I.

Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing Los Angeles Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.

If you’re in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice.

I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.

You can, but you won’t, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. I’m under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen.

And I’m writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody.

II.

I think the strongest argument against Trump is the argument from authoritarianism. But what is authoritarianism in this context? As I argued years ago, Trump isn’t Hitler, isn’t going to put people in camps, and probably his approval rating among minorities won’t even dip below the 30s. So what am I worried about?

One worry is that Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win (I don’t claim Democrats never do this, just that Trump has openly endorsed doing it orders of magnitude more). This probably can’t swing 60-40 elections, but it might swing 51-49 elections, and nowadays almost every election if 51-49.

Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.

This is far from Hitler or even Stalin. The model I worry about most is Hugo Chavez, who had no concentration camps and barely even managed a secret police. And Chavez himself was only slightly more interesting than hundred other tinpot generalissimos in a hundred different banana republics. None of these countries will ever be the villains in an Indiana Jones movie, but none of them are First World countries with great economies and vital contributions to scientific progress either. They’re just somewhat-poor, somewhat-corrupt places whose citizens keep trying to swim across the Rio Grande and make it to the US where there’s still freedom and opportunity.

Why does autocracy correlate with low development? I’m not sure, and I’m not trying to make some grand Acemoglu-style thesis, but again Chavez provides a useful model. Chavez fired everyone competent or independent in government, because they sometimes talked back to him or disagreed with him; he replaced them with craven yes-men and toadies. His ideas weren’t all bad, but when he did have bad ideas, there was nobody to challenge or veto them. He frequently chose what was good for his ego (or his ability to short-term maintain power) over what was good for the country, and there was no system to punish him for those decisions. Since rule-of-law would block his whims, he kept undermining rule-of-law until it was no longer strong enough to protect things like property, investment, or a free economy. Ambitious educated people, seeing nothing left in Venezuela besides a lifetime of trying to out-bootlick the other bootlickers to curry favor from a narcissist, left the country for greener pastures.

You don’t get from a flourishing democracy to Hugo Chavez in one leap - at least not without a politician younger and more vigorous than Trump. But our democracy isn’t entirely flourishing right now, and frogs are easily boiled. My threat model is less “Trump himself is exactly like Chavez”, and more “Trump’s election shows there are minimal consequences for violating norms; he brings us 10% closer to Venezuela; during the next election, both candidates violate the norms, the next guy brings us 20% closer to Venezuela, and so on.” The Republicans are already arguing that the Democrats’ authoritarian experimentation with cancel culture means it’s only fair that they get to have a mobocratic censorship regime too, if they ever get back in power. Once Trump escalates a bit, the Democrat after him will feel the same way and escalate even more. There will be plenty more chances to stop the cycle - but, like the proverb about planting the tree, the best time was ten years ago and the second-best time is now.

III.

The strongest counterargument to the above is that yes, authoritarianism is bad - and yes, Trump will take us a bit of the way to being a second-world country - but the Democrats are more authoritarian and worse.

Or, rather, the Democrats may not be “authoritarian” in the strictest sense of the dictionary definition, but that’s because the Democrats wrote the dictionary and defined the term to mean “bad in the exact way that bad conservatives are bad” (this is almost literally true; a lot of the current authoritarianism discussion comes from a construct invented by Theodor Adorno called “right-wing authoritarianism”).

As fellow-Harris-supporter Curtis Yarvin reminds us, right-wing authoritarianism looks like a dictator with a cult of personality eroding norms and centralizing power; left-wing . . . badness . . . looks like a semi-decentralized convergence of cultural elites into a stifling monoculture bent on increasing its own power by forcing all government and private actions to go through a gauntlet of priest-bureaucrats drawn from the cultural-elite-class.

Although the exact process is different, both right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing monoculture end in the same place: government control over everything, unfreedom of thought, retribution against dissenters, and the gradual siphoning of all productive activity to serve a parasitic ruling clique.

Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.

When I look at actual democratic backsliding, it looks nothing like this. It looks like a group of clever well-placed people gradually tightening the knot while maintaining plausible deniability. A court-packing here, but only because the old court was hidebound and reactionary. A carefully-worded constitutional amendment there, but only because nothing ever got done under the old system. A corruption crackdown, but only because corruption is genuinely bad. Then ten years later you wake up and one set of guys control everything and if you speak out against them they can destroy your life.

So (continues the strongest argument I can think of for supporting Trump) the Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Democrats got every social media company in the country to censor opposing opinions while swearing up and down that they were doing nothing of the sort, all on some sort of plausible but never-put-into-so-many-words threat that things would go worse for them if they didn’t. They did it so elegantly and naturally that even now nobody really wants to call them on it - partly because it’s hard to tell where free corporate choice ended and government coercion started, and partly because they’ve successfully established a culture where it’s declasse to even talk about it. So, which side are you more scared of?

This is the one pro-Trump argument that genuinely bothers me, but I have four counterarguments.

First, consider the Just Stop Oil protesters who throw paint on art. I believe these people are bad. But (you might say) these people are fighting fossil fuel executives whose terrible decisions have killed hundreds of thousands of people through particulate pollution and may yet kill orders of magnitude more through global warming. Surely this is worse than ruining one picture, which can probably be restored later anyway. So how can we throw the paint-throwers in jail, while letting the fossil fuel executives go free?

Actually we can do this very easily, because the paint-throwers broke the law, and the fossil fuel executives didn’t. Unless you’re the dumbest sort of naive consequentialist, you punish people who have violated bright-line norms, not people doing stuff you think is subtly damaging, even if the subtle damage causes more harm than the bright-line norm violations. You do this because it’s the prerequisite for having civilization at all: everyone disagrees on what’s subtly damaging, but everyone should be able to get behind protecting paintings. If people come together and form institutions to prevent bright-line violations everyone agrees on, and you pervert them or to fight your preferred battle against subtle damage, eventually those institutions lose credibility and you can’t do either.

(compare institutions that were formed bright-line mandates to discover truth or advance knowledge that shifted to warring against the subtle damage of racism or right-wing-opinions or whatever. Those institutions have now lost the ability to do either task, and rightly so.)

A single shoplifter or paint-thrower does very little damage, but this is true only because we jealously protect the norms against these kinds of people. If we truly gave up on punishing shoplifters, everyone would steal from everyone else and civilization would collapse. Asking “why should we punish shoplifters when they do so little damage?” is like asking “why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?”.

Here the Democrats are the fossil fuel executives slowly boiling democracy to death, and the Republicans are the activists throwing paint on it. Our first priority is to punish the bright-line violation, lest civilization collapse; afterwards we can focus on pushing back against the subtle damage.

You can’t even start worrying about whether bureaucrats are forming a priestly caste until you solve mobs trying to beat up the opposing side’s politicians. Yes, left-wingers are subtly weaponizing norms to support their own side, in much the same way that once you’ve established basic principles of non-murder / non-theft / capitalism, businessmen can exploit those principles to run businesses you don’t like. “People are working within the system to do something I don’t like” is a more refined level of problem than “there is no system and we’re in the state of nature murdering each other”. First you need to maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, and if you succeed, only then can you take your next step of worrying about all the people trying to find sneaky ways to gather power within the system.

Unless you want to vote third party, you can only use your vote to thwart/punish one side or the other. I think thwarting/punishing Trump’s foundation-level attack on norms using violence and rule-of-law-violations is a higher priority than thwarting/punishing the Democrats’ more subtle strategy of undermining liberalism within its existing norms.

Second, and more practically, there are political headwinds for left-wing monoculture right now, and tailwinds for the right-wing authoritarianism.

