Trump has not “swung far to the right” on immigration and transgender. Rather the Dems lost their collective minds and opened the border allowing millions of people to wander in.
They also decided that transgender, which wasn’t even a concept until recently, was now the next big civil rights issue. This included permitting men to compete in women’s sports. And let men in women’s prisons. In other words, women’s rights were demoted.
These two ideas were in highly unpopular, even among Dems. So no, Trump has simply gone back to normal on these two issues.
Exactly right. On those two issues Trump is totally mainstream - the fact that the left still frame his positions as conservative and as long as they continue to not recognize how out if touch thy are with the huge majority of the populace on theseisses they will remain a political minority barring some huge misstep by Trump and the Republicans,
The idea that gender is blurry has been around culturally for decades, as anyone that liked David Bowie's music can tell you. Is it the case that supporters pushed the issue into places faster than a lot of people are comfortable with? That does seem to be the case. Even as someone that supports the trans community I can understand why some people have questions around trans athletes and around how the issue is being presented in the classroom and of course the role of parents in decision making. That clearly created a backlash that was exploitable.
A lot of the language out of Trump and his crew around the issue does not seem normal to me; it's not pointing out questions that I could see a rational person having. It's angry and violent and is going to get people killed.
When David Bowie got punched in the eye in a fight as an adolescent, he was fighting another man. That in a nutshell is the difference, even where Bowie is concerned.
I agree the language of the EO pulls no punches, and coming from Trump is hypocritical, but when your political strategy is to get anyone who so much as quibbles with your agenda ostracized or fired, the only people remaining will be antagonists from the other side, who aren't interested in negotiating or feeling shame at opposing you.
The fact that Trump is having to campaign on this and not any number of cultural issues shows how far the us has swung to the left on issues that were unfashionable fifty or hundred years ago. Democrats will happily hold the line here and campaign on it because it’s where the line is, rather than ceding ground to any other number of rights. Anyone else would call this a victory for the Democratic Party on pretty much 90% of cultural issues that were in contention over the last fifty years. Real power is forcing your opponents to fight territory that is extremely left wing if passed.
You think unilaterally canceling birthright citizenship, a right that appears unambiguously in the United States Constitution, via executive order is mainstream?
Every wedge issue hate campaign based on religion or personal bias has run out of gas in US politics.
Sure, Trump found a few loons skeptical about women voting, and there is always the Shockley wing of bad genetic science, but these are laughable positions in the vast majority of the public.
The trans issue will go the same direction. Sure, some athletic associations will need to clarify some details, but after that who really cares based on a rational foundation?
Similarly, immigration will become much easier as an issue now that the Republicans will have to put up or shut up. Except of course they won't.
I’m not even an American much less a Trump supporter. But I am fed up with the left everywhere for approving of items like letting men compete in women’s sports.
Claiming transgender wasn't even a concept until recently is blatant disinformation. Over a century ago, the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin was founded and pioneered research on transgender, transsexual, and intersex studies. We should be much further along in our academic, medical and social understanding of these topics, but the Nazi party stymied that by raiding the institute and burning its research in 1933.
There is absolutely a debate to be had over transgender women competing in women's sports, and the awful conditions of America's prison system is a whole separate debate, but to take such niche topics and use them to discount the fight for trans rights, using women's rights as a shield, is absurd.
Yeah, that's obviously an unhinged thing the OP said. While I'm a supporter of trans rights (and in fact have a trans sibling), I think the Dems pushed the issue too hard and too fast (or at the very least allowed themselves to be perceived as such). It's frustrating, but you have to bring people along, not just decide in an echo chamber and then insult people who haven't been convinced of your way of thinking.
Totally, as far as my own beliefs and positions. But I'm also a pragmatist, so I don't necessarily need Dem leaders who are 100% pure in terms of agreeing with every progressive position I hold.
I'm not saying you do, I obviously don't know you at all. What I have observed, though, is that there is a trend on the left toward an increasing number of positions that are table stakes while on the right that number has been decreasing very rapidly (down to maybe two? Immigration and abortion. Maybe lowering taxes?).
I certainly don't think a completely transactional approach such as the one Trump has adopted is optimal, but I do think opening the tent a bit for people who maybe have more nuanced views on topics that are rapidly evolving in the public discourse makes a ton of sense.
Going back to trans issues, I think it makes sense that some people who haven't been exposed to the topic very much and haven't been brought along might think it makes sense for people who are born as boys to be required to compete against boys in sports. And I think candidates who aren't dug in on the opposite view can be acceptable.
First, on trans sports, even Renee Richards changed her opinion. I am perfectly happy with the idea that sports associations should be able to make rules about participation criteria.
But my point is that the number of areas where a rule like this is necessary is vanishingly small.
On the political fallout, in a close election every fringe segment gets 15 minutes of fame. It doesn't mean they should get to own policy decisions from then on.
Sure, my only point is that the Dem tent needs to be big enough to include candidates who don't align with everything that's currently a majority opinion within the party.
Biden sent back a daily average of 300 persons per day on his watch and only criminals. Trump is pretty much matching Biden's daily count with hardworking, tax-paying immigrants. Just an all around cruel guy is the new "President', a wanna-be dictator. It the same old story: huge tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of the country. Trump depends on insanely wealthy people to run his government. Really in excusable. How's the price of eggs so far. Wait for them and all other groceries to get more expensive as our hardworking immigrants are no longer here to harvest your food or replace your broken driveway or house. Wait for the retaliatory tariffs and jacked up prices on everything to increase inflation even more.
