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I didn't vote for Trump, though considering I live in one of the least-swing states in the country, I didn't vote at all because I didn't think it would be worth the gas I would expend driving to the polling place.
In any case, Trump is president now.
When I was a kid at the time of Obama v McCain my nice teacher Miss Collins gave us a very simplified and seven-year-old friendly explanation of politics. In some countries, one guy got to be in charge and nobody else got any say. But America was different because we got to have elections every four years, which let the people choose who we wanted to be in charge. Everybody went into a booth and chose who they wanted to be president, and whoever got picked by the most people automatically won.
When I got a little older I started spending a bunch of time on various forums and image boards where I learned that actually democracy is fake and gay. It's all a sham. We live under the system/the Cathedral/the regime/whatever. Voting doesn't matter because no matter who wins, The Regime will never allow a true based right-winger to come to power.
This skepticism continued through the Trump years, with the explanation for his 2016 victory being that They were caught off guard. And of course his loss in 2020 was because the System was no longer off guard, and had fortified itself against the possibility of another Trump victory through means of gross election fraud. "There's no voting your way out of this." In the lead up to 2024, various RW voices, including many on this forum, insisted that Trump would never be allowed to take office again. Mysterious votes would be hauled out at 3:00 AM to ensure a Harris win. Or else he would be assassinated. Or once in office, he would not be permitted to actually do anything Based™ by the Deep State.
Well, despite the universal opprobrium and opposition of every single group of people I've been assured are really running the show, variously journalists, left-wing billionaires, the CIA, other unelected federal bureaucrats, college professors, the Jews, NGOs, liberal white women, or some combination thereof, Trump won. "They were caught off guard" no longer remotely works as an explanation.
Trump doing mass firings of federal employees, mass deportations, and dismantling DEI, just like he promised. The libs are coping and seething, but they can't do anything more than that, and the reason they can't do anything more than that is because more people pressed the "Trump" button than the "Harris" button in the voting booth, and according to the magic piece of paper, this means Trump is in charge now. Democracy worked exactly like Miss Collins said it would. This literally happened, just replace Hitler with "woke DEI". As soon as it the results of the election were clear, the libs immediately acted in accordance with the magic piece of paper and handed over power, without any attempt at military coups, riots, Hail Mary legal endeavors, or even a lib January 6th. And no Deep State has stepped forward to prevent him from doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. The Magic Piece of Paper has spoken.
While this is a massive L for the libs, it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
Like what is the cope for this? Trump isn't a real right-winger, the System would never allow the election of a real right-winger who would restore seigneurial dues and reverse the industrial revolution? The System is just biding its time until it can do a reverse QAnon Storm?
All the based esoteric schizos gibbering about the Cathedral and ZOG and how everybody is a communist were wrong. Turns, they were the fake and gay ones all along, and my sweet normie liberal second grade teacher was right the whole time. Democracy is Real and Straight. Sorry Miss Collins.
I think that the US political system is bad (FPTP, EC, special interests and all that), but not anything near maximally bad. For generations, politicians have bent the rules to benefit their side, gerrymandering, running smear campaigns, voter suppression and all that, but while the political institutions were full of infighting, they were generally playing by certain rules. Respecting the constitution, the vote of the people (no matter how much you worked to mislead them before they cast their vote) and peaceful transition of power were all part of that.
As seen in J6, Trump is not playing by the same rules. I am not sure if he even has a concept of objective truth, but he certainly decided that as he did not like an outcome in which he lost, it was false and hence the product of fraud. He then also made that terrible bid to overturn the certification of the election using his mob, which was breaking very much with mos maiorum. Luckily, his hare-brained scheme did not work.
While the institutions certainly engaged in lawfare against him, they were also not willing to break their core principles to get rid of him. The deep state certainly did not murder him, nor did 'they' commit election fraud to defeat him. When he was elected, the Biden administration let power transition peacefully -- either because his handlers could not even think of a different way to behave or because they knew very well that the same institutions which will stop Trump from permanently grabbing power would also have stopped Biden.
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Trump won on a narrative, and the strength of the narrative overcomes the cathedral. And that narrative was- the 2020 election was stolen, leaving a senile usurper to let his incompetent, insane, corrupt, and lazy officials to oppress the people. Even the heavens show their displeasure with unrelenting bad weather and wars and rumors of war. But when the rightful king, hounded and persecuted, returns from his winter palace he will put all in order.
I think he avoided talking about the 2020 election too much. I mean, everyone knew what his position on it was, but it wasn't a huge topic of conversation.
Agreed. In part, Trump won because he made things about the future, and provided a vision for an America he wanted to create, whether you liked the vision or not. He brought 2016 energy to the 2024 campaign. His debate performance was generally bad (not as bad as Biden's!), but his RNC performance was good, and the assassination attempt gave him a huge boost; that iconic photo will be what you see in the encyclopedia when you look up the 2024 election. Biden and Harris just didn't seem to have a vision, the core of the campaign was "we are not Trump."
It's my belief that the winner of most presidential elections is the one with the strongest, most compelling vision for the country. "It's morning in America." "Putting people first." "Compassionate conservatism." "Yes we can." "Make America Great Again." "Build Back Better." Biden's vision in 2020 was a return to normalcy, and he narrowly won on that basis, largely due to the pandemic.
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I love your enthusiasm but hold on there sparky. Just because he signed a bunch of EOs doesn't mean any of this stuff will actually happen.
Between infinite lawsuits, various federal judges blocking the orders, and deep state foot dragging, it'll be a miracle if any of these things actually happen before a 2028 or 2032 Democrat President comes by and cancels it.
Then Yarvin laughs.
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As a long-time Moldbug/Yarvin reader, this is a surreal take.
What Moldbug wrote back from 2008 to 2012 was that the Republican party was fake opposition, that Republican presidents were basically pretending to be a CEO while in fact all hiring and firing is done by civil service laws, broader ideology is set by the Cathedral, and the Republican president impact is minimal. The steering wheel was not connected to the rudder.
