Buenos días desde Argentina del Norte! Американцы должны начать изучать русский язык. The election result was a shock, and yet all too unsurprising. But the US has taken on characteristics of a banana republic in terms of inequality, polarization, inability to address basic social needs or even talk seriously about them. Trump and the GOP create those conditions (as ofc US capital created banana republic conditions in Latin America, which is in fact a big reason why we have migrants), then blame Dems and take advantage. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” - George Orwell

I thought the election would break the other way. Trump lost in 2020. Last time, he had the advantage of incumbency. Since then, he got even more demented, he perpetrated the assault on democracy on 1/6, was mixed up in national security violations, financial irregularities, campaign irregularities, rape allegations. Roe chickens came home to roost.

Polls have pretty big errors and according to them it was a toss-up.

The counter-argument was, the US has drifted from center-left to right wing since the 80s. The GOP makes everything worse for the working class, and pins it on Dems, leading to GOP gains, and the doom loop continues.

I knew that, and that there was no room for error. But Trump is so obviously unfit and making ridiculous claims that were already rejected in 2020, offending everyone left and right, and I thought reasonable independents would double down on their 2020 rejection. Americans would not reject everything America stands for. Even though it was only a small shift from 2020, that’s all Trump needed and I was very very wrong.

Why did it break against Harris? Trump got about the same votes as 2020 (slightly more). Dems got 10m less.

2024 - Harris 70,356,521 votes, Trump 74,264,010 votes
2020 - Biden 81,283,501, Trump 74,223,975

With California and other mail-in votes, Harris will catch up a little and Trump will add some. I don’t think 2m though? (Nate Silver estimates differently, Trump +4m, Harris -5m v 2020)

There are missing Dem votes. Dems couldn’t motivate the Biden 2020 voters, at least the more marginally attached ones. (Without deep survey data and a Sankey chart, no way to tell how many actual Biden 2020 voters dropped out, switched, etc.) Harris did not generate the same fear of Trump that Trump generated of communism, immigrants eating the dogs, poisoning the blood and whatnot. Fear is a greater motivator than joy. I thought women and lefties would turn out in droves to head off the danger. It beggars belief, but it seems like only the highly educated women did.

That is the proximate cause. More causes in no particular order:

  • Trump’s simple message still finds its target, despite the disasters of his last Administration, his obvious unfitness. Including:

    • I will fix it, and only I can fix it! Cult of the Glorious Leader.

    • Authoritarianism: to hell with compromise, niceties like due process. Let the shooting start! Use the military against the enemy within! Firing squads! Lock’em all up if they oppose me! (and free my thugs)

    • Nationalism: Make America Great Again!

    • Grievance and Scapegoats: America is going to hell, all our problems are caused by external/internal enemies.

    • Racial supremacy: Foreigners are poisoning the blood. Don’t want immigrants, but want (white) people to have more babies. Liberals think you are garbage (never mind Trump called Dems garbage, and traitors, and the enemy within and whatnot)

    • Mob intimidation: 1/6

    • Gaslighting/big lie: So many to choose from, I won in 2020, everything was great in 2020 until Biden destroyed the country, Obama’s was born in Kenya, greatest inauguration crowd ever, crime is way up, worst employment in history, your kid will go to school and come back with a sex change operation, Dems support abortion after birth, etc., etc.

    • Rejection of free elections/free speech: Elections are fixed if I lose, 60 Minutes should lose CBS all their licenses etc.

  • Obviously, this is a textbook fascist playbook. It’s impossible to find any daylight between this and Hitler’s political playbook (if not the goals it was put in service of, death camps, conquering Europe). It’s a simple message, it triggers the amygdala, fear of the other. It’s a much harder sell to say, we’re all in the same boat and let’s work together and compromise with each other to create a more perfect union.

