Trump Halts All Federal Grants (update: OMB Rescinds Order)
“To the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance… Each agency must pause: (i) issuance of new awards; (ii) disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards; and (iii) other relevant agency actions that may be implicated by the executive orders, to the extent permissible by law.”
.
That’s from a memo issued Monday by Matthew J. Vaeth, President Trump’s Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget, with the subject line, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.”
The memo refers to “$3 trillion [in] Federal financial assistance, such as grants and loans” issued in 2024 and claims that
Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities… This temporary pause will provide the Administration time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of the funding for those programs consistent with the law and the President’s priorities.
The pause in funding is ordered to begin today at 5pm.
January 27th, 2025 Memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, Acting Director, Office of Management and Budget ordering a “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs” (click to enlarge)
The pause does not apply to programs that “include assistance provided directly to individuals,” nor does it apply to Medicare of Social Security benefits.
It does affect all of the major granting agencies of the US Federal government, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (already hit with various restrictions), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US Department of Education, among many others.
One aim of the pause is to give the Trump administration time to insert political appointees into the grant-giving and disbursement processes, giving them the power to upend agency decisions and rescind grants:
Agencies must, for each Federal financial assistance program: (i) assign responsibility and oversight to a senior political appointee to ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to Administration priorities; (ii) review currently pending Federal financial assistance announcements to ensure Administration priorities are addressed, and, subject to program statutory authority, modify unpublished Federal financial assistance announcements, withdraw any announcements already published, and, to the extent permissible by law, cancel awards already awarded that are in conflict with Administration priorities, and; (iii) ensure adequate oversight of Federal financial assistance programs and initiate investigations when warranted to identify underperforming recipients, and address identified issues up to and including cancellation of awards.
Whether, and to what extent, the President is Constitutionally permitted to interfere in these funding decisions is controversial. According to the Washington Post:
“They say this is only temporary, but no one should believe that,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement. “Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.”
The order’s legality may be contested, but the president is generally allowed under the law to defer spending for a period of time, according to budget experts. To comply, though, Trump must make clear though which budget accounts are frozen… and the budget office’s order may not provided sufficient grounds under the law to pause the funding.
Donald Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said the language in the memo is confusing, making its specific effects unclear. There will be widespread panic, Kettl said, as state and local governments as well as the people most reliant on federal-funded grants scramble to figure out if and when their cash flow will stop. “In two pages, we’ve got what amounts to 60 years of tradition and policies that are thrown up in the air.”
UPDATE: Some informative commentary from law professor Steve Vladeck (Texas):
The question of whether a President can refuse to spend—to “impound”—funds Congress has appropriated for a designated purpose is one that has come up every so often in American history, albeit not on this scale. Sometimes, Congress passes statutes that give at least some spending discretion to the President. But absent such authorization, the prevailing consensus has long been that Congress’s power of the purse (the Spending Clause is the very first enumerated regulatory power that the Constitution confers upon the legislature) brings with it broad power to specify the purposes for which appropriated funds are to be spent—and that a broad presidential impoundment power would be inconsistent with that constitutional authority. If the President can accomplish Congress’s intended goal by spending lessmoney, that’s one thing. But simply refusing to spend the appropriated funds because the President is opposed to why Congress appropriated the money in the first place is something else, altogether.
More here.
UPDATE 2: How is your university responding to this news? Let us know in the comments.
UPDATE 3: The New York Times reports:
A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal grants and loans…
Judge Loren AliKhan’s decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the activist group Democracy Forward. The group argued that the order, issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget, violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act, a law that governs the executive branch’s rule-making authorities. The judge said she would render a more permanent decision on Feb. 3.
The suit was separate from another case filed in Providence, R.I., after the ruling by attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia, which also seeks to thwart Mr. Trump’s effort to freeze funding pending his administration’s review of whether the spending comported with his priorities.
UPDATE 4 (1/29/25): The order has been rescinded:
UPDATE 5 (1/29/25): But… as the New York Times reports:
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, wrote on social media that “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.” She said the president’s executive orders on federal funding “remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”
She appeared to be referring to the fact that the executive orders Mr. Trump signed last week — which directed government agencies to review and eliminate spending on so-called woke ideologies — remain in force.
Thanks (enough of) America. And it’s just begun.
This is reprehensible. When I first heard about this, I wondered how it affected philosophers working at NIH. I’ve heard from many that the NIH postdoc is truly outstanding. Perhaps affected philosophers can chime in.
Some resistance to this will come through lawsuits. Other resistance will come through foot-dragging and sabotage from people who work at the relevant agencies. At the level of civil society, it would be nice if we can start (a) beefing up non-state democratic research funding organizations, mutual aid, etc., (b) thinking strategically about how to boycott the relevant bad private actors, and (c) thinking about ways to make life miserable for the people who carry this stuff out at an everyday level (the “senior political appointees” mentioned in the memo, ICE agents…). Re: (b) – I’d like to see a good list of corporations that manufacture retail goods that have (or whose executives have) publicly endorsed Trump, donated to his campaign or inaugural fund, or congratulated him on his victory.
This is all catastrophic – people, maybe many thousands of people, will die as a direct or indirect result of these cuts. It sounds pollyannaish at the moment, but one reason not to despair is that executive orders are what you do when you can’t get congressional approval for what you really want.
Philosophers have little to contribute when it comes to the immediate crisis, but we might start thinking about what to do in the medium- to long-term to address its more persistent underlying causes. Some suggestions: work on trust in science that’s appropriately responsive to the underlying reasons for distrust, alternative models of funding and democratization in science and research prioritization (novel corporate forms for private funding, participatory research assessment, community science/solidarity science, alternatives to/refinements of well-ordered science…), manifestly valuable public engagement, new ways of scaling up the usually piecemeal and laborious task of building community partnerships, and x-phi/moral psych work on the psychology of effective charitable giving and moral persuasion.
America was where the Civil Rights Movement happened. Where is the civil disobedience, the mass protests? I’m not seeing it.
For what it’s worth, and it might not be worth much, Vladeck’s summary of the constitutionality is soft-balling things a bit. There is no reasonable controversy — this is unconstitutional.
Yes, well, then the issue ends up in the Supreme Court (if it ends up there). That will take ages. And then, we’re talking about the Supreme Court who are, as we know, not even a little bit partisan these days. I wouldn’t hold my breath. This is a pretty well calculated move. In a technical sense, this Trump administration has long planned what it would do in these first days (and probably also in what follows). This is no longer the incompetent (again, in power-technical terms) first Trump administration.
Rumors of their competence may have been overstated.