Moldbug's proposed solution was to use the internet to route traditional mainstream media power, and hold a "true election" where a majority elects a president who promises to exercise the full executive authority of the Presidency, as FDR and Lincoln did, and to cut through or ignore the strata of civil service rules, administrative state rules, to re-attach the steering wheel to the rudder, etc. etc. in order to break the oligarchical Cathedral/administrative state.
A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed. I'm still worried that they are going to declare victory way too soon and it will all go off half-cocked. But it is a promising start. The Trump administration has yet to go full-Yarvin, and to the extent they hold back I think they are more likely to ultimately fail.
In 1972, the Cathedral could slander and smear a president and the normal Republican would believe the Cathedral over the president. In 2024, this is not the case. In part this is because of the Internet, in part because the Cathedral itself has hemorrhaged talent and dropped kayfabe -- but also in part because Yarvin himself exposed the Cathedral for what it was.
It's like Yarvin said, "Ah, I diagnosed your problem, it is far more fatal than people think, and the cures other people are selling will not work on it. However, I think I may have a treatment that just might work ..." And the person then tries the treatment and starts feeling better, and someone else says, "Ah, Yarvin said you would die of this disease, but you are feeling better, he is discredited!"
In fairness to your view, though, Moldbug and the neoreactionaries have written a lot of stuff and have gone back and forth on what might actually work, what will be allowed, etc, as is to be expected in any longrun and wide-ranging conversation. Yarvin has waffled and said that maybe the medicine won't work, maybe you need a different medicine, etc. With regards to the 2024 election, there was a lot of disagreement in the dissident right about whether the Cathedral would be strong and unified enough to find or manufacture enough votes to overcome its deep unpopularity. Yarvin himself said he did not know. Yarvin also just emailed an apology for underestimating Trump 47 and over-estimating the strength of the Cathedral in 2024.
But overall, to see this as a massive L for reactionaries is ridiculous. What we are seeing is actually the fruition of 17 years of intellectual trench-work and public persuasion.
ADDENDUM:
Moldbug's diagnosis was that we don't live in a two-party system, we live in a system where the Republicans or the "right" are basically fake opposition. They are allowed to win small victories every now, in part to make their opposition look real, and in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism, but they are never allowed to win on existential questions and in general the country moves to thee steps to the left for every step to the right. It's unclear if Trumps actions will amount to a full regime change and rightward shift on existential questions -- or if it will actually be a re-invorgation of the two-party system just as people were catching on to the fact that the Republicans were fake opposition. IN this scenario, there will be some right-ward shift on the craziest of the left-wing stuff from the past ten years, but the Cathedral will remain in-tact and the country will continue to move to the left after Trump leaves, and very little about our system will have fundamentally been altered or fixed by Trump.
Thus, Moldbug's analysis was and is correct, and as long as the Trumpist-right follows is prescribed treatment plan, they can defeat the Cathedral and cure the country. But if they go off the treatment plan and don't actually bother to follow through in enforcing these executive orders and in firing workers and taking control of the budget and defunding the NGO/academia/non-profit complex, etc, then all Trump will have done is to reboot the fake two-party system with a more exciting season of TV.
You can't expect much more from democracy than occasionally fixing obvious problems of too much leftism or too much rightism. Other regimes have a hard time clearing that bar.
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It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."
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Libs did try to resist Trump after his first election, believing he was illegitimate, didn't win the popular vote, needed tk be impeached over Russia, Stormy Daniels, etc. The last ten years has included more and more political conflict outside the voting booth.
Aa for your question about right wing theory cope: I've been in parties and bars with a lot of these people, we've had these exact conversations. The working theory is that we were wrong. We didn't believe in democracy or our ability to fight back and fix things, which is the same as saying we really didn't believe in America. Trump was the only one who did. Trump was right and we were wrong.
It is refreshing that I no longer hear this stuff anymore. Leftists have now accepted that Trump won legitimately for his second term, and no one seems to be doubting that he is the rightful president. Instead it's a lot of "I can't believe people voted for this". But I consider that a lot better then the constant refusal that he is the rightful president, because all of the investigations and doubts really did prevent Trump from fully having the power last time. It was one witch hunt after another, causing everyone left of Jeb Bush to really internalize that it's a virtue to resist Trump on every level. I think the lack of question to his legitimacy this time will make things different this time around, for what it's worth.
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It's worth reflecting on the fact that we all almost saw Trump's head explode on live TV. He was right by about 2 inches.
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Just because the liberals folded doesn’t mean that the Cathedral doesn’t exist. It means precisely that the liberals didn’t want to fight in the ways you mentioned. I’d argue that it’s because they don’t have to. As long as they have control of the university system, NGOs, and the administrative system, the damage that a Trump Presidency can do is limited and temporary.
Every student leaving a university has been trained to support DEI and redistribution of wealth. They’ve been trained to be globalist and to be if not atheists, at least very secular. And most of them, even if they don’t agree with that, have to go along with it because the DEI loving HR office won’t tolerate dissent.
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Isn't it a bit early for a triumph?
No, it’s a suovetaurilia.
I love the Motte! Thanks for the word!
Nonsense, this is obviously a Finnish word. Must be something to do with Sauna.
Ha, no doubt.
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It genuinely does look a bit Finnish, I was momentarily confused when looking at it. "Suo" means swamp, at least.
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I was pleasantly surprised to see so many doomers here issuing mea culpas on election night and admitting that if the 2024 election wasn't rigged, the 2020 one probably wasn't either.
Who flipped? I am convinced there were attempts to steal both, and there always has been from major urban metros my whole life. But that kind of steal is only so effective. AND it can be stopped/mitigated. Look at what has happened to Miami-Dade county with DeSantis' reforms and oversight. The number of suspicious ballots dropped precipitously and the Democrat advantage dropped by an equivalent amount, often reversing.