The most obvious is SCOTUS, which is firmly Republican. They seem pretty interested in the project of rolling back the past few decades of progressive power grabs, and I’m pretty happy with a lot of how this is going. But the sovereign immunity ruling suggests they’re not willing to be a strong bulwark against right-wing authoritarianism. Given that we have a judicial defense against the left but not the right, it’s probably safer to elect left-wingers than right-wingers.

The other tailwind is intra-party cohesion. Donald Trump spent the past eight years purging the Republican Party of people willing to stand up to him. The current head of the RNC is Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, the Democrats are delightfully unorganized, such that there are constant rumors that Joe Biden is trying to sink Kamala Harris, that Nancy Pelosi made some kind of horrendous blackmail threat to Joe Biden, and that possibly all of these people are part of a shadow war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I don’t believe any of it, but it’s pretty funny and less worrying from an ability-to-consolidate-power standpoint than what’s happening with the GOP.

Full disclosure: this isn’t a crux for me and I probably would have still opposed Trump even if the Supreme Court was mostly liberal and the Democratic Party was more cohesive.

Third, and more idealistically, I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election. I don’t think people would take me seriously or think of me as a good faith interlocutor in the future, and I don’t think I would even be able to think of myself that way.

Fourth, for every bad thing the Democrats are doing to subtly-in-the-long-term-within-the-system try to undermine freedom, Trump also wants to do those things.

For example, Maxim Lott sort of makes a version of the steelman argument above:

While Trump is often portrayed as the threat to US democracy, it’s Kamala Harris who has endorsed eliminating the filibuster . . . That’s no idle threat, as every Democrat in the senate already voted to end the filibuster (besides the two who are retiring: Manchin and Sinema.)

Forget whether eliminating the filibuster should really count as a threat to democracy; a simpler counterargument is that Trump also wants to eliminate the filibuster! Nobody even cares, because Trump wants to do so many worse things that it gets lost in the noise.

Or take the many legal cases that Democrat-controlled prosecutors’ offices have filed against Trump since he lost the presidency. Are these politically-motivated show trials? As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure. But it’s fair to be suspicious, and I know people who are considering voting for Trump on this basis alone. Meanwhile, here’s Trump:

“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” Trump wrote. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials."

Last month, after the Democratic National Convention, Trump reposted artificial intelligence-generated images of his enemies — including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates — in orange jumpsuits with the caption: “HOW TO ACTUALLY ‘FIX THE SYSTEM.’”

Trump has also reposted a photo of special counsel Jack Smith with the statement, “He should be prosecuted for election interference & prosecutorial misconduct.” And over the summer, Trump posted photos of former President Barack Obama and former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney with text calling for their prosecution at “public military tribunals.”

I’m not trying to make fun of Maxim or the show-trials people. I find myself falling into this kind of thinking myself. Part of Trump’s genius is being bad in so many ways that no particular way stands out and it seems like he must not be that bad.

IV.

"Abandon Harris" is a group of Muslim-Americans who campaign against Kamala Harris to "punish her" (their words) for supporting Israel's war in Gaza. You can see their website at

https://abandonharris.com

One word conspicuously missing is "Trump". Doesn't Trump support Israel even more than Harris? Doesn't he have lots of other policies that Muslims might object to - like the infamous "Muslim travel ban"? You can, if you dig hard enough, find a video in the FAQ where one of the leaders admits Trump is also bad. But, he says, if Muslim-Americans elect Trump, then it will teach the Democrats not to take them for granted, and maybe they'll get more concessions next time.

I won't criticize their strategy; it makes a certain kind of perverse sense. But also, something here resonates with me psychologically. I keep having to shake myself out of viewing this election as a psychodrama with two characters: myself and the Democratic Party.

