As I suspected, I got quite a few unsubscribes due to this article. Most of them came almost immediately after I published the article, so I am confident that none of those readers actually read the article.
If you are that intellectually fragile that you cannot read a differing opinion, then I don't want your subscription anyway. My views are very heterodox and I dislike most ideologies on the Left and Right, but a large portion of social media readers insist on putting me in an ideological box.
I voted for Donald Trump, far more enthusiastic than in the past. Here are my reasons:
1) I hope that this results in "the left" finally rejecting Woke (etc). I reject arguments that "Trump causes wokeness on the left." This was tried in 2020 and failed.
The left lost HUGE in the 1980s and the result was a moderation in the 90s.
Electing Harris, probably the EMBODIMENT of this Vibe, would prevent this from happening.
2) To the extent the left doesn't moderate, I think significant improvements against the radical left can be accomplished via executive order and judicial appointments.
3) I think there is a chance of significantly larger middle class family tax breaks under a Trump admin versus Harris.
I also expect that certain harmful tax breaks like SALT will be on the chopping block in Trump vs Harris.
4) I think the prospects for school choice and school vouchers are much better under Trump vs Harris.
5) I think the prospect of modest tariffs being used for middle class income tax relief are fine. If we called it a VAT instead of a tariff people would fall over themselves to endorse it.
6) I think foreign policy under Trump will be better than Harris.
7) I think that the re-alingment of Silicon Valley leaders to the right would be validated by a Trump win.
8) I think a Trump win would be the end of the trans insanity. I suspect that if he wins we will decide that Elon Musk's kid getting transed my be one of the most consequential outcomes of that movement.
9) I think a Trump administration would allow the Red State and Blue States to do their own thing without interference, and this would allow the marketplace of ideas to allow people to vote with their feet.
10) I think the supreme court will be much better protected under a Trump admin.
11) I have more confidence of Trump allowing the abortion issue to resolve then anyone else on the right.
I would also hope Scott Alexander read this stuff and see what he or his followers find objective,since there are few nonpartisan people with high information,anyway I would still maintain an optimistic future of US either way,other countries have bigger problems
Frankly Scott's election article reads like it was written backwards, i.e., he started with needing to endorse Harris, probably because that's a requirement in this friend circle, and then proceeded to provide the mental gymnastics needed to justify the endorsement.
What amazes me even more are the number of once sensible and moderate Democrats who now stand against everything they believed 20 years ago. And they also claim that neither they nor the party have changed views at all.
Honestly, it really weakens my faith in humanity as I know so many people like that, including family and friends. I think that they are just following the crowd and do not have the moral courage to think for themselves.
Their new beliefs are in many ways the logical conclusion of their old ones:
e.g., they always believed that the poor are victims of "systemic oppression", they've just decided that the Global South is poorer, hence more oppressed, than the American working class,
also the left has supported 'sexual liberation' since the 1960s, they've simply moved to ever more perverted sex acts.
# 26 the prospect of Trump fleeing the country to avoid prison or bankruptcy never crossed my mind, but a nice catch that you at least mention that possibility.
#28 I suspect with his other issues [baggage?] and disavowal by his other family members, RFK Jr. would not have ended up the Dem primary winner, but it was wrong to deny him a fair contest. And if he lost that contest, he still had the option of going Independent.
#29 I live in FL and did not realize that had happened, but I was not watching any Dem party activity and tend to focus on national level rather than state or local news.
And I gather you agree that the bias of the news media and their implicit [if not explicit] coordination on news stories and the Party Narrative is perhaps even more damaging to "our democracy" than the Dem Party leaders' failures and acknowledged or visible actions. Basically part of our "political immune system" is compromised and allows the disease to spread more easily and completely.
The fact that both parties have cowardly avoided any serious discussion of the debt and reforming of entitlements is a major failure all around, and THE major issue [long and short term] from my perspective [border security and immigration reversal being the 2nd]. I need to look it up, but what was the relative contribution to the debt from Trump and Congress [in response to Covid] in 2020 vs. Biden and Congress in 21 to 24? I want to say $1T vs. $5T or $6T off the top of my head. If you have a reference handy, I would appreciate that short cut. :-)
On your section of "The evidence", a great set of "indictments". A few merit further comment or question:
#3 I had not realized so many states had moved to keep Trump off of their ballots, rather than just the 3 or 4 more prominent ones in the news.
#17 the language here is a little confusing to me (sort of a double negative aspect?), but I gather you mean that quarantining and minimizing contact by selective cohorts were quickly recognized as a better policy than wearing masks (where the mask efficacy was always in considerable doubt).
#'s 22, 23, 24 on the 51 intelligence "experts" questioning the Hunter Biden laptop: I see from the comments 12 hours ago that you have read Dan Williams' substack post on the Industrial Censorship Complex, where he takes a more forgiving "benefit of the doubt" view towards those experts' letter/signing; and he seems to ignore your reference to the potential impact for 16% of Dem voters. If you have more to say about the veracity of Williams' posting, I would welcome seeing that (either here or there). He is causing me to question some of my acceptance fo the Shellenbeger et al. story, but he does not seem to strike quite the same level of neutrality that you have.
> I am here to say that “Trump is a threat to Democracy” line is simply a campaign tactic. It is not based on anything more than a visceral dislike of Donald Trump.
No, it's based on the fact that he LITERALLY tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a coup d'etat. I was all "Trump is just funny moron" until learning about the extremes to which Trump went to end the centuries-old American tradition of democratic rule. I retroactively consider "Trump being a rude dipshit means he's a would-be putschist" to be much more plausible than I did at the time, since it accurately predicted the future.
I'm sure consultants say that it wins votes. It also wins votes to mention his shit positions on abortion, the ACA, taxes, social security, and more. That doesn't mean those things aren't true.
If Trump wins, I expect him to use the powers of the Presidency to put his thumb on the scale in 2028, even if the Republican candidate loses. He claimed 2012 was stolen. (He also made similar nonsense claims about the 2016 primaries, the 2016 popular vote, the 2020 election, and will no doubt make them about 2024 no matter the result.) The only election he had Presidential powers during, he used them to attempt to overturn the results of the election, by refusing to send in the National Guard. I expect that specific method to not happen again, but the immunity decision gives him such latitude I'd rather not figure out what his cronies come up with.
Thanks for the reply. I was looking for a more specific and falsifiable prediction.
The closest that I see is "I expect him to use the powers of the Presidency to put his thumb on the scale in 2028, even if the Republican candidate loses."
I really do not see how that would be possible. The President has no real powers in conducting elections. Elections are run at the local level by state governments.
The 1/6/2021 incident was not successful, or a literal coupe d’etat, which is an organized armed takeover by military or insider elites to overthrow an existing government. The president was still Trump at the time, the participants were not organized or armed, and did not succeed at anything other than chaos. Trump instructed the Pentagon to keep the day safe, including by using the national guard but the orders were not followed through. I don’t like Trump, and never voted for him (including today), and the Capitol incident was embarrassing and badly handled, but there is no need to exaggerate.
There is every reason to explain that on January 6, Donald Trump attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. He had previously engaged in a criminal conspiracy (some of his other co-conspirators, such as Lorraine Pellegrino, have already plead) to create seven false slates of electors, with the intent of getting Mike Pence to throw out the results of all seven swing states. When Mike Pence refused, Trump proceeded to send thousands to the Capitol with the intent of pressuring him into giving in. He watched as they beat up cops for three hours, as they chanted "Hang Mike Pence," because he hoped that Mike Pence would yield to the pressure and do what he wanted: throw out the results of the 2020 election.
The whole, "it's not a coup, you need the military for a coup" is so tedious I don't even know why people say it. If I get a bunch of my boys and kidnap key leadership and overthrow a country's government, it's not a coup because I didn't have the military on my side as I do it? Stupid.
Let me try a few predictions concerning a future Trump administration, more to help clarify my own thinking (and reduce my own expectations) than to argue with your post.
