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I don't think it's social undesirability at this point. The main issue a lot of people (myself included) have with Trump is the fact that he is likely to bring about huge systemic instability. Most people who have some vested interest in the current amalgamation of systems and institutions in the US are very reluctant to support the sentiment of "it's all rotten, tear it all down" coming out of the populist right these days. Conservatism used to be about avoiding rapid change due to the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Now it seems to embrace it.
If you interpret that sentiment as reactionary, then I think there's little contradiction. When Reagan campaigned with the slogan of making America great again in 1980, I suppose it resonated with Boomers who basically felt that "America used to be pretty great when I was younger but now it has all gone to shit, can't we like just go back to being normal?!", and when Trump campaigned with the same slogan in 2016 it resonated with many voters for the same reason. It's not about promoting rapid change, at least in their minds, but about radically undoing rapid change.
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It would be nice if critics of "huge systemic instability" had a general theory of what "huge systemic instability" actually consisted of. For an example, weaponizing the federal security services against political opponents seems like something that should be pretty damn destabilizing, but somehow it's never accounted such. Likewise, a coordinated campaign to foment serious racial conflict, culminating in massive outbreaks of organized political violence should probably give one pause. One of the most thoroughly black-pilling moments I can remember is when, during the BLM riots, one of the moderate blue regulars here opined how they just wanted Trump gone so things could calm down.
You changed too much, and now our trajectory is both blind and ballistic. We repeatedly warned you not to do that, and you either ignored or mocked us. You burned the stability, and now you complain that we're not sacrificing our values to replace what you willfully destroyed. Conservatives are realists; they aren't going to pretend that things aren't as they plainly are. Rapid change has been happening for years now, and further rapid change is inevitable. The only question is what the nature of that change is to be, whether some new stable system can be salvaged from the rapidly-disintegrating wreck of our previous construction.
Okay: WWIII is plausible soon, and SJ is able and willing to form a fifth column. So, avoid people that will especially inspire SJ to do this.
Yes, this is spineless pragmatism that rewards their treasonousness. I know. I'm past caring. Hold on for now, root-and-branch later.
The most plausible path I see to WWIII is internal strife boiling over inside America, fatally compromising its ability to enforce the Pax Americana, resulting in a lot of countries lunging for the cheese while the cat's busy dying of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Granting unlimited social and political license to an irrational, irresponsible, and highly aggressive faction of ideological zealots seems like one of the best ways possible to cause internal strife to boil over inside America. Those of us taking the beating can see that you are compromising our values, interests and welfare in a vain effort to secure your own. Why should we not return the favor?
The problem is, crushing SJ would require exactly an escalation of the USA's internal strife. And it's too late to get it done before the mice can lunge; as I've said elsewhere on theMotte and on DSL, I suspect Beijing already is actively pursuing a plan to conquer Taiwan as we speak.
So, my advice: get out of major cities, prep for nuclear war, and let the culture war simmer down. Even with mild prep, you've got a better chance of survival if things simmer down just a little and the USA manages to avoid getting nuked. But if the USA does get nuked anyway and you survive... well, you'll have a far easier time crushing SJ then with half of them literally dead.
It's a shit situation, but that's the best pragmatic course I can see through this foggy old crystal ball. I'm not telling you to full-on bend the knee; I'd much prefer a non-Trump Republican in the White House than I would Biden if and when shit goes down, because Biden's senile. But I don't think going for Trump again is +EV. I can't very well stop you, but that's my advice.
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A Second US Civil War or something close, with the government in shambles, both sides have nukes, at least one side is getting foreign aid and lots of it? Yeah, that could do it.
I don’t think we’d be looking at a second US civil war, I think we’d be looking at balkanization with predictable conflicts to either determine the boundaries of the big players’ SOI’s or adjudicate resource issues previously solved by the federal government(looking at you, California water supply), probably with insurgencies in red areas of blue states.
There might be foreign aid flowing in but you’re not looking at a two-side civil war.
It really depends on the situation. If there's a situation where there are for some reason two equally-officially-potent factions and everyone knows this, sure. But I think it's more likely that you get one faction with the official authority and another faction rejecting it because of some egregious action, and then the good old "traitor" instincts kick in.
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At the risk of sounding a little preachy, I don't think your us vs them mentality is doing you any favors here. I'm not sure what you think my views are, but I'm pretty sure the "you" described above doesn't encapsulate them particularly well. I'm not if favor of moving in the current direction and haven't been in a long time.
