[This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]
I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
Trump incited a violent coup/insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.
Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.
RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic
As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.
One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).
coordinated social media censorship
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).
Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.
From the linked comment:
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
I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life
To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.
I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
If you believe that Trump has done a bunch of things wrong, the Democrats have done very little wrong, and the people prosecuting Trump are just following normal process in doing so, then yes these threats are worrying.
But if you believe that the charges against Trump were in fact trumped-up, e.g. because Democrats have done similarly bad things without being charged, then most of Trump’s statements look reasonable. E.g. this testimony about Biden seems pretty concerning—and given that context, saying “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me” seems totally proportional.
Also, assuming the “hush money” thing is a reference to Stormy Daniels, I think that case reflects much worse on the Democrats than it does on Trump—the “crime” involved is marginal or perhaps not even a crime at all. (tl;dr: Paying hush money is totally legal, so the actual accusation they used was “falsifying business records”. But this by itself would only be a misdemeanor, unless it was done to cover up another crime, and even the prosecution wasn’t clear on what the other crime actually was.) Even if it technically stands up, you can imagine the reaction if Clinton was prosecuted on such flimsy grounds while Trump was president.
The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. … There’s nothing illegal about [not hosting a primary] though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate.
If that includes suing other candidates to get them off the ballots, then I’m happy to call that unusually undemocratic. More generally, democracy is constituted not just by a set of laws, but by a set of traditions and norms. Not hosting a primary, ousting Biden, Kamala refusing interviews, etc, all undermine democratic norms.
Now, I do think Trump undermines a lot of democratic norms too. So it’s really more of a question of who will do more damage. I think that many US institutions (including the media, various three-letter agencies, etc) push back strongly against Trump’s norm-breaking, but overlook or even enable Democrat norm-breaking—for instance, keeping Biden’s mental state secret for several years. Because of this I am roughly equally worried about both.
Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
I don’t really see much substance here. E.g. Aaronson says “Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself.” I think America First is a very reasonable value for an American president to have (and one which is necessary for the “American-led peaceful world order” that Scott wants). Re protectionism, seems probably bad in economic terms, but much less bad than many Democrat policies (e.g. taxing unrealized capital gains, anti-nuclear, etc). Re “vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism”: these are precisely the things I’m concerned about from the Democrats. Re “the veneration of foreign autocrats”: see my comments on Trump’s foreign policy.
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship
Sorry, I’d linked it on memory since I’ve seen a bunch of censorship examples from them, but I’d forgotten that they also post a bunch of other non-censorship stuff. Will dig out some of the specific examples I’m thinking about later.
Re Facebook, here’s Zuckerberg’s admission that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months” to censor covid-related content (he also mentions an FBI warning about Russian disinformation in relation to censorship of the Hunter Biden story, though the specific link is unclear).
One more point: in Scott’s blog post he talks about the “big lie” of Trump: that the election was stolen. I do worry that this is a key point of polarization, where either you fully believe that the election was stolen and the Democrats are evil, or you fully believe that Trump was trying to seize dictatorial power.
But reality is often much more complicated. My current best guess is that there wasn’t any centrally-coordinated plan to steal the election, but that the central Democrat party:
Systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of people who shouldn’t have been voting (like illegal immigrants) actually voting (in some cases because Democrat voter registration pushes deliberately didn’t track this distinction).
Blocked reasonable election integrity measures that would have prevented this (like voter ID), primarily in a cynical + self-interested way.
On priors I think this probably didn’t swing the election, but given how small the winning margins were in swing states, it wouldn’t be crazy if it did. From this perspective I think it reflects badly on Trump that he tried to do unconstitutional things to stay in power, but not nearly as badly as most Democrats think.
(Some intuitions informing this position: I think if there had been clear smoking guns of centrally-coordinated election fraud, then Trump would have won some of his legal challenges, and we’d have found out about it since then. But it does seem like a bunch of non-citizens are registered to vote in various states (e.g. here, here), and I don’t think this is a coincidence given that it’s so beneficial for Dems + Dems have so consistently blocked voter ID laws. Conversely, I do also expect that red states are being overzealous in removing people from voter rolls for things like changing their address. Basically it all seems like a shitshow, and not one which looks great for Trump, but not disqualifying either IMO, especially because in general I expect to update away from the mainstream media line over time as information they’ve suppressed comes to light.)
Without expressing any views on which allegations against the two major sides are true, it’s clear to me that relatively few people in the US are particularly interested in what we might call nonpartisan electoral truthseeking: making it easy, convenient, and secure for all those (and only those) legally eligible to vote, without unlawful foreign interference or illegal disinformation (like false robocalls about poll location).
