A few weeks ago, I drew up a flowchart to estimate the probability that Trump would establish a dictatorship in the US, which looked, at the time, like an even money bet.
We don’t need to speculate any more. Trump has announced the dictatorship, and there is no sign of effective resistance. The key elements so far include
- Extremists announced for all major positions, with a demand that they be recess appointments, not subject to Senate scrutiny
- A state of emergency from Day 1, with the use of the military against domestic opponents
- Mass deportations, initially of non-citizens and then of “denaturalised” legal immigrants
- A third term (bizarrely, the nervous laughter that greeted this led to it being reported as a joke).
- A comprehensive purge of the army, FBI and civil service
It’s clear that Trump will face no resistance from the Republican party. There’s an outside chance that the Supreme Court will constrain some measures, such as outright suppression of opposition media, but that won’t make much difference.
It’s possible that Trump will overreach in some way, such as carrying out his threat to execute political opponents before the ground is fully prepared. Or, his economic policies may prove so disastrous that even rigged elections can’t be won. But there is no good reason to expect this.
I can’t give any hopeful advice to Americans. The idea of defeating Trump at the next election is an illusion. Although elections may be conducted for some time, the outcome will be predetermined. Street protest might be tolerated, as long as it is harmless, but will be suppressed brutally if it threatens the regime. Legal action will go nowhere, given that the Supreme Court has already authorised any criminal action Trump might take as president.
The models to learn from are those of dissidents in places like China and the Soviet Union. They involve cautious cultivation of an alternative, ready for the opportunity when and if it comes.
The remaining islands of democracy will have some difficult choices to make. I’ll offer some thoughts on Australia, and others may have something to say about their own countries.
For Australia, the easy, and wrong, course of action will be to pretend that nothing has happened. But in reality, we are on our own. Trump is often described as “transactional”, but this carries the implication that having made a deal, he sticks to it. In reality, Trump reneges whenever it suits him, and sometimes just on a whim. If it suits Trump to drag us into a war with China, he will do it. Equally, if he can benefit from leaving us in the lurch, he will do that
Our correct course is to disengage slowly and focus on protecting ourselves. That means a return to the policy of balancing China and the US, now with the recognition that there is nothing to choose between the two in terms of democracy. We need to back out of AUKUS and focus on defending ourselves, with what Sam Roggeveen has called an “echidna” strategy – lots of anti-ship missiles, and the best air defences we can buy, from anyone willing to supply them.
I’ll be happy to be proved wrong on all this.
Note: I’d prefer not to have any post-mortems on what the Democrats did wrong. Any possible lessons won’t be relevant to the future. And a country where only a third of the population is willing to turn up and vote against dictatorship is headed for disaster sooner or later.
{ 189 comments }
Juat an Australian 11.19.24 at 4:24 am
Like, I don’t like Trump, he’s a disagrace, and his appointments are shocking. But talking about executions? You really sound like you’ve lost your mind here. Anyway, he won’t win the next election – look at the guy. He’s already president for life, how long do you think he’s going to be alive for? (or at least, capable of being sufficiently lucid to stay standing up – it’s not long…)
John Q 11.19.24 at 5:44 am
@JaA
You obviously haven’t being paying attention
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trump-milley-execution-incitement-violence/675435/
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/25/trump-expressed-support-hanging-pence-capitol-riot-jan-6-00035117
https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-far-right-supporters-violent-memes/
Alex SL 11.19.24 at 5:56 am
I can’t draw a diagram here, but the future can still play out in a few different ways.
First, all you write becomes true.
Second, a combination of incompetence, overreach, and, as suggested in the post, disastrous economic policies leads to so massive a discrediting of Trumpism that even the Rs have to abandon him and his movement. We will see. I suspect that some of his worst ideas may not be implemented, such as high tariffs on everything, but even the mass deportations will do massive damage to the economy. The problem is, it also occurs to me that some authoritarian cults can demonstrably tolerate enormous economic misery and still stick with the cult leader. And even if this were the outcome, it would only provide a respite of a few years like Biden was, as it isn’t clear what would ever purge the extremism of the Rs. That would only go away if they lose elections, by large margins, for twenty years in a row, and under the US electoral system and media apparatus that will never happen.
Third, Americans are so proud of their republic, the MAGA movement is not centralised enough, and the USA are administratively so complex, that a full dictatorship can never be implemented. Yes, it will be even more difficult than it has been so far for Ds to win at the federal level, and the judiciary becomes increasingly reactionary, but all that happens is a further shift on a gradient where the USA were at any rate already far towards the undemocratic side. (This isn’t “both sides are equally bad”, but it is simply the case that there were already states so badly gerrymandered that the Rs have a house majority in every election despite the majority of the voters preferring a D governor, and the federal senate and the power of the supreme court have long frustrated democracy.) So, this is bad, but if it is on a gradient as opposed to a binary, the country can one day shift back a bit on that gradient. The source of my slight optimism here is that the USA also moved past McCarthyism and Jim Crow laws.
The only thing I know is that what won’t happen is a fourth option, that of an effective opposition developing any time soon. The two-party political system, the internal processes of the Democratic party, and the entire media apparatus appear perfectly designed to make that completely impossible.
And a country where only a third of the population is willing to turn up and vote against dictatorship is headed for disaster sooner or later.
That is the lesson that is relevant for the future, including in other countries. “It cannot happen here” is bollocks, and the belief in constitutional safeguards is naive. If a third of the population wants a dictatorship, you will sooner or later have a dictatorship, no matter what the constitution says or what your electoral system is.
bad Jim 11.19.24 at 6:22 am
There is a general sense that Trump’s cabinet candidates are too incompetent to accomplish much more than the destruction of their respective departments, and it’s been suggested that Gaetz, at least, would be no match for the wiles of his prospective underlings.
The deportation of more than a token number of undocumented workers would be catastrophic for the economy. Entire sectors would cease to function. The bankers who manage my funds acknowledged this when I discussed rebalancing my portfolio last week, and they effectively assumed that this couldn’t happen. Perhaps employment issues are largely controlled at the state level; apparently the use of E-Verify is general in Florida and rare in Texas and California.
It may well be the case that the US will cease for the immediate future to be a reliable ally for democratic states, which would be disastrous, though its no longer being the dominant power would not be an altogether bad thing
Alex SL 11.19.24 at 7:11 am
bad Jim,
Although I also think that not everything that pops into his head actually gets implemented, “they effectively assumed this couldn’t happen” may still be a bit optimistic. I understand no reasonable person assumed Brexit would happen, because they could predict it would make several forms of economic activity unprofitable in the UK and shrink its economy by a few percent. Yet here we are. Many people blithely assume that politicians never do what they promise and then are very surprised when, in reality, most politicians actually try to do what they promised, because they are also humans who have pride and ego.
Chris Bertram 11.19.24 at 9:08 am
I think it is hard to distinguish at this stage between what Trump actually plans to do and performance and bluster aimed at the base. But even if much of this is performance, I would expect a serious rise in political violence aimed at opponents, migrants, marginalized communities. This won’t necessarily be by law enforcement or the military but more likely by militias of various kinds or organized crime, and police investigations will simply go nowhere. It is a tried and tested system in parts of the Americas already and was in operation in the US South until fairly recently. What I think is more uncertain is how much this violence and intimidation extends into states like California or New York and how far Trump himself pursues confrontation there.
MFB 11.19.24 at 9:43 am
? Extremists announced for all major positions, with a demand that they be recess appointments, not subject to Senate scrutiny
Nothing particularly new here.
? A state of emergency from Day 1, with the use of the military against domestic opponents
A similar state of emergency was declared apropos the border in 2019; the Republic survived. Incidentally, Biden declared a state of emergency on the first day of his Presidency. The Republic survived.
? Mass deportations, initially of non-citizens and then of “denaturalised” legal immigrants
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants have been a thing since … well, since the Anglos took over North America, at least.
? A third term (bizarrely, the nervous laughter that greeted this led to it being reported as a joke).
Numerous Presidents in their second terms have joked about “four more years”. This would require the repeal of the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution. It could be done, but is extremely unlikely given Trump’s age.
? A comprehensive purge of the army, FBI and civil service
Overdue in my opinion (not that I’d trust this administration to do it properly) and not at all unusual under the spoils system.
There’s really nothing here. The new Republican government will be ugly, in some ways uglier than the Democratic government, in other ways less ugly (that’s a pretty low bar there). But it’s important not to turn one’s fantasies into an echo-chamber.
fmy 11.19.24 at 10:38 am
the best air defences we can buy, from anyone willing to supply them.
Looking at Ukrayne maybe be careful what and who to buy from. Under a sustained invasion campaign and with sellers having their own priorities, maybe something adequate that can be manufactured locally will end up as useful as the best from elsewhere.
noone1 11.19.24 at 12:22 pm
The two-presidential-terms-limit law is manifestly anti-democratic. Disqualifying popular presidents, for the benefit of establishment figureheads. It would be good to repeal it.
Harry 11.19.24 at 3:18 pm
I have a very tunnel vision about these things, restricted to my area of expertise, education. On the one hand they say they’re going to abolish the Department of Education, which would result in having no leverage at all on education policy; on the other they have announced grand plans and policies that they can only implement by maintaining a Department of Education and giving it a head who is quite capable. (Arne Duncan showed that the DofE can have a huge amount of influence on State policy; Betsy de Vos showed that with someone entirely incapable in charge it can have none at all, however loyal that person is).
I suppose the the outcomes depend on them finding people who are both sufficiently loyal and sufficiently capable to execute the will of the boss, whatever that will may be. And enough continuity to allow for follow-through.
I think JQs analysis probably overestimates both the competence of the likely personnel and the reach of the Federal government. But I could be wrong, and I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about making bets, even if I were generally a betting person which I am definitely not.
Harry 11.19.24 at 3:22 pm
PS, I suppose nominating loyalists who manifestly have no competence at all (Gaetz, Gabbard, that other sleazy chap at Defense whose name I can’t remember) makes me doubt Trump’s seriousness altogether (he does realise that US allies will simply stop sharing intelligence if the head of intelligence is someone who behaves like an asset to hostile foreign powers and can’t keep a secret, doesn’t he? No, maybe he doesn’t).
Douglas K 11.19.24 at 4:21 pm
I tend to John’s analysis.
There will be a great deal of corruption, cruelty and more stupidity. The question is will the stupidity prevent efficient implementations of the cruelty and corruption.
I’d like to appeal to the UN for election observers at future US elections.
From a computer-scientist perspective, we have been running around with hair on fire for some years now. Colorado where I live uses hand-marked paper ballots, the gold standard for voting, with automatic audits. Most of the swing states have computer voting which is unsecurable, and no possibility of audits.
See,
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-ahalderman-062117.pdf
somebody who remembers what comes from the barrel of a gun 11.19.24 at 4:35 pm
they dont need competence – this time they have a full set of steroid-abusing military officers lined up who actually will shoot the civilians. you dont need to worry about democrats if you simply arrest all prominent democrats and send them to guantanamo to be tortured to death as “the enemy within”. remember when andrew sullivan said that if you opposed the iraq war you were a fifth columnist? he finally won the argument
Peter Dorman 11.19.24 at 6:12 pm
I think I have to really disagree with JQ here. From what the historical record has to say about fascism and illiberal “democracy”, there are two barriers to the end-of-democracy scenario. (1) The dismantling of democracy — not only electorally but through the suppression of civil rights and public media — has occurred only in countries with limited democratic experience, i.e. institutionalization. This applies not only to classical fascism, but also countries like Hungary, Turkey, etc. The US has a massive institutionalization of liberal democracy. (The exceptions, like the 100 year reign of terror in the former Confederacy and the post-WWI assault on the Left, I think, illustrate my point by their exceptionality and focus on excludable groups.) To believe that Trump can overcome this, I would have to see scenarios that describe their destruction in concrete particulars. For instance, roundups of opposition figures would have to endure legal challenges, which would still be manifold even below the level of the Supreme Court, and the resistance of law enforcement agencies in blueish parts of the country. (2) The extra-legal threat of authoritarianism requires either a completely supportive military/police apparatus (the golpe tradition in Latin America) or an alliance between supportive elements of that apparatus and paramilitaries to overcome factions loyal to democracy. I worry about this, but so far the paramilitary right in the US strikes me as amateurish and disorganized. In my home state of Oregon, however, I noticed such budding alliances in small town and rural areas during the demonstrations of 2020. It doesn’t look like it has the capacity to scale quickly though.
I anticipate horrible things over the next four years but not, at this moment, a point of no return.
Chip Daniels 11.19.24 at 6:19 pm
Californian here:
Not so fast.
We still hold power in half the states, the wealthiest ones. And we aren’t bereft of tools at our disposal. No, there aren’t any One Weird Tricks to halt him, but his grand schemes all have weaknesses and chokepoints we can exploit.
One, he really isn’t that popular- he didn’t get even majority of the vote, and even that relied on people who as yet aren’t suffering and for whom he is really just an abstraction. We have a good chance to recapture the House in 2026.
Second, we have a lot of tools at our disposal. Most of the grand schemes require a lot of bureaucratic machinery to operate, and there are a number of legal avenues that can obstruct, delay, and divert the objectives.
Yes, even if many of these get ultimately overturned by SCOTUS, the delay is the point. The longer these things drag out, the more the odds that they will simply declare victory and move on to other things.
Finally, the really grand schemes not only require the bureaucratic machinery, but also depend upon the compliance and participation of millions of people. A good comparison is to the Vietnam war, where as the war became less and less popular, the participation by US troops because more reluctant, more sullen, and was eventually a work-to-rule noncompliance.
Remember, the primary goal of Trumpism is to inflict suffering and humiliation upon their hated outgroups. Which means that performative gestures as as good as substance. Think of them re-erecting Confederate memorials or renaming bridges or bathroom bans. Hurtful and insulting, yes, but comparatively low hanging fruit.
I don’t mean to downplay the danger- But the permanent end of democracy will require repeated victories across a wide range of platforms.
John Q 11.19.24 at 7:10 pm
As shown by MFB and no-one, Trump will be getting plenty of support from stupid ultraleftists (see Thälmann).
Peter D. Unfortunately, Trump will have strong support from police, even in blue cities. The Fraternal Order of Police (which was once, I think apolitical) endorsed him as of course have ICE officers.
Mr_Spoon 11.19.24 at 7:32 pm
“Thoughts and Prayers”.
Bob Michaelson 11.19.24 at 7:54 pm
Peter Dorman #14 “The dismantling of democracy has occurred only in countries with limited democratic experience.” Israel now has a fascist government, although it had democratic (if you ignore its Arab population) experience for many decades.
oldster 11.19.24 at 9:01 pm
“…focus on defending ourselves, with what Sam Roggeveen has called an “echidna” strategy….”
The fox knows many thing, the echidna only one — but it’s big.
Of course, Archilochus knew only about European echidnas. Maybe your monotremes are even more resourceful, or even more focused on thorny self-defense.
From a former ally — I wish you luck. Wish us luck, too.
hix 11.19.24 at 9:32 pm
While I am not quite as pessimistic as the op, it still feels bad enough to let chatgpt write happy fantasy stories about Donald Trump instead of an attempt at a real comment:
In the whimsical world of Fluffytown, a realm ruled by logic-defying stuffed animals with hearts full of kindness and minds sharp as needles, a most unusual guest arrived: Donald J. Trump. Alongside him, a collection of Trump-themed teddy bears, complete with his signature orange fluff and improbably tiny paws, rolled into town in a garish, gold-plated wagon emblazoned with the words, “TRUMP COIN – Believe in the Best!”
As he stepped out, Trump began his usual speech. “Hello, hello, everyone! I’ve brought you the most amazing opportunity. Cryptos! Fantastic cryptos, folks! Believe me, nobody knows cryptos like me. You’re gonna make so much money you’ll be tired of winning.”
Nearby, the stuffed animals gathered. Bristle, the hedgehog, muttered under his breath, “Here we go.” Beside him, Honeydrop, the queen bee plushie, buzzed in outrage. “Cryptos? He dares to bring this nonsense here?”
Trump continued, gesticulating grandly, “These TrumpCoins are not like other cryptos. They’re huge. They’re classy. Way better than Bitcoin! Bitcoin’s a disaster, folks. Total mess. But TrumpCoin? Believe me, it’s tremendous.”
Flutter, the dragonfly with a penchant for facts, zipped forward. “Excuse me, Mr. Trump,” she said, brandishing her tablet. “John Quiggin would disagree. Cryptocurrencies are inefficient, environmentally disastrous, and—”
Trump waved her off. “Quiggin? Never heard of him. Probably fake news! Sad!”
Honeydrop, now practically vibrating with indignation, turned to Bristle. “Ready?” she asked.
“Always,” Bristle replied with a resigned sigh. In a swift motion, Honeydrop picked up Bristle, spinning with the grace of an Olympic hammer thrower, and launched him straight at Trump’s face. Bristle’s spiky exterior collided with Trump’s famously coiffed hair.
“Ouch! What is this? Rigged! Totally unfair! I’ve been attacked by a hedgehog—this never happened to Obama!”
The Trump teddy bears, embarrassed by the spectacle, slinked away into the bushes, whispering amongst themselves about how they’d always felt uncomfortable being associated with their namesake.
Honeydrop wasn’t finished. She buzzed right up to Trump’s face, her stinger poised. “You want a big deal? How about my beautiful, big Stachel showing you the way out of here?”
Trump stumbled backward, flailing. “This is terrible! Nobody told me about aggressive bees in Fluffytown! They don’t have this in Mar-a-Lago!”
As Trump retreated, a siren blared. It was the Fluffytown police, led by Chief Snuggles, a no-nonsense panda. “Mr. Trump,” Chief Snuggles said, “you’ve violated several stuffed animal statutes, including Article 7: No scams in Fluffytown. You’re hereby deported.”
