11.1.24 - Would I vote for Trump?
Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of voting for Trump. Whenever I listen to Vivek, Vance, or his surrogates in general, I tend to have a lot of common ground with them. On the other hand, I’ve been completely uninspired by the Kamala campaign. Her and Walz just feel completely unserious. Truly lightweights. I don’t even feel disdain or anything. Just nothing.
This has been disconcerting for me because I hate Trump. So what’s going on?
Now, because I follow the data very closely, I know that a LOT of men in my age bracket feel similarly. Dems are losing us in big numbers. I can see it in my personal life.
Even in D.C., which is a bunch of liberals, dudes are just not having it. No guy I know is enthusiastic about Kamala or Walz. When I talk to guys in private, there’s a sense of vague support for Trump, even if we wouldn’t actually vote for him, because there’s an appetite for a certain kind of politics, a certain cultural inclination (I could call it wokeism, but I think that word’s definition has just expanded too much), to be checked and balanced. A very liberal friend of mine said something like he wants to see Trump win just a send a message to [colorful words for annoying left-of-center people]. Very few educated young men actually agree with Trump. But we may have the same vague gripes and opponents.
But why young men specifically? Why have dems been losing them so badly, why is gender polarization so bad? I have a very basic, power based theory, that could complement other feminist/media/radicalization/culture wars based accounts, which other people talk about all the time on twitter or op-eds and elsewhere.
If you’re young you’re in the phase where you’re moving up in the world. If you’re a man you’re ambitious. And I think in this phase of our lives we have quite literally evolved to have a good sense of what and who is in our way. The cultural institutions that are in our way. The beliefs.
I think many young (straight) men have a gut feeling that this liberal-intellectual-woke complex that developed over the past 20 years is a barrier, not a facilitator, for our ambitions to move up in status, power, whatever. I feel it too. I know the kind of people who are “in there,” I know how they feel about people like me, people who joke like me, talk like me, look like me. I know if they could pierce my mind and see my thought crimes they’d want to like, execute me.
I feel in my bones that they would hire someone who looks like a “Try Guy” over me. Someone who watches Hasan Minhaj specials and listens to Pod Save America. It’s not that I hate people like that, I’m chill with a lot of them, I did high school theatre, for godsake. And frankly, I’m not too far off, I’m an avid NYT opinion and Atlantic reader. I get it. But it’s still very much like just a different lunch table in the cafeteria in high school. We’re not each other’s vibe. And I can sit with them and chit chat, but I’ll never be one of them. There’s dozens of people in law school like this, and the best relationship we’ll have is exchanging polite pleasantries with an underlying suspicion.
If Trumpism wins, a great deal of that intangible cultural barrier is taken out of the way. Those people become a relic, like millennial hipsters, pushed to the margins of culture, no longer in the zeitgeist. And that would feel so good. If they were as laughable as people who have bushy beards and horn-rimmed glasses and suspenders. Not something I actually have to contend with.
If Trumpism wins, there will be something else to replace them. Something really bad, something I will want to fight against because I don’t agree with its policies, culture, or whatever. But in my gut I feel like it would be easier to deal with THAT, than whatever’s going on right now. I could sit at that lunch table more comfortably.
Unfortunately, the modern world is one of symbols, signals, and cultural signifiers. And there are some maps/symbolic system you’re better equipped to operate in. I could navigate the symbolic world created by Trumpism, much better than the one built up the Tumblr brain rot generation. I can’t explain it more logically, but it’s what my gut says. It would allow me to move up the status hierarchy.
In short, I don’t think I will vote for Trump. But I completely GET it. Because I feel it too.
I don’t want anyone to read this as an endorsement of Trump, writing this is an exercise of humility, vulnerability, and intellectual honesty. I thought it would be good to list out how my mind runs through the possibility, when I do consider voting for him. It’s also good to try and understand your own thoughts, I think, and that’s what I think I’m trying to do there (I think, I don’t know, I should write a post on why I write and why I think I think I need to write to think).
Anyways, I’ve read somewhere that liberals have a very hard time modeling the mind of conservatives (whereas the reverse is not true). And from what I understand, people are who super-duper anti Trump genuinely cannot understand how non-stupid people could even think about voting for him (but maybe I’m a stupid person, idk).
So I thought I would list out how I think about it, in very rough terms. Maybe a good resource for people in the future, who want to understand what the hell was going through people’s heads in the 2020s, and for people who want to understand why Dems are losing young men. I’m probably not a typical case, but I’m one case to consider.
Pros:
- Shakes things up, sometimes shocks are good for any system’s resilience. The liberal establishment has become dangerously complacent.
- Serves as a political signal to Dems to adjust their messaging and cultural strategy, stop being an elitist, feminized, eunuch party (already happening to some degree, though, which is good)
- I don’t think abolishing some three letter agencies is a bad thing, maybe we should get rid of the Department of Education etc. I want a leaner meaner government.
- Current silos and groupthink around key topics might be punctured, certain psychogenic epidemics in mental health, prevailing thinking around nutrition, big Pharma, vaccine injury, may be addressed with a more fresh eyed view. RFK jr types not right about everything in a literal sense, but directionally correct that it’s time to take a more skeptical stance. Trump gives them in into the government, opportunity to challenge the entrenched “experts”
- Very intense action on the border and undocumented immigrants may mean there is less of a political target on Dreamers, refugees, and other legal immigrants; it may be necessary to have a healthier discussion on immigration in total? If Americans felt less chaos in immigration system, feelings towards immigration could warm again.
