I have had the same experience, even with my good friends. After Trump was elected, I didn't join in with those who inserted in every conversation, relevant or not, something like "Well, we have a president who <something horrible>" I never joined in, even though it was clear they expected me to also denounce Trump. One friend noticing my lack of response, turned to me and asked "You don't LIKE Trump, do you?!" Years later, she still thinks she knows what I think about every possible political issue, because she has lumped me in with the group of people who wear MAGA hats, follow QAnon, and watch Fox News. I've tried to explain to her what a libertarian believes, and that I recognize the nuance in all these issues, but it's useless. The only way we stay friends now is to never, ever discuss politics at all.
Keep sharing your thoughts, David. It's nice to know that some other people try to think about issues from first principles, instead of as a matter of what one's tribe has told them to think.
I moderate a forum full of rationalists and adjacent people. (David knows the forum.) I've been accused of being biased against the left, against the right, and even against libertarians.
That's funny. I used to run a nonsectarian homeschooling group with about 120 families. There were all religions and no religions represented. And like you, I was accused of bias in all directions. My mentor at the time said that if they all feel that way, then I am doing it right.
Feel you man, I lost a long time good friend over Trump myself in that I had the gall to not full throat support my friend every time he blamed everything bad on Trump including, not sarcastically, the weather. The final straw on his end was when I pointed out the policy implementation he was lambasting was an executive order under Obama and all Trump did was literally renew it with no change to its existing implementation. We never spoke again to this day and was a twenty year friendship, stood in his wedding even.
I will say at least in my experience this is purely a phenomenon on the left. In my life I've never once met someone on the right who unfriended someone who expressed what they would claim leftist, liberal, or progressive policies nor a leftist who said they were unfriended for let's say, supporting Obama.
The place I might expect to find it on the right is with a Trump supporter unfriending a Republican who refused to support Trump, but I don't know of any examples.
I have found the same thing - that it's the left that is so intolerant of different views. If you don't join them in denouncing whoever they oppose, you are an enemy. And they define their opponents by reciting who they are associated with. So-and-so is associated with the Koch brothers, for example. I have a relative who is a master at that. When I ask if he even read the article that I posted, and can he tell me what point he disagrees with, he has to admit that he never bothered because of the link he already identified, he knows it won't be worth his time.
I'm sorry about your friend. I've seen close family ties completely broken over who someone voted for. A few decades ago, it would have been seen as rude to even ask.
Unfortunately gone is that period of history in the US and Australia after WW2 where a more bi-partisan attitude was applied to politics generally as most of the then adult male population (including politicians) had fought in either WW1 or WW2 (and many females had served in the military themselves or the war effort generally and had lost loved ones).
There was a more open society where both sides of politics hoped that their children didn't have to go through what they had had to endure. It grew, for many, out of a mate-ship under fire where all were equal.
We now have the luxury where wars are fought by the few and the remainder have time to be selfish.
Where we are misrepresented for our views (where we try to use reason and logic to discuss a subject), little can be done to correct that misrepresentation.
I believe Mark Twain once said:
"Never argue with an idiot as he (she) will drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience.
Since I taught in a political science department, it was interesting to watch my students try to put me in a partisan box. And my friends on the Right and the Left simply have come to regard me as a political nutcase. You, David, unfortunately probably aren't in a position to allow yourself to be regarded as a nutcase of any type.
Once my department got used to me it was kind of fun. Two of my best friends were one a hardcore Army brat Marxist and the other a guilt-ridden conservative Lutheran. We all enjoyed good beer. And we enjoyed discussing politics, knowing each others basic thoughts, I think we all learned quite a bit from each other.
But that doesn't happen, or work well, in the ordinary world. People like having a rooting interest that doesn't require much thought. And they don't like defending their team. They think its obvious their team is always the best and should win every game/election if the other team doesn't cheat.
I almost lost a good libertarian of some 20 years when I merely predicted, about 6 weeks out, that I thought Trump might likely win Michigan (where we both resided) and that if he did that would probably mean he'd win the Presidency. My libertarian was aghast. How could I dare support Trump. I pointed out that I didn't, but I had no rooting interest, I didn't like Trump at all and despised Clinton (partly because I am a veteran and I believed and believe that she held a particular animus for the military and anyone who had ever served voluntarily), and that my read of the lack of Clinton yard signs and supportive chatter told me she was in trouble.
He couldn't accept that I was applying observation and logic neutrally when Trump was so icky. (He didn't say icky, but that was the gist.) He eventually got past it, but it was touch and go. And he is generally a very logical fellow.
Ah, well, some of us oddballs are very irritating to the two fan crowds.
I am, however, a 70 year fan of the best team in major league baseball, the St Louis Cardinals, and I'll fight anyone who denies that.
