If you go to the root concepts, liberal means essentially "generous' like a "liberal scoop of mashed potatoes", whereas conservative means protecting what you have, as in "if we don't conserve our potatoes, we will run out.

Apparently from from liber "free, unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious." In the sense of freedom, then, liberal is connected with liberty (oddly as is libertarianism).

I think liberal and conservative in a political context has a bit to do with a focus on how we view others, and how we view resources.

So the idea of liberal "generosity" is about viewing others as people who maybe want to have some mashed potatoes, so liberals want to give them a liberal helping of those.

If you're focused on resources, then you may want to be conservative, and you may want to conserve the mashed potatoes.

I think the rise of Trumpism and why Trumpism is conservatism is because of two simple observations. In a world of scarcity, you may not want to give anyone any of your potatoes.

But it goes beyond traditional conservatism, which is the mood of, if you give away all of your potatoes to strangers, you may not have enough potatoes for your own family.

What's necessary for this calculus to make sense is a zero-sum view. By saying so it's in no way pejorative to conservatives. As it happens, economic growth is near zero in the USA.

But further to Trumpism. A Trumpist immigration policy is "lock the door so that more people don't come inside the house--because they will want potatoes."

And in Trumpism, it's more like "they already got in the house, and we already have a potato shortage".

At this point the conversation in Trumpism has to turn to "somebody is not getting potatoes and that's not going to be me"

And of course the logical conclusion that someone is going to have to go "under the bus" because there aren't enough potatoes.

This is reflective of Trump trade policy also, which is zero sum. In Trumpville, all "deals" only have winners and losers. So free trade is not ever win-win.

I think the larger problem is that in this analogy, potatoes are money, and that regardless of if you are a Trumpist or a Bidenist, the solution of printing more money is not going to solve the problem.

One of the odd things about Trumpism has been the rampant QE and money printing which actually flies in the face of "traditional fiscal conservatives"

This may just be a matter of personality and history, as Trump being from Real Estate has never seen a debt that he didn't like.

And that Trump appears to live by the rule "if you owe the bank $200,000 you are SCREWED. But if you owe the bank $2T dollars, the BANK is screwed."

This is pretty much the situation of @DeutscheBank which is trying to get rid of the Trump debt they are owed, but in fact, yes they are screwed. Nobody wants to buy it.

Interestingly, the Bank of Japan has been following that playbook for decades. While there has not been any catastrophic collapses, so you could call it a success, the people of Japan have been in effective zero growth for decades.

This tends to have a very depressing effect on the mood of the people.

The hope that liberals seem to be aiming for is an FDR sized "New Deal". Biden himself seems to be very fond of saying "Here's the Deal". It's an effective rhetorical technique for him because it allows him to stop meandering which is a bad habit of his.

This is NOT the "Green New Deal" but it is certainly the idea of a substantial government spend towards building infrastructure. Hence "Build Back Better".

This does have the benefit of creating a Keynesian accelerator and decreasing inflationary pressure--because instead of pure money giveaways people are actually doing work.

If you have read this far, here is a cookie.

So far the Trump "recovery" in the stock market has been called "K Shaped" because for those owning stocks it appears to be the upper leg of the K and for all the others it appears to be a collapse.

The interesting thing this time around is that Bitcoin provides a global counterweight to the government tendency to print money, accelerated by COVID.

Bitcoin effectively provides a way for those in the lower "leg" of the K to gain some of the monetary advantages of not just the upper K people but of governments themselves

This has all been amply documented elsewhere. I think my point is that the votes show that we are in a very tough spot in the United States. It's unclear where the potatoes are coming from.

I think that's it for now, and it's pretty unprocessed. Putting it out there for people to hopefully think about and maybe discuss if they feel moved to. Some of it is probably incompletely thought through.