#i am the legendary swing voter

[mitigatedchaos]

2008 - 2020+

(~1,700 words, 8 minutes)

A summary of events and my ideological development from 2008-2020; most of this will be familiar to long-time readers; this post is mostly for later review in 5-10 years.

[ @lokifreign ]

did it seem sudden in 08?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

10 years ago was 2013. By 2013, the direction of the eventual [identitarian] shift was visible, but it wasn't established that "real" "serious" liberals were going to go along with and indulge it.

[ @lokifreign ]

I had a different view (I'm 51; Clinton cleared up any lingering misunderstandings I entertained about dem/lib); it's interesting - I'd love to read something clear about that time period from that perspective. 08 for me was more about the death of the free internet, but I'd be really interested at seeing that realization from the inside somewhat namean. thanks fr sharin'! 🫀👍 [...] never mind! ^_^ all set

So to clear this up for anyone else...

2000-2008

From the perspective of someone who grew up in the 00's, the Republican Party put a tremendous amount of political investment into the Iraq War, which turned out to be a disaster. The only WMDs were leftover chemical shells, not exactly a "clear and present danger;" I'm not aware of any of them being used in terrorist attacks.

2008-2012

So going into 2008, Republicans looked epistemically bankrupt. The War probably cost them an entire generation. It was such a colossal fuck-up that one of the early MitigatedChaos essays, back in 2017, was "A Price Paid in National Will," arguing that patriotism is an exhaustible resource. It is basically screaming at the 00's US establishment right for squandering a valuable and precious resource with their dumb war. [1] As it happens, military recruitment is way down.

By contrast, the first-term Obama-era Democratic coalition offered us people like Roland Fryer, a pragmatic-minded black academic who was willing to reach counterintuitive conclusions or try things like just paying students to see if that worked. Combined with things like the lead-crime hypothesis or support for early childhood education, the epistemic grounding was a lot better than what they offered after 2016.

The public position of the Democratic Party 2008-2012 was largely meritocratic colorblind liberal individualism, combined with moderate immigration restrictionism, with only a modest exception for Affirmative Action in universities. They were still pro free speech, valued professionalism, and valued things like consumer rights, and mostly weren't against patriotism.

This was an extremely well-hedged set of positions, adequately handling risks from multiple directions at once - and the follower libs (the "Stage 3s" as post-rationalists would call them) echoed all of it, causing the overall Democratic coalition to seem much, much smarter than they actually are.

Even electing a black President seemed a decent bet, and if there is one thing Obama is really good at, it's projecting a Presidential image.

If you combine this with Transhumanism and an expectation that significant new technologies will overcome long-standing issues in the case that social solutions don't work, kicking in around 2040-2050, as most Rationalists probably would have expected at that time, it covers most of the bases. Get some potential gains from social policy, stalling for time for a few decades, and then if any problems are leftover, mop them up with biotech.

I was also engaged in a phase of gender exploration from around 2009-2012 (in cyberspace). I encountered some of the current gender ideas early. At the time, because they weren't as popular, there was a stronger selection effect.

2013-2017

From around 2012-2013 onwards, we started getting the articles about "manspreading," and "mansplaining," combined with a frame that it was prohibited for men to question this because of "male privilege" including subconscious bias which, by definition, they could not be aware of.

I actually checked in on a Mens Rights forum around this time, and a GamerGate forum later, and contrasted what I actually saw with both media coverage and left/lib representations which were... basically almost all completely different from my direct observations.

I was very doubtful because the epistemic norms of the movement were just awful, and very obviously designed in a way that was prone to abuse.

From around 2014 onwards, those same norms were shifting to the much more dangerous field of race. Obama didn't campaign on it, and more "serious" Democrats instead of like, Gawker, were more focused on things like "Republican obstruction in Congress."

By late 2014 or early 2015, I had given up on defending the Obama Administration in arguments, which I'd been doing since around 2008.

From 2013-2015, I was feeling depressed and anxious. Without realizing what I was doing at first, I began an exercise to rework the basis of my politics by working on a fictional country, rewriting it again and again and again.

