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I have a noob question, so it is clear at this point that trump is getting some support, quite a bit of it from people you would not expect from. I am 24 now and have never stepped foot in the US but Internet addiction helped me get a pretty interesting view of things from the past 8 years culture war wise. Most sane people did not want to touch trump in 2016 and even insane ones would distance themselves from him in 2020 which is when internet censorship peaked in my humble opinion. Moldbug said that winning trumps everything, everyone wants to be on the winning team which maybe explains why vc types are publicly supporting trump.
So are we in a thermidor right now? Does this mean that the world has achieved peak bioleninism or will it be like 2016? Because moldbug was correct to analyse that because of trump winning in 2016, the overton window shifted faster than it should have as the cathedral had a reason to mobilize all of its energy.
There was a lot of euphoria around 2016 with regards to trump, now I am an nrx guy, I am aware of how liberal democracies basically act as smokescreens because trump did have a lot of difficulties getting anything good done. Now there is one positive for the amerikaner that the trump campaign is talking about cracking down on illegal immigrants of all kinds, though I am skeptical since trump did disassociate himself from Project 2025. The present only makes sense once it becomes the past, will trump even win, not sure but will hm winning be any better than last time? Will the demographic shifts not mean that in the long term this may not matter? hard questions.
I don't know about VCs, but I think that the shift of tech executives toward Trump has another major cause besides just that he looks like he might win. The idea that it's driven by some sort of awareness that Trump is a heavy favorite to win doesn't make sense to me because to me it's pretty clear that, prediction market weirdness aside, the race is still a toss-up. There is no actual good evidence in favor of the theory that Trump is running away with it.
So what is the other cause for the shift? I think it's pretty simple actually. Most tech executives come from the kind of blue tribe middle/upper-middle class family and cultural backgrounds where either voting Democrat is just what one does, because "it is the right thing to do" (I don't believe that, but people in those cultures do)... or, at least, the idea of voting for a Trump seems beyond the pale. One might vote for a Romney, but not a Trump. Being in the middle/upper-middle class does not grant people any sort of special degree of interest in or understanding of politics. Indeed, most such people are politically pretty apathetic. They feel that they are doing the right thing for the world by voting for the Democrats or for moderate Republicans once every couple of years and they don't think much about politics otherwise except maybe to occasionally grumble about some particular blatant excess like the WMDs-in-Iraq clusterfuck. They are the kinds of people who think that the New York Times and the Washington Post are paragons of journalism and trust that writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond have given them a good understanding of anthropology. They are repelled by the Republican political umbrella's religious conservatism, its talk about Judeo-Christian values, its adulation of traditional family structures, its reflexive worship of the military, and many other things. As, to some extent, am I for that matter... and I myself would never vote for a Republican, if it was not for my belief that somehow, the Democrats have become even worse.
They are not stupid people, indeed many of them are brilliant, but a person's intelligence is usually not evenly distributed among different areas of understanding. It is at least as common for someone to be brilliant in one field and mediocre or even actually unperceptive in others as it is for a person to be smart all across the board. Take tech, for example. I have met many good coders who have very little interest in politics, have not thought very deeply about it, and do not have anything particularly interesting to say about it. The typical white collar professional knows very little about history and is not particularly interested in it. When he is done at work for the day, he does not spend hours thinking and reading about politics, he goes home and puts on Netflix.
Understandably, if one grows up in a background like this, spends most of one's time in college and business around other people who came from such a background, and spends most of one's energy focusing on business decisions and technology instead of on politics, it might take one a long time to come to the conclusion that maybe the Democrats are actually not on the right side of history any more than the Republicans are. Even when they begin to pressure you to use your company to censor their political opponents. Even when you realize that a large fraction of their rank-and-file voters automatically despise you simply because you have made a lot of money. Even when their policies make the cities where you live dirty and poorly policed. And it might especially take one a long time when the only alternative to those Democrats isn't a safe Romney type of figure, but is instead Trump and his whole gang of rabble-rousers.
I think it is notable that two of the most prominent anti-Democrat tech businessmen, Musk and Thiel, both spent time in South Africa. I do not know to what extent that experience shaped their political attitudes, but I doubt it is a coincidence that they share in common some experience having grown up not just in nice blue tribe suburbs in the West, but also in a country that has experienced a lot of devastation from racial animosity, crime, and corrupt political patronage systems.
Not exactly. One might publicly flirt with the idea of voting for a Romney, before deciding to go ahead and vote for the Democrat after all.
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In an interesting coincidence, the owner of the LA Times, who caused such a controversy by telling his editorial board not to endorse any candidate for president, was also born and raised in South Africa.
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The end of a revolution is usually only visible in hindsight. This might be it but it’s too soon to say.
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No. The tide continues to come in, even if one particular wave recedes.
Yeah, the election is brakes being applied on a car that will go faster once you take your foot off
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Probably. But a Trump win buys the country another 4 years. But at some point, the Democrats will win a clean sweep, amnesty the existing illegals, let in millions more, and win every election going forward.
They thought that would happen before, it didn't.
African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican. The younger they are and the more they identify as American (as opposed to their ethnic identities) the more likely they are to support the GOP.
The old patterns are breaking down and being replaced by new ones. Men vs women, college-educated vs non-college-educated, married vs unmarried are going to be the relevant demographic criteria of the next few decades, I would predict.
Which of course means that the GOP managing to boost the marriage rate is a matter of political survival, and this is probably doable by tax policies and benefits cliffs they love tinkering with(one wonders how many cohabiting couples- and seriously cohabiting is pretty bad and if we can get these people to marry slightly faster that's a good thing in se- would marry for a payout).
For a man, the financial risk of divorce utterly swamps any possible gains from tax incentives.
To get investment in capital, you need secure property rights, because nobody is going to invest time and effort in a business he cannot expect to profit from, in much the same way no one washes a rented car. Likewise, to get investment in marriage, you need secure ownership of women by men.
As long as Marriage 2.0 is the only game in town, men are going to continue following their incentives rather than accepting a debased marriage.
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Republicans are now running a 1990s-Bill-Clinton analogue for president. To remain even nominally competitive, the Republican party has had to abandon numerous priorities as simply untenable, to the point that the party itself has completely fractured from its base of supporters. It's certainly true that "old patterns break up and are replaced by new ones", and that there will be a viable "Republican Party" for the foreseeable future. They'll be running on democratic policies when they aren't outright endorsing democrats.
It seems to me that this is not, in fact, acceptable, and that it does, in fact, provide a pretty good argument for why the existing social structure should be done away with.
The GOP is the socially moderate party for social conservatives, which offers them protection for their way of life. The dems are the socially progressive party for people who want to make social conservatism illegal, which offers them realistically just harassment of social conservatives but it could be state discrimination occasionally, and of course both parties have other interest groups in their coalitions.
Seriously- religious freedom/conscience protections, homeschooling protection, parental rights- these are all major focuses of the GOP and they're areas where the GOP has winning records. They are also very important to social conservatives.
This seems like a system one would be well-advised to extricate oneself from with all possible haste.
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Isn't that exactly what happened in California after the 1980s amnesty?
I agree it's not a straight line descent, but the broad strokes seem to be there.
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Specifically the men in these demographics. The gender gap is turning reciprocal.
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That just means they need to step up the pace.
Modern progressive globalism burns human beings like fuel. If it's running out of fuel, or some of the existing fuel is going bad, then it needs to import more fuel. This will go on until it can't, but that might be well after any of us are alive to see it.
The Canadian globohomos seem to be running into a bit of a brick wall already, so it might be sooner than you think.
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Yeah but what next after 4 years? Though 4 is better than 0
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