Run the Florida model in a few other big swing states and nationwide Democrats have no chance as far as I can tell.
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People were pissed about 2020 shenanigans, and there was a lot of actual organisation to prevent another steal. In addition, Biden administration was a catastrophe so stealing this one would have been harder. Also, how much did democrats spend on various get out the vote efforts this time?
If you still believe that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 wasn't, I would like to see some evidence in support of the former claim. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence thereof.
This has been talked over and over and over and fucking over and I'm beyond tired of it. So I'll be brief.
the absolute hysterics about the suggestion of voter ID. You'd get laughed out of the room in Europe for even suggesting elections can be secure without, at least, state issued photo ID.
the inherent untrustworthiness of mail-in voting
motor voter laws in illegal heavy state that opt-in people by default ? You joking.
the various vote dump anomalies, batches of ballots that were 99% or even 100% pro Biden, the fact there's a wide delta between when counties report votes, allowing for fraud.. ... you can go back to these discussions and read it again.
In short, unless you insist on strict, EU style or even stricter measures for running elections you are not a serious person. Your country is falling apart and the one thing you should all insist on is elections that are as secure as possible. Yet here you are, no doubt almost certainly opposing Florida-style measures. (seems to take it most seriously from what little I've researched)
This post is one I agree with:
Is your argument that all of these vulnerabilities were addressed in between 2020 and 2024, which is why Trump got in in 2024 and not 2020?
My argument is that it's some combo of
-enough of them were addressed and that also
-Biden was so horrifically bad and the democrat party such a trainwreck that it's entirely possible they also failed to organise the steal properly.
Still, a lot of work to be done before people from countries where elections aren't disbelieved but simply annulled (when result is not pro-American enough) can look at yours and say "seems to be ran in a sensible manner".
If Trump had won in 2020, what would your conclusion have been?
Do you think Trump was elected legitimately in 2016?
This is like "if the evidence still pointed to this suspect, but he didn't do it, what would you conclude?"
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It's not "evidence", exactly, but having stayed up all night on Election Night 2024, I was getting text messages from my Biden-supporting friends and family members basically throwing in the towel and saying congratulations. Then at midnight or so, when all the major swing states stopped counting because poll workers "needed to sleep", I thought it really strange that all these states in different time zones decided that at the same time. Then when the 4am ballot dumps came in (what happened to sleep?), and I saw every predictor index go from 95%+ Trump to Biden, I was forever convinced that it was a rigged election.
Too many inexplicable abnormalities. There were some significant statistical anomalies that came out later to confirm my suspicions, but they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.
How convenient.
it's hard to believe you are being genuine or engaging in good faith here
I'm sorry, but "there would be hard evidence to support my claim, but They have suppressed it" is what you say when you have nothing. It is the first port of call for every paranoid conspiracy theorist who arrived at their conclusion first, went looking for evidence to support it and came up short. To which I say: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I also don't know what you mean by "genuine". I genuinely don't believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. I genuinely haven't seen any evidence that I found remotely persuasive.
a charitable reading of the above users post is the evidence did exist, it existed on the internet, but he cannot find it using the typical indexing sites like google
there is ample evidence of google doing this with basic searches, e.g., election fraud or vaccine safety now return 100+ pages of the exact opposite of whatever phrase the searcher is looking for
there is ample evidence of these sites delisting and deboosting sites which had this information, there is ample evidence of posts being censored across all social media sites in the wake of the election, including an entire denial of service attack against Parler by their web host (AWS) which destroyed the competitor
being genuine means when you ask someone a specific question or for specific evidence, you're asking the question because you want engage in a dialogue as opposed to it being a rhetorical tactic to win some argument on the internet or through attrition whereby you, who have expended exactly zero effort here but have set yourself up as some arbiter of truth, demand others expend lots of effort to move you
when a user responds to someone else's genuine explanation with something like "how convenient" or "hyuk hyuk that's what I thought," it's the later as opposed to the former
this sort of behavior is cancerous to a discussion forum and should be sanctioned
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Just the narrow vote margin alone suggests 2020 was more likely to be stolen than 2024 (although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)
The plurality of voters cast votes in favor of Gore in sufficient states to pass 270 electoral votes, and yet Gore did not get 270 electoral votes or become president. "Stolen" seems like an accurate descriptor.
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I agree that this question should definitely be asked here. The dissident right doomerism (which mirrors the 2016 Sanders whining) reminds me of my black/white thinking depressive episodes. It's a kind of justification, not a logical argument. What the right wants to do, just like what Sanders wanted to do, is difficult. Being an outsider is difficult. It is a political miracle for Trump-aligned right-wingers that Trump is electable, when every historical precedent would suggest otherwise. There will probably never be anyone like him in our lifetimes. The fact that he closely lost an election to a former Democrat Vice President under a fairly popular administration should not cause people to spiral so hard. It's an emotional reaction to a very normal possibility that your preferred outsider candidate can lose.
I happen to strongly believe that the election was not stolen, but I imagine that the people here who do also want to live in a high-trust society. My question for those people is, what does it mean if you're wrong about the election? If you learned for a fact the election wasn't stolen, and you had been shouting otherwise, you'd be forced to consider how you contributed towards lowering societal trust by lowering its faith in our democratic process unnecessarily. It's been totally reckless for the right-wing to jump on this boat with so little meaningful evidence. For all I hear about high-trust societies here, that aspect of things, the fact that the right-wing very loudly questioned an election that was very likely totally fine, seems to me to have massively increased distrust. And again, if they're wrong, then what was it all for?
I personally can't answer this, because I've always believed that none of the POTUS elections in my lifetime were stolen, 2016, 2020, 2024, and heck, even 2000. But there's a big leap in logic here in your statement. Let's posit that I'm correct that the 2020 election wasn't stolen; this doesn't imply that there was no good reason to believe that it was stolen. Sadly, our world isn't a clean and easily legible one, and it is often the case that there are many good reasons to believe things that turn out to be false. As such, it can be entirely reasonable to believe that questioning the election was necessary, even if it resulted in lowering our faith in our democratic process. Given that, it also appears to me that the reaction to the questioning was the actual point of lowering faith in our democratic process.
So the question actually hinges on whether it was reasonable to believe at the time that any of these elections were stolen, rather than whether it was the actual case that they were stolen.
I think that's a fair point, I could probably have targeted my critique more precisely. You could make a parallel to the "russia hoax" where Trump made it very much appear that he was a Russian asset, moreso than he really was. How much do we blame Democrats for going rabid because of that? I think ideally the democrat media would have been more measured and patient, and the temperature on everything could have stayed more reasonable while the professionals did there work, and I think an honest Democrat who engaged in any over-the-top accusations would reflect on that behavior as ultimately net-negative.
It is possible that bad behavior is so obvious that the rabble rousing is correct, but I should have clarified my point which is that when it is a failure, like it is here, those who were in the thick of it should acknowledge it, and move towards acting with more prudence if they realize the evidence wasn't quite so open and shut as they thought. If what I believe is true, then a very large amount of social trust was lost with little provocation from the party that supposedly highly values social trust. That party should reflect on that if it's being honest with itself.
This is really the issue to me. The institution that has positioned itself as the arbiter of partisan agreements no longer does their job with any commitment to the truth.
The reason there are so many unanswered questions about seemingly suspicious behaviors on election night 2020, is that there was never a good-faith effort to investigate those questions. If election skeptics thought something fishy happened at a vote counting center after observers were sent away, the reporting on such a claim amounted to "The people counting the votes said 'No, nothing fishy happened.' Therefore, it was the fairest and most secure election in history." Narrative buy-in won over actual investigating, which was never going to convince the skeptics and only pander to those who wanted the skeptics to be wrong regardless of the truth.
I agree that the mainstream media environment is not trustworthy and I don't go for them for unvarnished truth. But again I think there's a good comparison on the other side, so many on the left believe that Trump can never be right about anything, so they believe the opposite of whatever he says, which creates a huge blind spot that ultimately degrades societal trust. It can be a similar problem regarding what the right believes about mainstream media.
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If I learned for a fact that it had zero effect on the election, I would still not regret mentioning to people that I think it's very bad that the clerks of the two largest counties in Wisconsin encouraged people to lie on election forms to avoid providing identification and a large number of people did exactly that. I can imagine this washing out to zero actual difference, but it's still very bad and I'm not the one bringing social trust down by noticing that. Even if this (and the million and one other examples of violations of clear law with Covid as justification) had no effect, I would still favor restoring trustworthy elections where people vote in person with identification.
The question is how much noise and populist rage does this justify, and does it justify the language that has enabled people broadly to believe in much more conspiratorial takes under the umbrella of "the election was stolen". For instance I think it is a very good thing that that effect was much more muted after Al Gore lost, and the adults in the room encouraged moving on, at least much more than in this case where believing the election was stolen is a requirement to be a part of the Trump admin.
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I don't know if I'm necessarily That Guy, really... but you know, ahem ahem, cough cough... it does sort of look like one of the two American political factions had certain elements of itself turn on the Jews and was cast down more or less instantly for its trouble. Meanwhile the other faction can have one of its standard-bearers spaz out and look like he's sieg heiling in public and the ADL will run defense for him as long as Israel keeps getting bombs and the campus "anti-semites" get deported.
Just saying. It's not not what happened. No I don't care who 70% of dentists and divorce lawyers voted for.
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Obviously there’s a lot of euphoria happening now, but let’s be serious.
Nothing serious has happened yet that can’t be reversed on Day 1 of the next Democratic administration. If anything, the right has only taught the left that it can go further and faster.
Core things like deporting even a substantial proportion (more than 3m) long term settled illegal immigrants seem extremely unlikely and currently have no viable plan.
Major tensions in the ‘Trump coalition’ between the workers faction and the CEOs faction continue to simmer, the H1B thing is unresolved, the corn lobby vs RFK drama hasn’t even really started yet etc.
A big economic crash could see Trump become extraordinarily unpopular extremely quickly, and in 4 (or fewer) years it could all be over in tears.
The anti-DEI stuff is surface level. When they force every Air Traffic Controller to take an IQ test and fire those below a threshold (and have SCOTUS allow it) to get out of the current hole, then they’ll have started doing something in this area.
This seems like setting the bar impossibly high: 1-3 can't be satisfied by 10 days of performance, 4 applies to any Head of State, and 5 would be an arbitrary policy that very few people want and which those people only want for impure reasons (using an objective test of aptitude for specific job duties, performance on which would presumably correlate with IQ, is one thing; a literal IQ test and a threshold presumed to correspond to minimum acceptable aptitude for specific job duties is another).
So? The obvious conclusion is that there should never be a lot of euphoria after 10 days of performance. It's just too soon.
And points 4 and 5?
I would agree with you on 4 and 5. 4 could affect anyone and 5 is weirdly specific.
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I'm not sure if this was an IQ problem more than it was a labor shortage problem. Even someone motivated and with high IQ might have a problem doing the job of two, lesser IQ people.
Maybe AI can take over air traffic controller duties to help offset labor shortage, but so far I don't see that happening soon.
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Did you watch the post-election interview that Bob Brady gave? (I think this is it: YouTube link) If you thought that 30M votes were going to be stuffed at the last minute, I think the interview reveals a very plausible explanation for why they weren't.
Now, I am not saying that Miss Collins was wrong. But I am saying that watching the interview gave me the strong (and perhaps wrong) vibe that what happened is that Team Kamala was full of noobs and didn't pony up and play with the city machines and as a result the city machines sent a Clear Message about what happened when you go off-script by simply not coughing up votes for Kamala.
