Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.
This was written for FB and twitter where my filter bubble is strongly Democrat / Blue Tribe. I’d ideally update some of my phrasing for the somewhat more politically diverse LW, though I’m hoping my actual talking points still land pretty reasonably.
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I am not currently Trying For Real to do anything about the Trump Administration. If I were, I’d be focused on finding and empowering a strong opposition leadership with bipartisan support.
It’s in the top 7 things I consider dedicating this year to, maybe in the top 4. I could be persuaded to make it my #1 priority. Things seem pretty bad. The three reasons I’m not currently prioritizing it are:
1. I don’t currently see an inroad to really helping
2. Figuring out what to do and upskilling into it would be a big endeavor.
3. AI is just also very important and much more neglected (i.e. ~half the country is aware that Trump is bad and out of control, a much teenier fraction understand that the world is about to get steamrolled by AI)[1]
My top priority, if I were getting more involved, would be trying to find and empower someone who is, like, the actual executive leader of the Trump Opposition (and ideally finding a coalition of leaders that include republicans, probably ex-Trump-staffers who have already taken the hit of getting kicked out of the administration)
The scariest thing about what’s happening is how fast things move, how much Trump-et-al are clearly optimizing for the this blitz of stuff that’s constantly fucking up people’s Orient/Decide/Act loop. A scattered resistance seems like it basically won’t work, there need’s to be someone thinking like a Buck-stops-here leader, who has the usual cluster of “good leadership traits.”
I currently guess such a person is basically also gathering the support to be the next presidential candidate (I think they need all the traits that would make a good presidential candidate).
(Their campaign slogan could be “Make America Great Again!”, since Trump has seemed intent on destroying AFAICT that made America actually exceptional)
Anyone who’s around and available is going to be imperfect. There’s a fine line between “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good” and “actually trying to find someone who is sufficiently great at leading the opposition.”
(Gavin Newsome is the only guy I’ve heard of who seemed like he might be trying to play this role. I don’t know that he is actually good enough, both in terms of competence and in terms of morals).
I also think the people in my mostly-liberal-network are not really grappling with: the opposition needs to be able to peel away Republicans. I think the priority right now really needs to be “stop the erosion of the constitution and our institutions”, not “try to fight for what would normally be the political agenda you’re trying to bring about.”
I see people getting approximately as worked up over constitutional violations as various normal liberal talking points. We need a strong allyship between democrats and republicans.
I think a lot of democrats feel bitten by having tried to compromise in the past and feeling like the republicans kept defecting, and are now wary of anything that looks like compromise with republican leadership. This is reasonable, and I don’t actually know what the solution here is. But, the solution doesn’t look like enacting the standard playbook of how folk have been politically active over the past 20 years. That playbook clearly didn’t work, whatever the solution is needs to look at least somewhat different than doubling down on the stuff you were doing already.
If I were spending more time on this, my next actions would be doing a more thorough review of who the existing leadership among the resistance are, what the existing networks and power structures are. I have a sinking feeling there’s nobody who’ll really stand out as a great contender, and I’m not sure what to do if that’s the case.
But, the worlds where things go well, my current guess is we get a democrat-ish leader with a republican second-in-command, who are are able to lead a strong coordinated resistance, and who naturally transition to being a presidential/vice-presidential candidate in a couple years.
- ^
It’s plausible I do end up focusing on “civilizational level ‘improve discourse’, as opposed to my normal focus on the rationality/x-risk community”, which could pull doubleduty for “somehow help with Trump” and “somehow help with AI”
I think that by far the most important thing in this space is for a Democrat to win the 2028 presidential election. And I think the most important thing for making that happen is to nominate a Democrat whose positions on the issues are relatively close to the median voter.
We can get a sense of this by seeing how much potential Democratic candidates outperformed fundamentals (i.e. what you would have predicted given the state they were running in and the political environment that year). Some candidates who have done well on this metric include:
Andy Beshear (governor of Kentucky, a really red state)
Josh Shapiro (governor of Pennsylvania, a swing state, where he won his election by a large margin)
Amy Klobuchar (senator from Minnesota)
Ruben Gallego (senator from Arizona)
Mark Kelly (senator from Arizona)
Raphael Warnock (senator from Georgia)
Some candidates who have not done well on this metric include:
Gavin Newsom
Kamala Harris
Tim Walz
AOC
[Edited to add] Elizabeth Warren fares particularly badly on this metric, though I don’t think she’ll run in 2028
I buy this as a potentially important goal. Things that have me not automatically agreeing with it:
since one of the concerns is “will there actually be a 2028 election?” it’s not obvious that this is happening fast enough to actually matter. I’m worried about a bunch of important institutions getting eroded in ways that are hard to recover from.
I buy that “democrat wins” is simpler and more likely and I think probably better for a variety of reasons. But, if it were tractable, I’d want to hear arguments about why this is better than steering some sort of republican schism ending with a republican president running on a platform of undoing the damage. (I’m not particularly advocating this and not saying it’s remotely viable, but, one of my wariness here is about this veering into “democrat political machine as usual” as opposed to “thinking from first principles about what is healthy for the state of the country”, which should be able to return “oppose various standard democrat-things” even if you normally like them)
To be clear, do you think this mainly because of AI x-risk or Trump cueing the government? What’s probability would you assign to there not being an election?
how can we distinguish people who:
arrive at this statement through strong evidence and reasoning
sincerely believe it, but followed shitty practices to get to it such that their opinion carries no weight
are knowingly saying this to advance some other goal
I’m coming at this as someone who has voted for members of both parties in recent elections and who is extremely confident that there will be a 2028 election and that Trump will not be the republican nominee in that election. And yea, this sounds right to me. If there were an election tomorrow between Vance and any of Newsom, Harris, Waltz, or AOC, I’d easily vote for Vance. If there were a Vance v Shapiro election tomorrow, it would feel much closer and I’d want to do more research, but I think I would be inclined to go for Shapiro.
