12 Theses on Politics

We're all living in America

I’m not emailing this one out because it’s neither my area of expertise (oops, see #7), nor one that I expect people to widely appreciate for reasons other than how good the takes are.¹ That said, if you stumbled upon these, you’re free to let me know what you want to hear more about:

1. Democrats should flood the conservative media zone. Get top Dems and Dem influencers on Rogan, Tucker, Megyn Kelly, Candace; do Fox News and even OAN/Newsmax interviews. The idea is that it’s much harder to say wildly untrue things about someone when they’re sitting right in front of you. If you keep your cool the host loses their edge and you stop being the farmode boogeyman for the audience. I think Sam Altman did a really good job on Tucker for example. Tucker accused him of murder to his face and he reacted pretty calmly, putting Tucker on the back foot. I don’t think Tucker’s audience came away thinking Altman was evil. There’s a risk that supply of partisan content is extremely elastic and new echo chambers pop up, but if there’s even medium-length lag, you can buy a lot of moderation in a ~year.

2. The leftists and liberals who march with Trump. It’s no great secret of history that extremist movements feed on each other. Nationalists vs communists in China, Germany, and Spain in the 20th Century; Zionists vs Hamas; Bush-era hawks vs Al-Qaeda; probably more ethnic conflicts than I can count. The excesses of one side always justify the excesses of the other. If one side suddenly disappeared, the other would lose all its rhetorical force and a lot of its support. Obviously sides to polarized conflicts like these can be more or less defensible or grounded in reality. The left is much more reasonable than the right in practice, which is one reason I would like to appeal to them to rein in their excesses if possible. On the margin, that’s doing a lot more to help Trump than it is to help them. In addition to creating easy targets for the right (and not repudiating most of the easy targets), there is also purity-policing your own side: kicking out natural allies for not being closely aligned enough to your substantive vision. I’m glad to see some of this latter dynamic on the right lately, but we can always do better ourselves.

3. Why decent people don’t see that Trump is evil. This will be a list post that reflects the reality that there’s no single explanation. People have a bunch of beliefs and judgements and information gaps that combine and net out to broad support for Trump. These include: simple “team R” tribal dynamics; assuming there are two sides to every story; specific confusions about trade and labor economics; Trump’s relatability; not knowing what due process is; assuming judges are political actors like anyone else, and more…

4. Freedom bots. If you know Twitter (currently X) — and I know Twitter — you know that it’s overrun with right wing bots. Basically every comment section on every post about US politics is 40% vile and/or conspiratorial comments from KYDogMom449, TampaTurf, or BigVets4Trump. All AI generated profile pictures, most accounts opened in 2022 or more recently and have 10,000+ posts (i.e. 10+ posts every, single day for years). Always negative/antagonistic, always extreme. I assume these are run by some combination of Russia, China, and private MAGA groups in America. Comments saying simple, true, relevant things like “I think Biden won the 2020 election,” or “I don’t think the country is about to collapse,” are vanishingly rare by comparison, despite reflecting what most people think. I suspect this is downstream of fair-minded people being unwilling to spin up their own bot farms. Someone should be willing to sully themselves in this way to keep the public’s perception of the public’s perception from being further distorted.

5. Political credibility scores. Wherein I make a quiz filled with politically relevant facts, figures, and concepts. How well you do on this tells you something about how qualified you are to opine on politics. I have no clever mechanism to enforce honest reporting of scores, but perhaps some people would take some pause if they got an exceptionally low score. I jotted down the first few things that came to mind here.

6. The Trump administration wants ICE officers to be attacked. I could use a stronger word than attacked. The administration is spending tens of billions to send new, untrained, masked men onto American streets where they are told to employ extremely aggressive and indiscriminate tactics all to achieve a very average deportation rate compared to past administrations. It’s possible they believe this will successfully directly intimidate both immigrants and their political opponents into backing off of criticism, but I think it is more likely they are trying to instigate violence against their own officers. We saw how eagerly and opportunistically the Trump administration leapt at the chance to use Charlie Kirk’s murder to villainize their enemies. Attacks on ICE officers could be used just the same way. I think it is good to disseminate this hypothesis because it both discourages violence and thereby makes the whole scheme less likely to work. Perhaps I can say more about how the Trump administration has narratively positioned itself to benefit from chaos and decline.

