Liquidity Preference

Do you know any undecided voters? I’m not sure that I do, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone at this late date remaining torn on how or if to vote in this presidential election. And yet, undecided voters do exist. Perhaps you are even one of them. I hope so, because this post is for you!

This post highlights the arguments I would bring up with a swayable voter to try to convince them not to vote for Trump. I’m aware this is likely an exercise in futility, but given the importance of this presidential election, I think it’s worth at least taking a shot at persuasion.

Who is this hypothetical voter? I imagine that you historically vote Republican. You are not full-blown MAGA and are not entirely happy with the direction of the Republican Party, but you find voting for a Democrat unappealing. Or maybe you’re fairly centrist but are put off by aspects of the Democratic platform. Perhaps you’re leaning toward Trump but open to changing your mind. In your ideal world, Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee. Alas, in this world, he is.

Who am I? Cards on the table, I’m not a Republican. Historically I’m not much of a Democrat either. I grew up in a conservative family in a conservative suburb of Houston with Rush Limbaugh a frequent voice on the car radio. Prior to 2020, I voted Libertarian in every presidential election. (Consider writing this post my penance for that.) In 2020 I voted for Biden. I have significant disagreements with many Democrats, but have become convinced that Trump is so uniquely unfit and dangerous that I’m voting Democratic for as long as he’s on the ticket.

I’ve written two previous posts (here and here) making a more positive case for Kamala Harris. In this one I’ll focus on the negative case against Trump, not from a particular partisan point of view but rather on the basis of values that are shared or should be shared across parties. It’s a case that opposing Trump is the correct move across the board, both for the country as a whole and for the health of conservative politics in the long-run.

An extraordinary number of Republicans are not voting for Trump

If you’re a Republican who’s open to the possibility of not voting for Trump, you should know that you’re in good company. Mitt Romney, previous Republican nominee for president and current senator, is not voting for Trump. Former vice president Dick Cheney is not voting for Trump. Former congresswoman Liz Cheney is not voting for Trump. Chris Christie isn’t voting for Trump. Jeff Flake isn’t voting for Trump. Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, isn’t voting for Trump. Half of Trump’s own cabinet either isn’t voting for Trump or isn’t willing to publicly endorse him.

If you want to dig further there’s an entire Wikipedia page listing prominent Republicans opposing Trump’s 2024 campaign. It’s a ridiculously long list! It’s not unusual for there to be a few party defections, but this is an unprecedented level of opposition from a former president’s own party and staff.

I’m not suggesting that these endorsements alone should determine your decision, but they should suggest that there are good reasons for even impeccably credentialed conservative Republicans to oppose Donald Trump. Some, such as Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, have done so courageously at the cost of their careers. Much less is asked of you, who is merely going to cast a vote. You can be a principled conservative and not give that vote to Trump.

Recommended reading:

• Niha Masih of the Washington Post rounds up many of the Republicans endorsing Kamala Harris and their reasons for doing so.

Donald Trump is a rapist

Growing up in suburban Houston during the Clinton years, I was raised with certain expectations about what conservatives think about presidents and sexual morality. So it’s notable, and under attended by the press, that the current Republican nominee has recently been found liable by a civil jury for sexual abuse.

Specifically, the jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store. The act consisted, in her words, of Trump forcefully pinning her against the wall, pulling down her tights, and then:

The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

This, as the judge in the case clarified, meets the common definition of rape. The argument for not believing Ms. Carroll’s account, as best I can tell, is that she — a professional essayist — dared to recount the incident with some literary style. The argument for believing her is the corroboration of friends she told at the time of the incident, the decision of the jury hearing evidence in the case, and, well, everything else we know about Donald Trump.

So many women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct that it’s hard to keep track: there have been 19, 26, or even more of them by various tallies, often alleging a similar pattern of behavior in which he forces himself on women in vulnerable circumstances. We could add Trump’s own recollection of abusing his power as owner of the Miss USA pageant to walk in on contestants as they dressed:

“I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know I’m inspecting it. I want to make sure everything is good,” Trump told Stern at the time. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”

And, of course, Trump was notoriously caught on tape boasting about grabbing women by the pussy. “I don’t even wait,” he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Republicans talked themselves out of this mattering in 2016 by dismissing it as “locker room talk,” the implication being that actually grabbing non-consenting women by the pussy would be disqualifying, but just joking about it is OK. Well, we know now that he wasn’t joking, and here you are thinking about voting for him anyway.

One could go on, but there’s no need to belabor the point. You are not sitting on a criminal jury asked to convict a defendant. You are merely being asked whether Donald Trump, by the normal standards of evidence applied to politicians, is a sexual predator. No one has ever been less deserving of the benefit of doubt. If a male Democratic president were caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, admitted on record to barging into beauty pageant dressing rooms, were accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, and were held liable by a civil jury for sexual abuse, you would not have any trouble coming to the correct conclusion. You should apply the same reasoning to Trump, and if you decide to vote for him anyway you should do so in full knowledge that you’re voting for a rapist. But no one is making you vote for him, and you can choose not to.

Recommended reading:

• E. Jean Carroll in her own words.
• Jessica Bennett on the “strange sorority” of women who share the experience of having been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump.

