Comment by gsf_emergency_6
5 days ago
Maybe you've been outside for too long.
Both those who voted for Trump or abstained from Harris believed they were acting _against_ authoritarians.
(BB was kinda fiction-in-a-fiction and would have provided no clue either for Harris and against Trump-- and 1984 (/Schachnovelle) didn't give a clue on how you might recognise an inner party-goer if you ran into one? Maybe Animal Farm would be better?)
<anger>
Maybe it looks to you as if those who voted for Trump believed they were acting _against_ authoritarians, but I've lived among them.
I was still living in their midst when they tarred and feathered the Dixie Chicks (as they were then) for having the audacity to say GWB's Iraq Adventure might not be the most wonderful thing since sliced mayonnaise. (could we say they "cancelled" the Chicks?)
Then they claimed to be voting for DJT (a public figure whose bully bona fides go back at least 4 decades, eg https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6131533-trumpdeathpe... ) on an "isolationist" platform.
But now they're cheering Operation Southern Spear as if it were a homecoming game, as they did for GHB's Iraq. My local paper even had https://x.com/KatieMiller/status/2007541679293944266 (sorry for the X link) in it this morning.
They may say they're voting on a mind-your-own-business-principle, but whenever you look at what they do, they've consistently been voting on a leader-principle.
</anger>
Q. How do you describe a principled authoritarian follower?
A. "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind"
you are talking about the base that Trump knows he can always count on. they don't matter as much these days. (I completely forgot about them no airquotes) I'm not sure David Graeber ever publicly got angry at these guys, however*
Ask PH (or Algolia it) about who he is angry with on the left. Those who drove the Swing voters (the prole equivalent of interchangeables) over to the other side or got Biden to "abdicate" . Loosely reminds me of the turncoats at Sekigahara and Bosworth Field
https://www.hkml.net/Discuz/viewthread.php?tid=125577
(*The rival camps that the Trump "inner corporatists" take seriously are SV "inner-outer party" (Shu Han?) and WallStreet/Fed (Wu?). With their bands of incorrigible rationalists/technocrats.
Imho Trump _wants_ leftist intellectuals distracted from his true strategy, and this is why he's more careful with Mamdani-- enemy of my enemy yada yada)
https://webcdn.guangming.com.my/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/i...
One of the ways to learn a smattering of a language would be to look at YouTube comments; sentences of the form "in YYYY they still made real music" and "is anyone watching in YYYY?" seem to occur in every natural language.
(for Sekigahara I wonder if part of the issue was credibility: if Tokugawa promises so many koku, you can be pretty sure you're getting them [and in the event he even lasted into his 70s] but if Ishida promises you so many koku, well, a lot can happen in 7-8 years: what are the chances that young Toyotomi will honour Ishida's old deals?)
Edit: come to think of it, both Shu and Wu do spend many of their waking hours trying to figure out how to intermediate themselves into any possible otherwise-dyadic transaction... Wei supposedly does as well, but compared with Shu and Wu, at least here, Wei has a light touch.
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> they don't matter as much these days
True, but you were talking about voting Trump/Harris, which pretty much implies the wide electorate, no matter who the real selectorate may be.
(speaking of selection, I completely forgot to include the judiciary in previous models. Would the whole Civil Rights thing have even happened if it hadn't been for the Warren Court?)
[Not that Warren was an angel, but despite his bigotry in other ways —or maybe because of it?— he was able to win state office by just winning both party's primaries, which I hadn't even known was a thing]
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How you might recognise an inner party-goer? In the case of the US, I think long-tenured legislators were part of it during my tour, but in DJT's time I'd guess they, alongside silicon valley owners of various social graphs, are to be found among the interchangeables*.
Certainly casual Trump-watching is even less useful than the old days of Kremlin-watching; his inner circle changes so often (cue Bueno de Mesquita & Smith) that it's a good thing we have the web now — the airbrush artists probably would've organised and gone on strike if they'd had to keep up.
(I guess I should give DJT his due: I had thought the two party system was a structural problem, yet he's delivered an existence proof that it is indeed possible to do something about it)
* should someone send all 535 members of congress a copy of the snakebite article? It's not going to be me; that's their problem.
Yes!!