I am, however in favor of moving slowly. Despite what you may think, we did not end up in this situation overnight. Institutions have moved away from their traditional roles bit by bit over the last several decades. If we want to reverse any of this with any semblance of our current society intact, the progress is going to be equally slow. Thinking that we can quickly fix anything by tearing institutions apart is just going to make the situation far worse. We'll loose what we still have.
Seems like a big "if". There is nothing left of the law, the constitution or our civil society. Nothing to save, nothing to conserve. Nothing to lose but our chains, as the kids say. We are fast approaching truly epic and colossally dangerous amounts of freedom.
We have lost some function of some important institutions, but if you want to see what total loss looks like, take a look at Somalia for much of the last 30 years. The government functions in a small area around the capital, and everywhere else is run by warlords. There are no functioning institutions at all. Are you genuinely arguing that the US is in this same situation?
There is still a lot that can be lost.
Oh yeah there is, and not much left to stop it being lost.
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I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere. Some situations really are us vs. them. This is one of them.
Seven years ago, the previous iterations of this community were worrying over the insane levels of runaway polarization spreading through every corner of society, and how this needed to be corrected or there would be hell to pay. The problem was not corrected, and now there is hell to pay. An "us vs them" mentality continues to deliver superior predictive power. What benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
Well, it's a shot in the dark, but my guess is that you are a fairly average moderate light-blue Blue Triber, with some serious doubts about the excesses of the Social Justice movement and considerable nostalgia for the 90s-2000s era. I could be wrong, but it seems a reasonable guess. In any case, it is at such "moderates" that the above critique is aimed.
And other people are in favor of moving quickly, and moreover have done so. Results matter. Facts on the ground matter. You have to actually engage with what has happened, and what is likely to happen next. I see no way that "moving slowly" is going to be able to do that.
Sinkholes form over years or decades, but the part where the ground opens up and swallows your house with your entire family inside can happen in seconds. Something building up slowly does not mean it remains slow once it starts rolling.
In any case, I argue frequently that it all goes back to the Enlightenment, so that's three centuries back, give or take. The best estimate I've seen for the tipping point past which the situation became acute is 2014, but one can make arguments for the 90s or the 60s. The historical question is entirely separate from the question of what is happening now, though. And what is happening now is a runaway culture war death spiral, driven by mutually incompatible values. It took a long time for those values to become mutually incompatible, but now that they are, things proceed much more quickly.
It seems unlikely to me that you can unscramble an egg, but it would certainly be amusing to see someone try. What's the nature of the problem, and what would a solution look like, roughly speaking?
If I am forced to choose between all the institutions being captured by my tribal enemies and used to crush my tribe and its values without mercy or recourse on the one hand, and destroying those institutions and probably a lot of other things besides on the other hand, I am going to be heavily in favor of destroying those institutions. Sure, there's value in stalling and hoping for a miracle. Barring that miracle, it is not hard to figure out where things are going. We, Red and Blue collectively, continue to search for better ways to hurt the outgroup without individually getting in too much trouble. Soon or sooner, one will be found and used that our institutions cannot survive, and those institutions consequently won't survive.
Trump is a symptom of this process, not a cause. It doesn't matter whether he loses or wins this next election; the process will continue either way. Nothing he has done or might plausibly do is going to cause "huge systemic instability" outside the bounds of the huge systemic instabilities that are already growing at breakneck pace. If the system were not already completely fucked, people would not be lining up to vote for a geriatric con man.
So it goes.
This line of reasoning suffers from two flaws in my mind. First, scale. This type of indecent is exceedingly rare. I think a very common tactic in modern political debates is to zoom in on a horrific incident, and then imply that this type of even is happening at a national scale. This works because the human mind is bad with intuition/induction at the scale of nation states. That doesn't make it a valid point though.
Secondly, I don't agree with your point about tacit support. In order to tacitly support something, you have to at least be aware of it. The vast majority of people have never heard of these incidents. Admittedly this is a bit of a semantic argument, since you could just as easily say that ignorance is tacit support. But in my mind that should be reserved for situations where someone becomes vaguely aware of a problem but chooses not to pursue it further due to lack of concern.
