You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.
I have come to believe that many people's political attitudes can be boiled down to a single uniting element: an overwhelming fear that other people might do to them the kinds of things that they would absolutely do to other people if given half a chance.
This line of thinking is increasing and dangerous (and no doubt intentional from at least some of the popular examples that come to mimd). It will make it that much harder for authentic candidates to talk about legitimate change and ideology.
Many of these people literally believe that "free lunches for school children" inevitably turns into "those socialists will force me to eat bugs in an Orwellian nightmare".
For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.
Meanwhile they somehow don't see wealthy and powerful people using their political connections to enrich themselves by garnering favorable treatment from powerful government officials as an essential part of how things worked in the USSR.
The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.
The bad guys are the one in power right now trying to turn the US democracy into an autocracy, following the Project2025 playbook and what other autocrats have done like Putin. This isn't a normal administration.
Freedom of religion as well, and the age and mental acuity of the president. And handling of secret information. And being involved in foreign conflicts.
Don't forget Kenneth Walker's second amendment rights. You could understand some failing to live up to their values if they were minor issues, but it's like all of their core issues. About the only thing that seems consistent is wanting to harm their fellow citizens that they perceive as different.
Trump and his administration have explicitly directly claimed that they are the law, at least in as much as the executive branch should believe. They gave an executive order instructing every employee and official of the executive that they shall wholly and exclusively defer to the interpretation of the law as dictated by the president.
As a 20th century political theorist once said, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy." If you hear someone talking high-minded rhetoric and idealism but they won't make a friend or an enemy over it, they don't believe it.
Or, in my city, the cops who blew the whistle on other cops for electrocuting people's testicles as a means of extracting forced confessions. The "back the blue" crowd absolutely hates those guys.
I tend to think of "rule of law" as describing the fairness of the courts. But then you need effective law enforcement for the courts to mean anything.
Most of these examples are good ones, but this one actually isn’t. I don’t know what part of the country you’re from, but in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens. I don’t want to debate the substance of the view, I’m just pointing out that it’s not actually contradictory like you’re implying. I grew up in virginia when it was a red state, my first reaction would’ve been relief that it was still possible. But it also would’ve been my first reaction 25 years ago when I was a Gore supporter in a Bush county. Jefferson’s tree of liberty and all that.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
Is this saying the viewpoint is that violence against the government (capitol police) is supported, violence against local police is not supported (back the blue) and violence against citizens is supported (back the blue)?
The guy's arguing all over the place. Not much of it makes logical sense unless you stop looking for logic in the arguments.
Suffice to say, like most ideologues, the beliefs make sense when analyzed in accordance with the logic rules of the holder of the beliefs.
Think of the beliefs being discussed more as doctrinal tenets of a pseudo religious sect, and you get a little closer to the thinking of the adherents.
> in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens
From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.
And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
> From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
The question is who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself. Ordinarily police are deployed to protect citizens from criminals, so it’s bad to attack the police. But the Capitol police are protecting government officials from citizens, so attacking them is less bad. That’s the view.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The assertion that the civil rights era signaled a major shift in views about the relationship between individuals and the government is hardly controversial. There’s a book on this idea (probably more than one): https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
Indeed, folks in the progressive left share more or less the same premise. If you talk to a progressive about foundational principles like federalism and limited government, the chief response is that those ideas were championed by our forebearers so that the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. The point of disagreement is about whether the new approach is better than the traditional one.
> Today, when you talk about foundational principles like federalism, limited government, etc., the chief response is that those are incompatible with having a government powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority.
We live in different bubbles, it seems. I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. The majority can always protect itself by changing the law.
I skimmed through this. The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that. And look at this piece of doublespeak:
When I talk about civil rights, the reader should not get the impression that I’m friendly to segregation, or hostile to the civil rights movement as it existed for the whole of the 20th century up until 1964. In fact, I’m very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation for equal citizenship that went on up till then, but there were problems in the Civil Rights Act that were not evident at first.
They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution. They are "very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation", however. :)
> The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that.
But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.
That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.
Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.
> The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers.. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote:
> "This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system ...[or else] oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished... Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."
As well as :
> "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."
As well as:
> "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
Even if you think that all that matters is “where you end up,” your logic still doesn’t work. Adhering to principles of federalism and limited government also changes other aspects of society, in ways that people might deem desirable.
