It seems to me that something bigger and unrecognized may be taking place. President Trump and those close to him (people like Musk and J.D. Vance) seem actually interested in the substance of issues and in the common good, whereas the Uniparty establishment views issues in a purely instrumental way for the pursuit of power, and disregards or even attempts to derail issues of importance to the electorate which don't serve their purposes, even while paying lip service. We have never had this choice on offer before, and it may be that a dawning public recognition of this will cause a political upheaval. Very large shifts in the vote across nearly every segment, even in highly partisan areas where it didn't amount to a new majority have not to my knowledge been previously seen. Trump roughly halved the enormous Democratic margin in the big cities. He made big inroads in the youth vote, previously thought to be impenetrable. I was recently in Argentina where the astonishing Milei victory was not a question of a particular "eccentric mix of interests and priorities" but rather the electorate fed up with a long history of tweedledee and tweedledum going for a candidate with a real commitment to radical change of a completely unprecedented sort, namely the drastic downsizing of a corrupt bureaucracy and a rejection of the usual lying politicians. While older voters there didn't move that much, those 18 - 24 voted 81% for Milei. So it is possible that analyses of the current US election as just the latest in a string may be missing a larger change.
A lot of political commentators seem to be susceptible to some kind of stubborn and subconscious mental stumbling block. It is the phenomenon of being surprised but not "updating ones priors", so to speak. Or at least not updating them accurately, not getting that "where did I go wrong?" feeling about a need to detect one's mistakes and correct one's models, and so getting surprised again in a similar way. With apologies to Principal Skinner, "Am I so out of touch? No; it's the voters who are wrong."
It's not exactly "Crimestop", but similar. TrumpStop? BayesStop?
For some political commentators, it is simply that they are confirmed leftists (whether hard core, typical progressive, or moderate) and simply can’t conceive that other thoughtful intelligent people could disagree with them.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is certainly still a thing, though clearly some of the hyperventilating hysteria has calmed down substantially. But short of full-on TDS for non-left public intellectuals is "Trump-camp Obsessive Criticisism and Disaffiliation" T-OCD, preferring to swallow a progressive camel than to pass up an opportunity to strain out a T-coded gnat.
"And it doesn’t mean that Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities is well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears"
This sounds like whistling past the graveyard when the top two issues in almost every survey were inflation and immigration, and the GOP (meaning Trump as its most visible spokesperson) was regularly rated as most trusted to deal with them.
I get that doesn't mean that Trump will necessarily deal with those issues to the satisfaction of voters but saying his political campaign didn't align with them is focusing on minutiae.
A big part of the Better/Worse vibes are local governance (crime, education, infrastructure, local corruption, etc.) Democrats have to overcome the fact that perma-blue cities increasingly look and feel post-apocalyptic.
I just returned to Washington DC for the first time since the pandemic, and despite the many new luxury condo buildings, the decline in basic safety is stark.
The DC suburb of MoCo, MD has likewise been going downhill. I benefited from the decline in basic safety because the buyer of my MoCo condo had sold their DC home and moved to MoCo because of the rise in DC crime, but clearly the crime problem in DC has been spilling over into MoCo. Glad I left. On the positive side, I am hopeful that the tide may be turning in my beloved home state of California. LA voted to kick out Soros-backed district attorney Gascon, and CA voters overwhelmingly approved a proposition overturning the measure (Prop 47) that had effectively legalized shoplifting. In SF, Daniel Lurie (an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune) defeated DEI incumbent London Breed (a black woman, naturally) for major, and according to SF resident David Sacks (All-in Podcast), the most extreme progressives were voted off the city council. Maybe DC and MoCo will have to hit bottom before things begin to turn around there.
Having just left CA, I can tell you that even if you are correct - and you *might* be - that they’ve hit bottom, the odds of a V-shaped rebound are basically zero.
The only real question is whether it is U-shaped or L-shaped. I’d put my money on the latter.
