Another big difference: highest turnout in a century. Likely around 65% which would be the highest since 1908. So even if the map and outcome remain the same as 2016, it’s not the same. It’s more of the same. By about 5% more turnout
Conversation
Alright I think I’ll turn in soon. I think I’ll be waking up to the following scenarios in order of likelihood:
- Legal wrangle in PA
- Trump win
- Biden win
- Cthulhucene
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Ok: actual last tweet for the night. Trump is on droning about play by play in states. I’ll catch up tomorrow if he lobbed any grenades.
Looks like prop 22 might pass in CA
Now to read a chapter of Iain M. Banks’ Hydrogen Sonata before shuteye.
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Ok no real movement huh. Glad I went to bed. Time for coffee and burrito. Here on out it will be intermittent updates only in response to actual movement.
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Glad Prop 22 passed. The gig economy is too important to be run by regressive CA labor politics. I distrust big corporation less on this. If a 7/8 supermajority clause and corporate moneybags are required to defend against stuff like AB5, so be it.
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Also glad the Dems kinda got an ass-kicking outside of the undecided potus race. The party machine on senate/house was way too smug and self-satisfied assuming a strong position
Quote Tweet
A very raw and revealing Politico rant.
"TUESDAY WAS AN ABJECT DISASTER for Democrats in Washington. The infighting will be bloody -- as it should be."
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I had a single issue of interest: getting Trump out. That’s still up in the air. Everything else though, yeah... necessary institutional reform. Florida should be a sharp warning for people supporting a far left push. It’s bad ideology and losing political strategy in the US.
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When an institution is this sclerotic only charismatic power can renew it. Unfortunately of the two people with any charisma, one is an old caricature leftie out of Seinfeld and the other is a young firebrand leftie blinded by moral self-certainty riding a thirst-trap premium.
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I do appreciate the decade-long spotlight Bernie and AOC have maintained on the powder-keg issue of inequality but ceding broad political-moral authority to them while trying to maintain structural integrity under moderate leadership is a one-time, sharply time-limited option.
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If Biden wins, they’ve got 4 years to find a better equilibrium. If he loses, it’s game over now. Tactical skill at navigating the peculiarities of US politics can substitute for a vacuum of ideas only for so long. Either moderates come up with real ideas now, or the D’s splinter
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Replying to
To her credit, much as I dislike her politics, AOC seems to have higher integrity relative to Cruz, but more idealistic fervor. Absent Trumpist entryism, Cruz could legit have won 2016. But I somehow think AOC can’t ride her twitch-stream to the WH without going more moderate.
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Even without the results, the fact that it’s this close in the middle of a disastrous pandemic and with such an extreme cartoon villain as incumbent means the Great American People have spoken and showed who they are on average: mildly alt-lite fascism-curious crypto monarchists.
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I am dismayed by that basic revealed preference of course, but it is what it is, and a democratic truth. Even Biden’s likely popular vote margin (win or lose) won’t repudiate it. The US has always been a fascism-lite country but is now open about it. Glad that’s been cleared up.
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I do still believe in democracy despite funhouse mirror distortions of electoral politics. So if this is the honest reflection of what the US is as a country, I can live with it so long as it stays lite/mild, and the ideological margins I prefer can be kept secure in urban cores.
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“When people show you who they are believe them the second time” — Maya Angelou 2.0 😆
They’re not stupid, the Democratic mechanism is still the most legitimate one we have. You can’t force liberalism on an illiberal, thinking population. They’ve chosen who they are.
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The one consolation of this democratically revealed social truth is that it confers natural immunity against a left incarnation of Trump walking through the opening created by Bernie+AOC. Stalin-lite will be held at bay by the paranoid fever dreams of the Hitler-lite.
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This means, absent oxymoronic emergence of moderate political charisma (been there, done that with Obama, but a repeat is psychohistorically implausible now) the only counter to extremist charisma trying to woo a fascism-lite-leaning middle from both sides, lies outside politics.
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Commercial break. This segment of the doomscroll 2020 livetweet is brought to you by my frenemies at
Politics is not the answer. Start up, cash in, sell out, bro down. And hire me for consulting after you get Product-Market Fit and land a series A.
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In light of recent events, I’m going to recode Obama’s 2 victories as a triumph of appeal of monarchical cult-of-personality charisma over fascism-lite. Obama got coded as “one of the good blacks”
Blackish virtue signal so long as no real change to illiberalism called for.
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Both coding voting for Obama as “proof I’m not racist” and coding voting for Trump as “defense against radical left antifa communists” are rationalizations of thinly denied basic dispositions. And you can’t blame disinformation/media bubbles either. This is who the country is.
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If you’re comfortable with this 800lb egregorilla in the room, you’re fine.