Trump, now in full retreat, waved his hands. “You’re making a big mistake, folks. A HUGE mistake. Fluffytown’s gonna miss me. I had big plans, tremendous plans!”
As Trump was escorted to the Fluffytown border, Honeydrop and Bristle watched from a distance.
“Think he learned his lesson?” Honeydrop asked.
“Not a chance,” Bristle replied. “But at least Fluffytown’s safe from TrumpCoin.”
And as the gold-plated wagon disappeared into the horizon, the citizens of Fluffytown returned to their peaceful lives, vowing never again to entertain any schemes involving dubious cryptocurrencies.
Tom Perry 11.19.24 at 9:57 pm
I’ll be happy to be proved wrong on all this.
Then you’ll be happy.
Lee A. Arnold 11.19.24 at 10:42 pm
You must take into account the full dunderheadedness of the typical US voter. For example, on immigration:
Republican Latino voters, and Republican Latino members of the House of Representatives, are ALREADY saying on TV that Trump should deport ONLY the recent Biden arrivals, and let the undocumenteds who’ve been here for decades—working, raising families, paying taxes—stay in their homes. Some US business sectors starting to raise the alarm too: from Newsweek, yesterday: “Donald Trump’s Deportation Plan Causes ‘Panic’ Among Farmers”
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-mass-deportation-farmers-1987371
This may be the next big story in US immigration politics.
Which ought to raise the very next question, even in the dim MAGA noggins: “Well then, what should we do, for the people who can stay? Give them a path to citizenship?”
And thus it is, that MAGA may talk ITSELF into the compromise: more border security, more immigration courts and judges, and a path to citizenship for the people who’ve been caught for decades in the legal limbo created by the US politicians.
Which, we should note, is the EXACT SAME COMPROMISE found in all the comprehensive immigration reform packages offered by the DEMOCRATS, under every President since Clinton: more border security, and more judges, for a path to citizenship. Usually tanked by the extreme rightwing Republicans in the House.
It’s like dealing with children. Most voters cannot think about more than one connection at a time. They have to stumble into the correct answer, by first having their own stupid temper tantrum, and then finding out what a disaster that will be.
(Note: Biden sent his own version of the comprehensive immigration compromise up to the Hill on day two of his Administration. The later, pared down, Senate proposal, headed by Jim Lankford, was of course tanked by Trump himself, to get elected.)
Peter Dorman 11.20.24 at 12:35 am
@18: Israel is an exceptional case in so many ways. Yes, it was a herrenvolk democracy from the outset, but even more crucially, it was based, even before the establishment of the state, on ethnic cleansing of the local population. That set in motion a dynamic of repression that was always unfavorable to democracy and become more so over time. Plus there’s the theocratic aspect: Israel was mostly secular to begin with, but its self-definition as “the country of the Jews” made it vulnerable to religious dogma. Maybe the US had the ethnic cleansing element, depending on the region, into the late 19th century, but not now.
J-D 11.20.24 at 12:54 am
The last time Donald Trump was President, he did not do all the terrible things he had previously announced he was going to do; but he did do some terrible things which he had not previously announced he was going to do. So that’s my expectation for this time around as well.
engels 11.20.24 at 1:06 am
Assuming I can’t say anything critical about Resistance Joe, here’s a less apocalyptic (though still far from happy) vision of the next four years:
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/return-to-washington
Alex SL 11.20.24 at 3:16 am
Both post-mortems of the election and attempts at forecasting the future of Trumpism and American democracy suffer from the fact that Trump wasn’t elected by a single voter who can be interrogated about their specific worldview and rationale. He was elected by tens of millions, and they have many different worldviews and rationales. Any one of the following beliefs or various combinations of them could have been behind their vote:
He will deport all the immigrants, yay!
He said he will end all wars, yay!
He will bomb Iran, yay!
He will provide more support to Israel, so that they can settle Gaza, yay!
He will hurt the people I hate, like those woke university professors and the gays.
He will slap tariffs on everything, and then we will get manufacturing jobs back, yay!
He won’t really do that deportation and tariffs stuff, it would be much to damaging to the USA. He just said that to get elected.
The Democrats are trying to destroy our country, and he will save us from that.
The Democrats are murdering babies, and we need to stop that.
I just want to drink your liberal tears, lolz.
Government needs to be run like a business, and Trump is a business genius. No, I haven’t read about how his previous business ventures turned out, why do you ask?
As an immigrant who is struggling financially, I voted for him in the hopes that he improves the economy. What do you mean, he has certain views on immigrants? No, I never watch the news, why do you ask?
I know, but he doesn’t mean me and my still undocumented parents, he will only go after those other immigrants, the bad ones.
Whether a dictatorship is now fait accompli depends partly on how many people hold which of these beliefs and how they will react to what his government actually does, especially once it starts hurting them directly. The smart move would be to restrict implementation of culture war shibboleths to the symbolic and focus otherwise on making it impossible for Democrats to win future federal elections. Maybe that is what they will do. But looking at the, ahem, intellectual caliber of the president-elect and the cabinet nominations, I kind of doubt that.
Lee A. Arnold,
You may already know, but a different take on what you describe, and one that I find very fitting, is the Shirley Exception. The underlying problem is a persistent failure to understand that heavy-handed rules and political decisions, once in place, can and often will be enforced in ways one doesn’t like, and thus supporting those rules has consequences: We need to make strict rules, because if they are soft, people will take advantage of loopholes. — But here is an example of your strict rules leading to horrific outcomes that you said you do not want. — That won’t happen, because surely there will be an exception in that case. — But you just said you want rules so strict that there aren’t any exceptions!
Once again, Brexit comes to my mind. Many of those who supported it continue to believe to this very day that the decision should not have had any negative consequences, that the UK should have been able to keep all benefits of club membership despite leaving the club, and that that didn’t happen is merely because of civil servants undermining Brexit or the government not having negotiated hard enough. There will presumably soon be many Trump voters who will believe until their dying days that it must be possible to deport ALL immigrants while keeping their nice immigrant hairdresser and not collapsing all sectors of the economy that depend on migrant labour, to raise tariffs on all imports while prices don’t rise and the EU and China remain unable to retaliate, to abolish ObamaCare and still be covered for one’s pre-existing conditions, and that Trump could have just paid off the national debt by firing a few civil servants who do obviously useless stuff (meaning, “stuff I don’t personally understand”). If that doesn’t happen, it was either because he was undermined or because he didn’t try hard enough.
My hope is with those who thought he only said all of that to win and wouldn’t really do any of it.
Suzanne 11.20.24 at 3:43 am
@7: I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump is actually willing to quit after four years, given that the court cases against him have all gone away, his ego has been satisfied by a suitably substantial revenge win, and he’ll be pretty old. Many of the donors who staked him this time may want to move on to JD Vance, who proved to be a effective campaigner after a terrible start and will soon be a heartbeat away from becoming the youngest president in American history. I can see them paying Trump to go away.
@15: My immediate concern is for highly visible groups like the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, all of whom are here legally but as the new border czar recently reminded us, that status can be revoked as soon as the US determines their home country is “safe.” There will be resistance from the Chamber of Commerce side of the GOP, since many of these people are filling jobs long unfilled.
(Be it noted that social services in Springfield have been stretched to their limits and people who could formerly obtain help at local food pantries, for example, have had to go away with much less or nothing because of the influx of new arrivals. Springfield has in recent times been a bastion for Democratic candidates in a red county and Vance lost it by 10 points in 2022. This year it went for Trump for the first time in three cycles.)
I don’t see the Republicans restoring any Confederate monuments. While they may not actually pull any down, they’re happy to avoid fights on the question. Bathroom bans, on the other hand, will probably be very much to the fore.
Raven Onthill 11.20.24 at 6:26 am
With a perspective of 10 days after the election, I don’t think Harris’s loss was a result of anything special. The truth of the matter is that, as history shows, the US system is rotten at picking presidents. Trump is going to focus (he has said) on three things: mass deportations, tariffs, and revenge. The other policies will come from people around him.
The Senate Republicans and the Supreme Court may resist being turned into rubber stamps. The coalition that backs Trump also has enormous internal conflicts: the nationalists, the evangelicals, and the techbros all hate either other. Peter Thiel (vice-President’s Vance’s patron) and Elon Musk (who is trying to install himself in the administration without any formal office) hate each other. So there’s going to be a lot of chaos.
As Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li observes: “actually implementing totalitarianism–aka total state control over all aspects of society–requires an extremely large and efficient bureaucracy, and controlling and maintaining large institutions is itself very difficult” and Trump is an old, probably demented man, who was only ever good at salesmanship. I mean, who goes bankrupt running a casino? There is the possibility that Trump will be shouldered aside by someone more competent. Still, I think it’s going to be more like Mussolini than Hitler or Stalin.
All of which could be quite bad, but perhaps not as bad as you fear.
MisterMr 11.20.24 at 7:10 am
@Peter Dorman
Italy was unified in 1871 as a constitutional monarchy (so more or less democratic) and went fascist in 1922, so 51 years of more or less democracy (women couldn’t vote though).
What is your definition of estabilished democracy?
Ken_L 11.20.24 at 7:25 am
Out of morbid curiosity I revisited the last post I wrote for ‘Road to Surfdom’ back in 2009. I think it holds up pretty well, despite everything we’ve seen since from Labor in government. Edited extracts:
“Until Vietnam, it would have been electoral suicide for any political party in Australia to suggest developing a foreign policy stance independent of the USA. However the Vietnam catastrophe revealed the stupidity of so much US dogma that the way has been open ever since for leaders with vision and the national interest at heart to put us at arm’s length from the increasingly thuggish empire builders across the Pacific. New Zealand has managed to do just that but not us. Gough Whitlam’s government started to do it of course and the Fraser Government did not wholly reverse that direction, but Hawke and Gareth Evans seemed very happy to nestle once again under Washington’s wings and while I’m sure Paul Keating would have taken us in a very different direction, he was not there long enough to make an impact. In any event he seems more concerned to diss the Brits than to question the US alliance.
After 1996 we had 11 years of Howard and Downer with results that are well-known. Once again we are joined hip and thigh to the USA and their struggles are our struggles. Rudd (one tends already to dismiss Stephen Smith as anything but a cipher in foreign policy) has a great opportunity to break the ties and resume a progressive path to an independent foreign policy where we act in our own interests without the over-riding fear that if we offend the USA OMG 1942 will surely come again and this time the yanks won’t come rushing to save our necks!!!
[snip]
“It’s early days and Rudd has sent mixed signals but to date, indications are that he leans towards continued fealty to Washington. As he wrestles with economic crises, he will be increasingly tempted not to buy a fight with the Libs about our ties with the USA, knowing how easily any proposals for change could be misrepresented and exploited by the opposition. Nevertheless he should do it, and progressives who care about the future wellbeing of Australia should keep pressure on him to do it. The United States of America has become much too wilful and amoral an actor in world affairs for us to keep being its best friend forever.”
John Q 11.20.24 at 7:43 am
Engels @25
This analysis starts from the premise that, on issues like deportation, the Trump Administration is beholden to a Republican coalition dominated by business interests. This isn’t true of Trump, and it certainly isn’t true of Steven (sp?) Miller. The problems will only begin when other countries refuse to accept deportees.
J-D 11.20.24 at 7:45 am
Since you mention the comparison:
It’s not the only interpretation of the history of Nazi Germany, but one plausible interpretation is that the leader was never much good at anything except showmanship, that his chief subordinates hated each other and were regularly at odds, that a lot of chaos resulted, and that this contributed to bringing them all down; but after what kind of harm, we know.
J-D 11.20.24 at 7:49 am
Wikipedia tells me it’s Stephen.
bekabot 11.20.24 at 8:57 am
What this post really says (and it’s odd that no one has really responded to it yet) is that Americans who aren’t white nationalists — or who are neither white nor nationalist or who are nationalist but insufficiently white (though I think whites who are insufficiently nationalist may get a pass) — can expect no help from foreigners, whether the foreigners sympathize with them or not.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Tm 11.20.24 at 9:19 am
With respect to Trump, we should both accept that the worst is possible and that nothing is settled yet. There is no atuomatism in any direction. We cannot rely on checks and balances and guardrails to prevent patently unconstitutional stuff – rules and laws are not self-enforcing and Trump’s strength is precisely that he has managed to break the rules with impunity all life long (which btw in my opinion is a big part of his appeal in the eyes of his supporters). At the same time Trump only has the power that is given to him and the opposition is not yet powerless. What must not happen now is that our side rolls over and gives up resistance.
Regarding the “established democracy” argument, I am very skeptical. There is no reason to believe that this Supreme Court has any limits. They already rewrote the constitution to their – and Trump’s – liking in so egregious ways it is hard to argue that there is anything they wouldn’t do. I would also point out that the Weimar Republic, despite many flaws, had quite substantial checks and balances. Like the US, it was a federal state. It had a president who was not a Nazi but rolled over. In the beginning, there were still independent courts. They rolled over. The essential factor was that the conservative establishment did nothing to protect the Republican institutions. The question will be whether the American conservative legal and media and business establishment will act the same way. So far the answer is yes.
wacko 11.20.24 at 9:33 am
Speaking of American presidential decrees, anticipated and already issued. While the fate of those few Haitians who may have to leave Oklahoma and go home to Haiti is of course beyond horrifying, what about (from another Australian!) this minor development: Who Is Authorizing Biden’s Nuclear Brinkmanship While The President’s Brain Is Missing??
lurker 11.20.24 at 1:03 pm
“the “established democracy” argument” Tm, 35
The US could go more in the ‘a republic, not a democracy’ direction but keep the existing constitution and all its trappings. Much easier to do than going full Generalissimo.
“The essential factor was that the conservative establishment did nothing to protect the Republican institutions.”
They never liked the Republican institutions, the Weimar Republic was not their state, it was born of defeat and revolution. I’m not sure the same is true about most Republicans.
Tm 11.20.24 at 1:26 pm
“It’s not the only interpretation of the history of Nazi Germany, but one plausible interpretation is that the leader was never much good at anything except showmanship, that his chief subordinates hated each other and were regularly at odds, that a lot of chaos resulted, and that this contributed to bringing them all down”
Thanks for mentioning this talking point. The Nazi coalition was indeed full of contradictions but that precisely did NOT bring them down. Only full scale military power brought them down. From the moment Hitler took power, observers predicted he wouldn’t last long, the contradictions between Nazi radicals, conservative elites, and business interests would blow his government apart. The Communists (in exile) were especially beholden to wishful thinking and bad at grasping the reality that the Nazi regime was in fact quite stable and successful at consolidating and keeping power. They thought the 1934 “Röhm Putsch” marked the beginning of the end (this time for real!), the opposite was true. They seriously thought the 1935 Saar referendum would show Hitler’s unpopularity (only 9% voted for the status quo).
None of this was preordained, history could have turned out differently. But this is what happened. Learn from history.
MisterMr 11.20.24 at 2:41 pm
@bekabot
What kind of help could/should sympathising foreigners offer?
mw 11.20.24 at 2:46 pm
Tm @35. There is no reason to believe that this Supreme Court has any limits. They already rewrote the constitution to their – and Trump’s – liking in so egregious ways
In his first term, Trump essentially outsourced justice selection to the Federalist Society which meant that he ended up justices who were more libertarian-leaning originalists, than conservative Trump loyalists. Is there any reason to think Bostock v. Clayton County was to Trump’s liking, or McGirt v. Oklahoma? Notably, in both of those landmark cases, the majority opinion was written by Neil Gorsuch. I expect that some of his ‘disloyal’ appointees (particularly Gorsuch) may well rule against Trump if he overreaches (which seems likely).
SamChevre 11.20.24 at 2:52 pm
I’ll register my disagreement with this forecast. I will be surprised if any of the following happen:
1) More prosecutions of political opponents for political activity (including mostly non-violent protesting) than under Biden. (I’m including trespassing, “disrupting government function”, etc, as “mostly non-violent”; I’m excluding riots with large-scale vandalism, setting buildings on fire, and so forth from the “non-violent” category.)
2) Any use of the active-duty military domestically for law enforcement. (I’m excluding the National Guard, which has been used routinely for domestic law enforcement for decades.)
3) Any substantial change to electoral norms (defining “substantial” as “reversing features that are more than a generation old”). Suspending elections, running for a third term as president, attempting to control how Democratic Party primaries are conducted, or anything similar. (I’m excluding something like “changing the Voting Rights Act to prioritize compactness vs racial balance of districts”).
4) Sufficient changes to the military leadership to get back to Clinton-era policies on sex and gender.
5) Sufficient immigration law enforcement to reduce the undocumented + dependent population to Obama-era levels.
Cranky Observer 11.20.24 at 5:20 pm
“attempting to control how Democratic Party primaries are conducted, or anything similar.”
This is already being done. As one example the Missouri Legislature changed the party candidate selection system to provide state elections assistance for caucuses only (Missouri had used primaries for over 100 years). This ensured the selection of DJT on the Republican side but almost made it impossible for the Democratic Party candidate to be selected in an open process – which failure would have allowed the RFK supporters in particular more monkey-wrenching space. The state Democratic Party and a coalition of labor unions funded and pulled together a private primary (Biden 94%) but look for the Republican strategists to deploy new attack vectors every year in this area.
Tm 11.20.24 at 6:15 pm
Sam: The Voting Rights Act is surely more than a generation old and they have thrown it out the window, based on a constitutional principle they just invented on the fly.
mw: the Supreme Court was already terrible in 2020 but since then it has taken a hard turn down the road to fascism. Not just the composition has changed but Roberts clearly radicalized. Absolutely nobody expected the immunity ruling, another constitutional principle that not only has never existed but patently contradicts the letter and spirit of the Republic‘s founding documents. Btw the ruling was very deliberate election interference.
decided to go full Trumpofascist, why would he now pull ba
SamChevre 11.20.24 at 6:44 pm
Cranky Observer at 40
I should clarify: I would be surprised if these happen at the Federal level. None of Massachusetts or California prosecuting anti-abortion protesters more vigorously, Virginia tightening up enforcement of anti-mask laws, state-level redistricting, state-level election law changes, etc are things that I’m intending to register a forecast about.