I think it is an iterative process. There will be an order which is more restricted and legally more defensible. But my point was only that Trump and Co might know full well that the orders won’t stand, and yet do it anyway since it sufficiently disrupts. Anyway, I am glad to be proven wrong.
People literally read all this 4d chess into the 1st Trump admin’s actions, too — the one you called ‘incompetent’.
It is true, though, that the latest EO regarding K-12 education is more circumspect and at least offers grounds. Reads more tightly argued — to this non-lawyer, anyway.
Sorry, attributed the ‘incompetent’ remark to you rather the person who actually said it…
it’s an old axe to grind but this sort of thing was entirely predictable and is precisely the calls to “have conservations” and “take seriously the concerns” of trump voters is ridiculous.
people may indeed contain multitudes, but some of the multiplicity of some of those people in the u.s. contains rage, resentment, and the urge to re-make the country into a white nationalist ethno-state that rejects science and education. even more of those people contain multiplicities that are willing to let the latter happen. the evidence was there, it was easy to predict, every sane media outlet said “believe what they say they will do” and it didn’t work. so you’ll forgive me if i’m not interested in conversations with people who aren’t interested in shared governance, climate change, human empathy, science, and education.
I’ve spent the last six weeks in Montana. I’d say most of the people I’ve interacted with have been Trump voters. Among friends and family, many of whom I’ve had protracted conversations with, I know well over half voted for Trump. I don’t think it’s an accurate read on the situation to dismiss their concerns, or to levy accusations that they aren’t interested in shared governance, climate change, human empathy, science, or education. Most of these people are college educated, and well over half have degrees. It’s true they have strongly held views that run counter to what a lot of the rest of the country has come to accept as normal, healthy, and part of a good life, but they’re not the demons some people make them out to be.
Also, if one thought one’s fellow citizens were white-nationalist ethno-state crusaders, I hope there would be more interest in talking with them. I’d like to think that anytime I saw that sort of thing displayed I’d engage with the person displaying it and endeavor to help them see reason. That counsel is more important to heed once one recognizes the possibility that one might be systematically in error about the mindsets and motivations of these other people. Sometimes a conversation is important for one to have even if one doesn’t know it. That importance, and the need to take the possibility of error seriously, is perhaps more pronounced in cases where one takes oneself to be justified in refusing to entertain talking with the other person.
All that’s to say we should be careful about condemning conversations with Trump voters as ridiculous.
What *are* their concerns? The ones we shouldn’t dismiss, I mean.
I’m also curious to hear this. I’ve been obsessed—like so many others—with the real grounds for Trump support for a decade. I’ve read polls, listened to interviews and focus groups, endless analysis, etc.
I’ve come up with nothing that makes any rational sense—even on the obvious assumption that not everyone has my values.
Nothing which makes any rational sense? Or nothing which is true? Like, the belief that abortion is wrong and should be prohibited seems perfectly reasonable, even if it’s false. That is to say, I can understand why someone might believe it. And Trump *did* objectively transform that belief into policy. So, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a “real ground for Trump support” which “makes rational sense.” Similar comments would apply to (stereotypical) conservative beliefs about immigration, gender identity, business regulation, isolationism, and the like (which is, again, not to say that those beliefs are true). Or do you mean something else by “rational sense”?
No, I mean “rational sense”.
I accept that abortion is somewhat of an exception to that claim, but I don’t think it goes very far in explaining support for Trump in general.
The main reason being that the people who want abortion to be illegal typically like other parts of Trump’s “platform” if we can use such a generous term for it.
“1. The top reasons voters gave for not supporting Harris were that inflation was too high (+24), too many immigrants crossed the border (+23), and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class (+17).
“2. Other high-testing reasons were that the debt rose too much under the Biden-Harris Administration (+13), and that Harris would be too similar to Joe Biden (+12).
“3. These concerns were similar across all demographic groups, including among Black and Latino voters, who both selected inflation as their top problem with Harris. For swing voters who eventually chose Trump, cultural issues ranked slightly higher than inflation (+28 and +23, respectively).”
(From https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/ )
Thanks for the answer. Those are the familiar answers I’ve grown to expect, none of which have any basis in reality. I thought maybe Preston Stovall, in view of his urging us not to dismiss maga’s concerns, had something more compelling to offer.
“no basis in reality”? I guess you can console yourself in that comfort if you like. Last I checked, though, the price of food and housing (idk about fuel or other goods) was indeed going up very quickly and squeezing people badly. Or, at any rate, the rude health of the economy for the working class is not unambiguous and clear, such that thinking that inflation is a problem is an obvious and easily dismissible mistake.
I also don’t know how you can dismiss the claim about too much immigration as having ‘no basis in reality’, since that is obviously an evaluative question that can’t just be dismissed because you have (if you do have) some or other statistic about how much immigration there is. Similarly for the other matters.
In other words: cheap talk.
Yes, but what does this have to do with Harris (or even with Biden)? Correlation is not causation (see also: the economy was good under Trump).
Anyway, none of this is what this blog entry is about. I shall stop here.
The reality is that we suffered a global pandemic which tanked the global economy, causing high rates of inflation everywhere. Biden’s administration did a great job helping the US recover and getting inflation back under control. That a person would vote for Trump on the grounds that Biden made everything more expensive is preposterous.
Before covid hit, Trump had very high rates of illegal immigration and completely failed to do anything about it. Later, he encouraged repubs to block a bill that would have helped curb the issue so that he could run on the immigration issue, blaming Biden for it. Again, blaming Biden for this problem in deciding who to vote for seems out of touch with the reality.
To be clear, I don’t think the concerns are intrinsically baseless. I think seeing them as good reasons to support Trump is baseless.
I think these are not good reasons to support Trump.
But I don’t think the people who see them as good reasons to support Trump are totally baseless. Many people reason as follows: The President controls many important things. When the President was a Democrat, a bunch of things I cared about went badly. Therefore, we should try out a Republican President.
I think everyone (including the people who use this reasoning) agrees that this reasoning is not ironclad, but it takes a lot of explanation to show why it’s likely badly wrong in this particular case. Most of us who voted for Harris have already internalized this explanation, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has.
When did you last check then? Inflation in the US is now low and has been for quite a while.
How will Trump lower the price of housing? Be deporting the people building them?
The price of food and housing remains extremely high.
Anyway, your rhetorical questions are beside the point. I am not arguing that Trump will fix these issues — he won’t. I was mainly responding to the blithe remark that we can just dismiss Trump voter’s priorities/rationales — high prices, immigration, etc. — out of hand as having ‘no basis in reality’. You are simply delusional if you think people cannot reasonably disagree with you — and come to different conclusions about who to support — over these issues. But cheap talk will get you clout online amongst same-thinking people, at least. Maybe that’s the real reason for it.