7. Why there’s no centrist Rogan. A big part of Joe Rogan’s (and many others’) charisma comes from their willingness to speculate wildly about all manner of things they don’t know and to do so with great confidence. They trust their own intuitions. They think they’re onto something. It’s exciting. It’s also how most people relate to the world. When a big issue surfaces to their attention, the thing they want is something interesting or controversial to say. It will win them some attention. It might even subconsciously serve to let them know who likes them for them (i.e. is willing to entertain nonsense just because it’s coming from their mouth). The problem with moderates is that they insist on staying in their lane, expressing uncertainty, and deferring to experts. That’s no fun! I want to come up with a bunch of (directionally) true takes that are interesting and can be spouted off with bravado. This is to say nothing of the perhaps bigger need to disagree with particular beliefs while validating the people who hold them (as opposed to labeling them dangerous spreaders of disinformation).

8. Trumpism might be immune to ideological Turing tests. I’m overstating it with the title, but I have a Gettier-type problem with steelmanning Trumpism. I can say the words that will convince a Trumpist that I understand where they’re coming from with maximal detail (I will do that as part of the post and you can judge), but I will not in fact be moved even a little bit towards sympathy with the policy program, nor will I even understand the appeal, with the possible exception of satisfying some “burn it all down” rage. Otherwise, the policy program concretely benefits no one. Maybe seeing whether I fail the test itself will soften this view.

9. Why were there so many asylum seekers during the Biden Administration? It looks like internal DHS policies and some executive orders encouraging more and faster humanitarian paroling policies. I want to dig in deeper and see if I can figure out how naïve this was.

10. Watch the god-damned Super Bowl. Probably listen to Taylor Swift. More importantly, spend 2-3x more energy discussing these in public. I think spending 15 hours per year trying to indulge the most broadly shared parts of the culture is important for being a good liberal. You will mellow out and perhaps others will too.

11. Wokism as an autoimmune disease. It’s not exactly an original take that many on the social justice left regarded themselves as the inheritors of the civil rights movement and that this led to some excessive self-righteousness about e.g. pronouns and microaggressions. I personally think that most social justice folks would in fact be productive members of the civil rights movement if they lived in the 60s and that their main problem was simply being politically active in the 2010s — an admittedly quite rare period where there was no legitimate oppression to fight. Some people just have a revolutionary, fight-the-power aesthetic. Given that we as a species are prone to repressive authoritarianism, I’m glad this disposition is around. If it’s a constant force in the world, though, it will sometimes misfire, sending out a wave of rage and hostility that engenders backlash from regular people.

12. The lie at the heart of liberal politics. Liberals often insist on deep natural equality between all individuals such that, in a fair environment, anyone can do anything. The unequal outcomes we observe are all the result of unjust historical contingencies. What people hear liberals saying here is: “when we’re in charge, group x and group y will thrive because fairness and equality will reign.” Against a backdrop that contains some immutable-by-policy differences in both individual and group outcomes, this has a couple of effects. First, if you’re not a part of group x or y, that’s an instant trigger — you don’t think you’re thriving and now the liberals are going to make things harder for you to help somebody else. Second, many members of groups x and y won’t make it, and they’ll perceive a broken promise. Compare this to the right wing vibe of “we’re gonna be big strong and kick ass and let the chips fall where they may.” Chips falling where they may is what people observe under almost any circumstance, so, while people aren’t happy, at least you weren’t robbing or bullshitting them. Of course this makes voters sound very zero sum and sensitive to loss aversion (“have I been explicitly taxed?”), but we go to politics with the minds we have.

You can see that I have decided to win. I hope you will too.

1. Though, to be clear, the takes are not particularly good either.