Trump is a threat to American democracy

There is a long list of things that, prior to Trump, I would have believed sufficient to disqualify a presidential candidate in the eyes of reasonable voters. Committing rape is one; attempting to violently overturn the results of an election is another. Trump, remarkably, has done both and still won the Republican nomination for a third consecutive run.

The events of January 6th have been swept under the rug by a lot of voters, or sanitized as a mostly peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand. The protesters were in fact a violent mob that beat police officers, threatened the lives of members of Congress, and chanted to hang Mike Pence, disrupting the peaceful transfer of power. (In a first for a presidential campaign, Trump is running on a promise to pardon the protesters convicted of beating cops.)

Much has been written about January 6 but there’s no substitute for simply watching the footage:

There was much more to the plot to overthrow the election than the January 6 riot, far too much to cover here. I’ll highlight just one other egregious example, Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger intimidating him to “find” 11,000 votes to change the outcome of the state. Raffensberger, a fellow Republican, admirably resisted the pressure, and the tape of the entire call was published by the Washington Post. This alone should disqualify Trump from future office, even without January 6.

It’s trite at this point to suggest imagining Democrats doing what Trump has done, but it’s a worthwhile exercise. Imagine that Barack Obama had narrowly lost to Mitt Romney in 2012. Then, instead of conceding defeat, Obama filed dozens of spurious lawsuits and spread baseless conspiracy theories, was caught on tape pressuring a Democratic secretary of state to find enough votes to change the election result, arranged to send fake slates of electors to Congress, pressured then-vice president Biden to refuse to certify the election, and sicced a violent mob of his supporters on the Capitol to disrupt the proceedings.

If you lean Republican, I don’t think you would have any trouble concluding that Obama would be utterly irredeemable as a politician for attempting that and would likely have called for his prosecution. Of course, this is a fantasy because Obama would never have attempted such a scheme, nor would have Bush or Romney or Clinton or Gore or McCain or Biden or Harris or any other recent major party nominee for president. Because whatever their flaws, all of them possess the basic respect for democracy and the rule of law to know that’s wildly out of bounds. Trump alone doesn’t care.

The stability of democracy depends on both sides’ willingness to abide by the rules of the game, acknowledge defeat, and return to compete again the next election. The alternative is lawlessness and violence, where the winner is determined not necessarily by votes but by who controls the levers of power and is most shameless in abusing them. This is the danger of Trump and what he threatens to steal from the United States. As election law expert Andy Craig writes:

The rhetoric about stolen elections is not a genuine legal dispute but an attempt to construct a pseudo-legal cover for destroying our representative system of government altogether. It is a strategy designed to justify extra-legal actions—essentially another coup attempt. At the most extreme, such calls are deliberate incitement to violence, which is hardly a hypothetical concern when Trump has previously done exactly that.

There is only one candidate who has tried to overturn his loss once before and who will attempt to do so again. Normal policy differences between the parties pale in comparison to the danger this poses to our constitutional order. Everything else can be sorted out later through ordinary politics; the unraveling of democracy and the rule of law will be much harder to repair.

Recommended reading:

• Molly Ball on Michael Fanone, a DC cop beaten unconscious by January 6 protesters.
• Andy Craig on understanding Trump’s threat to overthrow elections.
• Reporters at Politico on what an attempt to overturn the 2024 election might entail.

Trump favors ruinous economic policies

In an ordinary election I’d be more inclined to write about the economic policies of the candidates. One of many ways that Trump has worsened American politics is by making the normal stuff of policy take a back seat to things like safeguarding democracy and the rule of law, things we could take for granted under normal politicians. But economic policy does matter and voters do have legitimate gripes about high inflation in the early 2020s, so it’s worth addressing.

High inflation is absolutely a valid complaint. It’s not one that can be completely laid at the feet of the Biden-Harris administration, however. Inflation was going to be a challenge no matter who took office in 2021. Recent inflation was partially a matter of policy, but it was also an inherent risk of economic recovery from the pandemic.

COVID was the greatest economic shock in a century. Emerging from the pandemic involved massive increases in demand, both from stimulus and from deferred consumption, and massive disruptions to supply chains. Economists differ on the exact details of how these factors interacted but this was pretty clearly a recipe for higher prices.

Post-pandemic inflation wasn’t just a US thing. The pattern is similar among peer countries, with inflation rising in 2021 and 2022 and then falling back down. That suggests that there’s only so much that any US president would have been able to do about it; there’s no realistic scenario in which we came out of the pandemic with a full economic recovery and no increase in inflation. You might as well be wishing for a pony.

Inflation in the US was higher early on than in other countries, and one can make a case that Biden should have anticipated that and pursued different policies. But inflation is also now lower in the US than in peer countries, and today the US economy is doing fantastic by just about any measure.

High inflation was also not the worst possible outcome of the post-pandemic recovery. There are alternative scenarios in which inflation was lower but employment took far longer to recover. It’s easy to imagine a very different 2024 election in which Democrats are hammered for presiding over recession and joblessness instead of inflation. In short, there was no easy way out of the pandemic and the recovery we got was one of the less bad possibilities, putting the US ahead of comparable nations.

A problem for Democrats is that inflation genuinely was higher under Biden than under Trump. But that doesn’t tell you anything really useful about what to expect in the upcoming term. Now that post-pandemic inflation has been tamed, you need to look at the actual policies the candidates favor. And on that score, Trump presents a real risk of bringing back rising prices.

According to Trump, “tariff” is the “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Economists disagree. Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods. They also make the cost of domestic goods higher, since those are often made with parts and components that come from abroad. If you like buying affordable goods from around the world, you should oppose tariffs. Trump loves them.

Trump is also very enthusiastic about mass deportation. He promises to deport up to 20 million immigrants from the United States. Never mind that there aren’t nearly that many immigrants here illegally to begin with; a policy of deporting the workers who are providing you with food, goods, and other services is unlikely to make those things cheaper.

In addition to those supply shocks, Trump’s risks for inflation include far higher deficits than under Harris and possibly even long-term interference in the independence of the Fed. As Noah Smith summarizes:

Low interest rates would reduce the immediate fiscal costs of Trump’s debt binge, but they would come with a price. If there’s still underlying inflationary pressure in the economy, low rates would accelerate inflation. Even more ominously, if businesspeople and investors realized that the Fed was no longer truly independent, it could touch off an inflationary spiral, where higher inflation expectations led to higher actual inflation.

This isn’t a niche view. A recent survey of economists asked which of the candidates’ economic plans would be more likely to lead to inflation. They pointed to Trump’s by a whopping margin, 70% naming Trump compared to just 3% naming Harris.

There are fair criticisms one can make of Kamala Harris’s economic policies but Trump’s ideas conflict wildly with basic economic principles. Given executive branch leeway on immigration enforcement and trade policy, he’ll also be much less constrained in pursuing them.

It’s completely fair to feel frustrated about inflation in the 2020s. But if you’re genuinely interested in avoiding short-term supply shocks and keeping inflation low moving forward, Trump is the riskier candidate to bet on.

Recommended reading:

• Noah Smith on America’s remarkably impressive economic recovery.
• Noah Smith on Trump and inflation.
• Josh Barro on why Trump is a more dangerous threat when it comes to dumb economic policy.
• Jeff Stein and David J. Lynch on how Trump could set off a trade war that raises US prices and hurts our exports.
• Frida Garza & Ayurella Horn-Muller on how mass deportation would wreck the food economy.

Trump will be gratuitously cruel to immigrants

It’s not uncommon for politicians to promise more than they can actually deliver. Typically, these are promises that at least aspire to making people’s lives better. Trump’s principal campaign promise is to make people’s lives worse. Namely, he promises to forcibly deport 15-20 million people from the United States.

This is unrealistic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that there are only about 11 million immigrants in the US without authorization. Deporting 20 million people would mean forcibly removing more than 5% of the current US population. There is no sensible, much less no humane, way to do this.

Yet there will be unfathomable cruelty in the attempt. Immigrants who are here legally will be targeted, since Trump aims to deport nearly double the unauthorized population. Marriages will be broken apart. Children who are American citizens will lose their parents to exile or will be forced to uproot their lives to join them in a foreign country. Law enforcement will make mistakes with impunity, arresting and possibly deporting people who have every right to be here. Millions of people who are in America peacefully pursuing a better life for themselves and their families — perhaps people you know, people you hire informally, people you say you care about — will face the terror of being detained in camps, deported, and losing everything.

Trump says that he will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law last used for Japanese internment, to “liberate” cities from immigrants. If permitted by courts to do so, the law would not be constrained by use against unauthorized immigrants, but would apply to anyone from targeted countries. And Trump has been relentless in demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants. As Anne Applebuam summarizes:

He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

This rhetoric is more akin to Stalin than to Ronald Reagan. Republicans in recent memory encouraged the idea that America should be welcoming toward immigrants. Trump, with his rallies for “mass deportation now” and his rants about immigrants eating people’s dogs and cats, calls supporters instead to indulge their worst, most racist instincts. And if he returns to office, there’s no doubt that he’ll staff the government with people eager to do the same, with the full power and cruel indifference of the state behind them.

Recommended reading:

• Melissa Gira Grant on the “incomprehensible scale” of Trump’s deportation plans.
• Jamelle Bouie on taking Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric seriously.
• Ilya Somin on the Alien Enemies Act.

Donald Trump hates America

To say that Donald Trump hates America is a strong claim. I don’t mean that he hates living in America. He’s obviously flourished economically here: he surely likes that in America he became fantastically rich, famous, and adored by a cult-like base of fans. But he hates what America stands for.

Democracy, when voters reject him? Hates it. Accountability and equality before the law, when his crimes get prosecuted? Hates it. Free speech, when he’s the one being criticized? Hates it. America as a nation of immigrants, a land of opportunity for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Absolutely hates it with a passion.

Trump claims to be a patriot but is “fascist to the core,” in the words of his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired General Mark Milley. Or as his former chief of staff John Kelly warns, “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

It’s why Trump refused to concede his loss in the 2020 election, why he sicced a violent mob on the Capitol, why he wants to revoke the licenses of TV networks that criticize him and shoot protestors in the legs, why he speaks dreamily of dictators, why one of his first acts as president was the Muslim ban, why he never misses an opportunity dehumanize immigrants.

Trump is plainly a fascist, an aspiring authoritarian ruler. If you’ve ever wondered what you would do if an actual fascist threatened the Constitution of the United States, it’s what you decide to do now.

