Steelmanning the case for Trump

His defeat is the fastest, safest path to a less exasperating politics.

I believe in steelmanning. I’ve heard arguments against it and I disagree with them. Maybe one day I’ll steelman those arguments too. For now, you’ll have to settle for this footnote.¹ But one of my best posts here was Steelmanning the Case for Biden, and soon after I realized I wanted to write this one too.

Still, this may bite off more than I can chew. At least for Biden the other side broadly shared my values, ultimate goal, and level of political engagement. This time there’s a tension between what I consider the strongest argument for Trump, what Trump’s most ardent supporters consider the strongest, and what most undecided voters may consider the strongest.

I’ve tried to fuse the first and third thing, knowing ardent supporters won’t be convinced anyway. The result is that some Trumpers may be insulted or tell me I didn’t include the strongest arguments for him; so be it. On a spectrum between completely disengaged and rabidly opinionated on politics, I imagine a sweet spot that is smart and curious enough to be still reading this, and yet conservative or tuned-out enough not to be firmly decided on whether or how to vote. My target audience includes both of these people.

Also note that refuting the best argument for Trump is not the same as creating the best argument for Harris, nor the argument that will rally the most voters strategically. The big omission here is abortion, which is very important for Democrats to talk about, but which I will not. Abortion is a values debate, 77% of conservatives identify as pro-life, and I’m trying to avoid the model of rebuttal that goes “X thing you care about is true, but it’s outweighed by Y thing I care about,” which already saturates our politics. The spirit of the exercise is to argue that X doesn’t even stand on its own.²

I get that persuasion feels like a quaint relic of a bygone era, and I’m probably wasting my time with an audience as small as mine. I’m doing this mostly for myself: from a small sense of duty and a large desire for sanity. But I also refuse to believe that 75+ million Americans are completely unreachable by reason. A lot of people just hate politics, distrust both sides, and are doing their best to sift through the noise, which isn’t helped by dodging the issues they care about.³

So this is my attempt to meet them where they’re at. It is a simplified steelman: not a dry comparison on every policy issue, but a sketch of three broad sentiments I sense reachable conservatives may share. It’s also very long, and I ran out of time to put it all in my words, so it uses block quotes more heavily than I’d like. Rather than read every word, I encourage you to skim to the subheadings you find most relevant or interesting.

The strongest argument for Trump I can think of goes like this:

The Steelman

1.“Policy is more important than the daily circus of political media. I don’t like Trump or much of what he says, but I generally prefer Republican policies on several key issues.”

Ideal political debates are supposed to be elevated conversations about which policies are best and which leaders can deliver them. Our actual mainstream politics are absurd and kind of insulting. There’s a lot of fearmongering, disingenuous arguments, constant drama, and outsized, desensitizing demand for perpetual outrage. Sometimes it feels like reality TV for politics nerds, which is not my preferred entertainment.

Maybe we shouldn’t care about any of that crap. Maybe we should tune out the headlines, mean tweets, and personalities and just compare the two party’s policy priorities. I, Andrew Doris, volunteered for my local Republican Party in high school because I preferred some of their policies, so I completely get why you might prefer them today.

(This is the part where you swap in whichever Republican policies you personally find most appealing. I will elaborate on mine just to build trust that I’m not a Democrat party hack.)

Let’s start with economic policy, since that is voters’ top concern in this election. Republicans traditionally care more about efficiency, growth, and individual liberty, each of which are important. Democrats are prone to overregulation that stifles growth, freedom, and economic dynamism; to overspending on bloated, inefficient, permanent bureaucracies; and to arbitrary handouts, like illegally forgiving student loans to relatively privileged people. Sometimes they support counterproductive price controls on rent or groceries.

Democrats are not Marxists, but many do stink of certain socialist sentiments. They reflexively blame everything on the rich and pretend that raising their taxes would solve many more problems than it could. They’re too hostile to markets, which typically work well. Generations of bleeding heart efforts to expand access to healthcare, higher education and housing are a huge part of why all three of those things are now so expensive.

Though today’s economy is very strong by most measures, for most of Biden’s term it was plagued by high inflation that hurt low-income people the most. Generous round-3 COVID stimulus checks, favored by Democrats along party lines, were part of the reason for that. And it’s not really fair to compare the economy now against the economy when Trump left office because the pandemic wasn’t really his fault. He may have bungled the response and spread damaging misinformation, but that would only have mattered at the margins. The whole world economy tanked, not just America’s, and a better president could not have prevented that. For most of Trump’s presidency, “inflation was mild, unemployment was low, growth was respectable, and the stock market hit 126 all-time highs.”

I also sympathize with some of Trump’s foreign policy ideas. The foreign policy establishment embodied by Biden has a romanticized conception of America’s role in the world, which results in an overambitious and over-militarized foreign policy ill-suited to multipolarity. This mindset is out of touch with Americans’ priorities and diverts resources and attention from pressing crises here at home. Harris hasn’t said much about foreign policy and has failed to put much daylight between her views and Biden’s, so it’s possible her policies would be more or less a continuation. And Biden’s results have been mixed at best.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was necessary but poorly executed. We have no plausible plan for victory in Ukraine apart from shoveling them tens of billions of dollars a year indefinitely, and yet no willingness to admit there will probably be a negotiated settlement at roughly the current battle lines. Trump is even worse on Israel/Palestine issues, but Biden’s management of that crisis has also been abysmal and fits a broader failure to prioritize. It's fair (though debatable) to argue that Trump is less likely to involve us in wars overseas, which is the last thing we need right now.

Finally, Kamala Harris may have ran as a moderate this year, she ran further to the left in 2019, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical that that’s who she is.

2. “Trump’s threat to democracy is exaggerated. He acted irresponsibly in 2020 and is too proud to admit a defeat – but he’s certainly not Hitler, and our institutions would probably survive his second term much like they did his first.”

Democrats get very worked up by Trump, and sometimes they get carried away. Some of them seem confident that if Trump is reelected there will literally be no presidential election in 2028, because he will be a completely unchecked, Hitler-style dictator from Day 1. This is probably not true.

