The Putin comparison actually gives him too much credit. Putin has long been more popular than Trump ever was, and for a while he did provide stability in a country that had suffered from a lot of chaos. Russians didn't understand-- didn't have the virtue to understand-- that if you trade liberty for security, you deserve neither and eventually lose both. But they had a lot more excuse for turning to authoritarianism than Americans do.
The man (Stepan Bandera) that Russia uses more than anyone else to argue that Ukraine is an inherently Nazi nation that must be destroyed, had his own variant of Benjamin Franklin's liberty-vs-security aphorism:
"Коли поміж хлібом і свободою народ обирає хліб, він зрештою втрачає все, в тому числі і хліб. Якщо народ обирає свободу, він матиме хліб, вирощений ним самим і ніким не відібраний."
(Translation: "When between bread and freedom, the people choose bread, they ultimately lose everything, including bread. If the people choose freedom, they will have bread grown by themselves and not taken away by anyone.")
I wonder how much you could explain the 2024 US election result by substituting "cheap eggs" for "bread" in Bandera's proverb?
MAGA is an embarrassment for America in so many ways and it has no real future. I wish the same was true with Putin but he has done well enough for enough Russians that they are not kicking him out for the near term.
Putin of course had the advantage of operating in a society whose political culture had been firmly autocratic for at least the last half-millennium – Ukrainian nationalism is in many ways a reaction against that culture.
And Russia in the '90s was also royally screwed by the Soviet Empire's division of labor: Russia's main products were oil and gas (whose world market price was low at the time) and weapons (practically worthless when the whole world was looking for a peace dividend).
I agree with this - I remember when some Russian friends I knew talked glowingly of Putin. They told me that life was absolutely miserable in the 90s compared to ~2010 for the middle class in Moscow. Relative improvement in living standards matters a lot. Trump 1.0 was popular because the economy still continued to improve from 2016 to 2020. Inheriting a solid economy in Jan 2025 and ruining it by June 2025 will not be accepted by Americans. If there is one thing Americans do not deal with well, it is scarcity.
I sometimes joke with my friends that the one clear way to spark a revolution in this country is to simply have eggs be unavailable at any grocery store. You'll have caravans from Arizona and Texas starting up tomorrow if that were the case heading to DC.
True except that the improvement in Russian living standards in the '00s was overwhelmingly on the back of rising fossil fuel prices, rather than anything Putin did.
Agreed. I think the only way that MAGA and Trump are thoroughly discredited is for the US to suffer a severe economic downturn. I just hate that those of us who didn’t vote for him will have to suffer too.
Yeah, Putin genuinely inherited a badly-broken country - the collapse of the Soviet Union followed by kleptocracy and chaos under Yeltsin did a number on Russia. For all the overheated rhetoric about "woke" the worst that happened in the United States was that some very silly people instituted some very silly policies in the context of a more-or-less highly functioning economy.
Last time they tried those "very silly" policies of racial discrimination it led to mass riots and unrest that forced the government to remove those policies. And that was when they used them against 15% of the population who couldn't vote. Instead of learning a lesson, the same political party tried those very silly policies again, but this time against 60% of the population who very much can vote. It doesn't take a genius to predict that it would lead to a very silly outcome.
It sounds like youre saying non-blacks faced measures similar to Jim Crow at the hands of the woke, which would demonstrate a truly extreme and hyperbolic victim mindset, with a very shallow understanding of history .... basically similar in tone to the fringe wokists
You hit one man with a firehose and set the dogs on him for his race and you deny another a promotion in favor of a less qualified coworker for his. You've made an enemy either way and moral comparisons between the means of making those enemies is completely irrelevant to that fact.
If wokeness was really preventing the promotion of more-qualified people, then why is the Trump administration - by all accounts not woke AT ALL - so inundated, even saturated, with utter incompetence?
You and I both know that political appointments are never done by merit by any administration of any party because they are by their very nature political. Yes, certain Trump administration appointees take this to an egregious and unprecedented (in recent history) level. No, this is not at all relevant to anything I am talking about and you know it.
I just listened to the interview Dan Carlin did with Mike Rowe on the Hardcore History Addendum podcast, and it dovetailed so neatly with what Noah’s saying here, but also adds one piece of important context I hadn’t known: even before all the tariff nonsense, there were hundreds of thousands of open manufacturing and construction jobs that were already going unfilled. Even if Trump were right that what he’s doing would induce domestic manufacturing to build capacity, we wouldn’t have the people to do it! MAGA being a largely online isolationist movement is a big part of why it’s not moving the needle: it’s not doing the cultural work of making these jobs attractive to the people who might do them, because the MAGA movement is itself made up of people who disdain the kind of work that needs to be done.