“You are simply delusional if you think people cannot reasonably disagree with you… over these issues.” I wonder why the Trump supporter is entitled to more charity than your current interlocutors. Is it the issues at hand or the people?
I mean, you can always change the subject. If it is not about inflation, then maybe it is about inflation in the past (“prices remaining high).
The only way for prices not to remain high is for wages to grow faster than prices, sticker prices are never coming down, no matter who is president.
And in fact, wages were growing faster than prices under Biden.
I don’t say that people *cannot* reasonably disagree with me. I say that they *happen to not* reasonably disagree with me.
I base this view on listening to the reasons they give for their view.
Saying I’m going to vote for Trump because I am worried about high prices is not a good reason unless there is a further reason that Trump would be a better steward of the economy. To believe that, you could give other reasons, and so on.
Can voters give good reasons in each case? Yes, they could. Do they? I’ve not heard a single instance and I’ve heard a lot.
This is fair, but from the empirical studies I’ve seen, this isn’t unique to Trump or Republican voters.
No, it is not.
I guess my own underlying reason for what I say stems from my disagreement with what Kenny said.
He said:
I don’t believe this anymore. I think that many SAY this, and may even in some sense believe it, but I think this is a rationalisation in the sense that if the shoe was on the other foot, they would see through this flimsy argument right away.
They want to believe this, and so they do. If they didn’t want to belive it, say if the conclusion was that they should vote for a Democrat, they would not.
So it’s not just that they reason uniquely badly, it’s that there is something else underlying what they say that is not the true reason.
You know the famous line from the Dark Knight: “Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Often, this is the impression I get. It is hard to reason with and be understanding toward people who in return only hate you and your values. That makes living together in a community somewhat difficult.
I also see a difference what many MAGA people say in private and how they behave publicly. In private, they are more open perhaps, but what does this matter if once they form a crowd, they stone you? (For now, metaphorically speaking.)
The last paragraph applies to pretty much any political mob — people get exclusionary and stupid in that context. By that standard, left-wingers often look very bad, too, but that’s no reason to think they should not be constructively engaged with. Mutatis mutandis, et cetera…
This whitewashing of the MAGA crowd needs to stop. The overwhelming majority of them are simply deplorables, and that is that. There is nothing to engage with.
I don’t know that anyone IS deplorable. Maybe they are, but I don’t think that’s the issue. Rather, there are pairs of sets of ethical and political principles that are so radically opposed that the adherents of one set cannot possibly reasonably engage on matters of public interest with adherents of the other. I am open to the possibility, but it seems vanishingly unlikely to me that there is a set of principles that (a) justifies accepting what is currently happening and (b) is similar enough to my own to allow for productive discourse. We don’t seem to share a project at even the most general level of description. So I’ll also pass on the engagement.
I am sure this attitude will be of enormous assistance in getting Trumpian voters to change their minds the next time around (if there is one).
Are they open to changing their minds in the first place?
Well if you want to neuter Trump in the mid-terms and turf out his successor in 2028, then you need to persuade the swinging voters that they made a bad call. And if you want the core institutions of the American Republic to be safe and to open the way for what is known the States as a ‘progressive’ agenda, then you need to detach at least some of his more hardcore followers, since the Republic won’t be safe and a progressive program won’t be possible while a sizeable minority thinks that Trump and his policies are A-okay. If you write either one of these groups off as beyond the pale, as simply ‘deplorable’, then you are opening yourself up to a life-time of political defeats. The swing voters, we know, can change their minds – that’s why they are swing voters. As for the more hardcore MAGA supporters, I don’t know. Perhaps some of them are persuadable and some not. But if you treat them as fellow- citizens to be reasoned with, then perhaps there is a chance, but if you treat them as ‘simply deplorables’ with ‘nothing to engage with’ then persuasion will be impossible. I don’t say that if you don’t treat them as ‘simply deplorables’, that they will change minds but I do say that if you do, then they won’t.
I agree with you. I think we disagree on this point here:
I don’t think that a lot of people who are not already opponents of Trump are open to rational persuasion, for a lot of reasons, one being that the media environment is just too noisy and crowded for “reason”.
So I shouldn’t have suggested that they aren’t open to changing their minds. I agree that we have to do everything we can to persuade them.
I just don’t see a lot of room for rationality in that process.
And these considerations don’t apply on the other side?
Charles Pigden is right. This thread is a source of significant despair for anyone hoping that the Democrats might learn their lesson from what happened a few months ago and correct course. But perhaps the Democratic party will turn things around, regardless, by ignoring the social class of people that includes most commenters on Daily Nous and listening instead to the much larger part of their traditional base, which they have apparently abandoned.
Indeed, one hopes that democrats will finally learn that trying to satisfy the pretend needs of deplorables is a losing strategy, since they don’t actually care about these pretend needs.
Unfortunately, too many still don’t see it.
Well it depends what you mean by ‘reason’. If it were me, I would be making extensive use of the Bible to hammer these supposed Christians. Bishop Budde missed a trick when she failed to make use of Matthew Chapter 25. (She also made a mistake by starting off with the fears of trans, gays and lesbians rather than those of the immigrant labourers who do the dirty work in American society. They came second on her list of potential victims to whom mercy should be shown. That just gave the rabid right a soundbite they could use to caricature her position.) But if, like me, you are an atheist you need to be honest about it. ‘I don’t believe this stuff but you say you do ‘(addressing not the hopefully redeemable MAGA supporters but their self-appointed leaders). ‘You defy and deny the words of the Christ that you claim to believe in. They were hungry and you denied them meat, they were thirsty and you denied them drink, they were strangers and so far from taking them in you cast them out with expressions of hatred and contempt. Christ says that if you do these things to the least of these my brethren you do them unto me. In deporting so many with such vicious cruelty, you are committing acts cruelty against Christ. So you had better hope that I am right and you are wrong and that nothing awaits you on the other side but nothingness. Because if you are right and I am wrong, I am looking at some of the Hell-bound.’ There is also a lot of usable material in Matthew 23.
Now I admit that the ideological struggle will be tough, especially as many MAGA supporters exhibit the traits of right-wing authoritarians (as diagnosed by the social psychologist Robert Altemeyer) which include a high tolerance for contradiction, and a tendency to anoint their leaders and then to give them a free pass for sins that they would righteously condemn in others. Apart from that they are prone to be judgmental and vindictive. So it isn’t going to be easy. But the right thing to do is to fan the feeble flames of reason in these people and not to write them off as dust and ashes.