We finally did it, we found the median voter!
Based on the rest of the comment it sounds like you reversed this sentence? Or, I’m confused about something about it.
Sorry, to clarify, the part of Eric’s comment that I agree with is that if we want a Democrat to win the 2028 election, it is much better to nominate someone from his first list than his second. Whether I actually want the Democrat to win is a question I don’t yet have a position on and don’t expect to form a position on until I know who the nominees are.
I think that the vast majority of people, including you, are catastrophically underestimating the seriousness of the culture war and overestimating the significance of Trump. There is a common historical pattern that could be called Short War Bias, where people mistakenly believe that a conflict can and will be won with a few decisive victories. Winning in 2028 will simply mean that you face an even more energized and radicalized conservative / MAGA base in 2032.
I see a close analogy between the culture war and the wars of religion in old Europe. Those wars lasted for centuries and involved millions of casualties (as many as the 20th century wars when normalizing for population size).
If you really want to improve the world, I would recommend a two-pronged strategy:
- Use the Pareto principle to limit the damage done by Trump in the next couple of years. Focus only on the 20% of battles that cause 80% of the damage, let him win the rest
- Try to create a political framework where the two tribes (Woke left and MAGA right) can live together without murdering each other
Recent events have updated me towards thinking that a decent fraction of Americans (10-40%?) will rationalize and go along with ~anything the current admin does. To me this doesn’t seem to have all that much do with the “culture war” as I took the phrase to mean, but rather that worryingly many humans are cognitively set up to fall for an authoritarian even in a modern western cultural context. I agree that we need to figure out how to live with them.
I’m also getting worried that the current admin expects to succeed at ending free elections, given how they keep doubling down on stuff that seems like it will play terribly with a majority of voters.
I feel like unfortunately I am maybe one of these people, but it sort of depends on the definition of “going along with”. I can’t imagine myself ever feeling generally good about any of the recent administrations, but I also can’t imagine myself trying to do much of anything about any of the things the administrations do, except for direct impacts on people I’m really close to. I’d guess that for that definition, the proportion may be significantly above 40%, like 80%-90%, but I’ve got no particular reason for those numbers.
TBC, by “going along with” I meant something like “explicitly approving of”. Agree that the proportion that wouldn’t directly try to do anything about it (besides voting) is much higher.
Cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPgn8ZMtsr6az6D9t/better-debates and confrontation-worthy empathy: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sTDfraZab47KiRMmT/views-on-when-agi-comes-and-on-strategy-to-reduce#Things_that_might_actually_work
I think I’ve never seen anyone empathize properly with MAGA people (myself included). It’s really hard and maybe requires a lot of internal strength / grace / ego management, as well as deep cognitive flexibility. (And willingness to stare into the abyss, in the sense that true answers might have a significant degree of, if you admit it as a possibility, you’re horrified; e.g. unthinking affiliation around authoritarianism, or something like that.) This would be more than a full-time job, including tons of conversations as well as theorizing and reading.
Do you find it similarly hard to empathize with people who support the following regimes:
- Chinese Communist Party
- Iranian theocracy (now perhaps endangered)
- Russia / Putin (at least historically, Putin had very high approval ratings)
- Pre-2025 Maduro / Chavez government of Venezuela
- Islamic fundamentalist / monarchist government of Saudi Arabia
Similarly, is it hard to empathize with citizens of friendly countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, who are incomparably more xenophobic than the average Republican?
It’s a cool question, but I’m not sure how to answer. I think all of those are really hard to empathize with. I think it’s really hard to empathize with people I know well! Like, I can do it, but in many cases it takes a bunch of effort and talking with them. Understanding someone so well that you could somewhat predict what sorts of things would actually shift them deeply (make them change political parties, change jobs, start or end relationships, etc.) is very difficult; usually people don’t even understand themselves that way.
I don’t think that understanding people better than they understand themselves is empathy. That’s cognitive modeling.
Empathy is being able to step into a worldview such that you can see what they see and feel what they feel, this requires some cognitive modeling but mostly seems to use different machinery.
My pretty strong guess is that to do good cognitive modeling, you have to do something like empathy, and also vice versa; or rather, to do either very well, you have to be gemini modeling much of the fundamentals of their worldview/mindset/umwelt/etc. But I’m not super confident, there are many experts in empathy who would know better what it involves.
“It’s hard to empathize with them because it’s hard to empathize with most people who don’t agree with me” has rather different implications than “it’s hard to empathize with this group in particular”.
Not obvious to me that this is true.
By anyone do you mean “anyone who isn’t MAGA”? Or does this imply that you haven’t observed any MAGA people?
Including them. It implies that they don’t have empathy for themselves / other MAGA of sufficient quality / depth.
Aside from a handful of incidents, the woke left and MAGA right are living together without murdering each other. It is not clear that the level of political violence has increased under Trump 2.
The problem we have is that both parties have been serving up weak candidates, and this is occurring against a backdrop of dysfunction in the federal government.
Replacing a weak candidate (Trump) with a better one would be direct, meaningful progress toward solving that problem.
It would be really really helpful if the discussion wasn’t so meta. Everyone seems to take for granted that Trump did Something that is really really worrying but no-one says it. What is that something and why does it make you so worried?
encouraging ICE to train its agents to round people up without proper warrants, and with disregard for their fundamental rights. Masked and out-of-uniform law enforcement is an affront to a free society.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
threatening Greenland without consulting congress
threatening private companies so they give “golden shares” to the government, or agree to share profits with it
Shutting down the immigration system unilaterally. e.g. adding $100k “fees” for visa classes without congressional direction
Suing newspapers and media outlets for disadvantageous coverage.
This is just a start.