An excerpt from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. “For many months during the election campaign, my close friends urged me to declare my support for John Kennedy. I spent many troubled hours searching for the responsible and fair decision. I was impressed by his qualities, by many elements in his record, and by his program. I had learned to enjoy and respect his charm and his incisive mind. But I made very clear to him that I did not endorse candidates publicly and that I could not come to the point that I would change my views on this.”
One thing that might help is to make it very clear that you don’t endorse any candidate.
It probably won’t have much of an effect.
Other solutions are to stop making any comments about candidates; or to have faith that most of your readers understand your libertarian views. The bothersome comments are coming from very few, but loud commenters.
We like hearing your views on candidates. You might also go whole hog in the other direction and do deeper analysis on both candidates.
I would have to know more than I do about past candidates. Mencken doesn't make most of the ones he wrote about sound very attractive. Trump reminds me somewhat of Andrew Jackson, but I don't know his history well enough to judge how close the similarity is.
I used to take a "politics don't matter attitude". Eventually, all policies trend toward the median voter, right?
But after 2020 I changed my mind. There really can be a big difference depending on whether an R or a D is in charge. Part of this was COVID where policy was important and varied wildly, but you could reference the entire George Floyd era. Does the median voter believe in 12 genders and the 1619 project? And yet that's what we got.
There are other things that have changed slowly. There may not have been as big a difference in economic conditions in CA and FL in the 1980s or 90s, but today there is a huge difference.
Lastly, the issue that most animates me is school vouchers. It's very obvious that only red states are going to implement it, that there will be zero bi-partisan votes for this stuff. The median voter would probably support it, but special interests won't and only one party will get behind it.
First of all, thank you for allowing free subscribers to post. I'd go bankrupt if I paid for every source I read. Second, I recently elicited a stunned Pikachu face from a friend for suggesting that not all republicans, by default Trump supporters in 2024, are insane conspiracy toting racists. My mild-mannered, thoughtful cousin-in-law believes his policies are better for the country, no conspiracies or hate is involved. Shallow, image driven politics is dangerous.
I have thought of offering a paid option, but it wouldn't be for commenting — commenters are a free input to the value of the blog. Back when my main internet activity was Slate Star Codex, most of my time was spent in the comment threads not on Scott's (very good) posts.
I haven't done it because even if the free option gave all the same things, some people might feel pressured and so not subscribe, and I write as a way of spreading ideas not a way of earning money.
I’ve experienced the same problem all my life, as I’ve never wanted to associate myself with either left-wingers or right-wingers. “If you aren’t on our side, you must be on the other side.” Sigh. The two-party system that you have in the USA must make it worse. I live in Spain, where there are more parties; but they still tend to be divided into parties of the left and parties of the right.
Apologies again for the incorrect inference of your politics. I was basing that bad read on a comment you might have made on ACX about getting a “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this” vibe when you were an undergrad and I was imagining someone in the vein of a young Bill Buckley. It’s also entirely possible you never said anything of the sort, so my bad.
I have a hobby of building up fictional back stories for the regular commenters there. A weird way to amuse oneself but it gives me a chuckle now then.
Carl Pham hasn’t been there in a while but I had him as a former Jesuit priest, speaking 6 languages proficiently and still being an occasional advisor to the pope.
I was sorry to see him go. With time his back story might have become a novel.
That's a story I tell about a conversation I had when I was nineteen and supporting Goldwater. I was certainly a libertarian at the time, but not yet an anarchist.
On the subject of back stories, I was trying to figure out, when writing the above, how early I shifted from classical liberal/libertarian to anarcho-capitalist. I couldn't remember, but I did remember that a key cause was reading Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, which had a plausible description of a functioning stateless society. I checked its date and it was published in 1966, two years after Goldwater ran for president.
I've written three novels, but none were about me. I think the personality of the protagonist of the first was in part based on my father, of the second on my wife and daughter.
Sometimes this can be headed off by anticipating the reaction and stating up-front, "No, I'm not a fan of person X, but that's no excuse for railroading him," etc. I do appreciate the frustration of encountering people who don't make any effort to think about whether their assumptions of you actually fit anything you've said.
It might be illuminating to examine occasions where the usual Manichean lines blink out of existence, and suddenly the 50-50 split turns into 90-10.
The most recent example I can think of would be 9/11. Check any approval poll around then. Before September, Bush rated probably around 40-50%, probably attributable to the usual political lines (and maybe exacerbated by the legal problems around the 2000 election). After September, approval shot up to around 90%, and the cause was clear.
One obvious prediction to make is that grave external threats drive out this type of bickering. One obvious counterexample is COVID. One response I have to this is that COVID might not have rated as a grave external threat to many people - possibly coupled with a conditioned belief that we can't believe everything our institutions tell us.