I have worked in manufacturing for 30 years, my entire career. My company pays very well and has excellent benefits. In recent years we have struggled to find good workers. Few people under the age of 40 want to work in a factory. They will go to work somewhere like Amazon for less pay.
But not in a way that leads to Trump temples or Trump prayer circles or reading groups to study Donald Trump Though - just atomized at-home on-Twitter worship.
You're right about their approach being a form of sterilisation and I think that's why MAGA supporters have stayed at home. They're sitting back and watching exactly what they wanted to see by voting for Trump: other people suffering. What are you going to do? Decency and cruelty like most other human attributes are on a normal distribution curve, so half the population are more than averagely cruel - and they get a vote, too. And it's not just the US. In the UK we may be only a few years out from an election which votes in the Reform Party: an unholy alliance of shysters, egotists, racists, crypto-fascists and thugs. That'll be fun - for people who enjoyed pulling the legs off insects when they were kids.
Our society is run by computer. I can't speak to exactly what the original tech bro thesis was, but if you tear down the existing institutional structure of our society and the dominant class who built it, it does seem likely that the new dominant class to emerge from the fray would be those who control the computers. Maybe the tech bro thesis for Trump 2.0 is looking better than ever.
The federal moves against green energy are the most infuriating thing to me. As a purely practical matter, only GOOD can come from greater domestic energy production. It's a complete culture-war own-goal to reduce energy production.
It’s one thing to be wedded to fossil fuels for sentimental reasons. It’s another to say that other people shouldn’t be allowed to build solar and wind.
One reason is that fossil extraction provides opportunities (eg oil rig worker) for poorly-educated but risk-tolerant men to earn big money, which is highly appealing to a movement as macho as MAGA.
No surprises then that Calgary is the heart of climate change denial in Canada, but that city oddly has a higher public transport mode share than any US city bar New York or San Francisco.
This the result of having a skyscraper-filled downtown with little car parking available, and demonstrates that job sprawl is a far stronger driver of car dependence than residential sprawl.
all those explanations are credible. It's always more complicated than a single cause. One additional contributing factor is tribal affiliation. Tribal fealty ofttimes has nothing to do with reality, fact and logic except when it sweeps aside all rational thought and exterminates truth.
The final sentence is reminiscent of Nicholas Maduro's comment about Venezuela's toilet paper shortage. "It will be OK because Venezuelans are now eating less". At that time there was also a food shortage and many were hungry. I guess it's operational economics in which the input equals the output.
A comment on your footnote that MAGA, unlike Hitler, is not building social structures or clubs. Last night was the inaugural party of the Executive Branch Club founded by Don Jr. and a bunch of billionaire friends. So, you know, give MAGA some credit.
Interesting. Although I'd understood the Strauss-Howe thesis to foretell first an upending of existing institutions followed by a renaissance of sorts. In that respect, MAGA is the tear it all down phase and whatever comes next will get to build the future. This will presumably by a decade (or two) long process.
Correct. The Fourth Turning is specifically described as a destruction of institutions followed by a rebuild. If anything MAGA arrived right on schedule
I think you are right on this, and there was a lot of destruction under Biden as well, the border comes to mind, identity politics became more about punishing whites than uplifting minorities, etc. It was more of a social destruction.
I think the fourth turning is just taking a lot longer than people expect, and their every twenty years, generation thing is less precise than they formulated it. I expect this mess to continue til 2040, maybe longer.
I would also note that there is a lot of creation going on in the midst of the destruction, it is not pure destruction.
Right I think institutional churn is probably a better description. Using the 4th turning framing, which I have a healthy amount of skepticism for but I feel has been right more often than not, Biden's attempt at physical infrastructure rebuilding had some success but failed to lead us out of the wilderness because there is still too much rot in the system and Biden didn't have the force of personality to sell the national project to the public
Yeas but the problem with MAGA is that it’s destroying, not just America’s failing institutions, but all the sources of American power and prosperity. It risks burning itself out and ceding to something else to write the future. Trump’s second MAGA outing is a kamikaze mission.