  • Half of Trump’s voters are unabashed fascists. A lot of them are Christo-fascists who think government’s purpose is to bring about the Second Coming. And then traditional fascists who want a strongman to get things done, the ends justify the means, economic and social goals trump niceties like freedom and fairness, democracy, rights of anyone but the ruling class. The GOP quakes before the far right. They represent maybe half of the GOP, even the mainstreamers have to kowtow. The media soft-pedals it and doesn’t want to piss them off by calling them out. The GOP could nominate Satan and they would get at least 30% and probably more.

  • The non-fascist half (or less) of GOP voters just don’t care about democracy v. fascism, they vote their pocketbook, who is better for me, things like ideology and freedom and democracy and fascism are just abstractions. A lot of them don’t even have the capacity to analyze which will be better for them, and vote based on vibes. I’m mad that Biden did this or some leftie said that. It’s more of a temper tantrum than anything else. Not the brightest, and Trump is a con man.

  • There are tankies on the left. They don’t turn out except for e.g. Stein or Sanders. They despise mainstream Dems like Harris and Pelosi, who in turn despise them. They didn’t turn out this time because they are big mad about hot-button issues I don’t really want to bring up. OK, enjoy the next 4 years, assuming there is a free election in 4 years which is not a safe bet. (I can sympathize with their beef that Dems have morphed into GOP lite but you know, small steps. Obamacare was a small step, saved budget money, it’s going to die without having survived 12 years).

  • Dems have to get a super-majority of the independents and they decide elections. Again, not the most plugged-in, switched-on or the brightest, and Trump is a con man.

  • Some people say ‘inflation’. But jobs, real wages, real personal income are well above pre-pandemic levels and back on a normal path. The economic backdrop was a minor miracle for Biden. The pandemic disruption was massive. Everyone was out of work. First one set of goods and suppliers like exercise bikes and Amazon were in overwhelming demand. Then hospitality and travel workers. Then massive supply chain disruptions. Then inflation started overshooting. I thought only a recession would cure it, but we got a soft landing. An election at full employment (4.1% unemployment after peaking at 14.8% in 2020) with inflation back under control (2.4% after peaking at 9% in 2022) seemed like a best-case scenario for Harris. Of course, unexpected inflation creates winners and losers; people were hurt by the end of pandemic measures, child tax credit (thanks GOP), loan payment resumptions. But obviously Biden did a lot of stuff to mitigate that. I thought he would get a passing grade on the economy. Anyway, if you say ‘inflation’ when your real income is up, and you were better off in every way with Biden policies, you were voting for Trump anyway.

  • Musk will claim it was his social media and get-out-the-vote SuperPAC that did it. In fact, if Trump is outperforming significantly vs. 2020, get-out-the-vote makes little diff. Given Trump’s outperformance nationwide, e.g. winning Iowa and Florida by >10%, his outperformance in swing states looks puny. But anyway, the Big Tech right-wing Mafia led by Musk will fully own this White House, if they can wrangle Trump. He might find a way to screw them over but they have leverage with social media, checkbooks.

  • The information battle space is massively tilted toward a GOP narrative. The fact that people will say ‘inflation’ is basically another way of saying, Democratic policies are going to help the undeserving who will make everything more expensive for me. It’s a BS narrative blaming Dems for unrelenting pressure on labor from capital and GOP-driven policies. The media will never call those out. But oh no, someone was ‘woke’ on campus or on Twitter. Anything raising up poor people (or failing to crush them sufficiently into the dirt) gets called out as socialist, straight fascism eyeing you in the face is never called out. Let’s not blame the right for driving cars through protesters or passing laws to legalize that. Let’s give credence to BS about Paul Pelosi when someone breaks into their house with rope, zip ties and duct tape and beats him up with a hammer.

  • There is a collapse of trust in elites and institutions. Voters think their institutions have failed them and actively want to tear them down. Dems are pro institutions, Trump wants to blow the institutions up (literally in the case of 1/6). Of course, the entire difference between the US and ‘shithole countries’ is attributable to trust and institutions. Trump is on a mission to make the US like the ‘shithole countries.’

