On first inspection, you’ll clearly see that recent candidates are pretty terrible. But on closer inspection, you’ll realize that it’s actually worse than it appears: the losers from the 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, and 1996 elections were all more popular than the three most recent winners!

I think this is a pretty underrated political development. To take a closer look, and I do apologize to Nate Silver, but I’ll share a partial graph of historical approval ratings from under his paywall to make a point.1

Trump-2 is off to an inexplicably bad start compared to past presidents, outdone only by Trump-1. Biden’s is not that much better, and taken as a whole, the recent Trump-Biden-Trump series of administrations have been horrendous in terms of popularity. The situation looks even bleaker when you look at the losers of the last 3 elections, not including Trump in 2020 obviously. Kamala and Hillary are just total goose eggs of candidates.

So what is happening here? Why are presidents and candidates just so widely disliked?

Primaries and the media

This is an argument that summarizes at least a couple issues that could be contributing to approval rating decline of presidential candidates over the last ~10 years. Obviously non-exhaustive:

Primaries

To make a long story short, originally presidential candidates were selected by their party leaders, and presidents were selected by the electoral college with no national vote determining the allocation of electoral votes. Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams were all elected through this system, negatively referred to as the “King Caucus”, because very few states even held popular elections, with the presidency actually being determined by D.C. insiders. That system of electing the president was replaced by state level voting in the 1820s, but presidential candidates were still selected by the party.

Then in the progressive era, primaries were introduced to allow candidate selection, and this gradually increased in importance, but primary results were ignored in favor of smokey-room discussions determining candidates instead. This persisted until the drama of the 1968 Democratic primary season.

To make an even longer story shorter, LBJ was unpopular due to the Vietnam war. Robert F. Kennedy (Yes, that RFK) was the frontrunner, as he won critical primary elections, but got assassinated (on the night he won California). Hubert Humphrey was then chosen by party insiders to face off against Nixon, sending democratic voters into an outrage, and then lost to Nixon, sending democratic voters into an even larger outrage. This spelled the end of party insiders choosing candidates, as primaries were reformed to increase the importance of the primary election votes.2

Now, what does this have to do with candidates being unpopular? The issue is that what we see at least with a rudimentary time series observation, is that candidates were popular in the past, back when candidates were actually just selected in the smoke filled rooms. I feel really bad because I said I wouldn’t share the rest of the paywalled content, but now that I’m here I need to show it to make the point that I want to make.

Now to pay it forward, I’ll gift one of my subscribers a Silver Bulletin sub. I highly recommend you subscribe here.

So it seems like the story goes like this: All of our favorite presidents, Washington, Jefferson, JFK, LBJ, RFK, CIA, and ETC, were all picked by elitist D.C. insiders. This was the case for essentially 200 years. Then we (the non-elite masses) thought we could do it better and instead messed everything up by picking increasingly unlikeable people. Seems plausible enough.

The media

Since I literally cannot stop stealing now that I’ve started, here’s yet another graph from Nate:

The gist is that at this point, you’d probably rather be the challenger than the incumbent. In 2024, incumbents got beaten to a pulp. There was this entire mini-discourse on why this was the case, with some people being team vibes versus team inflation. The gist of this discourse was that team vibes blamed the media for brainwashing everyone into hating incumbents, and team inflation saying that voters simply reacted to inflation very negatively which explains the world-wide nature of the reaction. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a little bit of column A and B, and that the media being very negative and rising in ideological tone over time.

The end of the limited network era of TV, back when there were only a few channels, basically lines up with when candidates started becoming unpopular. The end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 cleared the way for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and cable news networks to increase the temperature of the room and stoke negativity, and the rise of the internet, while taking a while, eventually gave rise to alternative media which ratched up the temperature even more. Maybe incumbents have it so hard because, well, they’re in office and getting constantly attacked! This could help explain the bipartisan nature of the ratings decline.

We should all know less about each other

In a recent Econ 102 podcast episode, Noah Smith argued that one explanation of what has been going wrong lately is the internet. In summary, his point goes that America is a large country with a geographically dispersed population. We’re not all next to each other. If you were a hippy, you would live with the hippies. If you were a redneck live with the rednecks. And this was basically stable for the 20th century. Then came along social media, and now these once separate groups became directly exposed to each other. Now you have the left trying to cancel the rednecks, and the rednecks are freaking out about drag shows, and that is raising the temperature of the room.

Before, these groups could live in the same country, just separated by hundreds of miles - but basically Twitter came along and destroyed everything.

I like this argument because the timeline basically lines up exactly, with the rise of social media surging after 2012, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter all doubled in usage from 2012-2016.

It would be nice to think about what life would be like if we could shut X down tomorrow and let D.C. insiders pick candidates again, but for now we’ll have to work with the system we have. I hope our presidents can win the people over, but for now it looks like they’re not.

So, what do Klein and Thompson argue for in Abundance? Surely we would learn by at least page 7 if they actually do embrace much of Democratic policy? Anyway, here’s page 7:

Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes insurance that people can use to pay for health care. Food stamps give people money for food. Housing vouchers give them money for rent. Pell Grants give them money for college. Tax credits for child care give people money to buy child care. Social Security gives them money for retirement. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit give them more money for anything they want. These are important policies, and we support them. But while Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have. Countless taxpayer dollars were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastructure without an equally energetic focus—sometimes without any focus at all—on what all that money was actually buying and building.

The argument Klein and Thompson are making is obvious: to increase the success of demand-side policy such as welfare, you need to ensure that the restrictions placed on the supply-side are such that the supply can reach the newly elevated demand. If not, then the spending is completely moot and possibly harmful. Some examples from their book are the housing crisis commonly found in blue states, as well as the failure of California High Speed Rail. They elaborate on this concept further:

The problem is that if you subsidize demand for something that is scarce, you’ll raise prices or force rationing.4 Too much money chasing too few homes means windfall profits for homeowners and an affordability crisis for buyers. Too much money chasing too few doctors means long wait times or pricey appointments. This leads to the standard Republican riposte: Just don’t subsidize demand. Keep the government out of it. Let the market work its magic. That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice. If virtual-reality headsets are expensive, well, so be it. It is not a public policy problem if most households cannot afford a VR headset. But that cannot be said for housing and education and medicine. Society cares about access to these goods and services, as well it should.

I do suspect that Abundance detractors have genuinely not read the book. These points are established well before the end of the first chapter. The reasons for left-on-left bashing are complex, but in part I think they are the result of an intellectual tradition that values intellectual debate. To an extent they are also a product of a tendency to value intellectual purity and coherence over diversity of point-of-view. This tendency to shrink the tent serves the left’s strong sense of justice, but nothing replaces clear-eyed policy discussion. In her book review, Zephyr Teachout says:

It can be jarring to read about zoning while Elon Musk chainsaws through the government, plundering public money for his own benefit, but Klein and Thompson argue that there is a direct connection: a failure to build represents a political stagnation that has led to political crises. Without cheap housing and energy, affordable health care, and basic infrastructure, public trust erodes and populist movements thrive. A government incapable of solving material problems creates a vacuum that demagogues fill.

But her arguments start to falter:

Which is to say, I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential.

…

It happens that I have a personal affinity for the language of abundance. My very first speech in my very first campaign for public office was about abundance and scarcity, and how we needed to reject Andrew Cuomo’s scarcity mind-set, which was holding back New York’s economy.

My view then, and now, is that to transform a bloated corporate feudal system into a dynamic one, we need to break up feudal power, unlock the brilliance that accompanies human freedom, and allow small and medium-sized businesses to prosper. We have to stop thinking of economic development as giving out big grants to big donors. Instead, we need to start thinking about it as building platforms for entrepreneurs and new ideas to flourish.

This position has a long lineage and is currently at the center of major public debates on industrial policy. After finishing Abundance, however, I’m unclear about where the authors stand on those debates. I know what they think about permitting reform, NEPA, and the NIH, and I know they think we need to be more solution oriented. But I don’t know what their agenda requires outside of that.

The claim being made is that because she and no one else on the left can understand the author’s basic points, that bad actors may take these arguments and run with them. But I want to zero in on this claim about corporate feudal power.

Recently in Washington State, a bill was passed 42-6 in the state senate. It was then sent to the house housing committee where it died after not being brought to a vote, failing a key deadline. The purpose of this bill was to amend elevator standards such that smaller elevators can be used as opposed to the current larger ones. Research suggests that apartments with smaller elevators or no elevators are at no greater safety risk than the status quo. This reform would have made it less costly to build apartments due to the less strict standards on elevator implementation.

So why did it die in the housing committee? After passing the landslide vote, the elevator constructors union placed some phone calls and killed it.

So my question to Teachout and other leftists is: what does combatting feudal power have to do with this situation? There are many examples on the state level of interest groups being a negative influence on building, whereas many corporations are pro-housing and lessening burdensome regulations.

Unions aside, at times there are weird situations where the government has to ask itself if it can build a project it wants to build. In this case, the DC school system has to wait for authorization from the Department of Buildings to extend working hours on school renovations. The holdup being that nearby residents have complained about the construction noise:

The construction plans for the site, and the impact it would have on nearby residents, have raised eyebrows, said neighbor Denise Issac. In addition to noise concerns from the extended hours, Issac emphasized that contractor parking on nearby residential streets could make egress from the neighborhood difficult, impacting elderly residents.

“They put a whole design together, reached out to the commission and never spoke to any resident in the neighborhood,” Issac stated.