Adam Hammond 11.20.24 at 7:29 pm
There has not been enough consideration of the Thiel/Vance/silicon valley play here. Why keep Trump himself?
The Trump administration has the balls lined up such that it would be possible (I don’t think it is as easy as the OP) to create a one party autocracy. The risk of failure for that plan is that too many people are hurt too fast and the judiciary and/or military apparatus balks, allowing an election result to interfere.
The biggest source of expanding chaos that might cause a massive re-think from the populace is Trump and his idiots. But HUGE amounts of money were poured into getting Trump elected, and many of the people behind that money are not actually idiots. Vance is positioned to take over, and there are a couple of ways that Trump could be moved aside.
Evidence for this more effective plan is that Trump does indeed stick to wild gestures of power without actually hurting many people with any power. Meanwhile, the administration efficiently remakes the bureaucracy and the military using complex and archaic rules that most folks don’t care about.
If Trump actually threatens Thiel’s autocracy, Vance will become president, and it will no longer matter that he isn’t popular.
mw 11.20.24 at 7:32 pm
TM @43 “Btw the ruling was very deliberate election interference.”
From another perspective, the ruling was intended to prevent election interference by states, giving the voters throughout the country the ability to vote for the candidate of their choice. Nothing says democracy like a ruling party disqualifying the leading opposition candidate. In my opinion, American government will be far more able survive another Trump term than it would have survived successful state level ‘lawfare’ that would have bankrupted, imprisoned and/or disqualified him.
BTW, yet another court decision that may restrain Trump is the striking down of Chevron, which reduces the power of those agencies that will shortly be under his control. In any case, none of the sitting justices have any reason to be deferential to Trump in his second term — there is nothing of consequence that he could do to (or for) them, and the justices he appointed will still be on the court long after he has gone. The one exception would be if Trump picked up the Democratic proposal to expand the size of the court and packed it with new loyalists. That would indeed be terrible, but I think the chances are, fortunately, extremely remote.
Tm 11.20.24 at 7:35 pm
Apologies for the poor editing…
engels 11.20.24 at 8:27 pm
why would he now pull ba
Did they come for TM already? One thing I can’t understand is why Democrats would peacefully hand over power to a fascist dictatorship.
Nathan Lillie 11.20.24 at 9:03 pm
The Trump administration, like Trump himself, are incoherent about what they want and it is hard to know what the effects of the raft of massive, poorly thought out, and inhumane changes will be if they are implemented.
However, it is quite clear that American democracy is over. The Senate might buck Trump a bit from time to time, some of the bureaucracies might put up a temporary fight, or the governors might resist, but most of bulwarks have already fallen. Trump and his people this time around understand that they will need to use violence and violate laws and norms, with all the risks that entails, to accomplish their goals, and they know not to put people in positions where violence is needed, if those people are not ready to use it.
They’ve learned they should dismantle or coerce the regulatory state – what agencies are going to fight Trump after the Department of Education is collectively fired? There will be some people, sure, but most will just hope to keep their jobs.
Many democrats and the media are already falling in line. And Trump is not even in office yet.
Alex SL 11.20.24 at 9:14 pm
Yes, it is astonishing how many things that are discussed as meaning the end of democracy are already realised here and there at the state level of the USA, and nobody does anything about it. At the federal level, the senate and the electoral college have long been designed to give conservatives an advantage to thwart majority preferences. And the supreme court has made absurd decisions that undermine democracy since long before 2016; Citizens United comes to mind.
But also, Rs in those states where it has become impossible for Ds to win do not assassinate political opponents or cancel elections. So, this still seems like the most likely outcome: a republic where the Rs get most of what they want for a generation even if 60% of voters turn against them, but with islands of democratic states and some decisions still not going the R’s way. And crucially, again, the current election is only a larger stride on the exact same slope on which events like Citizens United, the elections of 2000 and 2016, gerrymandering, racial profiling, voter list purges, working class felons being unable to vote while billionaires get away with most crimes, the mass incarceration of black men, making poor people wait to vote for hours while making it illegal to hand them water, and the abuse of executive orders and presidential emergency powers were already steps in the same direction.
J-D 11.21.24 at 7:52 am
The deeper into the ocean you dive, the greater the pressure becomes, but increasing pressure is something human beings can survive–that is, until they can’t.
Alex SL 11.21.24 at 8:16 am
Adam Hammond,
I think you overestimate the competence of nearly everybody involved, including Thiel. Yes, stupid people can and have installed autocracies, but assuming that there is a plan more complex than “scare the voters with fear of foreigners and assaults on their identity to vote against their own economic interests”, “get elected so that I can’t be persecuted any more”, or “get him to make laws that benefit me, like deregulating my business” is probably ambitious. Or if there is, such a plan tends not to survive contact with the messiness of reality for very long, see, e.g., every historical precedent from Cummings grand designs for disrupting UK governance to the conservatives who thought they could use Hitler as a puppet. Not that any of that turned out well, but the point is, right-wing authoritarians tend to be short-sighted and egoistical, otherwise they wouldn’t be right-wing authoritarians.
mw,
Is there any criminality that you think would disqualify somebody from running for office? Is it just that you don’t think corruption and tax fraud are not disqualifying, but you would draw the line at, say, murder?
It is just extremely convenient to say that this should be left to the ballot box in a country so polarised and gerrymandered that the Republicans could nominate the corpse of Bernie Madoff and still expect a decent chance of winning, because it all comes down to a few hundred thousand voters in seven swing states, many of who may see the corpse as the lesser evil compared to the ‘woke baby killers who want to destroy America by forcing everybody to be trans’ they have heard so much about.
As mentioned in my previous comment, there are an estimated over five million US citizens who had their right to vote taken away for having committed some kind of felony. This apparently includes hundreds of thousands of Floridians “disenfranchised only because of outstanding financial obligations”, which can presumably be taken to mean, for being too poor to be able to pay a fine. But that doesn’t happen to the very rich and well connected. They can not only vote, which should be at any rate a basic right, but even have the privilege of running for offices where high moral standards are an absolute requirement for acceptable performance, despite being widely known to be tax dodgers, financial frauds, and/or sex pests. Leave it to the voters! Those who weren’t disenfranchised for being poor, that is.
Tom Perry 11.21.24 at 12:01 pm
You may as well know a right-wing perspective on all this.
The pride and joy of American conservatism is our Constitution. This is not to say that all conservatives are Constitutional scholars, but Americans mostly agree that government should be limited in its powers, with robust protections for political minorities and for individual rights including free speech and association. The underlying concept is that government should be consensual, which is to say a free person would agree that the benefits of being governed outweigh the costs. This is the fundamental difference between conservatives, and left-wingers who subscribe to the Leninist notion that the only legitimate government is one which rules by force, free of all constraint or need for self-justification.
Democracy is essential to consensual governance, but democracy is not sufficient and it’s certainly not sacred. In a sense, democracy is always a scam in that voters can choose between the available options, but they don’t get to choose which options are available. There is always some shadowy element which determines which choices the public is allowed to make. American democracy, like democracy elsewhere, is generally managed in such a way as to restrict the outcomes – along with the public discussion leading to those outcomes – to a very narrow range which the managers find acceptable. Thus we have the concept of “managed democracy”, which Noam Chomsky used to refer to as Manufactured Consent.
Be that as it may, governance in America is at least nominally consensual and in accordance with an explicit contract between the managers and the governed. You might say that government is by contract: the people choose a contractor to govern them, and fire that contractor if government is unsatisfactory. This “contractor” consists not only of elected officials, but the whole of government and even non-governmental institutions such as the media, who are supposed to advocate for the people if there is a dispute.
Now, imagine you hired a contractor to paint your house, and the contractor showed up not with a bucket of paint but with a bucket of gasoline, and burned your house to the ground. You would have reason to be unsatisfied, and your annoyance would only increase if the contractor tried to gaslight you about it:
I didn’t burn your house! Whom are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
Well, okay, I did burn your house a little, but how can you say it’s my problem?
Well, okay, I burned the whole house, and here’s why that’s a good thing!
The American people have lately endured this exact process of wilful destruction followed by three stages of gaslighting, with regard to the following issues:
Iraq and other wars, of which the bumbling multi-billion dollar escalation against Russia is merely the latest
Military readiness and national security generally
Border enforcement
Sahmbolic responses to Covid and other disasters
Energy / economic policy / inflation
Law enforcement / public order
Public schooling and higher “education”
Etc. ad nauseam
There is not a single point of satisfactory performance on any major duty of governance within recent memory, nor has there been any accountability for all these failures. These are not mere peccadilloes; they come with death tolls adding into the millions. Together, these failures presage a civilizational collapse. Democrats and Republicans are about equally complicit, and the gaslighting from Republicans is sickening in its own special way.
Take Fentanyl, which is trafficked in bulk across our southern border. The Sinaloa cartel effectively forbids the sale of Fentanyl in their Mexican home territories, because the drug is too dangerous to the public health. Thus, our Federal government is less diligent in serving the public, than is an explicitly criminal organization. The cartel doesn’t even have a social contract to fulfil, yet they easily outperform our “legitimate” institutions on some of the measures which matter most.
Public order is perhaps the most non-negotiable provision in any social contract. Yet public order was simply allowed to collapse after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, as though that was anything but a one-off. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and many others went from beautiful cities to uninhabitable shitholes, to the accolades of our mainstream media. It is no longer possible to feel secure in public, or to keep a street-level business in those places, up to and including Wal-Mart. Accountability for this failure should rise to the level of criminal sanction, but there is no accountability whatsoever. Tell me again why this is a good thing.
Unlike the left, the right is fractious, with internal squabbling and recrimination being the norm. American conservatives are never likely to present a united political front. But we were forced to agree that the current management is killing the country.
The more thoughtful among us are painfully aware of Donald Trump’s shortcomings. The man is narcissistic, easily flattered, unserious, and only weakly ideological. He has a checkered past. But he has this moment because it is literally impossible to hire a worse contractor that the one we have. To complain that Trump’s team are “unqualified” is hilarious. I mean: compared to what? Even if you take anthropogenic climate change seriously, which I do not, you must admit it is nuts to think that people who can’t manage their way out of a taco shell should be tasked with saving the planet.
Equally ridiculous is the idea that if Trump was somehow put out of the way, everything would go back to normal. What would most likely ensue would be mass bloodshed as the people, deprived of contractual recourse, took matters into their own hands. We should all be grateful for a peaceful election process, but some people aren’t.
Even before the inauguration, the process of throwing the bums out has begun. The gaslighting media have cratered in the ratings, and it’s good that those people will soon be back on the job market, because after the deportations somebody will have to pick the crops and keep the meat-packing plants running. Of course, their only response is to feel just terribly, terribly sorry for themselves. They complain bitterly about the garbage people who put them in this plight, and indulge in fantasies of persecution which will never manifest in real life.
If Trump was a fascist, conservatives wouldn’t vote for him. The mere suggestion would hurt my feelings if it wasn’t so unhinged from reality. The contract still obtains; Donald Trump can no more establish a dictatorship than he can alter the gravitational constant or the value of pi. If you want to see a textbook example of fascism, look at the collusion between social media and unelected government actors in the run-up to November 2020. Hell, even Rod Liddle noticed, and he’s no right-winger. Trump is here to take the garbage – the real garbage – out. Whether or not he succeeds, there will be another election in 2028. When that happens, you ought to feel a little foolish, but you won’t.
Speaking of garbage, slave owners in the Antebellum South (all Democrats, by the way) used to be wary of lower-class whites, whom they lorded it over with a very unequal hand. They feared a popular uprising at least as much as a slave revolt. So they went to some trouble and expense to curry favor and make themselves sympathetic to the lower classes. If they regarded their social inferiors as garbage, it’s not in the historical record because they never would have dared to talk that way anywhere a commoner might overhear.
Our new managerial class in not so circumspect. For instance, they blithely propose to transition the masses to a diet of insect protein, which could only cause malnutrition and famine on a scale to make the Holodomor look like a sensible austerity measure. When anyone objects to this kind of thing, the managers and their toadies are shocked and offended: how can these revolting commoners not know their place? Even the CCP are not so open about their loathing and contempt for the ordinary people they rule over. The American managerial class is literally more dangerous and obnoxious than wealthy slave traders or genocidal Communists.
I swear, if you had a scintilla of self-awareness or psychological insight, if you were capable of the slightest pang of individual conscience, you would…
Never mind.
Tm 11.21.24 at 4:23 pm
“Their brilliant 34-count felony trial fizzled.”
Trump was convicted of felony crimes and he is still a convicted criminal. The felony trial did not fizzle, it was torpedoed by the fascist Supreme Court majority with the specific intent of helping Trump win the election so he could install fascism in America. I won’t engage with fascist enablers and apologists here but I’m also not gonna tolerate your lies.
Doug 11.21.24 at 9:22 pm
Gaetz withdraws as nominee for Attorney General. Collect the wins. Work for more. Do not obey in advance. Do not give up.
Not Trampis 11.21.24 at 9:30 pm
well two things dictators do straight away is to change laws so people can be arrested and then gaoled and organisations can be taken over or at the very least curtailed.
Have not seen that yet.
does not matter who you put in the DOJ or FBI. you need evidence to prosecute anyone.
If you remove public servants and replace them with loyalists it merely worsens this as all corporate knowledge is gone.
Trump is merely a mafia boss who wants things done without understanding the law
Alex SL 11.21.24 at 10:53 pm
Tom Perry,
I have rarely read anything as untethered from reality, conspiracy-laden, and at the same time internally incoherent as your comment at 52. If you got out a bit more and touched some grass, you would quickly have to confront the fact that your views are in a minority. (So are mine, but at least I am aware of that.) Only a fraction of Trump’s voters voted for him to “throw out the bums”; others voted for him because of inflation, or abortion, or habit, or, to quote one recent soundbite, “because he will pay off the national debt with Bitcoin”. He won, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t deluded about the views of your electorate and what that implies for their reaction when his policies hurt them in unexpected ways.
What particularly befuddles me about your right-wing pseudo-populist impulse is the contradiction between claiming to be anti-elite and anti-managerial class and being dissatisfied with the corrupt and unaccountable status quo (agreed!) but then seeing as one’s saviours a bunch of very obviously corrupt and self-serving billionaires who are much more elite, actual managers, and much more corrupt and unaccountable than the previous lot. Trump, Musk, and hangers-on are not your friends, nor are they friends of your constitutional order. You are the mark of their con.
Trump’s first order of business is to break down any established norms about financial disclosures and conflicts of interest, so that the office-holder can unashamedly enrich himself. Carter gave away his farm so that he couldn’t financially benefit from his presidency. Last time around, Trump forced his security detail to stay in his own hotels to profit directly at tax payer expense. Yes, there was already corruption, but you somehow think voting for somebody who is enriching himself at public expense much more blatantly than anybody else in the decades before him is “throwing out the bums”?
The “DOGE” will try to find efficiency in government. Problem is, the only two meaningful budget items are social insurance/services and the army; everything else is a rounding error. But you think Musk personally bullying individual working class public servants who have jobs that his Twitter followers don’t understand the purpose of while leaving the Pentagon’s procurement processes and Musk’s rocket contracts untouched is “throwing out the bums”?
I could go on, but the point is made. The present system sucks and is very corrupt. The alternative would be to vote in politicians who actually care about integrity and the welfare of the people instead of a bunch of billionaires who are publicly best known for defrauding their contractors, defrauding their business partners, defrauding the tax payer, not paying rent, and bullying their employees. Picking the latter means either not actually caring about integrity and the welfare of the people or having no understanding whatsoever of what is actually happening right now.
Do you apply the same logic elsewhere in your life? “I am dissatisfied with the food at this restaurant, so I will ask this guy to prepare my next meal who has repeatedly been investigated for poisoning people?” Your dissatisfaction is understandable. Your proposed solution is deluded. You are the mark of their con.
engels 11.21.24 at 11:39 pm
Unlike the left, the right is fractious
Actual lol
John Q 11.22.24 at 1:05 am
@Tom Perry
Thanks for this perspective, which certainly shows that we are living in alternative realities. A striking example is “transition the masses to a diet of insect protein, which could only cause malnutrition and famine on a scale to make the Holodomor look like a sensible austerity measure. ” This apparently refers to occasional discussions of the possiblility that insects might be an additional food source, turned into a 4chan style conspiracy theory
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1166649732/conspiracy-theory-eating-bugs-4chan
What’s depressing here is that you seem relatively sane and sensible, but are still spouting the kind of thing that has long been consigned to the lunatic fringe on the left, RFK Jr used to be the leftwing embodiment of this stuff, and now your side has him as Health Secretary.
nastywoman 11.22.24 at 1:06 am
and why are the official statements of the Trump Campaign printed on CT –
and the unofficial ideas of nasty women –
NOT?
John Q 11.22.24 at 1:06 am
Nothing more on Trump’s criminal trials please
Tom Perry 11.22.24 at 1:40 am
This apparently refers to occasional discussions of the possiblility that insects might be an additional food source, turned into a 4chan style conspiracy theory
I don’t read 4Chan, so I wouldn’t know what they say. I got this idea from reading what leftists say. Now, maybe the leftists I know about aren’t representative, and you don’t have to own my interpretation if you disagree with it. But I’m opposed in principle to insect protein in the food supply; I don’t believe there’s any feasible way to separate it from excrement and indigestible chitin, and as a matter of national cuisine I don’t think anyone should try to get even a little bit used to the idea.
Let’s just stipulate I’m flat wrong about that. It’s still fair for me to say it, if you can say this:
A state of emergency from Day 1, with the use of the military against domestic opponents .
What?
J-D 11.22.24 at 1:43 am
What leads you to that conclusion? It seems highly dubious to me.