  • You can’t afford housing. You can’t afford college. You can’t afford medical care. Someone tells you a BS story in appealing language, it’s not your fault, it’s all the fault of the immigrants, only Trump can fix it. And you buy it.

  • Trump has an uncanny Svengali-like ability to sell his bullshit. People vote for him and against the MAGA Senate candidate who says the same stuff. People vote for him and for AOC in her district FFS. People will study his 2024 campaign appearances and wacko social media posts and wonder at it. How good is this guy at speaking to the reptile brain in his supporters, and why is he so successful at it?

  • There’s a significant contingent that stayed home because they just couldn’t vote for a Black woman. Trump is someone they can see as their leader, Harris is not. I mean, on a sample size of n=2, American voters would rather have a President who is a rapist than a woman. Only guy to beat Trump was a backslapping Irish pol out of central casting.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The GOP is responsible for essentially all of the stuff the GOP claims to be mad about, offshoring, immigrants, high prices and consumer extraction, weakening of institutions.

The US is complicated, but the idea of freedom, anyone can make it regardless of race, color, creed, ideology, is pretty powerful. Of course we haven’t always lived up to that, slavery, Jim Crow, internments, Red scares. But there is no American ethnicity, only American culture, and an open society and freedom are a big part of what defines us. It’s incredibly sad to see so many turn their back on that.

Americans aren’t analytical. They aren’t taught the tools to think for themselves, to think critically about data, about economic and political systems, about social changes. It’s hard and there aren’t always good answers. If an American says they are an independent rational free thinker, a contrarian who does their own research, it’s generally a tell that they are getting some bullshit from YouTube and Twitter. The more certainty about their beliefs, the bigger the tell.

Critical thinking is meta by definition, it’s not just what are you saying, but why are you saying it. Data doesn’t show up in a vacuum, to understand it you have to solve for the system that created it. Anyone who thinks meta is the woke mind virus is literally saying, you gotta drink our Kool-Aid, see things only from our point of view. Anyone who tries to be real gets eaten alive.

Americans have had it so good for so long they don’t realize if you break your toys you might not get better toys (institutions). So many of these people have never experienced a negative consequence of their actions in their lives. They think they are the good, hardworking real Americans and they are going to be OK regardless. Surely the leopard would never eat my face? Maybe I can have a little bit of Argentina or Putin, just the good parts, as a treat? 🙄

Just as software started eating the world and now Big Tech is eating software with AI, Big Tech is now eating government. They will insert themselves into every transaction and take a vig, and surveil and extract everyone. It will be an even greater golden age of techbro excess and grift. Now, of course, they own the media and social media too. Good luck getting heard if you oppose their narrative.

The current era of relative US hegemony can be understood as a strong-dollar era. It’s the reverse of the 70s, an era of slow growth and high inflation and ‘malaise’. The world lost confidence in the US in the wake of Vietnam, abandonment of the gold standard, oil crisis, economic mismanagement. Currently, we are able to run large trade and budget deficits because the rest of the world wants to run up surpluses and buy US bonds and other assets as a store of wealth. The demand for dollars and US assets has a downside, it hollows out US manufacturing, gives us financialization, the Dutch disease, casino capitalism. If Trump imposes tariffs, dismantles the Federal government to eliminate state capacity to meddle with tech and other oligarchs, expels workers, cuts taxes, disbands NATO, it may create a lot of uncertainty and political risk and send us back to the 70s. Leaving the gold standard was an implicit default, Trump’s incoherent policies could amount to a similar abandonment of international commitments leading to global realignments away from the US.