1) He will bring staffers on board who are more knowledgeable than those in 2016ff, but with greater loyalty and thus less inclination to question him, even in a devils's adovcate role. He will still have to listen to congressional leaders to achive his agenda, as I don't perceive he has has been truly instrumental in bringing that many other Republican candidates along on his coattails [a few, yes, but not too many?]
2) He/they will move to implement some form of the Schedule F concept that surfaced at the end of 2019, although I read it was in the works legally from 2017, and then shelved due to Covid. But nothing significant will result to restrain the "admin state" and support the "unitary presidency" unless we have a suitably compliant and agreeable House and Senate to truly reform the abuses in the Civil Service Laws [plural? there are more than just one big one, I believe].
3) the border wall with Mexico will be funded and built within 4 to 8 years [presuming a cooperative Congress] but it is uncertain just how much real procedural and law enforcement reform of the immigration laws will result [especially if enough Dems can hang tough].
4) Deporting the 8 to 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants (especially beyond the criminal subset mentioned by Vance) will be very difficult unless a valid and forceful e-Verify program is implemented quickly and thoroughly, to deny work opportunities to most of them. Incentives for self deportation, coupled with "bounty" awards for ID'g suspect individuals and families, might help. Would legal immigrants, naturalized Hispanics, and native born Hispanics "rat out" their fellow ethnic citizens? Hispanics are not a uniform group and do not necessarily favor folks from a different region or country than where they came from.
5) addressing the non-Hispanic illegal immigrants (Chinese, Middle Easterners and potential terrorist Muslims, and others will remain a challenage if they came here explicitly to hide and then formet terror or other mayhem.
Yes, a great post where you ID your preferences up front but still manage to tip toe throught the bipartisan minefield in an objective and neutral way. Of course I have a bias towards the conservative and Republican side, and you are being critical of the Dem Party here. Given the discord between the MAGA and populist group and Never Trumpers and GOPe group in the Republican party, perhaps there is an opportunity for you to explore the foibles and flaws on that side as well.
Your section "This all started long before Trump" brought out an aspect of Democrat Party activity I had not fully appreciated, even as it was happening, given the bias in my news bubble. And long before Trump there were Hitler references to GW Bush and earlier Republican candidates, apparently all the way back to Eisenhower.
I would also add Reagan and Nixon as former Republican presidents who were called "Fascists" by a significant portion of the Left. In past generations, this behavior was largely restricted to the fringe Left, but now it has become standard practice by the entire American Left and the Democratic party.
The same way Republicans would accept the border bill if they thought there was a unique crisis instead of letting the issue so Trump has sth to fight for,the Dems wouldn't aggressively fight DeSantis,calling him worse than Trump-because they thought Trump was a more beatable opponent-if they really thought Trump was a unique threat. I am gonna take a detox from reading 'about the current thing' and focus on more timeless information after election. It is rather addictive and unproductive. I really appreciate your substack your blog and your ability to resist the temptation to speak about popular political stuff.
Trying to follow the "current thing" is exhausting and unproductive, so I do not even try. I know that I could get more subscribers if I did so, but I have not interest.
As I suspected, I got quite a few unsubscribes due to this article. Most of them came almost immediately after I published the article, so I am confident that none of those readers actually read the article.
If you are that intellectually fragile that you cannot read a differing opinion, then I don't want your subscription anyway. My views are very heterodox and I dislike most ideologies on the Left and Right, but a large portion of social media readers insist on putting me in an ideological box.
Your unorthodox views are why I like to read you. It is a perspective I don’t read much.
I voted for Donald Trump, far more enthusiastic than in the past. Here are my reasons:
1) I hope that this results in "the left" finally rejecting Woke (etc). I reject arguments that "Trump causes wokeness on the left." This was tried in 2020 and failed.
The left lost HUGE in the 1980s and the result was a moderation in the 90s.
Electing Harris, probably the EMBODIMENT of this Vibe, would prevent this from happening.
