I disagree with most of your points.[1] But even if I didn’t, it would be unclear to me how those considerations outweigh Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which you barely address.
What Trump and his supporters did in the wake of the 2020 election is a pretty central example of an attempted self-coup. To recap, Trump filed hundreds of lawsuits in all of the swing states to attempt to get ballots thrown out. He asked on Twitter for votes not to be counted. He begged and pleaded the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. He successfully got fake Electoral College certificates in seven different states. He urged Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, and after that didn’t work, he chose a running mate this year that said he would have overturned the election if he were in Pence’s place.
This is not the kind of thing that has ever happened before in a national election in a democratic country (that remained democratic afterward).
So, unless you have a counter-example in mind, we have to confront the fact that the United States is in a reference class with a very real risk of transitioning to an autocracy. And, notwithstanding some unfree, anti-market policies promoted by the Democratic party and the existence of woke journalists, the United States under Democratic rule is still a much better place to pursue EA projects (or pretty much any kind of large-scale enterprise) than any existing autocratic or hybrid regime.
[1] Here are some of my disagreements, in no particular order:
On immigration, Trump has said he will do STEM degree visas, and has put forward point systems before for increasing high-skill immigration.
I think you’re misremembering an offhand comment he made on a podcast in June. He said that he would give green cards automatically to foreign graduates of US colleges, which does sound great, but then his campaign walked back on that promise after the (predictable) backlash from his supporters.
Trump’s last administration definitely cracked down on high-skilled legal immigration; it’s unclear why he’d do a 180 in his next administration.
On natalism: humans evolved and are not happiness machines in a vacuum: we should expect people will have higher wellbeing when they have healthy kids than when they don’t. More happy productive people is good, and sustainable fertility lowers the pressure for AI as a deus ex machina to save/sustain everyone in the future.
If you want people to have more children, it’s unclear why you’d support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
Trump is also more willing to fire people whether for competence or personal loyalty, but the net result is more competence in decision making relative to the incentives provided by not firing people for anything other than scandals.
Trump once hired his personal bodyman (literally the guy who carried his bags around, John McEntee) as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who then performed a witch hunt in federal agencies, targeting everyone who wasn’t MAGA enough or who made the mistake of liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post and replacing them with zealots. Trump seems to hire people on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit; many of his appointees had no expertise in the areas they were supposed to lead and even denied scientific consensus (e.g. Scott Pruitt).
In his next administration, Trump plans to fire tens of thousands of non-political federal government workers (including scientists and experts) and replace them with loyalists. This is a very clear indication that he values zealotry over expertise and merit. So I don’t think it makes sense to claim that Trump would hire more competent people, when he transparently cares way less about competence than Democrats do.
while I don’t think the change in abortion rights was great, Sam is right that it is a sunk cost.
This is very much not true. JD Vance has hinted that he’d support federal surveillance of interstate travel to prevent women from getting abortions; the federal government could ban mifepristone nationally if Trump is elected (which Project 2025 recommends), and Republican trifecta could, of course, pass a national abortion ban.
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
Calling for the Constitution to be suspended
Saying the President should ignore the Supreme Court
Saying that Pence shouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results
Planning to use the military for domestic law enforcement
Calling for journalists to be jailed
Ending a 220-year tradition of peaceful transfers of power and spending considerable and relentless effort attempting to overturn an election
It’s plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s what Vance said on TV that he would’ve done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is “dictatorship.”
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you’ve listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don’t, it’s unclear why they’re relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does “massively biased media coverage” count against Democrats but not Republicans?
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, “In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.”
Trump has called for “a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him” and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
This isn’t good evidence of issues with the Democratic Party. First of all, RFK Jr is a prolific, long-time conspiracy theorist. He claimed that the 2004 election was stolen, that vaccines cause autism, that it’s not conclusive that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, that hydroxychloroquine is an effective COVID-19 treatment, that the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe, that secret unidentified participants were involved in both JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, and so on. I wouldn’t rely on his opinion about which party is better for democracy.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held: