At some point, people have to take responsibility for refusing to see what's obvious. That cuts both ways. I would be more inclined toward pity (under the "you can't fix stupid" theory) if the impact wasn't so harsh and damaging. I'm too damn old to wait for normality to come around again.
Advanced civilization seems to be at risk from being overtaken by social media personalities, shallow but superficially attractive, or "attractive", in the sense of successfully drawing the world's attention to themselves by peddling madness.
This is a digital equivalent of the British Gin Craze of the 18th century. A fully unregulated, strongly addictive product unleashed on a naive population.
In places with multiple parties, the crazies are at least a bit distributed around. In two-party systems, your choice is between "Xir Latinx Men with Penises are Women, even if they are five years old" vs. "(((they))) are spreading 5G laced chemtrails across the West and RETVRN to Bronze Age is the only solution!"
Helluva choice. It will take us some time to develop at least some societal resistance to this mental poison.
If you'll permit some reader feedback: I of course agree with you; these people are morons. But I have to say, I think this style of writing is beneath you. It provides no new information to your readers, it's horrifyingly unlikely to change anyone's mind on the other side, and it's frankly just unpleasant to read.
I subscribed due to your law articles; I think my favorite is My Clients, the Liars, but the others are excellent as well. It is of course your blog and your choice what to put here, but it saddens me that the intelligent articles have lessened and there are now so many posts that are just vulgar angry screeds against your outgroups now.
I always appreciate reader feedback! At least aspirationally, I want to avoid being a one-trick pony, but that inevitably will be in tension with making everyone happy with everything I write. It's a trade-off I have to accept.
Persuasion is also a very tricky beast, particularly when you're in the context of dishonesty or delusion as we are here. Maybe you're right that this post is horrifyingly unlikely to change any Trump supporter's mind, but that's a hypothesis I would be thrilled to test out! I actually wrote this with that in mind, because I know for a fact I have a few hate-readers out there. If any MAGA supporters are ever willing to talk to me again, this post would be my focus. If they don't, that gives me information about what they perceive to be their own weakness.
This was also an example of a meta-approach I repeatedly deploy where I accept as many of opponent's premises as possible. Part of the contribution that I hope is novel is a criticism of MAGA that aims squarely at the self-serving mythology they've built for themselves (some comments repeated this approach). Maybe there isn't any new factual information above, but perhaps the overall framework would be something a reader hasn't encountered before.
Cultural commentary is also a tricky thing because you're simultaneously a participant in the arena you're covering. Part of what I want to encourage is generosity for error-admission (which I earnestly believe in) but that requires cutting through an extremely tough outer shell. Degrading but honest insults seemed worth a try.
Obviously I could be wrong about the effect, or maybe just huffing valorization fumes to excuse my own poor behavior. What I can't be faulted for, however, is lack of trying other avenues. I've tried to approach dishonesty/delusion with the exact same framework I'd use for other disputes and have concluded it was a mistake. That was actually the motivation behind writing "My Clients, The Liars".
PS: Part of the reason there haven't been as much law articles lately is that most have been hoovered up into my (regrettably still pending) memoir. Soon.
Yeah I'll admit I don't understand humans in general *that* well. I have been led to believe that "one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar" as the saying goes, and I try to model my writing after e.g. Scott Alexander, who I'm sure has changed many minds.
Then again, that proverb's experiment has actually been done, and it turns out that flies actually prefer vinegar! And despite the total lack of actual correspondence between the two situations, perhaps the analogy holds regardless; Destiny is a rather unpleasant individual to listen to, yet is often credited for deradicalizing quite a few people.
Out of curiosity I've sent the article to a Trump-voting friend of mine and asked him for his thoughts, I'll relay anything interesting he says.
The niceness approach is my preferred and default approach, but it can only work in the context where everyone is operating honestly. It's otherwise incoherent and fruitless IME when dealing with a liar (either to themselves or others).
I would be thrilled to hear feedback from your Trump-voting friend, especially a follow-up after a few weeks!
No, I appreciate feedback in general and Isaac's in particular. There's plenty of valid reasons someone can be put off by my particular approach which have nothing to do with carrying a fondness for MAGA.
Ok, I will take your advice and respond simply by telling you that you are an idiot, seemingly too blinded by tribalism to have anything that could charitably be called a rational thought.
Be careful with this guy isaac if you beat him in an argument he’s will spend three days spamming your dms and responding to every post you’ve ever made.
Hanania is more professional in his disdain for low human capital, so I prefer his writing. Maybe that's just my slightly puritan background making me dislike vulgarity specifically.
This article brings to mind a question I've had for a while - how much responsibility do you think Trump has for his political success in the last decade? Not necessarily success in crafting or implementing some sort of political program, which seems hard to judge objectively. But being nominated by a major party or winning more than 45% of the vote in a presidential election multiple times can be considered a success and he has certainly done that.
I ask because here you call him a brilliant salesman and seem to credit him for his successful political strategy (which you describe as catering exclusively to idiots). But in previous posts, you describe Trump as having burgeoning dementia, unable to tell the difference between something that happened last week and something that happened a decade ago. I don't see how you can call him both a "ward patient" and a "brilliant salesman". It seems like it'd be one or the other.
The most common way critics square this circle is by suggesting that Trump doesn't have any responsibility for his movement's success and all the planning was done by Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin or some other shadowy puppeteer. Trump himself doesn't actually matter that much and could be replaced by any other figurehead. While I don't think this is true, this can explain how Trump can both dominate national politics and be unable to form complete sentences. Do you also believe that Trump could be easily replaced? I don't think I've seen you suggest there's some other individual or group behind his success, so I didn't think that was the framework you had for Trump's success (and here you seem to credit him).
(This explanation also doesn't really explain why other "puppets" haven't been successful. For example, if the only reason for Trump's 2024 win was Musk's support, why wasn't DeSantis able to win?)
Or others sometimes explain that Trump is both incredibly stupid and incredibly successful, but only because he is stupid enough to win over the incredibly stupid losers that voted for him. This has always struck me as very facile though. Some of the brightest minds in the country work in McDonald's marketing or producing reality TV. There's a lot of competition for the support of the people you're describing and the people that are successful in it aren't stupid. Someone delusional or with dementia would not last long devising national strategy for winning over that demographic.
So anyways, after reading many of your words about Trump, I'm not sure if you would describe him as a competent politician (or at least campaigner). It seems like half the time you describe him as smart enough to hoodwink half the world and half the time you describe him as too stupid to speak in full sentences. Is it one or the other or somehow both?
Thanks for this comment, it explains some of the crossed wires we had.
Trump has benefitted from luck, but he bears the overwhelming responsibility for his success. I think the guy has undeniable charisma, charm, humor, and an unparalleled instinct for optics and marketing. He understood how critical the appearance of success can be to attaining success within certain fields, and he knew how to leverage the persona of a "poor man's version of a rich man" to get ahead in life.
All of the above can still exist even with dementia. The best comparison would be how someone can remain socially savvy and charismatic even when blitzed out drunk. There are some dimensions where his idiocy is actually an advantage, because he often _appears_ to believe his own blatant lies. Compare that to someone like JD Vance, whose bullshitting ability is severely hobbled by the fact that he _knows_ he's lying.
When I say Trump is incompetent, I'm referring to a narrower more colloquial understanding of the word. I don't believe he has the mental acuity to learn the intricacies of a new subject on a deep level, but I'm confident he'd be able to go on stage and convince at least half the audience otherwise.
Ok, sounds like you'd essentially say that Trump is a genius at marketing, optics, persuasion or whatever, but not at anything else. And we just happen to live in a society where those skills allow someone to dominate.
But I think you're underselling your previous statements here. You didn't say that he was unable to learn the intricacies of a new subject on a deep level. You said that Trump is often so confused that he thinks something from a decade ago happened last week. Seems like that level of delusion would make marketing difficult. Drunks might be charismatic during individual encounters, but tend not to have long-term success. Trump's managed to dominate national politics for decade.
It also seems to require a loose interpretation of what a subject is. A real estate developer isn't learning a new subject when he identifies how to dominate a field of ~20 experienced Republican politicians? Or when his administration develops a vaccine faster than anticipated? Or when ISIS crumbled during his time in office? "Optics and marketing" is a fuzzy enough field that anything can be included. If by 2028 there's peace in the Middle East and an American base on Mars, we could still say that Trump just bullshitted his way there (while others would be considered a genius for their diplomatic and administrative abilities under the same circumstances). In other words, we can chalk all of Trump's successes up to bullshit rather than competence, therefore we never have to change our mind about him being incompetent no matter what he accomplishes.
Anyways, thanks for clarifying. As you can see, I'm still pretty skeptical that you're evaluating Trump reasonably. But I can see what framework you're working with at least.
I'm just not seeing the contradiction. Yes, he experiences severe confusion at times, and yet he can still revert to a decently successful deep-seated social instinct. You've probably seen this video of an otherwise unresponsive elderly man light up upon listening to music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWn4JB2YLU
I think the other missing piece of the puzzle is that much of his success is built up on the compelling image he has meticulously cultivated over several decades, back when he was still much more compos mentis. If he was an unknown figure and had not emerged into the spotlight until now in his current state, I seriously doubt anyone would've paid attention.
I don't think that's a relevant example unless that man is currently dominating the international music industry when he's not slumped over a chair, struggling to answer yes or no questions. Trump isn't a "decently successful" politician. He's the most influential person in the world. I don't see how you can compare him to an invalid old man that is able to speak disjointedly when helped by certain triggers before lapsing again into an unresponsive state. From that, you're extrapolating that a senile man could win control over the most powerful nation the world has ever seen? That seems like a jump and more than just a matter of scale.
The usual framework that people have when believing a leader is demented is that someone else running the show while using that leader's prior success. "Feinstein relies on her aides", "I'm voting for Biden because I trust his cabinet to call the shots", "H.W. Bush started his presidency early" or "Brezhnev's decisions were made by Andropov and Gromyko" etc. That's the usual description of a leader's behavior when they're senile. It's unusual to believe that a leader is both actively making major decisions, while regularly being so confused they don't what year it is. You haven't said that Trump is occasionally confused and there's a coverup (like the critics of Biden or Brezhnev). Instead you've been insistent that his confusion is regularly on full display during his many public appearances.
As an example, you've said that Trump's delusion is on display in the first few minutes of the Rogan interview and is so obvious that you have no idea how to communicate with someone who doesn't see that Trump doesn't know what year his Oprah interview occurred. (This is tangential, but Rogan and all major news outlets that covered the Rogan interview did not pick up on that confusion). Reading your previous comments, it didn't seem like you'd describe this "meandering interview" as showing charisma or charm at any point and would be critical of anyone that argued that it did.
I'd be interested in seeing what you'd contrast Trump's moments of deep confusion with. Do you think that the rest of the interview is different? What parts of it show his charisma, humor or charm? Overall, the impression I've gotten is you think Trump's behavior is always stupid and dumb, but that he's convinced stupid people it's not (and others say it's not because they're "subservient obedient cucks") Do you have a clip from the Rogan interview (or something else from the last ~year) that displays Trump's ability? I think that contrast would help me understand.
(To be clear, it's not relevant to the current discussion whether Biden, Reagan, Feinstein or Brezhnev was lucid during their leadership and I can delete an example if someone argues)
Come on dude, I used that video to illustrate a concept of how someone with unambiguous cognitive decline can be debilitated in one area while alive in another. I did not make any direct comparisons to Trump, the guy in the video is clearly decompensated at a far greater level than Trump.
I agree that's the usual framework for a demented leader is that someone else is running the show, I don't agree that would necessarily apply to Trump given the cult of personality. The closest parallel is the maneuvers his underlings pull regarding who to include or exclude during certain meetings (e.g. excluding Pete Navarro during tariff talks https://archive.ph/q8IxB).
I think some parts of the Rogan interview show charisma or charm, I just didn't mention them. I'm not going to watch the interview again but off the top of my head I'd probably cite the story he told about Abraham Lincoln and melancholia. Elsewhere, I've repeatedly found him very funny on multiple occasions.
I believe that Trump is always oriented X 3 or whatever measurement we'd use to say whether someone is demented. In the comments of your other article, you challenged a commentor to provide "examples of Trump successfully completing complex cognitive tasks that would be challenging for someone with dementia." I would argue that running a campaign for the most powerful position in the world is complex cognitive task and would be challenging for someone with dementia. It couldn't be completed in brief snaps of partial lucidity like that old man experiences when coached. So I didn't think Trump's condition is similar to his, differing only in scale.
In other words, the video is an example of someone with severe dementia who is able to express some coherent thought with heavy prompting under certain conditions. That doesn't seem relevant to whether someone completing a complex difficult project that takes more than year (such as a presidential campaign) could regularly become too disoriented too function. I don't think Trump's success is consistent with someone that is often severely confused and regularly operating off nothing but instinct.
I read that other article in the past and it contributed to me reading you now. However, I think that if 2025 Yassine read 2019 Yassine's musings on Trump's ability to convey sentiment, he'd say it was sane-washing cult talk. But you know better than me what you'd say now and then.
However I should apologize. I've also mostly ignored that you're saying that this is all pretty recent. Maybe 2019 Trump was different. He was talking with the clarity of sentiment reserved for prophets. But 2025 Trump doesn't do that and anyone that thinks he's conveying sentiment rather than facts is spewing some variant of “what they really meant” rehabilitative sanewashing. He seems similar enough to me but I watch the news now less than I did. I guess there's nothing for me to do but watch him more carefully.
There is no contradiction here. How about this question: tell me a subject you believe Trump understands 'very well' that is outside of anything related to sales/marketing. Can you name a subject that he comments on that you believe he has learned and learned deeply? A single one will do.
I think he knows a lot about real estate development. But I suppose you'd say that's part of sales? Or I could say that he knows about political campaigning, but I suppose marketing to you. I think I mentioned that earlier - marketing and sales are vague enough categories that almost anything could fall under them. I'd argue that both should be considered a different skill. Like Carly Fiorina was successful in sales strategy, but failed as a candidate. If campaigning isn't a different skill, why did she fail so badly? (But I guess it's a tangent to wonder why someone else hasn't been able to turn a marketing career into a presidency or why a Coke marketing exec couldn't get Clinton over the finish line.)
Another challenge that might come up is that any accomplishment could be dismissed as him merely hiring or working with competent people. Like if I say that Operation Warp Speed was a success or repeat that ISIS was contained during his presidency, you'll point out that he wasn't the one making the vaccine ahead of schedule or pursuing self-proclaimed caliphs down tunnels.
I think I'll go with something like tax and/or bankruptcy law. He seems quite successful at using those to his advantage to get as money as possible, usually from someone that needs or deserves it more than him. Does that meet your criteria? According to reporting I've seen from Matt Yglesias, Trump often pursued legal strategies that his lawyers advised against but was successful. This means that it's him, not just the team he chose, with a good understanding of those fields.
You think Trump could explain a fucking thing about tax and/or bankruptcy law? Are you fucking serious? Jesus, man. Rationalize your shit however you'd like.
You're an example of a smart person who got duped and is doing extreme mental gymnastics. You have to realize that on some level, right?
Do you think he knows how to use bankruptcy laws to offload his own personal debt onto investors into a casino and resort business operating out of Atlantic City and Gary, Indiana. I think he knows how to do that, because he's pretty much done exactly that. Saying that someone knows how to do something that they've already done does not seem like very complex mental gymnastics.
I think that there are few people in the world that would be better than Trump at taking a business, cannibalizing it for their own benefit, then leaving someone else holding the bag. That requires a good understanding of the laws surrounding bankruptcies, right?
And he pays very little in taxes. I think you have to have a good understanding of tax law (or a good ability to recognize when somebody has a good understanding of tax law) to avoid paying federal income tax for 10 out of 15 years while spending millions of dollars annually.
If he doesn't have an unusually good understanding(or an unusually good ability to recognize people with a good understanding) of bankruptcies and taxes, then how has he been so successful with them? (Unless you believe that he did not offload millions of dollars of debt onto the investors of his businesses and believe that he pays all the taxes that he should)
I think Trump benefits a lot from a huge portion of the electorate taking the basic honesty of political figures for granted.
People insist on the opposite, that politicians lie all the time and aren't to be trusted. But they implicitly accept that politicians exist within a system of bounded dishonesty-
And the sort of dishonesty they *expect* to get from politicians is weasel words, evasiveness, reframing situations to make their positions look better than a full accounting of the evidence justifies, etc. They treat them like perverse genies who'll play word games and try to screw you over, but won't technically lie. And these people listen to Trump, who just tells bald-faced lies without the slightest shred of guilt or hesitation, and they think "He doesn't sound shifty at all, he's clearly being honest!" It has the "ring of truth" to them because he's unburdened by the reservations about lying that they take for granted in politicians.
I don't think that bounded dishonesty stuff really explains the appeal. After all, people accuse politicians of outright lying all the time. That's especially true for the most hardcore Trumpists (rather than the 40+% that vote for him), which I think that these conversations usually focus on. As just one example, the people storming the Capitol on Jan 6 weren't complaining about weasel words, they believed that objective vote totals were being tampered with. They were making accusations of a "technical lie".
To me, Trump's reputation for "honesty" or straight talk or whatever comes from his tendency to make judgements of things in isolation. I expressed that poorly, but a good example is a few years ago when Trump commented that Hezbollah are "smart". A more mainstream politician (Pence) counterargued that “Look, Hezbollah are not smart. They’re evil, OK.” But that's not really a counterargument. Being evil is orthogonal to being smart. While you may disagree about Trump's evaluation of Hezbollah, Pence refused to even make a judgement on the effectiveness of a major player in the conflict. Trump's willingness to weigh in on these reasonable questions is what's given him a reputation as a "straight-talker".
Or Trump's skepticism of "experts" could be considered as skepticism of who should be considered an expert. It's true that Trump said he knows more than the generals, but that's because he was repeating what enlisted soldiers said:
It reminds me of Scott's post on Seeing like a State. Maybe it's true that random guys sitting in Afghanistan have better advice than the generals or defense experts.
And of course, the SSC post I think about most when looking at Trump is his review of art of the deal:
"But Trump of the book is more a-intellectual, in the same way some people are amoral or asexual. The world is taken as a given. It contains deals. Some people make the deals well, and they are winners. Other people make the deals poorly, and they are losers. Trump does not need more than this. There will be no civilization of philosopher-Trumps asking where the first deal came from, or whether a deal is a deal only by virtue of its participation in some primordial deal beyond material existence. Trump’s world is so narrow it’s hard to fit your head inside it, so narrow that on contact with any wider world it seems strange and attenuated, a broken record of deals and connections and hirings expanding to fill the space available."
Trump's worldview is so unique it's hard to compare to others.
I don't think it's *just* a matter of bounded dishonesty, but I think that's a major element which Trump gets a lot of mileage out of. When it comes to people attributing real out and out duplicity to politicians, like active vote tampering, I think it's extremely relevant that they think that in the first place because Trump told them to, and they trust Trump's word over other politicians' because he matches their heuristics for being a "straight talker," whereas the other politicians they're comparing him to sound less honest to them *because* of their reservations about telling outright lies.