As one of the "non-neutral" commenters highlighted, I'll just note that I was commenting while also supervising a toddler, and had gotten through three or so of your posts without figuring out for sure whether you agree with my view that Trump is quite unusual in his willingness to grab for extralegal power and his intent to use power for personal advancement. Absent that frame, I expect you'd be indifferent between him and Biden, or slightly prefer Trump (on grounds that he'll do less, because inept and unpopular with the sorts of establishment lawyers who know how to get things done), or, as you say is your preference, prefer the President be from whatever party Congress is not from.
I may be unusual in having a larger-than-standard dose of a kind of Puritan-origin type of thinking, fairly common in the U.S., especially in the Northeast and Colorado/Utah/Idaho, which tend me to think corruption at the top can take everyone, or nearly everyone, right along with it (the Dietrich Bonhoeffers of the world excepted). But I admit I still am confused about what you really think of Trump's character... do you think he is disgusted by Roger Stone's conversation with a cop re: assassinating members of congress, and will ensure that no hint of endorsing violence toward his enemies is permitted among those who work for him?
I don't think Trump is much troubled by moral concerns. Whether he suppresses talk of assassination among his people will depend on whether he thinks doing so will or will not promote his interests and whether he does or does not enjoy it — he may like the feeling of power such talk gives him.
He is certainly willing to grab for extralegal power and use power for personal advancement, but I don't thing that is "quite unusual" among politicians. He is more obviously dishonest than normal but I think lots of politicians are willing to lie if they think they can get away with it, including Biden.
I don't intend to vote for either Trump or Biden. Given the essentially zero chance that my vote will affect the outcome of the election — even lower than for most since I'm in California — voting is a consumption activity, like cheering for a sports team, and I don't want to cheer for either Trump or Biden, or their parties. If the Libertarian Party nominates someone reasonable I expect I will vote for him, otherwise I won't vote for president.
I think Biden is obviously a better person than Trump — I can imagine, in some alternate reality, being friends with him — but I'm not sure he would be a better president, given his ideological commitments and allies. Trump doesn't have any ideological commitments. His objective to be an important person, have lots of people admiring him and doing what he says.
From my point of view, it's a choice between someone who will predictably do things bad for the country and a loose cannon who might do almost anything. My only clear preference is for whichever of them wins being able to do as little as possible.
This is a very full answer and, given the challenges of engaging online with the kind of environment this topic tends to summon into the comments, much more than I could expect from nearly anyone other than David D. Friedman. Thank you for satisfying my curiosity/resolving my confusion, particularly given what commenters online on subjects like this one tend to be like.
I know I've said already that I had been confused about what your position might be; I think I had seen the headline "Trump's Threat to Democracy" in my inbox, which certainly piqued my curiosity, but also I think (especially because I was distracted and saw the headline many times in my 'to read' folder before I got around to reading) that I ended up pretty influenced by an anchoring bias. Of course your post by that name is about the potential threat to democracy that may flow from fear-of-Trump producing antidemocratic behavior on the left... but by the time I actually read the article, I was trying to dispel a firmly anchored impression that you had picked a side and were aiming to persuade against Trump... which, with the benefit of a toddler and confirmation bias, it took me a while to read my way back out of. To crib from Swift, "mistaken impression flies, and truth comes limping after it." It seems to have been my mistake entirely, but I trust it's done no harm.
As I suggested in my parent comment, you and I seem to me to have different priors about how likely a leader's willingness to promote supporters who endorse violence, and to justify violence by saying the other side does it too, is to produce a hierarchy officially committed to violence. If I find the time to talk about the subject, maybe I'll make it a post of my own. If I do, I'll try to remember to send a link, in case exploring that difference is of interest to you.
I think Eugine you must not have actually followed that link.
If you do, you'll see that Professor Snyder carefully does the work journalists *should* be doing, and shows that in fact Trump's comments are worse *in context* than they are out of context. You could miss it if you weren't there, and didn't actually look at the whole event, but Trump didn't say "it'll be a bloodbath" in a context that implies he means sales of American-made automobiles would go down, which is what most news outlets seem to prefer supposing he meant.
Rather he structured the entire event to theatrically invest everyone in attendance to affirm loyalty to the issurectionist violence of Jan 6, and that in place of having loyalty to the U.S. He wasn't saying "regretably, but in plain truth, auto sales of US made vehicles will fall terribly if I'm not elected." He was pivoting back to his central message, effectively, "but nevermind just U.S.-made auto sales. let's go back to my core point with this whole spectacle: if I'm not the recipient of the most votes, my supporters will rightly and heroically start a bloodbath to ensure I'm given power anyway, which we all here confirm is as it should be."
He isn't saying stuff about economics.. He isn't saying stuff about the regrettable violent tendencies of a smattering of supporters of his with whom he disagrees, as an aside in an otherwise normal policy/politics speech/event. He's built an entire event around endorsing violent loyalty to him personally, which at this point is in plain sight with loyalty to Jan 6 insurrectionists standing in for the national anthem.