Trump is an opportunity to prove your independence

I wouldn’t even try to write about post like this about previous major party candidates for office. Democrats normally vote for Democrats, Republicans normally vote for Republicans, and that’s fine. Major parties usually nominate fairly normal politicians who represent the views of their base, constrained by the norms of obeying the law and respecting the outcome of elections. There are many places where we might demonstrate our independence, but the ballot box isn’t often one of them. Usually, it doesn’t need to be.

Trump breaks that mold. He’s not a normal politician. Many Republicans can only stand to vote for him by pretending he doesn’t mean the things he says or that he hasn’t done the things he’s done. This is a grave mistake. He does mean them, he has done them, and he will be even less restrained by staff and less cognitively open to reason in a second term.

Watching the past decade of American politics and knowing many conservatives who are decent people in their everyday lives, the question I return to again and again is if there is any red line Trump could cross that would convince them not to support him. If there’s one persistent pattern to his political career it’s that he forces them to accept or ignore ever lower depths of depravity. In 2016 it was banter about sexual assault; now it’s actual rape. In 2020 it was musing that he wouldn’t accept losing an election; months later it was an attempted violent coup. What will you be forced to countenance if you restore him to power through 2028?

If you’re reading this, you’re probably old enough to remember conservative politics before Trump. Consider this: for Americans approaching their thirties, Trump is the only Republican candidate for president they’ve ever had the opportunity to vote for. To younger voters, conservativism and the GOP simply is Trump. It’s bigotry, stupidity, incompetence, insurrection, crime, and sexual abuse. If he wins this election, he will make his mark on the party even more indelibly. If that’s not the future you want for your party, you at some point need to stop going along with him.

This election is a last chance to finally move on. If not now, when? If Trump isn’t disgraceful and dangerous enough to convince you to put country over party just this one time, who on Earth would be? No less a conservative than George Will now concedes that the best thing can happen for both the country and the party is for Republicans to take the short-term loss and rebuild for 2028.

What to do? You could vote for a third party. You could leave the presidential line blank and only vote for down-ballot candidates. These are better options than voting for Trump. But I’d urge you to do what I will be doing myself, regardless of my policy differences with Democrats: vote for his opponent Kamala Harris.

Trump provides you with the rare opportunity to prove that you are capable of having the conscience and independence to vote against your party when it strays too far from basic American values, from what should be your values. Some admirably principled Republicans are doing so at the cost of their careers. For you, it would cost nothing. It’s hands-down the best thing you can do with your ballot this year.

Portland people: Tomorrow, October 11th, I’m excited to host a book chat with my longtime internet pal Evan Rail, talking about his new book The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit. We’ll be at Belmont Books at 7:00 pm followed by drinks at the great new spot Bar Loon. Come join us and enjoy a taste of the green fairy yourself!

From the official book description:

An astonishing true crime story about an eccentric grifter who blew up the lucrative black market for vintage bottles of the legendary drink of artistic renegades, absinthe . . .

Thought to be hallucinogenic and banned globally for a century, absinthe is once again legal and popular. Yet it is still associated with bohemian lifestyles, just as when it was the favorite drink of avant-gardists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh and Baudelaire. And today, when vintage, pre-ban bottles are discovered, they can sell for exorbitant prices to private collectors. But such discoveries are increasingly rare.

Which is why the absinthe demimonde of rich collectors was electrified when a mysterious bon vivant claimed to be in possession of a collection of precious, pre-ban bottles.

Is his secret tranche of 100-year-old bottles real? And just who is the shadowy person selling them? And what about rumors of another secret cache, hidden away in an Italian palazzo?

Journalist Evan Rail sets out to discover the truth about the enigmatic dealer and the secret stashes. Along the way, he drinks with absintheurs frantically chasing down the pre-bans, visits modern distillers who have seen their status rise from criminal bootleggers to sought-after celebrities, and relates the legendary history of absinthe, from its birth in Switzerland through its coming of age in France, and on to its modern revival.

Just shy of a year ago, I decided I was done with X. (RIP Twitter, which used to be my favorite social network.) I don’t remember what specifically pushed me over the edge to quitting, but I’m sure it had something to do with Elon Musk. Nothing he’s done in the time since has made me regret leaving.

Back in December, I wrote a post suggesting that a resolution to “never tweet” would be a good start to 2024. From that post:

Musk insists on being the main character of X in ways that owners of other social media platforms do not. And what a character he is. A small sampling of his recent activity could note this endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, this weird racist meme, telling companies pulling their ads because of antisemitism to fuck themselves, and running a space with himself, Alex Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other lunatics and dumbasses.

It’s possible to use the site without endorsing this garbage, but this garbage is very much the face of the site now. And I’m hardly one to judge, since it took me long enough to leave, but it’s baffling to me that so many of you are still content implicitly saying, “Follow me on X, because this is the platform I choose as the place to share my work, exchange ideas, and present myself to the public.”

Over the past year, a lot of friends and other people I enjoy interacting with online have made the switch to Bluesky, which now numbers more than 10 million users and is genuinely more innovative than X. Others are unfortunately still on the old platform. There are undeniably some costs to switching, but I’m nonetheless surprised at what they’re willing to put up with. (Quick disclosure: I am personally working on a different social network app — see the end of this post — but it’s a very different format than Twitter/X/various clones.)