It seems to be that this sort of long form bulls**t totally misses the point and is whistling by the graveyard. Most of the media has decided to go this route - let’s pretend this is all normal and it’s just another era. We elected a proto authoritarian government and I see no serious opposition. And no the D party is not serious opponents- it is clueless. I’m looking forward to the protracted explanations for why there are no 2028 elections is really just part of the democracy process. This has all happened before
What does Trump have to do with River except favoring crypto? It is not like Silicon Valley was hobbled under Biden administration. Farcical jingoism and anti-woke orders are not River.
Disregard for convention and first principles thinking that’s outcome-focused. Whatever you think about the packaging, his core is fundamentally anti-village.
Way back when, as a young lad, my high school history teacher instructed us that the pendulum takes between 20-30 years to swing back and forth in American history. I would mark the beginning of the current iteration with Brexit and Trump, so if my old teacher is right that means the pendulum will start to swing back around 2036.
That doesn't mean that a Democrat can't get elected in that time period, it just means that it's going to be a Clinton-style leader who does stuff like oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector and publicly disavowing Sister Souljah.
In addition the political era is turning over. The contest right now isn't between liberals and conservatives, it's between populists and the establishment. And it should be noted that the populist movement is a global one and is not exclusive to the United States.
Covid. If not for the pandemic Trump would have won running away. As it is Covid was a bump in the road but it was capable only of delaying the populist movement rather than derailing it.
Plus Biden in a previous incarnation was a centrist: he was one of the central architects of Bill Clinton's crime bill and he fervently advanced the narrative of criminals as super predators.
Typically the incumbent enjoys an advantage in electoral contests. Trump was running this time as the challenger.
Also, I suspect that the US is entering a period of extremely close political contests. 2016 and 2020 were decided by a tiny handful of votes in the EC. By those standards Trump's victory in 2024 was pretty convincing.
A focus on the EC margin is dangerously misleading. Owing to the winner-take-all nature of 48 of the 50 state EC vote balances (and, to a lesser extent, the disproportionate awarding of EC ballots to the different states), the EC >margin< is not a measure of the closeness of the election. Yes: the winner of the majority of the EC becomes president; no, the margin in the EC is not representative of either mandate or public support. The 2024 election, which you find “pretty convincing”, would have turned out differently had 0.008% of the votes been cast differently, or in different states than they were cast. And, to be clear, “in different states” could mean, for example, the difference between Trenton NJ and Philadelphia PA: i.e., across the river from each other.
Again, to emphasize the point: the EC >margin< is not a measure of whether a victory is “convincing”.
The EC margin is definitionally an indication of the closeness of an election precisely because it determines the winner. Again, in the context of the last two elections (and maybe elections going forward) 2024 was by comparison a more resounding victory because the margin of victory was in the hundreds of thousands of votes rather than tens of thousands (44k in 2020 and 56k in 2016).
What are you even talking about? Even accepting that the EC margin is the measuring stick (more people voted for the D candidates than the R candidate in aggregate across the 3 elections), these are basically the same results just flipping back and forth from R to D to R.
The EC result in 2020 was 306 for Biden. In 2024 it was 311 for Trump. In 2016 it was 304 for Trump. Call me crazy, but Nevada flipping from D to R isn't the difference between a victory by "tiny handful" of EVs in 2020 and a "convincing" margin in 2024.
The margin jn 2016 was about 56k votes across three states. In 2020 it was 42k. How many millions of votes were cast in the general?
In 2024 Trump's lead was in the hundreds of thousands. I suspect it's no coincidence that he won the popular vote (for the first time) and swept the swing states.
I just don’t buy the 20-30 year theory — so that means there was a liberal era from ~1990 to 2016 that includes both a not-particularly liberal Democratic president followed by the full 8 years of GWB?
_Relatively_ liberal. Remember, at essence the US is a center right country. That means the pendulum is going to oscillate around a point to the right of the political middle.
As for GWB, don't forget his initial domestic priority was "compassionate conservatism". 9/11 got in the way and he spent his two terms mired in foreign policy.
As I mentioned in my other post the real divide today is not between liberals and conservatives but rather between outsiders/populists and the establishment. And you can see that in an ongoing realignment.
I am not talking about the racial realignment that saw Trump win a majority of Hispanic men. Rather the political players are busy reorganizing themselves into new camps. Obviously you have people like Lynn Cheney defecting to the Harris camp--how much more establishment can you get than Cheney, who represents a multigenerational political clan?
On the other hand you have RFK Jr. and Gabbard splitting for Trump. But you also have outsiders like The Young Turks. Cenk Uygur went to TPUSA's national conference, fer crissake, where he got a standing ovation. His co-host Ana Kasparian went on Glenn Beck's show and before that Nicole Shanahan, who's been a progressive mega donor in California for years, went on Steve Bannon's podcast.
For that reason I wouldn't be so confident that the new alliance between MAGA and the tech overlords is as tenuous as some believe. Guys like Musk and Zuckerberg may represent the center of power in the Valley but they are very different from the pipeline that populates elite positions in government and the media. Zuckerberg dropped out of college--that would be the kiss of death for anybody with aspirations to be the next Sullivan or Blinken.
