Hey, I stumbled on this comment and I’m wondering if you’ve updated on whether you consider Trump/Republicans a threat to America’s interests in light of the January 6th insurrection.
With Trump/Republicans I meant the full range of questions from from just Trump, through participants in the storming of congress, to all Republican voters.
It seems quite easy for a large fraction of a population to be a threat to the population’s interests if they share a particular dangerous behavior. I’m confused why you would think that would be difficult. Threat isn’t complete or total. If you don’t get a vaccine or wear a mask, you’re a threat to immune-compromissd people but you can still do good work professionally. If you vote for someone attempting to overthrow democracy, you’re a danger to the nation while in the voting booth but you can still do good work volunteering. As for how the nation can survive such a large fraction working against its interests—it wouldn’t, in equilibrium, but there’s a lot of inertia.
It seems weird that people storming the halls of Congress, building gallows for a person certifying the transition of power, and killing and getting killed attempting to reach that person, would lead to no update at all on who is a threat to America. I suppose you could have factored this sort of thing in from the start, but in that case I’m curious how you would have updated on potential threats to America if the insurrection didn’t take place.
Ultimately the definition of ‘threat’ feels like a red herring compared to the updates in the world model. So perhaps more concretely: what’s the minimum level of violence at the insurrection that would make you have preferred Hillary over Trump? How many Democratic congresspeople would have to die? How many Republican congresspeople? How many members of the presidential chain of command (old or new)?
You should probably reexamine the chain of logic that leads you to the idea that the most important consequence of the electorate’s decision in 2016 was the events of Jan 6th, 2021. It isn’t remotely true.
To entertain the hypothetical, where what we care about when doing elections is how many terrorist assaults they produce, would be to compare the actual record of Trump to an imaginary record of President Clinton’s 4 years in office. How would you recommend I generate the latter? Does the QAnon Shaman of the alternate timeline launch 0, 1, or 10 assaults on the capital if his totem is defeated 4 years earlier?
A more serious reappraisal of the Trump/Clinton fork would focus on COVID, supreme court picks, laws that a democratic president would have veto’d vs. those Trump signed (are we giving Clinton a democratic congress, or is this alt history only a change in presidency?), international decisions where Trump’s isolationist instincts would have been replaced by Clinton’s interventionist ones, etc. It is a serious and complicated question, but the events of Jan 6th play a minimal role in it.
That’s a bit of a straw man, though to be fair it appears my question didn’t fit into your world model as it does in mine.
For me, the insurrection was in the top 5 most informative/surprising US political events in 2017-2021. On account of its failure it didn’t have as major consequences as others, but it caused me to update my world model more. For me, it was a sudden confrontation with the size and influence of anti-democratic movements within the Republican party, which I consider Trump to be sufficiently associated with to cringe from the notion of voting for him.
The core of my question is whether your world model has updated from
Given our invincible military, the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia).
For me, the January insurrection was a big update away from that statement, so I was curious how it fit in your world model, but I suppose the insurrection is not necessarily the key. Did your probability of (a subset of) Republicans ending American democracy increase over the Trump presidency?
Noting that a Republican terrorist might still have attempted to commit acts of terror with Clinton in office does not mitigate the threat posed by (a subset of) Republicans. Between self-identified Democrats pissing off a nuclear power enough to start a world war and self-identified Republicans causing the US to no longer have functional elections, my money is on the latter.
If I had to use a counterfactual, I would propose imagining a world where the political opinions of all US citizens as projected on a left-right axis were 0.2 standard deviations further to the Left (or Right).
I’d agree that Jan 6th was top 5 most surprising US political events 2017-2021, though I’m not sure that category is big enough that top 5 is an achievement. (That is, how many events total are in there for you?)
I wasn’t substantially surprised by it in the way that you were, however. I’m not saying that I predicted it, mind you, but rather that it was in a category of stuff that felt at least Trump-adjacent from the jump. As a descriptive example, imagine a sleezy used car salesman lies to me about whether the doors will fall off the car while I drive it home. I plainly didn’t expect that particular lie, since I fell for it, but the basic trend of ‘this man will lie for his own profit’ is baked into the persona from the get go.