Lately I find myself thinking of decent people still using X in much the same way I think of supposedly principled Republicans still voting for Trump. X and the GOP are on parallel trajectories. Both institutions are notionally continuous but fundamentally changed for the worse; both have seen their racist and crankish fringes rise to the top; both have been taken over and degraded by repulsively megalomaniacal men.

Both also continue to be supported by people whom, respectfully, I believe really ought to know better. Trump notoriously bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any voters. An equivalent boast for Musk would be making flagrantly bigoted posts on X and not losing users. Except the latter is a thing that’s actually happening, and while Musk has driven a lot of people (and advertisers) away, plenty remain.

The metaphor that’s often used by critics to describe X is that of a Nazi bar. As in, if you frequent a bar that welcomes everyone with open arms, including Nazis, then you’re effectively in a Nazi bar and ought to leave. I think the usefulness of that metaphor is complicated in debates about content moderation, which have all kinds of nuances around speech vs. reach, protocols vs. platforms, etc. But the metaphor is a little more useful if you’re talking about the owner of a platform rather than its users. In that narrower sense, X is like a bar where the owner is always onsite and holding court, which lately includes recommending a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist, joking about why no one is assassinating the liberal candidates for president and VP, and ranting about how immigrants are destroying American society, stealing elections, and eating people’s pets. Which, when you put it that way, does sound a bit like what you’d hear in a Nazi bar.

Let’s drop the Nazi bar metaphor and be literal. Musk is the owner of a large and influential social media platform. He has nearly 200 million followers on X, he is X’s main character by a longshot, and he uses X to boost his presence and his favored political views. And those views are, to be blunt, pretty damn racist.

A few examples of his recent posts, starting with this account from Thomas Chatterton Williams, who notes that “the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness”:

With his nearly 200 million followers—a sizable portion of whom amount to cultists—he is responsible for tuning X’s digital culture into a gratuitously repulsive frequency. Astonishingly active and available on the platform that he so bombastically controls, he not only enables bad actors; he also personally praises and promotes them.

Just a week before the presidential debate, Musk wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” about a conversation between Tucker Carlson and the amateur historian and Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper. In that talk, Cooper claimed that Hitler had killed millions of Jews unintentionally, and that Winston Churchill was the real villain of the Second World War. Musk has since deleted the post, but such an endorsement from X’s apex user makes the spread of anti-Semitism not just likely but inevitable.

Or as Charlie Warzel summarized Musk’s posts from a single recent weekend:

• amplified a conspiracy theory that ABC had leaked sample debate questions to the Harris campaign
• falsely claimed that “the Dems want to take your kids”
• fueled racist lies about immigrants eating pets
• shared with his nearly 200 million followers on X that “Trump must win” to “preserve freedom and meritocracy in America”
• insinuated that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” adding a thinking-face emoji. He subsequently deleted the post and argued that it was a joke that had been well received in private. “Turns out jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he wrote in a follow-up on X.

This past weekend, Musk posted, “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” He want on to explain a version of the Great Replacement theory, accusing Democrats of flying illegal immigrants into swing states to “fast-track” them into citizenship and create one-party rule. As Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post, none of this makes sense.

This is all bad enough coming from the site’s owner and most-followed user, but it’s also worth looking into how it seeps into the experience of everyone else. As noted above, racism is now rampant in replies and quote-posts. It’s also financially rewarded thanks to X’s ad revenue sharing program, which paid users can opt into. This pays posters on the basis of ads displayed in replies to their posts. Predictably, this creates perverse incentives to make incendiary statements. I was interested to see these figures from one of the site’s more notorious racists, whose payments peaked over a period in which he was focused on derogatorily posting about Haitians:

In other words, Musk has created a machine that turns racist shitposts into about $1,000/month, and you keep it running by using the app.

When Musk bought Twitter, some people speculated that he would bring in positive innovations and make it a haven for free speech. (If you believe that Musk is a genuine champion of unfettered speech, I have a bridge to sell you.) Instead he has driven away thoughtful users, created a toxic environment, and generally raised the acceptability of racism in American discourse. X is now best understood as Musk’s personal propaganda machine for his anti-woke and anti-immigrant political views with a vestigial, decaying social network attached.

So, what the hell are you still doing there? I know some of you are doing good work and feel like it’s important to continue sharing it on X, and I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about how that moral calculus shakes out. It’s not easy being a journalist or writer and we’re all trying to get our work out there; if you specialize in, say, more fact-based immigration policy, you might make a case that it’s worth being on X to counter the dominant narrative. On the other hand, if you’re just using the app to kill time and mess around online (this is most of you), you should absolutely quit and go elsewhere, and I don’t think that’s remotely a hard call at this point.

But even if you are on X as a writer or public intellectual, I would encourage you to think critically about whether being active there is really the best use of your time and whether it’s really making a positive difference. My impression from checking in occasionally is that many of you are drawn into responding to (and thereby elevating) cranks, bigots, and morons. I’m sure you can come up with some justification for remaining on the platform, but at least consider the possibility that X has become a fundamentally racist and anti-immigrant enterprise that is making America worse, and that the best decision for you is to no longer be part of it.