PS. As left-wing social democrat – I don’t want to abolish capitalism but I do want the capitalist class to be disciplined with a radical program of redistributive taxation – I agree with the leftist critiques of the Democrat Party from people like Sanders and TYT. There has been too much emphasis on identity politics as opposed to class politics, and way too much deference the donor class.
There may be a large number of them that aren’t. But there are definitely millions of people who *did* change their minds several times and voted for Trump at least once and against Trump at least once, which suggests that they might well be open to changing their mind yet again.
I agree with you both, Charles and Kenny, and I will say that I have had minimal success in appealing to the actual message of Christianity—and I do think it works not to try to present yourself as a Christian (if you aren’t) and avoid “ideological triggers” like the good Bishop unfortunately activated.
However, I still think that presenting it in the way that you do makes it sound a bit too easy. The fact is that the right-wing propaganda machine is so incredibly powerful that any persuasion is like running up a steep hill.
Even leaving everything else aside (and for the record, count me in team don’t-demonize-millions-of-people), Trump won the popular vote by 1.5% and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan by less than 1%. In a democracy, you don’t need to persuade the core supporters, just the people at the margins.
“strongly held views that run counter to what a lot of the rest of the country has come to accept as normal, healthy, and part of a good life”
Hmm I wonder what these views are.
Few people are “demons”, but that’s just a strawman. You can probably have a perfectly decent dinner conversation with someone having the most abhorrent “strongly held views”.
People who have these “strongly held views” are also often able to make exceptions for those in their immediate surroundings. They might not subsume their neighbors under the “strongly held views” but that does not change these views at all.
So, sure, you can be friendly with someone. But that’s not indicative of their moral character if they’re also perfectly content to make everyone suffer just so they can enjoy seeing other people suffer.
You had me up to here. Do you really think trump voters are rightly thought of in these terms? All of them? Most? Did you not mean to be talking about Trump voters in particular? At any rate, while I’ve met people in southwestern Montana that suffer from this kind of mentality (“some people just want to watch things burn” as it was labeled upthread), it’s mostly confined to the religious fanatic. And while people in this part of the country tend to be religious, it’s of the WASPy kind of Christianity that saw the Republic as a task to be undertaken in concert as a community. Despite what might be seen on shows like Yellowstone, the people around here that supported Trump are not stark-raving white nationalist ethno-state warriors.
I don’t quite see why it would matter for moral appraisal whether they *are* “stark-raving white nationalist ethno-state warriors” or whether they merely support “stark-raving white nationalist ethno-state warriors”, vote for “stark-raving white nationalist ethno-state warriors”, and derive satisfaction from observing the actions of “stark-raving white nationalist ethno-state warriors”.
Aha, okay, thanks. So you were talking about Trump voters. Then yeah, my remarks kick in. This strikes me as a reading of the political divide that inhibits our capacity for mutual understanding in this country, which then distorts the disagreements we have and makes it harder to get things done as a group.
Sorry, but I don’t understand how your remarks “kick in” on the question of moral appraisal. What exactly do you think is morally exculpatory here?
Your initial remarks (that are supposed to “kick in”) here were about people being pleasant conversationalists or good company or whatever.
But is not exculpatory. Perfectly horrid people can be good company (I thought you had agreed on this).
Your further remarks were that people are not TV-caricatures of evil. But I have responded that not actively doing the Bad Thing does not exculpate supporting/causally contributing to/cherishing the Bad Thing. You have not responded to this so I’m not sure of your view.
Is your view perhaps that we should just pretend that there is something morally exculpatory? (Maybe for Realpolitik reasons?)
Or is it that we should ignore morality altogether?
Or maybe do you think that the Bad Thing is not Bad at all?
I’m denying the aptness of characterizing our political divide today in terms that gloss one side as moral reprobates, and I’ve tried to indicate why I deny the aptness of such characterizations both with respect to some of my personal experience, and with respect to what I think the country needs.
And I have responded that your personal experience is neither here nor there. Someone might be nice to you just because they perceive you to be in-group while being the most vile reprobate to those they perceive as outgroup.
If you have nothing else to refute characterizing “one side as moral reprobates” than your claim that this side is not wholly composed of mustache-twirling cartoon evildoers who kick puppies for fun and are mean to everyone all the time — then all you have is a merely subjective answer to the most flimsiest of strawmen.
Cmon, you love to proclaim elsewhere how much you cherish debate. Have an actual debate.
Well, productive debate requires shared understanding over some of the particulars. It’s my testimony, based in part on my experience, that our current political situation is not aptly characterized with some of the langauge people tend to use — language like “the most vile reprobate[s] to those they perceive as the outgroup”, or talk of people who are “perfectly content to make everyone suffer just so they can enjoy seeing other people suffer”, or who “derive satisfaction from observing the actions of ‘stark-raving white nationalist ethno-state warriors’”. I also think the inaptness of these kinds of characterization is evident in the way their propagation across the civic landscape today has distorted our ability to communicate with one another.
I understand that you think my personal experience is irrelevant, and I’m not sure what else to say except that I appreciate the conversation as far as it went. But it seems to me to have reached a point of diminishing returns, given this gulf in mutual understanding. I think I mentioned this in a prior conversation, so let me reiterate: feel free to introduce yourself if you ever see me at a conference. I’d be happy to try to hash this out a bit more in person. And please, have the last word.
I mean, likewise, I don’t know what to do with someone who seems to think that nice or polite people cannot be morally abhorrent. These just aren’t very strongly correlated categories.
As such, you haven’t given me any evidence for the inaptness of these categorizations.
I never disputed that you can have a nice conversation with them, and you keep saying that you can have a nice conversation with them. All the while hiding the morally problematic aspects — racism, sexism, white nationalism, homophobia, etc — under the pleasant euphemism “strongly held views that run counter to what a lot of the rest of the country has come to accept as normal, healthy, and part of a good life”.
I’ll try this once more: these people have willfully and knowingly morally supported and causally contributed to a great amount of pain, with the worst surely still to come. They are not apologetic about it, they are delighted.
Do you dispute that this is what has happened? Or do you think there is something that excuses this? Or do you think that moral condemnation of these bad actions that cannot be excused is simply impractical? Or what else?
FWIW, I agree with you more than my earlier comments might suggest. I definitely do not think most Trump supporters are evil, nor do I think they are demons, deplorables, etc. Unlike many, I also don’t think most of them are overtly racist (in my experience, many *are* overtly transphobic, but that’s anecdotal on my part). I also wholeheartedly agree that it is probably counterproductive–maybe even harmful–to exaggerate their moral deficiencies in these ways.
