worse long term. The government we have, the old guard political class cannot actually solve problems, fix things, or come up with new ideas. FEMA can’t handle hurricane, but Cajun navy and private charities can. The government can’t handle education or health or roads. Trump might well be the shakeup we need. But I’m not sure because the amount of state capacity that will be wasted fighting every single step back will likely make it all worse.
He was president for four years. What did he shake up besides many of the establishment norms that are actually good establishment norms? He complained about the Deep State hampering him from doing things that actually should've been hampered, got nothing done, refused to leave, then had to be dragged out kicking and screaming. I'm not a big fan of Bill Maher but he predicted it all exactly right from the start.
If it were Andrew Yang or Mark Cuban or Michael Bloomberg or maybe even Bernie Sanders (despite me very much not being a socialist), and if they hadn't already been president for four years, I might be willing to lend charity to this overall vibe or maybe even vote that way. But I can't understand the people acting like Trump either was going to be the great disruptor and the great fixer or somehow will be now.
Massive changes to the federal judiciary, leading to a bevy of court cases that advance conservative policies- most notably the overturn of roe vs wade, but also more limits on the regulatory state and a general improvement in gun rights and state's rights.
Can you name a republican you'd put in that category? Because it very much looks like partisan rancor.
I personally expect Trump to muddle through in a way somewhat better for me and mine than Kamala will, certainly not with a major improvement over the status quo but definitely an improvement over Kamala. I'm willing to concede that he's not good for the health of the republic but don't think he's clearly worse than democrats. To steelman the case for Trump making major changes when he didn't last time, he has a better ability to manage personnel and put out executive orders because the right wing institutions are already helping him make them, and has a much more change-happy inner circle with people like Musk and RFK this time.
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