Think of the experience of the UK in 2022 where a majority of members of the Conservative Party voted for Liz Truss to be Prime Minister. She appointed a Chancellor of the Exchequer who produced a budget which the Financial Services sector thought would bankrupt the economy. Truss sacked her Chancellor and resigned herself after 49 days in office. How long before the American Financial Sector decide that Trump is working against their interests. America benefits from an enormous flow of foreign investment which could easily be switched off. This will resolve the Trump problem for America and the West.
Trump is making a grand attempt to build an authoritarian future. Hopefully, America will awaken in time and return to building and creating a future for itself rather than slithering into subjugation.
The Trump rhetoric is, "We will tear everything down and replace it greater than before." The Trump experience is, "We will tear everything down, half-ass the replacement, and skim off the top." As you said, Russia.
My reading of the "Fourth Turning" is not simply that new institutions will be created. Rather, the old order will erode, fail, and ultimately give way to a profoundly different new order, likely through significant upheaval. It won't be like Indiana Jones trying to smoothly switch an ancient artifact for a sandbag of equal weight. It will be more like the first half of the 20th century when a world of great empires gave way to the current Western world order. Can you really say at this point that's not what's coming?
Fair, though it is a pretty big change to have the break up of the Austrian-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires and the very significant diminishing of the French and British empires all replaced by US hegemony and post-WW2 alliances and institutions.
The irony right now is that it might take some kind of a revolution to reestablish conservatism. Previous American presidents have respected the Constitution. Now that that norm's broken, how can it be restored? Why should future presidents respect the Constitution? It would be nice if the answer were, "Because if you don't, the streets will explode, and you'll be overthrown by angry patriots." But if that's the equilibrium we want, we have our work cut out for us to get there.
How many 9-0 defeats did Obama suffer at SCOTUS (meaning his own appointees voted against his lawless decrees)?
Where were you when Biden claimed the right to spend hundreds of billions not appropriated by Congress (student loan handouts), and deliberately ignored the intent of two SCOTUS rulings against him, even bragging that “the Supreme Court tried to stop him but they couldn’t”- before they ruled against his third attempt to undermine the constitution?
America has been ruled by deceee for some time. Blind partisans love it when “their guy (or gal)” is dictator, but then suddenly remember the constitution when they are out of power. Pathetic, really.
To me the biggest difference is incoherence. When Biden’s staff put the latest decree under his nose to sign (or maybe just put it under the auto pen), they knew exactly which activists wrote it, who paid for it, and what the intent was. When it comes to all the tariff decrees it doesn’t seem as though even Trump is clear on the intent. Much more chaotic and less predictable
Oh come on, don't be obtuse. There's plenty of room to quibble, but before 2020, when you lost an election, you gave up power peacefully. One of many examples. Again, if you're going to claim that Trump isn't challenging, abusing, and violating the Constitution in a way that's unprecedented, severe, and flagrant, then you just need to read more and think more. There's plenty of places you can learn. Lots of people are writing about it these days.
The statement seems to be apocryphal, but it's true that Jackson treated the Cherokees very unjustly, against Supreme Court instructions. Even so, it's nowhere near as flagrantly unconstitutional as stirring up a crowd to attack the Capitol to prevent the transfer of power after losing an election, or plotting a third term directly contrary to the 22nd amendment, or issuing an executive order contrary to the 14th amendmeny, etc.
Trump supporters endlessly fall back on whataboutism to try to fend off condemnations of Trump. One problem with that is that two wrongs don't make a right. The other is that the whataboutism is unconvincing. The supposed precedents for Trump's misconduct never turn out, in examination, to be nearly as bad.
The Dems during Biden passed Infrastructure, IRA & CHIPS, and aver $170 billion in mostly military aid to Ukraine--against near total GOP opposition in the House, and majority GOP opposition in the Senate. These were not only investments in American manufacturing, but perhaps more importantly investments in our national security infrastructure, expanding or reopening munition productions lines; and establishing battery and microprocessor manufacturing for drone warfare. If we manage to prevail against China when they come for us in a few years time, it will be entirely due to Dem industrial foresight.
If that's not vision, then pray tell what is? The GOP haven't even managed to build Trump's wall.
What I mean by “viable plan for the American future" is a plan that can be understood by Trump voters and will be seen as a solution to their problem by Trump voters. The Democrats haven't done that yet. That's why only a third of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.
If a plan can’t be viable unless it is seen as a solution to the problem by Trump voters, then we are in for a decade of deep, deep trouble. Hopefully it’s fine if only 5% of soft Trump voters need to see it as a solution, rather than it needing to be seen as a solution by his base.
