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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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The GOP has a clear path forward, Trump has seemingly reinstantiated the Reaganist "coalition of doers", the coalition of people who add value to the economy rather than extracting it.

Much more so on X than in reality. Apart from Texas, the places that pay net federal taxes are all solidly blue, and the people who actually build Musk's rockets appear to be (based on published stats about who corporate employees donate to) supermajority Democrats. The biggest Republican success story (De Santis' Florida) has an economy that is dependent on attracting retirees who come with large fiscal transfers attached. Remember that Trump's stated economic policy (which his normie supporters are strongly in favour of) is to repeal the CHIPS act, impose 10-20% tariffs on any ASML EUV machines that Intel (or TSMC US) tries to install in their next fab, and focus industrial policy on trying to bring toaster factories back to the Rustbelt.

The problem for a coalition of doers on the right is that most of the doers sit in the libertarian quadrant of the political compass, whereas the easiest place to take votes off the Democrats is in the populist quadrant. In the UK, housing policy is sufficiently centralised that this problem blows up the Conservative Party about once every six months.