@BenRossTransit yeah. i think that’s right too. although i think by emphasizing “strong man” rather than “fix everything” we deny for ourselves an ethical path to compete. he said he would fix everything! he said things would be great, a new golden age. dems are too “reality based” to let themselves promise that anything will fundamentally change. it’s hard to get people excited over the slow boring of hard boards when the other guy is offering an amazing (if brave) new world.

@BenRossTransit i mostly think the campaign was lost not because of bad targeting or particular issues, but because the Trump campaign used new media to create a kind of tribe, in which belonging and (mostly false) worldview reinforced one another, in which the tools of a confidence man did their core work, engendering trust. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/11/08/its-the-parasocials-stupid/index.html

“We're still the same country that we were on Monday. We just have changed our form of government.” #HeatherCoxRichardson https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo

i feel like some random kidney cell still kidneying in the body of a thing that just blew its own head off.

@scott the president does have much greater capacity to raise small dollar money to counter, even taking into account the vaster scale of the race, i think. campaign cash has diminishing returns. and of course “earned media” is free, and most important. Harris could have done a zillion podcasts, for free, and if she came off well they’d have been worth a lot more than her expensive ads.

@scott they raised a shitload of small donor funds. yes, without big donors, they’d need tighter budgets, and less lavishly paid consultants. would the loss of infinite money be made up by freedom to take more populist (and genuinely virtuous) positions?

there’s definitely a tradeoff to weigh. we don’t know counterfactuals, but we do no that twice this trade-off worked out poorly. but once, with Biden, it worked out well!

it’s not easy.

from #ThomasFrank https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-trump-elites-centrism.html

(the piece is badly titled.)

“How Harris Lost the Working Class” by @davidsirota https://jacobin.com/2024/11/harris-trump-election-democrats-workers

@Hyolobrika almost no one openly identifies as fascist, and nearly every political movement has some degrees of the tendencies you might identify as fascist. but as I define it, i think the current incarnation of MAGA, with its frequent invocation of an insidious “enemy within” and calls for retribution, qualifies.

here’s how i define it: https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/05/what-is-fascism/index.html

during the 1920s and 1930s, “fascist” was a descriptive term, referring to particular political movements and politicians.

by the 1960s, those movements and politicians were so fringe, so widely considered beyond acceptability, the term became a mere epithet.

in the 2020s, it is descriptive again.

@feld @Hyolobrika that is the community you are trusting. you trust this community enough that it seems implausible to you that 51% would change the rules adversely.

liberal elites are constrained by manners — which they understand as scruples — from fully adopting, endorsing, or even tolerating certain cultural signifiers perceived as working class.

right-wing elites have no such scruples, so are able to adopt any cultural signifiers that help them win power.

( a response to @jbouie https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lakezrwdj72w )

"How Baltimore Locals Beat A Right-Wing Media Tycoon" #MarcieJones https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-baltimore-locals-beat-a-right

@Hyolobrika @feld that is why we invented the institutional state. it’s very much the same story as the blockchain. there’s a central power (central ledger) but no small group of people controls it, only a large decentralized community. we can trust that community, and enjoy the (absolutely extraordinary) benefits that can derive from central authority.

but, in both cases, there is always an attack surface.

@feld QE does much less than you think. But you are getting to the actually interesting questions. Fiat is extremely effective. It’s a tool of statecraft. The question is whether its effectiveness is a good or bad thing.

@feld you might address the basic point that the dollar has retained and gently increased value over time as long as it’s been held in the form of zero-credit-risk Treasuries. your graph just shows the existence of a mattress tax, not a weakness of the dollar as a store of value. while crypto has been a terrible store of value, because a currency has to accommodate those who expect to store negative values (be indebted) over fixed periods.

@feld not new to me.