I think you also see evidence of this over in Davos this week. Politicos and many others have begun to tune out the global liberalism WEF establishment and they are actually starting to worry about sustaining their relevancy.
I think you misspoke - didn't you mean "Will Trump continue the age of fascism, authoritarianism , censorship and cancel culture ushered in by Biden and/or whoever was making his decisions.
How do you characterize their Covid lockdown policies, censorship of whatever they decided was ‘misinformation as revealed by both the Twitter files and now Zuck, and the coordinated lawfare campaign which backfired it was so over the top. With regard to weed- I don’t need need the help of any drugs - never tried it and even avoid caffeine. Hope that it helps soothe your TDS. 👋👋
A "Conservative Golden Age"? By what stretch of the imagination is what we are witnessing and experiencing "conservative"? It has never been the case that "conservatives" in the US were actively hostile to the Constitution or the form of government it establishes.
Setting aside the perversion of language and associated normalization and "sane washing" of the language of this post, it is impossible to place - let's call it MAGA, because its adherent's call it that - MAGA as belong on any imagining of the political spectrum. Why is that? A form of government - in our case, a republican democracy whose framework is established by the US Constitution - gives rise to a language for describing the tensions within it. A political spectrum describes the balancing of those tensions. Beliefs that take one outside the governing framework can never be a part of a spectrum created by that form of government. MAGA, being antithetical to the republican democracy created by the US Constitution, cannot be considered a part of the US political spectrum.
A bit more than eight years - right after the 2016 election - a fellow named Nate Silver wrote what was all but a plea to not normalize Trump and his behavior. Any relation to yours truly?
This happened in Rome with the big populist upsets. Some highly wealthy Senators joined with the populist movements; some STARTED the populist movements. We see the same thing happening today. Leaders are leaders; sometimes they have to scramble to run around in front of their masses.
Yes, good ---- Tiberius Gracchus especially pushed the Overton Window, breaking precedent after precedent, and indeed, every time the other side did it more. It escalated. They had kept the mos majorum so carefully for so many centuries (the way of the majority, meaning the dead, since most people are dead, if you think about it) and it broke up so fast, in about a century. That all led up to Julius Caesar, and that was the end of the Republic, they couldn't keep it.
So far I don't think the precedents are broken badly, but we'll see what happens in the near future.
Abraham Lincoln was said to tell a joke about a dog. Paraphrasing, he would ask “How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg?”
When his interlocutor answered “Five,” Lincoln would respond “No: it is four. Calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
Does you let Trump define what it means to be a law? To be legal? To be Constitutional? Does the Supremacy Clause to the Constitution mean Trump can order state and local government employees to do his will?
Though I assume you meant for them to be rhetorical, I would say those are all unsettled questions right now. Well, except for the one about the sky, I suppose. :)
It's hard not to see the alliance between the Right and big tech as a burgeoning fascist alliance with Elon and the other nascent oligarchs heavily influencing policy and political outcomes in the new administration for their own financial benefit at the cost of the majority of the country. I think ignoring this and trying to frame it as some "Conservative golden age" is a bit naive. I hope I'm wrong.
There’s a lot to unpack here but I’ll limit it to a few thoughts. Any of the possibilities you suggest may happen, or none of them. I’m not sure that past is necessarily prologue any longer.
The one salient factor remains “it’s the economy, stupid”.
The economy may have been humming under Biden, “The envy of the world” according to The Economist, yet an exit poll revealed that 2/3 of voters said they were concerned about the economy.
To me, this speaks to the Right’s success in pushing an alternative reality through constant messaging through multiple streams.
Trump’s apocalyptic messaging, amplified by this media blitz became THE reality for an electorate short on critical thinking and economically illiterate. Inflation was GLOBAL, not simply a US phenomenon.
The message was powerful enough to elect our first convicted felon to the Presidency. No prologue for that.
Then there’s Trump and his need for absolute control and absolute loyalty, someone uniquely unbound by conventions. We’ll have 4 more years of Trumpean chaos, if not more. His being a lame duck might not be the case in 4 years. Or, it could all explode much earlier as MAGA factions, the Techbromance VS the Bannonites, tear at each other. No way to tell.
At this juncture, America’s financial Elite have lined up to kiss the ring, and Biden’s warning about an Oligarchy potentially running the country isn’t far fetched. The incoming administration has been dubbed “billionaires row”.
Another unmentioned force is a growing Christian Nationalist movement, estimated at 40% of evangelicals, which has declared Trump God’s Chosen and who turned out in force to vote. No American precedent for that one either.
But none of this may matter if the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton’s calculation of a 20% probability that AI will bring about human extinction in the next 30 years comes to pass.
That weave between conservative and liberal (whatever these terms mean) eras may be history.
Gotta look at the context. Though, you may be onto something. Since law, morality and ethics are “leftist” (whatever the hell that means) concepts that you find boring, would it be fair to say that criminality is a “rightist” (whatever the hell THAT is) goal, one where the ends justify the means? The more twisted the more exciting and attractive?
There is indeed a lot of ring kissing, but this is the same as foreign leaders who drop a few compliments and useless concessions, then roll over Trump. Except for the MAGA badge wearers, Trump is the village idiot in all those pictures.