I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.
Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.
This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.
To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.
[This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]
I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
Trump incited a violent coup/insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.
Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.
As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.
One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).
Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.
From the linked comment:
I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.
If you believe that Trump has done a bunch of things wrong, the Democrats have done very little wrong, and the people prosecuting Trump are just following normal process in doing so, then yes these threats are worrying.
But if you believe that the charges against Trump were in fact trumped-up, e.g. because Democrats have done similarly bad things without being charged, then most of Trump’s statements look reasonable. E.g. this testimony about Biden seems pretty concerning—and given that context, saying “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me” seems totally proportional.
Also, assuming the “hush money” thing is a reference to Stormy Daniels, I think that case reflects much worse on the Democrats than it does on Trump—the “crime” involved is marginal or perhaps not even a crime at all. (tl;dr: Paying hush money is totally legal, so the actual accusation they used was “falsifying business records”. But this by itself would only be a misdemeanor, unless it was done to cover up another crime, and even the prosecution wasn’t clear on what the other crime actually was.) Even if it technically stands up, you can imagine the reaction if Clinton was prosecuted on such flimsy grounds while Trump was president.
If that includes suing other candidates to get them off the ballots, then I’m happy to call that unusually undemocratic. More generally, democracy is constituted not just by a set of laws, but by a set of traditions and norms. Not hosting a primary, ousting Biden, Kamala refusing interviews, etc, all undermine democratic norms.
Now, I do think Trump undermines a lot of democratic norms too. So it’s really more of a question of who will do more damage. I think that many US institutions (including the media, various three-letter agencies, etc) push back strongly against Trump’s norm-breaking, but overlook or even enable Democrat norm-breaking—for instance, keeping Biden’s mental state secret for several years. Because of this I am roughly equally worried about both.
I don’t really see much substance here. E.g. Aaronson says “Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself.” I think America First is a very reasonable value for an American president to have (and one which is necessary for the “American-led peaceful world order” that Scott wants). Re protectionism, seems probably bad in economic terms, but much less bad than many Democrat policies (e.g. taxing unrealized capital gains, anti-nuclear, etc). Re “vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism”: these are precisely the things I’m concerned about from the Democrats. Re “the veneration of foreign autocrats”: see my comments on Trump’s foreign policy.
Sorry, I’d linked it on memory since I’ve seen a bunch of censorship examples from them, but I’d forgotten that they also post a bunch of other non-censorship stuff. Will dig out some of the specific examples I’m thinking about later.
Re Facebook, here’s Zuckerberg’s admission that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months” to censor covid-related content (he also mentions an FBI warning about Russian disinformation in relation to censorship of the Hunter Biden story, though the specific link is unclear).
One more point: in Scott’s blog post he talks about the “big lie” of Trump: that the election was stolen. I do worry that this is a key point of polarization, where either you fully believe that the election was stolen and the Democrats are evil, or you fully believe that Trump was trying to seize dictatorial power.
But reality is often much more complicated. My current best guess is that there wasn’t any centrally-coordinated plan to steal the election, but that the central Democrat party:
Systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of people who shouldn’t have been voting (like illegal immigrants) actually voting (in some cases because Democrat voter registration pushes deliberately didn’t track this distinction).
Blocked reasonable election integrity measures that would have prevented this (like voter ID), primarily in a cynical + self-interested way.
On priors I think this probably didn’t swing the election, but given how small the winning margins were in swing states, it wouldn’t be crazy if it did. From this perspective I think it reflects badly on Trump that he tried to do unconstitutional things to stay in power, but not nearly as badly as most Democrats think.
(Some intuitions informing this position: I think if there had been clear smoking guns of centrally-coordinated election fraud, then Trump would have won some of his legal challenges, and we’d have found out about it since then. But it does seem like a bunch of non-citizens are registered to vote in various states (e.g. here, here), and I don’t think this is a coincidence given that it’s so beneficial for Dems + Dems have so consistently blocked voter ID laws. Conversely, I do also expect that red states are being overzealous in removing people from voter rolls for things like changing their address. Basically it all seems like a shitshow, and not one which looks great for Trump, but not disqualifying either IMO, especially because in general I expect to update away from the mainstream media line over time as information they’ve suppressed comes to light.)
Without expressing any views on which allegations against the two major sides are true, it’s clear to me that relatively few people in the US are particularly interested in what we might call nonpartisan electoral truthseeking: making it easy, convenient, and secure for all those (and only those) legally eligible to vote, without unlawful foreign interference or illegal disinformation (like false robocalls about poll location).
I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.
Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.
This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.
To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.