So you believe that open lies (like Trump's) affect credibility less than the partial lies or mistruths of most politicians. And that Trump is then able to exploit the lack of credibility resulting from these partial lies to accuse them of outright lies? That seems to assume that the audience has no way to evaluate the truth of a statement besides how a politician says it. Like if Harris just said "Trump takes calls from Putin daily and does exactly what he's told. White House phone logs would prove it, but they're suppressing them" rather than statements "Trump is being manipulated by the strongmen he admires" or indirect accusations, would this gullible portion of the country then believe Harris's "straight talk"? I don't think that would have worked.
And I think you're overestimating how much Trump's statements influence what people believe. People have questioned the veracity of most elections this century. Just look at polls:
"42C. Political Accusations - Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President."
16% of Americans said it was definitely true that Russians changed vote tallies in 2016. 27% think that it's likely.
People tend to believe (or at least say they believe) that elections are rigged when they don't out the way they "should".
Or look at how much pushback Trump gets from his base about vaccines. When he talks about his accomplishment of getting the covid vaccine out quickly, a decent number of rally goers just boo him for it. It seems like your model would indicate that they'd believe his statements about that too. They believe his election lie because it builds off what they already feel They don't believe his vaccine statements because it doesn't.
I think a more robust view is that Trump got his reputation because he says things that other candidates don't, not that he says similarly dishonest things less subtly. There's certainly other candidates that didn't have reservations about lying or didn't care about "technical accuracy". I'd believe your theory if we were entering the 4th term of the Michelle Bachmann administration. But we're not, so there's probably something that Trump's done besides lie more openly.
I don't think lying more openly is the only active ingredient in Trump's favor, but I do think it's a major ingredient. There's more to it though than just the act of delivering bald-faced lies, it depends a lot on whether the person couches it in cues that people ordinarily use to judge whether someone is being deceptive. I wrote a comment on reddit some time back about my experience with a sociopath who employed a lot of the same tactics, and was similarly successful in getting people to believe bald-faced lies.
That comment doesn't go into the details of what the lies involved (the whole thing is a *long* story, I had friends telling me I ought to write a book about it well before it even resolved,) but in the course of those events I spent a lot of time and effort investigating that person's lies, and a lot of them were shockingly flimsy and easy to refute, and I was able to bring receipts to prove that they had been engaged in deceit of shocking magnitude (including tens of thousands of dollars worth of criminal fraud,) and large audiences of people following along with the events simply refused to engage with this evidence, and criticized me for being too hard on the person in question, and accused me of having an axe to grind, because the person just didn't *seem* to them like they were lying. They only realized their error when the person defrauded another victim of his entire life savings right in front of them.
The average person can't just choose to avail themselves of the advantages of lying without seeming like you're lying. That's why people who're unburdened by ordinary levels of guilt have so much ability to take advantage of people.
To me, Trump doesn't exhibit any kind of cues that people ordinarily use to judge honesty, because his behavior is so bizarre. Like I'd guess that most sociopaths are able to lie without showing body language unusual for someone that's being honest. But Trump shows nothing but unusual body language at all times, developing a bizarre new way of standing. He's not standing in the way an honest person stands because he's not not standing in a way that any other person (honest or not) has ever stood before.
I think you're overstating the influence of Trump himself vs what was already floating around in the electorate when it comes to things like possible vote tampering, I was around for 2000 and 2005, people got there just fine without his assistance.
There were always some people who were willing to speculate about that sort of thing, but having been there at the time myself, I don't think it ever reached the sort of normative level back then that it did before Trump started insinuating, and then outright stating, that if he lost it was sure to be the result of fraud and tampering rather than the actual will of the electorate.
Part of Trump's appeal is that he's often willing to say the quiet part out loud; my contention is that the quiet part was always there, and his saying it doesn't manifest it out of nowhere.
Online discourse sure has diminished hasn't it. I felt that things went pretty downhill following the 2020 election, and I think I remember you saying that you too felt a pretty significant degree of despair over that period and witnessing people in a community (that we both at the time valued) be mindkilled by politics in real time.
It isn't just Trump but gods something is so awfully rotten with so much of online political discourse nowadays, even when you actively try to look for places to discuss things in good faith. There was a period where "I want to discuss culture war issues with the same truth-focused intensity that rationalists generally strive for" did exist. But now even those places feel less ostensibly truth-oriented and more like part of a contest to find the most ruthlessly reductive ideologue, even though there is still the occasional insight.
Feels like the fundamental problem with what was ultimately a Laissez-faire approach to moderation, in that it really depends on the quality of the community and the general... pool of people that new users draw from. I think it would have still been inevitably doomed, you cannot browbeat a witch into becoming a principled libertarian. But in retrospect, there really should have been a reevaluation about the extremely common thread in why *extremely* high quality posters had for leaving. Gemma, McJunker, etc. They didn't just drift away, they left for common reasons.
It was always intended to be a place *for* high effort discussion that is ostensibly for "I want to discuss culture war issues with the same truth-focused intensity that rationalists generally strive for". Having left the Motte (since the move offsite), looking at it now it feels like the high effort discussion is simply the thing that legitimatizes the significant number of people more invested in rationalizing their animosity than in open minded dialogue.
I remember when I write a long mod comment about the first time we got a "Holocaust Denialist" effortpost. That comment seems hilariously quant with the volume and intensity of the vitriol being posted there now.
And of course all of this is somewhat tangential to the subject of this post with regards to right wing Trumpism, but the rather significant wave of truth agnostic fascism didn't help matters. It was quite wild seeing it infect even that community, though.
Who knows if it would've made a difference, but some of the changes I advocated for was forcing posters to acknowledge/respond to fact-checks and be banned from discussing that topic again until they do. There was so much blatant fakery trafficked around, and folks just retreated when challenged only to reemerge with the same thing later.
I think that is fair, and for what it that is worth that is something we did seriously discuss, and was brought up in mod discus. For whatever it is worth there were two reasons we (and I) didn't think that would be a good idea. First and most importantly we didn't want to have to be the arbiter of truth. I don't am not sure how the space could have existed in a form where "The mods say X is true, therefore..." would be workable generally. But there were some cases where we were comfortable putting our foot down.
One of the big ones is that I did successfully make the whole "Being Transgender is a mental illness" bannable on the grounds that it is an *insult*, not a claim. It isn't supported medically, medically speaking gender dysphoria is the mental illness, which is not the same thing, not that the distinction really mattered to people who said things like that either.
The other thing is that a lot of the awfulness were from truth agnostic statements. Not *falsehoods* but things like:
It isn't a statement you can fact check. It isn't "wrong" but it’s deeply corrosive to any kind of decent discourse. It presents coercion and outright misogyny as "reasonable preferences", implying that molestation are natural male urges that ought to be accommodating. Reducing gender relations to a bad faith caricature of "negotiation", where the female side is represented through parody. Again, truth agnostic, even though it presents itself as a "broker of uncomfortable truth" (very common, as you may remember from *some* of the IQ discussions). It presenting boundaries around bodily autonomy mockingly with the extremely idiotic "grapes" and "chair" analogy as just some extended sophistry to make bodily autonomy seem fuzzy. Body autonomy *can* be fuzzy, but it isn't fuzzy in terms of literally randomly touching other people's sexual body parts.
Again, notably none of these claims are "false", at least not in a fact-checkable sense. But here you have what is genuinely one of the top 3 posters in the history of the threads (Gemma) doing her best to calmly discuss it, only to get that awful chair analogy. God. No fucking wonder she, and nearly everything with something worthwhile to say left.
But that said, I think there would have been value, in retrospect, to try. As you are probably extremely familiar with, it takes significantly more effort to correct bullshit than to utter it. You really only need to go through the experience of pointing that out to have it go unacknowledged a few times to learn your lesson. Here is an example from myself where I tried to fact check what amounted to like 2 flippant sentences:
And the responses didn't really make me feel motivated to go through the trouble in the future.
And I also think it would not be hard for bad faith actors to couch "fact checking" with malicious intent. There are a lot of ways to fact check things in a way that is misrepresentative or misleading, and I think even optimistically it would be a hell of a rule to apply evenhandedly. But then again, moderation was part of the problem and I wouldn't want to naysay a solution that in retrospect could have helped.
But anyways. Sorry for responding with such length, just something that has been on my mind recently so it came out gushing like a flood that has killed and will kill again.
I know, I never wanted the mods to arbitrate anything, I just wanted requiring the bare minimum acknowledgement from the person being challenged. Worst case scenario, someone could reluctantly phone it in without substantively engaging with the criticism by just typing "I acknowledge" but I figured even that was good enough.
I remember your slavery fact-check! In retrospect, I was too charitable in my mod note where I thank them for citing something (even though it was to 3 books with a combined ~1500 pages and no pincites).
I like that idea, so much of the vitriol comes from exhaustion with constantly fighting for basic factual accuracy. I like the community notes on X for that, imperfect as they are, I would love a similar feature on other social media.
The fact is that the MAGA base consists of the servant class of modernity, those too stupid to get with the times and seize opportunities the same way the immigrants they despise do so. Trump gains their loyalty because he’s willing to agree with their delusions instead of pointing out their inferiority. It’s a movement of grifters/rentiers, racists and religious freaks, all of which want to make the world stop changing since the 1950s because they lapped up the Jacksonian garbage about the nobility of the common man and decided their parochial ignorance was better suited to running a country. Unfortunately, the Jacksonian poison has deep roots in the American political culture, which is why you don’t see their opponents taking concrete measures to harm them, such as gutting agriculture subsidies. Fools and their money are soon parted, and it couldn’t happen to a better group of degenerates. If they just admitted their inferiority and accepted their place, such as by becoming domestic servants who worked for $2/hr and didn’t complain if master cracked their skulls open for malingering, I’d have a better opinion of them - but instead, they insist on having pride and thinking they deserve respect. MAGA is basically a white mirror image of black grievance politics - one (Trump etc) panders to backwards rural/trailer trash whites, the other (Marion Barry, Brandon Johnson, Kwame Kilpatrick etc) pander to ghetto blacks.
