[throwaway82388]

There are only two sides in the culture war. Any free-thinking criticism of one side places you in or aligns you with the opposition.

“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.

Paul Krugman wrote recently that Elon Musk has “gone full MAGA.” The press will tell you what they can get away with. And right-thinking readers will uncritically accept it, for the most part. Trump was good for news traffic. My guess is that Musk is similarly good for business, judging on how many journalists seem to be on the Elon beat. I expect to read and hear a lot more of this for as long as that remains true.

[chitowneats]

> Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.

The degree to which this has occurred, across a wide range of issues, is still stunning to me.

[Apocryphon]

Not really. The Bush administration accelerated the polarization of post-Cold War American public culture, which the Obama presidency failed to truly heal. It’s hard to be stunned when everything is progressing (or rather regressing) into tribalism and atomization as it has been for decades, just louder and more obnoxiously.

[Apocryphon]

Musk, of course, is a typical Californian ideology tech libertarian industrialist who has now hitched his course to anti-woke culture war baiting and social media free speech pearl-clutching.

But there is something to be said about a Trumpian style to public behavior. Maybe it’s just social media demagoguery. Tactical trolling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkvvAQxxo_0

Musk, like other celebrity public figures on social media who make a lot of vapid grandiose statements and then flame out when challenged, are simply operating in the same style.

It’s funny you mentioned Bush, because growing up during his presidency, when terms like “reality-based community” and “truthiness” were coined, I never felt that Trump was a radically new phenomenon. He was Bush except louder - with less subtext.

[throwaway82388]

I’d describe Trump and Musk as similarly adapted to the attention economy. But it is a similarity of style, as you said, and not necessarily politics.

While Bush II was far from the inventor of executive dissimulation, his administration did have a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with the truth. But truthiness was coined by Colbert, a brilliant critic of that administration, to describe things that aren’t true but feel true. It’s regrettable, but increasingly over the last five or six years, that term could be applied with similar frequency to claims made on either side of the aisle.

[klqrt]

Bush comes from a dynasty of establishment bureaucrats, is a neocon, neoliberal and started a war under the false pretense of the presence of WMD in Iraq.

Trump is isolationist (but didn't push through his policies), didn't start a war and would probably have prevented the Ukraine war had he still been president. Yes, without further loss of territories!

There are no similarities at all. But no-more-mean-tweets is all that matters for the $250,000 per year SV chickenhawks. Others will go to war for them.