State of the Discussion

There's a webtool that bypasses their paywall. I'll post a link sometime when I get home.

If I understand my party (and I think I do) the awkward problem for the Deluzio brand Dems is they are not very pro-free trade so the Trump nonsense is kind of a monkeys paw wish. They want to oppose Trump but they don't want to/believe in embracing free trade market fundamentalism. I think theyr kind of dippy but I'm a neoliberal shill so I would.

Yes, the Republican party is broken.

Strangely, there are just no incentives for your old OG Republican to do anything other than watch where this goes.

If *they* kill it, then they kill what would have been the biggest, most beautiful success ever. Career ending.

If Trump crashes and burns, whelp they just go back to their safe seats and hope to ride out the failure... some won't make it, but some will. Still better than the sure thing of ending their careers.

The parties are frozen until something breaks.

I'd say that Biden was a *GREAT* compromise candidate!

The problem is that he didn't govern as one. Whether you want to get into whether that was Biden's doing or whether it happened without his knowledge, that's fine.

But Biden was voted for enthusiastically and then... well, you remember 2024 as well as I do.

As for Harris, when asked what she would have done differently, she said nothing. She said it on The View! She said it during a softball interview to a non-wonky audience!

And that's without getting into the stuff that they were able to run ads on without Harris even addressing forcing her most ardent defenders to say stuff like "but she didn't *RUN* on that!"

And so you're stuck with the Harris attacks being "here's what she said on camera" which, as attacks go, are among the most vicious.

Why doesn't the left get more credit for running Harris and having Liz Cheney up on stage with her?

Yeah, you'd think that they would.

This might, maybe, make sense if that kind of name calling were new or unusual or anything else but it is, of course, as old as the hills, older than you and I and entirely bipartisan. Though I, being left of center, would note that calling Obama an Islamic Marxist monster or Hillary all the things they called her was language that was coming from the actual GOP party actors whereas the Desantis=Hitler chatter was largely twitter twaddle and social media pap by my recollection.

And if that language is how we got Trump then is there some magical reason that the name calling of the right by the left absolves the right of responsibility for nominating Trump (and lets' not even talk about how libertarians actors online have almost en toto sold their souls to Trump)? Or why the left gets no credit for NOT nominating a left-wing Trump despite endless name calling from the right? I mean how is this not just Murcs' law all the way down to the bones? *bursts into flames for using an LGM term here*

It's funny, a lot of centrist writers are wringing their hands because Dems aren't issuing a libertarian embrace of market fundamentalism right now. Chait frets about it over at the Atlantic right now.

Jay, me lad, going for Desantis instead of Trump isn't compromising- it's capitulating. DeSantis was running as Trump in thigh high waders.

Compromising would be sticking with your candidate and pushing them to moderate on language and policy which, let us note, Both Biden and Harris did on immigration, identity issues and many other things. I think one can say they compromised too late (Biden) or too little (Harris) since they lost but one can't pretend they didn't compromise.

I think it goes without saying that the Democrats' fortunes will greatly improve if they come up with an answer to that question. They're in the wilderness for a reason.

However I don't think the swing-ish voters have read von Mises. I think there was a very understandable thermostatic reaction due to inflation with immigration and some cultural issues as auxillaries but there was no resounding mandate for this. People are about to get double forked here, and the promise that it's all going to be worth it because a bunch of factories are going to go up (where? when? for what? who knows) is a complete lie, if that's even what people are relying on, which I'm not entirely sure it is.

That belies all political and electoral history. Biden presided over a soft landing but the voters still handed his party still got handed an L because inflation* and bad vibes from Covid occurred during his watch. Do you think those same voters are going to talk about "wringing out the rot" when Trump induces a recession, inflation and tanks their 401k's? The politically engaged Trump voters -might- babble that cope. But with just them Trump and his party will go down in a landslide.

*And to some degree his spending levels too but mostly Covid.

OK how about it's just nonsensical? We finally put the "well this is what you get for not abandoning Obama and being so mean to Romneybot in 2012" and now we're on to "Well this is what you get for not abandoning Clinton/Biden in 2016/2020 and being so mean to Rubio/Cruz/Desantis"?!

1. Higher prices on everything;

2. Fewer products available. A company called Framework is not ending lower priced laptops to the U.S. anymore because of tariffs. Nintendo has stopped taking pre-orders on the Switch 2 to figure out the tariff regime.

3. Recession, Depression, Increased Unemployment, Bankrupted industries

Should we also cater to their insistence that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim and that measles vaccines are just as dangerous as the measles, or are we only supposed to attribute and credit invented motives to Trump supporters because those are the ones we need to make them seem sympathetic?

I don't think that "bordering on autistic" is an insult when you're actually talking to people who are "bordering on autistic".

It certainly not an argument for those people to change.

This is true but it should also be noted that the Parliamentarian system provides a release valve for poor leaders. I don't think it is fool proof if a plurality of voters want authoritarianism but release valves and being able to kick out the PM from within are important.

Sure, I'd support a more intelligent approach to this from the Democrats, same as the last 8 years.

I think what's frustrating me is our silence on the question of at what point more than a couple Republicans should start to break ranks. Given their stated desire to make America great again and all, and this plan's er- inconsistency with that.

Guys, this is bordering on autistic. The Democrats have made plenty of errors resulting in some real issues of credibility. But this idea that partisan mudslinging is the decisive consideration here strikes me as its own type of Twitter brain, where political junkies project their own obscure fixations into everything without even bothering to make a case for a connection.

You don't think it's worth mentioning that Trump is about to reward his working class supporters by pushing the prices of goods through the roof and destroying whatever retirement they have saved? Or driving us towards a recession where jobs and benefits will be harder for them to come by?

I don't think too many of them were following whatever MSNBC or pre-Elon Twitter was saying about DeSantis.

Heck, I remember in 2015 when Trump was just some weirdo that nobody was taking seriously, and people talking about how Ted Cruz looked like a drowned man's cock and Rubio was a Tio Tom and so on.

That strikes me as a lot more likely to normalize Naziism than to crush it.

But I'm one of those people who sees the American ex-Producers as not particularly Naziish and conflating what they are with what happened in the 30s and 40s is not going to work out in the favor of the people who keep nominating Clintons and Kamalas.

No disagreement from me on the big strategic picture.

But I still think it's worth making a stink about the bonfire we're throwing ourselves on with Trump in hopes that maybe he in all his fickleness pulls back some; maybe some credibility is salvaged for the day after he's gone. Because as much as I agree with you on the desirability of a responsible altering of course Trump may do enough damage to make that impossible for a generation. There's no 'oops just kidding' anymore, now that we've put him in charge twice.

Given that the majority of these new buildings turn out to be "apartment complexes built out to the lot lines behind the original dumpy two-bed-one-bath ranch house in a way that's very clearly an exploitation of regulatory loopholes", I think Bass's move makes sense.

Oh, I'm not trying to excuse Trump as much as I see him as God's Punishment.

(Of course I agree that we should have bilateral 0 industrial tariffs with Europe.)