My Q&A about the 2024 election

People have been asking me a lot of things

I am sad, which already feels like a dangerous concession in this new era of might-makes-right politics. One reason people say Trump’s movement has a fascistic character is because of the unconcealed joy it derives from the weak and suffering; this is also a reason why people say it’s not much of a Christian movement, despite its pretensions.

In the aftermath of last night, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends. Because I am a political person, people expect me to have a lot of deep thoughts on what has transpired. And I suppose I do, because I have trained my mind to work like that. But I am also quite miserable and at times like these I wish my mind worked some other way. As I walked the streets last night to clear my head, I once again found myself consumed with jealousy of the people laughing with their friends and talking about other things.

Q. What does this mean for conservatism?

A. As far as I’m concerned, “conservatism” of the sort that could have been identified as existing in some form between the Reagan and Obama presidencies, is basically dead as the animating orthodoxy of the Republican Party.

Conservatism of this sort was basically a mix of libertarian economic views, a hawkish foreign policy posture, and a traditionalist Christian code of social morality. This was the most influential political ideology of late 20th century America, but by the 2010s it was becoming increasingly scorned as out-of-date and out-of-touch. “Zombie Reaganism” was a popular slur, and David Frum had a clever line where he called the philosophy “solutions from the 1980s to problems from the 1960s.” Today it’s become increasingly associated with former speaker of the House Paul Ryan for some reason, I guess because he was the last high-profile Republican to sincerely believe in all that before the complete Trumpist takeover of his party.

After Trump won in 2016 rallying against illegal immigrants and free trade deals but striking a defensive tone about social security, some conservative intellectuals naively hoped this agenda could be refined into a novel form of populist-conservatism based around entitlement-friendly state-guided industrial planning or whatever. Instead, as the years have gone on, it’s become obvious that Trump doesn’t really know or care if his various idiosyncratic fears and fixations add up to anything coherent, and he mostly sees the pursuit of elected office as a means of attaining glory for himself and an ability to crush his imagined enemies. Vindictive use of state power against the hated is the guiding spirit of Trumpism, and there are a great many targets in his sight, including immigrants, journalists, Marxists (broadly defined), and trans people. Trump’s “intellectuals,” to the extent they can be called that, are people like Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and VP-elect JD Vance, who are drawn to Trump primarily because they can see the usefulness of a tyrant who hates the same people they do. This cause might be labeled “conservative” out of charitable tradition, but it’s not, really.

Q. So do you still consider yourself a conservative, then?

A. Trump’s movement has open contempt for American institutions, given they have a tendency of criticizing him or otherwise holding him accountable for his actions — something he has never cared for. He and his common-cause allies therefore fantasize constantly and loudly about destroying, suspending, or radically remaking the great institutions of a free America and creating something new in their place, something that makes it easier to reward good, loyal Americans and punish the traitor/scum/vermin/enemy-of-the-people-Americans.

As I said on my anti-Trump livestream, I think it’s easy to make the case that Kamala Harris was the more “conservative” candidate, in the sense of the candidate who clearly wanted to conserve American institutions — the professionalized civil service, the free press, the rule of law, an apolitical armed forces, the constitution — rather than destroy them, or bend them to her personal whim. But this is a literal and dated definition.

In his first post-election column, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall described the American political system as being divided between “one civic democratic party and one populist autocratic party.” That strikes me as broadly correct. I identify with the forces fighting to preserve civic democracy. America is clearly entering a post-ideological era in which the split of the partisan divide is about different things now.

Q. What does this mean for Canada?

A. I’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming video.

As far as US-Canadian relations go, I suspect Canada will weather the storm because even an ultra-protectionist administration inevitably puts Canada in a different category than other countries when it comes to things like trade and tariffs. I think there’s plenty of reasons to suspect a Pierre Poilievre-led government will have a more functional relationship with Trump, simply because Trump’s handlers have probably convinced him to conceptualize the left-wing Trudeau as an extension of “the enemy at home” in a way he didn’t previously. It’s interesting to note that MP Jamil Jivani, who is likely to become a high-profile cabinet minister under Poilievre, was JD Vance’s roommate at Yale. I suspect this could play a large role in Pierre giving Jamil a job with some relevance to US-Canada relations.

As far as Canadian conservatism goes, I stand by something I said in a video I made earlier this year; the conservative movement in Canada does not have an intellectual core that exists independently of the one in the United States (as is the case with most things in Canada). In my other Trump video I quoted Josh Marshall saying some pessimistic things about the future of right-wing youth culture, and these things will also affect Canada — which is to say, their introduction to the political right, what it stands for and believes, will be heavily shaped by right-wing message boards and online influencers. That faction isn’t yet as strong in the Canadian Conservative Party as it is in the Republican Party, but theres no reason to suspect their influence will do anything but grow over time.

It’s important for a healthy democracy to have a principled, policy-focused party of the left and a principled, policy-focused party of the right. For now, Canada seems more committed to preserving this traditional ideal than the United States. This is something the left in Canada should be willing to concede, as tempting as it will be to paint Pierre as a terrifying Trump-in-waiting for partisan purposes.

Q. Did the Internet win this for Trump?

A. Because Trump won, his courting of the hyper-online vote certainly seems vindicated. Jeremiah Johnson wrote a good piece about this, where he concludes:

…I can’t help but think back to the 2000s and 2010s when people would dismissively say things like “The internet is not real life. Twitter is not real life. You need to log off and talk to real people.” If that was ever correct it’s certainly not any more. It’s almost more correct to say that people knocking on doors need to get off the street and get back on the internet. To compete in modern politics you must be fighting in online spaces. It’s more important to win Joe Rogan than it is to win James Mattis. It’s more important to get your hashtags trending than to knock on doors. Social media is now more real than real life, and the politicians who recognize that are the ones who will win.

It’s not like Kamala did no online stuff at all, but it does seem that Democratic Party culture is overall more dismissive than not about the relative importance of “traditional” in-person political organizing versus being highly visible online. This strikes me as a conclusion that’s heavily bound up in a sort of gauzy liberal sentimentality for the labor-coded aesthetics of physically “organizing” as an end unto itself, and it’s probably worth discarding. A challenge for Democrats, however, is that they probably have fewer natural allies among online influencers, given how many of the biggest ones are fairly openly right-wing at this point. This mirrors a problem an earlier generation of Democrats had with talk radio, which was also disproportionally right.

If we accept, as I said earlier, that the traditional party divide has now transcended the ideological right/left axis and become something new pitting the forces of Trumpist authoritarianism against the defense of traditional American institutions, then I think many creators like myself have to think seriously about what side of this divide we want our content to be explicitly supporting, and what we can do to make that support consequential. In the last two days I have spoken with many of my YouTuber buddies who seem freshly enthusiastic about creating content that is more overtly or deliberately motivated by the cause of uplifting classically American liberal values in the face of a hostile government. I find that encouraging, and hope it succeeds.

I am confident that over time appetites will grow for content that is neither Trumpist nor of the useless, nihilistic far-left variety that clearly contributed nothing of substance to the fight against a second Trump term. Trump getting back in the White House is depressing, but a good thing about getting older is that it makes you realize that politics is fluid, and things inevitably fall in and out of fashion.

People will tire of this.