If what you mean is that you want to share your perspective here, that’s obviously true, but why do you want to?
Relatively? Compared to what?
wetzel-rhymes-with 11.22.24 at 4:19 am
American society is like a healthy cell becoming cancerous, as if history were run by anti-Hegel, like a healthy dividing cell becoming senescent, or undergoing apoptosis. At a higher system level we’re transitioning to fascism, which we experience in myriad Orwellian permutations. The spirit of the law and the letter of the law are detaching, but truth and fiction are merging. Nihilism prevails generally. We are losing the ability as a society to produce truth for ourselves, and everything is propaganda. What America has left are peer reviewed science and jury trials, so Trump nominates JFK Jr. to oversee medical science and Matt Gaetz (now bribe-taker Pam Bondi) to oversee criminal prosecutions..
As an American, I think many comments in this discussion are not justified in their optimism. I think John Q’s flowchart is too sanguine. What is happening is a sociological transition, the kind Giambattista Vico warned us about two hundred years go, and so America is now an ersatz Orwellian nightmare, a rich hyper-capitalist mirror of Stalinism or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Journalism no longer functions as an institution because in fascism everything is propaganda. Fascists used to crucify, but since the 20th century they make a carnography in war. The Christian sacrificial aspect of war and purges was fully appreciated by White Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin. Putin’s favorite. The symbol of terror in totalitarianism isn’t the cross or the noose. It’s disappearance, and America is disappearing from itself.
There was always “the voice that was great within us” in earlier dark periods. We aren’t in the terror state yet! Not in California! Except for our homeless. We aren’t deindividuated like Russians. All we need is a war to prepare the new American constitution out of genocide where we disappear from ourselves in fear and complicity.
bad Jim 11.22.24 at 4:35 am
The one thing I like about Tom Perry’s reality is the prospect of affordable property in the San Francisco Bay area.
John Q 11.22.24 at 9:46 am
Tom Perry
“It’s still fair for me to say it, if you can say this:
A state of emergency from Day 1, with the use of the military against domestic opponents .
What?”
Here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-confirms-plan-declare-national-emergency-military-mass/story?id=115963448
Alex SL 11.22.24 at 10:56 am
Tom Perry,
Two suggestions:
First, if you are worried about your stomach acid being unable to handle a bit of insect poop, never under any circumstances learn how meat is processed, especially under the business-friendly regulatory system of the USA. Or make that: never learn how food is being produced, processed, handled, and prepared in general.
Second, try not to assume that any suggestion made by some random person is automatically official policy of a government or political movement, even if you do not like them. That principle may lead to you being less of a pawn for charlatans.
I personally know an entomologist who promotes insect protein as a nutritional supplement. The government of the country he and I are citizens of has not yet forced everybody to eat crickets for breakfast on pain of prison if they don’t want to. There would be a few steps between his activism and such a decision that are unlikely to ever be realised. It seems to me that the same is likely true for the USA.
But this is how it goes; to my understanding, there is a non-trivial number of people who vote based on having heard rumors (1) about forced gender reassignment surgeries or the lefties wanting to take their house away and give it to illegal immigrants or 15 minute cities being a plot to make it illegal to own cars, and (2) a complete lack of any critical thinking skills or sense of plausibility. As I have argued here before, I think a big part of this is a lack of actual problems and strife in people’s lives, leading to a vacuum of strong emotion that has to be filled. In the absence of immediately life-threatening crises on the level of war, famine, and plagues, cocooned in a system where the worst case scenario is something like a brown person moving in next door, one’s masculinity being challenged, or (as bad as this latter one is) not having enough money, their brain needs to invent some Evil conspiracy that allows them to dramatically and heroically oppose Evil, despite the presumed Evil mostly being fellow citizens who have empathy for the vulnerable and/or who understand scientific evidence.
MisterMr 11.22.24 at 11:20 am
@Tom Perry
Don’t you eat shrimps and lobsters?
What’s the difference between a shrimp and a cricket?
(I’m an italian living in the EU, that already legalised some insects, but I’m a vegetarian)
lurker 11.22.24 at 11:30 am
@JQ, 66
TP will say that of course Trump does not mean that.
The mark thinks he’s in on the con and that others are the marks.
AWOL 11.22.24 at 2:12 pm
Doug at 52:
Not a win.
The pedophile’s rule in the DOJ would have been a chaotic, inefficient clown show under a lurid microscope.
Bondi has a long history of being a corrupt fascist. She looks like a “responsible choice” to most “pundits.” She will be efficient tyrant. “Meet the Press” will perform many acts of cunnilingus.
They’re just fucking with your head, like the fascist who found his way onto this board.
Tom Perry 11.22.24 at 2:14 pm
Yeah, I knew about that. Deportees are not “domestic opponents”; by definition they are foreign. Nobody’s going to send Seal Team 6 after Nancy Pelosi or any other American citizen. If that was the order, our military would be under a legal obligation not to obey.
The reason to involve the military in deportations is not so as to murder everybody. The military is the only .gov institution with the logistic capability to deal with a problem on this scale. This problem would not exist but for the criminal negligence of the federal government in the first place.
Trump specifically mentioned “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals”, which some of these foreigners surely are. How far the deportations will extend beyond that is anyone’s guess. Even a hardcore right-winger like myself might balk at some point.
Set that aside for the moment. I have something more constructive to say. I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to engage with me, and just as soon as I can get my thoughts together you will see some demonstrations of good faith on my part. Stand by.
Lee A. Arnold 11.22.24 at 2:17 pm
The kinds of individual cognitive limitation are very interesting. I just finished “New Economics 5. Knowledge.” This juxtaposes the dynamics of knowledge in non-market organization, to knowledge in market organization. It shows how both kinds are necessary.
“5. Knowledge” has a short introduction to a graphical presentation of knowledge. This culminates in an illustration (at time 2:45-3:20) of three sources of cognitive limitation: 1) Attention is limited. 2) Prior ideas may be wrong. 3) Analysis is increasingly fine-grained.
I did not go further there. But there must be a little more to it: You read or meet someone who makes sense for about 90% of the conversation, who then makes a sharp turn away from facts or rationality, and runs right over a cliff! Of course this happens on the left as well as the right.
The only explanation I can find is that most people have trouble in making more than two or three inferential links in a chain of reasoning. I was first told this by an elementary school science teacher. There was a recent study (I can’t find the link) that found an average ability of 2.6 inferential steps. I don’t know of any studies which show that education can improve this condition (we like to hope that it can.)
It seems like most people take the first step or two correctly, and after that, their eyes glaze over: their succeeding inferences are filled-in by placeholding half-truths, or complete fictions. Usually these have been inculcated by A) agreement with one’s own group of friends or a political tribe; B) what is called “motivated reasoning,” or using one’s own emotional prompts instead of intellectual reasoning; C) conspiracy explanations, which provide simple explanations for complicated problems or dimly-understood interconnections.
JKM 11.22.24 at 3:45 pm
@Tom Perry
As an inhabitant of Seattle I can assure you that Seattle is, at the moment, quite inhabitable as long as you dress for the rain and don’t feel oppressed by the nearly constant darkness of November in these parts.
Does it matter to you that you believe somebody needs to be held “criminally accountable” for something that isn’t even real?
bekabot 11.22.24 at 4:00 pm
“What kind of help could/should sympathising foreigners offer?”
Once I get past the hopes-and-prayers preamble I come up with “don’t close your borders”. Keep them open and regulate them instead. American conservatives like to frame these two pursuits as opposites, but they aren’t, and at least some of them know it. When (American) conservatives say that you can’t have a nation if you don’t have a border, they’re right, but a well-managed border is the last thing they want. They don’t want a border that works. What they want is a border that doesn’t work — roiling and ridden with turmoil and hazardous to health and life and much visited by amateur lawmen and caravans of refugees. That’s why proposals aimed at fixing the border get rejected while rhetoric about building cyclopean walls which other people will pay for is still effective eight years after it was first introduced.
To my mind there’s kind of a parallel with a popular vision of a conservative household which shows up every now and again (Tucker Carlson invoked it in a speech he made shortly before the election); a vision in which the parents (especially Dad) get to act like cranky toddlers while the responsibility for regulating them falls to their kids.
At any rate (back to topic) don’t let your politicians take you down this road.
Tom Perrry 11.22.24 at 4:14 pm
First, if you are worried about your stomach acid being unable to handle a bit of insect poop, never under any circumstances learn how meat is processed, especially under the business-friendly regulatory system of the USA. Or make that: never learn how food is being produced, processed, handled, and prepared in general.
I know all about that. I know that there are millions of E. Coli on literally everything, and there is unavoidable insect residue in food. I don’t insist on some impossible standard of cleanliness.
You can peel and devein shrimp. It doesn’t make them perfectly clean, but it basically separates the shell and the gut contents from the meat.
You can’t do that with insects. I don’t mind knowing that there are trace amounts of bugs and bacteria in my food. But if they’re on the ingredient list or detectable to my senses, I won’t eat that. Nobody grinds up a whole shrimp with the shell on and makes chips out of it.
LFC 11.22.24 at 4:52 pm
A couple of thoughts.
1) Some comments seem to reflect a misconception that there are two poles: democracy and autocracy, or democracy and fascism, or democracy and totalitarianism, with nothing in between. While there may be two poles in some sense, there is a long spectrum or continuum in between. Hence Levitsky’s and Way’s notion of competitive authoritarianism. Hence the fact that Freedom House, for instance, rates polities on a scale w.r.t. democracy. Etc.
2) That Trump bears a family resemblance to a fascist does not mean the U.S. is entering fascism (a claim I am somewhat skeptical about, without meaning to minimize the situation). The comment of wetzel-rhymes-with @64 claims that the U.S. is now a mirror of Stalinism or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In fact the death tolls of Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution, which were not caused by an “outside” event like a pandemic but rather flowed from conscious policy, numbered in the millions (estimates of 1 to 2 million for the latter), and the Cultural Revolution analogy would only begin to apply if , e.g., the U.S. govt forcibly transported academics en masse to farms to work (presumably unremunerated). The likelihood of that particular event occurring is zero.
engels 11.22.24 at 5:26 pm
a lack of actual problems and strife in people’s lives, leading to a vacuum of strong emotion that has to be filled. In the absence of immediately life-threatening crises on the level of war, famine, and plagues, cocooned in a system where the worst case scenario is something like a brown person moving in next door, one’s masculinity being challenged, or (as bad as this latter one is) not having enough money, their brain needs to invent some Evil conspiracy
I’m not going to weigh in on LTNs or insect protein but imho This Is Why You Keep Losing.
Tom Perry 11.22.24 at 5:27 pm
Someone up-thread suggested I need to get out and touch grass. Let me tell you about my history of grass-touching.
I happen to be a recovering warblogger. I started my first web log in February of 2002, and I was involved in am 8,000-word blog war with Kieran Healy before CT was even a gleam in anybody’s eye. I’ve been a CT reader and commenter, on and off, throughout the entire two-decade run. I’ve never shrunk from a CT argument. I know very well what you all are about.
I consider it a privilege to participate. I have derived vast personal benefit from subjecting my ideas to adversarial or even hostile review. I’ve learned a lot about the world and about myself, that I never could have learned by interacting with my fellow conservatives. For all that Mr. Healy and I had bad blood in the past, I would much rather hang with Kieran than with a crashing bore like Victor Davis Hanson or Glenn Reynolds. I have no use for confirmation of my own biases; if that’s all I wanted, I could just meditate alone in a cool, dry place.
Sometimes I get caught out. So what? Nobody has the time to be right about everything. When I experience cognitive dissonance, I take pleasure in making a prompt, effective adjustment.
JQ correctly identified the most overblown claim in my previous long post. Reviewing the search results, I find weak support for my prior understanding, but nothing to fully justify what I said. Fair enough, I was wrong about that. It can happen to anyone.
Other claims are more fact-based. I did put forward an objectively falsifiable claim: there will be elections as usual in 2028 and beyond. If this turns out to be false, I will not be able to say that the result was ambiguous or that I didn’t mean what I said before, and I won’t pretend to have forgotten what I said.
Some are saying that I’m the mark of a con. Assuming you are right, I would really like to know what, specifically, I will regret in the future. Come on, people of science: state a testable hypothesis and we’ll await the results of the experiment together. I’m not persuaded by name-calling and out-group labelling. Show me specifically what I’m wrong about and I’ll cop to it.
The bug-Holodomor example turns out not to be valid; apparently my pattern-recognition hardware overheated. So I’ll put forward an example that doesn’t require so much extrapolation.
Last year, Hillary Clinton said that Trump voters were cult members who would require “formal deprogramming” in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat. “Deprogramming” is what the CCP does to the Uighurs; it’s what O’Brien does to Winston Smith. It is a coercive, violent process aimed at breaking the subject’s will into a defenseless, suggestible mental state. Even when it is done with the best intentions, it entails inflicting stress on the organism to a degree which would be called torture in any other context.
Do I read that right? Did Hillary Clinton, a former Democrat Presidential nominee, call for the detention and torture of millions of American citizens, not for any crime proven or even alleged, but for voting against her party? That would seem to fit with the “loathing and contempt”, the “power without restraint or need for self-justification” that I was talking about just now.
I’m not going to tell you all how to live your lives, but I think you have to renounce this. The good news is, if you do renounce it, you don’t lose points. You score.
Maybe I’m naive, but I think we all could find not only common ground, but high common ground. There are issues on which we could all be in passionate agreement, if we only desist from denial, anger, and defensiveness. In the course of the Iraq debacle, I transitioned from being a warblogger to being a peacenik. I had no choice, the wars I had advocated for turned out to be economic, humanitarian and moral catastrophes. This new business in Ukraine is even worse. The plan, apparently, goes like this:
Sell lots of weapons, secure everybody’s phony-baloney job at NATO, maximize casualties by all means, fight to the last Ukrainian.
???
Strategic and moral victory!
I don’t think it’s going to work. Donald Trump has pledged to put an end to it. Say what you will about Trump, he’s the only president in my lifetime to stand up to State, NATO, and the M-IC and say “no more wars”.
Some fascist!
somebody who remembers that trump promised to invade mexico 11.22.24 at 6:19 pm
i wonder how tom perry @ 78 squares his perspective on trumps promised world of peace and prosperity with the promise to invade mexico with ground troops on day one, and “deport” 30 million americans there in one year. is this the kind of peace our neighbors can hope for from trump? should they applaud?
John Q 11.22.24 at 6:28 pm
“No more wars”
Except of course for the “special operation” in Mexico
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/us/politics/trump-mexico-cartels-republican.html
And the wars on Gaza and Lebanon (likely to go even further than Biden on this)
engels 11.22.24 at 6:28 pm
the worst case scenario is something like a brown person moving in next door, one’s masculinity being challenged
Or massive price rises for essential goods, complicity in genocide and sleep-walking into WW3… Never mind the majority of white women, half of “brown” Latinos (sorry, “Latinx”) and most of the non-college educated working class voted Republican… Maybe it’s time to retire this stuff?
engels 11.22.24 at 7:27 pm
Gaza isn’t a war, it’s a massacre.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153216
Tom Perry 11.22.24 at 8:14 pm
Except of course for the “special operation” in Mexico
Bush, Obama and Biden all caved to various cabals of lifetime-professional warmongers who allocated billions to establish and maintain permanent, deadly stalemates in far-flung countries of zero strategic or security interest to the US, deliberately maximizing human suffering for the benefit of war profiteers, with no consistently-stated objective or realistic endgame, against the clear wishes of the majority of Americans, most recently in concert with a genocidal puppet regime rated the most corrupt in the Northern hemisphere, at the imminent risk of a nuclear exchange.
Trump says no to all that, reserving the use of military force to wipe out a hostile foreign power which is holding a friendly government hostage and killing Americans by the tens of thousands on American soil. Trump’s war aim and endgame are clearly stated, likely achievable in a finite time with minimal casualties, and positively in the interest of the American and Mexican peoples alike.
I guess I’m supposed to be crushed at the hypocrisy of it all.
anon/portly 11.22.24 at 9:09 pm
JQ correctly identified the most overblown claim in my previous long post.
That’s complete bullshit. Nothing can top this (and I’m sure there’s other examples, this is just the one that caught my eye):
Public order is perhaps the most non-negotiable provision in any social contract. Yet public order was simply allowed to collapse after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, as though that was anything but a one-off. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and many others went from beautiful cities to uninhabitable shitholes, to the accolades of our mainstream media. It is no longer possible to feel secure in public, or to keep a street-level business in those places, up to and including Wal-Mart. Accountability for this failure should rise to the level of criminal sanction, but there is no accountability whatsoever. Tell me again why this is a good thing.
I live in one of those places! For people who live in the less affluent parts of town, for sure things are probably a little more dangerous. I’ve actually seen a security guy or two in a grocery store, which is disconcerting.
But the “defund the police” types are losing elections now, not just in my city but in at least some of the others listed above.
And the above omits important context; the era of public order breakdown was the 1970’s. My city and most US cities are far less dangerous now – it’s not even close. They’re not making new Death Wish or Dirty Harry movies[*] for a reason, even if crime or perceptions of crime are a factor in Trump’s (slightly – he’s still very unpopular) rising popularity.
My city hasn’t gone from “beautiful” to “uninhabitable shithole” at all, it’s still entirely the same place. No way Tom Perry would be able to tell the difference, if he has been a visitor.
I have derived vast personal benefit from subjecting my ideas to adversarial or even hostile review. I’ve learned a lot about the world and about myself, that I never could have learned by interacting with my fellow conservatives.
What utter tripe. Why not stick to making true statements, then? Why lard your posts with obvious falsehoods? There are some regular left-wing CT commentators whose entire shtick is over-the-top false claims (which being from the left are entirely ignored, never subject to scrutiny), so having a right-wing one or two would be refreshing, maybe.
Final note: I really hate the “criminal sanction” bit, whether from the left or the right. What statute? Who exactly committed what crime? There is no uglier piece of rhetoric.