The counterargument by Republicans I’ve talked to—and I agree with No77e that this discussion seems to be taking a lot of partisan views as settled priors—is as follows:
Weaponization of the justice system is baked in, at this point, to the point where adhering to due process as defined by the opposition party amounts to pre-committing to always cooperating against an opponent that has spent the past hundred turns defecting.
The murder of Craig Robertson (I’ll use The Guardian as a left-leaning source here; if you want a right-leaning source there are plenty) and the subsequent lack of investigation or consequences made it clear to half of the American population—whether you agree or not—that treating the legal system as if it operates in good faith is for suckers.
Reddit’s apparent glee (see the comments; the subreddit is askconservatives but the post histories of the celebrating individuals indicates that they are not right-leaning) over the killing of Ashley Babbit, an unarmed <protestor or rioter, depending on your party affiliation> and the fact that the killer, Michael Byrd, recieved not only a complete lack of consequences but a series of glowing press interviews, was likewise seen as a point-of-no-return.
Decarlos Brown, who killed Iryna Zarutska, had received enumerable light sentences from judges prior to her murder. There are enumerable similar stories that anyone who regularly talks politics with anyone right-of-center has heard, and, together, they give the impression that the current judiciary is not made up of trustworthy arbiters of justice, but is, depending on how much good faith you assume, either horrifyingly incompetent or actively malicious.
attacking foreign countries without consulting congress
I want to assume good faith here, but everyone I’ve talked to, of every political slant from communist to progressive to libertarian to conservative, in the past twenty years, has treated this as a longstanding precedent.
As a concrete example, the Obama admin jeopardizing worldwide trust in vaccinations and—according to some critics from the right and others from the left—contributing to the Polio eradication campaign’s demise on the verge of the finish line—to eliminate Osama Bin Laden seems more-or-less qualitatively similar in terms of legality to Trump (apparently) collaborating with elements in the Venezuelan government to capture Maduro and replace him with his veep.
threatening Greenland without consulting congress
Again, I want to assume good faith, but politicians offending foreign countries is not, in any sense of the word, an exceptional situation that demands exceptional action. Reagan famously joked that he was about to nuke the USSR, triggering an escalation in the alert state across East Asia.
threatening private companies so they give “golden shares” to the government, or agree to share profits with it
From the Republican perspective, at least, much worse has been done. Prior to 2016, I think that most people in either party would take the sort of messages that Twitter received from government agencies as an indicator of coercive behavior on the part of the FBI that violates the first amendment. At the very least, the simultaneous sea change in speech policies across every large platform circa 2017-2018 was very suspicious, and permanently severed the trust that much of the population had in a free and independent market.
Shutting down the immigration system unilaterally. e.g. adding $100k “fees” for visa classes without congressional direction
Dwight Eisenhower did approximately an order of magnitude more on immigration, so it’s difficult to argue that this is unprecedented. To say the least, a temporary pause on immigration and a fee on the H1B program (which itself only recently doubled in scale, and cannot be said to be a longstanding and inalienable national institution) is not unprecedented in American history.
Moreover, unilateral action on immigration is longstanding in the other direction. In 1994, a single judge unilaterally declared that California had to facilitate public services for illegal immigrants, striking down a 60-40 statewide referendum. Many people place this as the action that turned the state blue, and a supermajority of California voters not only did not vote for it, but actively opposed it.
Finally, the share of the immigrant population in the U.S. has tripled between 1970 and 2020, with the raw number quintupling. Over the same timespan, the number of Americans preferring that immigration be decreased has generally exceeded the number wanting it increased. Unless you take the extreme partisan stance that only restrictions require justification or public consent, I do not think that anyone outside of the leftmost half would look at the recent history of immigration in the U.S. and conclude that the restrictionists are unilaterally acting outside of their mandate.
tl;dr: Half of the American population sees Trump as a moderate, sometimes tepid response to a <government/regime, depending on your political position> that has already ignored precedent and invalidated rule of law so severely that capitulation would amount to the total destruction of their way of life, and possibly worse. They have reasons, outlined above, for believing this.
I expect that this reply will be downvoted, given the tone of existing replies, but I don’t think turning LessWrong into a partisan colony is a good thing. For one, it means that half of America will inherently view everything LW wants as enemy. It also incentivizes a lack of skepticism when a same-party source makes a claim that merits it. Reddit went this route after 2016, and a lot of previously interesting and vibrant communities are now composed almost exclusively of, for lack of a better phrase, political slop. Compare r/videos before and after the ban on political content was lifted.
I think the rest of these points are colorable and appreciate you saying them, but
Threatening to take territory from an ally by force is far beyond “offending foreign countries”, not precedented to my knowledge, and very bad.
And the Reagan thing was a literal joke made in private. As opposed to Trump actually you know, repeatedly threatening to actually invade Greenland in public.
Your points are mostly fair that this kind of behavior has precedents. But I’m a libertarian so saying the other team is doing the same thing doesn’t convince me much that it’s not bad. From my viewpoint, the current administration has more of a plan of ignoring rules, laws, the constitution, etc. than most previous. Each incident has antecedents, and I can see how people on the red team might think “we’re just doing to them what they’ve been doing to us”, but what I see is a more concerted effort to undermine the rule of law.
The behavior of ICE (masks, lack of visible ID, ignoring warrant requirements, ignoring judicial orders) seems beyond the pale, even if the rules (deportation) they’re enforcing are on the books. The way they use self-declared emergencies are more extreme than previous administrations, but you’re right, “everyone does it”.
Your example about RR joking about nuking Russia seems clearly different than Trump’s repeated threats. An off-the-cuff remark doesn’t carry the same weight as Trump’s persistent prodding on this subject.
I’m not sure whether jawboning done behind the scenes is worse than taking partial control and ownership of private companies in the broad light of day. I’m a libertarian, so both free speech and private property are pretty important values to me. They weren’t proud enough of the Jawboning to do it in public, and I think they backed off when it became public. Continuing to insist that individuals and companies accede to his demands for tribute seems different.