It bears repeating here that FOX News, Sinclair and the rest of RW media are collectively the OVERWHELMING reason that conservative voters saw--and continue to see--the Biden/Dem industrial policy accomplishments as negatives, rather than positives.
RW media is also the reason conservative voters still very strongly approve of the current insane raft of Trump2 policies and cabinet level incompetence. FOX News in particular is the gateway to the conservative mind, and until/unless they can be legally required to adhere to actual journalistic practices--i.e., tell even a semblance of the truth--there will be no meaningful changes in conservative opinion, short of economic and/or national security catastrophe.
If the Democrats can come up with a platform that attracts 10% of Trump's voters and 10% of the 90 million Americans who did not vote in 2024, then they can look forward to becoming a true majority party. I have two basic ideas one of which I will be discussing on my Substack in the coming two weeks. The other is discussed here:
Trump voters have zero interest in any solution for the future. They’re against immigration and the movement is based on cultural grievances. Other than dialing back on issues where they are on the wrong side of public opinion, like DEI, illegal immigration and trans, Democrats don’t need to do much to win MAGA votes IMO. Saying that they need to come up with economic solutions gives MAGA voters too much credit.
The CHIPs bill (original versions) was in Committee during Trumps first term and he pushed for an infrastructure bill during the COVID recession. Both ideas always had bipartisan support, but It was an election year, so Pelosi made sure neither saw the light of day- better for the economy and the people to suffer than for Trump to get a legislative win during election season. Actually, Pelosi was technically willing to back a $2 trillion plus infrastructure bill loaded with extraneous handouts and unrelated directives. Either her NGOs get paid or nobody eats.
Biden’s accomplishment was the IRA (and excessive stimulus boosting inflation….and racism….and censorship…..and politicization of “science”….and allowing Iran and its proxies to run amok in the Middle East…and being the first figurehead Prez since Wilson).
As for Trump, he has achieved nothing so far this term except closing the border (in relative terms). There is a lot of fear mongering and a lot of polticial theatre but not much actually happening of consequence, and Congress has done zero. I am in wait and see mode, unwilling to extrapolate from partisan hyperbole on either side. Not that I am a fan of rule by decree, of course. Unfortunately it has been status quo for two decades and partisans only take note of it when they are out of power.
Important to note that the majority of this investment was set to take place in states governed by Republicans because those are the places that you can still actually build things. So, yes, it will be due to the foresight of the Democrats in the Biden administration, but only because there are Republicans to do the actual work. It would be nice if the people capable of these things could cooperate, but instead those two groups have both chosen to ally with the idiots in their own parties instead.
The fundamental fact remains that while there may be people in the Democratic party that can see what needs to be done, they haven't yet come around to the fact that their own system that they have spent the last 50 years building is the main obstacle.
They did a lot of valuable things and can point to some good policies for the next election cycle. But inflation and the border crisis was out of control and Biden was clearly too old to effectively do damage control 😎
Takes a lot of balls to just brazenly ignore the evidence Noah presents above (totally and completely lie) and then self promote immediately after. Wow
What I mean by “viable plan for the American future" is a plan that can be understood by Trump voters and will be seen as a solution to their problem by Trump voters. The Democrats haven't done that yet. That's why only a third of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.
The Putin comparison actually gives him too much credit. Putin has long been more popular than Trump ever was, and for a while he did provide stability in a country that had suffered from a lot of chaos. Russians didn't understand-- didn't have the virtue to understand-- that if you trade liberty for security, you deserve neither and eventually lose both. But they had a lot more excuse for turning to authoritarianism than Americans do.
The man (Stepan Bandera) that Russia uses more than anyone else to argue that Ukraine is an inherently Nazi nation that must be destroyed, had his own variant of Benjamin Franklin's liberty-vs-security aphorism:
"Коли поміж хлібом і свободою народ обирає хліб, він зрештою втрачає все, в тому числі і хліб. Якщо народ обирає свободу, він матиме хліб, вирощений ним самим і ніким не відібраний."
(Translation: "When between bread and freedom, the people choose bread, they ultimately lose everything, including bread. If the people choose freedom, they will have bread grown by themselves and not taken away by anyone.")
I wonder how much you could explain the 2024 US election result by substituting "cheap eggs" for "bread" in Bandera's proverb?
Yes those eggs are still hella expensive.
MAGA is an embarrassment for America in so many ways and it has no real future. I wish the same was true with Putin but he has done well enough for enough Russians that they are not kicking him out for the near term.