My model of American voters ending American democracy remains extremely low. For better or for worse, that’s just not in any real way how we roll. Take a look at every anti democratic movement presently going, and you will see endless rhetoric about how they are really double secret truly democratic. The clowns who want to pack the supreme court/senate are just trying to compensate for the framers not jock riding cities hard enough. The stooges who want the VP to be able to throw out electors not for his party invent gibberish about how the framers intended this. The people kicking folks off voter rolls chant about how they are preventing imaginary voter fraud. That kind of movement, unwilling to speak its own name, has a ceiling on how hard it can go. I believe that ceiling is lower than the bar they’d need to clear to seize power, and I think the last few years have borne this sentiment out.
I’m not sure I exactly get your point re: how to measure Trump’s time vs. hypothetical Clinton’s time. I will just repeat my sentiment that we can’t know how they would have compared to one another, because Clinton’s time will remain hypothetical. It might have had more or less terrorism. I will reiterate that the odds of terrorism being the key point to compare those points is miniscule. If we’d picked Clinton instead of Trump in 2016, things would be wildly different today. For 3 likely differences, we’d probably have a Republican president instead of Biden right now, we’d have had a technocrat beloved of the media instead of a maniac loathed by them when Covid hit, and we’d probably be fighting wars in Syria and Afghanistan, with Russia unlikely to have invaded the Ukraine. It would be a substantially different place in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with whether or not the capital was occupied for an afternoon.
As far as putting money down, I will bet on ‘the US continues to be a functioning democracy’ long before I bet on what kind of calamity might befall us. I think that a successful insurrection is less likely to be the end of our democratic experiment than a nuclear war, but both remain comfortably in ‘far mode’, so to speak.
I do buy the idea that citizens are moving left/right and a middle ground is becoming harder to find. I think anyone as online as our generation is would have to see that much. I just don’t think that results in a civil war of the kind you envision. Before being ideologues, left and right alike, these voters are lazy and selfish. We will sit tight, clutching our votes and bemoaning the failures of our political masters/servants, as the world rolls along.
Hey, I stumbled on this comment and I’m wondering if you’ve updated on whether you consider Trump/Republicans a threat to America’s interests in light of the January 6th insurrection.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean, like, how would it work for like 1⁄3 of Americans to be a threat to America’s interests?
I think, roughly speaking, the answer you are looking for is ‘no’, but it is possible I’m misunderstanding your question.
With Trump/Republicans I meant the full range of questions from from just Trump, through participants in the storming of congress, to all Republican voters.
It seems quite easy for a large fraction of a population to be a threat to the population’s interests if they share a particular dangerous behavior. I’m confused why you would think that would be difficult. Threat isn’t complete or total. If you don’t get a vaccine or wear a mask, you’re a threat to immune-compromissd people but you can still do good work professionally. If you vote for someone attempting to overthrow democracy, you’re a danger to the nation while in the voting booth but you can still do good work volunteering. As for how the nation can survive such a large fraction working against its interests—it wouldn’t, in equilibrium, but there’s a lot of inertia.
It seems weird that people storming the halls of Congress, building gallows for a person certifying the transition of power, and killing and getting killed attempting to reach that person, would lead to no update at all on who is a threat to America. I suppose you could have factored this sort of thing in from the start, but in that case I’m curious how you would have updated on potential threats to America if the insurrection didn’t take place.
Ultimately the definition of ‘threat’ feels like a red herring compared to the updates in the world model. So perhaps more concretely: what’s the minimum level of violence at the insurrection that would make you have preferred Hillary over Trump? How many Democratic congresspeople would have to die? How many Republican congresspeople? How many members of the presidential chain of command (old or new)?
You should probably reexamine the chain of logic that leads you to the idea that the most important consequence of the electorate’s decision in 2016 was the events of Jan 6th, 2021. It isn’t remotely true.
To entertain the hypothetical, where what we care about when doing elections is how many terrorist assaults they produce, would be to compare the actual record of Trump to an imaginary record of President Clinton’s 4 years in office. How would you recommend I generate the latter? Does the QAnon Shaman of the alternate timeline launch 0, 1, or 10 assaults on the capital if his totem is defeated 4 years earlier?