[*] Not to my knowledge, anyway.
John Q 11.22.24 at 10:02 pm
“I guess I’m supposed to be crushed at the hypocrisy of it all.”
Certainly, you’ve moved pretty fast from “No more wars” to “Trump’s wars will be good, actually”,
And as advice from one peacenik to another, the claim that “this war will be over really fast, successfully, and with minimal casualities on our side” has been made for every war I can recall, notably including Iraq.
Alex SL 11.22.24 at 10:04 pm
engels at 77,
You may want to expand on that thought a bit more, because I cannot make sense of it. I am not a politician running for office and losing. I am not in the USA. Most people not having enough money is one of the actual problems I would like to see addressed, alongside the current unsustainability of our way of life.
But I don’t see how having a theory for why there are conspiracy cults that proudly believe obviously wrong things would lead to the person having that theory losing elections. I hope you do not mean to say that one should, or ever even can, adopt policy proposals that would satisfy those who believe that wind power, gender dysphoria, not being protestant Christian, vaccines, or having a central bank with a 2% inflation target are all conspiracies that deliberately try to destroy America and/or Freedom. If I were a Democrat, I would focus attention on people who merely aren’t convinced that Ds are on their side or who are uninformed or disengaged. Deranged cultists are at any rate unreachable.
Lee A. Arnold,
We all struggle to reason through complexities. Key is, some of us acknowledge our limitations, defer to experts where appropriate, and apportion our degree of conviction according to how confident we can be in our understanding of a matter. I can very confidently say that some claims or decisions are wrong, but I would be cautious to be too positive e.g. about details of trade policy, as that is not my area of expertise. And some of us are extremely confident and angry regardless of their lack of understanding of the matter at hand. I heard there is even a study from a few years back that argues over-confidence is the primary characteristic of conspiracy theorists.
What shocks me more than an inability to reason beyond two or three steps is the extremely broad failure to understand that some system may be determined by more than one variable. (E.g., yes, climate varies naturally, but that doesn’t prove that humans don’t have an impact too.) That simplism rears its head in this very discussion in two ways: most people try to identify the one reason Trump won or the one thing Ds needed to do to win, when in reality the electorate is extremely heterogeneous. And most people draw a straight line from what Trump says to what they expect will happen, be it for bad or, in Tom Perry’s case, good, when in reality Trump is a pathological liar and fraud, and even an absolute god-king has historically never been able to achieve everything they wanted.
Adam Hammond 11.22.24 at 10:32 pm
@Tom Perry
I eagerly renounce the BS reprogramming business. It was both a stupid thing to say and a stupid idea. Clinton isn’t some fringe blogger, and yet she does appear to believe that there are people who are so badly broken that it would be appropriate to take away their civil rights. While I would love to personally disavow HRC, I did vote for her against DJT, so I can’t let myself off the hook. If she tried to gain any official authority again, she would need to believably renounce such malignant idiocy. Unfortunately, she gets a platform. There is nothing of value on cable news, as far as I can see.
I don’t agree to your phrasing: that she issued a, “…call for the detention and torture of millions of American citizens … for voting against her party?” Please admit that there are several large jumps between the stupid idea of “reprogramming” and where you, and a whole lot of other people, went afterwards. There are voluntary drug rehabilitation programs that use the word reprogramming. Again, I am not defending her choice of words, or the idea behind them! Just trying to move you toward recognizing how your equation of “reprogramming” with “detention and torture” is more inflammatory than rational.
bekabot 11.22.24 at 10:36 pm
“I guess I’m supposed to be crushed at the hypocrisy of it all.”
My dear fellow, don’t be crushed. That’s extreme. They did it at the urging and with the full and free consent of right-wingers and Republicans and as a kowtow to the military virtues, so there’s no reason for you to feel left out.
(The major difference, which you don’t mention, is that all the jamborees you name were pursued on foreign soil, while the war you favor and want to wage is a Stateside war directed [in part] against your fellow-citizens. That is an innovation, I admit, though I can’t say it’s one I’m enthusiastic about.)
Tom Perry 11.22.24 at 11:04 pm
And as advice from one peacenik to another, the claim that “this war will be over really fast, successfully, and with minimal casualities on our side” has been made for every war I can recall, notably including Iraq.
Noted. I’ll keep an eye on it. If I start to regret this, I’ll be in touch.
J-D 11.22.24 at 11:36 pm
Are you sure about that? It seems to me that if that were true then you would have known in advance how I would react to this sequence of words:
Well, what reactions would you expect, here, at Crooked Timber, to that sequence of words?
No, she did not, and no, you did not read that right.
I’m trying to think of anything I’ve learned about myself by participating here, and although there may be something, it’s not anything I can put my finger on. Of course, it would be good to learn more about myself. Is it possible to do that by participating here? Can you illustrate the point by telling us anything about what you’ve learned about yourself by participating here?
Diodotos 11.23.24 at 12:33 am
No, Tom Perry, Hillary Clinton never said that “Trump voters” required reprogramming. She said that there was “a little tail of extremism’ making an unquestioning cult of Trump, and “maybe” they could only change with “formal deprogramming.” Lots of Trump voters are <a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/2024-election-surveys-show-trump-voters-misinformed-on-major-issues-by-j-bradford-delong-2024-11". Trump’s cult alone cannot elect anyone.
J-D 11.23.24 at 1:38 am
Here I am, on the other side of the world from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and many other US cities. (I have been in the US, but not for long and not for a long time.) So if I’m told by an American commenting on a blog that those cities have become uninhabitable, and then by other Americans commenting on the same blog that they have not, what’s a reasonable conclusion for me to draw?
engels 11.23.24 at 2:13 am
Alex, I don’t have a good theory of conspiracy-theorising, nor do I think it’s good, but claiming it comes out of working class Americans having it too easy (because they haven’t lived through a plague or a war… might want to check some recent history there) is clearly wrong, patronising and politically suicidal (also, whether or not they’re correct, there are comprehensible reasons why many people don’t want to blocked from driving their cars between urban areas or to subsist on a diet of insects.)
KT2 11.23.24 at 4:07 am
Tom Perry, “Show me specifically what I’m wrong about and I’ll cop to it.”
Tom Perry @75 re “Nobody grinds up a whole shrimp with the shell on and makes chips out of it.”.
Nobody?
Yes. They do.
And for context I agree with (1.) below: “we just kinda don’t eat many heads in western culture; we have been instructed by our nation’s Puritan founders to hate and fear things that are good”. (1.)
Tom, as you raise shimp… prawn heads, I’ll provide a personal anecdote which may be of value to contrast wiith some your absolute / binary statements you’ve kindly provided here, and your worthy attitude to being open to realising new information, as your attitude change re war indicates. But you then say Tom “Trump’s war aim and endgame are clearly stated, likely achievable in a finite time with minimal casualties, and positively in the interest of the American and Mexican peoples alike.”.
“Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity.”
? Stephen King
How ling do you think Trump’s “peace” will hold Tom? In Mexico, Ukraine or the US? I’d say 3-15 years at best. So no solution, just a diminution and breather. What of the military industrial complex? Won’t they just look for other markets … other fears and other markets? The echidna strategy combined with onshoring may see the military industry shrink.
“‘Peace?’ said Vetinari. ‘Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.”
? Terry Pratchett
###
In Oz, earing raw prawns seems de rigueur for many at Christmas. A real change from meat and 3 veg. My Dad made a supurb seafood sauce! (Hint… add a tablespoon of vanilla ice cream). We’d all sit around like seagulls swooping a prawn, peeling, discarding head and vien, dip and munch. Quick! Yum. Zero heads. Heads & carapace were discarded…. in summer… in the garbge. Wrap well! Make sure the garbage is down wind! Easy to gain aversion to head/ bug guts if a waft of 3 day rotting prawn bodies assails your brain. Or freeze. Til you remember to place in rubbish bin.
Yet in my mid twenties we had a mate who would experiment with food. No social opribrium or mores considered. Just follow a recipe. His menu included prawn chips. First the bodies. Peel prawns, de-vein, tail on – you need a natural finger grab. Cook, eat, yum. Yet as he was prepping prawns, he’d attract the attention of the squeamish and put the body side of the head to his lips and suck out brains + goo. He thought this was a treat. I declined. After we’d gorged on prawn bodies, his next menu item was prawn chips. Real prawn chips.
The heads, sans soft biology, were rinsed (not washed), dried and squashed flat. Place in bbq grill plate. Minimal neutral oil + a pinch of butter. Squash on grill. Add acceptable amounts of salt & pepper. Cooked til shell softened with crispy outer. I’d had eaten plenty of “prawn chips” at “chinese” western restaurants. These real prawn chips he made were a complex taste and completely updated my prior squeamishness. If you ate these prawn crackers Tom, you’d be telling at my Dad “Don’t discard the heads!”.
###
(1.) “The point, here, is: Err small when purchasing shrimp whose heads you intend to consume. Your pound of whole shrimp should include absolutely no fewer than a dozen of them; if there are fewer than a dozen shrimp in your pound, that means they are too big, and you’re going to end up bleeding from the roof of your mouth.”
…
https://deadspin.com/how-to-cook-and-eat-whole-shrimp-yes-even-their-heads-1574380827/
“A Guide To Eating Crawfish Head: Is It Safe And How Do You Eat Them?
…
“The crawfish boils of the south are famous for good reason—they’re scrumptious and are great to eat, head and all!
…
“Eating the crawfish head may appear daunting, but it is not difficult if you know what to do.
“There are a few different ways to eat crawfish heads depending on whether you have had them before (and if so, how you like to eat them). Here are two ways to eat crawfish heads:
…
https://www.crawfishcafe.com/a-guide-to-eating-crawfish-head-is-it-safe-and-how-do-you-eat-them/
###
I hope JQ posts this Tom. Because one person’s aversion is anothers go to reward. See Trump. Fix polarization one prawn head at a time. If I have provided an example for you to try, you may soften your bullet proof atritudes on other topics, still not eat prawn heads, yet accept others who do… “I won’t eat that. Nobody grinds up a whole shrimp with the shell on and makes chips out of it.”.
Yes they do Tom.
bad Jim 11.23.24 at 6:20 am
Getting back to the prospects for dictatorship, which for the sake of discussion should be presumed to be a tyranny more draconian than the state of segregation which prevailed across the southern U.S. when I was born, I’m struck by the insufficiency of the forces at the disposal of the administration, leaving aside for the moment the incompetence of its apparent principals.
The U.S. has nothing like a national police force. The FBI is relatively small and specialized; Customs and Border Patrol, whose writ runs to the coasts as well as both borders, is dwarfed by its territory. The U.S. military, the mightiest in the world, is orders of magnitude too small to occupy its own country, and has a less than stellar record in counter-insurgency. It should also be kept in mind that tens of millions of gun owners voted against Trump.
It’s never a good idea to dismiss the example of other countries when it comes to matters of policy like gun control or health insurance or energy or economics, but it’s also unwise to ignore America’s size or wealth or its peculiarly original sins.
Edward Gregson 11.23.24 at 6:26 am
Tom Perry @83 Biden ended the war in Afghanistan and got castigated for it by the press and the voters. Meanwhile, an invasion of Mexico to fight the cartels would make Iraq and Afghanistan and hell, Vietnam too, combined, look like brilliant triumphs of foreign policy.
Tom Perry @75 Just don’t feed the bugs for a day or two before you kill them if you’re that worried about the poop.
John Q 11.23.24 at 8:06 am
I hadn’t paid any real attention to Mexico until now. AFAICT Trump isn’t proposing an invasion, rather the use of Special Forces to assassinate cartel leaders.
But this is an amazingly dumb idea. For the last forty years or so, the cartels have been super-careful not to kill Americans, even turning in members who did so by mistake. That’s precisely because they know that any such action would bring down the force of the US state. But if thy are attacked anyway, the obvious counter-move to the cartels is to start taking hostages. The US will have its own Gaza crisis in no time.
nastywoman 11.23.24 at 11:01 am
and to get back from the ‘bugs’ with the New Yorker –
‘the crossbreeding of clownishness and politics has never been so intense. The Russian dissident literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin taught us to cherish “carnival” culture as a liberating force in social life… Yet the social-subversive impulse can serve different masters. As Emanuel Marx points out in his book “State Violence in Nazi Germany” (2019), Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, occurred during a carnival season that Catholics traditionally celebrated: “For the mass of participants and bystanders, the Kristallnacht was a noisy and rowdy carnival that suspended for a few hours the ordinary standards of behavior.” Breaking the windows of Jewish merchants could be as much a gleeful, subversive, Rabelaisian activity as mocking the overlords. Indeed, the Nazis in power gently chided, and even tried, a handful of the rioters for overdoing it.
Today, a rollicking carnival vibe still has the capacity to blunt the most sinister side of the authoritarian to his critics (Oh, come on, he’s just having fun!), and to encourage his followers to express previously censored emotions: You can say (or do) that now! Cultural historians of the future will doubtless note the resemblance of Donald Trump’s manner to that of the insult comic, from Don Rickles to Don Imus, and even the pre-reformed Howard Stern. We were not to take him entirely seriously, until it all became entirely serious’.
engels 11.23.24 at 11:37 am
It’s surprising (to me) how quickly this went from “eating insects is a conspiracy theory” to “mmm insects bon appétite!”
engels 11.23.24 at 2:24 pm
Haven’t read this but it’s an alternative to the “life is too easy for lower-income Americans” explanation:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X2200077X
• Higher levels of economic inequality are associated with higher conspiracy theorizing (CT).
• Enhanced anomie (defined as perceived social dysfunction and chaos) provides one explanation for the inequality-CT relationship.
• Inequality enhances perceptions of anomie because inequality erodes the social fabric of society.
• Conspiratorial thinking is a tool that (falsely) holds the promise to regain a sense of order and control in a society that is breaking down.
• Conspiracy theories are not merely irrational individual beliefs but also reflect the times in which people collectively live.
engels 11.23.24 at 4:30 pm
The Pain Creating a New Coalition for Trump
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-pain-creating-a-new-coalition-for-trump
somebody who remembers the signs at gun stores begging people to become cops and prison guards 11.23.24 at 10:12 pm
@bad jim raises the actual counterargument to my maudlin doomerism – that ICE can’t fill its positions now, military recruitment is poor since unemployment is at historic lows, and at no level can any law enforcement organization recruit enough to even drive a tank through the walls of a black grandmother’s house five streets over from where the warrant is to be served. prisons dont have enough guards, enough cooks, enough doctors, enough electricity, enough janitors, enough maintenance workers as it is, “and you, somebody, think trumps going to actually do what he promises and arrest thirty million people? come the heck on” it does seem like a lot of effort will be necessary to move the entirety of the united states military into the invasion of six mexican states and twenty three american ones. and from 2016 to 2020 it didnt seem like anyone knew how to get off their ass and do anything. they didn’t even get around to repealing obamacare?!
i suppose the more realistic threat is that they’ll have matt walsh film an ICE squad machine gunning an apartment building in el paso and just run that footage on fox news six hours a day for four years and then simply announce that all illegal immigrants have been eliminated permanently and america, so long as they dont let the evil, vicious democrats, the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed, return, there will never be an illegal immigrant again.
LFC 11.24.24 at 1:31 am
engels @101
That New Yorker piece has some interesting statistics; thanks for linking. (It could have used a closer proofread in a couple of instances, which I never thought I’d say about the New Yorker, but whatever.)
Alex SL 11.24.24 at 2:41 am
Regarding my observation on right-wing populists claiming to drain the swamp and then putting the swampiest people possible into positions of influence, the recent Current Affairs piece Hell Is Empty, And All The Devils Are Here provides a depressing rundown of Trump’s cabinet nominations. The most charitable interpretation here is that, to a right-winger, “throw out the bums and disempower the managerial class” translate into “deliberately put people in charge who are at the same time completely unqualified for and opposed to their nominal responsibilities”. Unfortunately, those responsibilities include keeping the population healthy, keeping infrastructure running, providing disaster relief, and maintaining US hard and soft power and reputation worldwide.
I can understand, to a degree, the impulse to burn everything down and start over. But I guess we will see how many of Trump’s voters and how many registered Republicans actually want the services they rely on to be burned down. I suspect that just like the Undeserving are always those other people the angry radio presenter told them about and not them, as they have merely fallen on hard times through no fault of their own, we may also find that the wasteful public servants are always those others who the angry TV presenter told them about, and not actually the ones running their Medicaid or the national park they like to visit. Then again, with some voters at least the strategy of underfunding government to cut taxes and then saying, see, government never gets anything right, so we should cut taxes some more, has worked well so far.
engels,
Inequality may well be another factor in conspiratorial thinking, but it doesn’t suffice to me as the only explanation. If I am poor, and the other guy over there is rich because he was lucky and because public investment in infrastructure and public education made his business possible in the first place, the logical consequence is to say that he should share some of his wealth to support the less lucky and infrastructure for the next generation. If find it difficult how I am poor, he is rich leads me to, e.g., vaccine denialism and screaming about non-gendered toilets while thinking that the rich guy has my best interests at heart.
I also fundamentally disagree with your implied definition of “working class”, except to the degree that in one very loose sense, everybody who works a salaried job is working class, even if they earn 450k per annum. In my experience, Trumpist voters and conspiracy mongers tend not to be those struggling to raise a child on waiting tables but instead a mixture of petty bourgeoisie, well-off retirees who have fallen into a right-wing media hole, well-off mothers who have fallen for health woo because they are obsessed about natural and purity and slept through high school biology or chemistry, students and academics who vastly overestimate their own intellect and feel smarter than others for having adopted alternative history conspiracies, and young to middle-aged usually men who want to get rich quickly and without effort and are upset when that doesn’t work out and/or because woman aren’t subservient enough to them. The last of these may be the closest to a meaningful concept of working-class, but they comprise only a small subset of that class, and what motivates them is trying to find exploits and short-cuts in life as opposed to, say, hard work being rewarded as it should and empathy for others who are also struggling.