But I do think they tend to be very epistemically irresponsible. Concretely, I mean they seem to be very bad at seeing their way of the fog of propaganda, lies, and misinformation created by organizations like Fox News (and by Trump, himself).
There’s surely room to debate this (cf. Thomas Kelly’s recent stuff on whether bias can be rational). But for my part, I think someone who forms lots of beliefs based on what they hear on a platform like Fox News, is at least vaguely aware that millions of people think those beliefs are false, and does not do the digging needed to discover that the beliefs are, in fact, false, is not rationally blameless. There’s a kind of epistemic deficiency there. And when you go to the ballot box and cast your vote on those deficient epistemic/rational foundations, you risk seriously harming the country. And now that risk has materialized into what is likely to become a serious harm.
So, I don’t demonize them, but I also do think they have a great deal of harm to answer for (or, likely will in the near future, anyway).
Thanks Evan. I don’t disagree with how you’ve framed things here, although I expect we’d have some sorting out to do in the details. And I’m not sure what to make of cases where suspicion of what gets framed as “very epistemically responsible” sources of information is warranted. I attended a talk on epistemic trust once where the speaker argued, roughly, that people who distrust mainstream information sources today are irrational, and that this could be corrected by exposing them to more of this information. In the Q&A, I was amazed to learn he’d given no consideration to the possibility that people are paying attention to mainstream information sources today and have learned that they are not infrequently untrustworthy, particularly around political topics. And a case can be made that high-profile media outlets on the left and on the right are, in general, rightfully treated with a measure of distrust today.
Now consider how much time is required to sift through the data needed to come to a settled view on any particular topic, together with how much noise one would have to sift out before finding reliable information, along with the training needed to interpret it correctly; altogether, it’s not obvious to me that either people on the left or people on the right, as collectives, are rightly viewed as irrational in distrusting information about politically contentious topics today.
just fyi i lived in montana for two years, have friends there, and visit often. and i grew up in idaho where my family still lives and i visit yearly.
maga in the intermountain west is not endemic, in fact almost without exception the maga agitators in both states come from out of state.
both idaho and montana (montana much more recently) have had democratic governors in living memory. yes the democrats have changed, yes western states have gotten redder in the past 20 years, and yes reactionary politics have always found fertile ground in american “backwaters.” that said, reactionary maga politics have been carefully sowed in these states via culture war nonsense, birtherism, and so forth. i’ve seen it happen over the past 20 years.
people can be and are fooled by propaganda and manipulation. appealing to resentment in those who are unhappy works as a political strategy. it is also monstrous. i don’t deny the unhappiness and in some cases suffering in maga land, although i also think it’s deeply overstated. i do deny that the politics of bannon, yarvin, theil, vance, miller, de vos, rfk jr., etc. are therefore excusable.
This is all fair, although I disagree about the extent to which MAGA is a homegrown phenomenon, and I suspect I’m more sympathetic to concerns over some of what you’re calling “culture war nonsense”. I’m not sure about Idaho, but the democratic shift in Montana over the last couple decades has been almost entirely driven by people from out of state moving into the bigger population centers. And while some of the more extremist MAGA support has come from people moving in from out of state, most of the multi-generational Montana natives I know are Trump voters, and I suspect that generalizes.
preston you have it exactly backward here. i can give you a detailed history of partisan politics in both idaho and Montana with names. montana has a long history of non-right wing major politicians going back at least to Jeanette rankin. maga-fication corresponds with (typically wealthy) already hard righters moving to Idaho & Montana as “refuges” from “commiefornia”.
please do google frank church, cecil andrus, richard butler, helen chenoweth, raoul labrador if for nothing other than their origin stories.
Sorry, what do I have wrong? I’m not denying a progressive trend in Montana. My paternal grandfather ran (unsuccessfully) for County Commissioner of Gallatin County as a Democrat, and he and my grandmother were Democrats their entire lives (as far as I know), going back to New Deal policies (he worked for the CCC in Gallatin County). But Montana has voted Republican in almost every Presidential election since the 1960s, and it’s the counties with big cities that are liable to change that, if it happens. As I noted, there are some right-wing MAGA extremists moving in from out of state as well. But Trump had a lot of support with native Montanans.
what you have wrong is the following: “the democratic trend is almost entirely….” that is patently not true, your grandfather’s case notwithstanding and presidential politics also not withstanding. in fact the maga governor of montana is *not from montana,* preston.
you might take a look at the history of governors of the state. since 1937 montana has had 7 democrats and 8 republicans as governors.
also, i didn’t say progressive at any point or even liberal. there is no world in which idaho or montana can be said to have been either.
the issue here that you seem to avoid throughout this thread is that maga is not the same thing as conservative or republican or red. further the fact that “natives” (a real term of art in the western u.s.) are largely maga-aligned is not evidence that they were not maga-fied by right wing media, social networks, and (dare i say it?) immigrant rabble-rousers.
my point about the politics of the intermountain west was not that they were ever driven by even center-left. my point was that maga-ification is precisely *not* of a species with conservatism.
what i am frustrated by is the implication in many of your posts here that, if i may (mis?) quote someone else on the thread, the idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with your view is likely a liberal elite who doesn’t touch grass in flyover country. i can assure you that this description does not apply to me.
Thanks, ikj. I’m aware Gianforte is not a native Montanan, and that we’ve often had Democratic governors. I have no idea whether you should go touch grass, but “presidential politics also notwithstanding” is a howler given that’s been the topic of discussion.
I find this whole thread remarkable. Talking to people as people about other things than politics goes a long way. People should try. Don’t take it from me but from Elizabeth Anderson (yes, total appeal to authority). As it happens I’m reading recent work on political epistemology for a tutorial and this thread exemplifies to me many of the things we get wrong about political disagreement.
Or take it from Daryl Davis.
Wonderful
Can you say more, Nicolas, about what you mean?
What part?
I mostly had the things in mind that we know about political disagreement and this thread gets wrong.
Our disagreements are often more shallow than we think.
The way people describe their political adversaries here reinforces polarization and makes it impossible to resolve disagreements.
All of this illustrates how much of a team sports politics is. It’s affiliation/identity expression all the way down from all sides and it’s depressing.
For what it’s worth, I find it equally depressing that after all of this, we are still hearing calls to treat fascists as rational participants in good faith discussions among people with a sincere interest in truth and goodness.
It’s this kind of normalization of anti-democratic thought and implicit treatment of fascism as a potentially reasonable solution to societal problems that got us here.