2) To the extent the left doesn't moderate, I think significant improvements against the radical left can be accomplished via executive order and judicial appointments.
3) I think there is a chance of significantly larger middle class family tax breaks under a Trump admin versus Harris.
I also expect that certain harmful tax breaks like SALT will be on the chopping block in Trump vs Harris.
4) I think the prospects for school choice and school vouchers are much better under Trump vs Harris.
5) I think the prospect of modest tariffs being used for middle class income tax relief are fine. If we called it a VAT instead of a tariff people would fall over themselves to endorse it.
6) I think foreign policy under Trump will be better than Harris.
7) I think that the re-alingment of Silicon Valley leaders to the right would be validated by a Trump win.
8) I think a Trump win would be the end of the trans insanity. I suspect that if he wins we will decide that Elon Musk's kid getting transed my be one of the most consequential outcomes of that movement.
9) I think a Trump administration would allow the Red State and Blue States to do their own thing without interference, and this would allow the marketplace of ideas to allow people to vote with their feet.
10) I think the supreme court will be much better protected under a Trump admin.
11) I have more confidence of Trump allowing the abortion issue to resolve then anyone else on the right.
I would also hope Scott Alexander read this stuff and see what he or his followers find objective,since there are few nonpartisan people with high information,anyway I would still maintain an optimistic future of US either way,other countries have bigger problems
Feel free to give him a suggestion!
I am happy to discuss with anyone who does so in a respectful way and stays on topic.
Frankly Scott's election article reads like it was written backwards, i.e., he started with needing to endorse Harris, probably because that's a requirement in this friend circle, and then proceeded to provide the mental gymnastics needed to justify the endorsement.
Yep. There is a lot of that going round, but I guess that it did not work too well.
Thanks for this excellent article.
It's amazing how many people I know who were ardent Democrats and now do not recognise (and are also horrified by) the current party.
It is a truly awful thing, and as awful as Trump is... the dispassionate analysis of the situation makes it clear what you need to do.
The Democrats need to go back to being liberals, and stop being authoritarians.
What amazes me even more are the number of once sensible and moderate Democrats who now stand against everything they believed 20 years ago. And they also claim that neither they nor the party have changed views at all.
Honestly, it really weakens my faith in humanity as I know so many people like that, including family and friends. I think that they are just following the crowd and do not have the moral courage to think for themselves.
Hive Mind is the only way to describe it.
Frankly the Democrats haven't changed that much in 20 years. You're just now seeing them for what they always were.
No, I am talking about people that I know personally. I know for a fact what they believed 20 years ago, and how much their stated views have changed.
It also clearly shows up in opinion polls. White, college-educated Democrats have really changed their beliefs to the Left over the last 20 years.
Their new beliefs are in many ways the logical conclusion of their old ones:
e.g., they always believed that the poor are victims of "systemic oppression", they've just decided that the Global South is poorer, hence more oppressed, than the American working class,
also the left has supported 'sexual liberation' since the 1960s, they've simply moved to ever more perverted sex acts.
You are starting to get way off the topic of the article.
The Democrats haven't been liberal in the classic sense in a century.
# 26 the prospect of Trump fleeing the country to avoid prison or bankruptcy never crossed my mind, but a nice catch that you at least mention that possibility.
#28 I suspect with his other issues [baggage?] and disavowal by his other family members, RFK Jr. would not have ended up the Dem primary winner, but it was wrong to deny him a fair contest. And if he lost that contest, he still had the option of going Independent.
#29 I live in FL and did not realize that had happened, but I was not watching any Dem party activity and tend to focus on national level rather than state or local news.
And I gather you agree that the bias of the news media and their implicit [if not explicit] coordination on news stories and the Party Narrative is perhaps even more damaging to "our democracy" than the Dem Party leaders' failures and acknowledged or visible actions. Basically part of our "political immune system" is compromised and allows the disease to spread more easily and completely.