A more serious reappraisal of the Trump/Clinton fork would focus on COVID, supreme court picks, laws that a democratic president would have veto’d vs. those Trump signed (are we giving Clinton a democratic congress, or is this alt history only a change in presidency?), international decisions where Trump’s isolationist instincts would have been replaced by Clinton’s interventionist ones, etc. It is a serious and complicated question, but the events of Jan 6th play a minimal role in it.
That’s a bit of a straw man, though to be fair it appears my question didn’t fit into your world model as it does in mine.
For me, the insurrection was in the top 5 most informative/surprising US political events in 2017-2021. On account of its failure it didn’t have as major consequences as others, but it caused me to update my world model more. For me, it was a sudden confrontation with the size and influence of anti-democratic movements within the Republican party, which I consider Trump to be sufficiently associated with to cringe from the notion of voting for him.
The core of my question is whether your world model has updated from
For me, the January insurrection was a big update away from that statement, so I was curious how it fit in your world model, but I suppose the insurrection is not necessarily the key. Did your probability of (a subset of) Republicans ending American democracy increase over the Trump presidency?
Noting that a Republican terrorist might still have attempted to commit acts of terror with Clinton in office does not mitigate the threat posed by (a subset of) Republicans. Between self-identified Democrats pissing off a nuclear power enough to start a world war and self-identified Republicans causing the US to no longer have functional elections, my money is on the latter.
If I had to use a counterfactual, I would propose imagining a world where the political opinions of all US citizens as projected on a left-right axis were 0.2 standard deviations further to the Left (or Right).
I’d agree that Jan 6th was top 5 most surprising US political events 2017-2021, though I’m not sure that category is big enough that top 5 is an achievement. (That is, how many events total are in there for you?)
I wasn’t substantially surprised by it in the way that you were, however. I’m not saying that I predicted it, mind you, but rather that it was in a category of stuff that felt at least Trump-adjacent from the jump. As a descriptive example, imagine a sleezy used car salesman lies to me about whether the doors will fall off the car while I drive it home. I plainly didn’t expect that particular lie, since I fell for it, but the basic trend of ‘this man will lie for his own profit’ is baked into the persona from the get go.
My model of American voters ending American democracy remains extremely low. For better or for worse, that’s just not in any real way how we roll. Take a look at every anti democratic movement presently going, and you will see endless rhetoric about how they are really double secret truly democratic. The clowns who want to pack the supreme court/senate are just trying to compensate for the framers not jock riding cities hard enough. The stooges who want the VP to be able to throw out electors not for his party invent gibberish about how the framers intended this. The people kicking folks off voter rolls chant about how they are preventing imaginary voter fraud. That kind of movement, unwilling to speak its own name, has a ceiling on how hard it can go. I believe that ceiling is lower than the bar they’d need to clear to seize power, and I think the last few years have borne this sentiment out.
I’m not sure I exactly get your point re: how to measure Trump’s time vs. hypothetical Clinton’s time. I will just repeat my sentiment that we can’t know how they would have compared to one another, because Clinton’s time will remain hypothetical. It might have had more or less terrorism. I will reiterate that the odds of terrorism being the key point to compare those points is miniscule. If we’d picked Clinton instead of Trump in 2016, things would be wildly different today. For 3 likely differences, we’d probably have a Republican president instead of Biden right now, we’d have had a technocrat beloved of the media instead of a maniac loathed by them when Covid hit, and we’d probably be fighting wars in Syria and Afghanistan, with Russia unlikely to have invaded the Ukraine. It would be a substantially different place in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with whether or not the capital was occupied for an afternoon.
As far as putting money down, I will bet on ‘the US continues to be a functioning democracy’ long before I bet on what kind of calamity might befall us. I think that a successful insurrection is less likely to be the end of our democratic experiment than a nuclear war, but both remain comfortably in ‘far mode’, so to speak.
I do buy the idea that citizens are moving left/right and a middle ground is becoming harder to find. I think anyone as online as our generation is would have to see that much. I just don’t think that results in a civil war of the kind you envision. Before being ideologues, left and right alike, these voters are lazy and selfish. We will sit tight, clutching our votes and bemoaning the failures of our political masters/servants, as the world rolls along.