Trump is not the first authoritarian populist to get elected in a democracy, and we have some research on what typically happens when they do. Key takeaways from this research are that outcomes vary based on the age and wealth of the democracy, the regional dispersal of power, and the number of veto points in its constitutional structure, each of which is good news for the United States. And of course, Trump’s already been elected once, which strained but did not break our democratic institutions. The military may be particularly difficult for Trump to subjugate. The left has been calling Trump a fascist since 2015 and there have been no concentration camps yet.

The smartest arguments for Trump have to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election and then cried fraud without basis; pressured state officials and Mike Pence to illegally give him the election anyway; whipped some of his supporters into a frenzy over these lies; and then encouraged an angry mob to go to the Capitol, while failing to take action or even show concern as they tried to storm it to disrupt core democratic processes. That’s a lot to concede!

But they could also note that Trump told them to go there “peacefully and patriotically,” and that a few hundred unarmed psychos being foiled by locked doors hardly seems like a well-thought-out plan even by his standards. If we’re predisposed to be very charitable to Trump, we could assume from this that he had no prior knowledge of what the most radical in the crowd, like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia groups, intended to do. What happened on the 6^th was clearly a premediated attempt to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on the day it was to be formalized – but I guess it’s possible it was not premeditated by Trump, whatever his lies and antics beforehand. When it ended, Trump realized he was cooked and begrudgingly left office.

Finally, Trump’s already barred from running for a third term, and has said he would not, and is old enough that he might really mean it. So maybe there’s little risk of a repeat anyway. More incremental threats to democracy are often linked to Project 2025, which Trump did not author and has distanced himself from, just as Harris has distanced herself from progressive radicals.

3. “Democrats have become the party of an out-of-touch, overeducated, condescending and conformist elite. I feel like our country is on the wrong track, and I hold the elite accountable. It’s time to shake things up, and democratically and epistemically good for the elite to lose.”

This elite goes by many names. When I was a kid, we called it “the establishment.” Radical conservative Curtis Yarvin calls it “the Cathedral” and likens it to a Brahmin class.⁴ Last week I read someone call it “the Regime”. In foreign policy we call it the blob. Pick your term: properly defined, I agree something like it exists.

Americans are polarized by lots of traits, but the biggest predictor of which side you’re on is education. Having a college degree is the defining marker of economic class today, and a prerequisite to rising to leadership positions across government, academia, business, and media. College-educated people have always skewed left, especially so in recent years. So leaders across these institutions have increasingly liberal or progressive values.⁵

But only 38% of Americans have a college degree. The portion of that 38% who have a professional interest in political affairs is far smaller still. Those with degrees (especially elite degrees from top universities) are disproportionately concentrated in big cities on the coasts, which further insulates them from the majority without degrees. And government elites are concentrated in one city in particular. While this has always been true, the internet has nudged all of us, elite or not, to self-select into echo chambers or communities of shared interest, with the effect of entrenching in-group norms, values, and assumptions.

The result is twofold. First, those with power are much more likely than average Americans to hold certain left-leaning beliefs, including:

• Socially tolerant positions on trans rights and gender identity issues, including putting pronouns in one’s bio.

• Sympathy for Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, DEI, etc.

• A belief in an expansive role for the United States in world affairs, including support for foreign aid and a major, permanent overseas military presence across several continents.

• Comfort with lockdowns, mask or vaccine “mandates,” or general deference to government health experts during COVID-19.

• Comfort with social media policies banning false, bigoted, or racially inflammatory content; or to a lesser extent, comfort with deplatforming such ideas in in-person events.

• Feminism

• Wokeness, etc.⁶

Second, the elite – being just as proud and tribal as everyone else – are prone to condescension, dismissal, mockery, or sometimes cancellation of those who do not share these beliefs. They have a natural human tendency to imagine their hard-earned qualifications are a little bit broader than they actually are. They are prone to conflate their values with their expertise; to say things like “trust the science,” and then offer subjective value judgments masquerading as science.

At a minimum, elites are more interested in debating ideas that other educated people frequently disagree about than they are in debating those on which educated people enjoy broad consensus. But sometimes, elite consensus has major blind spots, as Dan Williams explains:

“Outside the hard sciences, many ideas advanced and legitimised within science and academia are simplistic, selective, biased, and unreliable. The replication crisis is one indication of this. There were also many well - documented  problems with public health authorities during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there are countless others. Experts are often overconfident and wrong. Whole bodies of putatively scientific knowledge are commonly built on sand. These problems are exacerbated by a situation where the line between progressive activism and science is not always clear (and sometimes wilfully blurred). And in many ways, things are even worse within establishment liberal media. These and numerous other factors ensure that the blue tribe’s picture of reality is frequently biased, selective, or plain wrong.”

Even if the elite are smarter than the opposition on average, some of the opposition may be smarter still, at least in some narrow respects. From extensive personal experience, I can confirm that there is nothing on Earth more infuriating than being condescended to by someone who’s making a weaker argument than yours. That fury makes lots of people root for Trump as a sort of spiteful schadenfreude against the liberal elite. The writer who called Democrats “The Regime” put it this way:

“There are a large number of people who just absolutely hate The Regime. This bucket has a lot of very smart people in it who aren't actually MAGA. The Regime called for cloth masks to stop an airborne blood disease when every nurse in the country knows only N95s work. The Regime tried to make a vaccine with a 30% efficacy rate mandatory after lying about its efficacy rate. The Regime closed the schools when all of Europe had them open. The Regime burned police stations and ACABed and sieged the Portland federal building and cut Texas barbed wire to let more illegal people across the border while Abbot was trying to stop them. The Regime gave the Taliban an air force. The Regime backs Israel in acts that half the world considers genocide. The Regime uses Ukraine as a make-work program for US weapons manufacturers and tacitly endorses the bombing of Nord. The Regime endorses 14 year old girls getting mastectomies in order to elevate the virtue quotient of their parents on Facebook by accumulation of 'stunning and brave' points. The regime docks Asians 200 points on their SATs for college applications. The Regime bans gas stoves. Whatever. I'm not going to argue at this time about whether any one of these things are true or false, or valid or not. I’m merely describing what they see. "Boo Regime," they say. "Boooooo Regime!" They see Trump as an incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad and they can think of nothing more pleasing than to have such a complete bozo in charge of The Regime for four years gumming up the Regime's activities, because The Regime’s activities are completely awful.”

