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Scott's April Links led me to Walt Bismarck's "How the Alt Right won", a fascinating retrospective on a movement now nearly a decade old and six years removed from its slide into irrelevance following Charlottesville. Walt's surprising claim is that the Alt-Right won: identitarian politics, ranging from anti-immigration and desire for traditional gender roles from the "Alt light" to White nationalism, HBD, and skepticism of Israel from the harder "Alt right" are now quasi-mainstream among Republicans.
Walt is mostly incorrect. Certainly many Alt-Right talking points have been taken up by the Dissident Right, but the DR is an online phenomenon. Even now, the median Republican supports Israel, doesn't know what "HBD" stands for, and is only conceptually concerned about illegal immigration. Walt himself seems to have been both mildly blue-pilled and black-pilled following contact with the real world: a steady corporate job and girlfriend mellowed his edgier takes, while his realization that normie Republicans simply don't share the Spencer worldview and had no stomach for activism showed him the futility of full-on White Nationalism.
More compelling is Walt's personal journey and description of the heady year of 2015-2016 and the subsequent reality-check of 2017. While Walt paints with a broad brush, there is much truth in the wave of black-pilled Ron Paul supporters flocking to the hard right, entertaining and promulgating ideas for outside the normal discourse: I was one of them. He captures well the excitement and ethos of 2015-2016. He also captures well the ennui and bitterness following Charlottesville and Doug Jones' senate victory. With Covid throwing a massive wrench in the collective imagination, Walt's essays serves as a good reminder of the rollercoaster ride that was politics in the 2 years between 2015-2017.
Walt chooses to skip over much of 2018-2024. While 2017 was a very bad year (in addition to Charlottesville and Doug Jones, there was McCain sinking the repeal of Obamacare and his subsequent adoration by the left, which was for me personally a massive black pill), 2018-2020 was far better. Trump passed two major pieces of legislation which helped unleash an economy that had been sputtering under Obama. Doug Jones, rather than throwing a wrench, voted for each. 2018 was not the mid-term bloodbath that many feared. The politicized and baseless investigations into Trump made it clear to the median Republican that there was a deep state that was determined to undermine and overthrow Trump. By early 2020 I was cautiously optimistic about the direction of the country.
Then Covid happened. March 2020 to January 2021 was a dark time: the authoritarianism against law-abiding citizens, rioters burning down our cities suffering no prosecution, election laws changed to make "allowance" for Covid, relentless DEI. The intense isolation and frustration of feeling like the only sane person in a world gone mad. I believe this pent-up frustration was partially responsible for the events of January 6th. January 6th itself was a turning point. The harsh crackdown on the rioters when whole cities had burned six months earlier with no reprisal made it clear to the median Republican that there was a deep state that was determined to undermine and overthrow them. The culture war was now existential. And the Right started to put up a fight.
Into the fray stepped Rufo, Desantis, and Lindsay. They were able to identify core leftist ideology and repurposed previously leftist jargon (CRT, DEI) into pejorative labels. Desantis and Rufo put the weight of legislative action against the pervasive left-wing hegemony. Groups such as the National Conservatives, self-described Post-Liberals, and Christian Nationalists started coalescing and providing intellectual leadership for a new Right. X and Substack have allowed for the exchange of ideas that would have been impossible in 2020. Everyone, conservative or not, now sees that the emperor has no clothes. The deep state exists, and is sclerotic and incompetent. Several key victories, mostly through the Supreme Court, have served to shift the legal framework in favor of the Right. The Right isn't just fighting, it is often winning.
Walt is incorrect that the Alt-Right won. But he is correct that it had an important dissident voice that provided a valuable alternative to think-tank Conservatism. The newer leaders on the Right may be more "mature", more "institutional", and only retain a subset of the Alt-Right's objectives, but they owe a debt to the Alt-Right. They no longer need to apologize or throat-clear. They can speak plainly and authoritatively. The battle lines are clear, and the next stage of the fight can now commence.
The alt-right lost in the sense it has been subsumed overtaken by the trad/norm-core right and aesthetic on twitter, especially since 2022. The alt-right became associated with low status behaviors and mannerisms, like LARPing or the archetypical basement-dwelling keyboard warrior, and subsequently fell out of favor. Few things convey low status like neck-bearded neo Nazis bulging out of their uniforms out of breath as they plod down the street (even if this hardly describes every alt-righter, being associated with it hurt the brand badly). It also did not help that its members kept being arrested and its online communities, social media accounts, and payment processing accounts shut down, making it hard to raise funds or coordinate.
Elon's Twitter buyout and restructuring in 2022-2023 made the alt-right less relevant too, as everything became viewed through a woke vs. anti-woke lens. But the alt-right does not as readily fit within the woke vs. anti-woke paradigm, being that it also has intellectual roots in critical theory (e.g. Frankfurt School), fusionism, accelerationism, Durkheim theory and the like. The most popular accounts on post-Elon Twitter are more interested in owning the libs and posting viral clips of societal decay, like shoplifting footage or Apple store looting, than deep intellectual discussion or critique of society.
The norm-core right combines anti-woke and far-right trad values with 'normie' aspects of socialization, hence 'norm-core'. Whereas alt-right sought to subvert or exclude itself from mainstream society, the norm-core reconciles the contradiction between holding anti-woke views but ingratiating oneself and even thriving in a mainstream woke society, like good-paying careers, attentiveness to physical appearance (hence the importance of lifting and gym), civic participation (elections are very important) and family.
The norm-core right also tend to care much more about activism and political participation, in opposite of the alt-right that relies on memetic warfare like anonymous shit posting accounts on 4chan or twitter. The norm-core tend to use real names online and embrace civic participation and the democratic process, like voting for local elections and participation in school boards and meetings. Christianity is also very important, with a 'white pill' message of revival or hope, as opposed to the nihilism, secularism, or paganism of the alt-right. This also contributed to the norm-core being higher status.
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This is not an accurate retelling of economic conditions, but rather is a skewed worldview based on partisan priors. The economy recovered slowly but consistently over Obama's terms, and was quite good towards the end. Trump just caught the tail end of the bull market before it fell off a cliff due to covid. Trump's tax cuts for the rich did little to improve the economy.
While granting that the swiftness of the changes is almost certainly not a product of material changes on the ground, I think the claim that the view of the economy is purely partisan rather than driven by legitimate differences of opinion is doing too much work. People are capable of projecting forward a bit and considering what they think is likely to happen. They're going to be partisan because they have actual policy preferences that drive their partisan voting preferences. When Trump wins, people familiar with him correctly believe that there are about to be corporate tax cuts; Republicans think this is good and Democrats think it is bad, so they answer accordingly. When Biden wins, people familiar with him correctly believe that he'll do things like try to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to people that don't want to pay their student loans; Republicans think this is bad and Democrats think it is good, so they answer accordingly. When people are asked about "the economy" they're certainly answering with vibes rather than trying to do some quick calculus to try to figure out what the current rate of change of GDP per capita is, but I don't think they're obviously wrong in doing so.
People aren't "projecting forward", they're just parroting what their biased media consumption tells them. The fact that 80%+ of Republicans were positive about the economy in 2019, but then <20% of them were positive in 2023 is a pretty good indicator. They'll overwhelmingly point to inflation being disastrous and wiping out peoples' earnings, yet official data shows real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wages are up since then. When confronted with this fact, they'll then give very thin evidence trying to say the official statistics are all made up, even on a relatively more rigorous site like this one.
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Your version might be correct; I don't know, and I'm generally suspicious of all narratives about presidential responsability for economic outcomes.
What I do know is that when Trump was elected, I declined to invest my money in the stock market because I believed mainstream predictions that his election was clearly going to tank the economy, and then distinctly recall watching in some frustration as the stock market boomed and continued to boom.
Time in the market continues to beat timing the market.
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Honestly, you have nobody to blame but yourself for this. I trusted my gut, that cutting corporate taxes would be great for corporate profits, and went all in on the Trump stock market. To say nothing of the deregulation and protectionist trade policies. Any expert claiming otherwise was a naked liar, and I cannot possibly conceive of how anyone could have believed that hokum if they thought critically about it for even a millisecond.
My life’s savings were all earned and invested during the Trump years, and they were substantial and thriving. Then, despite my wage actually rising slightly during the Biden years, I haven’t seen my more recent retirement investments do any better than a local credit union savings account.
That's crazy considering the s&p is up nearly 30% YoY. Hell, even VUSXX is doing better than almost any savings account I've seen (and it has tax benefits too).
Things took a big dip around the start of the Ukraine war, but to judge by my own (small and Canadian-biased) collection of ETFs, have more than bounced back since. It's possible DF sold low and is now faced with the prospect of buying high.
Diamond hands...
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Yes, this is generally the right way to see it. Presidents aren't really responsible for the day-to-day fluctuations of the business cycle. They only really impact things in the long term.
You really shouldn't try to time the stock market, especially if you're persuadable by political trends.
In this case, it was acting on the advice of a super-famous economist.
...I don't really believe in economists any more.
Putting it in an index fund and forgetting about it is almost always the smarter bet, at least for long-term investing. I'd trust Warren Buffett over Paul Krugman any day.
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Never the worst decision, but Paul Krugman in particular stopped being an economist and traded that for being a credentialed political attack dog... probably decades ago at this point. Certainly back in the 2000s he was serving the role of the Certified Economist to tell NYT readers how stupid his political opponents plans were, and how good the Democratic policy was as being based in Science and Facts.
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