8. If you believe, as I came to believe as early as July 2017 (6 months in, during the failed ACA “skinny repeal” attempt) that Trump regime was basically ransomware, how do you get it out and prevent future infections? breakingsmart.substack.com/p/malware-is-c
Conversation
One thing I want to do with this meta thread is not let my unabashed middle-class globalist bougie class snobbery color my cold takes too much. Yep, I’m probably part of the class demonized as “elites,” and do harbor some of the contempt Trumpies sense and react angrily to.
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But I do believe that when I factor all that out, as best I can, we are left with real moral culpability that’s not just a matter of class/culture prejudice. There are crimes against shared humanity here. Remember, plenty of poor working-class whites *didn’t* vote Trump in 2016.
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Final meta point. Trump, despite being a rich, white, native-born, is an outsider lolcow in important circles where I, as foreign-born non-rich brown, am an insider. That this can be true is one of the deep, broad resentments Trump was a messenger for. Just acknowledging that.
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9. To the extent this whole 4-year shitshow was enabled and given its specific 2016-20 shape and form by software eating old institutions, what should we take away in terms of what new software-aware institutions should look like? What’s the message of the medium?
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10. This is basically a cope for poor Ben, but it does suggest a good question: what is the range of GOP presidents Dems would/should see as acceptable in future, even if distasteful? I’d have been 100% fine in 2016 with any of the other candidates, from Cruz to Jeb.
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(which is not to say I’d have personally liked any of them, or agreed with their policies, esp in a counterfactual Cruz admin, but I’d have seen it as legit, and good-enough faith. And tbf I rather liked GWB though hard-left partisans hate him... in many ways I’m pretty old-GOP)
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Yep. I strongly overindex on just playing a decent person in public life. That’s 80% of the job of a major public figure. If you flub that the rest is lost anyway.
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He was just a face of that systemic outcome. It is a mistake to think the presidency is a one-man show. That’s literally what Trump thought it was. He mistook a face-of-a-system role for emperor role. Remember Congress voted for that war.