> I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
That’s the same argument from the other direction. The federal government, as designed, wasn’t powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. Those rules entailed a major expansion of federal power. Indeed, you can see the seams in the civil rights laws. For example, Title VI’s ban on discrimination in public education is implemented through conditions on federal funding. Because the federal government can’t legislate such a ban directly.
> The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority.
That’s exactly the civil rights era retconning of the constitution I’m talking about. The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip.... The statement is about self determination: the right of a people to determine their own form of government. The equality being referred to is the equality between Britain and its monarch and the colonists.
The founders said almost nothing about protecting minorities from the majority, except perhaps in the context of religious freedom. Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.
> The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after ...
The context before and after is quite well known; I don't have to read it. What they say is that 'all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among those life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And to protect those rights, governments are instituted among men.' (from memory, probably a few errors).
All means all - minorities included. The equality is for "all men"; rights are for "all men". Nothing is said about Britain and its monarch, except in your dreams of rationalizing oppression. The language is plain and clear, part of the reason it is so well-known.
That seems inconsistent with the history of slavery in the US. The evidence is that the people writing that didn't actually mean "all men" - if I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United... it suggests 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. That seems like strong evidence that the literal text was being interpreted with implicit caveats.
A document cannot simultaneously holds all minorities to be equal with a right to liberty and accommodate slavery as it existed in the 1700s. Some of the signers may personally have disagreed with slavery but it seems difficult to say that the document itself represented a repudiation of the practice.
Prior to the civil rights movement it was assumed that by freedom of association, it was beyond the scope of the government to prevent things like segregation by private citizens. e.g. if a business owner did not want to serve black customers, then that is his right. So yes, someone who does not support the government having that power to infringe on freedom of association will not support any government intervention to prevent voluntary segregation.
This is why he distinguishes between the civil rights movement before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was only concerned with preventing government enforced segregation.
He opposes any known solution to the terrible evil of segregation, and doesn't care to offer any other. If you stand by while someone is drowning, eating a hot dog, you can claim 'I do support agitation for drowning victims', but the facts are plain.
Even in your analogy, that just means you’re not willing to jeopardize yourself in any way to help, not that you affirmatively want the other person to drown. In fact they recommend that you don’t try to help drowning victims, because they often cause their rescuers to drown as well. More generally, not caring about other people isn’t the same as affirmatively wanting to harm them.
The US Civil War was fought over protecting minorities from private slaveowners, so the federal government’s role didn’t fundamentally change in the 1960s.
> who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself
I must have missed the outpouring of Republican support for the black lives matter protests when they were attacked by police riots or when police stations were attacked. No private citizens being protected there, and the protesting was directly against government oppression (including of the 2nd amendment even!).
Republicans don’t think that police using lethal force against people with long criminal records—which come from terrorizing fellow citizens—is “government oppression.” That doesn’t describe every person that was the subject of the protests, but certainly describes the people who became the figureheads.
That's some high and mighty rhetoric, but it doesn't apply at all to Kenneth Walker (whose second amendment rights were trampled on) or Breonna Taylor (who died because of it). So once again, did I just miss the outpouring of Republican support for those specific protests or what?
'I'm all for rights, except the right to life (of some citizens)' is absolutely disgusting. Wow this comment says a lot about you and should remove the good faith people around here give you.
You're just giving him an opening to retrench at a steelman - when the police have to respond with deadly force for some completely reasonable justification, "right to life" doesn't have much to do with it.
The point is that even in very clear cut situations where the police are in the wrong, and have trampled over the very 2nd amendment rights that Republicans claim to love so much, it's then still crickets from Republicans. So this alleged "violence against the government is treated as distinct" seems to be just more post-hoc rationalization nonsense.
The problem is that rayiner is continually trolling with gut-appealing half-truths, sidesteps the straightforward logical implications as long as he can by responding tangentially, and when he can't do that any longer he just bails on the conversation rather than confronting the contradiction.
I guess I'm just glad us actually-conservatives (meaning everyone from "RINOs" to "the left" that actually respects our societal institutions enough to not want to see our country on the scrap heap) have reached a critical mass to beat back this wall of disingenuous bad-faith bullshit.
> as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
Unless it's the Jan 6th protesters.
Or the so-called "trucker convoy" across the border up here in Canada. (Convinced half the new-found hostility to us comes from this incident somehow getting on the radar of people who normally barely acknowledge Canada as existing)
In the end it's very much tribal, and little to do with the substance of issues and more to do with perceived teams.