Putin of course had the advantage of operating in a society whose political culture had been firmly autocratic for at least the last half-millennium – Ukrainian nationalism is in many ways a reaction against that culture.
And Russia in the '90s was also royally screwed by the Soviet Empire's division of labor: Russia's main products were oil and gas (whose world market price was low at the time) and weapons (practically worthless when the whole world was looking for a peace dividend).
I agree with this - I remember when some Russian friends I knew talked glowingly of Putin. They told me that life was absolutely miserable in the 90s compared to ~2010 for the middle class in Moscow. Relative improvement in living standards matters a lot. Trump 1.0 was popular because the economy still continued to improve from 2016 to 2020. Inheriting a solid economy in Jan 2025 and ruining it by June 2025 will not be accepted by Americans. If there is one thing Americans do not deal with well, it is scarcity.
I sometimes joke with my friends that the one clear way to spark a revolution in this country is to simply have eggs be unavailable at any grocery store. You'll have caravans from Arizona and Texas starting up tomorrow if that were the case heading to DC.
True except that the improvement in Russian living standards in the '00s was overwhelmingly on the back of rising fossil fuel prices, rather than anything Putin did.
Agreed. I think the only way that MAGA and Trump are thoroughly discredited is for the US to suffer a severe economic downturn. I just hate that those of us who didn’t vote for him will have to suffer too.
Yeah, Putin genuinely inherited a badly-broken country - the collapse of the Soviet Union followed by kleptocracy and chaos under Yeltsin did a number on Russia. For all the overheated rhetoric about "woke" the worst that happened in the United States was that some very silly people instituted some very silly policies in the context of a more-or-less highly functioning economy.
Last time they tried those "very silly" policies of racial discrimination it led to mass riots and unrest that forced the government to remove those policies. And that was when they used them against 15% of the population who couldn't vote. Instead of learning a lesson, the same political party tried those very silly policies again, but this time against 60% of the population who very much can vote. It doesn't take a genius to predict that it would lead to a very silly outcome.
It sounds like youre saying non-blacks faced measures similar to Jim Crow at the hands of the woke, which would demonstrate a truly extreme and hyperbolic victim mindset, with a very shallow understanding of history .... basically similar in tone to the fringe wokists
You hit one man with a firehose and set the dogs on him for his race and you deny another a promotion in favor of a less qualified coworker for his. You've made an enemy either way and moral comparisons between the means of making those enemies is completely irrelevant to that fact.
If wokeness was really preventing the promotion of more-qualified people, then why is the Trump administration - by all accounts not woke AT ALL - so inundated, even saturated, with utter incompetence?
You and I both know that political appointments are never done by merit by any administration of any party because they are by their very nature political. Yes, certain Trump administration appointees take this to an egregious and unprecedented (in recent history) level. No, this is not at all relevant to anything I am talking about and you know it.
"Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys." M.L.King Jr. "Advice for Living, November 1957"
MAGA is definitely not a conservative but rather a deeply cultural reactive movement that happened to hijack the conservative party.
I just listened to the interview Dan Carlin did with Mike Rowe on the Hardcore History Addendum podcast, and it dovetailed so neatly with what Noah’s saying here, but also adds one piece of important context I hadn’t known: even before all the tariff nonsense, there were hundreds of thousands of open manufacturing and construction jobs that were already going unfilled. Even if Trump were right that what he’s doing would induce domestic manufacturing to build capacity, we wouldn’t have the people to do it! MAGA being a largely online isolationist movement is a big part of why it’s not moving the needle: it’s not doing the cultural work of making these jobs attractive to the people who might do them, because the MAGA movement is itself made up of people who disdain the kind of work that needs to be done.
I have worked in manufacturing for 30 years, my entire career. My company pays very well and has excellent benefits. In recent years we have struggled to find good workers. Few people under the age of 40 want to work in a factory. They will go to work somewhere like Amazon for less pay.
That's shocking, given that I was sure that Amazon had a reputation as being (like Walmart) an especially bad place to work.
Your postscript mentions "no religion" but we see pervasive Trump Worship in MAGA. The idolatry of Trump by his followers is mind boggling.
But not in a way that leads to Trump temples or Trump prayer circles or reading groups to study Donald Trump Though - just atomized at-home on-Twitter worship.
We saw glimpses of QAnon trying to become a MAGA religion. But it turns out that there's no need to cloak the grift in anything.