Klein is not the problem

At the heart of the issue isn’t Klein and Thompson. One issue is that narrow interest groups such as neighbors of projects who complain about noise and elevator unions who complain that smaller elevator size means less elevator to build, get in the way of positive reform and corrupt the democratic process by killing popular projects with well-timed phone calls. Another issue is the obsession with inclusion that the Democratic party has—that whenever development is considered, they focus more on ensuring that all complaints are heard than carefully weighing the pros of building things in the first place. The deeper problem is the pathology of intra-left conflict. As Kenny Stancil of the ever-weird Revolving Door Project demonstrates:1

More broadly, Klein underestimates the value of rulemaking and enforcement. The alternative to a society governed by laws (in which lawyers play an important role) is one ruled by fiat. Donald Trump is making it clear that arbitrary and authoritarian governance is a recipe for economic, social, and environmental disaster.

The so-called Abundance™ agenda—also known as “rebranded neoliberalism” thanks to my colleague Dylan Gyauch-Lewis’ early critique of the broader corporate-backed project last fall—is perfectly compatible with right-wing goals such as environmental deregulation and union-busting.

It’s no mystery why the Kochs and other libertarians support the ostensibly Democratic “abundance agenda”: It launders conservative ideas.

The criticism here is that the worst thing in the world is having ideas that appeal to conservatives. Newsflash: building things can be popular among a wide range of people. Conservatives liking something doesn’t automatically make it bad, dimwit.

The question remains: will the left ever get its head out of its ass and realize that a diversity of opinion and inclusion will help popularize their ideas? I hope that this pathology is a bug of the left and not a feature, but I can’t be so sure.

Many of these points have their historical and modern examples, but I think good ol’ fashioned political science can be clarifying in times of power expansion on the part of the president. “How and why did we get here” is a question many have tried to answer, with some pointing to failures of this or that administration, or interest group conflict and so on. But the structural nature of presidential conflict that persists through current and future administrations are less subject to the controversies of the day and point towards deeper problems at the heart of American democracy.

Presidentialism’s contradictions

In his article, Linz chooses parliamentarism as the primary competing democratic structure to presidential systems. Set in the background of the collapse of the soviet union as well as the transition of many South American governments’ authoritarian regimes, Linz belongs to a group of comparative regime scholars set out to provide political guidance to these collapsing regimes to transform them into something better. Upon close inspection, contradictions in presidential systems emerge.

Parliamentary systems are those that have one democratically elected legislative body, whereas presidential systems include an executive who serves for a fixed term and is elected separately from the rest of the governmental body. In these cases, the president serves as the ceremonial and symbolic head of state as well as retaining independent executive powers. This dual-mandate creates in the office an aura, or a set of popular expectations and a self-image of what the president should be. Linz continues:

But what is most striking is that in a presidential system, the legislators, especially when they represent cohesive, disciplined parties that offer clear ideological and political alternatives, can also claim democratic legitimacy. This claim is thrown into high relief when a majority of the legislature represents a political option opposed to the one the president represents.

Under such circumstances, who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies? Since both derive their power from the votes of the people in a free competition among well-defined alternatives, a conflict is always possible and at times may erupt dramatically. There is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.

What’s striking about this point is that in recent history, the president and the congressional majority represent opposing parties around half of the time. The conflicts that necessarily rise out of these opposing factions do not have a democratic basis on which they can be mediated. Essentially, Linz is saying that in these cases we will have to lean on the constitution, but the complex legalese may not make sense to the public and lack the democratic legitimacy their votes provided.

Linz then highlights another source of conflict - the fixed nature of presidential terms and election schedules. Apologies for the quote wall, but this section is worth the read.

The second outstanding feature of presidential systems-the president's relatively fixed term in office-is also not without drawbacks. It breaks the political process into discontinuous, rigidly demarcated periods, leaving no room for the continuous readjustments that events may demand. The duration of the president's mandate becomes a crucial factor in the calculations of all political actors, a fact which (as we shall see) is fraught with important consequences.

Consider, for instance, the provisions for succession in case of the president's death or incapacity: in some cases, the automatic successor may have been elected separately and may represent a political orientation different from the president's; in other cases, he may have been imposed by the president as his running mate without any consideration of his ability to exercise executive power or maintain popular support.

…

All political leaders must worry about the ambitions of second-rank leaders, sometimes because of their jockeying for position in the order of succession and sometimes because of their intrigues. The fixed and definite date of succession that a presidential constitution sets can only exacerbate the incumbent's concerns on this score.

Add to this the desire for continuity, and it requires no leap of logic to predict that the president will choose as his lieutenant and successor-apparent someone who is more likely to prove a yes-man than a leader in his own right. The inevitable succession also creates a distinctive kind of tension between the ex-president and his successor. The new man may feel driven to assert his independence and distinguish himself from his predecessor, even though both might belong to the same party.

…

The old president, for his part, having known the unique honor and sense of power that come with the office, will always find it hard to reconcile himself to being out of power for good, with no prospect of returning even if the new incumbent fails miserably. Parties and coalitions may publicly split because of such antagonisms and frustrations. They can also lead to intrigues, as when a still-prominent former president works behind the scenes to influence the next succession or to undercut the incumbent's policies or leadership of the party.

These tensions are familiar to us today. Insider reporting shows over time that the considerations presidents make with respect to their vice are at odds with choosing a good leader. In Obama’s case, he specifically chose the already elder statesman at the time, Joe Biden, to be his vice. This choice was supposed to offset the public impression of Obama’s relative inexperience. More to the point, Obama sidelined Biden in favor of supporting Hillary. Recently, we’ve seen similar dynamics with Biden and Kamala, a choice that perplexed many at the time given that Kamala’s poor primary showing should have indicated that her popularity might not be enough to sustain a tough presidential campaign.

But again, Biden chose her to appeal to one side of the democratic column while ignoring the very real possibility that she would have to govern or at the least, run in his place, towards the end of his term. Even more recently we’ve seen Trump pick JD Vance, who by all accounts does not have mass appeal and merely represents Trump’s ideals in a younger vessel. Perhaps Vance could be a popular leader in the future, but it’s at the very least unclear that these recent vice picks are directly related to one’s capacity to lead.

If both sides of the political culture succumb to the same mistakes, this is representative of a deeper problem than the “my side good your side bad” style of partisan commentary popular today.

Zero-sum conflict

Warning: quote wall ahead.

Presidentialism is ineluctably problematic because it operates according to the rule of "winner-take-all arrangement that tends to make democratic politics a zero-sum game, with all the potential for conflict such games portend.

…

The danger that zero-sum presidential elections pose is compounded by the rigidity of the president's fixed term in office. Winners and losers are sharply defined for the entire period of the presidential mandate. There is no hope for shifts in alliances, expansion of the government's base of support through national-unity or emergency grand coalitions, new elections in response to major new events, and so on. Instead, the losers must wait at least four or five years without any access to executive power and patronage. The zero-sum game in presidential regimes raises the stakes of presidential elections and inevitably exacerbates their attendant tension and polarization.

This at least leaves the president room to potentially heal the partisan divide caused by the zero-sum nature of his election, right?

Once he has won, can he not set himself to healing the wounds inflicted during the campaign and restoring the unity of the nation? Can he not offer to his defeated opponents-but not to the extremist elements of his own coalition-a role in his administration and thus make himself president of all the people? Such policies are of course possible, but must depend on the personality and political style of the new president and, to a lesser extent, his major antagonists. Before the election no one can be sure that the new incumbent will make conciliatory moves; certainly the process of political mobilization in a plebiscitarian campaign is not conducive to such a turn of events.

The new president must consider whether gestures designed to conciliate his recent opponents might weaken him unduly, especially if he risks provoking his more extreme allies into abandoning him completely. There is also the possibility that the opposition could refuse to reciprocate his magnanimity, thus causing the whole strategy to backfire. The public rejection of an olive branch publicly proffered could harden positions on both sides and lead to more

The issue in a nutshell is that the president has the choice to try to bridge the gap to the losers or not. If he does, he risks alienating his most extreme supporters, but if he doesn’t he opens himself up to increased legislative gridlock as well as political attacks on the legitimacy of his democratic mandate.

For example, presidential systems either include legislatively malapportioned districts, or an upper chamber that gives extra weight to rural areas. If the president is elected with the help of urban areas, the gridlock he will inevitably face will be in part due to legislators who represent rural or sparsely populated areas. This invites accusations that the legislator is in hock to narrow interest groups or local influence - contradicting the president’s plebiscitarian mandate.1 By that same token, if the president does in fact gain support from these same areas, he is open to attacks from legislators using those very arguments.

The conspiracy theories start rolling in, with rurals believing that urban elites are destroying their way of life, and urban elites believing that they are being held back by antiquated ways of living. In this way, the office of the president is opened up to a type of populism which can embolden the president to view constitutional barriers to his power as incompatible with the mandate he is said to represent.

The plebiscitarian component implicit in the president's authority is likely to make the obstacles and opposition he encounters seem particularly annoying. In his frustration he may be tempted to define his policies as reflections of the popular will and those of his opponents as the selfish designs of narrow interests.

This identification of leader with people fosters a certain populism that may be a source of strength. It may also, however, bring on a refusal to acknowledge the limits of the mandate that even a majority-to say nothing of a mere plurality can claim as democratic justification for the enactment of its agenda. The doleful potential for displays of cold indifference, disrespect, or even downright hostility toward the opposition is not to be scanted.

The current state of politics

Imagine if you were in a diner in the 50s, and discussing the relative merits of voting for Eisenhower or Stevenson. The ideological overlap between the Republican and Democratic parties at this time was large.

Let’s dive into policy. The basic landscape of post WW2 politics was characterized by the Republican party embracing new deal reforms and the Democratic Party joining with the Republican Party in embracing moderate Liberalism and containment as a rebuttal to soviet expansion. The result of this coalition was the permanent acceptance of New Deal expansion and the expulsion of communist elements from the political culture.