Will that involve some loss of influence? Yeah, possibly, but if sacrificing a bit of influence is the cost of no longer associating with racists, that can still be the right thing to do. Lots of smart people with large followings on X have walked away without regret.

On an anecdotal level, I’ve also noticed that X no longer even functions as a useful way of getting my writing into the world. I stopped promoting my own pieces there a long time ago, but other accounts do link to them. Some combination of the algorithm favoring paid users or disfavoring posts with external links has made their posts irrelevant. For example, Slate has 1.6 million followers on X. Slate’s posts linking to my most recent article there have fewer than 8,000 views each. Not clicks, views! Another respected journalist with 37,000 followers also linked to my article; his post got 820 views. These are terrible rates, but they’re pretty typical if you’re not paying to play. In the good old days of Twitter, posts from prominent accounts could bring my work to a much larger audience, but on algorithmically opaque X they’re often completely worthless.

Finally, as Aaron Ross Powell argued recently, being active on X is ethically questionable not only for the ways it implicitly elevates Musk’s political project, but also for the ways it can skew your own view of the world:

That the broader conversation on X is functionally indistinguishable, both in its content and the character of many of its participants, from Truth Social interacts in troubling ways with the perception, by those still-active journalists and thought leaders, that X remains what Twitter once was: a more or less representative picture of the wider discourse.

First, there’s an internal, deleterious impact. Who you associate with matters, not just because the people you associate with is a reflection of your own character, but also because the people you associate with shape your character. We cultivate our ethical perspective in collaboration with others, and if those we collaborate with are unethical, we’ll shift in that direction, too. Thus if our thought leadership is mostly interacting with the kind of hard-right and profoundly immoral perspectives of the community Elon Musk has cultivated and promoted, and is reflected in electoral politics by people like JD Vance, then this is bad for those thought leaders, because to the extent it makes them increasingly unethical, in both values and the way they see the world, it makes their own lives worse. You can’t lead a good life as a bad person.

So again, what are you still doing there? Is it just inertia? X is never going back to what Twitter used to be and it’s most likely to keep getting worse. The near-future of social networks is smaller, more fragmented communities rather than a global town square. You can lament that, but you can also embrace it and find excitement in building new communities. And it’s easier to build your network when you join as an early adopter than as a latecomer. I hope you’ll give it a shot, because while I do want to read your work and see your photos and joke around with you online, I don’t want to meet you at a racist hellsite to do it.

A brief pitch for Bluesky

The social network that most closely replicates the feel of the good days of Twitter is, for me, Bluesky. There are now enough users on the site, including journalists and academics, to make it a great place for finding good things to read, keeping up with breaking news, and making jokes. It’s thoroughly replaced X for me, and at any given time a dip into my Bluesky timeline is much more worthwhile than what I find on X. I’ve also built up my network there such that when I post or write something, it has a chance of being picked up by much more influential accounts and actually seen by a lot of people. The total userbase is still smaller and less diverse than old Twitter, but the quality of engagement and discourse is leaps and bounds better than what’s currently on X.

As I mentioned above, Bluesky is also more innovative than X, not just for its open protocol but for rolling out new features too. One of these is “starter packs,” a smart feature that makes it easier to get started on the site by offering users a way to make lists of recommended people to follow. You can find mine here, so if you’re new to Bluesky or haven’t checked in for a while, it’ll give you a solid list of people to enliven your feed.

An even briefer pitch for Seabird

Unlike a lot of new social networks, Seabird (the platform I’m working on) is not anything like a Twitter clone. It offers a chronological feed but it’s designed exclusively for sharing links, encouraging discourse through blog posts, articles, and writing rather than debates on social media. We’re wrapping up work on a brand new build before we shift our focus to expanding our userbase, but we are welcoming new users. It’s the other platform where I’m most active these days and we have a small but enthusiastic community. Sign up here if you’re curious to check it out.

This was originally published as a section of my Substack newsletter on July 16, 2021. Since I’ve migrated off Substack and the topic of how libertarians should approach politics in the context of an increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic threat from the right is still (unfortunately) very relevant, I’m reposting it here.

Didn’t you used to be a libertarian?

I’ve gathered from conversations and online interactions that it’s worth addressing how my politics have (and haven’t) changed in recent years. Most of you know that I’ve been active in the libertarian movement for coming on two decades, starting with college summer seminars hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies and leading to an internship and full-time job in the media department at the Cato Institute, freelancing for Reason (which I still do), and other looser affiliations. Then two years ago I voted for a straight Democratic ticket for the first time, last year I marched in Black Lives Matter protests and endorsed Joe Biden, and currently I’m working to build up our local chapter of the Neoliberal Project. 

This might seem like a significant shift, especially if you’re used to thinking of libertarians as naturally allied with conservatives against the big government left. That brand of fusionism has been on the ropes for years and broke down further with Trump taking over the GOP. Personally speaking, this isn’t just or even primarily about specific policy positions, although Republican policies under Trump gave libertarians plenty to be upset about. My general views on policy haven’t actually changed that much; what has changed is my sense of what to emphasize and whom to ally with.

To think about this visually, let’s bring out our old friend the Nolan chart. [At top.] Libertarians correctly argue that their ideology doesn’t have a place on the typical left-right spectrum of politics. They’re too radical to be described as centrist, but they don’t fit typical conceptions of the left or right either. The Nolan chart plots ideologies along two dimensions instead of one, personal liberty (“socially liberal”) and economic liberty (“fiscally conservative”). This is far from perfect, but it’s popular as a rough approximation of what sets libertarians apart as a political faction while flatteringly putting them at the top of the chart.

A lot of people encounter a version of this chart on the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz” from the libertarian website Advocates for Self-Government. Just for fun, I retook it to see where I fall on it now. It still puts me in the libertarian box but tilted toward the left, with a 100% score on personal liberties and 60% on economic liberties.

I don’t quite agree with this but it’s not bad for a ten-question quiz. It understates my support for economic liberty by only asking questions that code as conservative (privatizing Social Security, replacing welfare with private charity, etc.). It doesn’t ask about the freedom to build multifamily housing, hire immigrants, or trade with foreigners, to name three highly relevant economic liberty issues on which the contemporary right has become increasingly hostile.

Quizzes like this one also oversimplify by not weighting the importance of the questions. Even if I were a more hardcore libertarian on issues related to the welfare state, I wouldn’t rate them as a higher priority than, for example, ending the drug war and its concomitant violent policing, arbitrary asset forfeiture, and excessive incarceration. The gradual legalization of cannabis is one of the most important liberty-enhancing political victories of the past two decades; another is the expansion of marriage rights to same-sex couples. There have been massive shifts on both issues and the left deserves more credit for leading the way. You can make a case that conservatives have defended freedom by opposing excesses of the left, but it’s hard to credit them with actively expanding liberty to any similar degree.

For all those reasons, the left-leaning libertarian corner of the Nolan chart makes sense as a description of where I’d put my political views: accepting of a basic social safety net but committed to free markets and personal liberties. And while my positions on some particular policies have changed over time, as a general description that’s also how I would have described my outlook for most of my adult life.

Something important has changed, however. It’s just not about specific policies or suites of policy preferences, so it doesn’t show up in charts or quizzes built around the things government should or shouldn’t do. It’s more about the need to support the basic political institutions that make democracy possible. This is basic stuff like voting rights, respecting the outcome of elections, preserving the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power. We might imagine this as a third dimension on the chart mapping a democratic versus autocratic axis, though that gets hard to visualize. This is all tremendously important, but since we live in a mature democracy in which we’re all expected to agree on these things, it typically stays invisibly in the background of our political debates.

The rise of Trump, his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and his continued grip on the GOP highlight the peril of taking respect for democracy for granted. Trump is bad not just because his bad policies outnumbered his good ones. It’s a mistake to even think about politics in those terms right now. Doing so distracts from a much more fundamental problem: the intellectual and civic decline of the American political right and the Republican party.

When I urged libertarians to vote for Biden, part of the reasoning was that it was simply wrong to evaluate Trump as a normal politician:

In a contest between candidates like Bush and Gore or Romney and Obama, a libertarian could sensibly tally up their policy objectives, compare them to our own, and perhaps come to a weak preference for the lesser evil […] This is no way to approach the difference between Trump and Biden. To paraphrase some old campaign wisdom, “It’s not the policy, stupid.” Trump’s unique malignance endangers the country in ways that set him completely apart from any modern major party contender for the presidency.

I’ve never been enthusiastic about major party presidential candidates, but I also never had reason to doubt their commitment to preserving America as a democratic republic and to honoring the results of our elections. That’s not the case with Trump, who was signaling well before November 2020 that if the vote didn’t go his way, he would use every tool at his disposal to cast doubt on the result and possibly overturn it.

This isn’t a minor failing of a politician, like being caught in an affair or having the wrong position on steel tariffs, that you might sensibly forgive because he’s ultimately on your side. It’s an insidious rejection of hard-won American norms and institutions that shouldn’t be tolerated by any party or movement and it’s dangerous to let it go unchecked.

The crux of my case for Biden was to support him as the pro-institutional candidate and deliver a margin of victory decisive enough to prevent a potential legitimacy crisis. This worked out in the sense that our institutions ultimately held and the winner of the election was installed in the White House. But we fell short in other ways: the margin was narrower than expected, a violent mob assaulted the Capitol with the aim of preventing certification of Biden’s win, and the lie that the election was “stolen” metastasized throughout the Republican base.

I think it’s a mistake to dismiss this as sour grapes of no lasting consequence. The sheer size of the constituency buying into the stolen election narrative (or pretending to for personal gain) is too large to ignore and extends into Congress itself. Our institutions are only as strong as the people who operate within them to uphold free and fair elections and respect the rule of law. We avoided constitutional crisis largely thanks to officials and politicians who put devotion to principles over party, but if they are replaced with partisan hacks, the legitimacy of future elections could be even more tenuous.

There are a few nightmare scenarios for how that could conceivably play out in the 2024 presidential election, such as Republicans in Congress refusing to certify results from a narrowly Democratic swing state or state legislatures sending electors who contradict the will of their voters. I’m not saying this is likely; it probably won’t happen. The point is that even strong institutions are vulnerable if one side is truly committed to refusing to accept defeat and trashing our constitutional order.