The development of some kinds of political writers may require something like this, either working from a distant time, like Moldbug, or trying to work out a simulation of a country repeatedly and gaming things out with others, as Scott Alexander and I both did. This allows something that I call Ideological Stereoscopic Vision - viewing the same issue from two ideological perspectives simultaneously. With this, it's possible to see the functional mechanics of your original ideology, which otherwise just appear to be truths.

I was going leave the Presidential box blank in the 2016 election, but voted for Clinton as a personal favor for a dear friend.

Overall my basic model from 2012 wasn't that bad. I hadn't called to deplatform all the Republicans, for instance, and once Trump won the primary, based on the uncertainty I concluded that it was possible he would win the general election.

However, I had to build a much more sophisticated model to explain the benefits of things like colorblind liberal individualism, and explain why it was being attacked, and how. Until 2014, I hadn't considered it something that even could come under serious attack, since influential people should know better than to let that happen.

2017-2020

Around 2017, I opened the blog MitigatedChaos.

In 2018, Roland Fryer was #metoo'd. An investigation mostly cleared him except to require workplace sensitivity training (proportional, IMO). However, the investigation was apparently overruled by a secret committee, and in 2019 he was suspended for 2 years without pay.

In 2018, Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" was published. This was followed in 2019 by Ibram Kendi's best-selling, pro-"corrective" discrimination, "How to Be an Anti-Racist." (At some point in 2020 or maybe 2021, the Microsoft Windows 10 login screen featured a link to "anti-racist books" with Kendi's book at the top.)

Unlike Fryer, both writers seemed uninterested in whether their proposals would actually work, as did their readers.

As someone who had voted for Obama in 2012, I was willing to elect politicians or spend money, even if that money might not necessarily work, but that was assuming those involved were actual academics making a serious attempt with some chance of success, not spiteful unqualified quacks.

Because people throughout society demanded that I take race seriously, in 2019, I conducted an investigation into school funding and whether charter schools would be capable of closing racial outcome gaps. (It's difficult to assess their effectiveness on grades due to selection effects on parents, but they're about as cost-effective as public schools, may produce a modest benefit, and allow parents to at least provide a safe environment for their children. The few online charter schools in my sample had dismal results.)

That was when I learned that the social interventions camp were 90% bluffing, hadn't checked the research, and the amount of good faith I had been giving them since 2014 was unjustified. Each of them assumed that someone else had been doing the actual work (not "doing the work" of reading about bad things that happened to racial groups, but the work of figuring out how to solve things).

That was mostly true in 2010. It certainly wasn't by 2018 - or at least the links between the people doing the work and the actual movement were well broken by that time. The implicit claims of what Social Justice can deliver, and the urgency with which they make their demands, have been wildly disproportionate the entire time.

Going into 2020, I still had hope that serious liberals might be in charge somewhere. But instead of actual reforms which might be useful, we got "Defund the Police," which as the CHAZ and subsequent national stats have demonstrated, is delusional.

After 2020

When it turned out that Biden is just lame, and the great racial awakening wasn't as promised, some of the air went out of it. Biden had the opportunity to end the thing in one swoop by just leaving Trump's executive order in place, but instead confirmed that the Democratic Party is committed to this program of crank race dogma, and in the institutions the supporters are digging trenches.

Mainstream Republicans are aware of the problem and acting now, so what was a rout has stabilized into a war front. The primary mission of the right-wing ideological vanguard from 2017-2022, waking the Republicans up to the scale of the problem, and punching through the window of social acceptability hard enough to get them moving, is now complete. As a vital or artistic movement, they no longer have the same margin of information advantage, and energy is leaving the scene.

Sometime after 2020, I developed the coalitional interest deadlock theory to explain some of what had happened - why did the Democrats double down on such a hateful strategy that's obviously bad for the country? Why not just stick with their epistemically-advantaged position from 2012? One possible answer: because each of their coalition members inhibits any other coalition member's attempts to fix anything, so the only thing to do is find an outgroup to blame and hope no one notices, as no one is willing to negotiate a settlement to free up resources for improvement.

