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I am not expecting the same level of whining we saw in 2020. One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist. The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged.
They've had eight years of whining (it wasn't fair that he beat Hillary, he must have cheated, the Russians, the Russians! in 2016, coup attempt killing democracy in 2020, law suits, criminal, lock him up! to date) and no sign of stopping yet, why not another four years? It's all being hyped up as "if Trump wins, Fascism now!" so there's somebody out there still outraged and noisy about it.
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This doesn't really seem true. Back in 2016, I wasn't upset about Trump winning the way that other people were, but I did have some pretty significant concerns about what I would have described as a high-variance Presidency. What the hell is this weirdo going to do? I didn't know and thought it was reasonable to be concerned that it would be something actually catastrophic for Americans. And then... pretty much nothing. After a pretty ordinary three years, things were actually looking pretty good heading into 2020 and I figured Trump was probably going to win a fairly easy reelection on the strength of a potent economy and there just generally being not much in the way of actual bad outcomes for Americans or even anything all that radical that anyone could point to.
This is where the narrator voiceover comes in to correct me that 2020 was not in fact a fairly normal year lacking in chaos or bad things for Americans.
I'm really not sure how we got the narrative that the liberals were crying wolf over the bad things Trump was doing, and then an actual catastrophe happened as a result, and somehow you still think they were crying wolf?
Eliminating the people in charge of keeping China honest on containing pandemics only a few months before China proceeds to not even try to contain a pandemic and blatantly lie about it seems like it might be a little related. Sure, they may have failed to contain it if they did try.
To be fair, the more important line of defense would have been keeping China honest on enforcing the rules about live animal markets they implemented after SARS and then stopped enforcing after a few years; I'm having trouble finding a hard timeline on that, but that's definitely primarily Obama's fuck up.
Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research. Changes to regulations around wet markets would have done absolutely nothing to stop the pandemic.
That said, the idea that the US could have done anything whatsoever to keep China honest in this regard is a joke - too many people in the US government had their fingers in this particular pie for them to be able to do anything about it.
Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.
I actually don't have a single source that sums everything up - I'll go looking for one that ties everything up, but unfortunately all the good summaries I have so far carry the kind of undeniable political valence that makes them not terribly effective at convincing regular people.
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My impression was that that wasn't the case: I know there was some series of fairly thorough videos recently that I didn't watch where two sides presented their positions, and the judges ultimately came out in favor of the natural origins hypothesis.
Not certain what I think, though my priors definitely would lean toward lab leak, but I haven't looked at any concrete evidence.
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The catastrophes of 2020 were the Covid freakout and the riots. The left got its way on both things. To the extent that Trump fucked up in 2020, it was in failing to reject the advice of "experts" and failing to listen to Tom Cotton on riots.
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The catastrophe was our Covid response. We could have ignored Covid and been fine, or gotten away with a far more measured response and still been fine.
Yes, trump was president when the Covid response was decided on. But the democrats were demanding even more of the catastrophic policies; maybe if Ted Cruz had won the 2016 election we wouldn’t have high inflation right now, but whatever. Saying ‘Trump caused a catastrophe by doing slightly less of the things we told him to do, and those things turned out to be catastrophic’ is giving yourself too much credit.
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I hope you're right! But I've always viewed the crazy COVID response itself as being because of leftism. I remember the leftists in my life talking about how COVID was Trump's fault and saying they need to take the pandemic response into their own hands. And people did this, making everyone think that COVID was the most serious illness ever that was going to destroy our country, which caused businesses to have everyone work from home because they didn't want to seem like they were uncaring. And before you know it, we had 3 years of lockdowns. I think that if a disease as non-deadly COVID happened 20 years prior, it's possible we wouldn't' have locked down like that, it was maybe only because the leftists had such groundswell power.
That's what I keep thinking, but they keep proving me wrong!
Yes people will be outraged. It’s a motte and bailey. I just think it will be far more muted. You can go on Reddit when you feel like it and post something like Trump isn’t that bad in a bash Trump thread and get downvoted.
I just think it will be 4-5x smaller this time around compared to 2020.
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There were strident Covid responses by both left- and right-wing governments. Few Hungary-loving conservative influencers seem to be familiar with what sort of Covid policies Hungary had, for instance (though it was far from the strictest ones). While Covid policies were polarized into left-right fairly quickly, things were considerably hazier in a host of other countries.
There's a pretty clear reason for this though, right? As dispositions, left and right aren't intrinsically authoritarian or libertarian in nature. In the United States, the broader right tends to be the home of people that are more libertarian-inclined, not uniformly, but to the extent of having guys like Ron Paul (in the older days) and Thomas Massie around.
I do think it's interesting to look around the globe and note that being Covid-insane (or Covid-cautious/Covid-serious if you're not the kind of hater that I am) doesn't really look all that linked to political ideology, but to belief in the power of the state to improve lives through controlling citizens. But really, in the United States, this does look like the sort of thing that will wind up highly left-coded and it's reasonable for Americans to react to their own politics accordingly.
There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.
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Well, the obvious counterexample would be Sweden, ruled at that time by Social Democrats (who had historically based their power specifically on the power of the state to improve lives through controlling citizens), but with a notoriously lax Covid regime compared to most other European countries. (Belarus had a laxer one, but it's also led by a bonafide authoritarian populist who was initially elected as the left candidate and has exploited Soviet nostalgia even more heavily than Putin.)
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