My expectations are just as low as yours, but when it comes to CA, even tiny green shoots of voter sanity are a welcome development. I left the DC area to move closer to, but not back to, CA. I'm not that crazy.
So Levin believes that Trump “has not brought American politics out of its 21st-century deadlock. That work will have to follow in his wake.” Which probably means that nobody on the AEI is being recruited for positions in the next administration and nor does it appear as if the AEI staff plan on contributing anything useful to advance even shared goals, preferring instead to carp and cavil from the sidelines.
Not really surprising seeing who all is on the AEI Board of Trustees (https://www.aei.org/about/annual-report/ ) and not surprising either given that “From 2007 to 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave about $7.9 million to AEI” and “In the 2020 election cycle, AEI employees donated $20,690, with 85% going to Republicans. Then-President Donald Trump received $1,188, and President Joe Biden received $1,434. 22.” (https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/american-enterprise-institute/ ).
All the more reason for Trump to use repeal of the 501(c)(3) exemption and related donation deduction to offset extension of the upcoming Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text ) expiration of the standard deduction increase, individual tax rate relief, and the size of the child tax credit. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12641 ). Combined with complete elimination of the SALT deduction, and a roll back on energy subsidies and tax breaks, there is a real opportunity to boost household incomes for ordinary Americans.
Are these the same young men who shifted, or have the young male Biden voters aged out and the young male Trump voters aged in? Makes a big difference to the interpretation of Twenge's point, but her source is paywalled.
There is surely some “aging out” involved, to your point. But young people have traditionally voted Democrat essentially *forever*, and so the shift is quite meaningful even if some of it is a different mix of individuals (substituting Zers for some younger Millenials)
As many others have noted, part of the problem with going all in on identity politics is that a lot of minority groups like working class Hispanics, gays, and East Asian tiger mom families don't actually have much in common, nor do they have overlapping policy preferences, so there isn't any real reason they should all be part of the same political coalition unless you can convince them they all have some sort of vague discrimination grievance to be redressed. One thing that will be interesting to me is whether the media will be inclined or be able to stoke the same racial resentment they did during the first Trump Admin. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the collective psychological panic this country experienced over the deaths of Michael Brown, George Floyd, etc., did not come out of nowhere.
"One thing that will be interesting to me is whether the media will be inclined or be able to stoke the same racial resentment they did during the first Trump Admin."
One "party-pendulum" theory I've ready is that both parties when out of power have their own version of negative tactics that can reliably take the incumbent down, but they don't have sufficiently compelling positive-vision messaging or defense against negative tactics to hold on to power.
For the Democrats, it's as you say, agitprop, stoking groups resentments, and whipping up a frenzy by creating and hyper-amplifying some real or hoax "scandal", and for the GOP it's the very sneaky, nasty, and underhanded tactic of accurately pointing out the Democrat's unpopular radical policies and how things got worse in their term.
“…and for the GOP it's the very sneaky, nasty, and underhanded tactic of accurately pointing out the Democrat's unpopular radical policies and how things got worse in their term.”
> ... unless you can convince them they all have some sort of vague discrimination grievance to be redressed.
Even now I honestly don't think the pundits have the least notion, the faintest glimmer of a realization, that there will be no more grievance-redressing in the future that they have fashioned. It was a one-off.
I'm less interested in the 2028 election and more interested in what policies get passed in the next four years (and especially the first 100 days). If we are to ping/pong every four years, one should make the most of ones time in power to have lasting legislation.
As such, what I'm primarily looking for from the Trump admin is big tax breaks for middle class families, school choice, and enforcement of civil rights law against DEI/Affirmative Action. Other things like ending the DOE would be nice too.
On the revenue side I'd like to see him stick it to rich blue staters. SALT for instance ought to be completely repealed on a permanent basis.
If all that got done and Vance lost in 2028 for whatever reason, I would consider the Trump admin a success. Status quo policy is hard to reverse once it's in place.
