{"id":2777,"date":"2016-06-07T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T23:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2777"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:20:29","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:20:29","slug":"daddy-why-didnt-you-blog-about-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2777","title":{"rendered":"Daddy, why didn’t you blog about Trump?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, Terry Tao, whose superb\u00a0blog typically focuses on things like gaps in the primes and finite-time blowup in PDEs, wrote an\u00a0unusual post<\/a>, arguing that virtually everyone knows Donald Trump is unqualified to be President, so\u00a0the challenge is “just” to make that fact common knowledge<\/a> (i.e., to ensure everyone knows everyone knows it, everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows it, etc).\u00a0 Tao’s post even included the pseudo-mathematical<\/p>\n

Proposition 1:<\/strong> The presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is not even remotely qualified to carry out the duties of the presidency of the United States of America<\/p>\n

together with some suggestions\u00a0for how this proposition might be “proven” (e.g., using Hillary’s recent San Diego speech<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In thus speaking out, Tao joins\u00a0Stephen Hawking, who recently\u00a0called<\/a> Trump “a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator.” \u00a0Now Ed Witten just needs to issue his<\/em> statement, and we’ll have a trifecta of “the three greatest geniuses.” \u00a0This shouldn’t be a stretch: Witten started his career<\/a> by campaigning for George McGovern, and has supported liberal causes for decades. \u00a0I’m not expecting<\/em> him to be seen\u00a0around Princeton sporting\u00a0a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding this site<\/a>, I don’t\u00a0belong on any list with Tao, Hawking, or Witten. \u00a0Nevertheless, friends have expressed surprise that\u00a0I’ve had almost nothing to\u00a0say on\u00a0Shtetl-Optimized<\/em>\u00a0about what’s already—regardless of what happens next—the most shocking US\u00a0political development of my life. \u00a0Of course, I’ve mined the subject for\u00a0humor. \u00a0When I gave the Strachey Lecture on “Quantum Supremacy”<\/a> on a recent visit to Oxford, I started out by asking whether I should disavow support from quantum supremacists, before\u00a0averring that\u00a0I needed to research the subject more. \u00a0(Get it? \u00a0I need to research it more?)<\/p>\n

I didn’t say more\u00a0because … well, what\u00a0could I possibly say that wasn’t being said 1010000<\/sup> other places on the Internet? \u00a0Shouldn’t some<\/em>\u00a0little corner of human discourse remain Trump-free, so that civilization has a base from which to rebuild after this is all behind us?<\/p>\n

Against\u00a0those considerations, I recently realized that there’s\u00a0an argument for speaking out, which goes as follows. \u00a0Suppose Trump actually wins (as of this writing,\u00a0Predictwise<\/a>\u00a0still gives him a\u00a0frighteningly-high 27% probability). \u00a0Suppose my family somehow survives whatever comes next, and one day my daughter Lily comes to me across the rubble of the post-thermonuclear hellscape and says,\u00a0“daddy, in the Good Days, the days before the War of the Small-Hands Insult, the days when there was plentiful food and water and Internet, didn’t you have what used to be called a ‘blog’? \u00a0Then why didn’t you speak out on this blog, why didn’t you do whatever tiny amount you could to\u00a0prevent this?” \u00a0So, alright, this post is my answer to her.<\/p>\n

Trump, famously, doesn’t even try to refute\u00a0the ubiquitous Hitler comparisons; instead he sneeringly invites them, for example with the\u00a0faux Nazi salutes<\/a>\u00a0at his rallies.\u00a0 Certainly with Trump, there’s the eerily familiar\u00a0sense of\u00a0how could this possibly\u00a0happen<\/em> in a modern country; and of a candidate winning not despite\u00a0but\u00a0because <\/em>of his open contempt for Enlightenment norms, his explicit\u00a0promises to elevate his will over the law.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I think\u00a0there’s a deep reason why Trump is not Hitler. \u00a0Namely, Hitler believed<\/em>\u00a0in something, had a purity of conviction. \u00a0Late in the war, when every available resource was desperately needed at the front, Hitler and his deputies still\u00a0insisted\u00a0that scarce trains be used to transport\u00a0Jews to the death camps. \u00a0To me, that shows some real dedication. \u00a0I’m not convinced that an examination of Trump’s long career in bullshit artistry, or of his unhinged statements today, shows a similar dedication to any cause beyond his own self-aggrandizement.<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0as many others have pointed out, “not being Hitler” is sort\u00a0of a low bar<\/em> for a President of the United States. \u00a0If Trump were “merely” a Pinochet or\u00a0Putin level of badness, I’d still see\u00a0his election as a\u00a0calamity for the US\u00a0and the world—like, maybe an order of magnitude\u00a0worse than the in-retrospect-mini-calamity of Bush’s election in 2000.<\/p>\n