- Aesthetically, Trumpism is far more aligned with most ordinary Americans and a positive conception of national identity. A little tacky, rah-rah patriotic. Maybe not a bad correction from the hyper-corporate liberal aesthetic of past decade or so. End of ObamaCore.
- I think he genuinely has smart people in his camp, whose main flaw is their opportunism. Vance, Vivek, Gabbard, RFK, Musk——these people are kind of a rogues gallery, but they’re not dumb. They’re genuinely all very intelligent, and that counts for something. I agree with many of the things they say. I don’t feel that Kamala is surrounded by intellectual heavyweights.
- The most commonly held hope, which I share with many Trump supporters, is that a genuinely dangerous faction of ideological leftist technocrats will be terrified out of the deep state and chased out of polite society. I tend to agree that there is a very deep rot in the heart of Washington’s culture, and Trumpism may be what’s needed to finally “drain the swamp?”
- With the exception of my girlfriend, I have more in common with people voting for Trump than the opposite. That has to mean something, right? If everyone I don’t get along with is a hardcore liberal, and hardcore Trump supporters and I generally get along, isn’t that a proxy for SOMETHING?
- I think voting for him would FEEL good.
Cons:
- I think he’s actually a fascist. Literally speaking.
- I don’t actually want families to be deported, if they haven’t done anything wrong. Just leave them alone!
- The chaos/shock to the system + puncturing of certain silos allows characters and ideas I like to ride into executive branch (RFK example above), but also very dangerous factions. He is not terribly strategic or disciplined, I believe that he has orbiters that are extremely conspiratorial, opportunistic, and that’s very bad. I’m thinking of Mike Lindell types. Not good.
- Health of our democracy will genuinely deteriorate as he is given a platform to undermine faith in elections even further; he will have more levers to change election policy, exert pressure on states. January 6th saga illustrated how bad things can get.
- positions on abortion unclear
- It certainly feels like the beginning of our long slide into a more authoritarian, personalist form of politics, and I want to hold that off as long as possible
- The tariff policy is probably very bad
-He’s almost certainly going to revitalize a crony-capitalism model, clearly what’s happening with Musk. A major government contractor being this involved with a political campaign just feels icky. Reminds me of Russia, India, China, etc. One off not too bad, but if it becomes the culture around Big Tech, which is trending right, that would be very bad. Don’t want that coalition to develop and become too strong. A cult of personality + faithful business community that relies on government subsidies/favorable regulations and run major payments, media, e-commerce platforms——that begins to look like a banana republic.
-Unlikely to correct course on the Israel policy, I don’t tend to think he’s motivated by humanitarian impulses
-Foreign policy at large becomes more personalist, transactional, less defined by institutional arrangements. Back to the jungle model of international relations I think. I’m agnostic on this, less of a pro or con and more just different. I’m a liberal internationalist at heart but its performance hasn’t been so perfect that I’m wedded to the model.
-Agencies will be filled with bozos, who will likely have ties to other segments of business community and civil society, executive branch becomes more of an extension of a political campaign or party. In some crude sense the executive will be more responsive to popular will, but it would also likely lose persuasive legitimacy with business community, Courts, etc. Executive branch becomes another player among many, less of an impartial authority. A bad thing? Really more of a system change, than a purely good or bad thing. If exec branch becomes more like a party state, government loses “legitimacy” as an impartial agent in our system, it is now closer to a private sector actor jockeying for influence, contracting and negotiating with other private actors. Government-business relations will become more “corrupt” in the classical sense of the word, but another way to say it may be “cooperative.”
-He lies, all the time. Not good in general.
-How he handles crises is genuinely unpredictable. All the reports from the White House suggest he is an unfocused, highly reactive man. Voting for him is a bet on the ecosystem around him, which is less predictable than people may believe. Jan 6 saga shows he could easily filter out smart voices and surround himself with sycophants.
-Feels like his intellectual/media ecosystem is bringing playful, rhetorical, racism back into the “norm” but fear it will be open the floodgates for actual racial policies down the line. Not comfortable with how Race/IQ/DEI discourse is going in academic circles, we’re trending towards scientific racism which feels bad.
-The feeling of chaos over the next four years will again degrade our political culture, probably irreversibly. There’s not going back after another term. 2015-2028, 13 years of American politics, will have been built up around and in response to his uniquely disruptive and divisive personality. Another generation of high schoolers, college students, entry level professionals will be moving up in whatever incentive structure is created by a Trump political climate.
- he’s probably a rapist? I can’t have that. Should be higher up the list tbh.
- History has shown that putting someone like Trump in power is literally always a losing strategy. Every single time. No reason to think it’s different now.
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In total, I really just couldn’t vote for Trump. I have gripes with the cultural status quo, but not enough to negatively polarize me into voting for someone who could pose so much harm to the country I love. I want a shake up. I don’t want chaos and pain. So no, I won’t do it.
Also, I’m a big loverboy and I won’t support someone my girlfriend hates. She’s da boss!
However, I do think he will win. And I won’t lie if I don’t admit that a teeny-tiny part of me hopes he does, and hopes that only the things I like, and none of the things I don’t will happen.
^I think since most people have the same wishful thinking, we’re set to put our country down the wrong path.
With grave concerns,
knxnts