Not that it is a better world because of it. Just that Trump's "vision" is not as important as pundits say.
Hinton is brilliant but is stepping far outside his areas of expertise when he tries to forecast calamities.
Sorry Nate, your opening summary of the current situation is clearly wrong and reflects your liberal worldview. On all those issue that you list Trump has swung back to the center, his positions on all those issues are not far right but mainstream. I think that your commentary presents an interesting framework with discussing, but the analysis is highly colored by your view of those issues. As you stated , Biden had betrayed his history and how he campaigned as a middle of the road finger in the wind Dem to governing (or letting his surrogates govern given his increasing senility) to a liberal on the lunatic fringe of his party.
Yes anti trans is mainstream but historically speaking this country is extremely liberal and left leaning culturally when compared to past generations even those on the early 2000s. The right gave up on a lot of the culture wars. I think that’s why dei and identity politics doesn’t land. On immigration might seem right wing but notice it’s criminals and those who have been here for less than 2 years. That surprised me. We’ll see if he beats Obama deportation numbers. I’m not sure how pro Silicon Valley the electorate is; I suspect we’ll find out. I’m pretty used to that high risk growth strategy. It’ll be interesting times but I don’t think rural or forgotten areas will be included.
One thing I have been pondering is Trump's win on international elections. American events and politics have influence on Western countries. I do wonder if Trump's victory will inspire citizens of other Western countries, and also show them that they can win in elections against ultra-progressive governments and get real change leading to AfD, Le Pen, and UK Reform victories.
In which case this will only reinforce the cultural victory domestically and embolden conservatives towards a Conservative Golden Age.
Tensions within the coalition that brought Trump to the White House started showing up before he even took office in issues like the H-1B visa fracas. On top of the normal thermostatic stuff, he and his surrogates have promised too much contradictory stuff to different constituencies, and a lot of his proposed policies (like high tariffs and mass deportations) would be both inflationary and economy-shrinking if enacted. Hell, even the boring option of just doing tax cuts probably drives higher inflation or higher-for-longer interest rates in the current macro environment.
I’d guess that the Dems take a somewhat harder line on crime and immigration in the next couple cycles (even electeds in safe constituencies are shifting that way, and were even before the election), but that the Dems will win the House in the 2026 midterms, and that Trump’s approval ratings will be lower in two years than they are now. Think that PredictIt/Kalshi-type contracts for each of those outcomes would be attractively priced at 50, 65, and 70 cents, respectively.
On Polymarket the DOGE cuts are likely (71% odds) to be less than $250b in the first 6 months of Trump's term. This would put it on par with past budget cut deals.
The wild card in all this calculation is that Trump is not a conservative. He has nothing in common with any of the other presidents on that chart. He is something else.
If the pendulum swings decisively to MAGA, it's very likely it won't be allowed to swing back again.
I think you are right, and it's an insightful comment. Trump is fundamentally a populist and he replayed the 1824--1828 Andrew Jackson populist campaign move for move. It worked, too. No wonder he has hung the Jackson portrait in the White House!
The case for a swing to the right is vastly overstated. Most people are to the right of the Democrats on immigration, but to the left of Trump. Most people are to the right of the Democrats on woke culture, but to the left of Trump. Trump won because of one issue and one issue alone - inflation. And his presidency will rise and fall on how the economy does - unless he completely overreaches, which given the last few days I suspect he will.
Trump has not “swung far to the right” on immigration and transgender. Rather the Dems lost their collective minds and opened the border allowing millions of people to wander in.
They also decided that transgender, which wasn’t even a concept until recently, was now the next big civil rights issue. This included permitting men to compete in women’s sports. And let men in women’s prisons. In other words, women’s rights were demoted.
These two ideas were in highly unpopular, even among Dems. So no, Trump has simply gone back to normal on these two issues.
Exactly right. On those two issues Trump is totally mainstream - the fact that the left still frame his positions as conservative and as long as they continue to not recognize how out if touch thy are with the huge majority of the populace on theseisses they will remain a political minority barring some huge misstep by Trump and the Republicans,
The idea that gender is blurry has been around culturally for decades, as anyone that liked David Bowie's music can tell you. Is it the case that supporters pushed the issue into places faster than a lot of people are comfortable with? That does seem to be the case. Even as someone that supports the trans community I can understand why some people have questions around trans athletes and around how the issue is being presented in the classroom and of course the role of parents in decision making. That clearly created a backlash that was exploitable.
A lot of the language out of Trump and his crew around the issue does not seem normal to me; it's not pointing out questions that I could see a rational person having. It's angry and violent and is going to get people killed.
When David Bowie got punched in the eye in a fight as an adolescent, he was fighting another man. That in a nutshell is the difference, even where Bowie is concerned.
I agree the language of the EO pulls no punches, and coming from Trump is hypocritical, but when your political strategy is to get anyone who so much as quibbles with your agenda ostracized or fired, the only people remaining will be antagonists from the other side, who aren't interested in negotiating or feeling shame at opposing you.
The fact that Trump is having to campaign on this and not any number of cultural issues shows how far the us has swung to the left on issues that were unfashionable fifty or hundred years ago. Democrats will happily hold the line here and campaign on it because it’s where the line is, rather than ceding ground to any other number of rights. Anyone else would call this a victory for the Democratic Party on pretty much 90% of cultural issues that were in contention over the last fifty years. Real power is forcing your opponents to fight territory that is extremely left wing if passed.