The fact that both parties have cowardly avoided any serious discussion of the debt and reforming of entitlements is a major failure all around, and THE major issue [long and short term] from my perspective [border security and immigration reversal being the 2nd]. I need to look it up, but what was the relative contribution to the debt from Trump and Congress [in response to Covid] in 2020 vs. Biden and Congress in 21 to 24? I want to say $1T vs. $5T or $6T off the top of my head. If you have a reference handy, I would appreciate that short cut. :-)
I definitely believe that both parties are cowardly for ignoring the federal debt and entitlements. I will write an article on that in the future.
Well the reaction to Romney's infamous 47% comment convinced politicians that the public does not want to hear about the entitlement problem.
On your section of "The evidence", a great set of "indictments". A few merit further comment or question:
#3 I had not realized so many states had moved to keep Trump off of their ballots, rather than just the 3 or 4 more prominent ones in the news.
#17 the language here is a little confusing to me (sort of a double negative aspect?), but I gather you mean that quarantining and minimizing contact by selective cohorts were quickly recognized as a better policy than wearing masks (where the mask efficacy was always in considerable doubt).
#'s 22, 23, 24 on the 51 intelligence "experts" questioning the Hunter Biden laptop: I see from the comments 12 hours ago that you have read Dan Williams' substack post on the Industrial Censorship Complex, where he takes a more forgiving "benefit of the doubt" view towards those experts' letter/signing; and he seems to ignore your reference to the potential impact for 16% of Dem voters. If you have more to say about the veracity of Williams' posting, I would welcome seeing that (either here or there). He is causing me to question some of my acceptance fo the Shellenbeger et al. story, but he does not seem to strike quite the same level of neutrality that you have.
> I am here to say that “Trump is a threat to Democracy” line is simply a campaign tactic. It is not based on anything more than a visceral dislike of Donald Trump.
No, it's based on the fact that he LITERALLY tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a coup d'etat. I was all "Trump is just funny moron" until learning about the extremes to which Trump went to end the centuries-old American tradition of democratic rule. I retroactively consider "Trump being a rude dipshit means he's a would-be putschist" to be much more plausible than I did at the time, since it accurately predicted the future.
I'm sure consultants say that it wins votes. It also wins votes to mention his shit positions on abortion, the ACA, taxes, social security, and more. That doesn't mean those things aren't true.
If Trump wins, I expect him to use the powers of the Presidency to put his thumb on the scale in 2028, even if the Republican candidate loses. He claimed 2012 was stolen. (He also made similar nonsense claims about the 2016 primaries, the 2016 popular vote, the 2020 election, and will no doubt make them about 2024 no matter the result.) The only election he had Presidential powers during, he used them to attempt to overturn the results of the election, by refusing to send in the National Guard. I expect that specific method to not happen again, but the immunity decision gives him such latitude I'd rather not figure out what his cronies come up with.
Thanks for the reply. I was looking for a more specific and falsifiable prediction.
The closest that I see is "I expect him to use the powers of the Presidency to put his thumb on the scale in 2028, even if the Republican candidate loses."
I really do not see how that would be possible. The President has no real powers in conducting elections. Elections are run at the local level by state governments.
Could you be more specific?
The 1/6/2021 incident was not successful, or a literal coupe d’etat, which is an organized armed takeover by military or insider elites to overthrow an existing government. The president was still Trump at the time, the participants were not organized or armed, and did not succeed at anything other than chaos. Trump instructed the Pentagon to keep the day safe, including by using the national guard but the orders were not followed through. I don’t like Trump, and never voted for him (including today), and the Capitol incident was embarrassing and badly handled, but there is no need to exaggerate.
There is every reason to explain that on January 6, Donald Trump attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. He had previously engaged in a criminal conspiracy (some of his other co-conspirators, such as Lorraine Pellegrino, have already plead) to create seven false slates of electors, with the intent of getting Mike Pence to throw out the results of all seven swing states. When Mike Pence refused, Trump proceeded to send thousands to the Capitol with the intent of pressuring him into giving in. He watched as they beat up cops for three hours, as they chanted "Hang Mike Pence," because he hoped that Mike Pence would yield to the pressure and do what he wanted: throw out the results of the 2020 election.