I'd also caution that while losing in 2020 was probably actually good for Trump (Democrats managed to self discredit themselves), we all still had to live through four years of school closures, crime, DEI, and inflation.
The work required by policy whiplash to undo work done in the previous administration is what keeps some people very securely employed. My impression is that without going to all-out war, what can easily and quickly be done can just as easily and quickly be undone, and what can't be easily and quickly undone will be made impossible to do.
How well things are going in 4 years will depend almost entirely on how well the Fed manages the economy. Trump's damaging policies: immigration, deficits, trade restrictions hurt growth in the long run but need not hurt growth in the short run. Now the size of the deficits, deportations, and tariffs may require another round of over-target inflation, but, unlike Biden, Trump may well be able blame the Fed, so the political cost can be small. Only a substantial over-estimate of the required inflation or mis-execution of a proper estimate that results in high and persistent inflation is likely to hurt Trump.
I totally don't get the "Masculine"/"Feminine" meme. Policing, immigration, DEI net CO2 emissions reduction, and long term growth policies are either good or bad, not "Masculine"/"Feminine."
Fine 4 quarters of guestimates about the future -- I always have priors, tho usually don't document them. I think everybody has priors, but few are willing to attempt the quantification -- which is too bad, because a lot of disagreements are on the difference in estimates. Or on the framework. Mine:
67%-33 on econ better-worse, 60-40 on feminine-masculine . So 26.8 + 40.2% +13.2 + 19.8 = 100%.
It would be nice if Arnold gave his Prior probabilities for each outcome, to see quantitatively where we disagree, on this framework.
Arnold's framework doesn't explicitly note how many Presidents get two terms. In Trump's 2028 case, after his second & last term, it could be said that Vance (or whoever Rep) is carrying on. When the economy is good to ok, the incumbent usually wins. But it's not clear whether that matters now.
R.R. Reno would probably analyze this a little differently under his "Return of the Strong Gods" framework. He views the post-1945 era as roughly a conflict between poles represented by the cofounders of the Mont Pelerin society: Popper (favoring the left-liberal Open Society) and Hayek (advocating the libertarian strain of the same). Reno might identify the Man-shift as a drift towards certain pre-1945 values and norms; towards destigmatizing the "Authoritarian Personality." It doesn't really match with a drift towards the either of the normal postwar political poles.
To meld the terms, the 1950s represented a short-term Man-shift that remains a bugaboo for the postwar forces of girly-goodness even today. The 2020s are also a lot like the 1950s in that World War III looks like a realistic possibility, as wars in the East (Korea before, Ukraine or Taiwan now) look like they may erupt into a general conflict. I don't think the Open Society era ends until a war comparable to WWII begins. You might see a little shifting around the edges without war, but war is the means by which social contracts are rewritten.
I'm willing to put money on Better and Masculine, with J.D. cruising to victory in 2028 and 2032. Any takers?
I'll take back some of my comment from yesterday about the war rhetoric vs negotiating rhetoric. Today Arnold says, "in what I call the latest war of the sexes." Yes, I do believe there is a new kind of war going on between the sexes. One reading of Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worries is that men are currently engaged in a war with progressives and feminism. Which reminds me?! I should write up my review of this book before Arnold does! A quick web search shoes that he still hasn't written his review! Race you Arnold?!
Question: does anyone have any thoughts, or, even better, evidence on how important Trump's Joe Rogan interview was in attracting younger voters? Since then, I have listened to the interview and a couple of others. Why does this guy have any credibility?