There is plenty in that paragraph I could quibble with, but the overarching sentiment, I get. “The Regime” is full of unthinking yet sneering conformism to liberal groupthink, and that’s worse than annoying: it’s unhealthy for our society and our democracy. Voting for Trump is a way to thumb these people in the eye, sure, but arguably also a protest vote in favor of more democratic rule by people with more representative values and less censorious tactics.

To be clear, Americans have always been governed by an elite. But that pill was easier to swallow when Americans felt things were going well. A big part of Trump’s initial rise was many people’s growing sense that things are going poorly – a sense which has only increased since then. The New York Times expanded on why 75% of Americans are now unsatisfied with the way things are going:

“These findings mirror what other pollsters have found when they asked respondents about whether they think the country is on the right or wrong track, and about their trust in government and confidence in American institutions…

The examples are almost too numerous to list: a disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.”

Alana Newhouse of Tablet Magazine argues this is actually the crux of the left-right divide: “The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.” This is the core of the vibecession. The root causes of the sentiment can of course be debated, but the overall mood of our country indicates some fundamental failing with the state of things, and it’s natural to want to hold leadership accountable.

Since Democrats are the incumbent – and more fundamentally, represent the norms and values of the ruling elite across many American institutions – the steelman would hold them accountable. If Trump wants to break norms and fire a lot of bureaucrats, maybe that’s the shakeup we need.

The Rebuttal

1. Kamala Harris would govern as a moderate, and her policies would be better for the economy, social harmony, and advancing America’s strategic interests abroad – even by traditionally conservative values.

Contrary to accusations that Harris has been light on policy details, her campaign has been far more substantive than Trump’s. The 2024 Democratic Party Platform is 92 pages long. The 2024 Republican platform is 16 pages long and a bit of a joke. Republicans did not even bother to publish a platform in 2020, even while Democrats (including Harris) were debating CBO-scored healthcare proposals in their 2020 primary.

If you read her platform, you will find that Harris is running as a moderate, with less transformative ambitions than even Joe Biden. Importantly, this fits her career track record better than the progressive image she put on in 2019, as those familiar with her roots in San Francisco politics can attest. Harris veered left in 2019 only because the national mood had shifted that way (more on that later) and her reputation as a tough-on-crime prosecutor became a liability in the Democratic primary.

Regardless, unlike Trump, Harris will not have the Congressional majorities or Supreme Court backing needed govern as anything other than a moderate. On a scale from 0 (most conservative) to 100 (most progressive), I’d put Trump at a 10 and Harris at a 60; anyone over a 35 will be closer to Harris. Matt Yglesias puts it well:

“If you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress.”

I do not have time to go issue-by-issue across every field of federal policy, so I’ll limit this section to conservatives’ top two concerns in this election – the economy and immigration – as well as the foreign policy issues I work on professionally.

1a. Trump’s economic policies are much worse than those of a typical Republican, and hard to defend via appeal to mainstream values.

The U.S. economy is doing much better than the economy of any other developed country. With a Republican president, traditional conservatives who care about growth, efficiency, and the dynamism and innovation enabled by the American system would be shouting this from the rooftops. Instead, Trump is pretending the economy is terrible on account of inflation that has already ended, and then promising an economic agenda that is almost entirely inflationary, not to mention out of whack with traditional Republican values.

The centerpiece of this agenda – which Trump says he can implement without Congress – is a massive 60% tariff on imports from China and a universal 20% tariff on imports from everywhere else. There is absolutely zero doubt in the mind of any impartial and qualified economist that this policy would significantly raise prices on a large variety of goods. None. You can argue this is worth it, but you can’t pretend it wouldn’t happen. It would probably also start a destabilizing trade war that tanks the stock market and leaves the U.S. economy more isolated, motivates de-dollarization, undercuts the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions, and reduces the availability of many goods and services.

Other conservative proposals include tax cuts on the wealthy combined with surges in federal spending that would increase the debt by $4.1 trillion over ten years – over three times what Harris’ proposal would do – and also accelerate inflation. To contain this inflation, the Federal Reserve would likely have to raise interest rates again…unless Trump fires the Fed chairman and tries to replace him with a loyalist, which he has expressed interest in doing, and which would be a disaster for monetary policy.

Combined with Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations (see below), economists fear these events could produce a massive supply shock and plunge the U.S. economy into a depression. It would also increase housing prices by exacerbating the construction industry’s labor shortage. Trump has firmly embraced NIMBYism - the single most important casue of high housing prices - while Harris has firmly embraced the superior YIMBYism.

Finally, insofar as Trump threatens democratic stability and the rule of law (see below), that gravely undermines the foundation of American economic prosperity by making the U.S. a riskier and less attractive place to do business.

1b. Immigration is good for the country, while mass deportations would be ineffective, chaotic, and violent, further tearing our country apart.

For years, Trump has scapegoated immigration for most of the country’s problems, from crime to the economy to the fiscal deficit to voter fraud. These arguments have always been completely unfounded. They tap into his followers’ basest nativist prejudices without any convincing empirical evidence.

Crime has been going down for years. And contrary to centuries of racist fear-mongering, immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens. This is true whether the immigrant came here legally or illegally. Immigration does not increase crime among native-born citizens either, resulting in lower crime rates overall. Empirical, nonpartisan studies demonstrating this can be found here, here,  here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. One of those hyperlinks summarizes: “the major finding of a century of research on immigration and crime is that immigrants…nearly always exhibit lower crime rates than native groups.” This is close to an expert consensus.

Likewise, fear of economic hardship or reduced opportunities from unchecked immigration is unfounded by the data. One review summarizes: “most existing studies of the economic impacts of immigration suggest these impacts are small, and on average benefit the native population.” Studies finding that immigration improves the wages, income or living standards of native-born citizens can be read here, here, here, here, and here; that immigration improves native employment, here, here, here, and here; that it improves native occupational mobility, here.

A consensus of 88% of economists polled at a 2013 IMG forum agreed that the average American would be better off with more high-skilled immigrants (0% disagreed), while 52% said the same for low-skilled immigrants (with 28% uncertain – only 9% disagreed). Even reviews finding a negative impact on natives concede “most studies find only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows.” Such findings are not as overwhelming as they were for immigrants and crime, but they certainly lean in one direction. One study put it simply: “evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less-educated natives is scant.”