This country was founded by "insurrectionist violence".
We've instituted a non-violent version in the form regular elections. However, that relies on elections being at least reasonably fair, not the brazen fraud we saw in 2020.
Like you say, 'Most people are not very interested in political, economic, historical matters,...' However, 'Most people enjoy cheering for their team. ' That really sums it all up.
I'm annoyed by the same phenomenon, but I also catch myself doing something similar enough that it might be almost indistinguishable in some circumstances.
In my case, when it comes to US politics, I figure both sides are (ahem) political animals, which means they rarely tell the truth, never give a truly balanced evaluation, and crave power badly enough to convince themselves that otherwise unethical behaviours are OK in this context. (And that's the ones that _aren't_ outright sociopaths.) There may be a few idealists not yet corrupted, but they are probably teenagers.
Yet I can and do class people in one or other American political bucket after hearing a handful of their opinions, and am rarely surprised by their later statements.
Only two. Lots of people claim to be something other than generic red and generic blue, but the ones that are trivially easy to categorize are the ones that stick firmly within one or other of the basic groups.
To be fair(?), lots of people avoid mentioning their points of disagreement with whichever team seems least bad to them, at least in public. They *may* avoid ritually proclaiming the Truths they don't agree with, unless put on the spot by someone demanding full allegiance. (Sometimes they'll even defy the demand for full conformity, even in public ;-))
I'm not likely to recognize that some old-fashioned redistributionist avoids discussions of gender theory, or some dyed-in-the-wool propertarian avoids commenting on the personhood of newly fertilized ova. At least, I'm likely not to notice if they are a relative stranger, and I only encounter them in public forums. (One exception: people who happen to have the same not fully tribal beliefs that I also have. There I might notice that they avoid talking publicly about the same things I do.)
On second thought, I can think of a couple of other buckets. There's the contrarian, who disagrees with everything. And there's the don't-rock-the-boat peacemaker, who never disagrees with anyone.
I don't think that does it. I don't fit in any of those buckets and I don't think any member of my immediate family does. There are a fair number of anti-Trump Republicans — do they go in the same bucket as MAGA enthusiasts? Old school liberals and SJW progressives? When an election is happening a lot of people choose a team to root for but not all — consider how many don't bother to vote.
Ah, but I don't presume to characterize everybody, and some of those I categorize only fit their category because of the way they behave in my presence; if I knew them better, they might turn out to be "Joe, who has complex opinions" not "Joe, loyal unthinking member of his tribe".
You're a special case. I mostly know you in public circumstances, where many people self censor, but you don't appear to be self-censoring. I don't think you are afraid of being rejected by both tribes, let alone being "canceled" or physically attacked. And like me, you are retired, and thus past the point of wanting to keep your public reputation clean enough not to repel potential employers.
I can't predict your expressed opinions by putting you in any particular bucket. If I want to predict you, I need a large collection of data, and often can't predict how you will react to a new political topic.
If I had to put you in one of my buckets, it might be contrarian - you seem to like being different - but you don't behave like the classic rebel-without-a-cause, who may change their expressed opinions simply to disagree with whatever someone else said.
If I had to identify myself politically, it would be something like Social Democrat. That's a vanishingly small category in the US, often conflated with socialist or even communist. But these days, most of us are "passing" as random Democrats. Some might (mis)recognize us a Bernie-ites; most probably don't see us. And I'm *not* being visibly different in public, and often not in private either.
I don't need the hassle of conversion attempts from True Believers (TM), who are certain that if I'm more on their side than the other one, I'll take up all the appropriate opinions when faced with the most trivial arguments in favor. Worse, my last job before retirement was infested with performative wokism; it soon became clear that pushing back was likely to be bad for my financial prospects. (Performative wokism: all the best public pronouncements, and not a shred of effective action for the supposedly valued oppressed groups.)
The impression I get is that some large percentage of the people I know really are True Believers (TM), though possibly prioritizing the specific things that attracted them to their tribe in the first place. And most of the rest are keeping their heads down, just as I am.
I was equally open about my views before I retired.
But I might not have been if I were at more risk of serious negative consequences.
I agree that there is a contrarian element to my tastes but it's limited to contrary positions that I think there are good arguments for, especially positions contrary to ones that are being defended with bad or dishonest arguments.
Is your "both sides" comment about politicians on both sides or their supporters? I don't expect that most supporters crave power — they just want their side to win.
I have had the same experience, even with my good friends. After Trump was elected, I didn't join in with those who inserted in every conversation, relevant or not, something like "Well, we have a president who <something horrible>" I never joined in, even though it was clear they expected me to also denounce Trump. One friend noticing my lack of response, turned to me and asked "You don't LIKE Trump, do you?!" Years later, she still thinks she knows what I think about every possible political issue, because she has lumped me in with the group of people who wear MAGA hats, follow QAnon, and watch Fox News. I've tried to explain to her what a libertarian believes, and that I recognize the nuance in all these issues, but it's useless. The only way we stay friends now is to never, ever discuss politics at all.