You think unilaterally canceling birthright citizenship, a right that appears unambiguously in the United States Constitution, via executive order is mainstream?
Every wedge issue hate campaign based on religion or personal bias has run out of gas in US politics.
Sure, Trump found a few loons skeptical about women voting, and there is always the Shockley wing of bad genetic science, but these are laughable positions in the vast majority of the public.
The trans issue will go the same direction. Sure, some athletic associations will need to clarify some details, but after that who really cares based on a rational foundation?
Similarly, immigration will become much easier as an issue now that the Republicans will have to put up or shut up. Except of course they won't.
I’m not even an American much less a Trump supporter. But I am fed up with the left everywhere for approving of items like letting men compete in women’s sports.
Which my comment addressed.
Claiming transgender wasn't even a concept until recently is blatant disinformation. Over a century ago, the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin was founded and pioneered research on transgender, transsexual, and intersex studies. We should be much further along in our academic, medical and social understanding of these topics, but the Nazi party stymied that by raiding the institute and burning its research in 1933.
There is absolutely a debate to be had over transgender women competing in women's sports, and the awful conditions of America's prison system is a whole separate debate, but to take such niche topics and use them to discount the fight for trans rights, using women's rights as a shield, is absurd.
Yeah, that's obviously an unhinged thing the OP said. While I'm a supporter of trans rights (and in fact have a trans sibling), I think the Dems pushed the issue too hard and too fast (or at the very least allowed themselves to be perceived as such). It's frustrating, but you have to bring people along, not just decide in an echo chamber and then insult people who haven't been convinced of your way of thinking.
For civil right issues, I am happy to be on the side of the early adopters.
Sure it means some political operatives can throw up smoke screens, and march around with tiki torches.
But those people are wrong, and it isn't an insult to say that.
The people who say they voted for Trump because of trans issues were never voting for Harris, no matter what they say on the internet.
Totally, as far as my own beliefs and positions. But I'm also a pragmatist, so I don't necessarily need Dem leaders who are 100% pure in terms of agreeing with every progressive position I hold.
I'm not saying you do, I obviously don't know you at all. What I have observed, though, is that there is a trend on the left toward an increasing number of positions that are table stakes while on the right that number has been decreasing very rapidly (down to maybe two? Immigration and abortion. Maybe lowering taxes?).
I certainly don't think a completely transactional approach such as the one Trump has adopted is optimal, but I do think opening the tent a bit for people who maybe have more nuanced views on topics that are rapidly evolving in the public discourse makes a ton of sense.
Going back to trans issues, I think it makes sense that some people who haven't been exposed to the topic very much and haven't been brought along might think it makes sense for people who are born as boys to be required to compete against boys in sports. And I think candidates who aren't dug in on the opposite view can be acceptable.
First, on trans sports, even Renee Richards changed her opinion. I am perfectly happy with the idea that sports associations should be able to make rules about participation criteria.
But my point is that the number of areas where a rule like this is necessary is vanishingly small.
On the political fallout, in a close election every fringe segment gets 15 minutes of fame. It doesn't mean they should get to own policy decisions from then on.
Sure, my only point is that the Dem tent needs to be big enough to include candidates who don't align with everything that's currently a majority opinion within the party.
The whole category "women" was demoted! The Dems tried to eliminate women: birthing "persons," "chest feeders," etc. The idea was no more women.
Biden sent back a daily average of 300 persons per day on his watch and only criminals. Trump is pretty much matching Biden's daily count with hardworking, tax-paying immigrants. Just an all around cruel guy is the new "President', a wanna-be dictator. It the same old story: huge tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of the country. Trump depends on insanely wealthy people to run his government. Really in excusable. How's the price of eggs so far. Wait for them and all other groceries to get more expensive as our hardworking immigrants are no longer here to harvest your food or replace your broken driveway or house. Wait for the retaliatory tariffs and jacked up prices on everything to increase inflation even more.
It seems to be that this sort of long form bulls**t totally misses the point and is whistling by the graveyard. Most of the media has decided to go this route - let’s pretend this is all normal and it’s just another era. We elected a proto authoritarian government and I see no serious opposition. And no the D party is not serious opponents- it is clueless. I’m looking forward to the protracted explanations for why there are no 2028 elections is really just part of the democracy process. This has all happened before
Are you into betting markets, by chance? I'd love to make money betting against you on the idea that there won't be elections in 2028 lol.
What does Trump have to do with River except favoring crypto? It is not like Silicon Valley was hobbled under Biden administration. Farcical jingoism and anti-woke orders are not River.
The whole Silicon Valley and Trump romance? AI initiatives? Doge? Going to mars? Kinda big things from the river.
I wonder - only somewhat tongue-in-cheek - that Mr. Silver is applying for a position as someone's court jester.
Disregard for convention and first principles thinking that’s outcome-focused. Whatever you think about the packaging, his core is fundamentally anti-village.
First principles thinking? There is barely any thinking, only reaction to the libs.
That's not how Marc Andreeson characterized things.
Way back when, as a young lad, my high school history teacher instructed us that the pendulum takes between 20-30 years to swing back and forth in American history. I would mark the beginning of the current iteration with Brexit and Trump, so if my old teacher is right that means the pendulum will start to swing back around 2036.