It seems to me that something bigger and unrecognized may be taking place. President Trump and those close to him (people like Musk and J.D. Vance) seem actually interested in the substance of issues and in the common good, whereas the Uniparty establishment views issues in a purely instrumental way for the pursuit of power, and disregards or even attempts to derail issues of importance to the electorate which don't serve their purposes, even while paying lip service. We have never had this choice on offer before, and it may be that a dawning public recognition of this will cause a political upheaval. Very large shifts in the vote across nearly every segment, even in highly partisan areas where it didn't amount to a new majority have not to my knowledge been previously seen. Trump roughly halved the enormous Democratic margin in the big cities. He made big inroads in the youth vote, previously thought to be impenetrable. I was recently in Argentina where the astonishing Milei victory was not a question of a particular "eccentric mix of interests and priorities" but rather the electorate fed up with a long history of tweedledee and tweedledum going for a candidate with a real commitment to radical change of a completely unprecedented sort, namely the drastic downsizing of a corrupt bureaucracy and a rejection of the usual lying politicians. While older voters there didn't move that much, those 18 - 24 voted 81% for Milei. So it is possible that analyses of the current US election as just the latest in a string may be missing a larger change.
A lot of political commentators seem to be susceptible to some kind of stubborn and subconscious mental stumbling block. It is the phenomenon of being surprised but not "updating ones priors", so to speak. Or at least not updating them accurately, not getting that "where did I go wrong?" feeling about a need to detect one's mistakes and correct one's models, and so getting surprised again in a similar way. With apologies to Principal Skinner, "Am I so out of touch? No; it's the voters who are wrong."
It's not exactly "Crimestop", but similar. TrumpStop? BayesStop?
Personally I think this one is simple to explain.
For some political commentators, it is simply that they are confirmed leftists (whether hard core, typical progressive, or moderate) and simply can’t conceive that other thoughtful intelligent people could disagree with them.
For the others, it’s TDS.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is certainly still a thing, though clearly some of the hyperventilating hysteria has calmed down substantially. But short of full-on TDS for non-left public intellectuals is "Trump-camp Obsessive Criticisism and Disaffiliation" T-OCD, preferring to swallow a progressive camel than to pass up an opportunity to strain out a T-coded gnat.
"And it doesn’t mean that Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities is well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears"
This sounds like whistling past the graveyard when the top two issues in almost every survey were inflation and immigration, and the GOP (meaning Trump as its most visible spokesperson) was regularly rated as most trusted to deal with them.
I get that doesn't mean that Trump will necessarily deal with those issues to the satisfaction of voters but saying his political campaign didn't align with them is focusing on minutiae.
A big part of the Better/Worse vibes are local governance (crime, education, infrastructure, local corruption, etc.) Democrats have to overcome the fact that perma-blue cities increasingly look and feel post-apocalyptic.
I just returned to Washington DC for the first time since the pandemic, and despite the many new luxury condo buildings, the decline in basic safety is stark.
Voters react accordingly.
The DC suburb of MoCo, MD has likewise been going downhill. I benefited from the decline in basic safety because the buyer of my MoCo condo had sold their DC home and moved to MoCo because of the rise in DC crime, but clearly the crime problem in DC has been spilling over into MoCo. Glad I left. On the positive side, I am hopeful that the tide may be turning in my beloved home state of California. LA voted to kick out Soros-backed district attorney Gascon, and CA voters overwhelmingly approved a proposition overturning the measure (Prop 47) that had effectively legalized shoplifting. In SF, Daniel Lurie (an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune) defeated DEI incumbent London Breed (a black woman, naturally) for major, and according to SF resident David Sacks (All-in Podcast), the most extreme progressives were voted off the city council. Maybe DC and MoCo will have to hit bottom before things begin to turn around there.
Having just left CA, I can tell you that even if you are correct - and you *might* be - that they’ve hit bottom, the odds of a V-shaped rebound are basically zero.
The only real question is whether it is U-shaped or L-shaped. I’d put my money on the latter.
My expectations are just as low as yours, but when it comes to CA, even tiny green shoots of voter sanity are a welcome development. I left the DC area to move closer to, but not back to, CA. I'm not that crazy.