The lack of ideological polarization made it easy for the government to work together, without much in the way of presidential power creep on one hand and congressional gridlock on the other.

Contrasted with today, that consensus is no longer in place and hasn’t been for a long time. The level of ideological polarization and intraparty uniformity create near-continuous gridlock, and a president increasingly incentivized to take extra-constitutional actions to preserve and expand the power he has. Congressional gridlock further discredits the legislative body in the eyes of the public, which generates a populist revival premised on attacking DC elites or the “rich men north of Richmond.”

Did Juan Linz have Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Even though much of his theory predicts the shape of presidential conflict we see today, I don’t think we can just throw political science into the garbage bin for sounding a bit TDS:

1. Linz died in 2013, well before he could have possibly been accused as retrofitting a theory to explain Trump’s actions in the year 2025.

2. This particular article was released in the 90s and mostly limited itself to South American examples of institutional turmoil, such as that of Chile.

And this I think should lower our priors on the efficacy of the presidential system. The extra-constitutional abuse of power is incentivized by a flurry of government artifacts, set in place to restrict the executive due to legitimate fears at the time of kings and Caudillos.2

So you have an office with a plebiscitarian mandate, who is also restricted to a fixed term on a fixed election schedule, and half the time congress hates him while his die hard supporters demand their pound of flesh. The root of the issue here is that we have highly ideological parties which increases the temperature of the political room at the same time it locks the legislative body into stasis - unable to restrict abuses of the president while at the same time increasing the likelihood of those abuses happening.

Actually make America great again

For a current example—Tracewoodgrains, while talking about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, said that the issue with the book is that Klein and Thompson aren’t making enough enemies.

This, I think, perfectly illustrates the issues quoted above. The abundance movement is in theory aimed at appealing to a popular will—the desire to construct helpful improvements across society, which can cut across narrow-interest groups and into popular reality.

At a minimum for abundance to succeed, the temperature of the room will need to decrease, because the ideas present in that book require congressional action to occur. In the future I hope we have political leaders that tone down rhetoric and political temperature in favor of national solidarity. Maybe then we can get back to building.

Way back in the bygone era of August 2024, I was a fledgling substacker1 and was writing commentary about the election. As Election Day loomed closer, substackers started publicly writing arguments for or against the candidates. One such “Substack war” was prompted by Hanania’s endorsement of Trump to which several other bloggers responded. My goal in my post was to categorize each blogger’s arguments, summarize the findings, and add some perspectives I believed were overlooked.

In broad strokes, I think that you could tell a story at the time where the Democratic party had many bad economic instincts.

For context, this was just after the Biden administration took a stronger Bernie-Warrenite stance against what they called “corporate greed” as a solution to inflation, as opposed to supply side reform. Additionally, Kamala released her proposal to ban price gouging in August, stirring controversy among moderates.

There are other examples, but I think they betray what is, at its core, an attempt to move the Democratic Party further away from the neoliberal consensus of the Obama era and closer to a new progressive synthesis, where taking down big business is seen as the key to unlocking a more abundant and equitable future.

I have at least some reasons for being skeptical of this. I recently said:

Broadly I’ve moved to the right on economics. When I was younger I made the classic mistake of thinking that something like minimum wage was an unalloyed good. With that topic and many others like it, I’ve moved to the right or lowered my confidence such that I basically copy paste my opinions from Clark Center Forum polls. Very generally I interpret this as placing me on the center right economically speaking.

While I have lowered confidence in general of the findings from the human sciences, economics is something I have higher confidence in because I personally consume less of something as it gets more expensive and more of it as it gets cheaper, so I have a high prior of econ-101 style thinking basically being correct.

This is the prior through which I view the Biden administration’s policies. I typically come away unimpressed with ideas like corporate greed, corporate concentration, and price gouging. In the back of my mind, I suspect the Bernie-Warrenite turn is a way to institute all sorts of clumsy legislation that will make the country poorer.

In another post, I further outlined my view that the economy matters more than cultural issues. I’d clarify now that I think culture is extremely important, but the culture war tends to focus on outlier cases that make for good discourse yet don’t amount to being more significant than the economy. If the parties were completely polarized on fertility for example, then I might think culture is more important than the economy, but with respect to things like Trans athletes, I don’t think so.

So coming in, I had multiple priors that advantaged supporting Trump. I thought the left had bad economic instincts and that the economy was more important than cultural questions. But one fact kept me from endorsing Trump and caused me to side with the Pro-Kamala Substack crowd.

The Smart Right Winger

I’ve spoken to several smart right wingers. I’ve read many of them. I have unironically read Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania is one of my favorite bloggers.

So I do like these people. In my engagement with smart right wingers, I think I have a pretty good mental model of how they come to the conclusion to support Trump and the Republican party.

What I think happens is that smart right wingers know a lot of factual information about a variety of topics in the discourse. But one thing stands out among the rest: they are reasonably good pattern matchers.

What I mean is that a smart right winger knows that there is a “Blue Tribe” and a “Red Tribe” in a broad sense. They also understand that the Blue Tribe as it were is in control of many of our nation’s institutions. Some left wingers will point out Fox Media or talk radio as being dominated by the right, but that’s not quite accurate. Any Yarvinite worth their salt should understand that radio and television news aren’t what influences elites, who for the most part read their information instead of listening or watching passively.

The New York Times, the medical establishment, the scientific community at large, the elite universities and the expert class in general are all blue coded. This is important because it matters to a great degree what these people think. This is essentially the cathedral as Yarvin eloquently puts it. I just call them our elite institutions.

So after realizing this, the smart right winger has a hard time reconciling facts they know to be true with the so-called facts our elite institutions propagate. Over the years we’ve watched the blue tribe cosign defunding the police, trans athletes in sports, new metaphysics involving gender, race-based college admissions and discriminatory hiring practices, and COVID school closures just to name a few.

In reaction the smart right winger cosigns Trump. Most of them buy into the idea that Trump can and should Dewokify our institutions, taking some inspiration from Germany’s Denazification program.

Our right winger signs his or her ballot to Trump, awaiting the day our nation returns to greatness.

The Left

This raises the question: just why are there so many bad ideas on the left? Smart right wingers will try to tell you a theory wherein the reason the left is home to so many western-civilization destroying theories like Marxism and Critical Race Theory is because they are actually out to destroy and replace western civilization with something else. While I suspect that some people on the left are trying to do this, I have a different answer.

My basic theory for why you see so many bad ideas pop up on the left is because the left as we know it is merely where intellectual discussion usually takes place.

Why is there no right-wing New York Times? No right-wing scientific institutions? Yarvin would have you believe that it’s because “power is conserved,” meaning that for there to be a right-wing New York Times, the current slate of institutions would have to deem it a legitimate authority. They would have to include The Right-Wing New York Times articles in their discourse as a place where true information comes from. They would have to share articles amongst themselves. Journalism professors would assign the RWNYT’s articles as homework. There would have to be pipelines from elite universities to work at the RWNYT and for well-known experts to write opinion articles there.

But this argument is too cute for me. For a smaller example, why is there no right Slow Boring? Yglesias could signal boost them as being a right wing counterpart to his own work, but would he? It’s an interesting question to think about.

And this I think gets at why there is actually no right Slow Boring. It’s because there is both less demand and supply for a critically deep right news ecosystem. The right tends to prefer modes of communication that lack depth for the sake of ease of consumption such as TV or radio, whereas there are enough people on the left that can read to support the large amount of deep daily coverage of complex topics that Slow Boring does. Or that The New York Times does etc., on the supply side, there are more people on the left that are capable of supplying this information than there are on the right. The level of communication that tends to appeal to the right is not suitable for scientific inquiry or accurate and detailed journalism.2

Intellectual discussion as it is positioned today is an activity that occurs for the most part on the left. If you have intellectual interests, you are at the very least to the left of the MAGA crowd. Leftness is in a sense synonymous with intellectual curiosity. And some of the most intellectually curious people of our time have had great ideas, and also bad ones! Ones that I heavily disagree with!

But that still puts me on the left. Why is there room on the left for people all the way from Communists to Neoliberals? From Bernie to Manchin? From Robert Reich to Larry Summers? From Freddie DeBoer to Matthew Yglesias? I hope one day the left includes Richard Hanania as well. The fact is that the left is a diverse ecosystem of intellectuals as well as people who want to masquerade as intellectuals.

Our elite institutions suffer from their own success. When you have something valuable going on, people rise up to challenge it from within its own ranks. Sometimes those bad ideas lose, but sometimes they win out. The price you pay for being the place for smart people to be is that smart people can sometimes come up with influential bad ideas.

But it would be foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The key here is to compare the institutions we have not with a perfectly idealized version in theory, but with the real alternative.

MAGA is not a substitute

Trump has recently proposed across-the-board tariffs that are maligned by economists. The formula they used to calculate this is astounding.

And this gets to the heart of the problem. In my estimation, broadly what has basically happened is that through a series of historically contingent events, tribal reinforcement, and education polarization under Trump, the Left has become home to smart and informed voters. The Left is also home to many of our nation’s influential experts and intellectuals. The Right has in exchange gotten dumber and more out of control. The disciplining effect the business community and investors have on the Right’s worst impulses is muted. The right wing media ecosystem is filled with a headache inducing amount of lies and misinformation, and our medical institutions are being hollowed out and replaced with sycophants.

Many point out that if far leftists were successful in alienating men and jews, they would basically decapitate the intellectual basis of their movement. What’s interesting is that MAGA has succeeded where the left failed on an even greater scale: they’ve alienated most morally upright educated voters and experts.