That doesn't mean that a Democrat can't get elected in that time period, it just means that it's going to be a Clinton-style leader who does stuff like oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector and publicly disavowing Sister Souljah.
In addition the political era is turning over. The contest right now isn't between liberals and conservatives, it's between populists and the establishment. And it should be noted that the populist movement is a global one and is not exclusive to the United States.
So how do you explain Biden, a decidedly non-Clintonian Dem, getting elected in 2020?
Covid. If not for the pandemic Trump would have won running away. As it is Covid was a bump in the road but it was capable only of delaying the populist movement rather than derailing it.
Plus Biden in a previous incarnation was a centrist: he was one of the central architects of Bill Clinton's crime bill and he fervently advanced the narrative of criminals as super predators.
"If not for the pandemic Trump would have won running away."
Do you really think so? That suggests that Trump should have trounced Harris, which didn't happen.
Typically the incumbent enjoys an advantage in electoral contests. Trump was running this time as the challenger.
Also, I suspect that the US is entering a period of extremely close political contests. 2016 and 2020 were decided by a tiny handful of votes in the EC. By those standards Trump's victory in 2024 was pretty convincing.
A focus on the EC margin is dangerously misleading. Owing to the winner-take-all nature of 48 of the 50 state EC vote balances (and, to a lesser extent, the disproportionate awarding of EC ballots to the different states), the EC >margin< is not a measure of the closeness of the election. Yes: the winner of the majority of the EC becomes president; no, the margin in the EC is not representative of either mandate or public support. The 2024 election, which you find “pretty convincing”, would have turned out differently had 0.008% of the votes been cast differently, or in different states than they were cast. And, to be clear, “in different states” could mean, for example, the difference between Trenton NJ and Philadelphia PA: i.e., across the river from each other.
Again, to emphasize the point: the EC >margin< is not a measure of whether a victory is “convincing”.
Boy, I'm sure convinced.
You should maybe read the news media, what is left of it: Trump won.
The EC margin is definitionally an indication of the closeness of an election precisely because it determines the winner. Again, in the context of the last two elections (and maybe elections going forward) 2024 was by comparison a more resounding victory because the margin of victory was in the hundreds of thousands of votes rather than tens of thousands (44k in 2020 and 56k in 2016).
What are you even talking about? Even accepting that the EC margin is the measuring stick (more people voted for the D candidates than the R candidate in aggregate across the 3 elections), these are basically the same results just flipping back and forth from R to D to R.
The EC result in 2020 was 306 for Biden. In 2024 it was 311 for Trump. In 2016 it was 304 for Trump. Call me crazy, but Nevada flipping from D to R isn't the difference between a victory by "tiny handful" of EVs in 2020 and a "convincing" margin in 2024.
The margin jn 2016 was about 56k votes across three states. In 2020 it was 42k. How many millions of votes were cast in the general?
In 2024 Trump's lead was in the hundreds of thousands. I suspect it's no coincidence that he won the popular vote (for the first time) and swept the swing states.
This seems like retconning.
I just don’t buy the 20-30 year theory — so that means there was a liberal era from ~1990 to 2016 that includes both a not-particularly liberal Democratic president followed by the full 8 years of GWB?
_Relatively_ liberal. Remember, at essence the US is a center right country. That means the pendulum is going to oscillate around a point to the right of the political middle.
As for GWB, don't forget his initial domestic priority was "compassionate conservatism". 9/11 got in the way and he spent his two terms mired in foreign policy.
Even before 9/11 no one would describe GWB as “relatively liberal” even for a Republican. He beat McCain by being the conservative in the primary!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassionate_conservatism
Yeah, it's a dumb thing that probably sounded good to a HS history teacher 40 years ago. Things shift much more rapidly now than they did in the past.
As I mentioned in my other post the real divide today is not between liberals and conservatives but rather between outsiders/populists and the establishment. And you can see that in an ongoing realignment.
I am not talking about the racial realignment that saw Trump win a majority of Hispanic men. Rather the political players are busy reorganizing themselves into new camps. Obviously you have people like Lynn Cheney defecting to the Harris camp--how much more establishment can you get than Cheney, who represents a multigenerational political clan?
On the other hand you have RFK Jr. and Gabbard splitting for Trump. But you also have outsiders like The Young Turks. Cenk Uygur went to TPUSA's national conference, fer crissake, where he got a standing ovation. His co-host Ana Kasparian went on Glenn Beck's show and before that Nicole Shanahan, who's been a progressive mega donor in California for years, went on Steve Bannon's podcast.
For that reason I wouldn't be so confident that the new alliance between MAGA and the tech overlords is as tenuous as some believe. Guys like Musk and Zuckerberg may represent the center of power in the Valley but they are very different from the pipeline that populates elite positions in government and the media. Zuckerberg dropped out of college--that would be the kiss of death for anybody with aspirations to be the next Sullivan or Blinken.
I think you also see evidence of this over in Davos this week. Politicos and many others have begun to tune out the global liberalism WEF establishment and they are actually starting to worry about sustaining their relevancy.
A more appropriate post would be "Are We Entering a Fascist Golden Age?"