They have little to offer but decline and hatred, for now. Maybe in 10 years, they'll be as different as the 2020 Republicans are from 2000's.

---

[1] A left-anarchist view here would be that such sentiments will always be exploited for wasteful wars of imperialism that enrich a small and well-connected group at the top; there is something to such a view, but the actual 21st-century US wars, and their duration, also seem to have been caused by ideological derangement.

[thisdaynews]

How Justin Trudeau survived

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-justin-trudeau-survived/

How Justin Trudeau survived

He’ll now lead a minority government that will have to cut deals to advance any of its priorities — a fate his late father, Pierre Trudeau, also endured in the 1970s. Such governments normally last about two years. Some deals — like the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — will be winnable. Some dynamics — like dealing with the conservative Western reaches of Canada — will be difficult.

Trudeau became the first Canadian leader in decades to lose the popular vote and win the election. He did it with a far more efficient vote distribution that pulled in scores more seats in Ontario, while Conservatives ran up the score in the less-populous west.

It could have been far worse for Trudeau.

After winning election on a wave of millennial support in 2015, Trudeau sailed through the first part of his term. He legalized marijuana and euthanasia, introduced a carbon tax and cut middle-class taxes while employment soared to historic highs. His status as a global progressive rock star scared off his domestic rivals, who struggled to find opponents who might unseat him: Several prominent Conservatives and New Democrats either retired from politics or passed on leadership campaigns, as the common wisdom in Canada had Trudeau as a slam-dunk for a second term.

But two events sent his numbers sinking.

First was a trip to India marred by an embarrassing security gaffe and a passion for traditional outfits that drew mockery and criticism. Second was a scandal in which he and members of his entourage repeatedly pressed the country’s attorney general to drop corruption charges on a Montreal engineering company.

Trudeau’s poll numbers never fully recovered from that scandal early this year. Then came September — and a Time Magazine bombshell showing him in brownface two decades ago, followed by more photos and videos of Trudeau in racist makeup.

‘This is unbelievable’

Trudeau wasn’t blindsided; in fact, Liberals knew the story was coming two weeks in advance. They had been hearing from contacts in Vancouver that TIME Magazine was asking around about old photographs of Trudeau.

One party official said they knew that when it landed it would break any campaign momentum and smother Trudeau in scandal for several days — and perhaps even fatally damage his campaign.

In the frenzy of staff calls leading up to the bomb drop, Trudeau made clear he would apologize profusely, and repeatedly.

Still, allies were deeply disappointed.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was so taken aback by the Trudeau photos that she spent several minutes of an interview with POLITICO that night with her laptop on, waiting for the prime minister to deliver his initial apology on board his campaign plane.

“I actually am fond of him, but this is unbelievable,” she said in the living room of the Vancouver home of her husband, Green Party MP candidate John Kidder.

But the controversy dissipated almost as quickly as it had appeared — particularly in electorally influential Quebec — seemingly doing little to dent Liberals’ standing in public opinion polls.

The party official opined that one reason the scandal showed no obvious effect on Trudeau’s poll numbers was that few Canadians believe he’s actually a racist — Trudeau’s track record includes support for drastically increased immigration levels and promoting numerous visible minorities to high-level Cabinet positions.

Still, the Liberals’ early-campaign strategy of digging up dirt on Conservatives via old social media posts “was thrown out the window,” Conservative MP Erin O’Toole said. “It was impossible for them to do that because these stories really put the Liberals on [the] defensive, and the prime minister’s sort of authenticity was being questioned.”

With a major campaign tactic sidelined, O’Toole said, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer was better able to deliver his party’s’ message without having to beat back those sorts of attacks on a daily basis.

Tying Scheer to Harper

Trudeau’s team had decided early on, however, not to focus on Scheer, but on more divisive conservative figures, like formerConservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Liberal team noted that Scheer stirred no passion among the voters critical to their reelection. In particular, progressives and suburban swing voters, all vital to the Liberal coalition in 2015, lacked strong impressions of Scheer, a barely known, blandly inoffensive rival.