Immigrants are more likely to be working age, more likely to work at any age, and more likely to take difficult or dangerous jobs which native-born Americans do not fill. They also have higher birth rates (hear that, J.D. Vance?) which helps fill the fiscal vacuum left by the baby boomers. Every migrant worker who was schooled elsewhere (read: not on U.S. taxpayer’s dime) becomes a “free” creator of goods, services and tax revenue, especially since non-citizens are exempt from many public benefits, even as adults. The result is that immigrants generally increase tax revenue by a larger amount than they increase government spending. Studies confirming this can be found here and here. Even in Europe, which has more generous public benefits than the U.S., “immigrants appear to have a minor positive net fiscal effect for host countries.”

The truth is that the United States probably needs more immigrants to remain economically, technologically, and perhaps even militarily competitive with a rival that has more than four times its population. The United States ranks 186^th among world nations in population density, with 38 people per square km compared to 109 per square km in the EU. The foreign-born share of the population today is well within historical norms from 1860-1920. There is simply no cause for alarm outside of some people’s subjective dislike of immigrants.

Suppose you disagree with me anyway. Fine. Harris supported a serious bipartisan border security bill that would have reduced migrant inflows, and Trump killed it for political reasons. One side is trying to balance competing considerations on a thorny problem in a nuanced way, and the other is shamelessly lying and fearmongering about immigrants eating the dogs.

Trump’s competing idea to address this issue is mass deportations of millions of people, which would be a futile, expensive, and intrusive humanitarian catastrophe. It would require hiring and training thousands of additional ICE employees, mass racial profiling, raids around the country, and establishing a vast network of internment camps to house deportees while processed for expulsion. Legal U.S. residents would be caught up in the sweep. This would not go unopposed by the passionate immigration rights defenders in our country, leading to violent confrontations. To call this a recipe for social harmony is delusional. Back when J.D. Vance was free to speak his mind, even he agreed:

A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self-deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test.

1c. Harris would lead a steadier, saner, more principled, and less dangerous foreign policy than Trump.

Foreign policy is not Kamala Harris’ specialty. According to inside sources, she “came into the vice presidency with relatively little foreign policy experience, which left her dependent on her advisers, who are largely traditionalists.” However, her likely National Security Advisor, Philip Gordon, has demonstrated encouraging instincts toward restraint. Harris is widely thought to be less reflexively deferential to Israel than Biden. While she has defended her boss’s policies out of necessity, she also reportedly pushed the administration for greater empathy towards suffering Palestinians, and was the first senior administration official to call for an “immediate ceasefire” in the conflict. More than 20 years Biden’s junior and with a fresh new cabinet, there is reason to be optimistic that Harris will be less wedded to old-fashioned blob-think than her predecessor. A continuation of Biden’s mixed record is probably the worst-case scenario – but still a safer and better path than Trump would likely pursue.

Despite his absurd reputation as an isolationist, Trump is no peacenik, and his first term’s foreign policy featured a long list of hawkish blunders Harris would not likely have made. These include:

• Massively increasing U.S. drone strikes and loosening the rules of engagement for such strikes, resulting in significant civilian casualties.

• Increasing support for Saudi Arabia while it was slaughtering Yemeni civilians, in open defiance of Congress, creating a horrendous humanitarian catastrophe.

• Pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, setting back global progress towards already insufficient climate targets.

• Pulling out of the painstakingly negotiated Iran nuclear deal in favor of a “maximum pressure” campaign which completely failed, and only strengthened hardliners within Iran.

• The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, which prompted a retaliatory strike that injured dozens of U.S. troops and risked a major war.

• The Abraham Accords, which (combined with the above two) is the U.S. policy most directly responsible for producing October 7^th.⁷

• Increasing troop numbers in Afghanistan after promising to end the war (a promise only Biden was able to deliver on).

Moving forward, Trump has floated military operations against Mexican drug cartels, firing missiles or sending troops into the sovereign territory of a friendly ally with deep social and economic connections. This is a very bad idea. Both parties are in a race to outdo the other as tougher on China, and Trump’s bumbling idiocy and need to “win” is unlikely to deftly navigate the precarious diplomacy surrounding Taiwan. Trump’s ignorance, vanity, and penchant for absurd and impulsive ideas is extremely dangerous in global affairs, where temperament is not independent from policy in a crisis.

The few areas where Trump is more dovish than Harris are more accurately described as pro-dictator than they are as pro-restraint, and would result in sudden destabilizations of global conflicts rather than a responsible handover of responsibility to U.S. allies. Instead of being frank with Ukraine in private that U.S. aid cannot continue indefinitely and advising them to seek a negotiated settlement or continue fighting at their own risk, as Harris may do, Trump may cut funding cold turkey and make serious, immediate concessions to Putin for free, perhaps even withdrawing from NATO entirely.

2. Trump attempted a coup against the constitution, which is not only disqualifying but indicative of future risk. Even in a best-case scenario, a second Trump term would inflict serious and lasting damage on vital democratic institutions.

A detailed case that Trump attempted a coup can be read here. The gist is that he lost a free and fair election, knew it, and then made a concerted, extended, preplanned, pre-telegraphed, and flagrantly illegal effort to overturn that loss anyway. January 6 was only the last-ditch finale of this effort and not even the most disqualifying step. Here is a condensed summary of how he did this:

1. “After losing an election that he knew to be fair, he tried to get state legislators to approve slates of fake electors rather than the real ones.

2. When this didn’t work, he tried to get [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger to fabricate fake votes that he knew to be non-existent.

3. When this didn’t work, he tried to get Mike Pence either not to certify the results of the election, to throw it over to the house who would declare him victorious, or to simply approve some fake electors to declare him president.

4. When this didn’t work, after a violent mob broke into the Capitol, he sat around doing nothing for hours, tweeting about Pence’s spinelessness, hoping that the mob would intimidate Pence into approving the fake electors. This was as he was begged by everyone around him to call off the mob.”

Trump’s foreknowledge that his supporters would attempt to storm the Capitol is probable, yet immaterial to whether he attempted a coup. That he telegraphed his unwillingness to accept a defeat in advance while telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” makes it even more obvious.[x] Had Mike Pence or others caved to Trump’s pressure, the coup may have gotten much further than it did, sparking a constitutional crisis and – very possibly – an armed struggle for power.