> You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024.
What groups? What people? Are they on HN? Are you responding to them?
This is just sneering. You're not responding to a particular argument or person - you're you're just creating a fictional (in that they don't exist as a coherent, self-identified group, and are only a group in your own mind based solely off of these attributes) until group of people with some alleged hypocrisy and using them to dog-whistle indirectly attack a group of people based on some political ideology that you don't like (and which is largely irrelevant to the alleged hypocrisy that you're inventing). This is some of the most anti-intellectual drivel possible and the diametric opposite of what belongs on HN.
Funny thing about the fictional "Wilhoit’s Law". It's not a law of science. It's nothing but an Internet snipe from a blog post by a music composer. It wasn't even written while the political scientist Frank Wilhoit was alive.
It's not relevant that the quote came from a composer specifically. It's relevant that it didn't come from someone with any expertise about politics. Yet it's been elevated to the status of a "law" by people who just really like the way it insults their opponents.
Such has been the US agenda in the developing world since the 70's. It's sort of odd to see them do it to themselves though. It's as if they became confused and started believing their own cover story.
Trump was never actually a "free market" idealogue. And the GOP officially dropped any mentions of it from their party platform a few years ago.
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
If I was forced to say one good thing about the guy, it's that he is quickly and faithfully delivering on his campaign promises, moreso than any other president that ever served in my lifetime. He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist and doing exactly what he said he'd do. Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving, but he said he'd do them, was elected, and then subsequently did them. So, I'll give him that.
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
He explicitly stated that he was not familiar with the contents of Project 2025 on numerous occasions. This did not stop the media from pushing it as yet another hoax. It is unclear whether anyone has actually read Project 2025 or if it just sounds scary.
It's truly remarkable how much honest material there is to criticize Trump with, yet folks insist on repeating blatant lies.
I don't get what you mean. It's not some secret - it's available for everyone to read. It's also written by people who are all around Trump and who got influential positions from him. It's been talked about for ages. Trump not knowing about it would be extremely weird. (Or if he actually never heard about it, that would mean he's extremely clueless - I'm not sure what's worse for him)
When you promise to broker peace you are promising only to try since it is obvious that you do not have the agency to guarantee success. There are a million things to hate about Trump's handling of Ukraine and Russia, but this just isn't one of them.
He lied and said he had no idea about Project 2025 - when people say "he's doing what he said" no - he's lied about everything and double backed a half dozen times.
While I agree with the sentiment that he is not backing down from a lot of his batshit promises, let's not forget that he made a lot of promises. The Russian invasion didn't end on day 1 or day 100 and he decided to only strongarm one side - iirc he said he would threaten Ukraine with withdrawing support and threaten Russia with giving obscene amounts of support to Ukraine.
His predictions about what other people/countries would do were, of course, wrong, but his promises about what he (and his admin) would do or try to do themselves are for the most part being delivered.
It's not for the most part.
He's delivering far lower percentage of his promises than most presidents.
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
> He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
When I read "elites" it always makes me wonder what kind of elites are meant. Surely not elites in intelligence or wisdom and knowledge. Does it mean just having tons of money? What does it mean to be an elite university in contrast to being an elite person?
The behavior I’ve seen from so many libertarians from 2017 onward, especially during the pandemic, January 6th, and Trump’s reelection, has revealed so much to me and has made me rethink my libertarianism. So many libertarians, when pressed, would gladly align themselves with the far-right for their own benefit, whether to accelerate the destruction of the state they hate so much, or whether because, deep down inside, they agree with the far-right on social views, and libertarianism was simply a cover for them to promote abhorrent social views.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Thanks for the thoughtful post with the rich historical references. For what it’s worth, I experienced a drift which is the mirror image of yours, starting left, developing my appreciation for the necessity of economic competition, and then coming to grips with the limitations of government intervention.
I'm right there with you, friend. I still consider myself a 'libertarian' though. Just always with a small 'l' because the party is garbage, as the ideals are primed to spread corporate propaganda like wildfire once someone buys into the fallacy that coercion by non-governmental entities is definitionally impossible.
