Trump Thread

[spmetla]

A week and change out and I'm just hoping that the polling and coverage is just the MSM trying to make the race seem tight so everyone keeps clicking on their links and eating up their coverage.

Fingers crossed that Kamala wins in a landslide that's so obvious that the insurrectionists can even get disheartened or at least dissuaded from resorting to violence.

[Montmorency]

I don't want to info dump on polling matters, but there's a lot of reason to believe that the polling is going to be quite accurate this election, unless there's somewhat more third party vote that's somehow being underrepresented (not sure if that's ever happened). If that's not the case, the only ray of hope is that Trump's polling is so high (with a high two-party share) there's basically no Undecided pool for him to be tapping into (Trump overwhelmingly took Undecideds in 2020, accounting for the so-called "polling miss"). Note that polling was very accurate on Democratic vote shares in 2016 and 2020 for national, state, and senatorial races; it just underestimated Trump somewhat.

I hate that the best presidency since the 1960s is being rewarded this way, but Harris is basically going to need a 2012-class polling error in her favor if this is how it stands for the next week. In 2021 I predicted 2024 would end up being an almost-exact replica of 2020.

Now watch me be wrong and some crazy shit happen like 4 states being within 0.5% (recount range), and the Supreme Court openly trying to coronate Trump with Harris leading in a tipping-point state (crazy how so much history hinges on Ginsburg not retiring during Obama's second term, or not putting off dying by 100 days or so).

[Montmorency]

Fun fact:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The House polling and the special elections swing averages (an alternative metric for projecting performance in House elections) have been in near-total agreement this time. Such close alignment between polling and alternative measures corroborates that the incredibly-tight spread of polling findings throughout this cycle for presidential and senatorial races among almost all pollsters and trackers reflects accuracy more than herding or other biases.

Not-fun fact:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

As of a few days ago, all of them agreed on the Dem national vote share falling within 0.4-1.0% ahead of Repubs', which would make it very difficult to get a Democratic majority. Currently, RCP has Repubs moving into the lead.

[spmetla]

Well the polls were fairly accurate and now I'm getting to see the horror that a second Trump presidency will bring. His nominations for key positions is certainly depressing to see.

[Montmorency]

I was writing here in 2015-17 about the stresses faced by the modern state against non-state organizations such as crime syndicates and multinational corporations. While I don't think I was wrong, exactly, my emphasis was misguided; the state can protect itself when the time comes. And my musings from 2014 on about the gradual return of fascism in the world (I thought Israel would later emerge as the first openly fascist country of the 21st century) was also misguided in emphasis. Fascism was an integrative modern project that sought to resolve the contradictions of industrial modernity. And now, sure, there are a number of movements that sometimes resemble fascism, from Hungary and Russia to North Korea and Iran, and share similar goals, but they have a different unifying (meta-)ideology, which I would call party-statism or civilizational statism; these are all context-unique projects to resolve the contradictions and disintegrative forces of postmodernity. Each is a form of soft totalitarianism that is conscious of the failures of legacy 20th century totalitarianisms that brought all prior totalitarian systems to violent collapse or the brink of it. (Beyond that, I won't get into details, as they're beside the point for now. The terms are somewhat self-explanatory.)

But what I've grown more conscious of since the first Trump term is that very gap in my emphasis, which overlooked more grassroots psychopolitical trends. The issue wasn't fascism or state decay as such, but the rise of a postmodern, incoherently-reactionary conservatism in the degraded minds of individuals worldwide. Affected people aren't looking for a means to overcome the contradictions of modernity or of liberalism; they have no particular concept of politics in a country at all except the immediate lashing out against instinctual hate objects. They don't want some systematic long-term reorganization of their countries, they just want short-term tribal power by which to subject those who fall outside the tribe to their whims. They are capable of accepting any direction and stomaching any policy, as long as it arises from within the tribe. They know what they dislike, but suffer from a form of stupidity - not necessarily congenital - that makes them incapable of rationally assessing cause and effect. For whatever reason, such people almost uniformly instantiate as postmodern conservatives, overwhelmingly more so than anything on the left spectrum.

The pandemic made it very plain: hundreds of millions of people, even in the heart of the so-called developed world, are literally psychologically incapable of constituting and sustaining a modern civilization, with all its complex maintenance. The film Idiocracy was partially-right as well, but it rendered its subjects in far too convivial a style.

In the country that is most far gone to this phenomenon, the United States, we see an accelerated feedback loop whereby the inability of government to address fundamental needs in the population, including education, leaves an ever-greater share of the population fallen out of the frameworks of modern rationality, which in turn blocks the formation of viable political coalitions with the will and ability to attack those problems... The overall outcome is a worsening cycle of social disintegration in the developed world, and beyond, that makes holding together a unified, technologically-advanced, socially-complex modern (let alone democratic) state untenable. Not, as I suspected, because the state is too weak, but because too many individuals lack the attributes to participate in modernity. Irrationalists of the sort who were temporarily suppressed throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas after WW2 by the more restrictive cultural and informatic environments available at the time.

Much of the world seems likely to enter a state of fragmented, gibbering technobarbarism in the 21st century, and the elitist elements of stories like Brave New World and 1984 will prove the most prescient (except those elites will also be high on their own supply). It will function badly enough that it will find itself replaced by some alternative, new system - after great cost. But it's such an obviously unproductive way of arranging society that I wonder if it's even possible it could come to that without something like nuclear apocalypse ending global civilization outright - if, rather, alternative frameworks won't intervene.

[Olaf The Great]

Fun fact:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The House polling and the special elections swing averages (an alternative metric for projecting performance in House elections) have been in near-total agreement this time. Such close alignment between polling and alternative measures corroborates that the incredibly-tight spread of polling findings throughout this cycle for presidential and senatorial races among almost all pollsters and trackers reflects accuracy more than herding or other biases.

Not-fun fact:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

As of a few days ago, all of them agreed on the Dem national vote share falling within 0.4-1.0% ahead of Repubs', which would make it very difficult to get a Democratic majority. Currently, RCP has Repubs moving into the lead.

Yeaaah, this will be some rough 4 years. Let's just hope WW3 doesn't start

[Devastatin Dave]

TRUMP! YES! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

[Shaka_Khan]

Maybe the return of Trump will make this forum active again?

[Devastatin Dave]

Maybe the return of Trump will make this forum active again?

MFAA!!!! Make this Forum Active Again! That's the spirit Shaka Khan! ALL HAIL the POWER of TRUMP!!!