What I think this episode shows is that there is no substitute for a careful consideration of policy discussion. With no smart people in the room left to check him, we have empowered a mad king to destroy the country and our institutions on the basis that they’ve gotten some things wrong over time, and on the flawed characterization that our institutions are irredeemably corrupt because bad ideas float in the soup of liberal democracy. The scope and scale of missteps by the liberal establishment deserve scrutiny and course correction, not total mayhem.

I think this goes to show just how hard replacing the liberal establishment really is. It takes more work than electing some rogue oligarchs to fire government employees, or allowing one corrupt man to place American companies under his thumb so they can beg for exemptions from his terrible policy.

People love to say “short-term pain for long-term gain.” That’s an interesting point as far as tariffs are concerned. But as far as liberal democracy goes, our institutions weren’t built overnight. Perhaps they will emerge stronger from the wreckage.

Perhaps they won’t.

I’ve been a reader of Bentham’s newsletter for months now. From shrimp donations to arguments for God, his blog really exemplifies what it means to read someone with a different perspective from yours.

I’ve read several of his posts which apparently prove that God exists. They mostly boil down to anthropic-adjacent arguments, which I have never found convincing, but his version is complex enough that I can’t follow along to decide if I agree with it or not.

But I still want to engage with the conversation, so I’ve taken varying degrees of interest in examples of miracles that he’s brought up from time to time, such as the flying saint, and most recently, the appearance of mother Mary in Zeitoun. Since he takes this as actual proof of Christianity’s legitimacy, I think it’s worth digging into the first hand accounts of this event - because if real - it’s definitely worth converting.

While I don’t have time to dig into all of these miracles, I am particularly enamored with this one because of how recently it occurred. So, unlike pringles, we’ll have to settle for just one for now.

I too, have seen miracles

Years ago, when I was a Christian, I remember my parents taking me to a revival. Revival services are basically sermons that occur weekly, like a normal church, except with more passion and dancing and singing etc. The idea is that it’s more interactive and focused on personal experience than your typical Sunday sermon, example below:

One day, the pastors wife, who was in a wheelchair (car accident), was wheeled out on the stage. At a particularly raucous moment in service, the pastor prayed over her and after much cheering, she got up and began to walk for a moment before returning to the chair and sitting down.

The atmosphere was Jubilant. This truly was a miracle. My mother told me as much, and if you do a little searching on youtube, you can see plenty of videos of the same thing happening.

My point is less about the miraculousness of the supposed miracle and more about the reactions to it. Church members heavily exaggerated the story, including my parents. The idea that she gave up the wheelchair and was completely recovered was false, as she continued to use it and I’m sure continued physical therapy for years afterwards. But this didn’t stop the congregation from interpreting it as a sign from God.

So before you take their testimony at face value, the point is to remember that people do in fact exaggerate things. Even a congregation of hundreds can exaggerate things, as can thousands, and hundreds of thousands etc. A wheelchair bound person briefly standing is retold as “they experienced a complete divine recovery.” A flash of light is interpreted as a fully formed, clearly outlined figure of Mary. Even minor attestations of being visited can spread far and wide as evidence of divine intervention.

But we live in a world with skeptics, and sometimes they can throw cold water on the magic of life. As a child, I relished in spoiling the magic of Santa for another kid. Joe Nickel spoiled a pretty impressive series of paranormal hoaxes.

And a professor, Dr. Cynthia Nelson of the American University in Cairo, arrived at the virgin Mary sighting and wrote about her account of the episode in detail. This blog post is a summary of her account.

What was the Virgin Mary sighting?

First, we can read about the most bullish description of the Mary sightings from Emma Donnelly, think of this as the “she stood out of the wheelchair, never to use it again” telling of events.

On April 2, Muslim garage attendant Farouk Mohammad Atwa and a coworker noticed a woman dressed in white standing on the roof of the Coptic Orthodox Church of St. Mary. Assuming that she was a nun with suicidal intentions, Atwa frantically ran over, shouting, “Lady, don’t jump!”

She remained silent and stoic, her hands clasped and her head bowed in silent reverence. The shouts of the two men attracted a small crowd. Those who saw the woman were filled with confusion and awe. One of the Church custodians voiced what everyone was thinking: “Could that be the Virgin Mary?”

As soon as the words left his mouth, the people agreed that the radiant woman standing over them could be no one but the Queen of Heaven. Although she was visible for only a few minutes, it soon became clear that it was not a solitary occurrence.

For the next three years, Mary returned regularly to Zeitoun. Sometimes, the apparitions occurred as often as two to three times a week. The miraculous appearances drew thousands to Zeitoun from all over the world, all to encounter the Holy Virgin. At the peak, an estimated 250,000 people came each night in hopes of simply glimpsing the Mother of God.

The appearances also followed a pattern. First, spectators would witness a brilliant ball of light “as bright as a million suns.” The light would slowly morph to take on the form of the Virgin Mary. She wore long blue and white robes that flowed in the breeze. A halo of blinding light surrounded the crown on her head. Some people saw only the Virgin. Others claimed they saw her with the infant Lord, a 12-year-old Jesus, or her husband, St. Joseph. She was also reported to occasionally carry a cross or an olive branch, the universal symbol for peace.

Over the three-year span of the apparitions, Mary never uttered a word. She remained in a constant state of prayer, and her actions and body language spoke volumes. Sometimes, she would glide around the domes that decorated the Church’s roof. Other times, she fell to her knees before the cross above the front entrance. At times, she stood still as a statue for hours on end, her flowing garments the only indication of her corporeality. Occasionally, she would acknowledge the crowds with a gentle smile and a silent blessing.

Mary did a lot of things, but it basically depended on her mood. She’d flip and fly through the air, sometimes gliding over the dome, levitating perfectly still, even bringing Jesus and Joseph along for the ride. And never a word.

But the fun didn’t stop there:

The Virgin’s appearances in Zeitoun were accompanied by a slew of miraculous events. People reported seeing large, glowing doves fly across the sky in a cross-shaped formation. Mary herself was said to smell of sweet incense so strong it seemed to come from “millions of censors.” Thousands of onlookers, skeptics included, recounted mysterious flashing lights and shooting stars appearing in the sky at the time of the apparitions. One witness described them as “a shower of diamonds made of light.” There were also reports of unexplained healings, including curing of blindness, polio, paralysis, cancer, and other terminal illnesses.

Donnelly ends with some words of inspiration:

It can be easy to get so caught up in all the noise that one can lose sight of what’s important. Making yourself heard seems to become the most important thing. It’s important to make one’s voice heard, but not at the expense of what’s really important. Mary’s silent reverence and her connection with the Lord, despite the crowds and cacophony below her, was never broken. She reminded us that only one thing gives people a clear view of what’s important: It’s not making yourself heard to other people, but making yourself known to God.

The most compelling part of the story is when the speaker mentioned that “skeptics were there, and even they were dumbfounded!” That brings us to one such skeptic, who I think provides an interesting point of view.

Supernatural or sociological?

Nelson begins:

After the Six-Day War, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo, there occurred an event that for several months became the focus of attention not only for thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds but also hundreds of foreigners, members of the international press, resident scholars and diplomats, representatives of Western Christianity, and the perennial tourists. This event, known locally as the Apparition of Zeitoun, involves the alleged multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitoun. The Copts are an Egyptian Christian minority who are descendants of the original Egyptian population at the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century and who were never converted to Islam.

…

I would like, first, to describe the events surrounding the apparitions, particularly during the initial months; second, to seek an understanding of how Egyptians construct their social world by asking the Egyptians themselves how they perceive and interpret the apparition of the Virgin Mary; and third, as an anthropologist, to examine this phenomenon in the context of its broader implications for people’s perceptions of reality, for relations between Christians and Muslims, for the role of the supernatural in the everyday lives of Egyptians, and the manner in which they cope with stress in general, as well as the sociopolitical setting of contemporary Egypt.

On Tuesday evening, April 2, 1968, around midnight, two workers left the garage facing the Church of the Holy Virgin. One of them, a Muslim, notices “a figure dressed in white on top of the dome of the Church. I thought she was going to commit suicide and shouted to her to be careful. My friend called the police and I woke up the doorkeeper. He comes out and looks and cries ‘It is the Virgin,’ and runs to call the priest.” This is the testimony of the worker as reported in the major newspapers as accounts of the apparition increased over the next weeks.

And describes her late arrival to the scene:

On April 15, I arrived at the church around 10:00 P.M. with a Coptic friend and her sister-in-law. There were a thousand to fifteen hundred people quietly milling about the streets around the church. It was difficult, but still possible, for cars to navigate. Several private cars were parked along the side of the street, and people were gathered outside the church waiting for “something to happen.” Most people had come by car to Zeitoun that evening and, judging from the manner in which they were dressed (Western business suits and fashionable dresses), they represented the urban middle and upper classes. The atmosphere was subdued and reverent. There were several Europeans from embassies and foreign businesses, who had come mostly out of curiosity.

While waiting, using colloquial Arabic, I engaged some Egyptians near me in a conversation about the apparition. Many claimed to have seen her and had returned to see her again; others had come in hopes of seeing her. One informant, who had been present on April 2 and had returned each night for the past two weeks, said the Virgin usually appears after midnight. (I was reminded of having read somewhere that midnight marks the center of time for Christendom!) As we were talking, a white-shirted figure appeared in one of the windows of the church, and the crowd broke into shouts but soon realized that it was nothing but a human figure.

Disappointing, but the fun did in fact start:

On another visit a week later, toward the end of April, the crowds had multiplied by the thousands, and a particular side street next to the church had been described “as where the Virgin is more easily seen.” Talking with a woman in her late fifties, the daughter of a very famous Cairo surgeon, I learned that her own daughter, an honor student in chemistry at Cairo University, who had seen the Virgin on April 12, insisted that her mother accompany her again to Zeitoun. She described her experience: “She was like a statue, hands folded in front, head veiled and bent. She rose up in the sky completely and was illuminated. I first saw the halo, then I saw the Virgin completely. She came down between the palm tree and the dome on this side street here.” As we were talking, the crowd began pointing to the palm tree and exclaiming “It’s the Virgin-she looks like a nun, and she is swaying to and fro as if she were blessing us!”