Every MAGA person I know is obsessed with the Fourth Turning, absolutely convinced they're the strong men who build good times and actually missing that they're the weak men who bring hard times. They mistake "hardness" for strength, thinking they're strong because they can bully others, but mentally and emotionally they are porcelain. Their inability to confront and correct errors lest they shatter is the weakness that will be our downfall.
This is the core criticism: MAGA fails by its own values. I wish this was the line the Dems took from the very beginning but they never were able to speak from a position of credibility on this subject.
Maybe it's the company I keep, but most of the Trump voters I know have been pretty clear eyed about what they're voting for, i.e. an unpredictable bulldozer who will hopefully do some damage to the Democrats and their institutions as he flails around. Obviously not ideal, but honestly I lost a lot of my own hesitation when the lawfare got serious, when it was clear that nobody actually had any principles here.
Him being a con man and him delivering on what I want are not mutually exclusive. You seem really invested in this idea that MAGA voters are being scammed or hoodwinked, and surely some of them are, I just don't think that's even a majority. I would have settled just for blocking dumb things the Democrats were doing or planning to do, so anything positive he does for me is already over performing.
Ironically, my fear in 2016 was that Trump was a fake conservative and would be so receptive to flattery that he'd turn lib once in office, but the unhinged reactions to him from the Democrats and their establishment has taken that possibility right off of the board. I don't really care if he's motivated by principles or grievance or grift, he's already done things for me that I honestly never thought I'd see in my lifetime, despite past promises from more conventional Republicans.
You mentioned that "most of the Trump voters I know have been pretty clear eyed about what they're voting for", but how many of those cared about corruption vis a vis Hunter Biden's nepotism and don't now? Part of what I'm describing is MAGA deluding themselves that they've won policy victories even though they haven't. If Trump has demonstrated a willingness to hoodwink his own followers, and MAGA has demonstrated a gullibility to being scammed, why would there be a boundary where that dynamic no longer plays out?
I suppose it's theoretically possible but I just don't understand how it works in practice. Can you give an example of a victory that you believe was worth the grift and corruption?
I think you're misreading the Hunter Biden scandal, which at least from my vantage point was less about the corruption per se than it was about the double standard and the media coverup, to say nothing of the possible security state involvement. Sure, the corruption itself was also bad in and of itself, but it wasn't novel, we've had self dealing presidential relatives before, it was the media suppression of the story, possibly hand in hand with the intelligence services, that was the real scandal. That, and the utter incuriosity about it from the mainstream, kinda like how the Tapper book about the Biden senility coverup some how stops short of the media enablers.
As to policy victories, the big one is still our 6-3 Court, that's worth a lot to me as someone living in a blue state with hostile institutions, and a durable one for the moment. Possibly the bigger victory is the intangible climate shift against the progressives, with all of their dogmas suddenly becoming very questionable in public in a way they weren't and would never have been under a Harris regime. I know you're seeing the gender stuff unravel, but even the race stuff is starting to fall, which again isn't something I believed possible in my lifetime, at least not peacefully. He's even really helped me out with the gun stuff, which isn't a top tier issue for most people nor one that I actually trusted him on given his record, but he's done more than any other Republican in my lifetime. Could he still turn and screw me? Sure, but as I previously said, he's actually outperforming my expectation going in.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean by "double standard". What are the two standards you're referring to? Regarding the "media coverup", I remain baffled by this issue. Twitter blocked links to the NY Post story for 24 hours, and in the process ensured that the Hunter Biden story would be one of the biggest stories that folks would continue talking about for years after the fact (like we are now).
If there's something I'm missing and you want to educate me (on this or anything else you think I'm wrong about), I'm more than happy to talk. Email me ymeskhout@gmail.com and we can set up a time.
At the same time, my praise is conditional on the fact that Trump mostly picked normie conservative judges vetted to him by the Federalist society, which he's now no longer happy with. I see no reason to believe that SCOTUS would have been materially different with any other Republican president.
Regarding the cultural climate shift, it seems obvious that Trump wouldn't have won if there hadn't been increased disdain towards institutions in general, so you're potentially confusing "cause" with "effect". As someone concerned about racial and gender dogmas, I'm explicitly worried about Trump encouraging backlash against critiquing those dogmas, because that's what happened in his first term (subject to the same disclaimer about cause/effect).
I actually split the cause/effect baby when it comes to Trump and the political climate, as he both played on a lot of things that were already happening, but he also played a role in creating the permission structure to question many of these dogmas in public by doing it himself first. "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" worked so well in part because he had her in her own words, and also because he was publicly voicing a previously forbidden belief that a lot of people clearly did in fact share. He managed to thread the needle on a lot of this stuff where he pushed back on the progressive craziness, but doesn't himself come off like a religious crank, which I think is an underestimated factor in his appeal.
I'll take you up on that DM shortly, I do find these conversations tend to be a lot more productive in private.
In the meantime though, surely you're familiar with the "Republicans Pounce" framing that the media constantly uses when reporting on GOP scandals vs Dem scandals? Hunter and his laptop are basically that on steroids, where the entire country was collectively gaslit into not only ignoring what really ought to have been a pretty major scandal that did in fact implicate Joe Biden, but largely made to believe that the whole thing was some sort of scheme cooked up by the GOP. Forget the sordid details of the drugs and the affair with his late brothers widow, the hookers, etc and just focus on how much money he was paid by various shady people for no apparent reason other than his influence on his father; surely that should at least have been investigated and remarked upon, right? Instead, the FBI prepared the ground by warning the media of a "Russian disinformation campaign involving Hunter Biden", despite them being possession of the laptop at that time and knowing the authenticity of its contents, followed by the infamous letter signed by all of the IC people claiming "all the hallmarks of Russian disinfo", then the social media suppression when the NYP did actually report on it, then the rest of the mainstream media pretending it didn't exist. Are you really going to argue that the exact same story but starring Don Jr gets the same treatment?
I agree with everything you have written here and I hate Trump & MAGA at least as much as you do (I made my plans to leave America the day after the 2016 election), and yet…
If you want to know why people voted for Trump, you should listen to what they say: immigration and wokeness. They are losing the country they love to immigrants, and American society is being configured to give preference to gays, African Americans, and transwomen. Kamala even said so in her campaign.
If we want to take Trump down, we have to address that
I agree to an extent, Dems have absolutely failed to address many valid concerns (which I've endlessly written about). That only goes so far, because many of the putative complaints start falling apart upon scrutiny.
Immigration is a reliable example of what I mean, because I've put in a lot of effort to have charitable conversations with immigration restrictionists to get at the heart of what their complaints are and clarity has been a serious challenge. For example, crime is often brought up as a concern, but then they refuse to engage with the stats or entertain keyholes solutions.
I live in the UK now and immigration is a big issue here too. People object to the culture changing away from the one they know. That’s less of an issue in the USA, except in the border states like California and Texas where there are towns where everyone speaks Spanish. Maybe 11 million illegal immigrants is not a problem, but then, why not change the law to make them legal? It’s because a lot of people object and they vote for Trump to stop it. Looking to debunk individual reasons like crime is missing the point.
I agree with you that this weird middle ground of "millions are openly breaking the law but we're not going to do anything about it" is untenable and undermines legitimacy in other areas, and I agree the law should be changed for that reason alone.
Part of the problem is just baseline congressional dysfunction, but in addition it's the lack of coherence and clarity about what people actually want to do about immigration. Some people are concerned about crime (It's not missing the point if that's the justification people offer!), some people have economic concerns, some have cultural concerns, and also some people just hate foreigners but pretend to have other concerns.
It's hard to synthesize all of those concerns into one tidy legislative package.
So while I agree with your essay, I got a lot of "why can't you idiots admit you made a mistake?" from it. And people don't do that!
I consider it a victory if I can get someone who used to say "X is obviously true" to "well X isn't true" without necessarily getting them to admit they were wrong. There are very strong ego-protection locks in place in most people's heads against that.
And yet, the Dems have no clue how to appeal to the American electorate. Perhaps Elon is right.
Dems indeed have no clue but Elon can't save us
At some point, people have to take responsibility for refusing to see what's obvious. That cuts both ways. I would be more inclined toward pity (under the "you can't fix stupid" theory) if the impact wasn't so harsh and damaging. I'm too damn old to wait for normality to come around again.
I wish I knew a way to get there
Advanced civilization seems to be at risk from being overtaken by social media personalities, shallow but superficially attractive, or "attractive", in the sense of successfully drawing the world's attention to themselves by peddling madness.
This is a digital equivalent of the British Gin Craze of the 18th century. A fully unregulated, strongly addictive product unleashed on a naive population.
In places with multiple parties, the crazies are at least a bit distributed around. In two-party systems, your choice is between "Xir Latinx Men with Penises are Women, even if they are five years old" vs. "(((they))) are spreading 5G laced chemtrails across the West and RETVRN to Bronze Age is the only solution!"
Helluva choice. It will take us some time to develop at least some societal resistance to this mental poison.
If you'll permit some reader feedback: I of course agree with you; these people are morons. But I have to say, I think this style of writing is beneath you. It provides no new information to your readers, it's horrifyingly unlikely to change anyone's mind on the other side, and it's frankly just unpleasant to read.