There are three possible natural reactions for those who are not fine with it: turn institutionalist-statist (impersonal state institutions as the , turn Straussian (noble-lie programmer) or Third Way.
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I believe 2010s have demonstrated 3 truths:
- democracy works (screw Thiel)
- Straussianism doesn’t work (people aren’t that dumb, you can’t fool all the people all the time, you’re not saintly enough to lie nobly, there are no good emperors)
- Industrial institutions are dead
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So your real political choices are:
- Accept your new 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla overload
- invent better institutions
- invent a third way to be elite that’s neither Straussian nor institutionalist
- score a mansion; aka secure a tiny personal zone of political agency
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Yeah this is a major faultline. Mercenary in the policy sheets, missionary in the charismatic streets basically.
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Yes, even though I’m not feeling this scenario in my gut, it’s now intellectually a clear possibility. The 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla will NOT be happy if the institutionalists buy themselves 4 more years by a razor thin margin that’s vulnerable to doubt-merchanting.
Quote Tweet
Everyone should be making plans to get out, because if Biden squeaks this out the backlash in four years is going to be a legit competent fascist. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
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“Competent fascist” means media charmer who will pay lip-service to individualism. Don’t expect a Hitler-like figure. That’s for Germany. The “competent fascist” is a culturally specific archetype that you may not recognize till too late if you’re overindexed on foreign examples.
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A thought on the “popular majority” — the 50-52% of the country that is NOT part of the 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla.
Fortunately it’s not an egregore in its own right. It’s a loose dissensus of a hundred factions united only by their distaste for the 800lb FLE.
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Natural, un-prefixed liberalism, grounded in individual curiosity, openness to experience, exploratory spirit, and divergent thought, does not cohere into egregores well. The part that does is called “classical liberalism” and is indistinguishable from the 800lb FLE at this point
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So even though it *looks* like it has demographic mass to compete, it doesn’t. It lacks the “sticks bound together around an axe” strength of true fascism. 49 sticks bound around an AR-15 trump (heh!) 51 loose sticks. Let’s not pretend it’s all electoral college distortion.
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Back to razor-thin race in MI/WI/PA. I’m now basically at peace with either outcome as democratically legitimate. The difference is in the noise zone. Yes if Trump takes it, he’ll do so gracelessly threatening lawsuits all the way, but he does have the mandate of the 800lb FLE.
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Note that the 800lb FLE will not return the favor. Win or lose, it will basically regard the popular majority as an alien existential threat to the body politic that doesn’t have a right to exist and needs to be disenfranchised one way or the other.
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The purist-fascist core of the 800lb FLE (fascism lite egregorilla, portmanteau of egregore and gorilla for those joining late) will keep trying to lock down the electoral college system and courts, and continue to tighten its grip via vote suppression, gerrymandering etc.
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The more lightly attached shell around that kernel will continue to make excuses for the core, rationalize its posture via appeals to anti-communist scaremongering, downplay the fascism charge etc. None of this is surprising anymore.
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I’d like to edit an anthology of short stories titled “Egregorilla Games: Tales from the global cozyweb underground”
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Scenario planning inside baseball update. We’ve landed on the cusp of complex and chaotic. Everything that Transition Integrity Project war-gamed out will now be tested. Recall that they concluded anything short of a Biden landslide would be fraught. Here we are.
Quote Tweet
Cynefin actually models these well
Clear: Biden clear landslide
Complicated: Trump clear landslide
Complex: Biden after crisis
Chaos: Trump after crisis
Disorder (center): Perma-unraveling
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If you haven’t been following this closely btw, the TIP itself (a mundane, nerdy exercise in the sort of wonky workshopping that goes on all the time) got coded as a wild Soros-funded deep state conspiracy to prepare the ground for an anti-Trump coup.
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Upside from this election so far:
1. I invented the word egregorilla and the term 800lb Fascist-Lite Egregorilla (800lb FLE for short)
2. Finally figured out how to use cynefin in a practically useful way. I grok the diff between exaptive constraints and no constraints now.
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I’ll admit now that I’ve used it meaningfully and substantially, I have a good deal more respect for Cynefin than before. Thing is richer than it looks at a casual glance. I was guilty of dismissing it too quickly as a lightweight, overwrought idea before.
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On a personal note I feel like I’ve truly matured a bit in the last 4 years. In 2016 it took me months of Trump-derangement syndrome to come to terms with the election outcome. This time, it took me 5 minutes to become genuinely okay with the remaining possible outcomes.
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And that’s the full range: from a relatively peaceful transition to either candidate or extended strife/chaos. I may face other psyche-management problems this time around, but difficulty accepting the truth-by-democracy isn’t going to be one of them.
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