But thanks for giving the other point of view. I can see that others see it differently.
I was responding to the question “What is that something and why does it make you so worried?” I would have been able to give a shorter list for any recent administration.
I appreciate your attempt to be charitable, but I don’t think the left-wing/liberal concerns with Jan 6 is appropriately summarized as “riot.”
I am going to be honest, if you asked me pre-Jan 6 “how many people would be shot if they attacked en masse the Capitol with Congress in session” my guess would have been much higher than one. This isn’t a case of protestors just doing their business in a public street and getting into some heated argument with police that degenerates into a fight. It was an attempt to interfere with government, and possibly a direct threat to the life and safety of elected officials. Even if you think it was warranted you would be an idiot to think it would be safe. You don’t storm the Bastille and expect no fire in return. A State’s whole thing is a monopoly on violence, it’s entirely expected that an attempt to violently subvert that State’s own internal mechanisms would be met with violence in return.
There’s a difference between becoming a partisan colony and noticing that democratic institutions are being actively undercut. Becoming clear on this is actually a (fairly easy) test of rationality, which we should pass as a community.* Yes, the world is complicated and there have been some serious defections on both sides. Yes, some of the MAGA complaints are valid. ALSO, Trump is degrading democracy and his administration is very rapidly sliding towards authoritarianism (in their actions, which match years of clear rhetoric). It is possible to separate this from underlying trends toward increasing executive power on the scale of decades and recognize it as the active crisis that it is.
I find this equivocation annoying. Is your comment about messaging or truth-seeking?
*Some rationalists may acknowledge that Trump has authoritarian tendencies and approve—though I think his blatant disrespect for the truth contradicts most constructions of rationalist virtue. But we should at least be aware of what is happening.
I hope your faith in LessWrong has been restored somewhat. If replies with well-researched specific examples relevant to the discussion got downvoted, there would be no point reading LW anymore.
(Also like, come on, bravery debates etc. Ah, I see you are kinda new here. The more you disagree on this website, the more karma you get… if you can keep it polite, smart, and supported by evidence, of course.)
I think this ship has sailed long ago, given that the website is explicitly and unashamedly atheist.
Politically, however, the typical criticism from outside has always been that we tolerate too many opinions.
I’d describe this “good criticism gets upvoted, good ingroup-rah-rah gets upvoted, bad criticism gets downvoted, bad ingroup-rah-rah often gets weak upvoted.” Which I don’t like but am not sure what to do about it.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.
It’s not perfect, but compared to most of the internet, even most of the smarter parts of the internet, we are trying, and the difference is visible. Sometimes bad things get upvoted, but at least a well-written criticism supported by references gets upvoted, too.
Obviously (given the word “bipartisan” in the title), the goal here is not to defeat Republicans at all costs and start a glorious thousand-years era of wokeness. Which already makes it different from a typical anti-Trump debate. This is not about tribes, it is about destruction of the existing political order by one wannabe dictator, whose actions are atypical even for his own political party.
In this context, naming the bad actions of the other side is good—you won’t get bipartisan support against “bad things that Republicans do”. If this is something that every Republican would say when asked to support the resistance, we better be prepared for that in advance. Admit that in the past mistakes were made by both sides, but now things are getting completely out of control, so we need to agree on some common foundation of how we want thing to function. That includes calling out the previous defections against this common foundation, on both sides.
Thanks for the perspective. I would like to note that pointing out earlier instances of bad behavior is important historical context, but doesn’t make more recent bad behavior any less bad. The USA has some really dark stuff in its past. We should remember and do better.
A couple of other things that stand out to me as particularly egregious:
My understanding is that Trump is far more corrupt than past presidents (including Trump in his first term). An example of this is allowing export controls of Nvidia’s AI chips to China in exchange for gifts from Jensen Huang.
The Trump administration has launched criminal investigations against political opponents at an unprecedented rate, most recently against Jerome Powell yesterday.
And of course, the fake electors plot to steal the 2020 presidential election (not to be confused with January 6th—I think his conduct on January 6th was really bad, but the fake electors plot is a much greater indictment of Trump’s character and much stronger evidence of his authoritarianism).
There was also the video from the homeland security secretary blaming democrats for the government shutdown in blatant violation of the hatch act.
Not the highest impact of his many crimes, but does really drive home how casually Trump is willing to undercut any apolitical technocracy for political ends.
That’s what all US administration did in the last two decades. When the Obama administration started bombing Yemen and Somalia they didn’t consult congress for permission for that.
What is this referring to? ICE doesn’t need a judicial warrant to arrest someone for a civil immigration violation
Since I am not taking on “do something about this” I also wasn’t taking responsibility for writing up a clear writeup of what was done that was bad that I made sure was factually accurate. Given that I’m not taking this on, if you’re not already sold on “Trump is bad”, prolly this post just isn’t for you.
ChrisHibbert’s list is the same rough starting point I would make. I’d add “not super answering to the Supreme Court when it intervenes on them.”
As a Canadian, threats to annex my country is certainly one.
One major category of concern is institutional erosion. Here are a few salient examples:
Mass IG firing (Jan 2025): Fired 17 inspectors general in one night without the legally required 30-day notice. Federal court ruled this “obviously” illegal. Several were investigating Musk’s companies. (IGs are the internal watchdogs that catch waste, fraud, and abuse.)
USAID dismantling: Shut down the agency that administered most U.S. foreign aid, firing 83% of staff. This destroyed implementation capacity built over decades. A Lancet study estimates 14 million excess deaths by 2030 from the cuts.
Schedule F: Reclassifying ~50,000 career civil servants to strip job protections, enabling political firings. This converts expertise-based positions into loyalty-based ones.
Firing independent agency heads: Removed FTC commissioners, NLRB members, MSPB chair. DOJ sent a letter to Congress stating it would no longer defend the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections—explicitly signaling intent to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that lets Congress create agencies insulated from presidential control.