Way to prove my point, thanks, Julian.
No, I agree with Julian, even if I take your point.
I agree that in many cases disagreement is more shallow than we think (and not least because a lot of it is driven by disinformation).
But it is equally true that MAGA does not argue in good faith and is not interested in what anyone else thinks; only power.
Furthermore, the view that says that those who think of MAGA what Julian thinks are just elites who need to do better in connecting with the hoi polloi is itself elitist.
It’s fundamental assumption is that only we have agency, only we are capable of taking moral responsiblity, only we have duties towards them and not vice versa, and only we have a duty to understand them.
The only point you make that is relevant to what I wrote is conceding your agreement with me. I simply remarked on what I think is a highly plausible empirically supported view of political disagreement which I found illustrated in this thread. I don’t care how much you agree with Julian, who has proved over and again to be an extremely disagreeable interlocutor. To each their own, but I have no intention to continue feeding him.
You’re welcome. For the record, you might want to examine your accusation that people who disagree with you are playing “team sports” and are only “expressing” affiliations. It’s not a good starting point for such open and good faith debates that you purport to desire.
For the record, I am dead serious about a point that is political as much as philosophical. The kind of normalization of fascism as a rational alternative that you, Preston and others are engaged in, is a major danger to democracy. I am not posturing here (what would be the use, given that I use a pseudonym?), I am responding to this danger in a public square.
I am, moreover, ready to argue and defend my position. Conversely, you are not giving any indication of being ready to engage in a serious discussion. Preston has already shown that he is capable of nothing more than evasion blithe dismissal.
Your dismissal of my point displays your ignorance about empirical and philosophical work in political science and political epistemology. The sports teams view, aka realism, has the most solid empirical credentials. That has absolutely nothing to do with people disagreeing with me. It couldn’t be less personal since, according to this view, which I think is true, most of us are playing that game, including me I suspect. (For the record I can’t vote in the US so my team affiliation is undetermined, but it would likely be close to yours).
More importantly though, you basically implied I was in bed with fascists, so no thank you, I’m done engaging with you. I’ve seen your behavior here and other trends and this leads nowhere. I have no time for anonymous sanctimonious keyboard warriors.
*here and on other threads, not trends.
Delon,
You’ve been swooping into DN threads like this for the last several months, as though you’re the only person familiar with realism, and moreover, as though you’re the only person who has ever interacted with and Really Listened to MAGA fans over the last decade. Believe or not, a lot of us have repeatedly attempted to politely and productively engage with MAGA family, friends, colleagues, and strangers, and have concluded with Julian that they’re largely not interested – many, many of them argue in bad faith and are primarily are interested in things like “owning the libs” and ultimately forcing everyone to abide by religious values they themselves fail to uphold.
Why is this so hard for you (and a lot of other philosophers you seem to “travel with” online) to appreciate?
That is literally the first time I’ve mentioned realism on Daily Nous. What are you talking about? I have no idea why you’ve formed this odd impression of me, but to each their own obsessions, I guess! Be safe!
“I have no time for anonymous sanctimonious keyboard warriors.”
Seems like you do. And if that’s what I am, what are you?
“you basically implied I was in bed with fascists”
For what it’s worth I’m still countenancing “deliriously naive” as an epistemic alternative.
Regardless of intent, however, continuing to demand that people who are unwilling or unable to argue in good faith should be debated in good faith has a deleterious effect on democracy and debate itself. Since I value good faith debate, you will excuse that I’ll continue to be disagreeable about such demands wherever I see them.
Be well, Julian.
Regarding political disagreement topic, I’ve found C. Thi Nguyen’s discussion (Polarization or Propaganda?) of Bob Talisse’s work insightful:
“According to one oft-told story, what’s going on is systemic polarization. Our once-peaceful society has been riven into polarized camps. Extremism and political separation are the core problems, and the fix is something like reconnection, intermingling, and friendship across party lines. (The sound of this story is somebody issuing a plea for civility “in these divisive times.”) According to a very different story, what’s going on is propaganda. Certain bad actors are generating false and misleading information for political purposes. To fix it, we need to fight those bad actors.”
Thanks for the recommendation. That’s an interesting piece. I disagree with his diagnosis and his conclusions but that’s a conversation for another day. FWIW I think voters (which is what prompted this thread) are a lot less susceptible to propaganda (and to the extent that they are more symmetrically so) than Nguyen suggests. Good work by Hugo Mercier, Dan Williams and others on this topic. And for the record Talisse’s is not my preferred account. I favor accounts like those of Jason Brennan, Michael Hannon, and Achen and Bartels, which Nguyen doesn’t seem to engage with. Anyway, it’s all good stuff.
This review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s latest book (and presumably the book itself, though I haven’t read it), is worth a look. An excerpt: “[Hochschild] speaks to one such worker, a coal miner who became addicted to OxyContin after suffering an accident on the job. His reasons for supporting Trump in 2016 are connected to his experiences, but they are not so easy to dismiss. ‘When Trump told us he was going to bring back coal, I knew he was lying,’ he tells Hochschild. ‘But I felt like he saw who I was.'”
since there seems to be some (willful?) misunderstanding here, let me point out that the quotation marks around “have conversations” serve a dual purpose.
first, they signify material from a previous comment thread. second, and this is important, they are scare quotes that are intended to indicate a specific meaning re. what types of conversations i mean.
i mean of course (and really the tone of the post makes this clear as does the other portion in quotes) political conversations geared toward rapprochement. so to be clear, i am not advocating for never speaking to a maga supporter again in any circumstance. i too need auto repair and tax services. i too recognize that if someone needs my help, their politics probably don’t matter (although i probably won’t help you if you’re wearing a swastika).
rather the idea is–as julian notes below—that i don’t take a politics of cruelty, schmittian enemy-making, anti-science, anti-public education, authoritarianism, reactionism, admiration for dictatorial regimes, etc. to be based on good faith principles of thought or worthy of empathetic discussion.
My intervention was predicated on the infelicity of characterizing things of the sort detailed in the OP as what you above called the “entirely predictable” result of people you there said were filled with “rage, resentment, and the urge to re-make the country into a white nationalist ethno-state that rejects science and education“, and which you here characterize in terms of “a politics of cruelty, schmittian enemy-making, anti-science, anti-public education, authoritarianism, reactionism, admiration for dictatorial regimes, etc. “. So far as I see, that point still stands. The attribution of bad faith, and a rejection of empathy, seems to me to add only injury to insult.