Of course Russia will love that, and it’s not exactly a coincidence. Trump is in bed with BRIC strongmen who are not friends of the US. And Musk is in bed with crypto dweebs. A lot of techbros think they will step into the breach and create an alternative financial system with crypto, and eat the Fed in addition to the administrative and regulatory state. Of course, that implies dollar hyperinflation and global economic collapse, which is bad for everyone. But there are crypto maximalists who think all of the above is inevitable and desirable in the long run. Especially if it puts them in charge of the commanding heights. So they are useful idiots for Putin and others who would prefer to end the hegemony of the US and the dollar. Disruption is good, right? How bad could it be if you disrupt the foundation of everything, like the Sun? I don’t think they have thought things through.

I think anybody who doesn’t think that this crowd is the extreme right, who doesn’t think Trump dreams of being Hitler or that Musk is a white supremacist, isn’t really paying attention or using critical thinking.

But when the shit really hits the fan, Trump voters are going to claim they didn’t vote for this. Well, you saw 4 years of this, you saw Jan 6, evidence of sexual assault, national security violations, financial shenanigans, calls for violence, ample evidence of dementia, felonies, and that is what you wanted. Good job!

Possible outcomes:

  • 4 years of ineffective chaos and limited damage (except to Ukraine or immigrants). Obvious, Trump is an imbecile with increasing dementia. His administration was incompetent 4 years ago. They did not suddenly grow big brains. In fact, the ones with any brains left and called out Trump as an absolute moron. Trump will be scraping the bottom for new appointees who will be even more extreme and even less competent. Well, Musk is competent and extreme. Maybe he will be the regent or maybe he will get backstabbed to death. I wanted to say, maybe they will disrupt parts of the government that need disrupting. Like, health care is a cashectomy on consumers and taxpayers. But then I remember, the defining characteristic of these guys is they do not give a shit about public service, their view of is a competition for who gets to extract rents.

  • Long term diminishment of the institutional capacity of the federal government (a top objective of Musk and Project 2025), destruction of NATO, Smoot-Hawley tariffs, trade wars, global recession.

  • Imagine if there is a pandemic with anti-vaxxer RFK in charge; strategic crises with a Flynn in charge; domestic unrest with a McCarthyist, shoot-first-ask-questions later person leading law enforcement; financial crisis with a Judy Shelton in charge. Dude was certainly not joking about firing squads or using the military against political opponents. The tell is when they claim in all seriousness that their opponents are doing it, spying on them, weaponizing the government, putting opponents in jail or camps, committing violence. Whatever they accuse their opponents of doing, they will do themselves. Maybe guardrails hold and maybe they don’t. If you don’t take him literally and seriously by now, you should start, even if it might already be too late.

Other than Argentina, another historical parallel is Napoleon III, without the benefits of early centralized authoritarian success stories, like modernizing Paris and an industrialization-oriented financial system, going straight to late incompetence and complete disasters which led to political instability that basically never stopped. The US never had the type of czarist, l’état c’est moi rule that made socialism look good, there was always at least a modicum of public-service spirit even among the most demagogic or capital-oriented. And certainly never a gang who came in with a plan to fire’em all like at Twitter, privatize the government and destroy it so it can never come back. Or pure looters/mountebanks.

The lunatics will be in charge of the asylum. All bets are off. Anything is possible. American Troubles, global financial crisis, and even world war are not off the table. If the US isn’t prepared to back Ukraine and other former Soviet and Eastern European states, Putin will be quick to take advantage, likewise China with Taiwan and other hotspots. Empires don’t last forever. The Soviet empire collapsed because it became dependent on energy exports, and when the oil price fell, they had written a lot of checks to internal constituents and places like Cuba which they couldn’t cash. This empire has a lot of enemies and vulnerabilities and overextensions and outstanding checks, is riding high, and pride goeth before a fall.

The lights are going out one by one and I will not live to see the them lit again. Perhaps the Lord forgives people who do not know what they are doing, but I do not, and neither does reality. Buckle up, my friends.

Expect this to be edited out and the Substack to be discontinued in the not too-distant future. The imminent death of Obamacare is going to require some lifestyle changes and I can ill afford crazy rants out there. In Trump’s America, speaking your mind is dangerous.