I suppose that is a reasonable assumption given the forum, but it's a bit off the mark. For the purposes of this discussion, let's say I have some strong traditionalist leanings. I think societies, governments, and cultures are inextricably linked, and they take a long time to evolve an equilibrium. I think that, once an equilibrium is lost, the resulting period of strife is typically pretty horrific. Given the massive technological and social changes that have occurred over the last several decades, I'm not sure that the previous equilibrium can be restored. But I would certainly rather try to do that than forage ahead with creating a new balance completely from scratch, given what the historical precedents for that look like.
I would imagine this is the fundamental difference in our assessment of the situation. You see the sinkhole as already having caved in. I don't. Aside from a palpable amount of discontent and some unsustainable social norms, our society is still functioning. We don't live in a failed state. The amount that we still stand to loose is enormous.
The killing is rare, but then it hardly needs to be common to have serious effects on our society as a whole. Lesser violence was not rare at the time by any means, with over a hundred cities were hit with serious rioting. Harassments and other forms of individual and organized meanness are completely endemic. I cite the killing not because it is typical, but because it was a high-water mark. The events surrounding it show that it is a very, very high mark indeed.
Yes, that is certainly a thing that happens. And sometimes, a single incident is indicative of a larger movement or trend.
That particular murder came just at the end of a nationwide spree of lawless political violence that saw major rioting in over a hundred cities. That wave of violence was intentionally fomented by activists and the press, who systematically lied to the public for years to make it happen. Once the violence started, it was intentionally encouraged by the press, by Blue activist networks, and by officials at the local, state and federal level, who did considerable amounts of work to encourage the violence and protect those committing it from any unpleasant consequences. The Blue public generally went along with it. They did this because they, the Blue public, the activists who spring from them, the press who speak for them, and the politicians they elect to lead them, hate people like me, and believe that harming us in any way they can get away with is obviously a good thing to do. They had not been shy about expressing that hatred previously, and once the riots started, they were not shy about acting on it.
They did so for months, through violence on the street, through greatly intensifying the already considerable harassment and persecution they'd been practicing in workplaces and social spaces for years, through malicious prosecution of those who dissented or attempted to defend themselves, through the multi-layered protection provided to their organized thug cadre and the lawless rioters generally, ranging from an unprecedented campaign of gaslighting and misinformation in the press, to ordering police stand-downs, to open calls for violence, to mass-crowdfunded legal services for those caught victimizing their fellow citizens, to vicious attacks against any authorities who attempted to restore order and any private citizens who attempted effective resistance.
They claimed that a heavily-armed takeover of several blocks of a city was akin to a "street fair", requiring no law enforcement response as the gunmen repeatedly opened fire on pedestrians. Only after a teenager was murdered did they "crack down" by ordering the rioters to disperse, while making zero attempt to identify or detain those responsible for the killing. A handful of activists were given photo-op arrests and then promptly released. One of the shooters was eventually arrested years later, far away. No attempt was made to hold the other shooters, the organizers, the people who committed felonies supplying weapons, or any of the other criminals involved accountable. The officials who let this all happen were not held accountable. The organizations who encouraged and supported it were not held accountable. It simply was not allowed to matter. And that was one incident in one city in a campaign that hit most cities in the country and lasted the better part of a year.
The riots were pretty hard to miss. A fair chunk of the country supported them. People here, reasonable, thoughtful people whom I respected, argued that people like me should accept being beaten by a mob rather than defend ourselves with firearms, since beatings are less lethal than firearms and so are the better outcome. People argued that they were voting for the party fomenting the riots and running cover for them, because things were just too crazy and they wanted them to go back to normal.
...I want to emphasize that none of this is remotely exhaustive. I'm simply throwing out random snippets from the months-long, ceaseless drumbeat.
Every prominent case of armed self-defense against the rioters was immediately prosecuted well beyond any reasonable interpretation of the law, often in a naked attempt to appease those same rioters, sometimes in explicit support of them. Every case was egregiously misreported in the press. Prominent rioter shootings, attempted shootings, and general misuse of firearms to threaten and intimidate were mostly ignored. Little or no effort was made to ID shooters who'd made even the slightest attempt to conceal their identities. Other rioters routinely destroyed evidence. When an arrest could not be avoided, the authorities cut deals whenever possible. And so on, and on and on.
And in the end, they won. The rioting worked. The lies in the press worked. The normies let them do it, and they won the subsequent election, and now they have control of the Federal government. They employed nationwide, lawless political violence to secure their partisan ends, suffered few if any consequences, and profited greatly thereby.