Keep sharing your thoughts, David. It's nice to know that some other people try to think about issues from first principles, instead of as a matter of what one's tribe has told them to think.
I moderate a forum full of rationalists and adjacent people. (David knows the forum.) I've been accused of being biased against the left, against the right, and even against libertarians.
That's funny. I used to run a nonsectarian homeschooling group with about 120 families. There were all religions and no religions represented. And like you, I was accused of bias in all directions. My mentor at the time said that if they all feel that way, then I am doing it right.
Feel you man, I lost a long time good friend over Trump myself in that I had the gall to not full throat support my friend every time he blamed everything bad on Trump including, not sarcastically, the weather. The final straw on his end was when I pointed out the policy implementation he was lambasting was an executive order under Obama and all Trump did was literally renew it with no change to its existing implementation. We never spoke again to this day and was a twenty year friendship, stood in his wedding even.
I will say at least in my experience this is purely a phenomenon on the left. In my life I've never once met someone on the right who unfriended someone who expressed what they would claim leftist, liberal, or progressive policies nor a leftist who said they were unfriended for let's say, supporting Obama.
The place I might expect to find it on the right is with a Trump supporter unfriending a Republican who refused to support Trump, but I don't know of any examples.
I have found the same thing - that it's the left that is so intolerant of different views. If you don't join them in denouncing whoever they oppose, you are an enemy. And they define their opponents by reciting who they are associated with. So-and-so is associated with the Koch brothers, for example. I have a relative who is a master at that. When I ask if he even read the article that I posted, and can he tell me what point he disagrees with, he has to admit that he never bothered because of the link he already identified, he knows it won't be worth his time.
I'm sorry about your friend. I've seen close family ties completely broken over who someone voted for. A few decades ago, it would have been seen as rude to even ask.
Unfortunately gone is that period of history in the US and Australia after WW2 where a more bi-partisan attitude was applied to politics generally as most of the then adult male population (including politicians) had fought in either WW1 or WW2 (and many females had served in the military themselves or the war effort generally and had lost loved ones).
There was a more open society where both sides of politics hoped that their children didn't have to go through what they had had to endure. It grew, for many, out of a mate-ship under fire where all were equal.
We now have the luxury where wars are fought by the few and the remainder have time to be selfish.
Where we are misrepresented for our views (where we try to use reason and logic to discuss a subject), little can be done to correct that misrepresentation.
I believe Mark Twain once said:
"Never argue with an idiot as he (she) will drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience.
Since I taught in a political science department, it was interesting to watch my students try to put me in a partisan box. And my friends on the Right and the Left simply have come to regard me as a political nutcase. You, David, unfortunately probably aren't in a position to allow yourself to be regarded as a nutcase of any type.
Once my department got used to me it was kind of fun. Two of my best friends were one a hardcore Army brat Marxist and the other a guilt-ridden conservative Lutheran. We all enjoyed good beer. And we enjoyed discussing politics, knowing each others basic thoughts, I think we all learned quite a bit from each other.
But that doesn't happen, or work well, in the ordinary world. People like having a rooting interest that doesn't require much thought. And they don't like defending their team. They think its obvious their team is always the best and should win every game/election if the other team doesn't cheat.
I almost lost a good libertarian of some 20 years when I merely predicted, about 6 weeks out, that I thought Trump might likely win Michigan (where we both resided) and that if he did that would probably mean he'd win the Presidency. My libertarian was aghast. How could I dare support Trump. I pointed out that I didn't, but I had no rooting interest, I didn't like Trump at all and despised Clinton (partly because I am a veteran and I believed and believe that she held a particular animus for the military and anyone who had ever served voluntarily), and that my read of the lack of Clinton yard signs and supportive chatter told me she was in trouble.
He couldn't accept that I was applying observation and logic neutrally when Trump was so icky. (He didn't say icky, but that was the gist.) He eventually got past it, but it was touch and go. And he is generally a very logical fellow.
Ah, well, some of us oddballs are very irritating to the two fan crowds.
I am, however, a 70 year fan of the best team in major league baseball, the St Louis Cardinals, and I'll fight anyone who denies that.
Please keep casting your pearls; the swine will do what they always do and the non-swine will apprehend what you write.
An excerpt from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. “For many months during the election campaign, my close friends urged me to declare my support for John Kennedy. I spent many troubled hours searching for the responsible and fair decision. I was impressed by his qualities, by many elements in his record, and by his program. I had learned to enjoy and respect his charm and his incisive mind. But I made very clear to him that I did not endorse candidates publicly and that I could not come to the point that I would change my views on this.”
One thing that might help is to make it very clear that you don’t endorse any candidate.
It probably won’t have much of an effect.
