techfeathers

The uncertainty is crazy, on the one hand I can't imagine that they'll actually want to cause people that much pain, especially with midterms only 2 years away, on the other hand, are they really just going to run a normal boring republican administration?

Totally objectively, not in regards to any specific person's personality, or the things they've said, or "Political Party bad" I don't know how you make such big structural change that is going to cause that kind of pain in under 4 years without some kind of anti-democratic push.

> Free trade has overextended itself and people now want less stuff and more meaning. That's why they came out in droves for Trump

I absolutely love your argument about less stuff and more meaning, and this issue of better jobs for the working class is one I would have loved to see realistically debated during the election (JD Vance briefly mentioned it, but there wasn't really serious debate about issues and policies).

But the idea that this is why people came out for Trump seems just not true. People mostly seemed to come out for the opposite reason, that they felt financially squeezed by inflation. I think a larger story about bringing manufacturing back for meaning is interesting, but not at the forefront of voters minds.

"Exit polls on Tuesday showed a stark partisan divide. Some two-thirds (67%) of voters said the condition of the economy was “not good/poor,” and only 32% thought the economy was “excellent/good."

https://fortune.com/2024/11/06/trump-harris-economy-voters-h...

> Yesterday's stock market bounce after the election of Donald Trump has added billions to the pockets of the tech elite, although apparently Mark Zuckerberg failed to cash in.

I know Mark is trying to play nice but I just don't see a world where Meta gets along with this administration, Maybe if they can stay out of the news, but liberal movements better not go viral on instagram/threads or he's screwed. I think Mark is trying to be more firm about a libertarian approach to governance, and the administration is too fundamentally socially conservative, and I imagine it will be painful, because facebook is likely the size it is because of it's hands off approach. Any attempt to regulate Meta could probably dramatically impact it's userbase.

Weren't Tariffs pretty central to the argument of why trump? If Trump talked about Tariffs non-stop as his economic agenda, and 70+ percent of people said they trusted Trump's economic agenda, it seems like a weird thing to go back on.

> I would say the odds are not zero that one day Trump may be saying this about Elon Musk :\

I am morbidly curious about he political battles over the next few years. A lot of disparate groups came together to get Trump elected, and a lot of those groups DO NOT agree with each other. Does the classical wing of the party trust the tech wing of the party? Vance and Thiel are Catholic, do the evangelicals work well with the catholics? Do Theil and Musk still have bad blood? Does Bannon still have power, and does he trust the tech wing? I would say objectively it seems like Musk and Trump would be a powerful duo and yet I can't imagine there's enough space in the party for the both of them. Do the tech bros and finance bros really have a lot in common with the blue collar wing of the party?

I imagine the hiring process will include a ton of political intrigue. Does a celebrity president want to put a celebrity like RFK JR in charge of anything? I wouldn't think so, he seems to independent a voice.

I sort of agree with you, I assume they ran on Trump is a threat to democracy because it polled well, and the data does show that they did much better in the states they campaigned in than states they didn't (on average 1.5 points better in the swing states they campaigned in). But it obviously wasn't persuasive enough, with the people they needed to persuade.

I think that Democrats are playing defense. People talk about a political realignment and I think the Democrats have become the small-c conservative party. They're afraid of losing the progress they've made so they're on the defensive while the Republicans are on the offensive / party of change. Democrats may win in 2026 and 2028 with this strategy, but it will be slim margins, if they want a real mandate, they're going to have to completely change their strategy.

Exit polls aren't perfect, but some of the exit polls showed that people liked Kamala Harris a smidge better, but thought that Trump would be significantly better on the economy. This "Republicans are better on the economy" is a tale as old as time, and seemed to break through despite Musk saying things like their plan is to crash the economy.

If Trump had won in 2020 and the economy was in the state it is now, I think it's very likely the democrat would have won. So much of our politics is circumstance, and if "Americans thought Democrats were worse" why did Biden get 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. The #MeToo movement, BLM and most peak woke stuff happened during Trump's presidency and yet the country still chose the Democrats. Like most analysis of data, most of the takes over the next few weeks and months will be wrong.

I think in a sense a lot of what's happening is more of a spiritual argument than a political one. Who do people perceive will be more "normal" and "stable". Given the voices at the top of the Republican party, the next four years is bound for some overreactions, and Democrats will be perceived as the normal ones again.