Their incessant digs at Harper, their slogan, “ Choose Forward” and Trudeau’s constant pleas for voters to look ahead, not backward, were based on a simple realization that they needed a better foil than Scheer.

Liberals said Scheer erred in running an aggressively partisan campaign, à la Harper. “Canadians rejected [Harper] in 2015 — overwhelmingly,” said one high-level Liberal staffer.

Scheer’s platform, released late in the campaign, confirmed plans for budget cuts, allowing Liberals to accelerate their comparisons to the unpopular budget-cutting premier of Ontario, Doug Ford.

“At the beginning of the campaign [Scheer] was still relatively unknown,” Liberal strategist Amanda Alvaro notes. “There wasn’t a lot of recall. But if you used names like ‘Harper,’ and ‘Ford,’ there was an emotional reaction.”

The strategy “was a bit of going back to the last thing Canadians recalled in terms of what a Conservative government looked like. The cuts, the austerity. Then [we added] something current with Ford — how services were disappearing in Ontario,” she said.

Obama helped — and so did Trump

American politicians stir passions in Canada, too — and Trudeau’s Liberals worked hard to pull U.S. politics into their campaign narrative.

When Obama tweeted his support for Trudeau on Oct. 18 — an endorsement facilitated by former White House strategist David Axelrod — it prompted cheers in the Liberal Party war room in downtown Ottawa. Party staffers weren’t just celebrating an endorsement — they were celebrating a contrast they’d spent months trying to set up.

In the Liberal campaign script, they were defenders of the small-L liberal international order, heirs to the popular Democratic U.S. president. Conservative rivals, in the Trudeau narrative, were a local branch-plant in the global conservative movement increasingly typified by a nationalist U.S. president Canadians don’t like nearly as much as Obama: Donald Trump.

Senior Trudeau cabinet members subtweeted Trump. Trudeau scolded recent U.S. abortion laws during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence.

One senior Liberal said, perhaps partly in jest, that all he wanted after the Obama endorsement was for Trump to come out and endorse Scheer.

In the end, Trump said almost nothing about Canada’s election, save for answering a reporter question about Trudeau’s blackface scandal.

(Late Monday night, Trump tweeted his congratulations to Trudeau.)

Any edge the Conservatives had may have slipped away during the final days of the campaign.

Former Tory adviser Tim Powers said the early call for Trudeau Monday night wasn’t a surprise. Trudeau campaigned well during the last week on stump, he said, and the Conservatives’ handling of a Globe and Mail report that their party had hired a political consulting firm to disparage the populist People’s Party of Canada didn’t help their cause the weekend before Canadians cast their ballots.

What comes next

In the end, Trudeau has outdone his father. His father, a legendary four-term prime minister, eked out a two-seat squeaker in his second term. The son will have a more comfortable cushion of several dozen seats.

The outcome reflects voter disenchantment with Canada’s two major parties. In a rare phenomenon, the Conservatives and Liberals remained mired in the low 30s, stuck in a statistical tie through the campaign, right up to Monday’s vote. The only dramatic movement came in Quebec, where, true to form, the province’s fickle voters turned suddenly and ultimately gave the separatist Bloc Quebecois major gains in Parliament, severely denting one of the firewalls Trudeau had been counting on.

The parliamentary configuration might make it relatively easy for Trudeau to govern despite not holding a majority. That’s because his Liberals hold so many seats that they can win any vote in the House of Commons with support from just one of the three main opposition parties.

Still, Western Canada is a wasteland for the next government, with the country deeply divided. A progressive group of parties that favor carbon pricing are resolutely dominant, and the oil-producing conservative West mostly powerless at the federal level. That split was epitomized by the defeat of a towering figure in Canadian politics, Ralph Goodale, who was first elected in 1974 and was the last Liberal standing in Saskatchewan. He lost, and the governing party has no representation left in the province.

Lauren Gardner reported from Regina, Sask.

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