Unqualified appointments:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (HHS): Longtime anti-vaccine activist with no public health administration experience. His department’s official MAHA report cited nonexistent studies, then introduced additional errors when revised.
Pete Hegseth (Defense): Fox News weekend host with no Pentagon or senior military experience. Participated in the Signalgate breach, sharing military operation timing on an unsecured group chat that accidentally included a journalist.
Kash Patel (FBI): No law enforcement leadership experience. Authored a book, Government Gangsters, containing a list of government officials he considers enemies of Trump, and has stated publicly he intends to pursue them.
Tulsi Gabbard (DNI): Former congresswoman with no intelligence community experience. Sen. Dick Durbin said she “would not be qualified for an entry-level position” at an intelligence agency.
Betsy DeVos (Education, 2017): Billionaire Republican donor with no education policy experience. First Cabinet nominee in history to require the Vice President to break a tie vote for confirmation.
This is a small sampling; a comprehensive account would be far longer.
A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis. The executive power is vested in the president and Congress shouldn’t be able to create “independent” executive agencies or prevent him from firing particular staff through legislation. The qualification of appointments is just opinion and not institutional erosion. The IG firing, if actually unprecedented and unreasonably politically motivated, is a better example, as is the unilateral USAID-related impoundment.
These are not mutually exclusive.
I disagree. If you appoint a leader of an institution with no experience related to that institution (Rex Tillerson: Secretary of State, Dr. Mehmet Oz: CMS Administrator), or who believes that institution doesn’t exist (Rick Perry: Department of Energy, Mick Mulvaney: CFPB, Betsy DeVos: Department of Education), they are highly likely to erode that institution, whether intentionally or through incompetence.
Not all appointments require extensive experience within that institution, but some positions should have deep domain expertise, unless their purpose is to serve as a wrecking ball appointment.
Ah, maybe you were using a looser definition of “institution.” I think it’s fine for the government to move toward dismantling the Department of Education, for example, because I don’t think of it as a core “institution” in the sense we’re talking about.
Do you think it’s institutional erosion when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, or if a Democratic president were to abolish ICE in 2029?
I’m unclear what institution is directly implicated in the Afghanistan withdrawal, so I don’t have an opinion on whether it qualifies as erosion or not.
Abolishing ICE would be taking down an institution, I suppose. I take (what I assume is your implicit) point that preserving an institution isn’t per se virtuous. Perhaps ICE is beyond reform and would need to be abolished and replaced instead, and perhaps the same is true of the institutions Trump is attacking?
Right, my point was that I understood “institutional erosion” to mean “damage to norms that are central to our constitutional order.” I didn’t understand it to mean more literally reducing the funding or personnel of any government body. For example, if Congress passed an act tomorrow closing the Smithsonian, I wouldn’t consider that “institutional erosion” in the sense we’re talking about.
Likewise, if an administration legally wound down ICE, the Education Department, or whatever, that isn’t what I mean by “institutional erosion.” If the HHS secretary believes that vaccines cause autism, that’s also not what I mean. People sometimes use the term so loosely that they imply that it’s “institutional erosion” to do things that create tons of outrage from the prestige media, as if a core norm of our constitutional order is not to pass policy that contradicts that class.
I have not looked into these details enough to have an opinion, but, I think a lot of US institutions work via a mix of legal rules and implicit norms, and my sense is Trump was doing a lot of violating the norms that made legal rules workable
Is this meant to reply to my other comment? What is this referring to
No, it’s me expressing disagreement with your reasoning for “A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis.”
because, a constitutional basis is necessary but not sufficient (because soft cultural norms are also important)
(But, this is an area I have not looked into enough to have a strong belief about the object level claims, just objecting to your reasoning as sufficient to prove the point you wanted to make)
Note that this is true the other way round as well (e.g. with stuff like attempted impeachment, imprisonment, and assassination). My post on underdog bias might be useful here, re the ways in which each side considers themselves underdogs.
Even if you think that a clear majority of the escalation has been from Trump (which doesn’t seem true to me), it’s worth thinking about ways to avoid your proposal acting as another step in the escalation spiral. For example, what kind of coalition would be able to actually update that Trump is less bad than it thinks if your current fears don’t come to pass?
Or, more concretely: what kind of coalition would be able to deescalate the conflict by actually making compromises (for example, being able to credibly put a crackdown on illegal immigration, or a repudiation of DEI, on the table). What kind of coalition could make credible promises to not jail Trump and his allies after winning the election? Etc.
Personally, my fears that Trump would erode democratic institutions have clearly already come to pass, as he repeatedly undercuts the independence of nominally apolitical bodies (recently: attempting to prosecute Jerome Powell to get leverage over the Federal Reserve, and that insane moment when he wanted airports to play a video blaming democrats for the government shutdown. But it’s a VERY long list. It’s difficult to make this point compactly, because the problem is not some specific scandal, but that he does this routinely). I guess if he stopped engaging in the same clear pattern of behavior he’s followed for the last ~9 years, I’d update that he’s not as bad as I (currently) think, but I do not find this plausible.
It is a normal political position in America that there is no such thing as apolitical executive agencies under the US Constitution. I don’t understand why supporting that policy has anything to do with “eroding democratic institutions” from your perspective. Leaving unelected bodies using executive power to implement Policy A after the public voted for a political candidate who supports Policy B seems incredibly undemocratic actually. Can you explain that?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
I don’t believe that post says what you think it says.
Your comment is unhelpful. I am pretty sure I do know what the post says, having recently read it.
The post focuses on independent institutions but the same principle applies to technocratic institutions. Otherwise I am not sure what you are getting at.
The argument that that post makes is very specifically about institutions involved in selecting the president—the media, some subset of nonprofits, the people who administer elections. It does not apply to bureaucrats not involved in selecting the next president. And the last time I checked, the fed chair as fed chair had no role in selecting the next president.