Of course, that's not necessarily a conspiracy along the lines of the CIA controlling voting machines via satellite or something. There are shades of conspiratorial interpretations here, ranging from the sinister and illegal "the machines didn't stuff the ballots because the Presidential campaign didn't release cash to them" to the dodgy-but-legal "the machines didn't bother to get out because they weren't adequately compensated by the Presidential campaign for staff time" to the relatively benign "Kamala failed to coordinate with the boots on the ground and as a result they were disorganized." I don't see the need to say any of the more conspiratorial interpretations are correct, but it seems worth at least acknowledging the possibility that city machines are capable of large-scale voter fraud.
But whichever of these explanations is true, it's worth watching the interview because I think it reveals a lot more about how politics and power works than sitting around theorizing about how a shadowy three-letter-organization has ironclad control over our elections.
That suggests that big city Democratic machines are in fact entirely ambivalent about the Democratic Party and progressive politics and only care about getting paid, which again would be a strong point against the “…burgers?” argument on the right that suggests these people Really Do Care a lot about this stuff for reasons that go way beyond financial incentives.
There are different factions on the left, and big city political machines just want to grill at taxpayer expense. They’re not radical activists.
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So, firstly, even people who Really Do Care are unlikely to do their jobs for free. If Kamala comes out and tells her chief-of-staff "sorry but we aren't going to pay you to do your job anymore" and she quits it's not really a dunk to say "wow it seems like the Democrats don't care about social justice and only care about getting paid." Probably they care about both.
But secondly, it does not surprise me that an Irish-Italian Philadelphian born in 1945 is ambivalent about certain aspects of current progressive politics. I doubt he is ambivalent about the Democratic Party; he almost certainly has an intense loyalty to his in-group. But I suspect for Brady and other old-school Democrats (e.g. James Carville) current progressive fixations are tripping them up from doing the real work which, if I had to guess, is winning elections and then using those elections to achieve old-school patronage-style wins in the FDR mold that benefit your allies but also large groups of people – think improving the healthcare or welfare systems, infrastructure improvement, etc. Not to suggest that they don't care about abortion or women's rights or things like that, but for a guy born around the end of World War Two the new gender stuff might not be their top priority.
I think there's a generational (and also different-parts-of-the-coalition) thing here, and if I am recalling the context of the original "...burgers?" comic, the suggestion is that the "...burgers?" people are elite media types that are going to be pushing their agendas with other people's money. I don't think the Bob Bradys of the world were ever really that sort of person, and I think the political world is big enough for both. Currently the GOP coalition is (to overgeneralize) a fusion of Silicon Valley tech elites who care about meritocracy and evangelical true believers who care about abortion – if you find that e.g. Elon Musk cares more about money than pro-life causes it is wrong to suggest that Republicans writ large don't care about the issue of abortion. Similarly, if Bob Brady and his city machine just care about money (which I actually do not think!), it does not mean that there aren't True Believers out there who care much less about the financial incentives.
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure what you're getting at in your initial post. I had the interview on in the background as I was getting ready for work, and it came across more as whining than anything else. He said that they never involved him in the process and the campaign just did their own thing. He also said that the local Democratic committee did what they could. Yeah, I grant that it's a political mistake not to at least talk to the chair of the committee in the biggest city in an important battleground state,but it's hard for me to imagine what he could have actually done. Was there something he wanted to do but needed to coordinate with the campaign? Did he want to offer his sage advice?
If your contention is that the reason Harris lost Pennsylvania is because her campaign didn't play ball with local party leaders and they punished her by not rigging the vote, a look at the actual numbers makes it pretty clear that it isn't the case. Kamala Harris got about 35,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and Trump got about 10,000 more than in 2020. If that difference is solely attributed to ballot box stuffing, it suggests that Brady can manufacture somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 votes. Except Trump lost by 80,000 votes in 2020, and won by 120,000 in 2024. A machine like this could have accounted for, at most, 20% of the difference, if we're as charitable as possible and assume he didn't max out his fraud capabilities in 2020.
Other counties don't help us either. The only other county that can be alleged to have a Democratic Machine akin to Philadelphia's is Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), and Harris and Trump both got about the same number of votes there as they did in 2020. And that's if you take the naive view that there's some monolithic machine because Democrats have won every election since the 1930s. If you were actually paying attention you'd know that the Allegheny County Democratic Committee wasn't exactly a model of functionality heading into 2020, and that the progressive wing of the party had taken over city and county government plus key state and US rep positions. In other words, the people in charge in 2024 were not the same as in 2020, and the new people couldn't credibly be said to be part of any machine. Outside of Philadelphia and Allegheny, you're looking at counties that are either too small or too Republican to have machines. In any event, the most votes you're talking about is a few thousand, and in some places Kamala actually got more votes than Biden.
I think I was trying to answer OP's question – "what's the cope for Trump winning" – with a more sophisticated steelman than "the CIA fell asleep at the hacker remote control button." Now, I never "doomed about the 2024 election" on here – you can go back and look at my posts, I don't think I talked much about it at all, but it's a sort of interesting intellectual exercise to think about, even if I don't personally feel the need to cope.
I would need more evidence than a single interview to contend this (although I will admit that it certainly sprang to mind watching the interview!) I also think that even without any "rigging" the local party machine can make a big difference! Of course, Brady says that he did in fact do his darndest to win the election for Kamala regardless of how poorly he and his team were treated.
I definitely think the Kamala campaign could have used his sage advice. My recollection of the interview was that he says he wanted to coordinate with her campaign, and although the details are a bit unclear I get the impression that it was in resource allocation, probably related to GOTV efforts, and maybe messaging. Now, my assumption is that political machines work on a patronage model (where they receive funding from their patrons for GOTV which they then pass down to their clients and so forth) and Brady's interview – which, as you say, has some whining – sounds to me like what someone would say if they weren't receiving expected allocation of funding from on high. (Of course it is very much in Brady's interests for people to think that he has magical powers to GOTV if they just treat him with enough deference and supply him with adequate funding).
First off, let me say that I really appreciate you bringing the numbers here.
Secondly – yes, and why do you think that was? I definitely think some of it was that voting was easier in 2020. But if you're a political machine, you should be aiming to at least match last year's performance, and they didn't. However, I do think there are non-conspiratorial interpretations for this, though. Besides COVID, it's also true that the city's population is declining – they probably lost upwards of 50,000 people between elections. 2024's voter turnout still didn't match 2020's, but it was very close. All of this – I agree – is consistent with Brady attempting to (and failing) bring home the bacon for Kamala (and again we don't even need to believe in any fraud for this to be the case).
On the other hand, if I don my tinfoil cap and grant the machine 1) very good fraud capabilities, and 2) a decent idea of what the other side's total turnout is going to be, then what I see is that the machine puts in just enough fraud to guarantee a win and for some reason didn't do it here – in Philadelphia they could have turned 70% of the voters instead of 65% and it might only have raised eyebrows in the usual places while bringing in, what, an extra 50,000 votes? That would have gotten them nearly halfway to the win they needed in the state.
TO BE CLEAR, I am not saying I believe this. I'm engaging with the OP – he asked what the cope is for the Trump win, and I'm suggesting one possible cope is that the Kamala campaign failed to play ball with the county campaigns and they reciprocated by failing to bring home the bacon (which frankly seems plausible even if you assume zero fraud). On balance I am inclined to believe that 1) Brady is telling the truth about poor coordination by Team Kamala, and 2) this hurt their GOTV, and 3) Brady would have preferred Biden was the nominee. I think you make a decent case that as much as Brady might prefer for everyone to think otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to tip the balance here (unless you grant the machine really good fraud capability - and from what I've seen actual cases of voter fraud where people have been caught have been box-stuffing, not "I am generating arbitrarily large numbers out of thin air.")
Well, my first question is – do we know that the machine doesn't lend support to county parties outside of its geographic boundaries? My second question is – did you catch the part where Brady suggests that Kamala's failure to coordinate wasn't just with his city, but was nationwide? Obviously PA itself wasn't the deciding factor here in the election, although it was important. Brady's suggesting a nationwide systemic failure to engage with local political machines. That seems to me like something that could be significant – but maybe not enough to tip the balance.
This is a very funny use of charitable, 10/10.
I certainly cop to not paying attention – I don't live in PA, for one thing, so I defer to your superior knowledge of the place or attention-paying skills. In fact, the sausage of political campaigning is fairly opaque to me, so I appreciate being told when I am wrong.
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Senior Dem and non-profit managers being shocked that their interns actually believe all that stuff has been a running theme for the last decade now. And the city machines are the least vulnerable to activist takeover tactics that originated in colleges and are optimized to take over the college-like environments of modern corps and ngos.
I can see an existential battle between the philly turnout machine boss and the 26yo kamela advisor who, like? hit up Beyonce on tiktok? and ofc she's down with the struggle against like fascism and stuff? and sure she'll help us turn out the youth vote?
So now you really are going back to the oft-mocked “it’s just kids on campuses” argument? I mean this seems clearly contradictory. The truth is that the “establishment” or whatever word you want to use for it was not sufficiently threatened by Trump to do everything to prevent him from winning again, the same way they didn’t actually do everything to stop FDR from winning.
You're talking to a different person. But yes, my blackpill take is that they need someone to take the fall for the coming recession, like your pt4 in another post.
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Counterpoint: Trump acheived all this because he followed the Moldbug plan of having a tech CEO bring in a bunch of 20-year-olds to run the executive branch like a startup. Curtis Yarvin is becoming whitepilled as we speak.
This feels like those people who think Yudkowsky is discredited because recursive self-improvement looks a bit different than what he imagined in 2007 or whatever. No one else was even thinking that deeply about AI in 2007.
I will admit to not paying Yudkowsky much attention but recursive self-improvement is an extremely old trope, you don't get any points for talking about that in 2007. Perhaps you were thinking of something specific he expanded on that wasn't mapped out by sci-fi authors before he was born?
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He only got to do that because more people pressed Trump button. That's the central point, if more people had pressed Harris button, Trump wouldn't get to hire or appoint anybody. Yarvin is as turgid and obnoxious to read as usual, but "moral energy" is conveniently unquantifiable.
RWers have spent the past several years LARPing like they were Soviet dissidents living under a regime of red terror when it turned out they actually lived in a liberal democracy that functioned as advertised the whole time.
Yeah, but the American people pressing the button for "right-wing strong man" (as opposed to generic Republican who fakes being CEO of America) is exactly what Yarvin proposed as his solution 15 years ago:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/true-election-practical-option-for-real/
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I agree with this in sentiment. Your main point is substantively correct.
Still, there are various facts that we're learning about how the government operated that suggest on that on the sliding scale between "red terror" and "following the rules", they were at least a smidgen over the line.
For example, sure, if you press one button or another (modulo Congress, which I'm still convinced ought to step up to their role they've seemingly willingly abdicated, but that's another thread) then the government changes priorities and spend money on different things. That's well and good, but it seems like we've been granting millions in tax dollars to left-leaning groups to do left-leaning politics is not quite inside the rules. The button-pressing-winner is emphatically not supposed to be allowed to spend government dollars to convince people to press his button again in 4 years.
Does that mean it's the Soviet gulag? Absolutely not, but nuance is good here and despite the histrionics of the reactionary right, they had some nugget of truth in there.
I agree with, but even in countries which Americans considered at least adjacent to Liberty, and not dictatorships, the people in power can explicitly use the fact that they in power and thus have access to the fiscus, to persuade the masses of the correctness of their political views.