Other solutions are to stop making any comments about candidates; or to have faith that most of your readers understand your libertarian views. The bothersome comments are coming from very few, but loud commenters.
We like hearing your views on candidates. You might also go whole hog in the other direction and do deeper analysis on both candidates.
I could imagine endorsing a candidate, although I can't think of any in recent decades who I would endorse.
That topic would probably make a good post. Certain aspects of society have gotten better, some worse. Have candidates gotten worse? If so, why?
I would have to know more than I do about past candidates. Mencken doesn't make most of the ones he wrote about sound very attractive. Trump reminds me somewhat of Andrew Jackson, but I don't know his history well enough to judge how close the similarity is.
Politics, as a very wise man once said, is the mind-killer.
I used to take a "politics don't matter attitude". Eventually, all policies trend toward the median voter, right?
But after 2020 I changed my mind. There really can be a big difference depending on whether an R or a D is in charge. Part of this was COVID where policy was important and varied wildly, but you could reference the entire George Floyd era. Does the median voter believe in 12 genders and the 1619 project? And yet that's what we got.
There are other things that have changed slowly. There may not have been as big a difference in economic conditions in CA and FL in the 1980s or 90s, but today there is a huge difference.
Lastly, the issue that most animates me is school vouchers. It's very obvious that only red states are going to implement it, that there will be zero bi-partisan votes for this stuff. The median voter would probably support it, but special interests won't and only one party will get behind it.
First of all, thank you for allowing free subscribers to post. I'd go bankrupt if I paid for every source I read. Second, I recently elicited a stunned Pikachu face from a friend for suggesting that not all republicans, by default Trump supporters in 2024, are insane conspiracy toting racists. My mild-mannered, thoughtful cousin-in-law believes his policies are better for the country, no conspiracies or hate is involved. Shallow, image driven politics is dangerous.
I have thought of offering a paid option, but it wouldn't be for commenting — commenters are a free input to the value of the blog. Back when my main internet activity was Slate Star Codex, most of my time was spent in the comment threads not on Scott's (very good) posts.
I haven't done it because even if the free option gave all the same things, some people might feel pressured and so not subscribe, and I write as a way of spreading ideas not a way of earning money.
I’ve experienced the same problem all my life, as I’ve never wanted to associate myself with either left-wingers or right-wingers. “If you aren’t on our side, you must be on the other side.” Sigh. The two-party system that you have in the USA must make it worse. I live in Spain, where there are more parties; but they still tend to be divided into parties of the left and parties of the right.
Apologies again for the incorrect inference of your politics. I was basing that bad read on a comment you might have made on ACX about getting a “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this” vibe when you were an undergrad and I was imagining someone in the vein of a young Bill Buckley. It’s also entirely possible you never said anything of the sort, so my bad.
I have a hobby of building up fictional back stories for the regular commenters there. A weird way to amuse oneself but it gives me a chuckle now then.
Carl Pham hasn’t been there in a while but I had him as a former Jesuit priest, speaking 6 languages proficiently and still being an occasional advisor to the pope.
I was sorry to see him go. With time his back story might have become a novel.
That's a story I tell about a conversation I had when I was nineteen and supporting Goldwater. I was certainly a libertarian at the time, but not yet an anarchist.
On the subject of back stories, I was trying to figure out, when writing the above, how early I shifted from classical liberal/libertarian to anarcho-capitalist. I couldn't remember, but I did remember that a key cause was reading Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, which had a plausible description of a functioning stateless society. I checked its date and it was published in 1966, two years after Goldwater ran for president.
Looks like there may be a novel in your back story too.
I've written three novels, but none were about me. I think the personality of the protagonist of the first was in part based on my father, of the second on my wife and daughter.
The problem is that neutrals are effectively free-riders.
Sometimes this can be headed off by anticipating the reaction and stating up-front, "No, I'm not a fan of person X, but that's no excuse for railroading him," etc. I do appreciate the frustration of encountering people who don't make any effort to think about whether their assumptions of you actually fit anything you've said.
It might be illuminating to examine occasions where the usual Manichean lines blink out of existence, and suddenly the 50-50 split turns into 90-10.
The most recent example I can think of would be 9/11. Check any approval poll around then. Before September, Bush rated probably around 40-50%, probably attributable to the usual political lines (and maybe exacerbated by the legal problems around the 2000 election). After September, approval shot up to around 90%, and the cause was clear.
One obvious prediction to make is that grave external threats drive out this type of bickering. One obvious counterexample is COVID. One response I have to this is that COVID might not have rated as a grave external threat to many people - possibly coupled with a conditioned belief that we can't believe everything our institutions tell us.