I subscribed due to your law articles; I think my favorite is My Clients, the Liars, but the others are excellent as well. It is of course your blog and your choice what to put here, but it saddens me that the intelligent articles have lessened and there are now so many posts that are just vulgar angry screeds against your outgroups now.
I always appreciate reader feedback! At least aspirationally, I want to avoid being a one-trick pony, but that inevitably will be in tension with making everyone happy with everything I write. It's a trade-off I have to accept.
Persuasion is also a very tricky beast, particularly when you're in the context of dishonesty or delusion as we are here. Maybe you're right that this post is horrifyingly unlikely to change any Trump supporter's mind, but that's a hypothesis I would be thrilled to test out! I actually wrote this with that in mind, because I know for a fact I have a few hate-readers out there. If any MAGA supporters are ever willing to talk to me again, this post would be my focus. If they don't, that gives me information about what they perceive to be their own weakness.
This was also an example of a meta-approach I repeatedly deploy where I accept as many of opponent's premises as possible. Part of the contribution that I hope is novel is a criticism of MAGA that aims squarely at the self-serving mythology they've built for themselves (some comments repeated this approach). Maybe there isn't any new factual information above, but perhaps the overall framework would be something a reader hasn't encountered before.
Cultural commentary is also a tricky thing because you're simultaneously a participant in the arena you're covering. Part of what I want to encourage is generosity for error-admission (which I earnestly believe in) but that requires cutting through an extremely tough outer shell. Degrading but honest insults seemed worth a try.
Obviously I could be wrong about the effect, or maybe just huffing valorization fumes to excuse my own poor behavior. What I can't be faulted for, however, is lack of trying other avenues. I've tried to approach dishonesty/delusion with the exact same framework I'd use for other disputes and have concluded it was a mistake. That was actually the motivation behind writing "My Clients, The Liars".
PS: Part of the reason there haven't been as much law articles lately is that most have been hoovered up into my (regrettably still pending) memoir. Soon.
Yeah I'll admit I don't understand humans in general *that* well. I have been led to believe that "one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar" as the saying goes, and I try to model my writing after e.g. Scott Alexander, who I'm sure has changed many minds.
Then again, that proverb's experiment has actually been done, and it turns out that flies actually prefer vinegar! And despite the total lack of actual correspondence between the two situations, perhaps the analogy holds regardless; Destiny is a rather unpleasant individual to listen to, yet is often credited for deradicalizing quite a few people.
Out of curiosity I've sent the article to a Trump-voting friend of mine and asked him for his thoughts, I'll relay anything interesting he says.
The niceness approach is my preferred and default approach, but it can only work in the context where everyone is operating honestly. It's otherwise incoherent and fruitless IME when dealing with a liar (either to themselves or others).
I would be thrilled to hear feedback from your Trump-voting friend, especially a follow-up after a few weeks!
You're giving his feedback way too much credit. If one finds it unpleasant to read someone speak the plain truth about MAGA, they're not high-minded.
They're children. Or dupes of a different kind.
No, I appreciate feedback in general and Isaac's in particular. There's plenty of valid reasons someone can be put off by my particular approach which have nothing to do with carrying a fondness for MAGA.
Ok, I will take your advice and respond simply by telling you that you are an idiot, seemingly too blinded by tribalism to have anything that could charitably be called a rational thought.
Did that work?
Be careful with this guy isaac if you beat him in an argument he’s will spend three days spamming your dms and responding to every post you’ve ever made.
My tribe is what/who, exactly?
Autistic freaks who like to hear themselves speak.
I don't mind insults but only if they're in service of a substantive point (or really really funny). Take a break.
Hanania-esque, and not in a good way.
Hanania is more professional in his disdain for low human capital, so I prefer his writing. Maybe that's just my slightly puritan background making me dislike vulgarity specifically.
Hanania kills me because his shtick feels so fake, his trolling of his audience is just so performative.
Oh, on twitter yes, that's pathetic. He's a pretty different writer in long-form.
Yeah, I used to subscribe to him as he has some unique insights, but he's been rubbing me the wrong way recently.
This article brings to mind a question I've had for a while - how much responsibility do you think Trump has for his political success in the last decade? Not necessarily success in crafting or implementing some sort of political program, which seems hard to judge objectively. But being nominated by a major party or winning more than 45% of the vote in a presidential election multiple times can be considered a success and he has certainly done that.
I ask because here you call him a brilliant salesman and seem to credit him for his successful political strategy (which you describe as catering exclusively to idiots). But in previous posts, you describe Trump as having burgeoning dementia, unable to tell the difference between something that happened last week and something that happened a decade ago. I don't see how you can call him both a "ward patient" and a "brilliant salesman". It seems like it'd be one or the other.
The most common way critics square this circle is by suggesting that Trump doesn't have any responsibility for his movement's success and all the planning was done by Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin or some other shadowy puppeteer. Trump himself doesn't actually matter that much and could be replaced by any other figurehead. While I don't think this is true, this can explain how Trump can both dominate national politics and be unable to form complete sentences. Do you also believe that Trump could be easily replaced? I don't think I've seen you suggest there's some other individual or group behind his success, so I didn't think that was the framework you had for Trump's success (and here you seem to credit him).
(This explanation also doesn't really explain why other "puppets" haven't been successful. For example, if the only reason for Trump's 2024 win was Musk's support, why wasn't DeSantis able to win?)
Or others sometimes explain that Trump is both incredibly stupid and incredibly successful, but only because he is stupid enough to win over the incredibly stupid losers that voted for him. This has always struck me as very facile though. Some of the brightest minds in the country work in McDonald's marketing or producing reality TV. There's a lot of competition for the support of the people you're describing and the people that are successful in it aren't stupid. Someone delusional or with dementia would not last long devising national strategy for winning over that demographic.
So anyways, after reading many of your words about Trump, I'm not sure if you would describe him as a competent politician (or at least campaigner). It seems like half the time you describe him as smart enough to hoodwink half the world and half the time you describe him as too stupid to speak in full sentences. Is it one or the other or somehow both?
(I'm most referencing https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/when-the-cult-leader-has-dementia)
Thanks for this comment, it explains some of the crossed wires we had.
Trump has benefitted from luck, but he bears the overwhelming responsibility for his success. I think the guy has undeniable charisma, charm, humor, and an unparalleled instinct for optics and marketing. He understood how critical the appearance of success can be to attaining success within certain fields, and he knew how to leverage the persona of a "poor man's version of a rich man" to get ahead in life.
All of the above can still exist even with dementia. The best comparison would be how someone can remain socially savvy and charismatic even when blitzed out drunk. There are some dimensions where his idiocy is actually an advantage, because he often _appears_ to believe his own blatant lies. Compare that to someone like JD Vance, whose bullshitting ability is severely hobbled by the fact that he _knows_ he's lying.
When I say Trump is incompetent, I'm referring to a narrower more colloquial understanding of the word. I don't believe he has the mental acuity to learn the intricacies of a new subject on a deep level, but I'm confident he'd be able to go on stage and convince at least half the audience otherwise.
Ok, sounds like you'd essentially say that Trump is a genius at marketing, optics, persuasion or whatever, but not at anything else. And we just happen to live in a society where those skills allow someone to dominate.
But I think you're underselling your previous statements here. You didn't say that he was unable to learn the intricacies of a new subject on a deep level. You said that Trump is often so confused that he thinks something from a decade ago happened last week. Seems like that level of delusion would make marketing difficult. Drunks might be charismatic during individual encounters, but tend not to have long-term success. Trump's managed to dominate national politics for decade.
It also seems to require a loose interpretation of what a subject is. A real estate developer isn't learning a new subject when he identifies how to dominate a field of ~20 experienced Republican politicians? Or when his administration develops a vaccine faster than anticipated? Or when ISIS crumbled during his time in office? "Optics and marketing" is a fuzzy enough field that anything can be included. If by 2028 there's peace in the Middle East and an American base on Mars, we could still say that Trump just bullshitted his way there (while others would be considered a genius for their diplomatic and administrative abilities under the same circumstances). In other words, we can chalk all of Trump's successes up to bullshit rather than competence, therefore we never have to change our mind about him being incompetent no matter what he accomplishes.
Anyways, thanks for clarifying. As you can see, I'm still pretty skeptical that you're evaluating Trump reasonably. But I can see what framework you're working with at least.
I'm just not seeing the contradiction. Yes, he experiences severe confusion at times, and yet he can still revert to a decently successful deep-seated social instinct. You've probably seen this video of an otherwise unresponsive elderly man light up upon listening to music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWn4JB2YLU
I think the other missing piece of the puzzle is that much of his success is built up on the compelling image he has meticulously cultivated over several decades, back when he was still much more compos mentis. If he was an unknown figure and had not emerged into the spotlight until now in his current state, I seriously doubt anyone would've paid attention.
I don't think that's a relevant example unless that man is currently dominating the international music industry when he's not slumped over a chair, struggling to answer yes or no questions. Trump isn't a "decently successful" politician. He's the most influential person in the world. I don't see how you can compare him to an invalid old man that is able to speak disjointedly when helped by certain triggers before lapsing again into an unresponsive state. From that, you're extrapolating that a senile man could win control over the most powerful nation the world has ever seen? That seems like a jump and more than just a matter of scale.
The usual framework that people have when believing a leader is demented is that someone else running the show while using that leader's prior success. "Feinstein relies on her aides", "I'm voting for Biden because I trust his cabinet to call the shots", "H.W. Bush started his presidency early" or "Brezhnev's decisions were made by Andropov and Gromyko" etc. That's the usual description of a leader's behavior when they're senile. It's unusual to believe that a leader is both actively making major decisions, while regularly being so confused they don't what year it is. You haven't said that Trump is occasionally confused and there's a coverup (like the critics of Biden or Brezhnev). Instead you've been insistent that his confusion is regularly on full display during his many public appearances.