When I looked to where the crowds were pointing, I, too, thought I saw a light through the branches of the trees, and as I tried to picture a nunlike figure in those branches, I could trace the outline of a figure. But as I thought to myself that this is just an illusion of the light reflecting through the branches, the image of the nun would leave my field of vision. Still, there was no doubt in my mind that there was a light and that if I looked for the image, it would come into focus. I immediately “explained” this perceptual experience as an illusion caused by reflected light. But the source of the light was a mystery, for the streetlights had been disconnected all around the church for several days. And within another week, all the trees around the church would be cut.

…

The woman beside me was convinced it was the Virgin, which reveals once again that what the eye sees is the consequence not so much of psychological processes but of intellectual, emotional, and ideational concerns.

What’s basically happening here is that by this point, the crowds had gotten huger and huger, and they became more reticent to interpret any narrowly visually stimulating phenomena as miraculous. Our resident skeptic was able to see something, but clearly was not seeing what the rest of the crowd was seeing.

I encourage you to read the rest, but she concludes with this:

The most important issue to grasp here is that the apparition of the Virgin also symbolizes the conditions of modern pluralism in Egyptian society. By pluralism, I mean a situation in which there is more than one worldview available to the members of society, a situation in which there is competition between worldviews.

How people cope with the stress of national disaster tells us much about what is essential to their identity, their cultural premises as to what is real; what their specific modes of interpreting events in history are; what sorts of societal tensions are intensified under the threat of disaster. The Six-Day War did not create these reactions; it was a catalyst that exposed the pulsing nature of the society itself. For a people frustrated and made anxious by the contemporary circumstances of history, the Apparition of Zeitoun expresses the yearning for salvation from suffering, the hope of a millennial dream. Where people are seeking answers to fundamental questions, they choose value systems and personalities that express their yearnings. And it seems to me that the appearance of the Virgin symbolizes the disillusionment with secular political explanations and a turning toward the religious—to a deeper level of existence in terms of which it all makes sense.

This legend was included in Bentham’s blogpost, The Best Argument For Christianity as evidence for Christianity.

The boring story is that there’s not an actual phenomenon causing anything meaningful to appear. This event was preceded by major conflicts in the area and after one legend turned into another, turned into another, ended up drawing big crowds participating in a sort of autonomous revival - reacting to the slightest stimulus with adulation and praise, which is what I experienced when I was in a similar situation, and is what Dr. Nelson experienced as well. This explains why, over the course of several years, no one from an established secular organization such as the US embassy in Cairo, or the New York Times for example, did not acquire evidence of the event that they attest is real.1

The reason this event didn’t cause her to convert to Christianity is obvious. When you actually experience these events, they are much duller and more sociological than they are claimed to be.

Bentham’s response:

A bit busy, so I can't write out a long response, but ping me in a week, and I'll have it be more comprehensive. A few comments:

1) I am far, far less confident in the miracle stuff than the philosophical arguments. Don't use them as litmus tests for how much you should trust my religious arguments, as they're the religious arguments I'm least confident in. Much more confident, for instance, in the expected efficacy of the shrimp welfare project than the Zeitoun stuff--I probably only have a credence of a bit below .5 in the miracle of Zeitoun being veridical.

2) Seems consistent with the miracle report that God would miraculously make a light appear and would have people's perceptions of it be influenced by their precepts and culture. The miracle doesn't have to involve Mary appearing looking as she normally did.

First of all, I appreciate the kind words and the willingness to read my stuff, despite disagreeing a lot. I appreciate it when people rule others in not out. I haven't read your blog much, but looks good!

Second of all, even if we grant Nelson's account, it's wildly unclear where the lights came from. This is what's most puzzling--that the lights continued to appear only over the Church over the course of years, even though all the streetlights and so on were disconnected. What would explain it? The police investigated--they found nothing!

Doesn't seem that surprising on the divinity explanation that a skeptic from very far away wouldn't see anything--there was already a giant crowd. Your theory, aside from leaving the lights unexplained (lights do not ordinarily continually reappear over the same spot for three years despite every plausible light source being disconnected) also fails to explain the early sightings, wherein people mistook the light for Mary. This is not a typical property of lights.

I suggest you read her post “Why "we" want insurance executives dead” first.

Healthcare is an interesting beast. To explain the case for government intervention in healthcare, we can begin with the premise that people should never be rejected from receiving care for say, a bullet wound. You would not want to hold up treatment for someone about to die.

What ends up happening is that this person is given treatment, but caring for people is expensive, and someone will need to pay. Not paying for healthcare does not make sense, because becoming a doctor or otherwise any healthcare professional takes years of training - and if salaries were too low due to not getting paid, there would be no incentive to build out that infrastructure. So healthcare is one of those things that, if you leave entirely to the market, some people will die due to unaffordability. The inherent cost of the issue is inescapable and must be paid by someone. That’s the simple logic behind why it shouldn’t just be left to the market.

So we have the basic situation: people are given treatment, and someone has to pay for it. And in our society, that someone is a combination of the government, citizens, and insurance companies.

The insurance company

How insurance works is:

1. You pick a plan/a plan is picked for you by your job

2. You pay a monthly premium

3. If and when you are in need of care, insurance pays out based on your plan

What this means in practice is that the insurance company is selling you a product for a cost. Since it’s a business, it needs to make money to continue to exist. What does Taylor say about this?

Let me be super clear: my post uses a collective "we" and is explaining the public sentiment. It is not me personally saying "I want these executives dead and so we should kill them." I am explaining that thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people.

According to Taylor, the people at the top “rake in millions.”

Just what is the profit margin of insurance companies exactly? Around 3.4%, or $18 billion in 2022.

Even if we were able to eliminate administrative profits entirely, as a fraction of total healthcare spending at $4.5 trillion a year, you would be saving a little more than 4 billion dollars. Given that the US spends 16.6% of its GDP on healthcare, what you end up seeing is that insurance profits almost certainly do not account for the gap between the US and the second-place holder, Germany, at 12.7 percent. Compared to Germany, the US is 27 percent higher in terms of it’s healthcare expenditures/GDP. We’ll touch on the cause of this increase shortly.

Also according to Taylor, it’s insurance companies who are responsible for all of this suffering:

People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering. I think it’s good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it. Again, not so they can be murdered, but so that we can change the system and start holding people in power accountable for their actions.

I just think this is wrong.

The suffering is caused by disease, issues of old age, or accidents. Suggesting that insurance companies are the cause of this pain elides the fact that pain and suffering are a feature of life to be mitigated. To the extent that insurance companies cause pain, it’s mostly to healthcare providers who they spend most of their time arguing against in order to lower costs.

This is the case whether it’s a private insurance company, or government insurance. Ultimately, these costs have to be bargained against, which is a dynamic we see play out in country after country.

So, what is the cause of the healthcare spending crisis in the US? We should be careful in answering this question, because this frequently stated claim presupposes that there even is a spending crisis in the first place.

There is no “healthcare crisis” in the United States by any reasonable definition

What are some reasonable definitions of what a healthcare crisis could be?

1. Most people have no health insurance, and will pay for the brunt of care themselves.

2. The US is uniquely terrible with overspending.

3. The country is, generally speaking, in poor health because of bad healthcare.

It’s important to keep in mind some basic stats when people tell you to kill CEOs due to any of these supposedly ongoing crises:

I. 92% of Americans have health insurance, with a majority being satisfied with their coverage.

Health insurance, just like congress is an example of a thing that people rate higher when asked about their individual experience, but rate lower when asked about their feelings on the topic with respect to the entire nation. But individually speaking, people are mostly fine with the insurance they do have, and the overwhelming majority of people do in fact have coverage. It’s not 2010 anymore: the ACA was passed and healthcare expansions have been in place for more than a decade.

This is an example where the discourse has not caught up to changing times.

II. The US is, by and large, within expected trends in healthcare spending. (read here from Random Critical Analysis, and here from the Economist)

Imagine you live in a lower income country like Uruguay. You’re not going to spend that much on healthcare, because you are poor. You’ll take care of your more immediate needs first. But as you move up the income ladder, you’ll be more inclined to spend more money on healthcare than you otherwise would. The truth is that a lot of healthcare spending is not a do-or-die thing as most people say it is. When you get a cold, or if you want a nose job, or veneers etc., is a choice that you can make without the duress of a life or death decision.

So what you see is that people elect to spend more money on healthcare (a broadly defined term) as they make more money. This is an interesting choice, but US spending is well within trends here.

RCA’s posts on healthcare are gargantuan, but well worth the read. For a partial dissent and more comprehensive view of this data, read Noah Smith on Healthcare, Education, and Childcare.1

III. Lack of healthcare access cannot entirely explain health outcome differences.

One might imagine that health outcomes being worse in the US could be due to factors beyond healthcare. Including car accidents, murder rates, obesity, and drug overdoses as examples. I just don’t buy that 8% of people being uninsured explains poor health outcomes, as opposed to these statistics. These metrics significantly diminish our health outcomes, and cannot plausibly be explained by a lack of insurance.

Car deaths:

Murder:

Obesity:

Drug overdoses:

All that said, there are healthcare problems. We do spend a lot, and if fertility is anything to go by, healthcare costs will become a big issue in the future, but the term “crisis” is inappropriate for what is in reality a solvable problem.