The whole, "it's not a coup, you need the military for a coup" is so tedious I don't even know why people say it. If I get a bunch of my boys and kidnap key leadership and overthrow a country's government, it's not a coup because I didn't have the military on my side as I do it? Stupid.
This article is not about past events, so it is off-topic (a violation of the commenting rules listed at the bottom of the article).
If you want an argument about what happened on Jan 6, take it somewhere else.
I asked for specific, time-bound, and falsifiable predictions within the next 5 years.
Very good list. Lead off with it-- the first part of the post is not nearly as good.
Thanks for the comment. I think if I were to lead off with the list, the target audience would stop reading immediately.
Let me try a few predictions concerning a future Trump administration, more to help clarify my own thinking (and reduce my own expectations) than to argue with your post.
1) He will bring staffers on board who are more knowledgeable than those in 2016ff, but with greater loyalty and thus less inclination to question him, even in a devils's adovcate role. He will still have to listen to congressional leaders to achive his agenda, as I don't perceive he has has been truly instrumental in bringing that many other Republican candidates along on his coattails [a few, yes, but not too many?]
2) He/they will move to implement some form of the Schedule F concept that surfaced at the end of 2019, although I read it was in the works legally from 2017, and then shelved due to Covid. But nothing significant will result to restrain the "admin state" and support the "unitary presidency" unless we have a suitably compliant and agreeable House and Senate to truly reform the abuses in the Civil Service Laws [plural? there are more than just one big one, I believe].
3) the border wall with Mexico will be funded and built within 4 to 8 years [presuming a cooperative Congress] but it is uncertain just how much real procedural and law enforcement reform of the immigration laws will result [especially if enough Dems can hang tough].
4) Deporting the 8 to 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants (especially beyond the criminal subset mentioned by Vance) will be very difficult unless a valid and forceful e-Verify program is implemented quickly and thoroughly, to deny work opportunities to most of them. Incentives for self deportation, coupled with "bounty" awards for ID'g suspect individuals and families, might help. Would legal immigrants, naturalized Hispanics, and native born Hispanics "rat out" their fellow ethnic citizens? Hispanics are not a uniform group and do not necessarily favor folks from a different region or country than where they came from.
5) addressing the non-Hispanic illegal immigrants (Chinese, Middle Easterners and potential terrorist Muslims, and others will remain a challenage if they came here explicitly to hide and then formet terror or other mayhem.
That's enough for me -- time for lunch :-)
Yes, a great post where you ID your preferences up front but still manage to tip toe throught the bipartisan minefield in an objective and neutral way. Of course I have a bias towards the conservative and Republican side, and you are being critical of the Dem Party here. Given the discord between the MAGA and populist group and Never Trumpers and GOPe group in the Republican party, perhaps there is an opportunity for you to explore the foibles and flaws on that side as well.
Your section "This all started long before Trump" brought out an aspect of Democrat Party activity I had not fully appreciated, even as it was happening, given the bias in my news bubble. And long before Trump there were Hitler references to GW Bush and earlier Republican candidates, apparently all the way back to Eisenhower.
I appreciate all your comments.
I would also add Reagan and Nixon as former Republican presidents who were called "Fascists" by a significant portion of the Left. In past generations, this behavior was largely restricted to the fringe Left, but now it has become standard practice by the entire American Left and the Democratic party.
The same way Republicans would accept the border bill if they thought there was a unique crisis instead of letting the issue so Trump has sth to fight for,the Dems wouldn't aggressively fight DeSantis,calling him worse than Trump-because they thought Trump was a more beatable opponent-if they really thought Trump was a unique threat. I am gonna take a detox from reading 'about the current thing' and focus on more timeless information after election. It is rather addictive and unproductive. I really appreciate your substack your blog and your ability to resist the temptation to speak about popular political stuff.
Trying to follow the "current thing" is exhausting and unproductive, so I do not even try. I know that I could get more subscribers if I did so, but I have not interest.
I am glad that you appreciate that approach.