As an example, you've said that Trump's delusion is on display in the first few minutes of the Rogan interview and is so obvious that you have no idea how to communicate with someone who doesn't see that Trump doesn't know what year his Oprah interview occurred. (This is tangential, but Rogan and all major news outlets that covered the Rogan interview did not pick up on that confusion). Reading your previous comments, it didn't seem like you'd describe this "meandering interview" as showing charisma or charm at any point and would be critical of anyone that argued that it did.
I'd be interested in seeing what you'd contrast Trump's moments of deep confusion with. Do you think that the rest of the interview is different? What parts of it show his charisma, humor or charm? Overall, the impression I've gotten is you think Trump's behavior is always stupid and dumb, but that he's convinced stupid people it's not (and others say it's not because they're "subservient obedient cucks") Do you have a clip from the Rogan interview (or something else from the last ~year) that displays Trump's ability? I think that contrast would help me understand.
(To be clear, it's not relevant to the current discussion whether Biden, Reagan, Feinstein or Brezhnev was lucid during their leadership and I can delete an example if someone argues)
Come on dude, I used that video to illustrate a concept of how someone with unambiguous cognitive decline can be debilitated in one area while alive in another. I did not make any direct comparisons to Trump, the guy in the video is clearly decompensated at a far greater level than Trump.
I agree that's the usual framework for a demented leader is that someone else is running the show, I don't agree that would necessarily apply to Trump given the cult of personality. The closest parallel is the maneuvers his underlings pull regarding who to include or exclude during certain meetings (e.g. excluding Pete Navarro during tariff talks https://archive.ph/q8IxB).
I think some parts of the Rogan interview show charisma or charm, I just didn't mention them. I'm not going to watch the interview again but off the top of my head I'd probably cite the story he told about Abraham Lincoln and melancholia. Elsewhere, I've repeatedly found him very funny on multiple occasions.
I wrote this in 2020, it might answer some of your questions: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/trumps-way-with-words
I believe that Trump is always oriented X 3 or whatever measurement we'd use to say whether someone is demented. In the comments of your other article, you challenged a commentor to provide "examples of Trump successfully completing complex cognitive tasks that would be challenging for someone with dementia." I would argue that running a campaign for the most powerful position in the world is complex cognitive task and would be challenging for someone with dementia. It couldn't be completed in brief snaps of partial lucidity like that old man experiences when coached. So I didn't think Trump's condition is similar to his, differing only in scale.
In other words, the video is an example of someone with severe dementia who is able to express some coherent thought with heavy prompting under certain conditions. That doesn't seem relevant to whether someone completing a complex difficult project that takes more than year (such as a presidential campaign) could regularly become too disoriented too function. I don't think Trump's success is consistent with someone that is often severely confused and regularly operating off nothing but instinct.
I read that other article in the past and it contributed to me reading you now. However, I think that if 2025 Yassine read 2019 Yassine's musings on Trump's ability to convey sentiment, he'd say it was sane-washing cult talk. But you know better than me what you'd say now and then.
However I should apologize. I've also mostly ignored that you're saying that this is all pretty recent. Maybe 2019 Trump was different. He was talking with the clarity of sentiment reserved for prophets. But 2025 Trump doesn't do that and anyone that thinks he's conveying sentiment rather than facts is spewing some variant of “what they really meant” rehabilitative sanewashing. He seems similar enough to me but I watch the news now less than I did. I guess there's nothing for me to do but watch him more carefully.
There is no contradiction here. How about this question: tell me a subject you believe Trump understands 'very well' that is outside of anything related to sales/marketing. Can you name a subject that he comments on that you believe he has learned and learned deeply? A single one will do.
I think he knows a lot about real estate development. But I suppose you'd say that's part of sales? Or I could say that he knows about political campaigning, but I suppose marketing to you. I think I mentioned that earlier - marketing and sales are vague enough categories that almost anything could fall under them. I'd argue that both should be considered a different skill. Like Carly Fiorina was successful in sales strategy, but failed as a candidate. If campaigning isn't a different skill, why did she fail so badly? (But I guess it's a tangent to wonder why someone else hasn't been able to turn a marketing career into a presidency or why a Coke marketing exec couldn't get Clinton over the finish line.)
Another challenge that might come up is that any accomplishment could be dismissed as him merely hiring or working with competent people. Like if I say that Operation Warp Speed was a success or repeat that ISIS was contained during his presidency, you'll point out that he wasn't the one making the vaccine ahead of schedule or pursuing self-proclaimed caliphs down tunnels.
I think I'll go with something like tax and/or bankruptcy law. He seems quite successful at using those to his advantage to get as money as possible, usually from someone that needs or deserves it more than him. Does that meet your criteria? According to reporting I've seen from Matt Yglesias, Trump often pursued legal strategies that his lawyers advised against but was successful. This means that it's him, not just the team he chose, with a good understanding of those fields.
Does that work?
You think Trump could explain a fucking thing about tax and/or bankruptcy law? Are you fucking serious? Jesus, man. Rationalize your shit however you'd like.
You're an example of a smart person who got duped and is doing extreme mental gymnastics. You have to realize that on some level, right?
Do you think he knows how to use bankruptcy laws to offload his own personal debt onto investors into a casino and resort business operating out of Atlantic City and Gary, Indiana. I think he knows how to do that, because he's pretty much done exactly that. Saying that someone knows how to do something that they've already done does not seem like very complex mental gymnastics.
I think that there are few people in the world that would be better than Trump at taking a business, cannibalizing it for their own benefit, then leaving someone else holding the bag. That requires a good understanding of the laws surrounding bankruptcies, right?
And he pays very little in taxes. I think you have to have a good understanding of tax law (or a good ability to recognize when somebody has a good understanding of tax law) to avoid paying federal income tax for 10 out of 15 years while spending millions of dollars annually.
If he doesn't have an unusually good understanding(or an unusually good ability to recognize people with a good understanding) of bankruptcies and taxes, then how has he been so successful with them? (Unless you believe that he did not offload millions of dollars of debt onto the investors of his businesses and believe that he pays all the taxes that he should)
I think Trump benefits a lot from a huge portion of the electorate taking the basic honesty of political figures for granted.
People insist on the opposite, that politicians lie all the time and aren't to be trusted. But they implicitly accept that politicians exist within a system of bounded dishonesty-
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
And the sort of dishonesty they *expect* to get from politicians is weasel words, evasiveness, reframing situations to make their positions look better than a full accounting of the evidence justifies, etc. They treat them like perverse genies who'll play word games and try to screw you over, but won't technically lie. And these people listen to Trump, who just tells bald-faced lies without the slightest shred of guilt or hesitation, and they think "He doesn't sound shifty at all, he's clearly being honest!" It has the "ring of truth" to them because he's unburdened by the reservations about lying that they take for granted in politicians.
I don't think that bounded dishonesty stuff really explains the appeal. After all, people accuse politicians of outright lying all the time. That's especially true for the most hardcore Trumpists (rather than the 40+% that vote for him), which I think that these conversations usually focus on. As just one example, the people storming the Capitol on Jan 6 weren't complaining about weasel words, they believed that objective vote totals were being tampered with. They were making accusations of a "technical lie".
To me, Trump's reputation for "honesty" or straight talk or whatever comes from his tendency to make judgements of things in isolation. I expressed that poorly, but a good example is a few years ago when Trump commented that Hezbollah are "smart". A more mainstream politician (Pence) counterargued that “Look, Hezbollah are not smart. They’re evil, OK.” But that's not really a counterargument. Being evil is orthogonal to being smart. While you may disagree about Trump's evaluation of Hezbollah, Pence refused to even make a judgement on the effectiveness of a major player in the conflict. Trump's willingness to weigh in on these reasonable questions is what's given him a reputation as a "straight-talker".
Or Trump's skepticism of "experts" could be considered as skepticism of who should be considered an expert. It's true that Trump said he knows more than the generals, but that's because he was repeating what enlisted soldiers said:
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/12/26/trump-previously-held-private-meetings-navy-seals-discuss-afghanistan-war.html
It reminds me of Scott's post on Seeing like a State. Maybe it's true that random guys sitting in Afghanistan have better advice than the generals or defense experts.
And of course, the SSC post I think about most when looking at Trump is his review of art of the deal:
"But Trump of the book is more a-intellectual, in the same way some people are amoral or asexual. The world is taken as a given. It contains deals. Some people make the deals well, and they are winners. Other people make the deals poorly, and they are losers. Trump does not need more than this. There will be no civilization of philosopher-Trumps asking where the first deal came from, or whether a deal is a deal only by virtue of its participation in some primordial deal beyond material existence. Trump’s world is so narrow it’s hard to fit your head inside it, so narrow that on contact with any wider world it seems strange and attenuated, a broken record of deals and connections and hirings expanding to fill the space available."
Trump's worldview is so unique it's hard to compare to others.
I don't think it's *just* a matter of bounded dishonesty, but I think that's a major element which Trump gets a lot of mileage out of. When it comes to people attributing real out and out duplicity to politicians, like active vote tampering, I think it's extremely relevant that they think that in the first place because Trump told them to, and they trust Trump's word over other politicians' because he matches their heuristics for being a "straight talker," whereas the other politicians they're comparing him to sound less honest to them *because* of their reservations about telling outright lies.