To be clear, I recognize your right to express this sentiment, and I can appreciate it to an extent. But insofar as we’re trying to think clearly about the relationship between the policy intervention detailed in the OP and the putative support Trump received from white-nationalist ethno-state warriors, I don’t think this is either a terribly accurate or a helpful way of thinking of things. To retrench to “well, all I’m saying is I don’t want to have dinner with Nazis”, while maintaining that you’re liable to be dinnering with Nazis, or Nazi supporters, if you dine with Trump supporters, is just to sweep the problem under the rug as far as I’m concerned. Better to have it out in the open, see how people handle it, and go from there.
Preston, you still haven’t given any evidence for the “infelicity of characterizing things” as such.
I’m trying to be charitable here, holding on as tightly as I can to the presumption that you have a better point than ‘They’re not bad people, they just do bad things and don’t regret them.’
Hi Julian. A remark of yours upthread reminded me of something I read once, and maybe this will help make sense of where I’m coming from. When you write things like this:
I’m reminded of this remark from Sam Hyde:
And I guess I have the same reaction in each case. It’s kind of a clever edgelord thing to say online, and I think I get where it’s coming from, but to the extent it’s worth engaging with it’s probably best to do it in person, where the natural ebb and flow of a face-to-face conversation can carry us along.
That still doesn’t answer my question.
“Why do you think these aren’t bad people?” isn’t answered by “Someone else who is wrong uses similar moral language.”
If you like, I can explain why Hyde is factually wrong. But given recent events, I have a hard time believing that you could offer an explanation of why I am wrong. Case in point: this is the fifth time I’m requesting such an explanation from you.
Let’s cut the crap: if you think that these attitudes that I and many others find horrid aren’t horrid at all (as you indicate above re “culture war nonsense”) then just say so. At least then we know where we stand.
I won’t presume to speak for Preston Stovall, but just for myself, I answer the question “Why do you think these aren’t bad people?” this way:
Some of them are. But some of them are not. And it appears that some of the comments throughout this thread are operating with the sweeping generalization that all Trump voters are bad people. Perhaps that’s not what is intended?
Let’s suppose that isn’t what is intended, and we basically agree that some are bad and some are not. Why might that be? I can think of at least three possibilities.
1) It might be that some of them are located in contexts where it is extremely difficult to recognize truth from falsity. I am not convinced that everyone who voted for Trump (or voted, for that matter) is in a position to effectively assess a sufficient amount of the information with which they are bombarded, and so they are trying to sort things out in the midst of their confusion, and do the best they can. (Perhaps they should not vote due to their ignorance, but that’s a separate issue, I take it.)
2) Perhaps, related to 1, feeling unsure about the truth, they find themselves committed to a series of beliefs that are generally conservative, and they find it difficult to separate themselves from that deeply entrenched set of beliefs. As I’ve heard it put: “I don’t like Trump and a lot of what he stands for, but I’m pro-life, and pro-religious-freedom, and pro-small-government, etc., so I don’t know who else to vote for other than the Republicans.” That kind of response may contain various errors, but I don’t take it to automatically mean the person is a ‘bad person’.
3) Perhaps they have genuinely assessed what information they have available to them, and they have concluded that – despite Trump’s (and Trumpism’s) negative features – there are enough good reasons to support certain aspects of that political platform that they will ‘hold their nose’ and vote for the lesser of two evils. I may strongly disagree with their decision and try to show them they are mistaken, but I wouldn’t necessarily classify them as a ‘bad person’.
A ‘bad person’ in this context – at least to me – seems to indicate a knowing and willing commitment to support immoral behavior of some kind. But persons in groups 1-3 may not be willingly supporting immorality; they may not want to support immorality, but cannot clearly see how to avoid immorality no matter what they choose, and they hope their decision will lead to more good than bad in the long run.
At least that’s my conjecture at this point.
“A ‘bad person’ in this context – at least to me – seems to indicate a knowing and willing commitment to support immoral behavior of some kind.”
This is helpful, because there is an important distinction to be made here. Is it a knowing and willing commitment to support (and, I might add, further) behavior that is
(a) immoral and known by the person to be immoral. Or
(b) immoral and not known by the person to be immoral.
I can imagine Preston as saying that his various acquaintances are good people because they strive to be moral, follow their conscience, often do good etc. If he applies definition (a), he may conclude that they aren’t bad people. They don’t willfully do anything they think is wrong.
But the Banality of Evil means that (a) is wholly unsuited as a definition.
Someone might not qualify for (a) merely because they remain willfully ignorant, or because they are able to excuse themselves from certain overt immoralities (“I’m just following orders”, “they shouldn’t have broken the law”). But self-deception does not change one’s moral standing.
So I’m sticking with (b), and I think the result of applying this definition is unequivocal.
So you’re saying that in all cases where (b) holds, the person is morally culpable? Necessarily, a person is ‘bad’ if they knowingly and willingly support an immoral behavior that they *don’t know is immoral*? Am I understanding correctly?
No, they are only morally culpable if they are willfully ignorant of the immorality of the behavior.
Ok, thanks. So then, it seems the difference in opinion apparently stems from how ‘willful ignorance’ should be understood.
I think Julian makes a good point. The fact is, it is not really that hard to see that Trump is a fundamentally evil person (yes, evil).
It’s blatant.
I would agree — but I don’t think it follows that *everyone* who voted for him is easily able to see that he is evil. There is a difference between something that ‘isn’t that hard’, and something that necessitates willful ignorance.
I was also suggesting that some people, even if they recognize that he is evil, have a moral framework that recognizes other evils as well, and they feel conflicted about which evils they will be supporting, depending on their vote. Again, this may be due to ignorance, but not necessarily willful ignorance. (To be clear, I’m not suggesting this is the case for the majority of Trump supporters, but rather for a non-negligible minority.)
On why it might be infelicitous to characterize Trump supporters as “having the urge to remake the country into a white nationalist ethno-state”: quite apart from anything else, many millions of Trump’s voters were nonwhite. I don’t think we have really solid ethnic breakdowns of the 2024 vote yet, but on exit polls Trump appears to have won ~15% of the Black vote, nearly 40% of the AAPI vote, and over 40% of the Hispanic vote, in each case up sharply from 2020 (and county-level analysis generally supports those numbers). It looks likely that he has the least white coalition of any Republican president since the Civil Rights era.
Again, willful ignorance etc.
I guess the deplorables are a broad coalition. Those who are not invested in white supremacy may be invested in Christian nationalism instead, etc.
But such hair-splitting aside, the situation is quite simple: the current situation was entirely predictable, with many people across the political spectrum raising the same alarm bells. Everybody who contributed to it did so either knowingly or with culpable ignorance.
