Liberals, Can We Not?

Focus on important policy rather than immaterial and unconvincing bs!

On his first day in the White House, Trump carried out a spate of diabolical executive orders that will harm huge numbers of people. It’s no exaggeration to say that these policies, like the cutoff of foreign aid and pulling out of the WHO, could result in hundreds of thousands or millions of extra deaths. It seems that just a few years after COVID hit the scene, we have not learned our lesson about the importance of pandemic preparedness, with Trump doing one of the few things that makes us less prepared for a future pandemic.

There’s a lot that’s worth criticizing about this. Many bad things can be said about the Trump administration’s initial policies—including, for example, pardoning violent criminals simply because they were loyal to Trump. So what did left-wingers choose to focus on?

Mostly two things. First, countless news sources ran stories about Elon’s alleged Nazi salute. Second, they talked about the trans executive order that was mostly popular—having provisions like that biological males who transition to become women must be in male prisons. One could discuss the merits of such a proposal, of course, but if your position is politically unpopular, having it be your main target of criticism is ill-advised.

The news stories about Elon were even sillier. Elon talked about giving his heart out to the crowd, and then made a gesture like the one below. But if one makes a hand gesture of giving their heart out, it will inevitably look rather like a Nazi salute. You can try performing it for yourself. While I think there’s some possibility that Elon did it to be edgy, hoping for a media overreaction, the most likely scenario, in my view, (~80% odds) is that it was an honest mistake. Few people publicly do the Hitler salute in front of millions of people intentionally.

The strategy of “portray Trump as a Nazi based on ambiguous and subtle interpretations of him and his orbiters,” has been tried for about half my lifetime, and it has consistently failed. Focusing on policy—especially in the face of a whirlwind of horrifying policy—is a far better strategy than comparing Trump to Nazis. No one who wasn’t already anti-Elon interpreted the alleged salute the way the typical liberal did—those who were supportive of Elon concluded that he was not, in fact, Heiling Hitler.

One of the many reasons Harris lost was that there was inadequate discussion of policies. Harris was vague and amorphous in her policy prescriptions. Much of her campaign seemed to be about highlighting that she was not Trump, and that people who didn’t like Trump—e.g. Cheney—liked her more. Had she followed the Yglesias strategy—run on specific and popular policy proposals—her odds of victory would have been far greater.

One of the reasons the left has grown to be unpopular is the focus on rhetoric and on discourse—on the immaterial as opposed to the material and the concrete. They’ve become much more concerned about vague policy pronouncements with limited legal effect than a cut-off of foreign aid that will potentially kill hundreds of thousands of poor Africans.

Wokeness was the pinnacle of this tendency. The woke seemed utterly indifferent to what was actually going on in the world, preferring to think of the world as an irredeemable hellscape, so the only solution was to sit in gender studies seminars and scold people for their use of language. They were not interested in progress but instead in problematizing anything that could be conceivably thought of as progress. In the rare event that they endorsed any policy proposal—like abolishing the police—it was utterly insane and wildly unpopular.

But even non-wokes fall for this trap. They spend so much time focusing on stuff that’s rhetorically and viscerally outrageous that they lose sight of what really matters. They ignore the real policy enactments, preferring to focus on pronouncements that they regard as rhetorically outrageous though politically effete.

There’s an old Norm MacDonald joke, that goes as follows:

The comedian Patton Oswalt, he told me "I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy." And I disagree. I thought it was the raping.

All too many on the left seem to be like Oswalt in the joke. The worst thing about the Trump administration is not what he says or what he Tweets, nor is it, even in the worst case scenario, that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute for the purpose of generating public outrage. Instead, it’s the policies that are enacted and cause people to die—from infectious diseases, starvation, future pandemics, and pollution. The coarsening of our public discourse caused by Trump is one undesirable feature of his political presence, but certainly not the main one, nor one of which people are unaware.

I worry that the Trump administration will go largely how the last campaign went. Focus was directed away from the stuff he did and more towards the stuff that he and the people around him said. When Americans were hungering for policy that would lower their gas bills, Trump was talking about drilling to reduce gas bills and Democrats were talking about how Trump was a fascist because of the rhetoric he was using. No surprise: the Democrats got clobbered!

When magicians are performing magic, often they will direct the attention of the viewer to some highly visible actions they take, while they perform an unrelated and subtle sleight of hand. It’s important to not be like those deluded by these magic tricks—having our collective outrage focused on shiny objects and ignoring the more insidious things that he does. Something has gone badly wrong when Trump can, for instance, open up the unpopular and disastrous embargo on Cuba without much backlash, for liberals are too busy foaming at the mouth in response to an ambiguous hand gesture.

When a guy says a bunch of ridiculous things and then drives a bus of a cliff, you’re supposed to talk about the driving of the bus off the cliff and not his offensive comments! The worst part is not the hypocrisy.