Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Stephen Hoskins's avatar

You wrote this with exactly the vitriol the admin deserves. Especially in the call-out of Samuel Hammond, who should be laughed out of wonk circles for his pompous sanewashing of Trump's obvious buffoonery.

Expand full comment
Geoff Olynyk's avatar

I think you’re right that the man himself has no plan. But the people around him? I think you’re wrong. It’s a really clear ideology. The “plan” is to restore a time when men worked in factories and supported families. (It won’t work, but plans in service of ideology usually don’t, on the left either — see “defund the police”.)

The Silicon Valley faction is belatedly realizing that their influence in the mad king’s court is low compared to the Vance wing of Catholic integrationalists / Dark Enlightenment / “based” 8chan males under 35 years old. Balaji (the Network State extreme libertarian guy) on Twitter was bemoaning that MAGA thinks they can turn the clock back to 1953 (or 1910) socially by twisting a knob called “tariffs” back to the value it had back then. But just like how IBM could set their prices to what they were in 1960, it wouldn’t restore their market dominance. US social fragmentation is driven by bigger factors than trade (see: the internet consuming all of everything socially, ie this blog).

But that’s it. They think they’re going to restore a time when women were in the kitchen and men were on an assembly line building B-24 Liberators or whatever. The “economics” are just window dressing, just like how science and theory was used as a fig leaf cover on the left when implementing extreme social justice policies for their real goal which is a sort of levelling or communism.

There’s tons more to say about horseshoe theory on this ideology. The left and the right both rightly are horrified as to what the American heartland has become in terms of social ties. But turning back clocks is hard. Doing it while half their party (the Tech Right) are trying to accelerate ever faster toward an AI takeover makes it even more bizarre when the Catholic-integrationalist wing of MAGA thinks they can do it.

(This post partly based on this great recent post from Henry Farrell here: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-reactionary-right-is-not-a-monolith )

Expand full comment
35 more comments...

No posts