This QT is my election livetweet thread. Now that things are winding down into a tight endgame with a cloud of murky lawsuits and doubt-merchanting hanging over them... I hereby declare the excruciating lessons learned meta-thread open.

Muahahahaha. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1323779406750314496

Note that lessons are the same no matter who wins (and I’ve already teased many of them in the livetweet thread), but the futures are not. A 4-year rearguard Biden presidency would open up counter reformation futures a second Trump term would foreclose. Huge divergent fork here.

I’ll run this thread at a slower tempo over weeks/months, unlike the quoted live-tweet thread which is live impressionistic daubs. Not quite cold takes, but not hot either. More like tepid takes. Feel free to shoot good postmortem links my way to react to.

Lemme index a few topics here for future processing:

1. The charge that Trump was the victim of "unfair" double standards throughout his admin

2. The idea that his loyalty-based appointments and purges are the same thing as the detrumpification that will inevitably happen now.

3. The idea that the collusion/interference investigation is on the same level as whatever conspiracy theories Trump unleashes about the legitimacy of this election.

4. The idea that Trump vandalizing of a whole slew of governance norms was either harmless or admirable cunning

I'll just index a bunch of topics here, but might not opine on all of them. These are just themes/questions of Excruciating Lessons Learned that are occurring to me. If I see good threads by other people addressing them, I'll just link them here.

5. Future of old media, especially its opinion section clickbaiting and its polling section?

6. Future of new media (facebook, twitter, 4chan...), which played a good Mini-Me to old media.

7. How should we think about instances of Trump doing what many who detest him felt was the right thing? Should it be regarded as simply "wrong person doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" as Milton Friedman put it, or should we look more skeptically at the "right thing"?

8. If you believe, as I came to believe as early as July 2017 (6 months in, during the failed ACA “skinny repeal” attempt) that Trump regime was basically ransomware, how do you get it out and prevent future infections? https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/malware-is-choking-the-world

One thing I want to do with this meta thread is not let my unabashed middle-class globalist bougie class snobbery color my cold takes too much. Yep, I’m probably part of the class demonized as “elites,” and do harbor some of the contempt Trumpies sense and react angrily to.

But I do believe that when I factor all that out, as best I can, we are left with real moral culpability that’s not just a matter of class/culture prejudice. There are crimes against shared humanity here. Remember, plenty of poor working-class whites *didn’t* vote Trump in 2016.

Final meta point. Trump, despite being a rich, white, native-born, is an outsider lolcow in important circles where I, as foreign-born non-rich brown, am an insider. That this can be true is one of the deep, broad resentments Trump was a messenger for. Just acknowledging that.

9. To the extent this whole 4-year shitshow was enabled and given its specific 2016-20 shape and form by software eating old institutions, what should we take away in terms of what new software-aware institutions should look like? What’s the message of the medium?

10. This is basically a cope for poor Ben, but it does suggest a good question: what is the range of GOP presidents Dems would/should see as acceptable in future, even if distasteful? I’d have been 100% fine in 2016 with any of the other candidates, from Cruz to Jeb.

(which is not to say I’d have personally liked any of them, or agreed with their policies, esp in a counterfactual Cruz admin, but I’d have seen it as legit, and good-enough faith. And tbf I rather liked GWB though hard-left partisans hate him... in many ways I’m pretty old-GOP)

11. What price Bannon-Miller ethnonationalism (Trump is a lazy shallow racist, but these two were genuine Nazi-wannabe-ideologues)

12. What price protectionist economic nationalism? Is there a version that works in a liberal spirit or is it inseparable from ethnocentrism?

13. What about Bannon’s “dismantle the administrative state”? Is there a there there that’s in some sense a legit policy objective in the spirit of the better bits of deregulation a la Reaganomics? Or is it now impossible to disentangle from ethno-fascism-by-privatization?