You shouldn’t ignore catastrophic risks like that even if you think they’re improbable. And the way you insure against such improbable risks is by not tolerating aspiring autocrats even when they do nice things like deregulate the economy or cut your taxes.

Where does that leave libertarians? I wish I could say the answer is obvious and that we have been united in alarm against the autocratic turn of the American right from the beginning, but that hasn’t quite been the case. Some libertarians downplayed the danger, treated Trump as if he were within the normal bounds of American politics, or worse, enthusiastically welcomed him for shaking up the status quo and owning the libs. (I’ll cop to having been somewhat oblivious myself. I underestimated the possibility of Trump actually winning in 2016 and assumed the GOP would be forced to regroup after the embarrassing spectacle of running him as a candidate.)

Of course, other libertarians were right all along, including the late and greatly-missed Steve Horwitz. In a post from January 2017 that’s worth reading in full, he diagnosed a few reasons why some libertarians were getting Trump wrong. Two worth noting:

1. Too many libertarians are too focused on economics and are less concerned with other parts of the liberal order, especially the formal and informal political institutions that are equally necessary for a free society. […]

2. Too many libertarians hate the left more than they love liberty.

Steve was also clear about how libertarians should relate to the political left given the dangers emanating from the right:

Now, more than ever, libertarians need good-hearted, open-minded people on the left as allies in an attempt to preserve the things we agree on. We should never let our frustrations with the left become more important than preserving the liberal order.

So far, I’ve been intentionally avoiding the word “liberal” because Americans use it in such a peculiar way. In most of the world liberals are people who broadly support personal freedoms, open markets, and democratic institutions. In the United States the word came to be a synonym for “left,” with “more liberal” meaning “more left” no matter how illiberal the extreme left is in actuality. Because of that, we end up resorting to clunkier constructions for describing our political factions. A conservative like George Will is a “classical liberal;” a Democrat like Bill Clinton was a “neoliberal;” Justin Amash and Gary Johnson are “libertarian.” These groups certainly aren’t identical, but by abusing the word liberal we obscure their shared foundations.

Interestingly, “liberal” is becoming something of an epithet among the progressive, socialist, or far left too, as in this sign I came across recently in Portland:

If the word “liberal” is up for grabs, we might as well take it.

Personally, this isn’t a renunciation of the libertarian label so much as it is a change in emphasis. Emphasizing a libertarian identity as a contrast to mainstream Democrats and Republicans makes sense when the worst that can happen is ending up with someone like Barack Obama or Mitt Romney as president. Right now it feels more important to emphasize the longer, wider tradition of liberalism relative to the narrower libertarian movement, even though I situate my own views within both of them. For now, I’m putting liberalism first.

What does this mean in practice? For starters, it means voting for Democrats for the foreseeable future despite significant differences on policy. (Living in a very capital-D Democratic state that’s not well run, I’m not thrilled about this. But Oregon’s dysfunctional Republican party is hardly fertile soil for producing a reasonable alternative.) It means strengthening our election laws. It means working with groups like the Neoliberal Project and the Center for New Liberalism, which I think are better positioned than explicitly libertarian groups to advance pragmatic, liberty-enhancing policies in blue states and cities. And of course it still means working with smart, cosmopolitan libertarians, although that excludes much of the present Libertarian Party.

It also means working with honest people on the right. Nothing I’ve written is inherently anti-conservative or anti-Republican. There are current and former Republicans standing up for truth and liberal democracy, and we need them on our side, but the party is increasingly focused on punishing anyone who dissents from the authoritarian lie that the election was stolen: see Romney, Liz Cheney, or Adam Kinzinger. At the local level, it’s people like Upper Peninsula Michigan state senator Ed McBroom; if you haven’t read this Atlantic profile of him, it’s worth your time. Unfortunately, these are rare exceptions.

To my friends on the right who may be reading this, even if you can’t bring yourself to embrace the word liberal, I urge you to take seriously the threats to our democracy that are coming from your own side. Resist the kneejerk temptation of whataboutism that obsesses over real or imagined problems on the left while deflecting from the failure to get your own house in order. Be more like George Will; this profile is a good place to start. Be more like John McCain; go back and watch his 2008 concession speech to remind yourself how it’s supposed to be done in our country. Above all, break the illusion that America will die if Democrats win elections. You don’t have to like it when they do, and some of the policy results will suck, but this is nothing compared to what you risk by continuing down the path of burning it all down for an authoritarian loser.

Maybe this is alarmist. Maybe it’s cringe. Maybe the political winds will shift, the Trumpian fever will break, and we’ll look back on this period as a weird and very regrettable phase. But as a libertarian and a liberal, I’ve never been more worried about sustaining our most basic political institutions. With different people in our military, Department of Justice, courts, Congress, and state governments, or with an insurrection that managed to kill members of Congress or take them hostage, or with a president who combined Donald Trump’s lack of principle and lust for power with a more capable intelligence, the election and transition could have gone so much worse. Instead of recoiling in horror from that possibility, we have one party perpetuating the lie of a stolen election and making such an outcome more likely in the future.

This isn’t going to fix itself and we shouldn’t surrender our country to people who cosplay as defenders of freedom, liberty, and the Constitution while assaulting its democratic foundations. If we ever want to get back to a more normal politics, it’s up to the liberals of all parties to make sure they don’t succeed.