I think the populist and establishment wings of each side are discrete entities; we have an institutional right (e.g. Cheney, Romney), an institutional left (e.g. Obama, Clintons), a populist right (Trump, MTG, DeSantis), and a populist left (almost-only Bernie, but AOC, Zohran, Ilhan Omar, etc are directionally this thing).
Populist left citizens do things like assassination attempts, and both the institutional and populist right blame the institutional left (the more-plausible things they say look like ‘your extreme rhetoric emboldened these crazies’).
Populist right politicians do things that are directionally authoritarian and both the institutional and populist left blame the institutional right (because they ceded power to Trump, either deliberately or by accident).
Things like Ray’s post seem to be advocating for the institutional wings of the two parties to come together electorally and beat out the populists on either side.
I take your post to be somewhat conflating between the institutional and populist left.
The things that have already come to pass are already deeply damaging to our institutions. We are not in 2016 when we could only extrapolate how he would behave as president. We have a decade of evidence since then. He may not play out every single thing people fear, but, like, if he doesn’t end up trying to acquire Greenland by force, that’s not much of an update. Not everything worth worrying about comes to pass. It’s absurd that such a thing is plausible for him, even if it’s not probable.
FYI from my side it looked like there was some general pattern of escalation starting in the 90s. (Or hell maybe it’s reasonable to say it started with FDR), and then there’s a mostly-different kind of escalation happening with Trump.
I agree there is some escalation spiral that needs to stop or transform. Part of why I emphasized getting a republican bought in early is that that seemed like a good litmus test for “are you on track to deal with things in a deeper way?”
The leader, platform, and constitutency of the Trump opposition all need to take shape together. It’s a complex problem, and we shouldn’t expect a simple solution.
One of the hard parts, I think, is what seems to be a decline in single-issue voters. In the past, women, blacks, gays, Jews, trade unionists, environmentalists, and so on seem to have been more focused on their particular issues. That meant that you could promise the benefits that each desired without as many tradeoffs. Now, both MAGA and the progressive left seem to be “multi-issue Blobs,” where you either support all their ideas, or you’re their opponent. With this, willingness to crash down the established order seems to be something these Blobs endorse, either as a negotiating strategy or as an end in itself.
So it seems to me that the real opponent in the next election isn’t Trump. It’s the Blob.
And that means finding a compatible set of single-issue swing voter/independent/inconsistent voter constituencies that aren’t already diehard Republican MAGA. Off the top of my head, the planks might look like this:
The rent’s too damned high: YIMBY + affordable housing (abundance agenda)
Healthcare’s too damned expensive: Bounties on blockbuster drugs, so the consumer experiences them as cheap/free. Don’t just approve meds that are approved in other countries, allow patients to get prescriptions from providers in other countries with quality healthcare systems via telemedicine. Promise to train more doctors and nurses by expanding residency positions and subsidizing hospitals that achieve greater throughput in the number of resident doctors they train.
I can’t afford kids: Subsidize IVF, the cost of pre and postnatal care, childcare, encourage subsidized maternity/paternity leave, tutoring, outpatient clinical services for kids with disabilities, continue and expand the Trump accounts.
American refuge for religious minorities: Less focus on Israel/Palestine, more focus on safety and freedom for American Jews and Palestinians. Make America Safe for Jews Again. Make America Safe for Muslims. Promise to aggressively crack down on terrorism against religious communities of any stripe. Stand against racial and religious profiling in policing.
Law and order for liberals: More legal immigration pathways coupled with stronger border enforcement. Stronger anti-drug policing, more policing in low-income neighborhoods, not to attract police officers but to get the support of those communities, which often favor more policing action. Tough on burglary, public drug use, and vandalism.
Blue collar utopia: Learn a trade via apprenticeship by working for the government rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and maintaining run-down houses or building new ones, especially in the poorest communities in America. Such programs should also emphasize the skills to building your own small business or working for yourself.
Prosecute your local pedophile: Cracking down on pedophilia, deep sex fakes, and reshaping the rape/consent discourse: we’re going to take rape accusations damned seriously, but we’re also going to be the party of innocent until proven guilty.
I’m sick of the anger: You can say whatever you want online, but we’re going to make social media companies fix their algorithms and turn down the controversy, stop rewarding the most inflammatory speech. It doesn’t matter if there’s something that can actually be done productively here. It’s just important to talk like you’re going to do something about it.
Reagan Republicans: anti-tariff, low taxes, deregulation, independent Fed, strong focus on IP, property rights, and an emphasis on “surgical improvements to government efficiency.”
Tribes: pro tribal sovereignty, hammer on recognizing historic injustices with boarding schools, get the federal government out of regulating tribal economies, and insofar as possible, subsidize them for improving tribal governance. But zero “land acknowledgements.”
Progressive, but sick of social justice: Talk about encouraging progressives and liberals to join the police, military, and to work in prisons as guards/wardens. Just show up, be honorable, do a good job, be the change. Strong freedom of speech angle, anti-DEI, pro intellectual freedom vibe, but there need to be concrete and vivid proposals on how to address racism and sexism in hiring.
I went to college and all I got was accused of turning in an AI-generated essay: Demand that universities create a formal plan for adapting their educational program to be AI-compatible, ending the witch hunts for AI using students. Require them to educate their students on what career opportunities specific majors do and don’t qualify them for. Create programs for voluntary relinquishing of social media under the “collective action problem” thesis: make universities create a “phone-free friendship” program.
The candidate needs to position themselves as a “goes-without-saying” Democrat, but what they talk about during the general election needs to be 95% this kind of stuff that’s targeted at independent, swing and inconsistent voters and spend 5% of your time reassuring the liberal base. During the primaries, you build support with the “groups,” which also are happily mostly pretty single-issue. But you don’t treat those groups as your ticket to the Presidency, just as a stepping stone to the nomination. Whichever reasonable candidate is most clearly making that distinction seems the most promising to me.