As one of the "non-neutral" commenters highlighted, I'll just note that I was commenting while also supervising a toddler, and had gotten through three or so of your posts without figuring out for sure whether you agree with my view that Trump is quite unusual in his willingness to grab for extralegal power and his intent to use power for personal advancement. Absent that frame, I expect you'd be indifferent between him and Biden, or slightly prefer Trump (on grounds that he'll do less, because inept and unpopular with the sorts of establishment lawyers who know how to get things done), or, as you say is your preference, prefer the President be from whatever party Congress is not from.
I may be unusual in having a larger-than-standard dose of a kind of Puritan-origin type of thinking, fairly common in the U.S., especially in the Northeast and Colorado/Utah/Idaho, which tend me to think corruption at the top can take everyone, or nearly everyone, right along with it (the Dietrich Bonhoeffers of the world excepted). But I admit I still am confused about what you really think of Trump's character... do you think he is disgusted by Roger Stone's conversation with a cop re: assassinating members of congress, and will ensure that no hint of endorsing violence toward his enemies is permitted among those who work for him?
I don't think Trump is much troubled by moral concerns. Whether he suppresses talk of assassination among his people will depend on whether he thinks doing so will or will not promote his interests and whether he does or does not enjoy it — he may like the feeling of power such talk gives him.
He is certainly willing to grab for extralegal power and use power for personal advancement, but I don't thing that is "quite unusual" among politicians. He is more obviously dishonest than normal but I think lots of politicians are willing to lie if they think they can get away with it, including Biden.
I don't intend to vote for either Trump or Biden. Given the essentially zero chance that my vote will affect the outcome of the election — even lower than for most since I'm in California — voting is a consumption activity, like cheering for a sports team, and I don't want to cheer for either Trump or Biden, or their parties. If the Libertarian Party nominates someone reasonable I expect I will vote for him, otherwise I won't vote for president.
I think Biden is obviously a better person than Trump — I can imagine, in some alternate reality, being friends with him — but I'm not sure he would be a better president, given his ideological commitments and allies. Trump doesn't have any ideological commitments. His objective to be an important person, have lots of people admiring him and doing what he says.
From my point of view, it's a choice between someone who will predictably do things bad for the country and a loose cannon who might do almost anything. My only clear preference is for whichever of them wins being able to do as little as possible.
I hope that answers your question.
This is a very full answer and, given the challenges of engaging online with the kind of environment this topic tends to summon into the comments, much more than I could expect from nearly anyone other than David D. Friedman. Thank you for satisfying my curiosity/resolving my confusion, particularly given what commenters online on subjects like this one tend to be like.
I know I've said already that I had been confused about what your position might be; I think I had seen the headline "Trump's Threat to Democracy" in my inbox, which certainly piqued my curiosity, but also I think (especially because I was distracted and saw the headline many times in my 'to read' folder before I got around to reading) that I ended up pretty influenced by an anchoring bias. Of course your post by that name is about the potential threat to democracy that may flow from fear-of-Trump producing antidemocratic behavior on the left... but by the time I actually read the article, I was trying to dispel a firmly anchored impression that you had picked a side and were aiming to persuade against Trump... which, with the benefit of a toddler and confirmation bias, it took me a while to read my way back out of. To crib from Swift, "mistaken impression flies, and truth comes limping after it." It seems to have been my mistake entirely, but I trust it's done no harm.
As I suggested in my parent comment, you and I seem to me to have different priors about how likely a leader's willingness to promote supporters who endorse violence, and to justify violence by saying the other side does it too, is to produce a hierarchy officially committed to violence. If I find the time to talk about the subject, maybe I'll make it a post of my own. If I do, I'll try to remember to send a link, in case exploring that difference is of interest to you.
I think with my questions I've done a poor job of really pointing at just how starkly I differ, in terms of how I view Trump.
I think Timothy D. Snyder has it right: Trump is the bloodbath candidate.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-bloodbath-candidate
Why? Because the press loves to quote him out of context?
I think Eugine you must not have actually followed that link.
If you do, you'll see that Professor Snyder carefully does the work journalists *should* be doing, and shows that in fact Trump's comments are worse *in context* than they are out of context. You could miss it if you weren't there, and didn't actually look at the whole event, but Trump didn't say "it'll be a bloodbath" in a context that implies he means sales of American-made automobiles would go down, which is what most news outlets seem to prefer supposing he meant.
Rather he structured the entire event to theatrically invest everyone in attendance to affirm loyalty to the issurectionist violence of Jan 6, and that in place of having loyalty to the U.S. He wasn't saying "regretably, but in plain truth, auto sales of US made vehicles will fall terribly if I'm not elected." He was pivoting back to his central message, effectively, "but nevermind just U.S.-made auto sales. let's go back to my core point with this whole spectacle: if I'm not the recipient of the most votes, my supporters will rightly and heroically start a bloodbath to ensure I'm given power anyway, which we all here confirm is as it should be."