So you believe that open lies (like Trump's) affect credibility less than the partial lies or mistruths of most politicians. And that Trump is then able to exploit the lack of credibility resulting from these partial lies to accuse them of outright lies? That seems to assume that the audience has no way to evaluate the truth of a statement besides how a politician says it. Like if Harris just said "Trump takes calls from Putin daily and does exactly what he's told. White House phone logs would prove it, but they're suppressing them" rather than statements "Trump is being manipulated by the strongmen he admires" or indirect accusations, would this gullible portion of the country then believe Harris's "straight talk"? I don't think that would have worked.
And I think you're overestimating how much Trump's statements influence what people believe. People have questioned the veracity of most elections this century. Just look at polls:
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/zq33h2ipcl/econTabReport.pdf
"42C. Political Accusations - Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President."
16% of Americans said it was definitely true that Russians changed vote tallies in 2016. 27% think that it's likely.
People tend to believe (or at least say they believe) that elections are rigged when they don't out the way they "should".
Or look at how much pushback Trump gets from his base about vaccines. When he talks about his accomplishment of getting the covid vaccine out quickly, a decent number of rally goers just boo him for it. It seems like your model would indicate that they'd believe his statements about that too. They believe his election lie because it builds off what they already feel They don't believe his vaccine statements because it doesn't.
I think a more robust view is that Trump got his reputation because he says things that other candidates don't, not that he says similarly dishonest things less subtly. There's certainly other candidates that didn't have reservations about lying or didn't care about "technical accuracy". I'd believe your theory if we were entering the 4th term of the Michelle Bachmann administration. But we're not, so there's probably something that Trump's done besides lie more openly.
I don't think lying more openly is the only active ingredient in Trump's favor, but I do think it's a major ingredient. There's more to it though than just the act of delivering bald-faced lies, it depends a lot on whether the person couches it in cues that people ordinarily use to judge whether someone is being deceptive. I wrote a comment on reddit some time back about my experience with a sociopath who employed a lot of the same tactics, and was similarly successful in getting people to believe bald-faced lies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1au1fqw/deleted_by_user/kr2e8ll/
That comment doesn't go into the details of what the lies involved (the whole thing is a *long* story, I had friends telling me I ought to write a book about it well before it even resolved,) but in the course of those events I spent a lot of time and effort investigating that person's lies, and a lot of them were shockingly flimsy and easy to refute, and I was able to bring receipts to prove that they had been engaged in deceit of shocking magnitude (including tens of thousands of dollars worth of criminal fraud,) and large audiences of people following along with the events simply refused to engage with this evidence, and criticized me for being too hard on the person in question, and accused me of having an axe to grind, because the person just didn't *seem* to them like they were lying. They only realized their error when the person defrauded another victim of his entire life savings right in front of them.
The average person can't just choose to avail themselves of the advantages of lying without seeming like you're lying. That's why people who're unburdened by ordinary levels of guilt have so much ability to take advantage of people.
What kind of ques?
To me, Trump doesn't exhibit any kind of cues that people ordinarily use to judge honesty, because his behavior is so bizarre. Like I'd guess that most sociopaths are able to lie without showing body language unusual for someone that's being honest. But Trump shows nothing but unusual body language at all times, developing a bizarre new way of standing. He's not standing in the way an honest person stands because he's not not standing in a way that any other person (honest or not) has ever stood before.
I think you're overstating the influence of Trump himself vs what was already floating around in the electorate when it comes to things like possible vote tampering, I was around for 2000 and 2005, people got there just fine without his assistance.
There were always some people who were willing to speculate about that sort of thing, but having been there at the time myself, I don't think it ever reached the sort of normative level back then that it did before Trump started insinuating, and then outright stating, that if he lost it was sure to be the result of fraud and tampering rather than the actual will of the electorate.
Part of Trump's appeal is that he's often willing to say the quiet part out loud; my contention is that the quiet part was always there, and his saying it doesn't manifest it out of nowhere.
Lets be honest, there's Trump delusionment on both sides.
I don't think there's "delusionment". Just either inconsistency or some consistent view that I don't understand without it being explained.
Online discourse sure has diminished hasn't it. I felt that things went pretty downhill following the 2020 election, and I think I remember you saying that you too felt a pretty significant degree of despair over that period and witnessing people in a community (that we both at the time valued) be mindkilled by politics in real time.
It isn't just Trump but gods something is so awfully rotten with so much of online political discourse nowadays, even when you actively try to look for places to discuss things in good faith. There was a period where "I want to discuss culture war issues with the same truth-focused intensity that rationalists generally strive for" did exist. But now even those places feel less ostensibly truth-oriented and more like part of a contest to find the most ruthlessly reductive ideologue, even though there is still the occasional insight.
I explicitly was thinking of that community when writing this. It's a very depressing degradation.
Feels like the fundamental problem with what was ultimately a Laissez-faire approach to moderation, in that it really depends on the quality of the community and the general... pool of people that new users draw from. I think it would have still been inevitably doomed, you cannot browbeat a witch into becoming a principled libertarian. But in retrospect, there really should have been a reevaluation about the extremely common thread in why *extremely* high quality posters had for leaving. Gemma, McJunker, etc. They didn't just drift away, they left for common reasons.
It was always intended to be a place *for* high effort discussion that is ostensibly for "I want to discuss culture war issues with the same truth-focused intensity that rationalists generally strive for". Having left the Motte (since the move offsite), looking at it now it feels like the high effort discussion is simply the thing that legitimatizes the significant number of people more invested in rationalizing their animosity than in open minded dialogue.
I remember when I write a long mod comment about the first time we got a "Holocaust Denialist" effortpost. That comment seems hilariously quant with the volume and intensity of the vitriol being posted there now.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/c4invv/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_24_2019/es17nyj/
And of course all of this is somewhat tangential to the subject of this post with regards to right wing Trumpism, but the rather significant wave of truth agnostic fascism didn't help matters. It was quite wild seeing it infect even that community, though.
Who knows if it would've made a difference, but some of the changes I advocated for was forcing posters to acknowledge/respond to fact-checks and be banned from discussing that topic again until they do. There was so much blatant fakery trafficked around, and folks just retreated when challenged only to reemerge with the same thing later.
I think that is fair, and for what it that is worth that is something we did seriously discuss, and was brought up in mod discus. For whatever it is worth there were two reasons we (and I) didn't think that would be a good idea. First and most importantly we didn't want to have to be the arbiter of truth. I don't am not sure how the space could have existed in a form where "The mods say X is true, therefore..." would be workable generally. But there were some cases where we were comfortable putting our foot down.
One of the big ones is that I did successfully make the whole "Being Transgender is a mental illness" bannable on the grounds that it is an *insult*, not a claim. It isn't supported medically, medically speaking gender dysphoria is the mental illness, which is not the same thing, not that the distinction really mattered to people who said things like that either.
The other thing is that a lot of the awfulness were from truth agnostic statements. Not *falsehoods* but things like:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7qk2bq/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_15/dsyi6os/
It isn't a statement you can fact check. It isn't "wrong" but it’s deeply corrosive to any kind of decent discourse. It presents coercion and outright misogyny as "reasonable preferences", implying that molestation are natural male urges that ought to be accommodating. Reducing gender relations to a bad faith caricature of "negotiation", where the female side is represented through parody. Again, truth agnostic, even though it presents itself as a "broker of uncomfortable truth" (very common, as you may remember from *some* of the IQ discussions). It presenting boundaries around bodily autonomy mockingly with the extremely idiotic "grapes" and "chair" analogy as just some extended sophistry to make bodily autonomy seem fuzzy. Body autonomy *can* be fuzzy, but it isn't fuzzy in terms of literally randomly touching other people's sexual body parts.
Again, notably none of these claims are "false", at least not in a fact-checkable sense. But here you have what is genuinely one of the top 3 posters in the history of the threads (Gemma) doing her best to calmly discuss it, only to get that awful chair analogy. God. No fucking wonder she, and nearly everything with something worthwhile to say left.
But that said, I think there would have been value, in retrospect, to try. As you are probably extremely familiar with, it takes significantly more effort to correct bullshit than to utter it. You really only need to go through the experience of pointing that out to have it go unacknowledged a few times to learn your lesson. Here is an example from myself where I tried to fact check what amounted to like 2 flippant sentences:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/m0abd1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_08_2021/gqppvnm/
And the responses didn't really make me feel motivated to go through the trouble in the future.
And I also think it would not be hard for bad faith actors to couch "fact checking" with malicious intent. There are a lot of ways to fact check things in a way that is misrepresentative or misleading, and I think even optimistically it would be a hell of a rule to apply evenhandedly. But then again, moderation was part of the problem and I wouldn't want to naysay a solution that in retrospect could have helped.
But anyways. Sorry for responding with such length, just something that has been on my mind recently so it came out gushing like a flood that has killed and will kill again.
I know, I never wanted the mods to arbitrate anything, I just wanted requiring the bare minimum acknowledgement from the person being challenged. Worst case scenario, someone could reluctantly phone it in without substantively engaging with the criticism by just typing "I acknowledge" but I figured even that was good enough.
I remember your slavery fact-check! In retrospect, I was too charitable in my mod note where I thank them for citing something (even though it was to 3 books with a combined ~1500 pages and no pincites).
I like that idea, so much of the vitriol comes from exhaustion with constantly fighting for basic factual accuracy. I like the community notes on X for that, imperfect as they are, I would love a similar feature on other social media.