Let’s repeat that. The betting favorite in this election attempted to overturn the last election, which – but for the intervention of people no longer in the picture – could easily have sparked an armed struggle for power. A mother fucking civil war. People upset about asylum, bad vibes, pronouns in bios, or mean tweets from Democrats are not taking that reality seriously enough. In the words of comic Jeff Maurer, they seem to be arguing that “Trump didn’t destroy American the first time, so logically we should let him try again.”

Even if you think our country is on the wrong track, it’s important to be mindful of just how much worse it could get. And it is wishful thinking to imagine that Trump’s threat to democracy is all in the past. Yascha Mounk gives four excellent reasons to believe that a second Trump presidency would be significantly more damaging to democracy than the first, which I’ll paraphrase:

1. Trump Has Learned How to Wield Power. When Trump was first elected, he had never held elected office and did not understand how to effectively exercise power, including the where and how the Constitution limited his power. Four years of experience will make him more effective at circumventing the checks that foiled him last time.

2. Trump Now Has a Deep Bench of Loyalists. Trump’s first cabinet was composed of orthodox business leaders and old hand Republicans whose political vision did not align with his. Since then, the MAGA-wing of the Republican Party has invested in training and recruiting an army of loyal Trumpers who stand ready to do his bidding.

3. Trump Has Taken Control of the Republican Party. In Congress, the RNC, and state level politics, the Republican Party has had high turnover since 2016 to replace the old guard Republicans and people who (for example) refused to pretend the 2020 election was stolen with people willing to bend the knee.

4. Trump Is Out for Revenge. Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he plans to go after the people who thwarted his coup or prosecuted his crimes from 2020, including (in his words) “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.”

What will these new threats to democracy look like? Here are 7 possibilities, ranging from extremely likely to perfectly possible:

1. Trump will pardon the perpetrators of January 6^th and escape conviction for crimes of which he is guilty.

Trump would obviously fire Jack Smith and have the Justice Department dismiss his felony charges. He has also promised to pardon the January 6^th “martyrs” on Day 1 of his presidency. This erodes the rule of law and reduces the deterrent for waging political violence on his behalf moving forward, endangering democracy.

2. Trump will try to punish his political opponents.

Trump has voiced support for locking up his enemies on literally 100 occasions. He already tried to punitively investigate dozens of opponents in his first term, including Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Joe Biden, and Brad Raffensperger, and LTC Vindman. This time he will be even more consumed by it. As Harris said in her speech last week, she would enter office with a To-Do list, and Trump would return to office with an enemies list.⁸

It’s easy to imagine the FTC or Justice Department taking action against liberal mainstream media outlets while giving Twitter, Truth Social, or Fox News kinder treatment. Importantly, these threats would not even have to be carried out to have a chilling effect that weakens democracy – for example, by pressuring some billionaire to put the kibosh on his newspaper’s criticism of the President.

3. Trump will continue to encourage and incite his supporters to wage violence on his behalf.

When a Trump supporter tried to kill Nancy Pelosi and broke her husband’s skull with a hammer, Trump mocked them both to a cheering crowd. So did his son. When feds seemingly foiled a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, Trump used the story as a chance to bash her on Twitter. Vox recalls similar cases:

At a 2016 rally in Iowa, Trump instructed his supporters to “knock the crap out of” disruptive protesters. “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees,” he added. During the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder, Trump implied that any rioters should be shot by tweeting an old white supremacist slogan: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

In 2023, Trump suggested that former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley deserves to be executed. On Veterans’ Day, he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” 

In 2016, Capitol police recorded fewer than 900 threats against members of Congress. By 2021, that number was 9,700. There have been comparably extreme increases in threats against mayors, federal judges, election administrators, public health officials, and even school board members. Judges and prosecutors in Trump’s criminal trials have been swatted and threatened. Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security. One prominent conservative journalist has faced “death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists,” as well as people showing up at their home and their kids’ school.

You already know in which direction these threats are coming, but we have research to back it up: studies show political violence and threats are “three to five times higher” on the right than the left, and also far more deadly and impactful. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, the attack on an El Paso Walmart frequented by Latinos in 2019, and the 2022 massacre of supermarket shoppers in a Black area of Buffalo were all done by ultra-conservatives. MAGA Republicans are also much more likely to endorse pro-violence statements.

If Trump wins, there is zero reason to expect this to end and every reason to expect it will escalate. If Congressional votes are swayed by swarms of death threats from Trump’s supporters as he winks about pardoning these patriots if they pull it off, will you understand why Trump is a threat to democracy? The assassination attempts against Trump this summer do not undercut, but rather reinforce this point. We are teetering on the edge of a very dark place, and Donald Trump is the one who brought us there.

4. Trump will replace many – potentially tens of thousands of – career civil servants with incompetent lackeys, destroying the administrative independence that has long checked executive overreach.

Trump has announced that he would reclassify tens of thousands of experienced federal workers to something called Schedule F, where they could be fired and replaced at the pleasure of the President. He already tried to do this in October 2020, so we can have no doubt of his intent.

Apart from damaging democracy, this would make government agencies even more dysfunctional by preventing them from hiring and promoting people based on merit and experience. But more importantly, it is straight out of the authoritarian playbook and yet another threat to democratic norms.

A central tenet of liberal democracy is that government officials are supposed to be loyal to the constitution – to the existing laws passed through democratic processes – not to any individual elected leader. The career civil service were made independent from political appointment to avoid a spoils system that led to corruption and favoritism in the application of the law. For example, rule of law requires that it is enforced evenly on everyone, irrespective of political affiliation. We wouldn’t want a system in which, for example, officials withheld disaster relief funds from areas that voted Democratic out of loyalty to the President’s wishes. This is the sort of system Trump is explicitly trying to create.

5. Trump could abuse the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against “the enemy within”, violently squashing legitimate protests.

There would be no shortage of things to protest in a second Trump term, and Trump wouldn’t like that one bit. When BLM was protesting, Trump asked his generals “can’t you just shoot them?” There’s lots of fancy new surveillance technology he could leverage against these protestors too. Emboldened and unrestrained, it’s easy to envision Trump imposing martial law on unruly American cities, especially in states that didn’t vote for him. And when would he lift it? Would he elect to keep it in place indefinitely, “until we figure out what’s going on?” Through the 2026 or 2028 elections, perhaps even delaying or suppressing voting in left-leaning states? Should we have to find out?