When I was younger I'd do online political tests and invariably come back with left-libertarian. Then the detour into cpunks, ancap, and the "two axis political chart" made me see myself unaligned and see a lot of utility in rightism. But that started to fall apart when it became clear that fundamentalism doesn't address the big picture of emergent layers of complexity. Ironically it was Moldbug's writing that nudged my transition back to seeing myself as latently left-aligned. No matter how much you'd like to, you can't fight thermodynamics!
I think Georgism is a pretty limited position, not a complete framework. I do agree with land value tax and tax on natural resource. But I'm not sure its the complete solution.
Also not sure if the idea of paying out people from this tax makes much sense. Arguable it made more sense when he wrote it, before the social state.
Perhaps it‘s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I find it hard to consider anyone enamored with Trump to be legitimately libertarian. The guy basically regards himself as a dictator and his edicts are mega-authoritarian.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
One of the biggest challenges with the libertarian movement is that it attracts people who like libertarianism not because of the non-aggression principle, but because it enables them to legally engage in certain activities.
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
Libertarianism is essentially "more powerful and richer people should not be restricted in any way whatsoever". If your freedom or rights are limited by someone who is not directly government, libertarian answer is "that is their freedom you dont matter, government should protect their right to mistreat you".
Something like that happened to me, but I'm European, and I never had many illusions about much American libertarianism. It was clearly funded by people who were just using the movement to get favorable regulation. And that was reflected in the issues they were talking about. I think there is no contradiction between a small government and one that can fine or arrest people aggressively when they break the rules.
In addition to that, it always had a strong southern "state rights" dog whistle. Personally I never liked Murray Rothbard. And the Rothbardian full on appropriation of Mises. Plus they often welcomed 'libertarians' that had very bad ideas, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
In terms of Austrian economics, I always much prefer the George Mason people. I think the economics fundamentals of Austrianism were very forward thinking and they produced a lot of great stuff and people, both directly and in the larger bubble of associated researchers.
> I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
I think American Libertarianism basically went way to far into hyper-individualism and total freedom of action and defense of historical privileges and laws. While different classical liberal philosophies would focus way more on the cost of those actions and negotiation a balance between individual freedom and society.
Classical liberal philosophy was never supposed to mean that you can park your car anywhere and throw garbage out of the window or that you can carry your gun everywhere.
Also I think there is a huge difference between restricting government on a federal level and on a local level. I don't think any philosophical school has really figured out this issue. Both centralizing and localizing have lots of problems.
I'm at the point where I am not really have a clear 'movement' that I can point to. I still agree with much of the criticism of communism, socialism and many typically left ideas. I disagree even more strongly with the far-right.
In Europe we have central parties, but those often are socially conservative and have sub-optimal economic policy and bad local politics. So like many others I have to end up voting center-left even if I don't agree in principle with their philosophy.
On thing that helped me is not to think of absolutes and end-states, and only think of incrementalism. Even if I disagree with the something in principle. As current laws exist I might support things I wouldn't in a different situation.
In Swizterland where I life, at least we can often vote on specific issues. And that can cut across parties. And the consensus based federal government is globally unique and works pretty well for stability and consistency.
Trump isn't a free market ideologue and never has been. I'm not sure what you expected. He didn't conceal his viewpoints; if you are surprised, I think you weren't paying much attention.
The Republican Party on the other hand is very much in favor of the free market… or was. Many long time Republicans turned on a dime and deserve to be called out on it.
They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards. But the party was founded on the premise that tariffs would protect their northern constituents and industries, and they took over a century to shake that tendency. Perhaps the only Republican president before Reagan who was in favor of lowering tariffs was Eisenhower, as part of rebuilding globally after WW2.
Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.
> They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards.
Which is the relevant part. I’m not really concerned with historical positions of the party itself so much as the politicians themselves, none of whom were alive a century ago.
I think it's a bit more accurate to say that many long time Republicans claimed to support free markets. It's a little naive to believe that they actually meant any of that in reality. Them and their donors were growing fabulously wealthy off of functionally non-free markets.
They don't even claim to support total free market as end goal. Both party support free speech and free trade on principle, but support what shouldn't be free is highly political.
Trump has literally been prattling about his love of tariffs for decades and was explicit about his plans to heavily leverage tariffs during his campaign..
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
I just think a lot of democrats really haven't paid attention to how Trump has morphed the Republican party and the realignment that has been going on. They still think of a Republican as George w. Bush / John McCain / Mitt Romney even though they have all been effectively excommunicated from the party. I think part of it was hope was Trump was a momentary blip but that's obviously no longer the case.
Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.
Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.
But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?
Trump is very adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that is much different from how a standard politician does it, so he gets a lot of people are excited at hearing what they want to hear. A regular politician equivocates and never really commits. Trump just asserts a statement that sounds definitive despite being word salad, and then shamelessly contradicts himself by asserting the exact opposite later. If he gets called out on it he just responds with nonsense.
If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.
Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.
It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.
50 years of attacks on our education systems have yielded exactly what was intended: a nation so poorly educated that they cannot discern truth from fiction anymore.
They wanted destruction of minorities (racial, sexual, gender, religious), but not of the country. They still hold out hope that Trump will hurt them more in the long run. It’s an extremely mean-spirited party at this point.
To be listened to, rather than to be told what to care about, and to have those concerns make it to competent people with the power to do something about them.
But it's not really compatible with a system where one person represents millions. You'd need something recursive such that no person represents more than a hundred or so, that way there's time to circle back and explain why certain complaints aren't being addressed this cycle and such. You know, responsibility of leadership to the people.
It's also not really compatible with a system where your representative for foo-type issues must also be your representative for bar-type issues, because "competent people" is too broad of a category to be useful.
How to get there from here? I'm not sure but it seems like it'll require a more significant discontinuity than we've seen so far.
I think the fix is a more drastic refactor than that. We need more depth in this tree. Much more depth.
I imagine a sort of cultural "open enrollment" period during which anyone can mark anyone else as their representative. Perhaps we create four or five categories that we need representation in (foreign policy, infrastructure, education, monetary policy... something like that), so you gotta then find four or five representatives which you personally know and trust.
Then we follow the directed representation graph to its terminal nodes (or cycles) and those are the representatives that we ask to get together and get things done. Those are our leaders. They meet only sometimes, the rest of the year they spend working with their constituents.
What would happen is that representatives are more locally focused on their districts and would vote in larger 'sub'-parties.
In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.
I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.
One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.
> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.
Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.
Where congress just follows the party line. Or does back room deals
I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic. A software engineer in Austin and one in San Jose have far more in common than a software engineer in Austin and a Tractor dealer in Austin.
The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Back room deals aren't necessary a negative. That how the sausage is made. I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise, rather then having media spectral where congress sessions are reality TV. Mostly used to get clips that can then be used in adds.
> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.
I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.
Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.
I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.
"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"
Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.
The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.
I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.
> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.
Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.
Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,
You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest.
If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.
Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.
If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.
I don't know, if you just have a fixed '50' many people will be very unhappy with the list. That's why I suggested that this somehow had to be algorithmic.
Its an interesting concept, I don't know of anybody that has fully defined how this would work.
>I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise,
Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.
It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.
Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.
The parties in the US are pretty damn weak. And their ability and interest in overthrowing their own members is limited. They need to focus resources on the battleground states. So in the US, parties are much less less powerful.
In Britain, you basically get removed from the party very quickly and as an independent its incredibly hard.
Trump is only the latest example of how parties are weak in the US.
The point is to make it easier for people to hassle their representative, and to make it feasible for them to actually understand what the people they represent actually want.
Nation-wide Chesterton's Fence happening right now, with people learning a hard lesson soon enough. Let's just hope it won't be too late to repair their broken systems.
Maybe they don't like the fact that there's people out there making 500 grand a year? At least not while they're struggling to make ends meet on 50 grand a year.
Now your leaders are supposed to be wise enough to not take down the 500 grand a year guys. But what if they aren't?
I mean, eventually we also hope some other places develop something like a functioning democracy, or whatever is better in the future, and we hope it will be a matter of time until they at some point do.
The problem with the US is though, that they have the most powerful military on the planet, and the US ending up in smoking ruins probably means lots of other places going down with it, when the US looks outside for reasons of its failure. It is quite dangerous.
Please don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We were much better off the last 4 years than it looks like we will be for the next, but it was far from ideal/perfect.
Change what though? I'm convinced a lot of this has been right wing media portraying government as corrupt and broken for decades while demonizing the Democratic party as being responsible. True, some of this is likely the result of globalism and neoliberalism, but instead of an educated debate on the tradeoffs involved and how the world has changed, there is a culture war.
Wanting change is a curious notion considering they are FOX viewing baby boomers. Isn‘t it more a change in the sense of stopping change and turning back time?
