Scott Siskind Explains MAGA

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Organizations tend to accumulate bureaucracy. For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes. Progressive politicians have responded by outsourcing more and more tasks to it, while right-wing politicians have fumed against it.

Populism, especially far-right Trump-style populism, isn’t just a grab bag of opinions on immigration, crime, etc. On a deeper level, it’s a toolbox of strategies, justifications, and beneficial memes for circumventing the institutional middle layer. Some of this is unitary executive doctrine. Some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason. Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything. Some of it is a principled refusal to ever listen to or care about corruption allegations. Liberals treat these as anomalous vices, but they’re all load-bearing parts of a social technology for letting leaders ignore the institutional middle layer and govern without their consent. . . .

Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.

The obvious failure mode of the populist strategy is that they elect a moron or psychopath - or, more politely, a person with idiosyncrasies - and then their side’s commitments to ignoring experts, punishing disloyalty, circumventing checks and balances, and trusting the plan makes it impossible to push back. To defuse this critique, the populists veer hard into conflict theory - all problems are caused by the elites, and as long as we get someone on the right side, their good intentions (or at least anti-elite intentions) will more than compensate for their lack of restraint and expertise. Any given dictator could always turn out to be a benevolent dictator; you can always glance behind you at the institutions controlled by your enemies and say “I like my chances”.

But all of this depends on empirical parameters. How likely is it that your fellow populists will unite behind a good strongman rather than a bad one? How much damage will his inevitable idiosyncrasies cause, compared to the devil-you-know of the institutions? Once you’ve undermined the usual checks-and-balances, how much resistance will the vestigial checks-and-balances your side has left in place be able to mount against genuinely bad policies.

Trump and his tariffs are our first and strongest data point for determining these parameters in the American setting. Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy. The first and only time they got a chance to compare his damage to the damage of the institutions, the institutions came out looking at least more compatible with normal economic activity. And the first and only time they got a chance to see if the vestigial checks-and-balances left in place by his own party could restrain him, his subordinates proved to be spineless toadies who praised his genius and munificence even as he bankrupted the country.