Since Tao was criticized for not explicitly listing\u00a0his reasons why Trump is unqualified, let me now give\u00a0my own top ten—any one of which, in a sane world, I think\u00a0would immediately\u00a0disqualify Trump from presidential consideration. \u00a0To maximize the list’s appeal, I’ll restrict myself entirely\u00a0to reasons that are about global\u00a0security and the future of democratic norms, and not about which people or groups Trump hurled disgustingly unpresidential insults at (though obviously there’s also that).<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. He’s shown contempt for the First Amendment, by saying “libel laws should be opened up”<\/a> to let him sue\u00a0journalists who criticize him.<\/li>\n
  2. He’s shown contempt for an independent judiciary, and even lack of comprehension<\/a> of the judiciary’s role in the US legal system.<\/li>\n
  3. He’s proposed\u00a0a “temporary ban” on Muslims entering the US. \u00a0Even setting aside the moral and utilitarian costs, such a plan couldn’t possibly be implemented\u00a0without giving religion an explicit role in the US\u00a0legal system that the Constitution was largely written to prevent it from having.<\/li>\n
  4. He’s advocated ordering the military<\/a> to\u00a0murder the families of terrorists—the\u00a0sort of thing\u00a0that could\u00a0precipitate a coup d’\u00e9tat if the military followed its own rules and refused.<\/li>\n
  5. He’s refused<\/a> to rule out the tactical first use of nuclear weapons against ISIS.<\/li>\n
  6. He’s proposed walking away from the US’s defense alliances, which would probably\u00a0force\u00a0Japan, South Korea, and other countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals\u00a0and set off a new round of nuclear proliferation.<\/li>\n
  7. He says that the\u00a0national debt could be “paid back at a discount”<\/a>—implicitly treating the US government\u00a0like a failed casino project, and reneging on Alexander Hamilton’s principle (which has stood since the Revolutionary War, and helps maintain\u00a0the world’s economic stability) that US credit is ironclad.<\/li>\n
  8. He’s repeatedly expressed admiration for autocrats, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, as well as for the Chinese government’s decision to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests by arresting and killing thousands of people.<\/li>\n
  9. He’s expressed the\u00a0desire\u00a0to see people who protest his rallies\u00a0“roughed up.”<\/a><\/li>\n
  10. He said that, not only would he walk away from the Paris accords, but the entire concept of\u00a0global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Would Trump moderate his\u00a0insane “policies” once elected? \u00a0I don’t know, but I’d say that electing someone who promises to ignore the rule of law, in the hope that they don’t really mean it, has one of the worst track records of any idea in human history<\/em>. \u00a0Like, I acknowledge that a Trump presidency has a wide distribution over possible badnesses: whereas a Ted Cruz presidency would be pretty much a point distribution concentrated on “very\u00a0bad,” a Trump presidency would have\u00a0appreciable\u00a0probability mass on “less bad than Cruz,” but also appreciable mass on\u00a0“doesn’t even fit on the badness chart.”<\/p>\n

    Anyway, for these reasons and others, Shtetl-Optimized<\/em> unhesitatingly endorses Hillary Clinton for president—and indeed,\u00a0would continue to endorse Hillary if her next policy position was “eliminate all quantum computing research, except for that aiming to prove NP\u2286BQP using D-Wave machines.”<\/p>\n

    Even so, there’s one crucial point on which I dissent from the consensus of my liberal friends. \u00a0Namely, my friends and colleagues constantly describe the rise of Trump as “incomprehensible”—or at best, as comprehensible only\u00a0in terms of\u00a0the US\u00a0being full of racist, xenophobic redneck scumbags who were driven to shrieking rage<\/a> by a black guy\u00a0being elected president. \u00a0Which—OK, that’s one aspect\u00a0of it, but it’s as if any attempt to dig\u00a0deeper, to understand the roots of Trump’s appeal, if only to figure out how to defeat\u00a0him<\/em>, risks “someone mistaking you for the enemy.”<\/p>\n

    I remember watching the now-famous debate<\/a> in August, where Megyn Kelly confronted Trump with his long\u00a0history of\u00a0derogatory comments about women, and\u00a0Trump replied with a smirk, falsely\u00a0claiming\u00a0that his\u00a0comments were “only [about] Rosie O’Donnell”—bringing down the house (both men and women) in laughter. \u00a0At that point, something clicked; I got it<\/em>. \u00a0From then on, Trump’s continuing rise often\u00a0scared or depressed me, but much\u00a0less\u00a0about it surprised me.<\/p>\n

