2025-02-05
Two interesting pieces: Opinion | Don’t Believe Him - The New York Times, via Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION. At MR, Cowen suggests that the actions of the Trump administration are not designed to effect permanent policy change, directly. Instead it’s all about shifting the window, getting people to talk about things that were long settled, sowing doubt. Forcing a conversation will lower opinions about the thing:
What about those ridiculous nominations, starting with RFK, Jr.? As a result of the nomination, people start questioning whether the medical and public health establishments are legitimate after all. And once such a question starts being debated, the answer simply cannot come out fully positive, whatever the details of your worldview may be. People end up in a more negative mental position, and of course then some negative contagion reinforces this further.
This also doesn’t need to be a carefully planned or coordinated agenda:
To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing). It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to. There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.
And then Ezra Klein makes a couple of points: