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Since the complaints about Trump are growing ever more shrill in Western Europe as well and there’s an increasing level of liberal doomposting about him online, I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events. I guess most of them agree that Hillary should’ve won in 2016 but was undermined by manufactured scandals and whatnot, but I’d put forth the argument that the US culture war was already getting so heated by that point that liberals weren’t going to secure long-term political gains through such a victory. After all, Congress was still going to be majority(?) Republican, and it was always going to be possible for Trump to win the candidacy in 2020.
If we observe what dissident right-wingers describe as the Gramscian long march through the institutions, it’s fair to conclude that the way for liberalism to win is through incremental but irreversible gains, completed while real and potential enemies remain complacent and clueless, distracted all the time by issues that are ultimately irrelevant. Thus the interest of liberals normally isn’t to escalate the culture war, no matter how good it makes them feel about themselves, but to deescalate it, and win small victories without generating too much public hostility and alienation. There’s a time for humiliating your enemies if that’s what you want, but only when they’re fatally weakened and on the ground.
Concluding from this I’d argue that the time to avert the current mess which horrifies the average liberal was in 2012, either through a) not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney, which I guess would have entirely been possible had Obama’s reelection chances not seemed slim, and which wouldn’t have ended up paving the way for someone like Trump b) Romney or someone similar winning the election through not actually being a timid cuck but not being as polarizing as Trump, and ending up governing for one term.
What do you think?
They could've tried not alienating people who basically agreed with them, but thought throwing principles away was gauche? No idea. I wouldn't be here, anyway.
Decade and change was long enough to steer away from the rocks...
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I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets? When is the last time you heard a conversation with coworkers, friends or family about a news story shown on network news or from a large circulation newspaper or magazine? How many kids are now not interested in four years of woke nonsense in the university and opting for trade schools instead? How many are turned off by forced diversity in their workplace?
The future isn’t in those institutions. People get their news and general information from podcasts and blogs or streaming. They choose trade school for job skills and use online MOOCs if they want to get book learning. They’d have to basically retake a completely different set of institutions, except that because the barriers to entry are pretty low and the audience is much more likely to leave if they smell an overt political agenda.
The future is working at the nail factory, watching the barge go down the river, raising chickens in your backyard, getting taken to court for child support, drinking raw milk, refusing to get vaccinated and various other wholesome and natural behaviors...
I see no reason to believe that this is, in fact, the future. That being said, it's a better future by far than some of the alternatives.
How the fuck did turok of all people get filtered
Comments like that one, I suspect.
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@netstack why does the post that @FCfromSSC is replying to just say “filtered” and not show the actual post?
wait how did I get involved here
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It seems I'm subject to some weird shadowban.
no, you're getting hit by the "new user filter". We have to go in and manually approve the posts, but they aren't marked very well so it's easy to miss them in the new comment feed. It's a leftover artifact from the Drama codebase, and the code guys haven't found a way to disable it yet, so it hits people until they get over some threshold of cumulative upvotes. I used to have to fish self-made-human out of it all day. I've just approved all your recent posts and those of two or three other people as well.
@ABigGuy4U, see above.
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I was satirizing the Online Right's poverty fetish.
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Much more than you would think. Its not always the NYT from its website, its a clickthrough from Twitter/Facebook. Its not always CNN, its a CNN clip posted to youtube that autoplayed after the football highlight clip they were watching. But that is the simple stuff. People still watch broadcast TV, particularly for sports. The news-magazines that are on before/after? Heavily biased. The random updates at halftime/quarter? Follow the mainstream narratives. The narrative for large swathes of the population is still set by these legacy outlets. The fact is that is is much easier to live your life that way. It takes a certain amount of dedication to realize the stuff that filters in through to you in the background of your favorite soccer team's games is all lies about the border when you have been listening to said broadcast since you were 10.
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I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.
The post-covid immigration surge would have been smaller because of Trump and the post-covid inflation would also have been smaller because the war in Ukraine would have probably ended through diplomatic means 2 months in. Nevertheless with no immigration platform and a bad economy whoever would have run as a republican candidate in 2024 (Pence? De Santis?) would have lost badly, possibly historically so. And the dem republican would have not been Biden, possibly more radical and capable of running whatever agenda they had for 8 years (or more!) uninterrupted.
Second best would be picking a different date as the presidential debate in 2024. Had Biden not been sunsetting that one fateful day his poll numbers wouldn't have crashed, there wouldn't have been an assassination attempt on Trump and he could have won with a small margin. Then in 2028 Trump would probably have been too old to run again. It really was just a little bit of bad luck.
Its also plausible that 4 more years of aimless Trump would have had the Democrats doubling down on all their worst ideas, just doing them while out of power. Dozens of impeachment attempts instead of 2, relatively focused federal prosecutions. Even more state prosecutions, now of a sitting President. All in trans crazy activism writ large, etc.
All in all, I don't think Trump 2024 is even that much for normie Dems to worry about. Perhaps they lose some percentage of USAID, PEPFAR, etc slush funds permanently and semi-permanently. That reduces their federal dollars advantage from what? 1000-1 to merely 100-1? They also still have all the universities, and ending DEI doesn't mean you are ending funding for higher ed, which is simply funding for leftist propaganda, as a rule. And they still have captured the k-12 teachers and unions, so unless the public ends all public funding for all public education, there is Trillions of taxpayer dollars flowing into Democrat coffers still. You'd need to redirect like 40% of all public funds spent nationwide to get Republican orgs to parity when it comes to slush funding.
Plus you have inherent "get out the vote ;)" advantages baked in.
So the normie Dem that isn't worried is the correct one. Protect a bit of the status quo that you can, keep running milquetoast candidates like Biden that can pretend to be moderate. Perhaps not one who has been senile for 4 years. The institutional advantages are still overwhelmingly in your favor. Carry on, and maybe stop transing the frogs (and the kids).
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I might be one of the more blue-tribe-normie-adjacent person here and I think this is accurate.
Blue, sure, but if UwUers get to call themselves normies now I'm quitting life IRL
UwU
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I appreciate the optimism that Biden just got caught on a singular bad day
He did seem to have better days during the campaign. Obviously a question if that was an 'average day' and the better days were the 99th percentile ones, but also a presidential debate probably not the best place for a person in his situaation.
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I mean, as usual, define "Blue Tribe normie"? I've seen everything from "We should have implemented a complete information control regime in 2014 instead of 2018" to "The Democrat's shouldn't have rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders" to "Revolution now! Get out the guillotines!"
Personally, I'm not sure how the information control regime that existed up until Elon bought Twitter would have prevented an "Elon buys Twitter" type extinction level event, perhaps a bit earlier. Maybe earlier information control could have kept Elon inside a cage of censorship himself. Maybe with a 4 year head start they could have convinced him that sterilizing and mutilating one of his kids in California is actually great. I can't completely rule it out. Maybe after Trump is denied the presidency in 2016, having never been President, a focused DOJ could have been more effective at destroying him, throwing him Prison, and confiscating all his assets like they Alex Jones. I'm skeptical to all this, but it's a major strain of thought of a lot of "Blue Tribe normies". The only lesson they've taken is they should have done censorship sooner and harder. You need to outlaw the other political party.
I'm more sympathetic to the "Bernie should have won the primary" blue tribe normies. A bit more kind hearted than the MSNBC brained ones above, I find myself more able to have a pleasant conversation with them. I still think they are wrong. I think Bernie's sell out behavior since his loss in 2016 with his conforming to every DNC policy that he previously disagreed with, and generally being feckless to promote his agenda with even the small amount of power he'd been given indicated a Bernie 2016-2020 Presidency would have just been Neoliberalism as normal. We wouldn't see "Open borders are a Koch Brother's Conspiracy" Bernie in the White House, which leaves Republicans their strongest issue, which takes us right back to an information control regime and lawfare to stop a Trump who simply doesn't give up in 2020.
Then you have the "Get out the guillotine" Blue Tribers. I see no flaws in this plan. It's a lesson I've taken to heart.
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I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.
I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.
Is it motte rerun week? A blast through the past of all our most frustrating arguments?
No the outrage wasn't fake, that speech was one of the final chinks in the Obama scales over my eyes that had me believing the propaganda that he was a decent guy not into the partisan bullshit. I'm pretty sure someone else has explained this situation better before, but those small business owners were legitimately outraged and rightly so. 'You didn't build that' is not a misquotation, it is precisely what Obama said, and the idea that he was referring to bridges and roads is at best motte and baileying.
Obama's an erudite guy, if he means bridges and roads or infrastructure he is more than capable of saying those words. He said 'that' because it was punchier, encapsulated all he said previously and because it illustrates his position that people who live in a society owe that society in part for their success. It was also a direct and deliberate attack on one of the red tribe's most important values, that through hard work you can get a better life. And those small business owners were correct to view it as the prelude to an attack on small businesses, because that's exactly what happened.
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Without getting into the weeds here, I think you've slightly misjudged the call of the question. The issue isn't "who started the mudslinging," or even "was the anti-Romney campaign particularly egregious" - instead what is being asked here is "what were the inflection points which activated the Trumpian base sufficiently for him to arise in 2016?" The anti-Romney campaign is one possible answer, regardless of whether the Dem's rhetoric was in part accurate, or if the heat wasn't a substantial change from what came before.
Personally I think the Romney campaign was a lost opportunity, not a Trumpian precursor; Trumpian folks did not get all that excited about Romney; they were the ones boosting Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in the primaries. A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.
Well the "uncalled for" quip does kind of point at a question of who started it, the easiest way to avoid that is to describe the smear campaign sans judgement. I feel like on this site you constantly get reminded of all the reasons why the innocent conservatives just had to rebel against the mean democrat which conveniently ignores how dems felt under his predecessor (and "we hated him too" doesn't quite make up for it)
I meant the "uncalled for" quip to describe that that there was a candidate who very obviously wasn't a racist, sexist, toxic scoundrel but was still denounced as such.
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While I agree that Romney's loss did not polarize anyone, in hindsight I do believe it had a surprising effect of ruining one of the left's most effective memetic attacks.
The DNC ran ran a lot of smear campaigns on Romney in an attempt to alienate the GOP base and activate their own.
Unfortunately, large swaths of the GOP voter base already viewed Romney as a worthless, squishy RINO who's main value was that he probably wouldn't ruin things as fast as Obama would.
On the DNC side, the voters completely believed it, and my hardcore left wing acquaintances genuinely meant it when they called him a "dog murdering polygamy cultist".
This caused two things to happen. The first is that this is probably the start of the DNC voter's hysteria floor moving from 1/10 to 6/10, and that made it considerably harder for leadership to unwind the outrage when it was no longer politically useful. This reached a peak in the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020, but remains a problem even half a decade later.
On the GOP side, it was different. The fact that the current candidate is always some variant of a dog murdering polygamy cultist, while the previous candidate is always a guy who you may not agree with, but you can respect his principles, suddenly become a Noticeable Narrative to the GOP rank and file. Once they Noticed, imthey were memetically inoculated, and immediately responded internally with some variant of "if you're going to call the most milquetoast mother fucker we can possibly find SatanHitler, then why should I believe you about anything at all? Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining".
Then, in 2016, Trump showed up, and suddenly the left could neither dial up their outrage knob enough to be noticeable, nor could they demoralize the right with appeals to respectability.
To me at least, it's a pretty clear trend line to our present circumstances.
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Yeah, none of the trump supporters I know IRL is peeved about the media’s treatment of Romney- but they remember fast and furious, the IRS targeting scandal, Obama’s guns and religion comment, masterpiece cake shop, often the little sisters of the poor, and the Obama executive actions on immigration.
I guess they weren't peeved about it because the very idea that the GOP should run a respectable, sensitive, decent etc. candidate was already such a laughingstock by that point as a consequence of the Romney campaign that it didn't even occur on anyone's radar.
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Don't forget operation choke point.
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I sometimes wonder if the media had been a lot nicer to Jeb Bush, if Donald Trump would never have gained the attention and momentum to win the primary. But Trump caught on with so many voters unhappy with the system and the media. But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election, tough to forsee some other candidate with populist tendencies appearing 2020, 2024, but seeing Trump's success I wonder what would have filled the vacuum.
Trump had high unfavorables and was hammered by the media. I think it's reasonable that a normal Republican (Ted or Jed) could have won after 8 years of Obama, though ultimately with a different voter coalition
Until Trump arrived on the scene, my plan in 2016 was either to vote for Hillary or to stay home. In no circumstance would I ever have voted for a Bush, nor any Republican running on the Bush consensus.
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I think an alternative candidate still gets hammered by negative press, the media paints Obama as a huge positive, and the GOP candidate still plays by pre-Trump rules and cannot overcome those effects.
But "overcoming those effects" is also how Trump won the primary. So youre imagining a world where the press was nice to primary Jeb, but hard on general Jeb. Possible in theory, but is is really more likey than nice in both?
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