Murdering people is bad

Simply put, many secular trends cause US healthcare spending to be high, but it’s in line with the trends affecting each country, most notably due to aging I’m sure, as well as various societal issues causing more obesity, car accidents, murder, drug overdoses, Baumol’s cost disease and so on. Looking at health outcomes and describing a made up crisis to blame on insurance companies is a much too simplistic view of a more complicated issue, the full extent of which I don’t have time to cover in a single post.2 In any case, there’s nothing inherently immoral with an insurance company responding to outrageous provider billing with “um… source?” Providers are a titan in the healthcare space, and it’s understandable that similarly large companies need to bargain on behalf of cost control.

In any case, Lorenz shouldn’t be happy about people being murdered.

Suggesting that killing insurance executives is in any way a solve or a reasonable reaction to these complex issues is both evil and absurd. This is a much overstated crisis to begin with, and with profit margins as small as what we see, insurance companies cannot be saddled with the entirety of the blame. Much of the blame has to be reserved for government regulation, worker cartels, and secular trends as well as any insurance company fraud, if we are trying to accurately understand what is in fact a complicated problem.

In conclusion, Lorenz is a terrible person and should stop justifying violence and spend more time reading charts and graphs. I will commend her for her ability to take complex issues and boil them down to populist “the people vs CEOs” rage. But she’s wrong.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing and sharing. Also, we’re almost at 100 followers, and my 100th is getting some serious sloppy toppy as thanks.

- Josh

Which candidate is better?

There have been a battery of posts about this question since the first shot was fired by Hanania in favor of Trump. Several responses were given: Jeff Maurer, Jeff Giesea, and Bentham’s Bulldog, all in favor of Kamala. I am on team Kamala, but I’m the closest to the center on this issue - They are firmly pro-Kamala and while I am directionally on that side, I am much less enthusiastic about the choice. I find this conversation refreshing as people usually do not try to provide a detailed answer to this question, because they treat the answer as trivially obvious even though an honest answer would have to cover everything from history, the constitution and the stated policies of the candidates, and even the results of prediction markets and game-theoretic reasoning. I’m glad each of these writers took on that challenge to provide a much needed detour from the crude level of discourse you usually see around these questions.

On the Trump question, the undecided voter can take these 4 posts above as a jumping off point to get a lay of the land and the points in favor and against. I’ll start by sketching out the main arguments used by our Belligerents, before adding my own.

Hanania’s argument is roughly as follows:

• Conservatives are flawed in many respects, but the Republican party stands for Capitalism, which is important to remember given that the strength of the economy is the best way to improve people’s lives.

• Typically, this is not what the conservative party is. In different times and places, the conservative party is usually not the pro-Capitalism party, but in the United States that happens to be the case.

• Cultural rights are less valuable than economic rights. This is because with money you can flee to a more free area or otherwise bypass lots of harmful cultural policy. Economic security underlines cultural freedom.

• Is the Democratic party actually anti-market? Prediction markets are one example, with Democrats being opposed and Republicans in favor. Even in non-culturally charged low-salience issues, the parties regress to some mean where the Democratic party is against markets and the Republican party is in favor.

• Republicans are much worse on immigration, but voting for a candidate is actually just voting for a coalition, and a vote for Trump is a vote for the pro-market coalition. In general, Republicans are better than Democrats.

Bentham responds:

• He agrees with the broad thrust of article, but has three main points that change his vote to Kamala.

• The first is competence. Kamala is much more competent than Trump, and when it comes to running the White House competency is a vital asset. She is not only more intelligent and harder working but is more likely to hire on competency as opposed to loyalty the way Trump would.

• This means that on at least some X-risk scenarios Kamala is more likely to navigate those issues better. Covid is a good example of this.

• Lastly, Trump is worse on factory farming. For Bentham this alone is disqualifying.

Jeff Giesea’s points:

• Giesea was a lifelong Republican, until Jan 6. That event completely changed his view of Trump and as such his support for the candidate.

• Trump has poor character and as such has transformed the Republican party into a grift. On the other hand, Kamala’s campaign has been so well ran that it speaks to her competency as a potential president. He views Jan 6th as a red line, that no matter what economic points you want to give to Trump you just can’t vote for him.

• Giesea still disagrees with Kamala on economics, but views giving Trump the nuclear launch codes as foolish.

Jeff Maurer’s points:

• He starts by stating that he will talk only about economics for the sake of the response being directly to Richard’s argument, but that Trump is still a threat to democracy and that matters.

• Maurer says that the price gouging stuff is dumb, but plenty of left-leaning pundits have attacked Kamala over it, showing that the left has an autoimmune response to this sort of thing. Also, Kamala’s positions on these things are more about getting votes than being representative of deeper feelings about capitalism. “The first thing is that left-leaning economists have queued up to call the policy stupid — Jason Furman, Catherine Rampell, Noah Smith, Josh Barro, and the Washington Post editorial board — to give an incomplete list — have publicly said “shit sucks””

• In any case, markets are better when they are regulated and anti-trust is widely used.

• Trump is advocating for a large tariff hike, which is also anti-capitalist. He’s also anti-immigration. For what it’s worth, Harris is more of a YIMBY than Trump.

• Broadly, Maurer agrees that the basic framing of the parties is this: the parties are controlled by kooks, the question is which kooks are more in control? There is a degree of symmetry to the parties in this regard, with the Warrenites being massively influential in the Democratic party, and a large assortment of grifters and opportunists for the Republicans.

• Maurer uses the federal reserve and debt ceiling fights as informative to this question.

I. Response to Maurer

For the three responses, I would rank them in order of which one is best as: Giesea - Bentham - Maurer.

To Maurer’s point about the debt ceiling fights, parties only have so many levers to signal to their voters what their stances are. The Republican party cannot realistically lower the debt, but they still deem it necessary to signal that they care about it by fighting over the debt ceiling periodically. Obviously the debt ceiling simply allows us to pay existing debt and isn’t a tool that can actually lower the debt, but voters are ignorant of that fact - they literally think that Republicans fighting against the debt ceiling is them fighting the debt. It’s not so much that Republicans are uniquely uninformed about how the government works, it’s that very few people - my guess around %95 cannot describe the debt ceiling correctly. You pander to the audience you have, not the audience you wish you had.

As for the left having an autoimmune response to Harris’ bad ideas, this is not actually a good thing on the meta level. An autoimmune response indicates sickness, and the fact that there is a market for a small number of center-left commentators to push back against her policy positions does not indicate that the Democratic party is healthy. It’s sick in an important way: they’re too statist and not pro-market enough, and there are many influential groups pushing it left.1 The right doesn’t have this same defense mechanism because market supremacy is something of a conceptual anchor on the right, whereas it’s a lively debate on the left. It’s still good in isolation that the left has this reaction, likely a result of absorbing more intelligent people and experts from the right, a topic I’ll touch on in a bit.

Anyway, most of what the executive does is appoint people and sign executive orders. She’ll sign a high number of anti-market orders and directives. On the executive order point, the case against Kamala is stronger. Maurer is right to bring up the tariff and immigration points, but I do wish someone would try to calculate the actual cost of these things. I’m not absolutely positive it outweighs the damage Kamala would do, and I don’t think most people disagree given that they usually only mention those things once. His point about fed independence is very good - that is a great example of Trump being extremely dumb and anti-expertise. Trump has a habit of regressing to just installing cronies to positions of power.

As far as the points about capitalism in general, the most important economic policy a government can effectively do is redistribution. Both candidates are pro-redistribution and I don’t see Trump really cutting medicare or social security. Maurer’s points about regulations being good are weaker - there are hundreds of thousand of pages in the code of regulations, and the effects it has on the economy cannot be definitively quantified in any objective way. It’s too complex, and there are an infinite number of ways a researcher can slice and dice the data to conjure any number of important correlations between the Federal Code and the Economy. You could try to do cross-country comparisons to avoid this problem, but that introduces about as much complexity to the analysis as it subtracts. As far as science goes it’s unknowable.

To Maurer’s credit, he did say he would only address the economic argument against Trump, which is Kamala’s weakest point as a candidate.

II. Competency is key

Why was Trump unable to successfully steal the election? It basically comes down to what the executive actually does - which is making executive decisions about appointments and orders. Trump’s original sin was playing nice with the Republican party and choosing Mike Pence. As a giveaway to the evangelical wing of the party, Trump chose Pence as his vice presidential running-mate. This was because lip-service will only get you so far; at some point you need to make a real political choice to secure the votes of people who have some reason to be skeptical of you. But he didn’t repeat that decision most of the time, and most of the time he surrounded himself with hacks and Trump loyalists.

It was this critical reason, among others, that caused Trump not to be able to steal the election. Trump surrounds himself with retards and incompetent hacks, mostly because being competent and intelligent correlates with not wanting to do everything the man says. This means that the people closest to him end up being worse in general, because he chooses based on loyalty and fealty to the MAGA cult over competence. The people who came up with the fake electors scheme, the lawyers who tried to argue that there was widespread fraud, and the rioters who showed up on Jan 6th were all really, really dumb. There was almost no shot at any of this working - which is good news for us, but bad news if they actually did get power again and were really running the country.

In all likelihood, a Trump 2 administration will differ in one very important way from Trump 1: he will have realized that people like Pence, these individuals that are lifelong Republicans, are not loyal enough to him. His cabinet will be filled to the brim of the dumbest, lowest IQ people possible, pledging loyalty to Mar-A-Lago above the constitution. Vance is the first step in this direction - and is why a lot of political commentators thought this was a misstep when he could have chosen much more obvious picks. He made that mistake once and has no intention of repeating it.