Here is the problem Julian. Trump’s victory and his hideous political agenda make it imperative, for the sake of democracy, humanity and constitutional government, to detach as many people as possible from his electoral coalition – the swing voters at a minimum and at least some of the more hard-core MAGA voters at a maximum. This is necessary to ensure that Trump is neutered in the short-term and that neither he nor an equally ugly successor is re-elected in the long-term. Unless this happens, there is a very real threat of an authoritarian takeover of the United States with appalling effects on the world at large, as international standards are shredded, as the hungry go unfed, as the fossil fuel industries gallop us towards a Climate catastrophe, and as fascists and near-fascists are emboldened and encouraged the world over. People will die, perhaps in large numbers if Trump is not stopped. Moreover, is not enough simply to detach the swing voters, since even a sizeable minority of hard-core Trumpian voters constitutes an ongoing threat to constitutional government and an effective block on progressive politics. Thus it is politically important, insofar as it is possible, to shrink that hard-core by persuading at least some of the MAGA voters to see the error of their ways. But to detach them from the dark side it is necessary to understand the Trumpian voters and to devise policies and propaganda that appeal to their better natures and that address their concerns in so far as they are rational or understandable. And you simply can’t do this whilst treating them as collection of moral and political write-offs. (This, of course, does not preclude going in hard on the MAGA leaders.) Given all this, Julian, what is your solution to the crisis of the American Republic? To wallow in your own righteousness, denouncing Trumpian voters as a ‘broad coalition’ of deplorables, some invested in white supremacy some invested in Christian nationalism and some culpably ignorant in averting their eyes from evil. And you are not alone in this. Here is ikj: ‘forgive me if i’m not interested in conversations with people who aren’t interested in shared governance, climate change, human empathy, science, and education.’ Not interested in such conversations? Then how are you going to convert them, which you desperately need to do? Without such conversations they can’t be persuaded to vote for science and education or to take effective action on Climate Change. In fact they may very well vote against all these things with disastrous effects. What people like ikj are and ‘Julian‘ are proposing, in effect, is that they should let the world go hang, confining themselves to a political bubble, or a sort of moral gated community, in which they only have dealings with people as morally pure as they take themselves to be, entertaining themselves meanwhile with ritual denunciations of the benighted heathens outside the bubble. Apart from the selfishness of such a policy, there is the very real risk that the bubble may be breached by those with whom they have disdained to engage.
Note that I am not claiming that Trumpian voters are without sin. In fact I agree that you can’t vote for Trump without exhibiting vices or intellectual deficits of one kind or another. (This includes a staggering ignorance of both basic economics and American history.) But there are similar sins and defects on the other side. Are some Trumpians censorious, self-righteous, dishonest and vindictive? Yes, and so too are some of their opponents. Witness the campaigns of vilification and persecution against so-called TERFs. Have Trump supporters voted for somebody evil? Yes (given my standards). But it should not be forgotten that Harris was a member of an administration that condoned and even facilitated the genocidal military campaign in Gaza. Thus she was, an accessory to an horrific war-crime, which makes her pretty evil in my book. Had I been an American, I would have voted for her nonetheless, not because she was not evil but because she was less so than Trump. But if you voted for Harris as the lesser of two evils, then you ought to be able understand how some people could vote for Trump, believing him to be bad in some respects but better on balance (perhaps because he would fix the economy) than his rival. Is this the correct view? No. A sensible of view? Perhaps not. But an intelligible view? Definitely. And since it is an intelligible view those who hold it should not be written off as beyond political redemption. Again, one of the reasons that some people vote for Trump is that they suffer from the delusion that Trump sees and respects them whereas ‘liberal’ elites regard them with contempt. Julian’s solution? More contempt.
One of the nastiest features of Trumpism is its tendency to dismiss great swathes of people as somehow morally deficient, thereby justifying monstrous exercises in callousness and cruelty. But what you Julian and your allies have been doing on this thread is arguing, over and over again, that it is right to to dismiss millions of people as so morally defective that it is not worth engaging with them, even though the safety of the American Republic , and indeed of the world, depends on enough people doing just that. . I daresay, or at least, I hope, that if you had the power you would not consign the delinquent Trump voters to concentration camps, which is what Trump is proposing for some of the people he maligns. and disrespects. But the real lesson of Leninism (the kind title that once upon a time was highly popular) is that what begins with righteous indignation, moral condemnation and a zeal for justice can end up as mass murder. When you brand millions of people as so hopelessly bad that it is not worth having any truck with them, you set yourself at the top of – though I don’t say you descend – a slippery slope with millions of corpses heaped up at the bottom.
‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’ says the Bible. Well the non-judging ship has sailed long ago for the likes of Julian and ikj. But since they are so heavily into moral judgment, here’s one from me. You are a pair of political idiots with ugly self-righteous souls.
You are appalled by Trump’s victory and its fascistic aftermath? So am I. But if you want to do something about it, I suggest that you stop descanting on the wickedness of those who voted for him and start doing your damndest to ensure that they don’t vote for him again. And that means (among other things) talking to them.
Two things I find remarkable
Starting one comment above lamenting that “is they are not white Suprematist , they are Christian Suprematist etc.” : of course the right wins if it’s more inclusive in the forms of hate it can accept than the left in the forms of love it can express. They are not excluding trans-haters who are not homophobic, they make anti – Islam people feel appreciated without requiring that they also hate non Islamic blacks, etc. If the left addresses only the 5 percent most moral part of the population, it can hardly win elections in a democracy, as certainly most people in a society are partly immoral, epistemic irresponsible, etc. And if the hate that a, let’s say, a transphobic homosexual receives from the left for being transphobic is greater than the hate he receives from the right for being homosexual, then it is not necessarily irrational for said person to vote for the right, the people who express the least hate. A last point: it strikes me that some people seem to conceive of winning elections as involving persuasion. In my view, people form their values and opinions outside the electoral political process in the strict sense (say involving party platforms etc) and for causes largely independent for it. It’s always about choosing the lesser evil. Winning elections appears to be more about coalition building, than about changing the mind (or hearths) of people. To think of it otherwise seems non realistic to me.
Re Update 5, to the best of my knowledge:
1) The stay by Judge AliKhan remains in place
2) This very tweet is almost certainly going to lead to a TRO by Judge McConnell. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/29/spending-freeze-blocked-trump-judge-00201341Current procedural status is waiting for the suing state AGs to propose the language of an order.
Also, for those interested, updates on next steps on these cases can be found as entries on https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-legal-challenges-trump-administration-actions/