Correct. Republicans voted to close the border and deport illegal aliens, not cut the budget deficit. The fiscally responsible republican party hasn’t existed since the 1920s. Trump has been consistent on this since 2016: he considers Medicare and Social Security untouchable. (The other republicans weren’t going to cut those either, but they were going to talk about reforming them.)
> Trump has been consistent on this since 2016: he considers Medicare and Social Security untouchable. (The other republicans weren’t going to cut those either, but they were going to talk about reforming them.)
Technically they weren't going to cut them, but they also weren't doing anything to effectively address the upcoming shortfalls in the SS and Medicare trust funds and in fact the tax changes they are trying to enact would shorten the time to those shortfalls.
One has to love this chameleon of a Republican "platform" where values and ideals are championed to browbeat support for a particular action, but then written off as irrelevant when they're awkward for analyzing other actions - while other values and ideals are dragged out in support.
A week ago, "the debt" was really important. Now that Dear Leader has declared otherwise, apparently it's not. Right into the memory hole it goes.
The reality is there is no platform beyond anger (the base), and naked autocratic power (the politicians). Everything else is post-hoc rationalization.
(and just to clarify so I'm not written off as some progressive partisan: I'm a libertarian who was unaligned, understood and saw merit in both camps' ideals - until the Republican party turned its back on conservatism in favor of cult of personality reactionaryism)
There is a platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. No taxes on tips was on the platform (#6) as was no cuts to medicare or social security (#14). Balancing the budget was not on the platform.
There are republicans who care about the debt, but the party as a whole doesn’t. The economic libertarians have been thoroughly marginalized in the modern GOP, because economic libertarianism is unpopular.
To be clear, I admire the traditional small government conservatives, though I am not one. The GOP hasn’t been that party since the 1920s. The mass immigration of the 20th century made that approach unviable. We’re a country of machine politics now and it’s only going to become more pronounced. The guy who ran on “No Taxes on Tips” to buy the Latino vote in Nevada was never going to balance the budget.
It looks like Trump has decided to approach deficit reduction like he approaches climate change: claim that it is a hoax that his policies will increase the deficit [1].
According to that document he actually is cutting the deficit by $1.407 trillion with the One Big Beautiful Bill, and with the tariffs and deregulation the deficit will be cut by least $6.6 trillion over the next 10 years.
That platform statement does not contain values or ideals! It contains goals, which could possibly be achieved in very different ways. Values and ideals are then trotted out in support of the specific policies that purport to achieve those goals, and my point is that those ideals are highly inconsistent and seemingly sum up to mere blind anger.
Your individual assertion that you don't care about a balanced budget isn't particularly relevant to the larger context where an overwhelming amount of Trump supporters did just make arguments professing support of the need to get the budget under control to justify last week's policies.
Just because people don’t have a grand unifying theory tying their preferences together doesn’t mean their preferences are motivated by “mere blind anger.” Trying to fit your preferences into some internally consistent framework is a high-IQ fixation.
That’s especially true because society is hard to analyze. For example, I think it will be bad for society to encourage greater race and ethnic consciousness in a diverse society. I can point to all the sectarian conflict that exists in countries around the world as an example of what I seek to avoid, but that’s hardly definitive. Is the upshot that we have to proceed with a vast social experiment, because we can’t provide a closed form analysis of the proposal a priori?
Ideals don't have to rise to the level of "grand unifying theory" to be meaningful. In fact given how poorly "grand unifying theories" tend to work, the whole point is that ideals sit in a sweet spot of complexity between there and a novel judgement for every new development.
I had an argument to write here, but I'm having a hard time getting it down to something concise and without a lot of inbaked assumptions, so I am just going to turn it into a question. Like, I am really trying to understand the continued support for Trump. I was an unaligned libertarian. I read Moldbug as he was writing. I got it. I disagreed from a philosophic information theoretic perspective (complexity multiplies, Urbit is just another "write once run anywhere"), but I still get the desire.
Then Trump. I totally got 2016 Trump support. The system seemed so entrenched and immutable, at least this guy is shaking things up and talking about real problems. I was the one telling my breathless progressive friends that he was likely to win. "But he's soooo racist" "uh-huh".
But then just the total lack of performance when actually in office? All performance, no execution besides who can be hurt this week? The only commonality I see is "owning the libs" where "the libs" means anyone who doesn't support Dear Leader. It just seems like one big tautology, for a lack of a real constrictive political direction or values.
I really want see where I am wrong, because none of these policies add up to making sense to me. Tariffs that harm our country, phrased in terms as if needing physical goods is somehow a strength? And then not even followed through on ? Attacking our allies for "not paying their share" while they buy into our economic empire and prop up our currency?
I get the populist anger, yes. But anger on its own does not produce good outcomes - in fact, quite the opposite.
I guess my question boils down to - if there are values besides anger, spite, owning the libs, and autocracy, then what exactly are they these days ? I don't mean the old mantras that are brought up to make people frustrated they didn't pan out, and then sidestepped when discussing current policy (like you've done with the deficit here). But the actual values that can be appealed to critique the current path? Heck, phrase it in terms of what would make you see a different candidate as even better than Trump.
Because like, for example:
> I think it will be bad for society to encourage greater race and ethnic consciousness in a diverse society
I agree with this. I don't call it "reverse racism", I just call it "racism" - a focus on collectivism in terms of group identity. But what I see in Trumpism isn't a repudiation of that general racism, but rather continued escalation of the dynamic merely with the "other side" winning. But I feel like if I tried to flesh that argument out by appealing to what you threw out as a supposed value, then I'm just going to run into a different newly-conjured value that overrides the first - in other words, rationalizations rather than actual values.