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Do liberal democracies advertise that they'll prosecute whistleblowers reporting on the law being broken by institutions, unless the right candidate is elected? Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought they explicitly advertise the opposite.
Do they advertise that they'll attempt to control people's speech, unless it happens to be in line with who's in power? I was also under the impression that the ad pinky-swore liberal democracy will never do that.
No, but they advertise that if the government is being mean to you, you can go in the booth and press the button next to the name of the guy who says he'll make the government stop being mean to you, and make it be mean to the other guys instead, and if more people press that button then press the other button, the government will stop being mean to you. This is what just happened.
Can you link me to that advertisement? Because I'm pretty sure that they very emphatically don't advertise that, that they actually advertise the opposite, and that this is one of the defining differences between liberal democracies and other systems.
If this is what Mrs. Collins told you, she may be more based than you're giving her credit.
That liberal democracies never employ repression against political opponents, or that their doing so immediately falsifies the premises of liberal democracy? I don't think this is really held by anyone. Certainly I think very few defenders of liberal democracy would argue that, though they may argue that liberal democracies tend to pursue political repression less than countries which aren't liberal democracies, or do so less harshly, both of which I believe are true.
Granted that's my fault for glibly talking about "advertisement" as if there's a CEO of liberal democracy. A more important promise of liberal democracy is that if you don't like the current government, including if you think the current government is ineffective, corrupt, or unfair, you can vote it out, and the government you vote in its place will pursue different policies.
I think "being mean to your political opponents" isn't necessarily repression.
Repealing the EV tax credit is mean to EV manufacturers, but it's absolutely not repression. It's a policy that Congress really could decide either way based on their priorities.
Of course, there is a line where "being mean" crosses over into repression. But there is plenty of space on this side of the line where it's just "we don't support that as a priority". For another example, we don't want to log/drill this federal land (mean to the loggers/drillers) or we do (mean to the conservationists that want to keep it intact). Neither are repression.
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More like "something something rule of law...", and "mumble mumble not a tyranny of the majority". Anyway, if some exceptions are allowed without it disproving the broader point, I don't see why we should dismiss Yarvin wholesale.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression, we're just more subtle about it". If this is what you believe, than you may be more based than you think.
That's not a promise of liberal democracy specifically, all democracies promise that, including illiberal ones (which I am told are a very very bad thing).
It doesn't entirely disprove his whole theory, even though I do think he's wrong. It is a data point against it. He himself admits he's surprised. I threw a jab at Yarvin, but I mostly have in mind actual, concrete predictions that They were so powerful and so well-entrenched, and democracy is such a fraud, that Trump specifically would not be allowed to win.
All political systems engage in repression to some degree. But differences of degree are important. Less is better. The repression experienced by the American right over the past several years has been quite mild compared to even the mildest of twentieth century dictatorships, which is why terminology like "the Regime" (obviously chosen to imply an equivalency between liberal democracies and the various states most people imagine when they hear the word "regime," Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and others) is very silly. I expect Trump will exercise some degree of repression against the left over the next four years as he's promised to do, though it won't be particularly severe by historical standards either. And if the GOP loses in 2028 (or even loses badly in the midterms), it will stop.
I don't consider "illiberal democracy" to be a very useful term. All states have some democratic features. Even the Soviet Union in the 1930s did. All states have some non-democratic features. It's also a matter of degrees, and there are edge cases, but that doesn't mean the distinction between non-democracy and democracy is nonexistent, just like there's a distinction between purple and blue despite the seamless blend.
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Perhaps, as they say, real liberal democracy has never been attempted.
Have you heard anyone in charge of a modern-day country say that? Political repression is what the others are doing; you are just taking appropriate measures against the extraordinary threats the nation is facing.
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He hasn't even been in power for a single month. Let's wait and see what happens. You can't judge a presidency from the first two weeks.
Also Trump has to be one of the most Zionist presidents the US has ever had. He was grand marshal of the salute to Israel, he just passed an executive order on antisemitism.
He just froze aid to everyone except Israel and Egypt (which gets aid due for the sake of Israel). The remaining Adelson is still getting her money's worth. And then there was all the stuff he did in his last term for Israel - exiting the Iran deal, moving diplomatic recognition to Jerusalem...
I don't know how it's possible for the word ZOG to be problematized like it's some crazy, loopy theory when in the case of the US, it's literally true. The US is surely the most Zionist state in the world besides Israel, they send billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, they defend Israel directly with airpower, intel, diplomatic support, buying off Israel's neighbours and pursuing regime change in Israel's enemies.
BDS against Israel is legally penalized in most US states. It's not just Zionism but active anti-anti-Zionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in_the_United_States
If the theory is that the US government is "owned" by a shadowy group of people actively prioritising Israeli concerns over those of the US, that is Elders of Zion level crazy. You can certainly argue that certain policy decisions in actuality have favoured Israel over the US, but in almost all cases those carrying them out thought they were the best for the US.
This is sensationalist. Supporting Israel with modest amounts of airpower (they helped shoot some missiles out of the sky, which I'm sure the Israelis appreciated, but it's not as if the USAF was carrying out airstrikes on Beirut), diplomacy and intel (which the US gets massive amounts of from Israel in return) falls under the general category of the sort of thing you do for a close ally. I'm also not sure what you're getting at by suggesting they're defending Israel by buying off their neighbors. Do you think Jordan or Egypt would attack Israel if not for US aid? And do you think the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan (as the only examples of regime change I can think of) were done primarily for Israel's sake?
Iraq absolutely, Afghanistan no, Syria partially. There is an entire chorus of ex-US officials and politicians who privately and publicly admit that Iraq posed no threat to America (geographically this is quite straightforward) but did pose a threat to Israel. I've posted about this in the past: https://www.themotte.org/post/56/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/5090?context=8#context
And then there is the Israeli 'intel' that spiced up Iraq's WMD program and made the case for an invasion. It's the same kind of intel that Israel constantly produces. Iran has been six months away from nuclear weapons for the last 30 years according to them. This is not useful intelligence!