So Levin believes that Trump “has not brought American politics out of its 21st-century deadlock. That work will have to follow in his wake.” Which probably means that nobody on the AEI is being recruited for positions in the next administration and nor does it appear as if the AEI staff plan on contributing anything useful to advance even shared goals, preferring instead to carp and cavil from the sidelines.
Not really surprising seeing who all is on the AEI Board of Trustees (https://www.aei.org/about/annual-report/ ) and not surprising either given that “From 2007 to 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave about $7.9 million to AEI” and “In the 2020 election cycle, AEI employees donated $20,690, with 85% going to Republicans. Then-President Donald Trump received $1,188, and President Joe Biden received $1,434. 22.” (https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/american-enterprise-institute/ ).
All the more reason for Trump to use repeal of the 501(c)(3) exemption and related donation deduction to offset extension of the upcoming Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text ) expiration of the standard deduction increase, individual tax rate relief, and the size of the child tax credit. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12641 ). Combined with complete elimination of the SALT deduction, and a roll back on energy subsidies and tax breaks, there is a real opportunity to boost household incomes for ordinary Americans.
Are these the same young men who shifted, or have the young male Biden voters aged out and the young male Trump voters aged in? Makes a big difference to the interpretation of Twenge's point, but her source is paywalled.
There is surely some “aging out” involved, to your point. But young people have traditionally voted Democrat essentially *forever*, and so the shift is quite meaningful even if some of it is a different mix of individuals (substituting Zers for some younger Millenials)
As many others have noted, part of the problem with going all in on identity politics is that a lot of minority groups like working class Hispanics, gays, and East Asian tiger mom families don't actually have much in common, nor do they have overlapping policy preferences, so there isn't any real reason they should all be part of the same political coalition unless you can convince them they all have some sort of vague discrimination grievance to be redressed. One thing that will be interesting to me is whether the media will be inclined or be able to stoke the same racial resentment they did during the first Trump Admin. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the collective psychological panic this country experienced over the deaths of Michael Brown, George Floyd, etc., did not come out of nowhere.
"One thing that will be interesting to me is whether the media will be inclined or be able to stoke the same racial resentment they did during the first Trump Admin."
One "party-pendulum" theory I've ready is that both parties when out of power have their own version of negative tactics that can reliably take the incumbent down, but they don't have sufficiently compelling positive-vision messaging or defense against negative tactics to hold on to power.
For the Democrats, it's as you say, agitprop, stoking groups resentments, and whipping up a frenzy by creating and hyper-amplifying some real or hoax "scandal", and for the GOP it's the very sneaky, nasty, and underhanded tactic of accurately pointing out the Democrat's unpopular radical policies and how things got worse in their term.
“…and for the GOP it's the very sneaky, nasty, and underhanded tactic of accurately pointing out the Democrat's unpopular radical policies and how things got worse in their term.”
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
> ... unless you can convince them they all have some sort of vague discrimination grievance to be redressed.
Even now I honestly don't think the pundits have the least notion, the faintest glimmer of a realization, that there will be no more grievance-redressing in the future that they have fashioned. It was a one-off.
You're more optimistic than I am, anyway.
I'm less interested in the 2028 election and more interested in what policies get passed in the next four years (and especially the first 100 days). If we are to ping/pong every four years, one should make the most of ones time in power to have lasting legislation.
As such, what I'm primarily looking for from the Trump admin is big tax breaks for middle class families, school choice, and enforcement of civil rights law against DEI/Affirmative Action. Other things like ending the DOE would be nice too.
On the revenue side I'd like to see him stick it to rich blue staters. SALT for instance ought to be completely repealed on a permanent basis.
If all that got done and Vance lost in 2028 for whatever reason, I would consider the Trump admin a success. Status quo policy is hard to reverse once it's in place.
I'd also caution that while losing in 2020 was probably actually good for Trump (Democrats managed to self discredit themselves), we all still had to live through four years of school closures, crime, DEI, and inflation.