Gavin Newsom is pretty good here. So is Rubin Gallego. I think a Newsom/Gallego ticket would be promising.
The enemy gets a vote. Whatever you plan to make your focus in the general, if there’s some unpopular-with-the-middle position you take in the primary, that’s likely to be what they attack you on.
Very much agree with the blob being a problem on the left, but I’m unconvinced there is a blob on the right. There’s at least some evidence suggesting that the right has more ideological diversity than the left (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12665).
Long comment is long. Most of this is either vague, wrong, or stuff you already knew 20 years ago, but I wanted to share my thoughts anyway.
Please note none of this is justification, you will likely think “no, that’s entirely wrong” a lot throughout this. I know, I’m sorry, I wish it could be different.
Most of this is inspired by Scott’s much better post “The Psychopolitics of Trauma”: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
You can feel badly hurt by something. You can feel badly hurt by something and have every single fact wrong. Diametrically wrong. That doesn’t matter. Emotional wounds run deeper than truth can reach.
We often hear “but Biden” or “but Hillary” or “but the WEF” from the right. Whenever you try to bring one of Trump’s many, many faults to the table, they come back with “but Biden broke it” or “but what about her e-mails?”. Why? What is it about these people that rile up the right make it seem like such a trump card against your argument?
I think everything is tied to everything else in their minds. I think it’s similar to a troubled relationship where any flaw of one person is met with the laundry list of past mistakes. Leave your socks on the floor and you get flak for not rotating the tires earlier or not raking the leaves or being too emotional or whatever.
The hate for Biden is especially humorous. He was President for only 4 years, elected for being the plainest option to beat Trump, and now the right consider him the evil old man who broke it all. I think that Biden isn’t special, nothing he did in particular draws their ire. He’s just the avatar of the left, after Hillary, after Obama, after Clinton. They hate the seat, not the person.
Republicans are hurt, badly hurt. Falsely hurt, but they’ve spent a long time hearing the false reasons. Social media algorithms are a lot of it, every flaw of the right is explained away with a falsity or a bogus study out of context. But I think talk radio had a huge impact first. We mostly kind of ignored it as a ranting person on AM, but I think hearing 3 hours a day of it for decades on end slowly breaks you.
When you listened to Rush Limbaugh, you got to feel like people were on your side. Like someone was pointing out the emperor’s new clothes. That every problem of the right was an inconvenience at worst, never heard about at best. And every flaw of the left, real or not, was amplified, made their whole character. Democrats stopped being bad for specific reasons, they just became bad. And the more bad they seemed, the more you’d believe about them.
And it was 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 30 years. I listened to talk radio growing up. I went from “wow, these people are so smart, fighting the left like this!” to “okay, ouch. We have good ideas but we have to present them better, why are you harping on this?” to “There is nothing here for me.”
Now, why Trump? Trump is an anathema to the purported Christian values of the right and yet it doesn’t matter. I don’t really get it myself. But I don’t think logic was ever in play—the farthest right believe in their own correctness first, the logic confabulated later, like the woman with the brain injury unable to update on her paralysis and her brain instead confabulating reasons why she can’t move it (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZiQqsgGX6a42Sfpii/the-apologist-and-the-revolutionary).
Okay, yeah, maybe it’s not that bad. I just think similar mechanisms are in play. I’ve done it myself—my System 1 really wants to not do a thing, and I end up saying lots of words I don’t really believe just to get out of it. A lot of it is tribalism, but a lot of that tribalism here is built on the ceaseless message: “They hurt you. They hate you. They want you gone.”
It is not true. But when you’ve heard it for your whole life, when everyone you respect says it, when charismatic speakers put up logical but false arguments and posit immense conspiracies, and you really have been hurt by something (NAFTA or opioids or algorithms or Walmart or neap tides or whatever), it’s easy for someone to say “Trust me. They hurt you. If you hurt them, you will heal.” as a play for power.
Trump 2 is, god, I don’t know. I think of him more as an RNG than a shrewd planner. No Republican of 2012 (I know this, I was there) cared about Greenland. I don’t know why we want Greenland, even ignoring the horrible things we’d do for it. Why ICE doesn’t seem to be doing much deportation but is threatening a ton of random citizens and even killing them now. There’s a similarly to the paralyzed woman in Scott’s post (in kind but not in scale!) - what they do is random and punitive and senseless, and when asked WTF they are thinking, they confabulate answers based in their rage.
None of it is real. They thought the COVID vaccines were genocide, killing up to 90% of the population. I heard it often, but not one who believed it acted like they did. Imagine if you knew that a full 7,200,000,000 people were going to die! A death toll higher than all war combined. You’d probably be gathering supplies. Getting guns and ammo. Waking up in cold sweat, nightmares of bodies piled up everywhere, beyond too many to bury. The end of your old life. Almost everyone you love dying and you can’t do a damn thing about it. I mean, wouldn’t you at least try to declare war on Pfizer or firebomb a Walgreens or something, if you really believed it?
Some may have taken that idea seriously, I never met any. It wasn’t a belief evaluated, it was just a bunch of words modulated onto screaming, System 1 screaming “THEY HURT US! THEY HATE US!” and System 2 knowing it has to come up with something. Learning about the conspiracy was often a moment of smugness, a moment of “see! see! they do hate us!”, another little dopamine hit of “yep. turns out we’re right again!” rather than the intolerable horror it should have been.
None of their arguments, nor their beliefs, are the real reason they support Trump and his actions. To turn one would require a monumental effort—I think it is possible, but I don’t think most people are capable of it. You can only do it one-on-one, it will take a long time, and you will have to sit and smile to real attacks on your character, on people you love, groups you ally with. It is uncomfortable and I can’t ask anyone to do unless they really need to, and it will look less like “ah, I see now, you’re right” and more like a very slow shift over months or years, all of your ideas ones they think they came up with themselves. It’s not satisfying… but I think it is possible.