You're right about their approach being a form of sterilisation and I think that's why MAGA supporters have stayed at home. They're sitting back and watching exactly what they wanted to see by voting for Trump: other people suffering. What are you going to do? Decency and cruelty like most other human attributes are on a normal distribution curve, so half the population are more than averagely cruel - and they get a vote, too. And it's not just the US. In the UK we may be only a few years out from an election which votes in the Reform Party: an unholy alliance of shysters, egotists, racists, crypto-fascists and thugs. That'll be fun - for people who enjoyed pulling the legs off insects when they were kids.
The tech bro thesis for supporting Trump 2.0 isn’t looking so good
Our society is run by computer. I can't speak to exactly what the original tech bro thesis was, but if you tear down the existing institutional structure of our society and the dominant class who built it, it does seem likely that the new dominant class to emerge from the fray would be those who control the computers. Maybe the tech bro thesis for Trump 2.0 is looking better than ever.
The federal moves against green energy are the most infuriating thing to me. As a purely practical matter, only GOOD can come from greater domestic energy production. It's a complete culture-war own-goal to reduce energy production.
MAGA supporters are wedded to fossil fuels in particular for various reasons.
It’s one thing to be wedded to fossil fuels for sentimental reasons. It’s another to say that other people shouldn’t be allowed to build solar and wind.
any of them explainable reasons?
One reason is that fossil extraction provides opportunities (eg oil rig worker) for poorly-educated but risk-tolerant men to earn big money, which is highly appealing to a movement as macho as MAGA.
This is exactly the same in Canada. The conservative movement is particularly strong in Alberta. The Texas of Canada.
It is also apparent in voting patterns across demographics (male vs female ; HS vs college vs degrees).
No surprises then that Calgary is the heart of climate change denial in Canada, but that city oddly has a higher public transport mode share than any US city bar New York or San Francisco.
This the result of having a skyscraper-filled downtown with little car parking available, and demonstrates that job sprawl is a far stronger driver of car dependence than residential sprawl.
Actually that tracks... Bringing back more familiar jobs versus moving ahead to jobs of the future :( Sad to me, but I see how they get there.
all those explanations are credible. It's always more complicated than a single cause. One additional contributing factor is tribal affiliation. Tribal fealty ofttimes has nothing to do with reality, fact and logic except when it sweeps aside all rational thought and exterminates truth.
no, check the links Noah had above.
Trump is blocking the permitting needed for the projects. https://clearpath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/44/2025/02/Trump-Halts-Renewables-Permitting-on-Private-Land_-Energy-Brief.pdf
The final sentence is reminiscent of Nicholas Maduro's comment about Venezuela's toilet paper shortage. "It will be OK because Venezuelans are now eating less". At that time there was also a food shortage and many were hungry. I guess it's operational economics in which the input equals the output.
Liking in that I agree, but obviously disliking all of this!
A comment on your footnote that MAGA, unlike Hitler, is not building social structures or clubs. Last night was the inaugural party of the Executive Branch Club founded by Don Jr. and a bunch of billionaire friends. So, you know, give MAGA some credit.
Wow! Amazing piece Noah. Well said.
Interesting. Although I'd understood the Strauss-Howe thesis to foretell first an upending of existing institutions followed by a renaissance of sorts. In that respect, MAGA is the tear it all down phase and whatever comes next will get to build the future. This will presumably by a decade (or two) long process.
Correct. The Fourth Turning is specifically described as a destruction of institutions followed by a rebuild. If anything MAGA arrived right on schedule
I think you are right on this, and there was a lot of destruction under Biden as well, the border comes to mind, identity politics became more about punishing whites than uplifting minorities, etc. It was more of a social destruction.
I think the fourth turning is just taking a lot longer than people expect, and their every twenty years, generation thing is less precise than they formulated it. I expect this mess to continue til 2040, maybe longer.
I would also note that there is a lot of creation going on in the midst of the destruction, it is not pure destruction.
Right I think institutional churn is probably a better description. Using the 4th turning framing, which I have a healthy amount of skepticism for but I feel has been right more often than not, Biden's attempt at physical infrastructure rebuilding had some success but failed to lead us out of the wilderness because there is still too much rot in the system and Biden didn't have the force of personality to sell the national project to the public
Yeas but the problem with MAGA is that it’s destroying, not just America’s failing institutions, but all the sources of American power and prosperity. It risks burning itself out and ceding to something else to write the future. Trump’s second MAGA outing is a kamikaze mission.