14. For those who believe Trump represented a rare *qualitative* break from a ~250-year spirit of American public affairs rather than a difference in degree, what was the essence of that break, and what role does “his kind” (Nixon? Goldwater? Jackson?) deserve in public affairs?

Damn, I’m racking up the excruciating analysis questions here.

15. To what extent was the fear of a slide into naked authoritarianism (which people like @sarahkendzior kept up a relentless spotlight on) justified, and still requires attention/action?

16. We saw a long-nurtured apparatus produce fait-accompli outcomes in the judiciary: the Federalist society had a mission accomplished moment under Trump. What did we learn?

17. What enabling archetypes besides Trump emerged as important? McConnell, Bannon, Miller... who else?

18. China relations are probably the only area where even Trump haters like me would be willing to concede he accomplished something: a reset in an unsatisfactory 2015 equilibrium. What did he accomplish and at what cost? What parts are worth keeping? What costs need addressing?

19. What did Woke/SJW learn? What did we learn about it? Where does it go from here?

20. What did we the alt-right learn? What did we learn about it? Where does it go from here?

21. What new things did we learn about race relations?

22. What did we learn about immigration?

I’ll stop here for now. Enough can still go wrong between now and January (including a proof-of-simulator-interference level improbable Trump comeback) that I don’t want to get ahead of events even in indexing obvious questions. Next batch of questions after official results.

Things that can go wrong in order of increasing improbability

1. Trump finds non-frivolous legal challenge
2. Far-right triggers game-changing unrest
3. Assassinations of key figures
4. Natural-cause deaths
5. Statistical miracle gets Trump to 270*

* proof that this is a sim

One question I *don’t* intend to worry about: how trump voters will react. They do them, we do us. Half this problem was caused by us trying to have both sides of this us-vs-them conversation.

We’ve already excruciatingly analyzed and modeled them for 4 years. We’re good there.

23. What have we learned about Big Cheater games? (see next few tweets in quoted thread for context) https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1325099635350728714

24. The progressives helped Biden bring in enough democrats to win, but the national vote is a clear mandate against progressives. How will they negotiate their policy goals against that powerful background headwind?

25. Early signs point to a Biden Derangement Syndrome (BDS) that’s much narrower but far deeper than Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). 1/3 the number of people under 3x higher psychosis threat. What has the experience with TDS taught us about how to mitigate BDS?

26. Was polarization merely a pair of availability cascades around dead-end left/right extremist rhetoric? Will there be a moderation availability cascade if spotlight is on boring things, making depolarization a self-fulfilling prophecy?

27. Did the outcome invalidate the deep-corruption promises of contrarian holy warrior revolutionary fervor on both ends or is this merely a halfway pause before a bernieward swing in 2024?

28. Will the presidency as a cult of personality give way to a more lowkey role for the office, now that we’ve seen the perils of both too much positive and negative charisma? Can we be done with that charisma malarkey or will we fall for yet another angel-demon king in 2024?

Amending question 25 a bit. Ryan is right, Biden does not arouse derangement level passions. BDS is really not symmetric with TDS. It’s really TLDS: Trump-loss derangement syndrome. It would exist no matter who he lost to. https://twitter.com/ryanfmason/status/1325170091177226240

29. Trump’s base was people whose life scripts dead-ended in the 1980s when their future went to China and robots. Is the woke base also a dead-end life script of intersectional dense-urban diversity as an end in itself? Has their future too gone elsewhere? Where? Service robots?

So what is the biggest thing we learned? I think it is this:

Big cities have endured for 2500 years, 10 times longer than the United States, and through pandemics 100x bigger. They’re not going anywhere.

30. What have we learned about the future of cities, since it’s clear natural liberalism lives or dies with cities?

31. What did we learn about the difference between law and order (both literal and dogwhistle versions) and criminality/corruption?

2x2: low to high law and order vs low to high criminality and corruption

32. What did/do Trump voters get wrong about the majority of the country?