    I think\u00a0people support Trump for the same reason why\u00a0second-graders support the\u00a0class clown who calls the teacher a fart-brain to her face. \u00a0It’s not that the class\u00a0literally agrees<\/em>\u00a0that the teacher’s cranium is\u00a0filled with\u00a0intestinal gases, or considers that an important question to raise. \u00a0It’s simply\u00a0that\u00a0the clown had the guts\u00a0to stand up to this scolding authority\u00a0figure who presumes to tell the class every day what they are and aren’t allowed to\u00a0think. \u00a0(As far as I can tell, this has also been the central operating principle of right-wing shock artists over the decades,\u00a0from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter to Milo Yiannopoulos.)<\/p>\n

    Support for\u00a0this thesis comes from r\/The_Donald<\/a>, the main\u00a0online clearinghouse for Trump supporters. \u00a0Spend some time\u00a0there, and many of the themes will be instantly\u00a0recognizable if you’ve followed\u00a0the interminable controversies about campus political correctness over the last few decades. \u00a0Perhaps\u00a0the most popular\u00a0theme is the self-referential one, of\u00a0“refusing to be silenced” by the censorious Social Justice Warriors. \u00a0Trump supporters, for example, gleefully share articles\u00a0about the university administrators and students who’ve treated “Trump 2016”\u00a0and “Make America Great Again” chalked on\u00a0campus sidewalks as hate crimes<\/a> to be investigated and punished.<\/p>\n

    (Every time I read such a thing, I want to yell at\u00a0the administrators and students involved: how can\u00a0you not see<\/em> that you’re playing directly into the other side’s\u00a0narrative, giving them the PR bonanza of their dreams? \u00a0Actually, I’ve felt the same way about many left-wing campus\u00a0antics since I was a teenager.)<\/p>\n

    I explained\u00a0earlier how abysmally\u00a0I think Trump comes across\u00a0under the cold\u00a0light of reason. \u00a0But how does he look to my inner five-year-old, or my inner self-serving orangutan? \u00a0Well, Trump’s campaign has<\/em><\/a> attracted some noxious\u00a0anti-Semites, who surely\u00a0want me dead for that<\/em> reason, but I see little\u00a0indication that Trump himself, or most\u00a0of his supporters, feel similarly. \u00a0I can’t say that they’ve said or done anything\u00a0to threaten me personally.<\/p>\n

    Meanwhile, many of the social-justice types\u00a0who are Trump’s ideological opposites\u00a0did<\/em> try to destroy my life—and not because I hurt anyone, tried to hurt\u00a0anyone, or said anything false, but just\u00a0because I went slightly outside their\u00a0Overton Window<\/a> while trying to foster empathy and dialogue and articulate\u00a0something true. \u00a0And having spent a year and a half reading their shaming attacks, on Twitter, Tumblr, Metafilter, etc., I’m well-aware\u00a0that many of them\u00a0will try\u00a0again to destroy\u00a0me if they ever see an\u00a0opportunity.<\/p>\n

    So on the purely personal<\/em> level, you might say, I have a hundred\u00a0times more reason to fear Amanda Marcotte than to fear Donald Trump, even though Trump might become the next Commander-in-Chief (!?), while Marcotte will never become more than a clickbait writer. \u00a0And you might add: if even a nerdy academic in Cambridge, MA, who’s supported\u00a0gay rights and environmentalism and Democrats his whole\u00a0life, is capable of feeling a twinge of vicarious satisfaction\u00a0when Trump thumbs his nose at the social-justice bullies, then how much the more<\/em>\u00a0might a\u00a0“middle\u00a0American” feel that way? \u00a0Say, someone\u00a0who worked his whole life to support a\u00a0family, then lost his job at the plant, and who’s never experienced anything but\u00a0derision, contempt, and accusations of unexamined white male privilege from university-educated coastal elites?<\/p>\n

    The truth\u00a0is, there’s a\u00a0movement\u00a0that’s very effectively wielded social media to remake the public face of progressive\u00a0activism—to the point where today, progressivism could strike an outside observer as being less about stopping climate change, raising the minimum wage, or investing in public transit than simply about ruining the lives of Brendan Eich and Matt Taylor and Tim Hunt and Erika Christakis and Dongle Guy and Elevator Guy and anyone else who tells the wrong joke, wears the wrong shirt, or sends the wrong email. \u00a0It strikes me that this movement never understood the extent to which progressive social values were already winning<\/em>, with no need for this sort of vindictiveness. \u00a0It’s insisted instead on treating its vanquished culture-war enemies as shortsightedly as the Allies treated the Germans at Versailles.<\/p>\n

