My take is that most of the points raised here are second-order points, and actually the biggest issue in this election is how democratic the future of America will be. But having said that, it’s not clear which side is overall better on this front:
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state, strong partisan bias in mainstream media, and extensive censorship campaigns), engaging in lawfare against political opponents (e.g. against Elon and Trump), and generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life (including bureaucracies which do a lot of harm, like the FDA, FTC, EPA etc). All of this is highly undemocratic, and implicitly coordinated via preference cascades (e.g. see how during covid the Democrats established strong party lines on masks, lockdowns, lab origin, etc, which occasionally required an 180-degree flip from their previous positions). While I think Democrat appointees are likely to be more competent on average than Republicans, I can imagine similar preference cascades leading to totally crazy AI policies.
The strongest case against Trump is how many of his cabinet members and previous close supporters from his last term turned against him—particularly Pence’s account of Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election results. I don’t trust a lot of the coverage about how authoritarian Trump is, since there’s a lot of anti-Trump bias in the media (see for instance the “very fine people” hoax), but those people were selected for being sympathetic to Trump in the first place, and should know the details, so their opposition to him updates me a lot. This is especially worrying given that AGI might provide an opportunity for a US leader to seize centralized power.
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state, strong partisan bias in mainstream media, and extensive censorship campaigns), engaging in lawfare against political opponents (e.g. against Elon and Trump), and generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life (including bureaucracies which do a lot of harm, like the FDA, FTC, EPA etc).
Bureaucracy point seems potentially reasonable to me, although hard to say if that exactly equates to less/more democratic or just worse domestic situation.
The cover up of bidens mental state is “highly undemocratic”? that would be not in the top 1000 least democratic things trump/republicans have done in the last 8 years.
You don’t have to just trust media portrayals or ex-advisor testimonies to know how authoritarian Trump is, much of this stuff is publicly available online and you can just look at primary sources. For example, the full Trump call to Georgia Sectary of State is uploaded to Youtube (I linked to the part where he started yelling but honestly the entire call, which you can listen to, is imo pretty damning). Trump afterwards Tweeted
I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!
Which is interesting because Raffensperger patiently responded to every allegation over a call lasting a whole hour.
My take is that most of the points raised here are second-order points, and actually the biggest issue in this election is how democratic the future of America will be. But having said that, it’s not clear which side is overall better on this front:
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state, strong partisan bias in mainstream media, and extensive censorship campaigns), engaging in lawfare against political opponents (e.g. against Elon and Trump), and generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life (including bureaucracies which do a lot of harm, like the FDA, FTC, EPA etc). All of this is highly undemocratic, and implicitly coordinated via preference cascades (e.g. see how during covid the Democrats established strong party lines on masks, lockdowns, lab origin, etc, which occasionally required an 180-degree flip from their previous positions). While I think Democrat appointees are likely to be more competent on average than Republicans, I can imagine similar preference cascades leading to totally crazy AI policies.
The strongest case against Trump is how many of his cabinet members and previous close supporters from his last term turned against him—particularly Pence’s account of Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election results. I don’t trust a lot of the coverage about how authoritarian Trump is, since there’s a lot of anti-Trump bias in the media (see for instance the “very fine people” hoax), but those people were selected for being sympathetic to Trump in the first place, and should know the details, so their opposition to him updates me a lot. This is especially worrying given that AGI might provide an opportunity for a US leader to seize centralized power.
Bureaucracy point seems potentially reasonable to me, although hard to say if that exactly equates to less/more democratic or just worse domestic situation.
The cover up of bidens mental state is “highly undemocratic”? that would be not in the top 1000 least democratic things trump/republicans have done in the last 8 years.
You don’t have to just trust media portrayals or ex-advisor testimonies to know how authoritarian Trump is, much of this stuff is publicly available online and you can just look at primary sources. For example, the full Trump call to Georgia Sectary of State is uploaded to Youtube (I linked to the part where he started yelling but honestly the entire call, which you can listen to, is imo pretty damning). Trump afterwards Tweeted
Which is interesting because Raffensperger patiently responded to every allegation over a call lasting a whole hour.