With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
No because Trump is an outlier. Trump-style populism relies on his charisma; it's not replicable at scale. Not even Trump could build a machine that produces Trumps; and his party is not interested in doing so at any rate.
A big part of Trump's appeal is that, behind the spray-tan and the money and the political ambition, he just seems like a dude. There's an odd charisma to that. During his first term, sometimes you could tell he was just chilling in
Cedar Rapidsthe White House watching cable, because Fox and Friends would be discussing some issue and the President of the United States would just... call in. Or tweet about the issue.Trump's tweets themselves were a big part of Trump!45's appeal, as he just said whatever he was thinking about unapologetically. He felt raw. You talk to Trump supporters, and the number one thing they'll tell you is that Trump "tells it like it is." I'm not so sure about the epistemics of that, but certainly Trump frequently sounds like an actual person, he has the kind of political conversations people have with friends and family in private, but just in front of other people. That's why people go to his rallies, it feels like home!
Even back when I hated Trump, I acknowleged the rawness of his tweeting and speaking and found it impressive -- not in terms of his diction, but in terms of how he just communicated like some guy, just a guy being a dude. He contrasts so powerfully with the obvious fakeness of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, whose every word you know was focus-tested. Kamala Harris is terrified of verbal blunders -- that's why she falls into word salad, she's afraid of making a mistake and so just repeats the talking points she knows are safe.
By contrast, the big thing Trump's hilariously, ridiculously bad at is giving a prepared speech. He stands there and reads the teleprompter like a 10th grader reads their assigned sentence in Great Expectations. Sometimes you get the sense he's never heard the very words he's speaking before (and he probably hasn't), and you get Donald Trump live-tweeting his own speech, which is hilarious and strangely charismatic. I was just watching his victory speech, and he reads:
And then, looking away from the teleprompter, goes:
He's reacting to his own speech! He's not figuratively but literally going, "wow, we did? We took back the senate? Wow, that's great!" It makes you follow along his thought process, which makes you feel closer to him than you are. He combines this with frequent references to "we," and even infamously talked about himself in the third person at times during term 1. The point is that he makes people feel like they're up there on the stage with him: he makes people feel empowered. These are absolutely the sort of skills -- creating a sense of intimacy and power -- that come up in all sorts of interpersonal domains, like sales, friendly banter, and even flirting. The man is rizzing an entire country.
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Calling it charisma is circular reasoning. People like him because he's charismatic. He's charismatic because of... his voice? His hair? His smile? What about him can't be replicated, exactly? Undeniably what he's giving us is rare, but it revealed to us something undeniable, this type of mass appeal we haven't seen before. He's like a businessman without the bullshit, like an old old American, so old that a huge subset of Americans can't even really fathom his appeal or why it works. And I think that in all honestly is the origin of TDS -- it's because they don't get his main appeal that they assume he's popular because of x/y/z -ism. Not even reds understand it, but crack the code and we'll be seeing more Trumps some day. Not soon, but it's coming. This isn't a stars-aligned moment, but rather a 'we've accidentally stumbled into something huge, and almost a decade later we're still working out what it means' type thing. This is clearly not a fluke.
I mean, I'm not proposing a model but an empirical observation. If the Republican machine could replicate trump to replace him they would have, considering how much they dislike him.
I don't think that "charisma matters in politics" is news. Plenty of American presidents have had mass appeal, just for instance Obama. But the Dems cannot produce Obamas anymore than the Reps can produce Trumps. If that's solved -- sure, but there's no reason to me to think that Trump moves us closer to solving it. American politics has had centuries to codify charisma and hasn't managed to do more than come across it in the wild.
Charisma is undeniable, but it's a holistic product of concrete things. Trump's charisma is not his background or his manner of speech or suit, but they all play a part in forming his charisma. So what's the nature of that charisma? Why does it work when Trump does the funny hand motions and says "I've got a deal with China, it's the greatest deal, you're gonna love it", when if any other candidate did this it would be suicide? Answer: It appeals to that old old American mentality I mentioned. That sort of enterprising, ungarnished, take-no shit ambition which historically defines this nation's existence. It's because Trump actually embodies these values that it works for him, and for that reason republicans can't produce a replica, because these are not their values. Which is really a failure of democracy: Like every system of morality known to man, when you optimize for trait X as seen from outside, you don't end up with a society full of trait Xers, you get a dog-and-pony show great at convincing swathes of the population someone has trait X even if they don't, and only that; Not actually getting trait X. But for this reason, red tribe could totally produce new Trumps if they recalibrate. The big obstacle is they're so divorced from the common man, they too can't quite fathom his appeal.
What are the actual values of republican politicians? Are they the same as the actual values of democrat politicians?
Self-replication is the primary one, and it goes for both sides.
Self-replication in terms of party, personal family, or ideology?
Party. It's a gross phenomenon when parties tailor their every little motion to match the flow of the crowd (or really a clumsy, out-of-touch notion of the people), and even uneducated Americans can probably sense they have no other real motive. Like parents who spoil their children and bend their will to match the kid, the whole process feels backwards. Presidents are leaders, but these apparatuses don't select for actual leaders because a tough guy maverick will refuse to play by the rules. I get the ick looking at parties; How's a bunch of followers going to produce a leader? It's backwards.
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Some people are hyping up his kid, so it might turn out he literally is that machine himself.
Don Jr and Eric are weak and shit. Jared and Ivanka could have been worthy dynastic successors to Donald, but they don't seem to want it enough.
It's Barron that's getting hyped.
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