A rational theory of spite suggests that even if they know that it will be worse for them too, if the level of their spite is great enough, they are still better off because the joy of the suffering of others is greater than their own induced suffering.
By my reckoning, Trump is just the reactionary talk radio monster of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and others finally escaping its cage. They'd get people all riled up with low-information rage against the gubmint, and then dial it back just enough to herd them to the booth to vote for establishment republicans. The main way the party has morphed is that the inmates have finally taken over the asylum.
What speech that makes him uncomfortable has he banned exactly ? Asking out of curiosity because I see posts on twitter all the time calling him Nazi, blah-blah.
There are tens of thousands of posts with the word "cisgender" at the moment on X. So, I think this "ban" is currently only in one's febrile imagination. Putin does not allow tens of thousands of opposition politicians, so the analogy also does not hold.
Its an extremely big difference from the Biden era where any post critical of the vaccine and backed up with papers was taken down pronto. This was even confirmed in several senate hearings.
As a non-American, I was very happy when Musk bought out twitter - it was ridiculous being unable to criticize vaccines - you couldn't even articulate the Indian government's stance on Pfizer and how Pfizer refused to provde test data. "Freedom of speech" was utterly non-existent in that era.
> “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” Mr Musk wrote in June.
> “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.”
> The newly enforced policy, first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, saw some users greeted with a full-screen warning when trying to publish a post using the terms on the X mobile app.
The fact that this is arbitrarily enforced isn't exactly painting it as a haven for free speech. The only thing worse than absolute censorship (which is obvious and can be routed around) is stochastic, inconsistent censorship - which gives him and his defenders a fig leaf[1] to hide behind.
Look, maybe you prefer the new brand of censorship X has adopted. It sounds like you do. Great. But what you can't do is call it a free speech platform, while keeping a straight face.
[1] I would like to point out, as an example: that China doesn't censor the internet - you just mysteriously have your connection go to shit and drop out if you try to search for 4/15.
So, posts are NOT being banned, but only visibility tagged as that article mentions and as many users also explicitly tested. No one reported a ban - only a warning with a visibility setting. Seems perfectly fine. Your speech is NOT banned as you incorrectly claim. And your account is still valid.
Did you ever try writing a mRNA-vaccine critical post during the Biden administration on twitter, quoting factual sources and linking to scientific papers ? Your account got banned pronto.
And as we all know now - it was done at the behest of the US white house.
Firstly, it's absolutely bonkers that any alleged 'free speech absolutist' could consider 'cisgender' to be a slur. It's like saying that 'man' is a slur.
And that's not an argument that you're going to do well with. Because the claim is utterly pants-on-head, irredeemably farcical, as is anyone who would stand behind it.
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But, secondly, if you read the screenshots in the link, you'll see that the posts are being suppressed.
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And thirdly, you don't see me claiming that pre-Musk Twitter was any kind of bastion of 'free speech absolutism'. I'm not making that argument.
The argument I'm making is that post-Musk Twitter definitely isn't one.
That's always been a feature of the 2-party system. I mean, the Democrats were once the party of southern white supremacists. We don't really get new parties, but the parties we have change over time as the coalitions within them rearrange.
I think a multi-party parliamentary system would be better at finding middle ground, but it's silly to say that the two-party system keeps politics "fixed".
True, the make-up and priorities of both Republicans and Democrats have changed a few times over the years.
I would say that in this case, it's a party aligning to an individual far more than it has ever been in the past. Racist Southern Democrats didn't become Republicans because they were enamored with a Republican leader, they changed parties because they found themselves misaligned with the Democratic Party's pivot to civil rights.
I wholeheartedly agree that a parliamentary system would serve the US better.
In terms of tariffs you're normally either a "protectionist" or for "free trade". That's sort of the two sides of that argument. There is some middle ground, but those are the extremes. It is not really related to regulations, that's more if you believe that the market is able to regulate itself, in terms of environmental impact, fair wages, safety and those sorts of things. The latter is the things which are impacted by firing regulatory enforces, or removing regulation altogether.
The Trump administration seems to run a protectionist policy, with a deregulated home market. This will hurt exports as it makes products more expensive, but also less likely to be able to comply with the regulations of other markets, e.g. in the EU, which is heavily regulated. US companies have a reduced incentive to comply with EU rules, if they know they have a protected market at home they can milk instead.