The riots were one instance, of perhaps a half-dozen major violations of the social compact, together with too many lesser violations to count. Blues have been steadily escalating since all this hit its inflection point in 2014. They have shown no indication that they recognize that what they are doing is unacceptable; after all, the public has accepted it, have they not? They do not know how to stop, cannot even conceive that stopping might be necessary. And normies buy their propaganda wholesale, and tell people like me that it's our responsibility to knuckle under and surrender our values and accept unlimited abuse to preserve the peace, because don't you see how much worse it would be otherwise?
Yes, that is in fact my argument, regarding the normies who can't wrap their head around the nature of the problem. Of course, this does not apply to the officials, activists, organizations and entities who did not merely stand silent, but actively worked to make these things happen, and to protect and support those who did so, and actively obstructed all efforts to defend against their actions or hold them accountable after the fact. Violence on the scale and with the duration we saw in 2020-2022 does not happen by accident or through the actions of a few bad apples. It was coordinated, and it relied on institutional support.
Likely so. Perhaps you and the other normies should have done something to keep a lid on things while the Blue Avante-Guard was burning down any hope for a peaceful future. Sadly neither you nor I succeeded in doing so. If you think what has happened can happen, and then we simply all agree to pretend it was all fine and try to go back to normal, you possess a remarkable level of optimism, not least in imagining that they will not do it again, and worse. Sooner or later there will be serious resistance, and all their previous actions show them to be absolutely incapable of restraint. They will continue to escalate long past the point of no return.
The previous "equilibrium" led straight here. There is no point in attempting to restore it, and the common knowledge we now possess makes such a rollback impossible in any case. The social cohesion is gone. The trust is gone. There is no way to get them back. The remaining options appear to be militant separation or fratricide.
If by "caved in", you mean that things have already collapsed, then by no means. Say rather that the US is ~250 years old, and it seems fairly unlikely it will make it to 300 in anything approaching its current form. If it makes it another decade without serious problems, I'll be quite surprised.
The economy is still mostly functional. Coordinated meanness is still limited to somewhat constrained channels; the riots did in fact end. But the existing order rots a little more each day, that rot is accelerating, and most evidence points to it being irreversible. Major portions of our social system no longer perform their intended function to any appreciable degree; prominent examples include the press and our educational institutions. Those that still function, often do so by burning credibility with one or both tribes, and when that credibility is exhausted they will break down or be torn down. I do not believe that either of us will see a properly functioning Presidential election in what remains of our lifetimes, that is to say, a presidential election that actually confers a supermajority perception of legitimacy to the "winner". I think we likely will see the Supreme Court packed within the decade.
You are correct that the amount we still stand to lose is enormous. I believe you are wrong that such loss is avoidable, regardless of what you or I or anyone else does. If it is avoidable, it will be because we managed to stall the problem out long enough for some out-of-context development to reshuffle the political situation sufficiently to defuse it. Asteroid mining or abrupt strong automation leading to post-scarcity could maybe do it. Otherwise this place is fucked.
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I'll cop to ignorance on my part, whose murder does this refer to?
I know I'm not the one being asked, but I suppose the reference is to the murder of Aaron Danielson, but I could be wrong. In a rather strange turn of events, his murderer was in turn shot dead by police later, and as far as I know, this didn't end up being that much of a scandal, as it appeared to be a clear-cut case of an armed suspect not complying with police commands and threatening officers with a firearm. I still think this was one of the most curious turns in the American culture war altogether.
Thank you, that seems to be correct.
The murderer would be lambasted as a caricature of antifa members were he not a real person.
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Probably this. There were crowds of protestors celebrating his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl
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Also, the corruption. Putting in so many completely inexperienced family members, and extracting money (e.g. via forced use of your hotels) is banana republic stuff that weakens all kinds of good things.
I think Trump is an order of magnitude less corrupt than the alternatives on offer from the Democrats or even the other republicans. He's done nothing that even gets close to the ouster of Shokin, let alone the rest.
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This leaves conservatives with few useful tools to counteract rapid change which has already produced its consequences. I need to reread Burke, but I don't think there's anything about conservatism that would preclude modern day versions of an invasion of France to restore the monarchy.
I think there are quite a few tools that are there, but that are not being used. The problem is that for the last several decades, a lot of political attempts have been made to fix cultural problems. Culture, while maybe upstream of politics, is still downstream of economics. If there were ever any real economic efforts made to change culture, I think we'd see some interesting results. Such efforts would have to be sustained and coordinated though. So far that has proved elusive.
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