This is not to say I don't think the Democrats have soul searching to do. I do think there are some gender alignments happening in Gen-Z an Gen-Alpha that need to be looked at, and the culture is constantly changing. The election of 2028 will be so much different than the election of 2024. But I think catastrophizing like this is also more click bait than anything tangible about "who is worse"

I do have to say, that I'm very curious to see what the next four years look like. The strange thing about the working class people that Trump brought over, is I think many of them expect Government action/intervention in their lives, and a large part of the Republican party still seems to be pretty hands off, de-regulation, attack the welfare state, tax cuts for billionaires.

So I don't want to immediately just dismiss the idea that Republicans are the party of "blue collar workers", and if they really can bring manufacturing back, they'll be heroes, but I'm curious how patient the base will be for it. If they really do cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, there will be big time economic losers. It seems like a geo-economic realignment to bring back manufacturing could take more than four years, and it seems hard to believe there won't be economic costs. will they be patient? Will that geo-economic realignment even help the current generation, and can they stay in power long enough to fulfill it?

I don't buy that Repubs are the free speech party (or even that Dems were the free speech party). Republican complaints about free speech were almost entirely self-serving and never on principal.(this is not to say judges or other conservative thought leaders may not be pro-free speech) but for the political parties: commitment to free speech comes from the tension between the two parties. Give either of them too much power and free speech is out the window.

Also, pro war party is a weird thing to say. Repubs in 2000 wanted to be the aggressors. Defense to Ukraine has thus far been pretty bi-partisan.

68% of people say "I often wish there were more political parties to choose from" describes their views either extremely or somewhat well.

Rounding up looks like around 145 million people voted in this election, that's less than half the population of the united states.

Do you have any evidence to support the idea that the current system reflects the "position of the majority"?

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-well-the...

I don't think so, he wouldn't have overcome that event, and I think this was equally a referendum on Biden.

Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.

It feels like there are lots of people in the GOP who want to go a lot farther than "Ordinary people" do.

Is it? You couldn't really know until you split out the parties. One odd thing I find with the GOP right now is there seem to be a lot of people voting with the hope they won't actually do the things they said they'd do.

> Trump is a sociopath, again amongst other things, but he is very very clear about where he stands on things and what he's planning on doing.

I don't know if you'll agree with this, but I actually think that one of Trump's gifts, or maybe his campaigns gifts seems to be to convince everyone they're going to get what they want, and is in fact not very very clear where he stands on things. He's sort of emotionally clear (tarriffs and illegal immigration)

But I also think...

If you ask a blue collar worker, they'll tell you Trump is pro-union If you ask a business owner they'll say he's anti-union. If you ask someone on the ACA, they'll tell you he'll protect it, if you ask a fiscal conservative, they'll tell you he'll abolish it. If you ask a woman, he'll keep abortion with the states. If you ask a catholic, he'll abolish abortion. He's friends to muslims but will also deport them.

He's the friend to the blue collar worker, enemy of the elites, but also friend to billionaires willing to work with him. I think this is why Trump would have beaten Sanders. Sanders would have never gotten the support of the business class, and if he did it would have eroded his support with his base, Trump is somehow immune to that.

I'm curious if habits like smoking will ever make a resurgence. Seems like the rates keep going down. I can't imagine we'll ever go back to a time where smoking in restaurants or bars is normalized again.

This may sound weird, but this article makes me wonder if my lack of reverence for heroes is a character flaw.

What? The article says you're back to "seeing the world that many thought dead: one where individual achievement matters, where male ambition serves a purpose, and where great men still shape the course of history."

Yeah, maybe the point is more about a focus on the future than a "lie" and being willing to be really ambitious about that future. Yes, Trump sort of honestly described the problem, but provided overly ambitious and conflicting ideas on how he would solve it.

This is kinda the point I'm trying to make, that in the current environment most people want a leader who isn't afraid of lying to make a point. That is in my perspective what vision mostly is. When things are in crisis, like 2020, people were probably more comforted by boring competence.

For instance, in terms of visionary leadership, I think Musk fans mostly don't care that he lies about when a product will be delivered. They want to believe so to speak.

I think the only solution was also the craziest/most risky and the party would have never gone for it.

Hold an open primary with a candidate that talks in no uncertain terms about the failures of the Biden presidency, and the new path forward, criticizing the Biden admin for not doing enough on inflation.

I think essentially Trump won in 2016 and 2024 because he was willing to take such a risk against political norms, and this was a change election. No explaining the causes of inflation, or what Biden did right and incremental steps were going to change that. People wanted a visionary leader, and while I disagree with Trump, I think Trump and Musk provided that new vision for America.

I hate this by the way, I'm an incrementalist policy wonk who in general hates visionary leadership.

But Trump talked about stopping at nothing to remake the American economy to radically improve the lives of all Americans. Harris talked about $25,000 to buy a house.