6. Trump could encourage or permit loyal Republican officials or legislatures at state level to purge voter rolls, pack election boards, change how ballots are counted, or otherwise fiddle with the conduct of elections on the pretense of combating nonexistent fraud.
   

7. Trump could ask J.D. Vance to do the same thing he asked Mike Pence to do in favor of the 2028 Republican nominee.

With a packed Supreme Court that just gave him blanket immunity and a White House full of loyal toadies, the possibilities are limited only by irrational willingness to assume good things about Donald Trump. In fact, Trump openly admits that he plans to be much less restrained by his surrounding institutions this time around. And populist movements everywhere are innately authoritarian, illiberal and hostile to limitations on their chosen leader’s power.

Democracy exists in degrees, and so do the threats it faces. No, Trump is not Hitler. But there are lots steps between here and there that are a whole lot worse than the liberal democracy we’ve enjoyed for 248 years. Scott Alexander offers one analogy:

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….

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.

A billion people in a hundred middle-income countries around the world are stuck in corrupt, stifling, infuriating quasi-democracies. They wake up every day surrounded by problems and injustices that they cannot fix or safely speak up about. An alphabet soup of human rights NGOs issue a gazillion reports documenting all their government’s abuses, and those reports gather dust as the leaders keep jailing journalists anyway. They clamor to come here because we have a better system: one rooted in vague rules on paper that mostly everyone followed until this orange jackass showed up.

When Democrats say that Trump is a threat to democracy, that claim does not depend on a certainty that his return to power would be the end of free elections forever.⁹ The point is that any amount of funny business in this area is not something you want to mess around with. In many ways, Donald Trump would make our democracy sicker, weaker, and more vulnerable to abuses by himself and others. Just as he already has.

3. Trumpism is fundamentally incapable of constructing something better than “the regime.” Far from correcting course, his reelection would prolong and deepen the exasperating rut in which our country is mired.

3a. Effective policymaking – and even more so, systemic change – is extremely complicated, requiring a nuanced and sophisticated approach.

Days before the 2016 election, Scott Alexander made a prescient warning:

If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it.

Policymaking is really, really hard. Harder still in the most diverse and powerful country on Earth. Building effective, representative, properly oriented institutions from scratch is another difficulty level entirely. It is one thing to feel that our nation is on the wrong track – I agree. But is another thing to accurately diagnose what specifically is not working, why that is, and what to do about it. To know what to break, what to tweak, and what to keep in place.

If you want to smash everything and start anew, your only prayer of success is to have a) broad public buy in, b) deep humility about how much you do not know, c) minimal risk that failure would make things significantly worse, and d) a really compelling theory of change and vision of what to build next, grounded in all the best research experts can provide. Neither Trump himself nor the movement he leads has any of these things at all.

In fact, the only people in the country who have seriously tried to flesh out D are educated elites that Trump is running against. And even the most learned people in the country do not have any remote consensus about why the national mood is so sour. Some of their theories are as follows:

• A broken, infuriating healthcare system with ever-rising costs, which eats into take-home salaries and creates the impression of stagnant wages

• Similarly soaring costs of housing and college education, leaving the American dream out of reach for too many Americans

• Free trade / NAFTA shipping blue-collar manufacturing jobs overseas, gutting communities in the heartland until those who could leave left and the rest sank into deaths of despair

• Smartphones and social media rewiring our brains towards instant gratification and profound self-awareness, ruining our attention spans and heightening social anxiety

• Declining religiosity – or really, belief in anything – and an ensuing loss of community and meaning that leaves people adrift, isolated, or numbed out

• An alleged collapse of the nuclear family and normalization of divorce producing fears of abandonment and unstable home environments;

• The loss of place-based community and in-person interaction resulting from increasingly transitory and online lives

• The disorienting pace of technological progress and its implications

• Falling levels of sex and dating, whatever you want to blame that on

• Media negativity bias and the sensationalist outrage industry

• People not actually being that depressed, but using the “on the wrong track?” polling question as a referendum on the incumbent in polarized times, such that at least half the country answers no at any given time.

It is also important to note that most other rich countries do not seem to think they’re on the right track either – incumbent parties lost the most recent elections in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – which suggests that what ails the American mood may not be unique to the American elites or institutions Trump wants to destroy.

The true cause is probably a messy combination of these factors and others. And who knows, maybe I’m wrong and immigration belongs on the list too. The point is not which answer is right. The point is that solving something as innately multifaceted as “the way things are going” requires a degree of nuance, sophistication, and curiosity. The only way we can figure out both the problem and the solution to America being on the wrong track is through a reasoned discussion rooted in facts and decency.

Therein lies the problem:

3b. Donald Trump leads an anti-intellectual cult of personality that is fundamentally at war with expertise, or even with reasoned arguments rooted in facts and decency.

Democracy is an airplane. We need trained experts to fly the plane, and passengers to decide where to fly. Donald Trump’s movement does not have many pilots because it is optimized for loyalty instead of competence, demonizes experts as the enemy, and is anathema to most intelligent people. The result is widespread ignorance and incompetence throughout the GOP that will further prevent Trump from building anything better than existing institutions, while creating a significant risk of crashing the plane.

About 70% of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud because of Trump’s lies on the subject. Half of Republicans think the COVID-19 vaccine is unsafe, and a quarter of them think vaccines in general are unsafe for children (even before Trump started campaigning with a shameless peddler of anti-vax nonsense he might put in charge health policy). A quarter of Republicans believe the government, media, and banks are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global sex-trafficking operation out of a pizza joint in the Washington D.C. suburbs. A Republican congresswoman has “suggested Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires, speculated whether 9/11 was a hoax and supported the QAnon conspiracy theory.”

The conservative media ecosystem is chock full of cranks and liars, “poisoned by disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, populism, and post-truth” reasoning. What Trumpers consider “independent” or “free thinking” media is really just pundits who are bad at epistemology. Here’s Dan Williams again on why the red tribe’s beliefs are much less true than the blue tribe’s:

The Republican Party and conservative media today have become almost fully unmoored from reality. Utterly baseless lies, fabrications, conspiracy theories, and absurdities run rampant. Nearly everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie or exaggeration. And remarkably, this situation seems to worsen as time passes.