He isn't saying stuff about economics.. He isn't saying stuff about the regrettable violent tendencies of a smattering of supporters of his with whom he disagrees, as an aside in an otherwise normal policy/politics speech/event. He's built an entire event around endorsing violent loyalty to him personally, which at this point is in plain sight with loyalty to Jan 6 insurrectionists standing in for the national anthem.
This country was founded by "insurrectionist violence".
We've instituted a non-violent version in the form regular elections. However, that relies on elections being at least reasonably fair, not the brazen fraud we saw in 2020.
Like you say, 'Most people are not very interested in political, economic, historical matters,...' However, 'Most people enjoy cheering for their team. ' That really sums it all up.
Yes. I often wonder about people who aren't interested enough to read about it, yet still claim the right to have an opinion.
I'm annoyed by the same phenomenon, but I also catch myself doing something similar enough that it might be almost indistinguishable in some circumstances.
In my case, when it comes to US politics, I figure both sides are (ahem) political animals, which means they rarely tell the truth, never give a truly balanced evaluation, and crave power badly enough to convince themselves that otherwise unethical behaviours are OK in this context. (And that's the ones that _aren't_ outright sociopaths.) There may be a few idealists not yet corrupted, but they are probably teenagers.
Yet I can and do class people in one or other American political bucket after hearing a handful of their opinions, and am rarely surprised by their later statements.
How many buckets does it take?
Only two. Lots of people claim to be something other than generic red and generic blue, but the ones that are trivially easy to categorize are the ones that stick firmly within one or other of the basic groups.
To be fair(?), lots of people avoid mentioning their points of disagreement with whichever team seems least bad to them, at least in public. They *may* avoid ritually proclaiming the Truths they don't agree with, unless put on the spot by someone demanding full allegiance. (Sometimes they'll even defy the demand for full conformity, even in public ;-))
I'm not likely to recognize that some old-fashioned redistributionist avoids discussions of gender theory, or some dyed-in-the-wool propertarian avoids commenting on the personhood of newly fertilized ova. At least, I'm likely not to notice if they are a relative stranger, and I only encounter them in public forums. (One exception: people who happen to have the same not fully tribal beliefs that I also have. There I might notice that they avoid talking publicly about the same things I do.)
On second thought, I can think of a couple of other buckets. There's the contrarian, who disagrees with everything. And there's the don't-rock-the-boat peacemaker, who never disagrees with anyone.
I don't think that does it. I don't fit in any of those buckets and I don't think any member of my immediate family does. There are a fair number of anti-Trump Republicans — do they go in the same bucket as MAGA enthusiasts? Old school liberals and SJW progressives? When an election is happening a lot of people choose a team to root for but not all — consider how many don't bother to vote.
Ah, but I don't presume to characterize everybody, and some of those I categorize only fit their category because of the way they behave in my presence; if I knew them better, they might turn out to be "Joe, who has complex opinions" not "Joe, loyal unthinking member of his tribe".
You're a special case. I mostly know you in public circumstances, where many people self censor, but you don't appear to be self-censoring. I don't think you are afraid of being rejected by both tribes, let alone being "canceled" or physically attacked. And like me, you are retired, and thus past the point of wanting to keep your public reputation clean enough not to repel potential employers.
I can't predict your expressed opinions by putting you in any particular bucket. If I want to predict you, I need a large collection of data, and often can't predict how you will react to a new political topic.
If I had to put you in one of my buckets, it might be contrarian - you seem to like being different - but you don't behave like the classic rebel-without-a-cause, who may change their expressed opinions simply to disagree with whatever someone else said.
If I had to identify myself politically, it would be something like Social Democrat. That's a vanishingly small category in the US, often conflated with socialist or even communist. But these days, most of us are "passing" as random Democrats. Some might (mis)recognize us a Bernie-ites; most probably don't see us. And I'm *not* being visibly different in public, and often not in private either.
I don't need the hassle of conversion attempts from True Believers (TM), who are certain that if I'm more on their side than the other one, I'll take up all the appropriate opinions when faced with the most trivial arguments in favor. Worse, my last job before retirement was infested with performative wokism; it soon became clear that pushing back was likely to be bad for my financial prospects. (Performative wokism: all the best public pronouncements, and not a shred of effective action for the supposedly valued oppressed groups.)
The impression I get is that some large percentage of the people I know really are True Believers (TM), though possibly prioritizing the specific things that attracted them to their tribe in the first place. And most of the rest are keeping their heads down, just as I am.
I was equally open about my views before I retired.
But I might not have been if I were at more risk of serious negative consequences.
I agree that there is a contrarian element to my tastes but it's limited to contrary positions that I think there are good arguments for, especially positions contrary to ones that are being defended with bad or dishonest arguments.
Is your "both sides" comment about politicians on both sides or their supporters? I don't expect that most supporters crave power — they just want their side to win.
I think you are right. The politicians want power; the supporters mostly want vicarious power, aka "our guys in charge".