I think you misspoke - didn't you mean "Will Trump continue the age of fascism, authoritarianism , censorship and cancel culture ushered in by Biden and/or whoever was making his decisions.
Where do you get your weed?
How do you characterize their Covid lockdown policies, censorship of whatever they decided was ‘misinformation as revealed by both the Twitter files and now Zuck, and the coordinated lawfare campaign which backfired it was so over the top. With regard to weed- I don’t need need the help of any drugs - never tried it and even avoid caffeine. Hope that it helps soothe your TDS. 👋👋
My city locked down when Trump was president.
The rest of your material is equally fictional. Fox news is not reality based.
Trump had nothing to do with any COVID lockdowns. Anywhere.
Those were uniformly self-inflicted by local popular mandates.
If you actually read what I wrote you might be able to respond more accurately.
On the other hand, the comment I replied to specifically blamed Biden.
Trump is a criminal. That a campaign "backfired" only means he is petty and looking for revenge.
A "Conservative Golden Age"? By what stretch of the imagination is what we are witnessing and experiencing "conservative"? It has never been the case that "conservatives" in the US were actively hostile to the Constitution or the form of government it establishes.
Setting aside the perversion of language and associated normalization and "sane washing" of the language of this post, it is impossible to place - let's call it MAGA, because its adherent's call it that - MAGA as belong on any imagining of the political spectrum. Why is that? A form of government - in our case, a republican democracy whose framework is established by the US Constitution - gives rise to a language for describing the tensions within it. A political spectrum describes the balancing of those tensions. Beliefs that take one outside the governing framework can never be a part of a spectrum created by that form of government. MAGA, being antithetical to the republican democracy created by the US Constitution, cannot be considered a part of the US political spectrum.
A bit more than eight years - right after the 2016 election - a fellow named Nate Silver wrote what was all but a plea to not normalize Trump and his behavior. Any relation to yours truly?
Teapot dome, HUAC, Watergate, Iran/Contra, and fake intel leading to Iraq mess. And that doesn't even include race baiting.
Trump is pretty representative of one portion of American conservative history.
The political parties are getting scrambled. When Cenk Uygur gets a standing ovation at TPUSA what other conclusion is there?
The old rules are being discarded and the country is moving into a new era. That's why things right now are not "normal".
They are also not "conservative".
This happened in Rome with the big populist upsets. Some highly wealthy Senators joined with the populist movements; some STARTED the populist movements. We see the same thing happening today. Leaders are leaders; sometimes they have to scramble to run around in front of their masses.
https://www.thefp.com/p/republics-unravel-rome-america-trump-jan-6
Yes, good ---- Tiberius Gracchus especially pushed the Overton Window, breaking precedent after precedent, and indeed, every time the other side did it more. It escalated. They had kept the mos majorum so carefully for so many centuries (the way of the majority, meaning the dead, since most people are dead, if you think about it) and it broke up so fast, in about a century. That all led up to Julius Caesar, and that was the end of the Republic, they couldn't keep it.
So far I don't think the precedents are broken badly, but we'll see what happens in the near future.
I think in the headline NS is essentially accepting that right now President Trump defines what it means to be "conservative."
Abraham Lincoln was said to tell a joke about a dog. Paraphrasing, he would ask “How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg?”
When his interlocutor answered “Five,” Lincoln would respond “No: it is four. Calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
Does you let Trump define what it means to be a law? To be legal? To be Constitutional? Does the Supremacy Clause to the Constitution mean Trump can order state and local government employees to do his will?
Is the sky blue, or red?
[:-) I am SO stealing that Lincoln story.
Though I assume you meant for them to be rhetorical, I would say those are all unsettled questions right now. Well, except for the one about the sky, I suppose. :)
The one about the sky is ESPECIALLY unsettled.
It's hard not to see the alliance between the Right and big tech as a burgeoning fascist alliance with Elon and the other nascent oligarchs heavily influencing policy and political outcomes in the new administration for their own financial benefit at the cost of the majority of the country. I think ignoring this and trying to frame it as some "Conservative golden age" is a bit naive. I hope I'm wrong.
There’s a lot to unpack here but I’ll limit it to a few thoughts. Any of the possibilities you suggest may happen, or none of them. I’m not sure that past is necessarily prologue any longer.
The one salient factor remains “it’s the economy, stupid”.
The economy may have been humming under Biden, “The envy of the world” according to The Economist, yet an exit poll revealed that 2/3 of voters said they were concerned about the economy.
To me, this speaks to the Right’s success in pushing an alternative reality through constant messaging through multiple streams.
Trump’s apocalyptic messaging, amplified by this media blitz became THE reality for an electorate short on critical thinking and economically illiterate. Inflation was GLOBAL, not simply a US phenomenon.
The message was powerful enough to elect our first convicted felon to the Presidency. No prologue for that.
Then there’s Trump and his need for absolute control and absolute loyalty, someone uniquely unbound by conventions. We’ll have 4 more years of Trumpean chaos, if not more. His being a lame duck might not be the case in 4 years. Or, it could all explode much earlier as MAGA factions, the Techbromance VS the Bannonites, tear at each other. No way to tell.
At this juncture, America’s financial Elite have lined up to kiss the ring, and Biden’s warning about an Oligarchy potentially running the country isn’t far fetched. The incoming administration has been dubbed “billionaires row”.