The fact is that the MAGA base consists of the servant class of modernity, those too stupid to get with the times and seize opportunities the same way the immigrants they despise do so. Trump gains their loyalty because he’s willing to agree with their delusions instead of pointing out their inferiority. It’s a movement of grifters/rentiers, racists and religious freaks, all of which want to make the world stop changing since the 1950s because they lapped up the Jacksonian garbage about the nobility of the common man and decided their parochial ignorance was better suited to running a country. Unfortunately, the Jacksonian poison has deep roots in the American political culture, which is why you don’t see their opponents taking concrete measures to harm them, such as gutting agriculture subsidies. Fools and their money are soon parted, and it couldn’t happen to a better group of degenerates. If they just admitted their inferiority and accepted their place, such as by becoming domestic servants who worked for $2/hr and didn’t complain if master cracked their skulls open for malingering, I’d have a better opinion of them - but instead, they insist on having pride and thinking they deserve respect. MAGA is basically a white mirror image of black grievance politics - one (Trump etc) panders to backwards rural/trailer trash whites, the other (Marion Barry, Brandon Johnson, Kwame Kilpatrick etc) pander to ghetto blacks.
Scathing
Every MAGA person I know is obsessed with the Fourth Turning, absolutely convinced they're the strong men who build good times and actually missing that they're the weak men who bring hard times. They mistake "hardness" for strength, thinking they're strong because they can bully others, but mentally and emotionally they are porcelain. Their inability to confront and correct errors lest they shatter is the weakness that will be our downfall.
This is the core criticism: MAGA fails by its own values. I wish this was the line the Dems took from the very beginning but they never were able to speak from a position of credibility on this subject.
Excellent piece!
>only $47.45/month! Get it?
The man's comedic skills are wasted in the Oval Office. That's hilarious.
Fantastic writing Yassine
Am I allowed to hate them and pity them?
Those seem mutually exclusive to me.
Maybe it's the company I keep, but most of the Trump voters I know have been pretty clear eyed about what they're voting for, i.e. an unpredictable bulldozer who will hopefully do some damage to the Democrats and their institutions as he flails around. Obviously not ideal, but honestly I lost a lot of my own hesitation when the lawfare got serious, when it was clear that nobody actually had any principles here.
I've explicitly cited this justification above! The missing ingredient is the ability to differentiate between two realities:
1. He's the unpredictable chaos agent that at least is delivering on what I want
2. He's a conman who has convinced me to believe he's the unpredictable chaos agent that at least is delivering on what I want
I've laid out evidence for why I believe we're in the second reality.
Him being a con man and him delivering on what I want are not mutually exclusive. You seem really invested in this idea that MAGA voters are being scammed or hoodwinked, and surely some of them are, I just don't think that's even a majority. I would have settled just for blocking dumb things the Democrats were doing or planning to do, so anything positive he does for me is already over performing.
Ironically, my fear in 2016 was that Trump was a fake conservative and would be so receptive to flattery that he'd turn lib once in office, but the unhinged reactions to him from the Democrats and their establishment has taken that possibility right off of the board. I don't really care if he's motivated by principles or grievance or grift, he's already done things for me that I honestly never thought I'd see in my lifetime, despite past promises from more conventional Republicans.
You mentioned that "most of the Trump voters I know have been pretty clear eyed about what they're voting for", but how many of those cared about corruption vis a vis Hunter Biden's nepotism and don't now? Part of what I'm describing is MAGA deluding themselves that they've won policy victories even though they haven't. If Trump has demonstrated a willingness to hoodwink his own followers, and MAGA has demonstrated a gullibility to being scammed, why would there be a boundary where that dynamic no longer plays out?
I suppose it's theoretically possible but I just don't understand how it works in practice. Can you give an example of a victory that you believe was worth the grift and corruption?
I think you're misreading the Hunter Biden scandal, which at least from my vantage point was less about the corruption per se than it was about the double standard and the media coverup, to say nothing of the possible security state involvement. Sure, the corruption itself was also bad in and of itself, but it wasn't novel, we've had self dealing presidential relatives before, it was the media suppression of the story, possibly hand in hand with the intelligence services, that was the real scandal. That, and the utter incuriosity about it from the mainstream, kinda like how the Tapper book about the Biden senility coverup some how stops short of the media enablers.
As to policy victories, the big one is still our 6-3 Court, that's worth a lot to me as someone living in a blue state with hostile institutions, and a durable one for the moment. Possibly the bigger victory is the intangible climate shift against the progressives, with all of their dogmas suddenly becoming very questionable in public in a way they weren't and would never have been under a Harris regime. I know you're seeing the gender stuff unravel, but even the race stuff is starting to fall, which again isn't something I believed possible in my lifetime, at least not peacefully. He's even really helped me out with the gun stuff, which isn't a top tier issue for most people nor one that I actually trusted him on given his record, but he's done more than any other Republican in my lifetime. Could he still turn and screw me? Sure, but as I previously said, he's actually outperforming my expectation going in.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean by "double standard". What are the two standards you're referring to? Regarding the "media coverup", I remain baffled by this issue. Twitter blocked links to the NY Post story for 24 hours, and in the process ensured that the Hunter Biden story would be one of the biggest stories that folks would continue talking about for years after the fact (like we are now).
If there's something I'm missing and you want to educate me (on this or anything else you think I'm wrong about), I'm more than happy to talk. Email me ymeskhout@gmail.com and we can set up a time.
As for SCOTUS, I've praised Trump's picks in general and on the topic of gun rights in particular: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/clarence-thomass-gun-control-snare
At the same time, my praise is conditional on the fact that Trump mostly picked normie conservative judges vetted to him by the Federalist society, which he's now no longer happy with. I see no reason to believe that SCOTUS would have been materially different with any other Republican president.
Regarding the cultural climate shift, it seems obvious that Trump wouldn't have won if there hadn't been increased disdain towards institutions in general, so you're potentially confusing "cause" with "effect". As someone concerned about racial and gender dogmas, I'm explicitly worried about Trump encouraging backlash against critiquing those dogmas, because that's what happened in his first term (subject to the same disclaimer about cause/effect).
I actually split the cause/effect baby when it comes to Trump and the political climate, as he both played on a lot of things that were already happening, but he also played a role in creating the permission structure to question many of these dogmas in public by doing it himself first. "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" worked so well in part because he had her in her own words, and also because he was publicly voicing a previously forbidden belief that a lot of people clearly did in fact share. He managed to thread the needle on a lot of this stuff where he pushed back on the progressive craziness, but doesn't himself come off like a religious crank, which I think is an underestimated factor in his appeal.
I'll take you up on that DM shortly, I do find these conversations tend to be a lot more productive in private.
In the meantime though, surely you're familiar with the "Republicans Pounce" framing that the media constantly uses when reporting on GOP scandals vs Dem scandals? Hunter and his laptop are basically that on steroids, where the entire country was collectively gaslit into not only ignoring what really ought to have been a pretty major scandal that did in fact implicate Joe Biden, but largely made to believe that the whole thing was some sort of scheme cooked up by the GOP. Forget the sordid details of the drugs and the affair with his late brothers widow, the hookers, etc and just focus on how much money he was paid by various shady people for no apparent reason other than his influence on his father; surely that should at least have been investigated and remarked upon, right? Instead, the FBI prepared the ground by warning the media of a "Russian disinformation campaign involving Hunter Biden", despite them being possession of the laptop at that time and knowing the authenticity of its contents, followed by the infamous letter signed by all of the IC people claiming "all the hallmarks of Russian disinfo", then the social media suppression when the NYP did actually report on it, then the rest of the mainstream media pretending it didn't exist. Are you really going to argue that the exact same story but starring Don Jr gets the same treatment?
I agree with everything you have written here and I hate Trump & MAGA at least as much as you do (I made my plans to leave America the day after the 2016 election), and yet…
If you want to know why people voted for Trump, you should listen to what they say: immigration and wokeness. They are losing the country they love to immigrants, and American society is being configured to give preference to gays, African Americans, and transwomen. Kamala even said so in her campaign.
If we want to take Trump down, we have to address that
I agree to an extent, Dems have absolutely failed to address many valid concerns (which I've endlessly written about). That only goes so far, because many of the putative complaints start falling apart upon scrutiny.
Immigration is a reliable example of what I mean, because I've put in a lot of effort to have charitable conversations with immigration restrictionists to get at the heart of what their complaints are and clarity has been a serious challenge. For example, crime is often brought up as a concern, but then they refuse to engage with the stats or entertain keyholes solutions.
I live in the UK now and immigration is a big issue here too. People object to the culture changing away from the one they know. That’s less of an issue in the USA, except in the border states like California and Texas where there are towns where everyone speaks Spanish. Maybe 11 million illegal immigrants is not a problem, but then, why not change the law to make them legal? It’s because a lot of people object and they vote for Trump to stop it. Looking to debunk individual reasons like crime is missing the point.
I agree with you that this weird middle ground of "millions are openly breaking the law but we're not going to do anything about it" is untenable and undermines legitimacy in other areas, and I agree the law should be changed for that reason alone.
Part of the problem is just baseline congressional dysfunction, but in addition it's the lack of coherence and clarity about what people actually want to do about immigration. Some people are concerned about crime (It's not missing the point if that's the justification people offer!), some people have economic concerns, some have cultural concerns, and also some people just hate foreigners but pretend to have other concerns.
It's hard to synthesize all of those concerns into one tidy legislative package.
What's the off-ramp for these people?
I wish I knew. I'm holding out hope that fostering a generosity culture for error-admission might help.
So while I agree with your essay, I got a lot of "why can't you idiots admit you made a mistake?" from it. And people don't do that!
I consider it a victory if I can get someone who used to say "X is obviously true" to "well X isn't true" without necessarily getting them to admit they were wrong. There are very strong ego-protection locks in place in most people's heads against that.
It depends, see my reply here: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/im-starting-to-feel-pity-for-maga/comment/134265825
Did you get confused and reply to the wrong thread? Who's the Muslim? Who said anything positive about neocon foreign policy?