Blanche Davidian 11.24.24 at 2:50 am
Here’s what we do. When the states show up in Congress to solemnize the casting of their ballots for Trump, the Attorney’s General for a third or so of the states appear and will object to the presentation of the results under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution based on the participation of the former president in the insurrection on January 6, 2021 which has rendered him ineligible to serve in the Fedearl office of President. What a carnival!
J-D 11.24.24 at 4:05 am
Maybe I’m missing something, but to me this seems a lot like somebody saying ‘I accept there is no reliable basis for the opinion I have formed, but nevertheless I am going to stick with it for the time being’.
John Q 11.24.24 at 5:58 am
Engels @100 That’s interesting and important, but I think that a purely economic explanation is inadequate.
Some social structures are conducive to conspiracy theoretic thinking. For example, churches have been a vector for conspiracy theories in good times and bad. This is scarcely surprising, given that a core belief of all the Abrahamic religions is that an invisible but immensely powerful enemy is ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world (and, in popular versions, directly responsible for most of it).
J-D 11.24.24 at 6:36 am
That’s not strictly accurate. Without going into more detail than is worthwhile (I could go into more if I wanted to), the idea of the Devil (or an approximate equivalent) has found its way into the traditions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism but in most or all varieties it has not officially become a core belief. Obviously (well, it’s obvious to me) it can easily happen that what are important beliefs for an adherent of a religion are different from what official doctrine says is important, so it’s probably fair to say that there are a lot of adherents for whom, in practice, the Devil forms part of their core beliefs, but there are also a lot of others for whom this is not true.
That would still leave us with a situation where there are a lot of people with shared beliefs about the Devil which are important to them, which is enough to conduce to conspiracy-theoretic thinking. You don’t need expertise in the history of religion to recognise that much.
MisterMr 11.24.24 at 10:31 am
My two cents about “conspiracy theory” and the like: we have a baboon brain, expecially at an emotive level, and this baboon brain is equipped with some emotional patterns that work to keep a baboon society in place: ingroup/outgroup, positive alpha male/ father/authority figure, negative alpha male/tyrant, enemies inside of the pack etc.
Let’s call these “archetypes”, following Jung.
When we look at ideologies, these are systems of thought that link emotional values to social realities, so ideologies have two sides, on the one side they reflect some group socio-economic (in a broad sense) values, but on the other these values are expressed through archetypes: eg. in vulgar marxism the capitalists will be branded with the “tyrant/bad alpha male” archetype, and depicted as such, even if Marx speaks of systemic problems and not of the personal morality of capitalists.
These “archetypes” will also be somehow sexualized, because sexuality (who mates with whom) is a very important part of baboon society.
The atheist in me sees the similarity of these archetypes with religious thinking.
When people are in a situation of emotional unbalance, they are more likely to use archetipal/emotional thinking, and so they will believe more in religions/ideologies, and also in conspiracy theories, that are pure archetypal thinking (and in the extreme cases are very sexualized, pope Francis or Soros killing babies to eat adenochrome is the idea that foreign baboons are coming to kill our cubs and take our women).
In this sense, the idea that some rightwing voters feel menaced in their masculinity is not a joke about them, but is the way they process a feeling of losing their place in society.
Overall, Trump voters are wealthier than Dem voters, or are part of more socially advantaged groups (white males). But they are in a situation where they fear they are going to lose their position, hence the anxiety, and the high economic inequality increases this.
Also, the big economic inequality didn’t start today, but the cultural/psychological effects take a lot of time to sink in, so we are now probably paying the price of the policies of the 80s and the 90s (people born in 1980 are 48 today).
Also sprach MisterMr.
wacko 11.24.24 at 2:21 pm
@MisterMr,
What’s the “situation of emotional unbalance”? Are you in a “situation of emotional unbalance” yourself, or is it always other people? And how is “situation of emotional unbalance” differs from knowing and voting for your economic interests?
Also, Trump voters are neither wealthier than Dem voters nor a more socially advantaged groups. Trump voters are mostly working class people.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535295/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/ , and elsewhere.
M Caswell 11.24.24 at 2:24 pm
While maybe not decisive, there’s lots of evidence that the ultimate source of evil is invisible (cf mens rea).
Whether it has “immense power,” or rather, according to some traditions, a particular lack of power, is interesting.
LFC 11.24.24 at 4:14 pm
Re Alex SL and MisterMr comments:
Upper middle class, affluent voters went disproportionately for Harris. (Paul Campos at LGM had an informative post w graphs on this. Can’t link it right now.) It will be interesting to see a full analysis of the vote when the final tally is in, but the preliminary indications, including Trump’s inroads w Latino voters, seem to lend support to the view that the Dems simply didn’t connect effectively w large swaths of voters who are struggling economically. The sad thing of course is that the incoming Republican regime will hurt these voters even more.
Shel Horowitz 11.24.24 at 5:04 pm
Largely missing from this discussion is the non-electoral-politics based resistance. As a USArian, I see the Left as far better organized than we were in 2016-17. People mobilized in huge numbers back then and were able to curb some of the worst aspects of Trumpism.
Unfortunately, the Right is also better organized AND has a lot more sitting judges and Justices who have shown alarming willingness to make policy up out of old bandaids and spider webs–certainly not based on precedent.
Someone pointed out that Gaetz’s withdrawal (which also lowers the House majority, potentially, as do several of his other appointments) had a lot to do with citizen outrage AND Trump overreach in trying to bypass the confirmation process. It will be a give-and-take. It will be very hard to live in the US for the next few years, but there will be active nonviolent response resistance, and resilience. And yes, we will face some defeats, and real people will be hurt. But we will also win some victories.
bekabot 11.24.24 at 5:16 pm
“‘Noted. I’ll keep an eye on it. If I start to regret this, I’ll be in touch.’
Maybe I’m missing something, but to me this seems a lot like somebody saying ‘I accept there is no reliable basis for the opinion I have formed, but nevertheless I am going to stick with it for the time being’.”
It also says “I expect my personal feelings and reactions to events to be of great interest to you, even though I pride myself on my indifference to yours.”
Charming.
RobinM 11.24.24 at 6:06 pm
Wrt to Engels @ 100, it got me thinking about how witchcraft and the hunting of witches ebbed and flowed in early modern Scotland. I became convinced (a long time ago, so I’ve forgotten the details), perhaps mistakenly, that that had something to do with shifting senses of security, including economic security.
MisterMr 11.24.24 at 9:20 pm
@wacko and LFC
Wealth and income are a different things, wealth correlate to right wing vote more than income, and then you have to disaggregate education, that correlate both to income and to left leaning vote.
@wacko
Currently I’m quite ok but I’ve been in periods of my life in emotional umbalance, e.g. when my father died, or in a 2 years period of unemployment. I’m not sure what is your point, it is quite obvious IMHO that if you fear that you are going to lose your job, or you think other people are devaluing you etc. , you are likely to have some emotional umbalance.
Alex SL 11.24.24 at 9:22 pm
MisterMr,
Your broader point makes sense, but I would like to quibble on two points. To my knowledge, alpha male is a debunked concept, rejected even by the researcher on whose work the myth was originally founded. And I am 48, but I was definitely born a few years before 1980.
LFC,
That is news to me. I haven’t checked the 2024 numbers, but in previous elections and plebiscites, right-wing nationalists were supported by the uneducated once you statistically correct for wealth and by the wealthy once you statistically correct for level of education. Are you certain that Campos did not merely notice that educated people voted D?
LFC 11.24.24 at 11:13 pm
Alex SL,
Here’s the link to the Campos post. I’ll let you reach your own conclusions.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/11/economic-anxiety-for-real-this-time
J-D 11.24.24 at 11:28 pm
No.
We do not.
That’s balderdash, and it doesn’t stop being balderdash because of the insouciance with which it is repeated.
engels 11.25.24 at 1:28 am
in one very loose sense, everybody who works a salaried job is working class, even if they earn 450k per annum
Only if they don’t have any assets/savings (Elon Musk isn’t working class fyi).
What LFC said about the Trump vote.
wetzel-rhymes-with 11.25.24 at 2:59 am
@LFC
Assigning degree or type of fascism to numbers killed is nihilistic. The question is whether the violence is an atrocity exhibition or terror spectacle. The acceptance of war as an atrocity exhibition in Iraq is directly related cruelty to children at the border and the practice of counting dead to weigh how guilty we are. A human life has no moral value in itself. The difference for us is the propaganda value, which is nihilistic. What they all have in common is totalitarian phenomenology. In the transition to totalitarian fascism the difference between truth and fiction disappear. You can see this happening in Trump’s open attack on journalism, science, and the law. People don’t understand we have practically no other institutions for the social production of verifiable truth. When that happens, as Orwell claims in 1984, the truth is that it is not truth but propaganda. “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.” Orwell also wrote, “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” so to stay on the pitchfork side of the scapegoating, the individual no longer becomes an issue to itself.
Alex SL 11.25.24 at 4:55 am
LFC,
Thanks. I see no information in that post that supports you claim that Trump’s voters, or right-wing populist voters globally, are primarily the poor. All it does is point out growing inequality, and I see no analysis of voters’ social status, wealth, and education. The post is perfectly compatible with, for example, what MisterMr wrote at 109, that these are wealthy voters who are worried about losing their status or having to share with the poor. That fear does hit the, shall we say, precariously privileged harder under high inequality, because they have deeper to fall if they make a mistake or a crisis hits them.
KT2 11.25.24 at 5:51 am
JQ, is there a coda re “except the rescue in the end”?
William Goldring (imho) on “Trump’s dictatorship is a fait accompli”…
“The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.
“The whole book [Lord of the Flies] is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?
Responses in a publicity questionnaire on Lord of the Flies from the American publishers, as quoted in Who Rules?: Introduction to the Study of Politics (1971) by Dick W. Simpson, p. 16
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Golding
Fun fact Golding and James Lovelock used to lived in Bowerchalke and were walking companions. Golding suggested the name for Lovelock’s hypothesis. Gaia.
tm 11.25.24 at 9:19 am
LFC: “Upper middle class, affluent voters went disproportionately for Harris. (Paul Campos at LGM had an informative post w graphs on this. Can’t link it right now.)”
The link you posted doesn’t say anything of the like (it’s concerned with the rise in inequality) and that is probably because there is no actual evidence for this claim. Exit polls (which should never be taken as reliable) merely differentiate between below and above 100’000 family income and the difference between Harris and Trump along the income gradient is tiny, much smaller than the difference by gender, race, education, religion, and urbanity. Iow income does not predict voting in our time and age.
Btw class as such is never differentiated in the published exit polls. They do not tell us how the self-employed or business owners vote as opposed to workers and pensioners, for whatever reason.
wacko 11.25.24 at 9:35 am
My point, Mister, is that you keep describing other people, your opponents, as voting against their interests, because of their “emotional imbalance” (in need of “formal deprogramming”, perhaps?). Otherwise, why bring it up, this deus-ex-machina-style “emotional imbalance”? Also, you insist on describing your opponents as wealthy and privileged, against all factual evidence. I see this as an indication of lost connection with reality. I find this behavior typical, and I think this might be the reason liberalism (of the “social-democratic” kind) is in shambles now. Oh, well.
As usual, YMMV.
MisterMr 11.25.24 at 11:58 am
@Alex Sl 122
Hey, we are the same age! I meant to say 40 years old but then I put in my real age, lol.
About the “Alpha male” thing, my understanding is that “dominance hierarchy” is still an accepted concept in biology, what is not accepted anymore is the idea that these things directly translate in human societies. But I’m not saying that “alpha males” exist in human societies, only that we can perceive some people as “alpha males”, or try to project an “alpha male” image.
E.G. Trump clearly tries to project an “alpha male” image, but this doesn’t mean that biologically he would be one (too old), or that he is aplha because he is dominant (actual dominance e.g. by wealth in human societies is something very different from dominance in the animal world).
In short I don’t think that these “achetypes” exist in the real world, only that they live rent free in our subconscious.
@J-D 119
“That’s balderdash”
If you think that something specific that I said is balderash, say the “alpha male” thing, I can live with it. If you instead think that people are super-rational and have no instincts (the “baboon brain”), I can’t see how this could be possible.
@wacko 125
I actually think that high wealth voters voted for Trump in their own direct economic interest, and some other groups (e.g. white males) because of a mix of status concern/anomie etc., also known of being pissed off at wokes, and rational but wrong economic interest (they really think that higer tariffs will make them better off, I disagree but this doesn’t make them irrational).
The “emotional imbalance” only refers to the anti-woke stuff, that is however strongly linked to a loss of status (and also a loss of economic status in the previous decades, I actually said this above uh).
“formal deprogramming” is not my words, and anyway you are taking strong electoral campaign language at face value. If you want offensive language closer to my opinions I’d go with the “they cling to their guns and their bibles”, Obama style.
Alex SL 11.25.24 at 1:21 pm
wacko,
Unless you think that people can never make mistakes, it follows logically that people can vote against their own interests. The implication is usually that the self-interest in question is about economic well-being and rights and freedoms: the problem it tries to summarise is somebody believing that the immigrant who peacefully lives next door is their enemy, but that a billionaire who lobbies for their working conditions to be made worse, their salary to be suppressed, and their healthcare to be cut is their friend because he is white and says “freedom” a lot. Not a complex concept.
Of course, if one defines somebody ‘voting in ones interest’ to be so broadly that it includes voting for a politician because he promised to stop the liberals from forcing everybody to be gay despite the liberals not actually planning to force everybody to be gay, then everybody always votes in their interest. But that would be a circular, analytically useless definition.
LFC 11.25.24 at 5:20 pm
To those saying that the Campos link doesn’t support my claim:
You are right; I was thinking of another Campos post, which did have a graph about the income levels of Harris and Trump voters. Unfortunately, on a quick look now I can’t find it. (Sorry for the confusion.)
LFC 11.25.24 at 5:31 pm
Alex SL @122
I never claimed that Trump voters are “primarily the poor.” I said Harris got a larger share — though perhaps not much larger — of upper-income voters. Once the education and other effects are removed or accounted for, the difference may be v. small, as tm @124, if I understand him correctly, is saying.
Tm 11.25.24 at 9:20 pm
LFC: The exit polls as they are published are insufficient to really answer that question because they don’t differentiate higher incomes from middle incomes and the difference in voting behavior between middle and lower income groups is small and given the low reliability of these polls, the only conclusion they support is „income doesn’t predict voting“. Which is pretty remarkable. Income used to be a strong predictor of political views and this doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Except probably for the low and high ends of the distribution. But they are not well represented in the surveys. And those at the low end are least likely to vote, in part because non-citizens are way over-represented.
Suzanne 11.26.24 at 12:25 am
@ 101: Thank you for the link. The article is franker than some of the post-election analysis about the messaging problems experienced and blunders committed by the Democrats, although in truth it would be more direct to say “Biden and subsequently by Harris” rather than Democrats generally. While it was not a great time to be an incumbent and Trump can be a tricky opponent, this was not an election beyond hope.
bekabot 11.26.24 at 12:28 am
“Also, you insist on describing your opponents as wealthy and privileged, against all factual evidence.”
If by “your opponents” you mean “Trump voters” — it’s been my experience that a fairly consistent type of Trump voter is the guy (more rarely the woman) who’s a big fish in a small pond, or who wishes to be a big fish in a small pond, or who wants to be seen as a big fish in a small pond, or who experiences himself or herself in that way. I live in a small pond myself and I’m very familiar with the type. Individuals who conform to this type exist in a relationship to wealth and privilege which isn’t strictly traditional-working-class, even in cases where the relationship they crave only holds good inside their head(s).
Temporarily embarrassed billionaires make the cut with room to spare.
Could this be what y’all are talking about? If not, I’m at a loss.
KT2 11.26.24 at 6:54 am
JQ said “Any possible lessons won’t be relevant to the future.”
“None of us are as dumb as all of us.” ~ Mark Kelly
“Democracy is Always Right (That’s Just Math)
BY TIM SOMMERS
…
“While it’s true that for each person that you add, with enough information and good judgment to vote for the better candidate even 50.00000000001% of the time, you increase the odds of electing the right person, but this cuts both ways.
“For every person you add who has a slightly worse than average chance of picking the right person (even 49.999999999%), you decrease the odds of electing the right person. In fact, with too many incompetent people, it becomes a virtual certainty that the voting will give you the wrong answer, choose the wrong person. Virtually certain.
“Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that. Right?
“After the Columbia space shuttle explosion in 2003, astronaut Mark Kelly, classmate to all three of the astronauts who died, ended a conference call on the subject with a line that’s now a poster on a conference room wall at NASA’s Huston complex. It says, “None of us are as dumb as all of us.”
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/11/democracy-is-always-right-thats-just-math.html
J-D 11.26.24 at 9:45 am
To say that human beings often behave irrationally is, obviously, true–so obviously that it’s hard to figure how the observation would seem worth making.
To say that human beings have the same instincts as baboons is balderdash.
I didn’t choose to bring baboons into this discussion, you did. You must have had some reason for that choice. I don’t know what the reason was, but it wasn’t a good one.
wacko 11.26.24 at 11:12 am
bekabot 132, rest assured: your political opponents are horrible people and you are a very good person. I can see it.
engels 11.26.24 at 1:42 pm
Dealignment from the Democratic Party now extends to every working-class demographic group.
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/working-class-voters-democrats-trump
bekabot 11.26.24 at 1:48 pm
@ wacko
“your political opponents are horrible people and you are a very good person”
When did I say that?
But seriously, on the contrary. I’m enough like the people I’m talking about to recognize them and realize what we have in common. When a person (for example) seems to know a lot about mail fraud (or whatever) you have to wonder, or not-wonder, where he got his information. Right?
wacko 11.26.24 at 2:58 pm
Alex SL,
no one cares about “the immigrant who peacefully lives next door”. It seems that someone fooled you to think they do.