So why can I agree with Hanania that economics is the most important issue, and that the Republican party has many strong points in that regard, but still support Kamala? It comes down to human capital. It’s true that Kamala has plenty of bad opinions, and it’s also true that Elizabeth Warren and the lizard people have had a worryingly large impact on the party, but the Democratic bench is full to the brim of some very strong players who are good on economics. What you will ultimately get from Kamala is an administration hamstrung from the beginning by a close senate - likely the first administration in a long time that enters the White House without a senate majority. I do not expect this to improve much in the midterms if Kamala wins this year.

Losing the senate also compromises her pick of Judges who will rule on a variety of important economic issues thanks to Chevron. Her cabinet will be mostly standard Democrats with decent heads on their shoulders, able to exercise rational judgement while carrying out their duties. I have no doubt she will sign a flurry of bad executive orders but the most damaging of those will likely be challenged in court, I bet successfully so. The most insane of her ideas such as price gouging will not be able to pass due to a divided congress, and while I am dismayed that there has to be an autoimmune response to them, the pushback she receives from experts will likely make her back down to a degree because she will defer to experts in a way that Trump would not.

The points about tariffs and immigration are worth bringing up however, mainly because Trump is on the wrong side of both of those issues. While Article I, Section 8 of the constitution does give congress tariff power, congress has largely relinquished this power to the executive with a series of acts over the years, especially during the 60s and 70s.

The Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (Section 232), the Trade Act of 1974 (Section 301), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), and the Tariff Act of 1930 all contribute to the executive’s tariff authority. Both Trump and Biden invoked the Trade Expansion Act and the Trade Act of 1974 to levy tariffs, and Trump also threatened to use the IEEPA during negotiations with Mexico but didn’t have to because Mexico gave in anyway. There’s nothing really stopping Trump from instituting arbitrarily high tariffs, which will not only damage the United States but also our allies abroad as well.

The same story is true with Immigration. Article I, Section 8 also gives congress immigration power, but they’ve relinquished most of that to the executive too. Importantly the enforcement or lack thereof of much existing immigration policy is left to the executive’s discretion. This is exercised through the DHS, ICE, and USCIS in terms of border security as well as deportations and immigration applications.

Presidents have also used executive orders to control immigration, with two important examples. Using Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Trump issued travel bans that were initially blocked but later held up in court. Obama issued DACA which acted as de facto immigration policy, granting illegal immigrants who arrived as children deportation protection. Prosecutorial discretion is also an important facet of the executive’s authority as they can simply not charge someone with committing a crime. The president can use the IEEPA, change the refugee admissions cap and can even modify immigration regulations. The only check on this is judicial review, but the court is so heavily lopsided that for all intents and purposes this check is not meaningful.

In short, I do think Kamala is weaker than Trump on economics mainly because she will sign a bunch of executive orders and her appointments won’t be stellar, but because of a series of bills the president just has too much say over the border and tariffs - issues that Trump has been consistently terrible at and vows to be even worse.

III. Final Thoughts

I think the choice is surprisingly close. The issue boils down to judging Kamala by her words on the campaign trail when she is trying to secure her party’s support - and before she has been tested by general election voters and a divided congress, compared to an idealized view of Trump if he were to focus on being meaningfully pro-market.

From my point of view, the lay of the land is as follows,

Kamala:

• After failing to get any traction during the 2020 primaries and finding herself catapulted into the spotlight, is posturing as hard-left on economics to gain Democratic party support and to distance herself from Trump, given that they both support entitlement spending. This makes her come across as more left-wing than she otherwise would be.

• This is causing her to reflexively spit out Warren talking points, facing backlash seconds later after the Republican party labels those views socialist, and even getting pushback from her own side and experts. She seems to be shying away from speaking about those topics again.

• Because Manchin is retiring and the Montana senate race looks like an R victory, Kamala would be the first president to be elected without a senate majority in quite some time. This dumps water on all of her policy ambition as well as her judicial appointments. There are however 2 things she can still do on her own:

• 1) She can sign executive orders, and she most certainly will sign many, possibly a record breaking amount. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to predict the outcome of this.

• 2) She can appoint people to her cabinet and other agency positions. I expect most of these to be standard Democrats, but most importantly they will probably be smart and qualified. This is not all sunshine and rainbows however, for example: Trump appointed a business-friendly NLRB, and Biden appointed a union-friendly NLRB chair. Although the union membership rate has slowly declined under Biden, so I am yet again puzzled at the lack of effect the government seems to have on this sort of stuff.

• These being her only moves is still contingent on Montana, with Electionbettingodds.com giving Republicans a %65 chance of winning.

Trump:

• Will come into power with the senate and likely the house as well.

• His administration will be something like the first one, but even more Trumpy this time. I predict that if there is another pandemic or serious disaster, the response will be even more confused than the first time given more Trump loyalists in power.

• He will remove Powell and replace him with someone who will raise and lower interest rates at Trump’s behest.

• Trump will pass tax cuts for the rich, ballooning the deficit at the same time his fed chair stooge lowers interest rates, increasing inflation and making the average person poorer. This is because tax policy can be changed with a simple majority and does not abide by normal filibuster procedure.

• He will try to mitigate this with increasingly large tariffs, which will for the most part backfire and make things even more expensive. We likely go into something of a recession during this.

• He will appoint the dumbest, lowest IQ MAGA loyalists to every important position of power, starting with RFK being the head of the CIA. Whether he does it or not doesn’t matter, even considering the possibility of doing so is absurd. This is a glimpse of what’s to come.

• He will also heavily restrict immigration because why not.

I conclude that Kamala is the right choice for the job. Hanania brings up good points like executive orders and regulations, but I’m sure many of her orders will get challenged, and the code of regulations has increased linearly through Republican and Democratic presidents anyway. What I’m basically saying is that in some important respects the executive has a ton of latitude, but in the big picture it’s hard for the executive to meaningfully implement socialism using executive orders and regulations. Contingent on Montana Harris will be facing an uphill battle to do much. This is basically because she is perceived as very left, which is the system working as intended. She could be more moderate and likely win the presidency and senate, but she’s not so she’s less likely to win either of those things.

Trump on the other hand just so happens to be in the position to do a lot of bad things: he would make poor appointment choices not based on merit but based on MAGA loyalty, he would heavily restrict immigration, he would pass ever larger tariffs and fire Powell, and he would also balloon the deficit with tax cuts, damaging the economy in the process. This is nothing to speak of abortion or other social values that may or may not pass under his administration. This also doesn’t touch on issues with democratic norms or institutions that result from him filling the government with sycophants. You basically have to hope that his appointments er towards being more pro-market in between giving Trump blowjobs and just being plain corporatist - favoring or disfavoring market actors based on fealty to Trump.

I think that if the choices were different, my choice would be different. A more normal Republican would be a very competitive choice against someone like Kamala possibly even nudging me over to their side. But Trump is a genuinely special case and the low IQ appeal that he has bleeds into his decision making and his closest political allies’ leadership. Our institutions will become dumber and less competent as a result, and the xenophobia he and the larger MAGA crew are known for will negatively affect our relationships abroad with tariffs as well as immigration. The competency issue also carries with it a bit of x-risk with them being unable to correctly interpret information in highly charged and unclear circumstances in a way that would not be the case in a Harris administration.

Let me be perfectly clear: I support split ticketing and voting for Harris alongside Republicans down ballot if there are decent non-MAGA choices there, depending on candidate stances and quality. I also think that if Trump loses and MAGA loses mindshare among politicians, then I could see myself endorsing Republicans for the 2026 midterms. This is all highly contingent on my opinions as time goes on and the state of politics of course, but it’s a possibility.

The Democratic party may be sick, but the Republican party is dead. It’s the Mar-a-Lago party now, and it’s just not competent enough to be in charge of the country. For this reason I believe Harris is the better choice.2

EDIT Oct/25/24; Not once during this essay did I bring up foreign policy, which is a mistake on my part - but if included, the essay may have ballooned in length. Long story short the worrying combination of Trump’s domestic policy combined with his stance on foreign policy has a decent chance of ending very poorly, and does impact an objective assessment of his potential administration very negatively.

Edit 7/19: There has been much discussion on whether Destiny condones the shooting or if he merely “lacks sympathy” for Donald Trump. This post was written hours after Destiny began commenting on it when his rhetoric was at its most violent, and he has since taken a more toned down line on the assassination. Regardless, his interview with Piers Morgan is more than enough to substantiate the view that he does not condone the shooting - which works well enough for this piece to remain relevant.

Destiny, in broad strokes, has shared what I would call a 'Post-liberal' view of political assassinations. Typically, liberals are against political assassinations because they view voting as how power is determined as opposed to taking power by killing political opponents. He extends this view to all conservatives and I assume anyone to the right of him who supports Trump, in the sense that if politics is all about preventing threats then anyone who aids and abets the threat in any way is an acceptable target (or that he won't have sympathy for attacks, or that he hopes the shooter’s aim improves etc). Whatever his position is1 - I am against it for the following reasons:

The main arguments are the following:

1. The modern rarity of political assassinations implies that the mentally ill are prone to being copycats.

2. Mentally ill people lack proper judgment and are unlikely to be successful.

3. Conservatives do not want to "destroy the country" in any meaningful sense, Destiny's view that they do ignores all faults with the Democratic party's program and marketing as well as the historically unpopular candidate Joe Biden. There are good reasons to vote for the republican party as well as Trump that he’s ignoring.2

I. The Rarity of Political Assassinations.

Richard Hanania writes that political assassinations used to be more common. I asked Claude.ai to list 19th and 20th century assassinations but stopped at 30.

1. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914) - Heir to Austro-Hungarian throne

2. Abraham Lincoln (1865) - U.S. President

3. John F. Kennedy (1963) - U.S. President

4. Mahatma Gandhi (1948) - Indian independence leader

5. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) - Civil rights leader

6. Alexander II of Russia (1881)

7. Yitzhak Rabin (1995) - Israeli Prime Minister

8. Anwar Sadat (1981) - Egyptian President

9. Leon Trotsky (1940) - Russian revolutionary

10. Indira Gandhi (1984) - Indian Prime Minister

11. William McKinley (1901) - U.S. President

12. Benazir Bhutto (2007) - Former Pakistani Prime Minister

13. Patrice Lumumba (1961) - First Prime Minister of Congo

14. Malcolm X (1965) - Civil rights leader

15. Robert F. Kennedy (1968) - U.S. Senator

16. Reinhard Heydrich (1942) - Nazi official

17. Ngo Dinh Diem (1963) - President of South Vietnam

18. Olof Palme (1986) - Swedish Prime Minister

19. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (1975)

20. James A. Garfield (1881) - U.S. President

21. Park Chung-hee (1979) - President of South Korea

22. Rafael Trujillo (1961) - Dominican dictator

23. Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898)

24. King Alexander I of Yugoslavia (1934)

25. Huey Long (1935) - U.S. Senator

26. Luis Carrero Blanco (1973) - Spanish Prime Minister

27. Ziaur Rahman (1981) - President of Bangladesh

28. George Moscone (1978) - Mayor of San Francisco

29. Harvey Milk (1978) - San Francisco City Supervisor

30. Inejiro Asanuma (1960) - Japanese Socialist Party leader

These are just in the 19th and 20th century. Given supposed 'political polarization' over time, you would expect there to be way more political assassinations today considering that firearms are much better, more prevalent and declining mental health. In short, there are more crazy people today (per capita and absolute) and also way more and better firearms. This indicates that crazy people express their craziness in socially understandable ways. It may be that the rate of political assassinations can be heavily socially influenced, because school shootings were less common in history and political shootings more common, but that has reversed today likely for social contagion reasons. In sociology this is called the Mass Shooting Contagion theory. Talking about and valorizing how great political violence is in any way, even if tacit justification and not outright calls, could increase the rate of political assassinations. For this reason I think it's understandable why so many people are condemning it - and I believe that Destiny has entirely ignored this possibility in favor of even worse arguments in support of the idea.

II. Mentally Ill People Lack Proper Judgement.

No matter how strong arguments in favor of political assassinations could be, the reality is that people who actually want to do them are going to be more ill on average, causing their judgement to be poor. Destiny seems to view it as okay if Trump died, but I'm not positive that it would be any better than him surviving (not including the other arguments, in which push me to the side that it is better that he lived.) In reality, no one can know what would have happened, but if the shooter was successful I would expect more copy cats. You could say that there are more mentally ill left people than right people, and in the ensuing war you would expect the left to win out in terms of number of assassins, but mentally ill attackers don't always have clearly defined political views in terms of left-right. A lot of times their political positions are as crazy as they are.

It's also reasonable to assume that crazy people have worse aim and lack of proper follow-through and planning. The sniper in this situation did manage to get into a decent position before getting some shots off, but a more trained and clear-headed actor such as an actual military sniper would have almost certainly succeeded if they had the same objective. This is because they would have had more training, not be actively insane, and planned for days if not weeks of the exact location, type of gun to bring and so on. Mental illness impairs the level of conscientiousness you would need to consistently do a ton of damage, and it's only in wild situations where crazy people rack up high body counts, such as an actual concert full of thousands with a hotel overlook and nearly endless ammunition. The success of the vegas shooter doesn’t prove that mentally ill people are good shots, only that they ‘succeed’ when given unlimited ammunition and targets.

Any justification, tacit calls, or any view that this act was good or could be good or whatever clarification you want to make - has to keep in mind that your reserve stock of fighters are insane and not capable of consistently executing their plans.

III. Conservatives Do Not Want to "Destroy The Country" in any meaningful sense, and there are good reasons to support Trump that do not involve destroying the country.

I view this as the most important section, and unfortunately I'm not going to spend much time on it because actually going into policy would take thousands of words, so I'll keep it short. The basic view is that Destiny has a warped view of conservatives for some reason or another that I won't speculate on3, and is not taking seriously the points in favor of voting for Trump/Republicans. This is leading him to think that the only possible reason someone would vote for Trump is because they want to Destroy Democracy. Also, he thinks that Trump will Destroy Democracy, which I will try to touch on but won't be able to fully cover. The argument in this section is that since they don’t want to destroy democracy, the idea that they do should not be used as justification for violence. I will shortly break down the candidates and where they agree/disagree.

Policy points that Biden and Trump agree on (That I think are the most important):

1. United States economic policy should be more populist in general. We should impose tariffs on trade and make things in America and so on. We should deficit spend our way to increase domestic production because free trade has only damaged the working class.

2. Various trade deals and globalization have weakened America and empowered our enemies abroad. We should limit this and return to how it was, with good jobs and not rely so much on Chinese goods.

3. Social Security and Medicare, as well as most entitlement spending, should not be cut in any way. Taxes should not be raised on anyone (Trump) making more than 400k (Biden) to pay for this.

Policy points that they disagree on (most important):

1. Abortion.

2. What should be done in Israel (Biden would be tougher on Netanyahu) and Ukraine (Trump is skeptical of Zelensky and Ukraine aid)

3. Trump may or may not want to aid Taiwan if they are invaded.

4. Trump wants to cut taxes for the rich and fund this with a tariff. Biden wants to levy more tariffs but would spend it on deficit reduction or more domestic spending and not cut taxes.

5. Obviously they would appoint conservative/progressive people to the judiciary and civil service. This is basically what project 2025 is.

6. Cultural reasons. Trump is more culturally conservative than Biden and may sign bills that are positioned conservatively in nature.

Now, you may disagree with Trump and agree with Biden on all of those things. You may even think that cutting taxes, pulling aid from Ukraine to some degree, appointing conservatives, and signing conservative bills are absolutely terrible. But this is not Destroying Democracy in any meaningful sense. The pillars of a second Trump campaign, at least policy wise, are run-of-the-mill Trump populism. If Destiny thinks that would amount to the end of the country then I have no idea what he's talking about.

The last major point in this section is about Biden and the democratic party. As a candidate, Biden does not have mass appeal. He is literally an out of touch old person. His popularity is at low levels rarely seen, and according to both Nate Silver's model as well as the economist, is at less than 30 percent odds to win the electoral college. Both models predict that as of today, he will lose the popular vote. He's not particularly likeable and under his administration there has been a record high of illegal immigration which is causing backlash to immigration in general. Inflation is high and wage growth is poor relative to recent history, and despite Biden's claims that corporations are behind it, "greed" has not caused the increase in inflation, spending has.

What you have is an unpopular candidate due to factors including his age, inflation, and immigration. You may disagree that Trump would change these things or be an answer to them. But it's not Destroying Democracy to vote against Biden on these issues, even if you think that on net Biden is the better candidate. There are legitimate points of grievance about his administration and as a candidate in specific, and these broad ideas of immigration and inflation contribute majorly to his slipping approval numbers. The opinion that you should vote for him in spite of that may be reasonable and in fact I mostly agree, is still not a justification for political violence of any kind. Since the majority of people disapprove of him anyway, that implies there is a lot of violence to be doing since there's a low chance he wins in a fair election - which I've already argued against in the points above.

IV. Final Thoughts

A sub point that I won't cover in depth here because I'm not going to take up any more time is the idea that Trump, regardless of his voters, will want to destroy democracy or be able to. In short, I agree that Jan 6th was terrible and that Trump is a threat to democracy yadda yadda,4 but him legitimately winning an election (which he is likely to do) will prevent him from trying to contest his loss (which is unlikely to happen). Unfortunately/fortunately, Trump winning may very well lower his desire to contest the election. I predict that he will not destroy democracy in any meaningful sense if he wins.5 You may think that Jan 6th should disqualify him from winning regardless (I agree with this) but that is beside the point. Voters can decide for themselves whether they want 4 more years of a Biden administration that they mostly don’t like, or 4 years of Trump with some chance of democracy ending. It’s not clear to me that they should automatically vote for Biden because this is contingent on a cost-benefit analysis of the value of democracy and the percentage chance that Trump ‘ends it’ and the expected value of the Biden administration, which I personally think is reasonable but could be convinced otherwise.

As an aside, there is something strange to the idea that Biden is unpopular and will likely lose, and conservatives should be killed because they are threatening Democracy. There is a sub point related to Biden’s administration and how various decisions like him not stepping down, choosing Kamala as his VP, and (the much memory-holed) positioning of his first term as a temporary transition, but alas I am out of time here.6

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure what Destiny thinks about the whole Trump Will End The Union Theory, because in this tweet he frames the outcome as basically tax cuts, which I think is more realistic than the end of the American experiment. There is an outside chance that the assassination attempt emboldens Trump to be more extreme, but that would just be another argument for why it was bad, not that it was good.

There are other arguments such as the expected value of assassinating an unpopular person to begin with, their possible replacement with a more popular candidate, emboldening the party to be more extreme, revenge killings, breakdown of social order, lessening of democratic legitimacy of the winner if their opponent was assassinated, the moral implications of murder, and so on and so forth. I did not include these not because they are bad but because you have to stop somewhere.

TL;DR

1. Shootings are rare enough in modern history that it implies that they are subject to social influence.

2. Shooters are mentally unwell and not a reliable group of people to carry out carefully planned attacks.

3. There are legitimate reasons to vote against Biden/for Trump such as Biden's lack of appeal as a person, inflation, or immigration. It is these reasons that power support for Trump, not some desire to "destroy democracy" or whatever. Trump will not destroy democracy by winning a fair election and carrying out what his voters want, which is mostly not to destroy democracy or whatever. Destiny is hyperventilating over the idea that Trump and his voters want to and will destroy democracy for no good reason.7