Few things could illustrate this more powerfully than Trump’s preposterous, evidence-free, racist claim that immigrants are eating Americans’ pets en masse, something which most Republicans apparently believed and Tucker Carlson celebrated as “awesome” because it “makes all the right people mad.”…

[T]he problem is not that the red tribe has wholly abandoned any concern with truth. The problem is that without knowledge-generating institutions and their norms and procedures (e.g., in science and professional journalism), caring about the truth achieves nothing. The consequence is instead a reversion to an epistemic state of nature in which ignorance, error, and tribal narratives are the default state.

In other words, for all the problems with America’s knowledge-generating institutions, these institutions evolved over centuries for a reason. If you reject them wholesale, the result is not liberation from bias and delusion; it is the complete capitulation to them.

At the end of the day, “the establishment” and its synonyms are pejoratives for a system in which the most complicated and important policy decisions are made by the people most qualified to make them. Those fancy degrees the elite accrue are often in subjects highly relevant to making policy decisions, like political science, economics, sociology, philosophy, psychology, or history. Elite opinions on these subjects are not always better than regular people’s, but they are usually better. The expert consensus is not always right, but it is usually closer to the truth than the people ignoring it in favor of heterodox echo chambers.

Apart from who is right, there’s the question of who can persuade – of who can mold consensus as a genuinely transformative leader. Donald Trump is not that. He is rather an unstable egomaniac, compulsively unable to tolerate criticism and driven by self-promotion above all else. He’s an erratic thinker and communicator with an insatiable lust for power and attention. He is already a convicted felon and fraudster, and guilty of other serious crimes, including sexual assault, the theft of classified documents, and – in case you forgot – attempting a coup against the constitution of the United States.

Before he stepped foot in the Oval Office, Trump had said literally hundreds of things so moronic or offensive that intelligent people considered them disqualifying for presidential office. His presidency was a daily firehose of stupidity. This is not a recipe for a leader or movement that can pull off a successful redesign of American institutions on the fly. Nor is it a movement most intelligent people will ever be able to take seriously. It is rather a movement that lends credence to the progressive left’s most scathing damnations of American corruption. Which me to…

3c. Donald Trump has a radicalizing effect on people. His reelection would reanimate woke politics and ensure the national discourse remains superheated and unproductive.

Trump’s movement is so divisive, juvenile, and odious that it makes it hard for other Americans to think clearly either. I’m running out of time, so I’ll let other writers take this one. The best rundown was from the hilarious Jeff Maurer in “To fight wokeness, vote Harris.” In addition to validating the far-left’s America is bad narrative, Maurer observes:

During Trump’s presidency, it also felt like talking about anything other than Trump was bad form. That was largely because Trump was the president, and though a woke teacher can tell your kid that triangles are racist, and a woke city council can change Main Street’s name to Indigenous Bodies Straining Under The Yoke Of Capitalism Boulevard, only a president can launch missiles or capture the Justice Department. During the Trump years, concerns about left-wing illiberalism were invariably met with “but surely Trump is the bigger threat.” And…yes, he was! It did not seem like the right time to “punch left”….Trump gave the far left a sense of purpose and stifled center-left pushback.”

Alexander predicted as much in his 2016 endorsement:

“Aside from the fact that getting back at annoying people isn’t worth eroding the foundations of civil society – do you really think a Trump election is going to hurt these people at all? Make them question anything? “Oh, 51% of the American people disagree with me, I guess that means I’ve got a lot of self-reflecting to do.” Of course not. A Trump election would just confirm for them exactly what they already believe – that the average American is a stupid racist who needs to be kept as far away from public life as possible…

When people say that the Left is in control, they’re talking about academia, the media, the arts, and national culture writ large. But all of these things have a tendency to define themselves in opposition to the government. When the left controls the government, this is awkward and tends to involve a lot of infighting. When the right controls the government, it gets easy. If Trump controls the government, it gets ridiculously easy….If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.”

And Noah Smith explained this week why a vote for Trump is a vote for chaos:

“Trump seemed to provide proof positive that America really was an indelibly racist nation, “stamped from the beginning” with the evil of slavery and white supremacy and so on. It was Trump’s presidency that convinced liberals and progressives throughout America to listen to the siren song of the anti-American leftists who had previously been shut out of mainstream politics.

Unrest in America is now in the process of ebbing. If the late 2010s were our modern version of the 1960s, the 2020s under Biden have been more like the 1970s — exhausted, bitter, confused, but fundamentally non-explosive. The “great awokening” is burning itself out like a prairie fire, and the dreaded alt-right has more or less subsided.

A second Trump term would delay this necessary process of exhaustion and retrenchment. Trump’s quasi-dictatorial bluster, and his rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, will inevitably reignite the passions of liberal backlash. Shut out of political power, and with the social campaigns of the late 2010s still fresh in their minds, liberals strike back in the spaces where they still exert power — universities, businesses, civic organizations, school boards, and so on. The wokeness wars will return. Meanwhile, rightist organizations, invigorated by a second Trump victory and triggered by liberal backlash, will again march in our streets.”

3d. Trump is gasoline for the engine that’s taking America down the wrong track. The country cannot move forward until he is out of the picture, and this is our last chance to convey that his model of politics is inviable.

Remember my list of plausible reasons our national mood is so sour? Here’s one I left off this list:

• A toxic, acrimonious, and polarized political discourse lacking shared empirical authorities and marked by mutual fear and hatred of the other side, which shuts down fact-finding, critical thinking, and compromise at the highest levels of our democracy.

When I reflect on why I feel our country is on the wrong track, this is the factor that strikes a chord. I’ve devoted my spare energies in life to a project of civil discourse that feels increasingly futile and depressing, and never more so than when Trump was in office. I elaborated in my welcome post:

Each major controversy—COVID, BLM, January 6^th, October 7^th, an election here or a mass shooting there—stirs up a new firestorm that makes everyone feel worse. The internet explodes with bad-faith polemics that hype us up on our own bullshit. We reshare our side’s best arguments and mock the other side’s worst. When things simmer down, we go back to our bubbles having learned little and achieved less. The discourse stays broken, and so does seemingly everything that discourse is meant to guide.

