| HN Mirror

So this is more political than I usually care to get here, and I'm only talking about this because I think I can get something intellectually interesting about it (and dang, if you're listening, let me know if I should dial it down and I'll drop it right away), but I do have some observations on American politics before and since 9/11:

- There was a lot of horrible, awful stuff in the '90s that kinda got memory holed because people focus now on modern issues like 9/11, the financial crisis, the rise of the alt-right, covid, etc. But in the '90s you still had the hate crimes against Rodney King and and Matthew Shepard, the LA riots, David Duke becoming a GOP gubernatorial candidate, Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 RNC, the back half of one of the worst crime waves in our history (which petered out in the mid '90s, largely thanks to the end of leaded gasoline in cars), deeply rooted homophobia that pervaded every aspect of culture, etc. Post-9/11 America had its problems, with hate crimes against Sikhs because they were mistaken for Muslims (plus hate crimes against actual Muslims) and a general attitude of "you're either with us or you're against us", but it's not like the '90s was free of any of that ugliness either.

- Politically, post-9/11 America almost felt like a breather because it was the one and only time neocons had total control of the GOP and shut the paleocons out of the levers of power, and it's my observation that neocons are far more amenable to modern American ways of life than paleocons. The Bush era was the only time in my life I thought about Republicans, "they're trying to do what they think is best for the country, it's just that I think they're completely wrong about what actually is best". And with the modern GOP... you can see with Trump and his supporters doing anti-American things like threatening to pull out of NATO and withholding medical aid to blue states just because they didn't vote for him that he and his closest followers have a fundamental sense of contempt for the American way of life and America's role in the world, which isn't something I could ever say about the Bush-era GOP. In fact, neocon foreign policy was basically "the American way of life is so good, we should export it to the rest of the world by force". That's not the modern GOP.

- After the 2008 financial crisis, neocons were thoroughly discredited, and paleocons had a resurgence, taking back the GOP by creating first the Tea Party and the then Trump movement. The biggest difference between the Tea Party and Trump is that the Tea Party's behavior was purely confined to the sphere of politics.

- I think the first big low-trust moment in politics was Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" at Obama on the floor of Congress in 2009. Say what you will about Obama's politics, but not only is Wilson's line disgustingly crass, but it's a kind of crassness that none of us had previously seen on the floor of Congress in our lifetimes. I think the last time we saw that kind of boorish behavior in Congress was the 19th century. Similarly, we had the GOP's accelerated use of the filibuster. Before the Obama Administration, the filibuster was primarily a "break glass in case of emergency" button, but GOP senators during the Obama Administration used it in place of a no vote, effectively forcing the Senate to have a 60% supermajority to pass anything. You can find a number of graphs and charts showing how sudden and drastic this rise in the use of the filibuster was [0] [1] [2] [3] (I found most of these by doing a Google Image Search for use of the filibuster in congress over time btw). This is indeed not normal behavior. Similarly, GOP senators refusing to confirm Merrick Garland for SCOTUS just because it was an election year and they hoped Trump could appoint Scalia's successor is also low-trust behavior. Nothing about this is doing anything to help America or Americans, it's purely so they can wield even more power for themselves and lock their enemies out of power. In the past, you would only see a political party moving in lockstep to block a major nominee if the nominee had political stances that were just plain beyond the pale or if they were found to have had a criminal background, not as a matter of course just because they want their own party to fill the position instead. Merrick Garland is no left-wing ideologue, he's a milquetoast centrist who, as attorney general, hasn't prosecuted Trump and the like nearly as hard as he should have.

- But everything in that above bullet point was something you would only see if you paid any attention to politics. Outside the sphere of politics, things were still normal until 2015.