The work required by policy whiplash to undo work done in the previous administration is what keeps some people very securely employed. My impression is that without going to all-out war, what can easily and quickly be done can just as easily and quickly be undone, and what can't be easily and quickly undone will be made impossible to do.
How well things are going in 4 years will depend almost entirely on how well the Fed manages the economy. Trump's damaging policies: immigration, deficits, trade restrictions hurt growth in the long run but need not hurt growth in the short run. Now the size of the deficits, deportations, and tariffs may require another round of over-target inflation, but, unlike Biden, Trump may well be able blame the Fed, so the political cost can be small. Only a substantial over-estimate of the required inflation or mis-execution of a proper estimate that results in high and persistent inflation is likely to hurt Trump.
I totally don't get the "Masculine"/"Feminine" meme. Policing, immigration, DEI net CO2 emissions reduction, and long term growth policies are either good or bad, not "Masculine"/"Feminine."
Fine 4 quarters of guestimates about the future -- I always have priors, tho usually don't document them. I think everybody has priors, but few are willing to attempt the quantification -- which is too bad, because a lot of disagreements are on the difference in estimates. Or on the framework. Mine:
67%-33 on econ better-worse, 60-40 on feminine-masculine . So 26.8 + 40.2% +13.2 + 19.8 = 100%.
Better masculine : 67*40 = 26.8 Better feminine : 67*60 = 40.2
Worse masculine: 33*40 = 13.2 Worse feminine: 33*60 = 19.8
(Women are always right!)
It would be nice if Arnold gave his Prior probabilities for each outcome, to see quantitatively where we disagree, on this framework.
Arnold's framework doesn't explicitly note how many Presidents get two terms. In Trump's 2028 case, after his second & last term, it could be said that Vance (or whoever Rep) is carrying on. When the economy is good to ok, the incumbent usually wins. But it's not clear whether that matters now.
R.R. Reno would probably analyze this a little differently under his "Return of the Strong Gods" framework. He views the post-1945 era as roughly a conflict between poles represented by the cofounders of the Mont Pelerin society: Popper (favoring the left-liberal Open Society) and Hayek (advocating the libertarian strain of the same). Reno might identify the Man-shift as a drift towards certain pre-1945 values and norms; towards destigmatizing the "Authoritarian Personality." It doesn't really match with a drift towards the either of the normal postwar political poles.
To meld the terms, the 1950s represented a short-term Man-shift that remains a bugaboo for the postwar forces of girly-goodness even today. The 2020s are also a lot like the 1950s in that World War III looks like a realistic possibility, as wars in the East (Korea before, Ukraine or Taiwan now) look like they may erupt into a general conflict. I don't think the Open Society era ends until a war comparable to WWII begins. You might see a little shifting around the edges without war, but war is the means by which social contracts are rewritten.
I'm willing to put money on Better and Masculine, with J.D. cruising to victory in 2028 and 2032. Any takers?
I'll take back some of my comment from yesterday about the war rhetoric vs negotiating rhetoric. Today Arnold says, "in what I call the latest war of the sexes." Yes, I do believe there is a new kind of war going on between the sexes. One reading of Joyce Benenson's Warriors and Worries is that men are currently engaged in a war with progressives and feminism. Which reminds me?! I should write up my review of this book before Arnold does! A quick web search shoes that he still hasn't written his review! Race you Arnold?!
https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2023/klinggender.html
Good. I missed it in my search. Thanks.
every system draws parasites
when the parasite load really hampers the function of the system the system is changed by its users
if DOGE creates a better and more functional system then the US would return to politics as usual
you could probably judge how well the system has been changed by what the Ds would be running for and against in '28
but I don't have a clue what those would be
and BTW: only communists thing 50:50 politics is bad
too soon! please, no talk of 2028 (or 2026) until we actually have a new administration in office.
Question: does anyone have any thoughts, or, even better, evidence on how important Trump's Joe Rogan interview was in attracting younger voters? Since then, I have listened to the interview and a couple of others. Why does this guy have any credibility?