    So yes, I do think (as Bill Maher also\u00a0said<\/a>, before summarily\u00a0reversing<\/a> himself) that the bullying wing of the social-justice left bears at least some minor, indirect responsibility\u00a0for the rise of Trump. \u00a0If you demonstrate\u00a0enough times that even people who are\u00a0trying\u00a0to be decent\u00a0will\u00a0still get\u00a0fired, jeered at, and publicly shamed over the tiniest ideological misstep, then eventually some of those who you’ve frightened might turn toward a demagogue who’s incapable of shame.<\/p>\n

    But OK, even if true, this\u00a0is water under the bridge. \u00a0The question now\u00a0is: how do we make sure that\u00a0the ~30% probability of a Trump takeover of American democracy goes toward 0%? \u00a0I feel like, in understanding\u00a0the emotional legitimacy of some of the Trump supporters’ anger, I’ve cleared a nontrivial Step One in figuring out how to counter him—but I’m still missing Steps Two and Three!<\/p>\n

    In the weeks leading to the 2000 election, I ran a website called “In Defense of NaderTrading.” \u00a0The purpose of the site was to encourage Ralph Nader supporters\u00a0who lived in swing states, like Florida, to vote for Al Gore, and to arrange for Gore supporters who lived in “safe” states, like Massachusetts or Texas, to vote for Nader on their behalf. \u00a0I saw correctly that this election would be razor-close (though of course I didn’t know how<\/em> close), that a Bush victory would be a disaster for the world (though I didn’t know exactly how), and that almost\u00a0any<\/em> novel idea—NaderTrading would do—was worth a try. \u00a0My site probably played a role in\u00a0a\u00a0few hundred vote swaps,\u00a0including some\u00a0in Florida. \u00a0I think constantly about the fact that we only needed 538 more, out of ~100,000 Floridian Nader voters, to change history.<\/p>\n

    Is there any<\/em>\u00a0idea that shows similar promise for defeating Trump, as NaderTrading did for defeating Bush in 2000? \u00a0Here are the four main things I’ve come across:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Terry Tao’s proposal<\/a>: All the respected people\u00a0who think Trump is gobsmackingly unqualified (even, or especially, “normally apolitical” people) should come out and say so publicly. \u00a0My response: absolutely, they should, but I’m unsure if it will help much, given that it hasn’t yet.<\/li>\n
    2. Paul Graham’s proposal<\/a>: Democrats need to turn Trump’s name-calling and other childish antics against him. \u00a0E.g., if voters love Trump’s referring to Rubio as “Little Marco,” Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” etc., then why doesn’t Hillary start referring to “Baby Donald” or “Toddler Trump,” having another temper tantrum for which he needs a pacifier? \u00a0My response: again I’m skeptical, since Trump has already shown an\u00a0uncanny ability to absorb all ridicule and shaming without injury, like the giant saucers in Independence Day<\/em>.<\/li>\n
    3. Trump needs to be baited into more social-media wars that make him look petty and unpresidential. \u00a0My response: while it’s obvious\u00a0by now that he can<\/em> be so baited, it’s unfortunately far from obvious whether this sort of thing hurts him.<\/li>\n
    4. Hillary should hold debates against the libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson<\/a>, thereby helping to shift conservative votes from Trump to Johnson, and also making an implicit statement that\u00a0Johnson, not Trump,\u00a0is\u00a0her legitimate conservative opposition. \u00a0My response: this is maybe<\/em> the most interesting idea I’ve heard (besides the obvious one, of the so-called\u00a0“NeverTrump” Republicans bolting to start a new party—which, alas, it looks less and less likely that they’re going to do).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      If you have additional ideas, feel free to share them in the comments! \u00a0As you work\u00a0it out, here’s my promise to you. \u00a0Just like I dropped my\u00a0research in 2000 to work on NaderTrading, so too over the next five months, I’ll do anything<\/em> legal if I become\u00a0convinced that it draws on my comparative advantage, and has a non-negligible probability of helping to ensure\u00a0Hillary’s victory and Trump’s defeat. \u00a0Even if it involved, like, working with Amanda Marcotte or something.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      A few days ago, Terry Tao, whose superb\u00a0blog typically focuses on things like gaps in the primes and finite-time blowup in PDEs, wrote an\u00a0unusual post, arguing that virtually everyone knows Donald Trump is unqualified to be President, so\u00a0the challenge is “just” to make that fact common knowledge (i.e., to ensure everyone knows everyone knows it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2777"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2812,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions\/2812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}