I never endorsed any of this
Think of the experience of the UK in 2022 where a majority of members of the Conservative Party voted for Liz Truss to be Prime Minister. She appointed a Chancellor of the Exchequer who produced a budget which the Financial Services sector thought would bankrupt the economy. Truss sacked her Chancellor and resigned herself after 49 days in office. How long before the American Financial Sector decide that Trump is working against their interests. America benefits from an enormous flow of foreign investment which could easily be switched off. This will resolve the Trump problem for America and the West.
I regard the sorry Liz Truss saga as a demonstration of the superiority of parliamentary systems over presidential ones.
If the American financial sector had such a tight control over the US government, we wouldn't be nearly this poorly governed.
Clearly we wish we could trussify Trump 😡
Trump is making a grand attempt to build an authoritarian future. Hopefully, America will awaken in time and return to building and creating a future for itself rather than slithering into subjugation.
The Trump rhetoric is, "We will tear everything down and replace it greater than before." The Trump experience is, "We will tear everything down, half-ass the replacement, and skim off the top." As you said, Russia.
My reading of the "Fourth Turning" is not simply that new institutions will be created. Rather, the old order will erode, fail, and ultimately give way to a profoundly different new order, likely through significant upheaval. It won't be like Indiana Jones trying to smoothly switch an ancient artifact for a sandbag of equal weight. It will be more like the first half of the 20th century when a world of great empires gave way to the current Western world order. Can you really say at this point that's not what's coming?
yes, it is going to take a lot longer than people realize
The "western world order" is just a new great empire, not a fundamental change. But the rest of your point stands.
Fair, though it is a pretty big change to have the break up of the Austrian-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires and the very significant diminishing of the French and British empires all replaced by US hegemony and post-WW2 alliances and institutions.
The irony right now is that it might take some kind of a revolution to reestablish conservatism. Previous American presidents have respected the Constitution. Now that that norm's broken, how can it be restored? Why should future presidents respect the Constitution? It would be nice if the answer were, "Because if you don't, the streets will explode, and you'll be overthrown by angry patriots." But if that's the equilibrium we want, we have our work cut out for us to get there.
Have you been under a rock for the last 20 years?
How many 9-0 defeats did Obama suffer at SCOTUS (meaning his own appointees voted against his lawless decrees)?
Where were you when Biden claimed the right to spend hundreds of billions not appropriated by Congress (student loan handouts), and deliberately ignored the intent of two SCOTUS rulings against him, even bragging that “the Supreme Court tried to stop him but they couldn’t”- before they ruled against his third attempt to undermine the constitution?
America has been ruled by deceee for some time. Blind partisans love it when “their guy (or gal)” is dictator, but then suddenly remember the constitution when they are out of power. Pathetic, really.
But when the Supreme Court ruled against Biden, he stopped. And anyway, it was far less of an aggressive push. No "dictator on day one.'
I see a big difference in degree.
To me the biggest difference is incoherence. When Biden’s staff put the latest decree under his nose to sign (or maybe just put it under the auto pen), they knew exactly which activists wrote it, who paid for it, and what the intent was. When it comes to all the tariff decrees it doesn’t seem as though even Trump is clear on the intent. Much more chaotic and less predictable
> Previous American presidents have respected the Constitution.
Tell me you don't know American history without telling me you don't know American history.
Oh come on, don't be obtuse. There's plenty of room to quibble, but before 2020, when you lost an election, you gave up power peacefully. One of many examples. Again, if you're going to claim that Trump isn't challenging, abusing, and violating the Constitution in a way that's unprecedented, severe, and flagrant, then you just need to read more and think more. There's plenty of places you can learn. Lots of people are writing about it these days.
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
- Andrew Jackson
The statement seems to be apocryphal, but it's true that Jackson treated the Cherokees very unjustly, against Supreme Court instructions. Even so, it's nowhere near as flagrantly unconstitutional as stirring up a crowd to attack the Capitol to prevent the transfer of power after losing an election, or plotting a third term directly contrary to the 22nd amendment, or issuing an executive order contrary to the 14th amendmeny, etc.
Trump supporters endlessly fall back on whataboutism to try to fend off condemnations of Trump. One problem with that is that two wrongs don't make a right. The other is that the whataboutism is unconvincing. The supposed precedents for Trump's misconduct never turn out, in examination, to be nearly as bad.
Since neither party has a viable plan for the American future, the most popular candidate in 2028 will be “None of the above."