In what universe is giving Israel free weapons they use to bomb their neighbours good for the US? Make them pay ridiculously high prices like everyone else! Consider the Arab Oil Embargo - helping Israel can be very, very costly. The US economy suffered enormous damage. No level-headed analysis of the pros and cons would come out in favour of giving Israel a huge amount of military aid to replace their losses in a war with the Arabs where the Israelis had basically already come out on top, considering the Arabs have a tonne of oil/leverage and the Israelis have none.
If forcing regime change were evidence of the ZOG being "literally true", we'd have more examples than Iraq (i.e. Lebanon, Iran, Yemen etc). The US wasn't the only country enthusiastically invading Iraq btw - was Tony Blair's government also owned by Zionists?
Israel also buys weapons at high prices from the US. Much of the pressure that Joe Biden was applying to Israel came in the form of withholding deliveries of weapons Israel had already paid for. Like, it's fair to argue the US should provide no aid at all, but this isn't the ZOG.
The US started supporting Israel after their victory in the six-day war showcased their value as a military power in a region broadly aligned with the Soviets. By the time of the oil embargo keeping Israel on their side during the cold war felt like the right bet to decision makers in the US. You may think they were wrong, but that they thought this was the correct choice seems more plausible than that they were being controlled by a shadowy cabal who had between 67 and 73 achieved total control of the government.
How many wars are you asking for? Manipulating a country into invading another country on the other side of the world is just about the biggest show of control you can imagine. It's followed closely by manipulating a country into harassing countries on the other side of the world, which we see with Syria and Iran. And manipulating a country into aiding another country's invasion (in the case of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon). The US doesn't do this for anyone else, America suppressed Britain and France in 1956 while Israel got away scot-free.
The US allies that joined America were there to look like they're contributing (Poland was eager to earn US favour) and there's certainly some Zionist influence too via Murdoch media. It is basically impossible to read a flagship Australian newspaper without hearing about how awful it is that we're not favouring Israel enough. Day in and day out.
There is nothing shadowy about the cabal, it's blatant. Kissinger was right out there in the open sending weapons to Israel. The USS Liberty was immediately swept under the carpet in '67 despite being a very serious military incident. You have all these US officials boasting about how their number one goal is to work with Israel. Pelosi talks about how even if the Capitol were razed, there would still be cooperation with Israel. Trump complains about how Israel used to totally control the US congress and now that control has withered away.
Why did the Arab states turn to the Soviet cause in the first place? Because they wanted weapons to attack Israel with and the US was unwilling to provide them, while the Soviets would.
Yes US politicians seem to think that favouring Israel is the 'correct choice'. Somali-descended US politicians might favour Somalia. Politicians paid by China might find their views on the South China Sea maturing and developing in a certain direction. Islamic politicians might seek more protections for Islam. It doesn't follow that favouring Somalia or China or Islam is good for US interests. AIPAC boasting about 95% of its candidates winning their elections is not necessarily good for US interests.
More than one? (Which I'm very dubious was done primarily, let alone entirely, for Israel's sake, but whatever). If the ZOG was "literally true" (and blatant about it, as you claim later on), then Israel wouldn't have 5-10 hostile regimes surrounding it that haven't been overturned.
If this were the case, they'd do it for Iran, Lebanon etc. Like, if your argument were that the ZOG was in power 2003-2009 the claim that Israel orchestrated the Iraq war would at least be in service of your position, but if they've been pulling the strings since and before, you'd expect them to use that control to deal with their current threats.
So is the claim that the US only has issues with Syria and Iran (which overthrew the US-backed Shah) because Israel keeps dragging them in? But then why would the US not have kept the Israel-friendly Shah in power (the revolution fits comfortably into the supposed ZOG window)? Why would Obama not intervene in Syria after chemical weapons were used? Why would Obama and Biden have been so pro Iran-rapprochement? Etc.
I mean, maybe I'm being autistic and interpreting too literally your earlier claim that
but again, if the position is that all US interests are subordinate to Israeli interests and have been since the mid 20th century, then Israel wouldn't face any threats at all (or at the very least, far fewer). Is what I just described your position, or have I misinterpreted it?
I'll take your word for it. I'd suggest trying a flagship newspaper in the US or UK, where leftist/centrist publications (so most of them) usually consider it awful that the US/UK/whoever isn't favouring Palestine enough.
A blatant cabal would be politicians saying right there in the open that Israel's interests take precedence over the US'. No one says that (Trump's statements sort of come close, but he says all sorts of exaggerated bs). The rest of the stuff you described is mostly standard for allies. If Japan accidentally sank a US warship there wouldn't be an immediate cessation of the alliance. If you asked Pelosi about whether the US would still be allies with the UK if the capital was razed she'd probably say yes.
The Arabs turned to the Soviets for a whole host of reasons, including Arab nationalism/Socialism, anti-colonialism etc. As I understand it the first Soviet arms delivery to Egypt happened in 1955, several years before and orders of magnitude higher in value than the first US military aid to Israel in 1959. So the US wasn't giving military aid to Israel either at the time the Arabs turned to the Soviets.
Yeah that's a fair position, as is debating the value of the Israeli alliance generally (fwiw I think Republicans over-value Israel and Democrats under-value, but that's another discussion) but this seems like the Motte to the Bailey of "everything we do is determined by Israeli interests", which is Israel-derangement-syndrome.
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And yet a supermajority of American Jews voted for the D candidate, like always. The only Jews that vote GOP are observant Orthodox that have very little political influence. Trump and Republicans in general are probably more Zionist than your average secular American Jew.
There are some Republican voters that are less Zionist, they hate big banks, most corporations and want to end animal testing. They are naturalist, and despise asphalt culture and conspicuous consumerism.
They vote r, because have you seen the d. But the r isn't really centered around their core values.
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