But there are, obviously, serious problems with masses of unvetted people illegally crossing borders. I’m sure you yourself would prefer it wasn’t happening.
Arguably, there are also serious problems with legal mass-immigration, where masses of new immigrants don’t assimilate and create enclaves unreachable by the state institutions. Malmo is usually presented as an example. I don’t know if you agree that it’s a serious problem, but perhaps you can agree that it’s a reasonable concern.
And that’s all.
MisterMr 11.26.24 at 4:01 pm
@engels 136
Given that Harris lost votes in basic all demographics, but much more so in non-college ones, I’d say that the relevant variable is education, plus the fact that in general democrats lost some votes because they were the incumbents.
So it seems like a confirmation of Piketty’s theory of the “Brahmin left VS Merchant right”, here is an article with data up to 2020.
An excerpt:
dilbert dogbert 11.26.24 at 6:39 pm
Tim Snyder has some words to add: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-strongman-fantasy-updated-1124?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=310897&post_id=152202118&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1nzbtr&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
KT2 11.26.24 at 11:25 pm
wacko @138 said “no one cares about “the immigrant who peacefully lives next door”. NO one? Are you jesting, trolling, or sincerely believe what you wrote wacko?
wacko; “But there are, obviously, serious problems with masses of unvetted people” …
“… don’t assimilate and create enclaves unreachable by the state institutions.”
Absolute statements such as “no one” & “enclaves unreachable by the state institutions” is absolutely incorrect, yet may be relatively correct.
(J-D fel free to correct us)
Lots of enclaves: “In United States law, a federal enclave is a parcel of federal property within a statethat is under the “Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the United States”.[1] These enclaves are used for the many different functions of the US federal government, and include post offices, arsenals, dams, road, etc., and usually are owned, secured and administered by the US federal government itself.”
Federal enclave Wikipedia
Plus weird anomalous enclaves;
“Category:Enclaves in the United States” wikipedia Category:Enclaves_in_the_United_States
Relatively, even in the 21st century with more knowledge and sources available than previously, enclaves form and are relatively unreachable.
Example: interactive and searchable including data and sources on;
“IN 2023, WE TRACKED 1,430 HATE AND ANTIGOVERNMENT GROUPS ACROSS THE U.S.”
https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map
And… “The Year in Hate & Extremism 2023” “In 2023, the SPLC documented 1,430 hate and antigovernment extremist groups that comprise the organizational infrastructure upholding white supremacy in the U.S. The years since the Jan.?6, 2021, insurrection have been a time for the hard right to prepare.”
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/year-hate-extremism-2023
Enclaves of the 21st C mind;
“The Sovereign Citizen Movement in the United States” … “Today, thanks to the internet, there are sovereign citizen theories in the United States that originated in places such as Great Britain and Australia.” … “However, Brooks was hardly alone. Some of the other murder cases involving defendants-turned-sovereign include:” …
extremismterms adl org
/resources/backgrounder/sovereign-citizen-movement-united-states
Enclaves Cliven Bundy is excluded from, due to … wacko, you pick a reason…
“The 22 Most Exclusive Gated Communities in the US”
proptia dot com most-exclusive-gated-communities-security
Enclaves even the above can’t access nor find in any usual manner… decibillionaires bugouts.
wacko, many “… don’t assimilate and create enclaves unreachable by the state institutions.”, relatively.
As MisterMr says @126 “If you want offensive language closer to my opinions I’d go with the “they cling to their guns and their bibles”, Obama style.”, and are relatively unreachable in their physical or mental enclaves.
Tm 11.27.24 at 8:46 am
engels 136: Remember there are no – zero – exit polls that differentiate working class voters from business owners, self-employed etc. So these claims are always based on the education variable, which simply means that low education business owners are counted as workers and educated workers are excluded from the working class. As political analysis this is malpractice.
engels 11.27.24 at 11:34 am
TM sez
these claims are always based on the education variable
From the link:
MrMr, I’ve long been sympathetic to Piletty’s analysis and so has Jacobin.
Peter T 11.28.24 at 3:43 am
Adan Tooze has an analysis I found persuasive: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-336-trumps-victory-in-2024
As he notes, Project 25’s conviction that the republic has no need of science (more properly that science and professional expertise is the enemy) will be put to the test when the next epidemic/climate disaster/financial meltdown happens.
Tm 11.28.24 at 8:30 am
engels: Income and education, sorry. Both cannot be used as proxy for class.
As I pointed out above at 130, the exit polls regarding income are not very useful because they don’t show the upper and lower and of the distribution. And they don’t tell us anything about class, so the “working class” in the title of the post is a fraud. The limited available data only show that income is nearly uncorrelated to voting behavior, and given how unreliable the exit polls are, the only conclusion they support is „income doesn’t predict voting“.
A difference of a few points, essentially within the margin of error, between the above and below 100k income groups is taken as evidence of big shifts in class politics but a much larger gender gap and even a much larger difference between age groups is hardly talked about. “Class first” is a hell of a drug.
Alex SL 11.28.24 at 8:58 am
wacko @138,
Well, yes, but also, no. The irony is precisely that most right-wingers campaign against immigrants (and ‘undeserving’ welfare recipients, and ‘useless’ civil servants, and so on) in the amorphous abstract but are then very surprised if the hatred they have promoted against that entire class of people and the political decisions that flow from it also affect the nice immigrant next door (and their brother who is, of course, a deserving welfare recipient, and the useful government service that they rely on, and so on, and Shirley there should be an Exception for those, that isn’t what I meant).
It is more difficult to hate the familiar face on the other side of the table than the anonymous bad people in the distance who the angry news anchor is constantly shouting about. But the climate that they create, changes in immigration laws, deportations, they affect everybody.
And yes, right wing influencers and politicians will often say that they only mean the bad, illegal, and criminal ones. And then if you actually keep watching the next few rallies and interviews, they will categorise entire countries as s—holes where nothing good ever comes from, vilify entire populations, and say quite openly that they plan to simply revoke the legal status of entire classes of legal immigrants. As Trump has said he will do for tens of thousands of recent Haitian immigrants, because all Haitians, and not just ‘bad’ ones, have become a culture war issue during the recent campaign.
Which means those then become illegal immigrants, eh voila!, the right-winger has found a convenient way of claiming with a straight-ish face that they never target legal immigrants. Just watch out if you are a legal immigrant – your ethnicity could be next to be treated the same way.
wacko 11.28.24 at 11:27 am
Alex SL,
First of all, your right-left dichotomy doesn’t make sense to me. You and like-minded people are privileged upper-class persons, and your opponents are working class people. So, as far as I’m concerned, “right-wing” is you. And by the way, in reference to another comment of yours, in modern economy “working people” are not “the poor”. The poor, “lumpenproletariat” in marxist terms (“welfare recipients” in your terms), are not working people; they don’t work. And they usually are, in marxism (but contra Bakunin), bribed by the upper class to do their bidding. Which is, arguably, what we’re observing in American politics these days.
Now, going back to the discussion. So, you admit that “…influencers and politicians will often say that they only mean the bad, illegal, and criminal ones”. And your response to them is that you read their minds and determined that in fact they mean all immigrants, and that’s why the whole campaign against (ostensibly) “the bad, illegal, and criminal ones” must be opposed and denounced. Is that it?
engels 11.28.24 at 11:40 am
TM, I understand that class, education and income are not the same thing but the claims you are making for their mutual irrelevance are wildly overstated, to put it politely. If you’re concerned Jacobin are “fraudulent” then please read Piketty or Tooze who say similar things. This is really like arguing with a man in a dustbin at this point.
MisterMr 11.28.24 at 12:27 pm
@TM 145
I refer to the study I linked above, at the pages 16 and 17.
The problem is this: when you control for income and education, respectively, education alone strongly pushes to the left, (+15%) whereas income still pushes to the right (-10%). (percentages represent the likeliness to vote for the left for people in the top 10% of either education or income).
However, if you DON’T control for the two variables, people who have higer education also tend to have higer income, so the two effects cancel each other, so that high income, if not controlled for education, only pushes -5%, and becomes less powerful as an indicator.
But this doesn’t mean that “class” disappeared, rather that instead of one specific dimension for class we have to think abou two:
high income, high education -> ambiguous
low income, high education -> left
low income, low education -> ambiguous
high income, low education -> right
since many people fall in the “ambiguous” quadrant, the “class” effect becomes more confused if you only look at one of the dimension.
This is also the reason (I think) that wealth is more associated with rightwing politics than income: because income from wealth is less associated to high education.
Now going back to the argument about authoritarian tendencies in the right, first of all the anti-intellectualism of the right is quite obvious, but also the fear of loss of status is: having an higish education is becoming more and more a need in modern economies, and also culturally higer education tends to rule, for the obvious reason that media types (e.g. journalists) tend to be high education people (often high education and comparatively low income, excluded the famous ones).
engels 11.28.24 at 7:00 pm
A good, in-depth analysis of dealignment from a couple of years ago:
https://jacobin.com/2023/08/dealignment-working-class-politics-2022-midterms-economic-populism-democratic-party
reason 11.28.24 at 9:00 pm
Alex SL
“stop the liberals from forcing everybody to be gay despite the liberals not actually planning to force everybody to be gay,” … in fact not actually planning to force anybody to be gay.
J-D 11.28.24 at 11:36 pm
I understand what TM means by class, but obviously TM’s explanation of that point hasn’t been clear enough for everybody to grasp it.
Here’s an explanation of what TM means by class (which I am able to recognise because I’ve seen it used before, by multiple people: it’s not some idiosyncratic invention of TM’s), using illustrative examples.
Let’s suppose that you are a highly trained specialist in surgery, who owns and operates your own practice. That makes you a member of the owning class and not the working class, not because of your high level of education and not because of your income (it makes no difference what your income is), because you own the business yourself, you don’t work for somebody else who owns the business. Now let’s suppose that (for whatever reason) you close your private practice and take a salaried job as the head of surgery at a hospital. You have now changed from being a member of the owning class to being a member of the working class, not because of your level of education (which hasn’t changed) and not because of your income (it makes no difference whether that has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same) but because now you are working for somebody else who owns the business, which you do not own.
Now let’s suppose you’re a farmer, running a farm that you own. That makes you a member of the owning class, regardless of your level of education or income. Then let’s suppose that (for whatever reason) you sell the farm to an agribusiness corporation which hires you to keep doing the same work of running the farm as a salaried manager. You have changed from being a member of the owning class to being a member of the working class, not because of your education or income (it makes no difference whether that has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same) but because now you are working for somebody else who owns the business, which you do not own.
That’s the kind of class system which TM is talking about: a system in which there’s a working class, made up of people who work in/for businesses which they do not won, and an owning class, which owns the businesses in/for which the members of the working class work.
John Quiggin 11.29.24 at 2:10 am
The conflation of “working class” with “no college” (and often, implicitly or explicitly, “male, manual worker”, as in the photo accompanying the Jacobin article) is a kind of analytical dealignment.
At least for Marxists, class used to be defined in terms of relationship to the means of production.
Now it’s more like pop sociological definitions of status, under which “Joe the Plumber”, a capitalist making $250k/year can be passed off as working class, while a schoolteacher making $40k is a member of “the elite”.
Alex SL 11.29.24 at 5:48 am
wacko,
Where are you getting any of this from? Are you seriously telling me that the billionaires are all on the side of socialist and green parties, but that a Hispanic woman on a temp teaching contract or a Hipster guy who funds his studies by bartending are the quintessential Trump voters? Just to be very clear here, the latter two are working class, the billionaires aren’t.
In other words, what others have already written. I am well-educated, but I am not upper-class, nowhere near. We are privileged to own a two-bedroom apartment and a car. If that makes us upper-class, then what is a plumber who owns an actual house with a garden – jet-setting Aspen elite? Once you have twisted definitions like that, what words do you have left for CEOs or for people who inherited a trust fund?
My response to politicians who say that they only mean the bad immigrants and then implement policies that target “nice” immigrants is to conclude that they are lying. There is no more mind-reading involved than if somebody says they haven’t run a red light when we have camera footage of them running the light.
The point here is really, however, that those who believe the claim of only bad immigrants being targeted must either be liars themselves or extremely gullible. It isn’t exactly hard to figure out what is really going on when hearing “invasion”, “s—hole countries”, “they are sending their worst”, “I want my country back”, and so on. It isn’t exactly hard to figure out what is really going on when Trump already did a blanket ban on several countries simply for being majority Muslim. By definition, that wasn’t targeting only criminals. Liars lie. How naive can you get?
wacko 11.29.24 at 7:30 am
I believe for Marxists “class” is defined in more vague general terms, such as “common interests” and “antagonisms”, “social relations” and “relations of production”, and “development of collective consciousness”. It just that in 19th c. western Europe they somehow only found two large classes. Perhaps they have fractured somewhat, in the last century and a half. Can a professor, or even a typical school teacher, develop a common “collective consciousness” with the bogans of the world?
wacko 11.29.24 at 9:39 am
Alex SL, people who don’t need to do any physical labor for a living, and probably haven’t done a single day of honest labor in their lives, are privileged, in my view. Their socioeconomic (“class”) situation is completely different from those who have to compete every day with desperate undocumented workers inside their country and sweatshop workers in China and Bangladesh. But if you want to be known as “left”, it’s fine, go for it.
“The point here is really, however, that those who believe the claim of only bad immigrants being targeted must either be liars themselves or extremely gullible.”
That’s the point? Seriously? Do you really want me to agree with you that anyone who advocates for controlling the borders, for limiting and/or re-structuring immigration (to make it similar to the Australian model, for example), for deportation of foreign criminals, etc, is a liar, fool, add your own insult here? I don’t think you have a chance to convince anyone. This is a thought-preventer and conversation-stopper right there.
Tm 11.29.24 at 10:08 am
engels 148: I don’t argue for the “mutual irrelevance ” of income, education, and class. I’m pointing out that the income variable in recent US elections (and in other elections in Europe) has almost no predictive power wrt voting behavior, contrary to variables race, gender, education, urbanity, and age. In addition, the available data are woefully incomplete (don’t differentiate high incomes etc.) and do not support any conclusions about class status. I find it curious that self-styled “class first” leftists are vastly overinterpreting these incomplete income data to draw big conslusions about class politics in the US that are not warranted, while consistently ignoring or downplaying the other data that shows that factors unrelated or only weakly related to class play a much bigger role.
If we had actually relevant class-voting data, they would almost certainly show that Trump’s core base are not workers but the petit bourgeousie, as we know from historic fascism, and that the working class votes majority Dem but is divided and a large fraction has aligned with Trump for reasons that have little to do with their economic position, rather are based on crudest identity politics because that is what Trump represents, a white nationalist identitarian movement.
One more point about dealignment: probably a higher proportion of workers voted for Nixon and Reagan than for Trump, what do we make of that?
In the whole post-election discourse what has been underdiscussed is the alignment of fascism with oligarchic capitalism, best represented by Musk. The capitalist class has rallied behind Trump like a herd of lemmings. They have revoked the postwar compromise and decided that they don’t actually need liberal democracy and welfare states any more and can do very well without. That is the realignment we need to talk about.
We can see that in donor data. According to the link below, big donors supported Biden in 2020, apparently because they had enough of Trump and wanted a sane and competent government. In 2024, they switched and rallied hugely behind Trump. Why could that have been? I guess it must be because they realized Biden and Harris are neoliberal sellouts who abandoned the Working Class, and therefore decided to support the populist party that is going to abolish the NLRB and CFBP.
https://bsky.app/profile/adambonica.bsky.social/post/3lbfmyrabxc24
MisterMr 11.29.24 at 10:30 am
About “class”, I understand that class in the classic marxist sense refers to people who own the means of production.
But it is very difficult to use that definition when studying election results for two reasons:
The first is that “capitalists” in the proper sense are a really small fraction of the population, the top 0.1% or something like that. So when we speak of people in the top 10% we really mostly are speaking of small bourgoises (small capitalists).
The second is that we do not have clear data about capital ownership, we mostly have rougher data about income. About that, if someone has high income but also high education, it is possible (but not certain) that s/he has it because of the high education, so s/he would be an “aristocracy of workers” person but not a capitalist; if on the other hand one has high income but low education it is likely (but not cerain) that this person also own some sort of capital and this is generating the income, so s/he might be a capitalist / small burgeoise.
In this sense, normalising income with education helps (IMHO) to distinguish income from capital and hence capitalists.
But the third more fundamental reason is that “capitalists” and “workers” are two macro-classes that represent the basic dynamic in a capitalist economy, but in each place in each time period there will be more specific dynamics that interfere with that: it could be rural workers/owners VS industrial workers/owners, it could be industrial VS services, there could be geographical difference in a country where one part is well integrated in the international economy and the other is not.
It is IMHO good to keep workers VS capitalists as a base of the analysis, but this shouldn’t prevent us to use additional categories/classes for the more specific time period/place.
That said, due to the first of these reasons, I’d say that rightwing parties still represent “capitalists” largely, but the working class is culturally fractured so some of it goes to leftwing parties and the other half goes to the right.
But then, “capitalists” (owners of the means of production) are by definition a minority, so it is quite normal that “capitalist” parties have to be sustained also by a large section of the working class, or they would disappear, something that has yet to happen in any modern democracy.
MisterMr 11.29.24 at 10:34 am
Add on to my previous post:
A fourth problem is that the role of “capitalist” is in modern day often mixed with that of the CEO, who in strict sense is not the owner of the company, so there is the question of where we place in this class structure the managers, obviously the top ones but also lower cadres, who are not capitalist but are in a somewhat different relationship with the “working class” (and often will be high education).
engels 11.29.24 at 11:53 am
the income variable in recent US elections (and in other elections in Europe) has almost no predictive power wrt voting behavior… Trump’s core base are not workers but the petit bourgeousie
This is basically what dealignment means (along with Democrat base being educated professionals).