A digression: back in 2010, when New Atheism was the big thing, I was in a college atheist club. The membership divided neatly into two groups. First, people like me, who were young and liberal and philosophically-inclined and thought it would be a fun place to discuss the big questions. Second, people who had been raised in a fundamentalist religion, been traumatized by it, had some kind of incredibly dramatic break, lost all their friends and family members, and failed to separate cleanly. There was still some splinter of the religion lodged in their mind, they hated it, and all they could do was constantly re-enact their trauma by arguing against their faith in an environment where everyone agreed with them and they would definitely win. These are the people who would spend the whole session droning on about how the first Book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Beersheeba, but the second book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Jerusalem, so the whole thing was a flimsy tower of cards that no sane person could possibly believe. I make fun of them, but they had more right to be there than I did - I was amusing myself, and they were fighting a psychological life-and-death battle. I hope they found what they were looking for.

This is how I think about politics too. Some people are just there to discuss industrial policy. Other people - well, the Right-Thinking Liberal Establishment is a lot like a fundamentalist religion. You grow up believing it preconsciously and absolutely, you see some cracks in it, you freak out, you go through a multi-year period of will-I-or-won't-I, you eventually find some stable point just within the periphery or just outside of it, and either everyone you love abandons you, or they don't. You'll always have a little splinter of it stuck in you and you'll never be entirely happy. Why do you think people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack? Who's paying that money? Not psychologically well-adjusted people with no wokeness-related trauma, that's my guess.

When you're in that state of mind, you end up like those Muslims in Michigan. Your world narrows to a two-character psychodrama between yourself and the Democrats. In this psychodrama, the Republican Party is an offscreen character, mentioned but never seen. It fills the same role as Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984: a formless target representing either everything you hate or everything you hope for, depending on how the psychodrama goes. Nobody knew Emmanuel Goldstein's position on tax rates, and it would be insane to ask.

When I feel tempted to hoist the black flag, it's not because Trump has good policies. It's for the same reason as the Muslims in Michigan; my world has narrowed into two points.

So for example, Kamala Harris threatens to put price controls on the economy. This is horrible and activates a whole complex about Democrats being economically-illiterate mobocratic socialists out to destroy economic freedom. Fine, she deserves this. But when I zoom out a little, Trump's economic policies include rolling back Federal Reserve independence, "auto insurance prices falling by 50%" (how? does he think auto insurers will voluntarily choose to do this?), trade wars with other countries, limits on the importation of food, and, uh, price controls. I don't want to argue about whether all of those add up to being more economically-illiterate, more anti-capitalist, or more dangerous for the economy than Kamala's price controls. My point is that the part of me that gets angry about Kamala's price controls has no opinion on any of these things.

A long time ago, I wrote about the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup. Ingroup and outgroup you know. But how come people have stronger emotions about Ibram X. Kendi (or Chris Rufo) than about Kim Jong-un or whoever's committing the latest genocide in Sudan? It's not because you're American and naturally care about American affairs - how about that Brazilian judge who banned Elon Musk's X? It's because all those guys are part of your psychodrama and some Sudanese psychopath isn't. Well, Kamala Harris' price controls are my outgroup; Donald Trump setting tariffs is my fargroup.

I don't know if anyone besides me and that handful of Muslims is in this exact situation. It sure looks like Donald Trump appears in many people's psychodramas. You can tell because they can't mention his name without an outburst of "Orange Hitler cheeto fascist tiny hands Nazi". Those people have their own work to do.

But when I ask what work I have to do, it’s to prod the part of my brain that says “The Democrats are terrible! You should lodge a protest vote!” and remind it that Trump is also terrible. This isn’t a null hypothesis test, where you consider whether the Democrats are worth voting for, and then, if not, vote for their opponent. It’s a comparison on the merits of two alternatives. All of this will be unbelievably obvious to 99% of you, but I promised I’d try to say something different from all the other articles on this exact topic, and the best I can do is reach out to the 0.001% other people stuck in the same psychological vortex I was and see if any of it rings true.

If so, ACX recommends voting for Harris, Oliver, or Stein.