- When Trump came along, his behavior intersected with the concepts of guilt and shame in a way that proved incredibly destructive to society. The words are not synonyms: guilt is what you feel when you violate your own standards, and shame is what you feel when you violate society's. A bad actor can absolve the public of shame by behaving shamelessly and not facing any consequences for it. Tale as old as time, to see people behaving badly in public, getting away with it, and spawning more people doing the same. But Trump went farther, and he absolved the public of guilt, too. He didn't just perform bad acts in public, he presented them as a virtue. He told them that any hatred they hold in their hearts is A-OK, that there's nothing wrong with resenting other people. When Hillary Clinton confronted him in the 2016 debates about potentially cheating on his taxes, he said "That's because I'm smart." And time and time again, when Trump would do something awful, he would extol the virtues of his own behavior. His behavior was to enrich himself, destroy his enemies, act with fear and hatred towards minority groups, and turn against his closest allies the moment they stopped being useful to him. And he told the public that this is morally correct, that everything he has done is the right thing to do. And that eventually wore away society's guilt and created a legion of people whose entire moral code consists of "enrich yourself, destroy your enemies, fear and hate minorities, and throw your loved ones away once you no longer have use for them". And any society whose moral code is that is by definition a low-trust society.

- In a society with a healthy level of guilt, it wouldn't be unheard of for somebody to have a bigoted thought only for them to feel guilty, chastise themselves over it, and never act on it. Like maybe someone reads a news article about somebody being killed by a member of a minority group, they may think "those people are all murderers, they don't belong here" and immediately the guilt kicks in and they realize this knee-jerk thought is wrong, that you can't hold an entire ethnicity or race responsible for one individual doing something evil, and they move on and get the racism out of their head. But in a world where Trump has worn away society's guilt, that doesn't happen. No, the leading candidate for a major party's presidential nomination instead says that Mexico is sending murderers and rapists across our border and we need to stop them by any means necessary, and then when that very same man wins not only the GOP nomination but also the presidency, the next time they have a knee-jerk reaction to reading a piece of news about a murder that happened to be committed by someone of Mexican descent, they're going to think "The president was right, they really are all murderers and rapists!" and not feel an ounce of guilt and never examine their behavior or change their ways.

- And then you have covid, when certain elements of the GOP turned stopping a deadly disease into a partisan, political issue. The GOP told them there was nothing wrong with refusing to do anything to help curb the spread of a highly contagious disease with a 1-2% IFR and even that there was nothing wrong with refusing to get vaccinated after vaccines become available and actually make it possible to go back to a pre-2020 way of life. That the base of an entire major political party decided they were A-OK with covid running out of control had impacts outside the political sphere. Because if they're willing to kill their fellow Americans with a plague, they're also going to be plenty willing to take any number of other hostile actions against their fellow Americans. And those who aren't Trumpers are going to respond in kind: i.e., if the GOP is willing to straight-up kill us in droves, we need to treat any whiff of Trumpiness in somebody's behavior as a personal, existential threat to our lives and take steps to protect ourselves.

- And that's where we are now. I can personally say that since Trump took the national stage and especially since covid, I have hard cut multiple people out of my life including some who used to be good friends just because they made it explicit that they were A-OK with Trump, and I can no longer see their politics and their attitude to society as anything other than a personal threat to me, when before 2016 I had a very large circle of friends of all different political viewpoints and never cut anyone out of my life over it. Simply put, if they're going to act like low-trust people, I'm not going to trust them with any part of my life.

[0] https://stevesnotes.substack.com/p/reforming-the-filibuster

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/impact-filibuster-f...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/18089312/myths-about-the-filib...

[3] https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/03... (This one is interesting because you can see how Democrats responded by also increasing their use of the filibuster to match, once they lost the Senate in 2014. You can see how polarization from one side begets polarization from the other.)

(Again, dang, let me know if this is too political for this site, and I won't pursue this subject any further. I figured there was value in intellectually exploring how political events have knock-on effects that reshape our culture in fundamental ways and providing elaboration and explanation on my thesis that the last 9 years have seen the US transform from a high-trust to a low-trust society.)