Another unmentioned force is a growing Christian Nationalist movement, estimated at 40% of evangelicals, which has declared Trump God’s Chosen and who turned out in force to vote. No American precedent for that one either.
But none of this may matter if the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton’s calculation of a 20% probability that AI will bring about human extinction in the next 30 years comes to pass.
That weave between conservative and liberal (whatever these terms mean) eras may be history.
In the meantime, we dance.
"The message was powerful enough to elect our first convicted felon to the Presidency."
Boring. When you leftists start saying this, I skip the rest. Which is why the WaPo and NYT are going broke: that's ALL they know how to say.
Gotta look at the context. Though, you may be onto something. Since law, morality and ethics are “leftist” (whatever the hell that means) concepts that you find boring, would it be fair to say that criminality is a “rightist” (whatever the hell THAT is) goal, one where the ends justify the means? The more twisted the more exciting and attractive?
You seem to be a long, long way from the right side of life.
There is indeed a lot of ring kissing, but this is the same as foreign leaders who drop a few compliments and useless concessions, then roll over Trump. Except for the MAGA badge wearers, Trump is the village idiot in all those pictures.
Not that it is a better world because of it. Just that Trump's "vision" is not as important as pundits say.
Hinton is brilliant but is stepping far outside his areas of expertise when he tries to forecast calamities.
I figured a bit of levity wouldn’t hurt.
But there is so much crazy at play that attempting to predict the possible future based on a questionable past may be fun, but not very useful.
I’m reminded that back in 2014 Nate said that the GOP was all but finished.
Look how that turned out.
Well he was right, wasn't he?
The old GOP is dead and buried.
It’s more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Valid point. Dead, not buried. A parasitic WASP situation.
Yeah, good point. We call what's left "RINOs."
Sorry Nate, your opening summary of the current situation is clearly wrong and reflects your liberal worldview. On all those issue that you list Trump has swung back to the center, his positions on all those issues are not far right but mainstream. I think that your commentary presents an interesting framework with discussing, but the analysis is highly colored by your view of those issues. As you stated , Biden had betrayed his history and how he campaigned as a middle of the road finger in the wind Dem to governing (or letting his surrogates govern given his increasing senility) to a liberal on the lunatic fringe of his party.
Yes anti trans is mainstream but historically speaking this country is extremely liberal and left leaning culturally when compared to past generations even those on the early 2000s. The right gave up on a lot of the culture wars. I think that’s why dei and identity politics doesn’t land. On immigration might seem right wing but notice it’s criminals and those who have been here for less than 2 years. That surprised me. We’ll see if he beats Obama deportation numbers. I’m not sure how pro Silicon Valley the electorate is; I suspect we’ll find out. I’m pretty used to that high risk growth strategy. It’ll be interesting times but I don’t think rural or forgotten areas will be included.
Trump's 1st term was 1.9 M deportations.
Biden managed 4 M.
Obama over 8 years : 5.28 M.
Trump talks a big game, but he is actually just not very good at getting things done.
One thing I have been pondering is Trump's win on international elections. American events and politics have influence on Western countries. I do wonder if Trump's victory will inspire citizens of other Western countries, and also show them that they can win in elections against ultra-progressive governments and get real change leading to AfD, Le Pen, and UK Reform victories.
In which case this will only reinforce the cultural victory domestically and embolden conservatives towards a Conservative Golden Age.
The international audience is at least as likely to react against US political trends as it is to imitate them.
Elon Musk is wading the German elections with all four feet. He is a rather --- international --- character.
Tensions within the coalition that brought Trump to the White House started showing up before he even took office in issues like the H-1B visa fracas. On top of the normal thermostatic stuff, he and his surrogates have promised too much contradictory stuff to different constituencies, and a lot of his proposed policies (like high tariffs and mass deportations) would be both inflationary and economy-shrinking if enacted. Hell, even the boring option of just doing tax cuts probably drives higher inflation or higher-for-longer interest rates in the current macro environment.
I’d guess that the Dems take a somewhat harder line on crime and immigration in the next couple cycles (even electeds in safe constituencies are shifting that way, and were even before the election), but that the Dems will win the House in the 2026 midterms, and that Trump’s approval ratings will be lower in two years than they are now. Think that PredictIt/Kalshi-type contracts for each of those outcomes would be attractively priced at 50, 65, and 70 cents, respectively.
On Polymarket the DOGE cuts are likely (71% odds) to be less than $250b in the first 6 months of Trump's term. This would put it on par with past budget cut deals.
More here: https://news.polymarket.com/p/dc-vs-doge
The wild card in all this calculation is that Trump is not a conservative. He has nothing in common with any of the other presidents on that chart. He is something else.
If the pendulum swings decisively to MAGA, it's very likely it won't be allowed to swing back again.
I think you are right, and it's an insightful comment. Trump is fundamentally a populist and he replayed the 1824--1828 Andrew Jackson populist campaign move for move. It worked, too. No wonder he has hung the Jackson portrait in the White House!
The case for a swing to the right is vastly overstated. Most people are to the right of the Democrats on immigration, but to the left of Trump. Most people are to the right of the Democrats on woke culture, but to the left of Trump. Trump won because of one issue and one issue alone - inflation. And his presidency will rise and fall on how the economy does - unless he completely overreaches, which given the last few days I suspect he will.
Great post, Nate.