What "free market" ideologues are you talking about? Seems like you're just intentionally making the hasty generalization fallacy (same one that leads to racism) to attack a group that you don't like for ideological or emotional reasons, especially because Trump was never a free market idealogue, and the tariffs are evidence of that.
Ideology is their sales pitch, it's for you and me to consume. It has nothing whatsoever to do with their goals and intentions. This has been true of Thatcher and her deeply protectionist policies all the way up to today with Trump and his tariffs. We're not choosing between regulations and no regulations, we're choosing between regulations that benefit the working class and regulations that benefit the owning class. (Although I suppose it could be argued that in the US you choose between regulations that benefit the owning class and regulations that benefit the owning class more)
> Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke"
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
If you genuinely don't think that each side has principles, which in fact overlap considerably, you aren't very curious about the world.
ETA: In case you are genuinely interested in learning about how liberal and conservative people differ psychologically, Jonathan Haidt is a very good person to read.
One groups principles are hierarchy, control, and cruelty.
Arbitrary corrupt incompetency is what they're looking for.
Caring about other, having respect, being sensitive, these are all 'woke' things from the "great awakening" cult.
I want more affordable college and the people in charge want to send people like me to concentration camps through kangaroo courts. This is the difference.
The people who go on about “woke” are the most performative victims of all. Invoking the word “woke” for things they don’t like is a form of that performative victimization.
There is not and has never been any trace of free speech or free market "ideology" from Trump. Perhaps as a talking point but never in any policy or action. Trump is the anti-libertarian, severely authoritarian and moving things toward a centrally planned economy!
It's hard to label Trump a free market ideologue. He's more Mr tarrif man.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The Singaporean government's hand in it's own economy is larger than a lot of self-professed communist states - Temasek Holdings, Mediacorp, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines etc etc.
I never understood why libertarians/free market proponents think that Singapore is the paragon of laissez-faire economics. Try studying the country's housing market policies, for example, and you'll quickly realise that the government is extremely interventionist.
The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.
While they are interventionist in some way, so is everybody else. The US government involvement in housing is gigantic as well.
We can learn a lot from the policies, both free market and otherwise. And we shouldn't learn from others.
No free market person thinks of Singapore as some prefect example. As that doesn't exist. So you have to take example from different places. And Singapore has more good examples then most.
> The US government involvement in housing is gigantic as well.
Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
Singapore owns the HDB, which owns the leasing rights to 80%+ of all residential property and almost all land in the country. Issuing 99 year leases to citizens and PRs.
Imagine if the US government owned all land rights, built virtually all apartments and instigated racial quotas to match the demographics of the country; then subsidized the price drastically to make it affordable for the population. That's what Singapore does.
This isn't unique either.
The other libertarian wet-dream Hong Kong has a similar land-leasing policy. The major difference there is that 999 year leases were allowed at one point (rare and no longer issued).
In fact the only freehold property in Hong Kong is St John’s Cathedral.
First of all, I do know the difference between Singapore and the US. But my statement is true anyway. I wasn't drawing a direct equivalence of housing policy.
The person above pointed out that Singpore, is #1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom" and the rank high in other such indexes.
Housing policy in regards to ownership maybe a counterpoint to that, but we are not looking at individual policy but the at everything.
If you want to dispute the claim that Singpore is not 'free market' at all, then please direct me to an index with better methodology in that regard.
> Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
That to, but that's not primary what I am talking about.
No I'm talking about zoning and many, many, many other types of regulation. Plus of course, tax code and many other things.
Typically new land for a city is rezoned, then a developer comes in, build there and often inherits the infrastructure to the city to maintain. Then the city collects some property tax from that.
That is different then the Singapore model but its also a gigantic intervention in pretty much every aspect of the housing market.
Not to mention the government hold many plots of lands that could be developed. The government owns quite a lot of land.
The direct ownership is only one aspect, what you can do is another.
And as I said, I'm not disputing that in such a ranking, their land and housing policy could be considered as a negative compared to the US.
I wouldn't call it a dictatorship -- no label neatly applies to Singapore, but calling it a dictatorship (even if benevolent) is quite incorrect. Describing it as a soft authoritarian country is much more appropriate.
Every voice on that (except the last one as it is too vague) is popular with the relevant electorate. I dislike how a bunch of random unrelated shit is stuffed together into a single bill but that is because the US is a vetocracy.
>1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms
My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.
There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.
I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.
Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.
>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.
I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.