(Someone else can respond to the charge that Jacobin abandoned Marxism for “Joe the Plumber” right-populism because one of their illustrations has a man in it.)
Anna M 11.29.24 at 1:38 pm
I’m not a fan of people adopting the aesthetic of dialectic materialism while refusing to seriously engage with material conditions and the implications thereof.
Sigh.
The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.
But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between Englishmen and Irishmen is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.
England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.
To be blunt, I’d appreciate it if people stopped trying to inject their nationalism into my socialism.
engels 11.29.24 at 2:57 pm
“capitalists” and “workers” are two macro-classes that represent the basic dynamic in a capitalist economy, but in each place in each time period there will be more specific dynamics
Erik Olin Wright’s typology is useful imo.
https://laviedesidees.fr/local/cache-vignettes/L639xH439/relation-table-c08d5.png?1675953021
engels 11.29.24 at 3:42 pm
let’s suppose that (for whatever reason) you close your private practice and take a salaried job as the head of surgery at a hospital. You have now changed from being a member of the owning class to being a member of the working class
“Brain surgeons of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your pension pots” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it…
engels 11.29.24 at 5:56 pm
I’d appreciate it if people stopped trying to inject their nationalism into my socialism.
You just quoted from a letter endorsing Irish nationalism (not that I wish to defend or associate myself with Wacko’s particular brand of national populism).
anon/portly 11.29.24 at 7:04 pm
157
We can see that in donor data. According to the link below, big donors supported Biden in 2020, apparently because they had enough of Trump and wanted a sane and competent government. In 2024, they switched and rallied hugely behind Trump.
I couldn’t get to the Blue Sky link Tm provides, but this Forbes article suggests that what Tm says here is not accurate. (Maybe what the Blue Sky link refers to is donations from Silicon Valley types, not donations as a whole).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-vs-harris-fundraising-race-harris-outraised-trump-3-to-1-with-last-pre-election-report/
wacko 11.29.24 at 8:39 pm
I can’t understand anything in Anna M’s comment, but I’ll say this: I don’t see any problem with nationalism + socialism.
At the risk of sounding like that other commenter here: I still remember the Cold War period, when a mixture of nationalism and socialism was The Left, and a mixture of liberalism and capitalism was The Right. Yes, Uncle Ho, Fidel, Lumumba, Tito, and that’s just off the top of my head. Nothing’s wrong with it.
J-D 11.30.24 at 12:23 am
So long as the working class has the vote, no political party is going to secure majority support with owning class votes alone; securing a majority will always require support from some part of the working class. That’s not new, it’s always been true since the working class got the vote.
John Q 11.30.24 at 3:23 am
““Brain surgeons of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your pension pots” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it…”
It doesn’t, but what conclusions should you draw? The obvious one is that highly trained and highly paid manual workers, of whom brain surgeons are the extreme case, aren’t part of the working class. I don’t know if you want to go there. If you do, where would you draw the line?
Alex SL 11.30.24 at 6:48 am
wacko,
You see me pointing at Trump’s past policies to explain the contradiction, and you just ignore that and get angry as if there was a hypothetical different Trump who hasn’t done a “Muslim ban” but only wants to reform immigration. (To the Australian model, even, which in recent years has involved, among other things, locking underage refugees in a prison camp for many years and without legal recourse in the hope of deterring other refugees from even trying.)
You see me pointing out that people without any significant wealth who need to work a daily job are clearly working class, so you seamlessly move the goal posts so that working class is now narrowly defined by “physical labour”, which is increasingly rare in a society that has invented machines and increasingly automates away not only factory work but even mining work. Seems nearly all of the population is now ‘elite’ because they work in offices instead of using pickaxes or shovels.
Of course, all of us could take your approach. I would find it extremely easy to win an argument, at least in my head, that all Americans are evil if I simply redefine ‘evil’ to mean ‘having US citizenship’. But most of us try to argue in good faith based on widely accepted definitions and evidence.
John Q,
The most logical definition to me is still absence of ownership of the means of production and need to sell one’s labour to survive. Yes, that includes highly qualified workers who can command extremely high salaries, like surgeons, but I do not see the problem with that. They are in the same economic relationship to their employer as a cleaner or night guard in the same hospital. The failure to see that similarity is a lack of class consciousness, which allows employers to divide and conquer, leading to the mess we are in with the gig economy. Conversely, if they run their own company with employees who sell their labour to them, or once they accumulate so much wealth that they can just walk out, their own need to sell one’s labour is overcome, and they are not working class anymore. Most CEOs are clearly in the latter category, with incomes so high that they could stop working at age 35 or so if they wanted and only continue because they can never have enough.
MisterMr 11.30.24 at 9:15 am
There is the question of wether the left abandoned unskilled workers, or workers abandoned the left: many years ago the right populist nativist party “Lega” was on the ascent in Italy, and it allied with Berlusconi, but then broke with B. and this ended the first Berlusconi government (IIRC that was 1994).
Some politicians from the italian left tought that they could pull the Lega to the left, precisely because they tought it was a blue collar movement, and they even called Lega “a rib of the left”. This went nowhere though and the Lega was and still is a very far right party.
In my view, the Lega is mostly the party of northern Italy small business, that mostly bamboozles blue collar guys with identitarian fluff, so it will never go to the left.
In this case, IMHO it is the working class guys who broke with the left for identitarian reasons, not the left who broke with them.
OTHOH, in the 80s and more so the 90s the left went very neoliberal, and has yet to completely reverse its course, so it is quite ambiguous.
SamChevre 11.30.24 at 12:07 pm
The obvious one is that highly trained and highly paid manual workers, of whom brain surgeons are the extreme case, aren’t part of the working class. I don’t know if you want to go there. If you do, where would you draw the line?
I would say that anyone who has unusual education/skills that increase their pay significantly is part of the petite bourgousie – human capital is capital, not labor.
For one thing, this makes the observable pattern of behavior more sensible: electricians think of themselves as electricians, not owners/labor depending on whether they work for someone else or own their own van. For another, it makes clearer some of the desires of skilled labor – to have social structures and policies that maintain the value of their capital. (For non-college skilled labor, this looks like opposition to imported products and labor; for teachers, it looks like opposition to charter schools and vouchers; and so on.)
(I of course think that a society where petite bourgousie are 75% of the households is desirable and achievable.)
Anna M 11.30.24 at 1:12 pm
It is odd that someone with such a prestigious pseudonym should conflate “supporting emancipation from a colonial capitalist state and aristocracy in order to deal a blow to the capitalist class and unify the working class across artificial borders” with “fracturing the working class through identity politics”. I’d appreciate it if you made an effort to be a bit better than this.
Since my point escapes you, allow me to simplify it.
If I live in a society which makes employment a key factor in my material conditions, and this then puts me in conflict with another worker, my enemy is not that worker but rather the system (e.g. capitalism).
If someone suggests prioritising the subordination of a particular identity group (based, it must be noted, not on an examination of economic relationships but rather a very “vibes-based” assertions) over opposition to capitalism, then my most charitable interpretation is that they are committing a grave category error (a far less charitable interpretation would be that they are trying to use the language of proletarian emancipation to fragment the working class as opposed to supporting liberation).
wacko 11.30.24 at 2:29 pm
Alex SL, no, I didn’t get angry.
I don’t have any problem with what you call “Muslim ban”. And a temporary halt on issuing visas in countries with significant anti-American sentiment actually has little to do with immigration. You’re acting like it was an obvious injustice and grievance, but I don’t see how. And even if it was harsh by your lights, I still don’t see how your absolute rejection of any attempt to control immigration follows.
As for the “working class”, like I said, anyone can have their own definitions. This is a technicality.
I don’t know anything about the incident in Australia that you mentioned, but I’m reasonably certain that asylum seekers are placed into refugee camps, not prison camps. You were probably misled.
I don’t get the thing about citizenship being evil. Typically, in a republic, immigrants can integrate, then naturalize, and voila: their interests are represented by politicians they elect. That’s how it is everywhere, and it’s perfectly normal.
Cheers.
engels 11.30.24 at 2:33 pm
where would you draw the line?
Anyone with sufficient assets to live off them comfortably without working (even at a reduced standard of living) isn’t working class imo. A hypothetical “just about managing” brain surgeon who had to do craniotomies to pay the rent would be a (highly atypical and privileged) proletarian but given the salary probably not for long.
bekabot 11.30.24 at 4:56 pm
“But if you want to be known as ‘left’, it’s fine, go for it.”
Late to the party again (long Thanksgiving) but here goes:
I’ve said this tons of times on different occasions — it doesn’t matter what you call yourself, what’s important is what other people call you. Those are the labels that stick.
The bar for being called ‘left’ in America is set very low. You don’t have to do all that much to earn the tag.
I don’t expect that the bar is going to be raised in the immediate future. Do you?
So who’s calling who a lefty? Do you think the dude you’re castigating parades around in a red tie? I doubt it. You might parade around in a red tie, though — but you don’t have the option of not doing it ironically. Grad students who drink PBR don’t turn into mooks because they slurped the wrong potion. (I know that I’m showing my age.)
engels 11.30.24 at 5:01 pm
Anna, I didn’t conflate those things (unless you’re claiming that using the term “nationalism” does so—but you used it).
hix 11.30.24 at 8:23 pm
Good that we made the difference clear between refugee camps and prisons. It does not even sound better if you draw a picture in your mind! It’s like Germany has Ankerzentren instead of concentration camps for the type of refugees it wants to get rid of as fast as possible by among other things makeing the stay as uncomfortable as possible within the fortunately still relatively (and only relatively to other nations) strict legal limits . If the word is right, things get better.
(Why did I even write that response, guess because of a mood that just wants to argue even on the internet, never mind, ill still press submit)
Anna M 11.30.24 at 9:57 pm
engels – In the context of my comment, I pointed to a missive which supported unification of the working class across borders and emancipation from a capitalist country to advance revolutionary goals, while objecting to the expressed national chauvinism which proposed advancing the interests of one specific nation across class lines over the interests of the global working class. I don’t believe this is as contradictory as you seem to imply, unless you choose to ignore the broader context of both the author I quoted and class struggle in general (workers have no nation, remember?). Frankly speaking, I struggle to see what point you are trying to advance here, or why you believe it is so important and relevant to the conversation I was having as to require me to give it consideration?
John Q 12.01.24 at 1:33 am
Engels @174 “Comfortable” must be doing a lot of work here. Assuming willingness to accept a low standard of living (say that of a minimum-wage worker) while employed, most skilled workers could earn enough in 20-30 years to stop working and retire early (there’s a whole subculture devoted to doing this). On your definition, the working class must get steadily smaller over time, unless you upgrade the “comfortable” requirement as wages rise.
engels 12.01.24 at 2:25 am
To be clear: minimum wage < “comfortable” < brain surgeon salaries (£250K+?) and it probably should be uprated over time.
Anna, my point is that socialists shouldn’t always oppose nationalism (I have a Palestine flag in my window rn).
wacko 12.01.24 at 7:52 am
Hix 177, all over the world asylum seekers live in refugee camps. And children go summer camps. It sounds like this is something about you.
Anna M, 172, I still don’t understand what you write. I said that the bosses make domestic workers compete locally against the undocumented and globally against sweatshops on the other side of the globe. I believe it was stated clearly enough. You feel you’re responding to it, yes?
Anna M 12.01.24 at 8:26 am
Given that I haven’t claimed socialists should always oppose nationalism, I fear your point is somewhat wasted on me – but thank you for the clarification, regardless.
wacko 12.01.24 at 9:28 am
Re: nationalism.
During the Cold War it was all about freedom ™ . Must have freedom, the commies don’t have freedom. Freedom, freedom, freedom.
Then commies disappeared, and our desperate desire for freedom disappeared with them. Nowadays “freedom” is something white supremacists talk about. National sovereignty (aka “nationalism”) became the evil enemy (read some Chomsky 1990s texts on Multilateral Agreement on Investment).
engels 12.01.24 at 9:08 pm
This is… unfortunate.
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/harris-campaign-economic-populism-democracy
engels 12.01.24 at 9:29 pm
I don’t have strong feelings about immigration one way or the other but this is hilarious.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14143359/DAN-HODGES-Tories-lose-control-migration-willingly.html
Anna M 12.02.24 at 8:14 am
And yet, curiously, rather than focus on opposing the exploitative systems of capital you instead seem to focus on opposing very specific sections of the competing workers based purely on identity politics (you are aware we can read all your comments, yes?). Indeed, it seems to me that a brief-yet-not-unfair summary of what we are presented with would be “bosses are bad, but we need to focus on immigrants who are simultaneously both bribable, unemployable, and make no positive contribution to an economy whilst also being competing workers (but not in a way which necessitates class solidarity) seeking to take jobs from the working class (by which is meant people engaged in manual labour, like coal miners, but not people working in a call centre who are instead part of the ‘elites’)”. As social-political-economic treatise go, this isn’t exactly Das Kapital (even setting aside the rather obvious lack of cited evidence, clear definitions, relationships to economic power, class consciousness, or seemingly basic understanding of the terminology being employed). Again, if someone wishes to employ the aesthetic of dialectic materialism I expect them to engage seriously with its tools, providing evidence based models which may be tested and validated, and that interact with existing examinations of modes of production and class theory to produce meaningful models of society – which hardly seems the case here.
Were I in a particularly generous mood, I might suggest one could do worse than starting with reading “On the Lausanne Congress” with respect to managed migration vs. international organisation, examining whether or not immigration control within a capitalist state would likely be under the control of labour, and then considering whether staving off internal class conflict at the expense of other countries is more beneficial to the worker or the ruling class. Personally, in this stage of capitalist decay, it seems to me that capitalism can not afford to maintain the existing wages and conditions regardless of whether there are migrants, and so targeting migrants through border control won’t alter this – there would seem to be more than sufficient resources to provide a decent standard of living for everyone, it is merely that they are under the control of a few wealthy people and corporations.
As I noted previously, If I live in a society which makes employment a key factor in my material conditions, and this then puts me in conflict with another worker, my enemy is not that worker but rather the system (e.g. capitalism). It seems to me that efforts should be focused on developing class solidarity and proletarian power, awakening class consciousness, and opposition to the capitalist systems of exploitation – and not falling into traps of arguing over identity politics. Fundamentally, the program of proletarian liberation should not be to seek accommodation with the capitalist class at the expense of the worker (migrant or not), but instead uniting workers across borders in defense of their material conditions.
Or, if I may be permitted to make a slightly reductive witticism, it is “Workers of the world, unite!” – not “Workers* of the world, unite (*vibes-based exceptions apply)”.
bekabot 12.02.24 at 4:45 pm
“Nowadays ‘freedom’ is something white supremacists talk about.”
Where do they talk about freedom? When? I’ve been listening-in on their conversations for years and I’ve missed the ones about freedom. Once in a while they’ll invoke Aunt Lydia’s freedom-from (mostly when they use it this boils down to a stated desire for freedom from having to share air, space, or jobs with people they detest) but even then it’s not a consistent talking point. Somewhat more often they’ll mention various types of freedom-to: freedom to live in a world they don’t inhabit, freedom to remember a past which didn’t happen, freedom to inherit a bogus legacy, and freedom to get credit for things they haven’t done. Since I was brought up to the view that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, this is a type of freedom which doesn’t strike me as in any way real. The only real kind of freedom I’ve ever known them to talk much about is the freedom to gawk at celebrities whose parties they aren’t invited to, and that’s a liberty not only shared by every ancestral forelock-tugging vassal standing by the side of a dirt road, but also by the more old-timey Republicans, who were (as I can testify) much better at it.
So: sorry, not buying.
somebody who watched ken burns baseball documentary 12.02.24 at 5:11 pm
anna m @ #186 raises a trenchant and direct point that i remember was echoed by a statement that was made by the head of the major league baseball player’s association: exploitation cannot be determined simply by looking at the amount of the wage; exploitation can only be identified by looking at the amount of the wage (and other conditions of the workplace) in relation to the benefit generated to the owner by the labor. his point was simple: compared to the average stadiumgoer, the professional baseball player is paid exhorbitantly, but compared to the average MLB owner, the professional baseball player is paid chickenfeed, often put through dangerous physical regimens that will affect them long after their “retirement”, and subject to contractual limitations that aren’t applied to any other worker in any other field. and if you ask any fan “hey, if we fired every MLB player and replaced them with the next lowest ‘class’ of MLB player from various minor leagues, would it be as fun and exciting to watch major league baseball” the answer would be unanimously in favor of the quality of the current crop of professionals.
to bring the topic back around to whats next, my expectation is that the trump administration will file an amicus brief arguing that the NLRB is unconstitutional, and it will be eliminated by a 8-0 vote (the liberal justices having been arrested and replaced “temporarily” with guys from the fifth circuit). This will be followed by a federal law banning unions, strikes and asking your boss for a raise.
lurker 12.02.24 at 8:42 pm
“when a mixture of nationalism and socialism was The Left, and a mixture of liberalism and capitalism was The Right. Yes, Uncle Ho, Fidel, Lumumba, Tito, and that’s just off the top of my head” wacko, 166
Well, I can remember more leaders who combined nationalism and socialism.
Ceausescu, who added interesting Dacianist and Protochronist ideas to his Romanian socialism. Ideas that are still alive, in unexpected places. I’ve seen it predicted that the plurality of Roma (not the same thing as Romanian) voters may be voting for an Iron Guard (the OG Iron Guard turned Nazi SS stomachs) fanboy presidential candidate. We’ll see.
Zhivkov, who did his best to make Bulgaria truly Bulgarian, but was interrupted before he could assimilate or expel every last Turk.
Ne Win, and the Burmese way to Socialism.
The glorious Arab Socialism, with its last bastion still standing thanks to Russia, Iran and captagon.
I can understand and support nationalism in the sense that an Irish/Indian/Ukrainian/Kazakh government is going to be more responsive to the wishes of its people and less likely to starve people to death by the million.
But I’d keep the nationalism and the socialism separate, if at all possible.
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