If this is your best theory of mind for people on the right, then yes you have little chance of convincing anybody that doesn’t agree with you.
I hope this isn’t your actual understanding of the world. If it is, then you’re lost and need to find the way.
One thing that I think might be
low hanging fruit
generally useful maybe (though maybe also bad idk)
is to build a pipeline P that makes it easy to interact with large amounts of fairly legible media content. Specifically, things like
point P at an author / source (e.g. a blog, twitter account, youtube channel, forum user; or a person, organization, political party), and then P indexes all the stuff from that source
ask P what a given source says about X
ask P to search for contradictions (e.g. a pundit saying J6 is terrible and then later saying J6 is fine, or what have you)
ask P to collect all instances of X (e.g. instances of ICE officers behaving poorly)
ask P to collate videos or other media into fast-paced clip shows
given a bit of media (tweet, clip, etc.), fetch the full context
etc.
This has good and bad uses. It would make it easier to clip-chimp. However, it might make it easier to break into really intense filter bubbles that are clip-brained, using concentrated memetic injections.
I think if Trump torpedoes the American economy and America’s international reputation, that could be a very good thing from the perspective of AI x-risk.
Torpedoes our economy: Could “pop the AI bubble” if the US economy crashes or just becomes less attractive as an investment destination.
Torpedoes our international reputation: If Europeans start believing that American AI companies are on a path to omnicide (arguably a fairly accurate belief), they might put pressure on ASML to cut off the supply of chips to American AI companies.
Yeah. I agree with this.
I feel annoyed that the “no kings” movement often brands itself as “no kings, no billionaires”.
I have mixed feelings about billionaires (I’m sort of abstractly in favor of the idea, extremely in favor of it being legal for someone to be Bill Gates or Dustin Moskovitz, and also very frustrated with how irresponsible and many billionaires seem to be with their social and political power). But I have negative feelings about people declaring “no billionaires” as a slogan. Most of the time, when people blame things on billionaires, they’re making completely innumerate claims and flouting econ 101 principles (plus sort of attacking my social class of “smart people who could plausibly fantasize about getting rich from doing a startup”).
I think it’s more than just “irresponsible”. A big part of the argument is that billionaires have the capacity and incentive to do bad things. Like Facebook trying to get everyone hooked on their feed, or Walmart having tons of employees on food stamps. (Or the East India Company fighting a war to keep selling opium to the Chinese...) Big power motivated by greed doesn’t always lead to good things. Sometimes it does, but it’s not obvious that it’s the best way.
This is a problem with profit-maximization, or large corporations, or something, not billionaires — Facebook and Walmart would face the same incentives and do those same things even if their ownership were more distributed.
Well, we can see that corporations owned by everyone (public utilities) mostly don’t behave as sociopathically. They have other pathologies, but not so much this one. So, because everything is a matter of degree, I would assume that making ownership more distributed does make corporations less nasty. And the obvious explanation is that if you’re high above almost all people, that in itself makes you behave sociopathically. Power disparity between people is a kind of evil-in-itself, or a cause of so many evils that it might as well be. So I stand by the view that “no billionaires” is reasonable.
“No billionaires” as a slogan has another problem, that billionaire is not a very good category (in the rationalist, cut reality at the seams sense.) The incomiest [sic] billionaire has made on average 700 times more per year than the poorest billionaire, but they have the same category name so we try to apply the same intuitions when predicting events around them. For comparison, we probably wouldn’t put someone making $16,000 a year in the same category as someone making $11,000,000 a year when making intuitive category based predictions.
not to worry; by the end of the decade we’ll be able to neatly point to either trillionaires or billionaires, enabling specificity without much shift in vocabulary.
What are the other 6?
Are there other rationalists / EAs working on something similar?
I think so but not sure about the details atm.
This is maybe a good thread to speak up and say if you are interested in helping in the form of “donate to opportunities that people are tracking in the background” or “put serious labor in that won’t flake”. And then maybe whoever’s more involved can DM people or post publicly depending on the circumstances.
I would donate, particularly if “increasing small donor count” is useful.
Though we have opposition to Trump in common, and are probably closer culturally to the Democrat side than the Republican side, rationalists don’t have that much overlap with Democrat priorities. In fact, Dean Ball has said “AI doomers are actually more at home on the political right than they are on the political left in America”.
There have been a couple interesting third parties. A couple years ago Balaji Srinivasan was talking about a tech-aligned “Gray Tribe”, which doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. Andrew Yang launched the Forward Party, focused on reducing polarization, ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and a centrist approach. Seems pretty appealing but is still very small compared to the mainstream parties.
I’m not sure what the answer is.
I would not trust Dean Ball as a trustworthy actor acting on the object-level, and certainly would not take any of his statements at face value! I think it’s much better to model him as a combination of a political actor saying whatever words causes his political aims to be achieved, plus someone willing to pursue random vendettas.
Do you know what his aims are? I feel like that’s an important part of a model like this!
Alas, no my model is rather limited.
Here’s an ill-considered hot take: there may be more opportunity to do good by positioning yourself as MAGA (disingenuously, if you have to) and promoting stuff you think is important where MAGA is at least a little flexible (AI?), because my sense is that this kind of thing is pretty neglected vs opposition to Trump.
(not that I’m volunteering).
Peter Wildeford looks to me like he does tread carefully around criticism of the admin, I can’t easily estimate his impact. Dean Ball has gone further in supporting the admin and seems to have been very impactful as a result. Maybe there’s substantial opportunity to copy Dean’s playbook.
NB this is marginal impact reasonong, not “if I were all powerful what would the best outcome look like” reasoning.
If you are not MAGA, claiming to be MAGA for this purpose is concern trolling.
L. O. L.