[war1025]

The main thing Trump has been doing as a favor to conservatives is heavily loading the court benches with conservative justices. That will have a long-term impact.

I think the mistake liberals make when looking at Trump, is they think he must be viewed by his supporters the same way they looked at Obama.

Obama is someone they looked up to on a personal, moral level.

Trump is, as you said, amoral. He goes where the political winds and his instinct take him.

I think people would feel much more at ease at least with the whole unstable, incompetent leader thing if they bothered to read Art of the Deal (written in 1987), in which he lays out how he views the world basically word for word in line with what he said during his 2016 campaign.

He may be unorthodox, but he is consistent.

Would I want to be his friend? Probably not. But that's not the role he applied for.

[gerbilly]

Ok, thanks.

I'm not conservative, just FYI, so I find it interesting to discuss differences with thoughtful conservatives which you seem to be.

If conservatives value loyalty/respect for authority more than so called 'liberals', then aren't you afraid that the conservative agenda carried out to it's logical conclusion might descend into authoritarianism/theocracy?

(You didn't state that you held these views or preferences, but I just assumed them in the interest of getting my question out quicker. Correct me if I am wrong.)

[war1025]

I'm politically unaffiliated. When asked, I identify as a "Not-Democrat", which is mainly because I feel that the Democratic party pulled a bait-and-switch on the working class by using their "everyone go to college" meritocracy thing as a convenient segue into just backing the wealthy the same as Republicans do.

If both parties are just in favor of keeping the powerful in power, then I will personally side with the party that explicitly says so.

Regarding "logical conclusions", I think the key is that the goal isn't to carry it out to its extreme, but to counter-balance the pull from the other side. Sure it feels good to have momentum, but no one should be surprised when the tides turn back the other way for a while.

The goal is to find dynamic balances between opposing ideals. In order to do that, you need to try to pull past where you think the correct middle ground is. I think that's true for both sides.

A thought I had extending my previous Trump / Obama comparison, is that if you compare it to the David vs Goliath story, I think people viewed Obama as David. I.e. the unsuspecting hero that comes out of nowhere to save the people. Trump is more of a Goliath character. Did people expect Goliath to be nuanced and articulate and thoughtful? No. They just wanted him to be a big tough bastard that would go beat up on the enemy.

[mistermann]

Man, imagine if we could raise the caliber of the public political discussion to that demonstrated in this exchange. Heck, even HN would be a good start.

In my opinion, a big part of the problem with politics in the public sphere is that we've been conditioned (deliberately, or just naturally) to think about politics along a very small number of very specific (and non-comprehensive) dimensions, and through these dimensions reality is communicated to the public (in good faith, or not, in a competent and professional manner, or not), through various media forms. (And then most subsequent discussions take place at this level (at best), with rare outliers like this one where you respectfully discuss the deeper dimensions).

And then at election time, we force them to further crush it down into one dimension with precisely two choices (chosen via an incredibly low-dimensional and flawed nomination process): Republican or Democrat. But when they make that boolean choice, the mind is secretly operating at this much higher dimensional representation of reality (based on models that are, to varying degrees: factually incorrect or null (with auto-estimate enabled by default), and they cast their vote.

Most people "logically" think their decision (and those of others) is based upon the projected dimensional reality we live in (~Overton Window), but the actual reason underlying evaluation is way more complex, and invisible to us.

That probably makes no sense, but what I mean is very similar to the argument about "How is the internet still obsessed with Myers-Briggs" the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20887213

Myers Briggs is an attempt at "a" representation of reality. Many people reject it for obvious reasons, but then they'll sometimes turn around and insist in a different thread (with a new topic) that "Republican" or "Hillary Supporter" or "pro-rights" political stances are pretty damn accurate representations of reality, and can accurately predict behavior in a (subconscious) high-dimensional model (~mind reading).