Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, July 24, 2023

He Never Learns

 Yglesias is back on his shit. He continues to think that policy drives votes, when it's pretty clear - especially in the GOP - that votes drive policy. Sure, Trump understood that Paul Ryan's austerity to Social Security and Medicare was politically toxic, but that's hardly a deep insight. As Yglesias mentions, Trump did not arise from the conservative movement and it's terrible policy ideas.

Trump arose from the right's perpetual sense of grievance. He embodies it in his personality and his policies largely follows suit. Yglesias says that DeSantis' unwavering anti-immigrant policies are somehow more stringent than Trump's, but I don't think that's substantively true. What Trump understands that DeSantis doesn't is that there are "good" immigrants and "bad" immigrants. Cubans and Venezuelans who hate liberals are good. Everyone else - but especially Muslims and Black people - are bad. 

Trump fundamentally doesn't "believe" in anything, so that seems to give him a veneer of flexibility. But that's just not the right way to look at a guy who's the walking personification of Cleek's Law That actually makes him quite rigid, once he knows what will upset the libtards. 

People - especially the Trumpenproletariat - are not thinking about the nuances of policy. That's a pundit's fallacy.

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