The following post gives one half of my vision:
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/how-to-fight-trump-part-one
The Dems during Biden passed Infrastructure, IRA & CHIPS, and aver $170 billion in mostly military aid to Ukraine--against near total GOP opposition in the House, and majority GOP opposition in the Senate. These were not only investments in American manufacturing, but perhaps more importantly investments in our national security infrastructure, expanding or reopening munition productions lines; and establishing battery and microprocessor manufacturing for drone warfare. If we manage to prevail against China when they come for us in a few years time, it will be entirely due to Dem industrial foresight.
If that's not vision, then pray tell what is? The GOP haven't even managed to build Trump's wall.
What I mean by “viable plan for the American future" is a plan that can be understood by Trump voters and will be seen as a solution to their problem by Trump voters. The Democrats haven't done that yet. That's why only a third of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.
If a plan can’t be viable unless it is seen as a solution to the problem by Trump voters, then we are in for a decade of deep, deep trouble. Hopefully it’s fine if only 5% of soft Trump voters need to see it as a solution, rather than it needing to be seen as a solution by his base.
This.
It bears repeating here that FOX News, Sinclair and the rest of RW media are collectively the OVERWHELMING reason that conservative voters saw--and continue to see--the Biden/Dem industrial policy accomplishments as negatives, rather than positives.
RW media is also the reason conservative voters still very strongly approve of the current insane raft of Trump2 policies and cabinet level incompetence. FOX News in particular is the gateway to the conservative mind, and until/unless they can be legally required to adhere to actual journalistic practices--i.e., tell even a semblance of the truth--there will be no meaningful changes in conservative opinion, short of economic and/or national security catastrophe.
If the Democrats can come up with a platform that attracts 10% of Trump's voters and 10% of the 90 million Americans who did not vote in 2024, then they can look forward to becoming a true majority party. I have two basic ideas one of which I will be discussing on my Substack in the coming two weeks. The other is discussed here:
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/how-to-fight-trump-part-one
So, why not subscribe to my Substack (always free), if only temporarily.
Trump voters have zero interest in any solution for the future. They’re against immigration and the movement is based on cultural grievances. Other than dialing back on issues where they are on the wrong side of public opinion, like DEI, illegal immigration and trans, Democrats don’t need to do much to win MAGA votes IMO. Saying that they need to come up with economic solutions gives MAGA voters too much credit.
One of the reasons, anyway
If the Democratic Party wants to attract those who once voted for the Trump this is the absolute heart of the problem.
The CHIPs bill (original versions) was in Committee during Trumps first term and he pushed for an infrastructure bill during the COVID recession. Both ideas always had bipartisan support, but It was an election year, so Pelosi made sure neither saw the light of day- better for the economy and the people to suffer than for Trump to get a legislative win during election season. Actually, Pelosi was technically willing to back a $2 trillion plus infrastructure bill loaded with extraneous handouts and unrelated directives. Either her NGOs get paid or nobody eats.
Biden’s accomplishment was the IRA (and excessive stimulus boosting inflation….and racism….and censorship…..and politicization of “science”….and allowing Iran and its proxies to run amok in the Middle East…and being the first figurehead Prez since Wilson).
As for Trump, he has achieved nothing so far this term except closing the border (in relative terms). There is a lot of fear mongering and a lot of polticial theatre but not much actually happening of consequence, and Congress has done zero. I am in wait and see mode, unwilling to extrapolate from partisan hyperbole on either side. Not that I am a fan of rule by decree, of course. Unfortunately it has been status quo for two decades and partisans only take note of it when they are out of power.
Important to note that the majority of this investment was set to take place in states governed by Republicans because those are the places that you can still actually build things. So, yes, it will be due to the foresight of the Democrats in the Biden administration, but only because there are Republicans to do the actual work. It would be nice if the people capable of these things could cooperate, but instead those two groups have both chosen to ally with the idiots in their own parties instead.
The fundamental fact remains that while there may be people in the Democratic party that can see what needs to be done, they haven't yet come around to the fact that their own system that they have spent the last 50 years building is the main obstacle.
They did a lot of valuable things and can point to some good policies for the next election cycle. But inflation and the border crisis was out of control and Biden was clearly too old to effectively do damage control 😎
Takes a lot of balls to just brazenly ignore the evidence Noah presents above (totally and completely lie) and then self promote immediately after. Wow
What I mean by “viable plan for the American future" is a plan that can be understood by Trump voters and will be seen as a solution to their problem by Trump voters. The Democrats haven't done that yet. That's why only a third of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.