I get that most Americans are not like me, but since you’re reading a politics Substack, chances are you share my exasperation to some extent. You may sense there are more obstacles standing in the way of constructive political conversation today than at any other time in our history. You may sense that what America needs now is a gradual cooling of tensions.

History suggests that is possible. Noah Smith notes that “populist movements generally lose support over time”:

William Jennings Bryan was nominated for President three times, and his share of the vote went down each time. Ross Perot and Bernie Sanders both garnered much less support in their second outings. Over time, people tend to lose enthusiasm, as the upstart’s rhetoric goes from fresh to tiresome, and as it becomes clear that the swamp will not in fact be drained.

But whether and when tensions cool depends on whether Donald Trump wins this election. Why? Because this election is Game 7 for Trumpism. So far, the series is tied. And the lesson Republicans take from this whole 8-12 year dalliance with the devil is going to be shaped by whether he wins the deciding contest. Some form of MAGA will be here to stay regardless, but its exact form is not yet determined. Will it be more like Glenn Younkin and Greg Abbott, or more like Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump Jr.? Will the crazy be cranked up to 8, or to 11? Just how much authoritarianism can they get away with before the American people cry foul?

A second national repudiation of Trump, this time in an extremely winnable election, would be a very positive influence on the answers to all of these questions. It’s the difference between Republicans introducing legislation to add his face to Mount Rushmore, and Republicans calming the rhetoric and talking about him as little as possible in 2026. It’s also the difference between Democrats calming down and freaking out, as I explained.

So if you hate wokeness, prize free speech, and want to support a healthy political discourse, stop pretending the authoritarian strongman intent on punishing his critics is capable of leading that conversation, and instead pick the candidate who is not so uniquely loathsome that she single-handedly breathes life into radical ideas about America being evil to the core.¹⁰

If you hate the way that our politics have become – the stupidity of this entire circus, and the constant tenor of chaos and outrage – ask yourself which of these candidates is the one bursting with stupidity, chaos, and cause for fresh outrage every time he steps up to the podium.

If you do not want to wince every time your President opens his mouth; if you want to be confident that America’s liberal democratic institutions are not under catastrophic assault; and if you want social harmony, a more fair and stable economy, a healing country that can talk through hard problems, and prudent incremental improvements across the policy universe, vote for the party of dorky well-meaning wonks who know what the hell they’re doing.

1. I admittedly have only the free subscription to Noahpinion, so I couldn’t read the rest of his best possible argument against steelmanning. What a shame! But to address the ungated portion, I have four thoughts. First, even when you do accidentally strawman the other side, you still advance the discussion by learning that. Onlookers who shared your misconception of what the other side believes learn too. Sometimes you’re wrong, and your efforts to refute the steelman actually provide the steelman for the other side to knock down – but that’s still productive and worthwhile.

Second, people considering/voting for Trump are already Trump’s lawyer. They don’t need us to translate what he’s getting at when he speaks – they feel it instinctively, and sense all the technical nitpicking and fact checking is missing the forest for the trees. That’s what the whole sanewashing debate is about: to what extent should the media read through his crazy weave to engage the widely held sentiments he’s clearly trying to convey? To me, that’s part of what actual empathy for low-information Trump voters looks like: using our fancy-pants college words to ask them “is this what you mean?” Presenting their case charitably – probably better than they could themselves – helps them feel heard and see us as less out of touch. It boosts our credibility, and their receptiveness to rational argument.

Third, declining to engage the other side’s strongest arguments for fear that fascists or sophists will misuse it bad faith feels like letting the fascists and sophists win. To give up on the good faith exchange of ideas, or the project of reasoning towards truth together, is to abandon the key thing that makes democracy worth preserving in the first place.

Finally, the risks of steelmanning are more acute for people like Noah with a huge national profile. They’re much lower for the rest of us peons, and especially so on Substack, where I’ve found people are more likely to be curious thinkers acting in good faith.

2. Similarly, there are many niche reasons I personally support Harris that I’ve not discussed here, like protecting PEPFAR or reducing lead poisoning, existential risk, or the suffering of farmed animals.

3. Voters unhappy with Democrats have overwhelmingly given inflation and immigration as their top reasons. And I worry that instead of addressing these issues comprehensively – instead of giving an actual explanation for the many reasons why inflation went up for a time, and why prices would actually be higher under a Trump administration and his crude tariffs, or daring to actually make a case immigration that emphasizes the need for both border security and empathy without the fearmongering - Democrats have tended to just change the subject as quickly as possible to their two or three issues that poll well: abortion, tax the rich, Trump’s an ass. This is exactly the sort of shifty politician bullshit that has so many people fed up with elites.

4. In Googling who came up with this term I also learned that Yarvin was the first to borrow the “red pill” term from The Matrix.

5. Note, however, that liberal and progressive values are not the same thing, which makes our leadership class much less insular than its critics often allege.

6. Importantly, just because the elite are more likely than average to support these things doesn’t mean they are more likely than not. I’d argue wokeness is not a majority position even among the elite.

7. The Accords normalized relations between Israel and other Arab states without requiring any resolution to the Palestinian problem, breaking with decades of expectation that normalization would be dangled as an incentive for Israel to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. This removed the most powerful nonviolent geopolitical lever available to the Palestinian cause; they turned to violent ones instead.

8. One argument I did not include in my steelman is that Democrats are also weaponizing the Justice Department to persecute their political opponents. I didn’t include this because it’s not a strong argument at all. For one thing, it is not true. Democrats have no comparable track record or rhetoric about targeting a sinister, generalized group of enemies. The Justice Department under Biden has prosecuted Trump and Bannon because they are provably guilty of serious crimes (like, for example, attempting a coup). But it has also gone after two Democratic Congressmen, the Democratic Mayor of New York City, a major Democratic donor, and Joe Biden’s own son, because Democrats enforce the law equally on everyone. Nobody can pretend Trump does this with a straight face.

9. Though again, it’s perfectly possible that it would. Yglesias muses: “The odds of American democracy collapsing, conditional on Trump winning, are below 50 percent. But are they below 30 percent? Below 10 percent? Below 5 percent? I’m not sure I’d go much below 5, and I’m not remotely comfortable with that.

10. …and also take your own advice from Steelman Argument #1 about not letting culture war sideshows distract you from policy substance.