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Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
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6 Jan, 9 tweets, 2 min read
It's very common to say, "Trump is the symptom, not the cause," and I think I've even said it myself a few times, but I wonder if that's true. I wonder if that's something we tell ourselves because just as it's unbearable to think a nincompoop like Princip could have started WW1,
it's unbearable to think a buffoon like Trump could have caused so much damage to a great superpower.
But I think it may well be possible that Trump was a cause. Had he not run for president, one of the other candidates would have won the GOP primary,
and while they've all *in retrospect* shown themselves willing to follow Trump right off a cliff, not one of them--at the time--seemed vastly aberrant or committed to undermining critical American traditions. Without Trump, very little of what's ensued would have happened.
And in many ways, Trump won the primary because he was a famous guy who'd been on people's television for years. If he hadn't entered the race, would we have had a populist uprising? Maybe--but the only other candidate who was offering one was Bernie Sanders.
And I don't think he could have been elected. That Trump was a elected was a very narrow thing, almost a fluke. If Trump was merely a symptom, he wasn't a symptom of anything that *necessarily* leads to a Trump.
The same symptoms could have led to the election of an effective reformer who had a great presidency, and we would have been perfectly satisfied with this, as a historical explanation.
The Great Man theory of history has long been unfashionable, but I think Trump actually confirms it more than he disproves it. What's happened since 2016 wasn't overdetermined.
We look, in retrospect, for explanations that satisfy us more deeply than, "Trump, weirdly, appealed to a lot of people." So we say, "Trump was inevitable, somehow, because of the China shock, demographic change, the financial crisis, or some other deep pathology in US life."
In other words, it would have ended up like this even if Trump had never been born.

But I'm not sure that's true. Maybe it mostly came down to the bad luck that he was born.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
6 Jan
If you know anyone who was swayed by Malone's obscenely mendacious appearance on @joerogan @joeroganhq, and if he or she isn't willing to look at the data in written form, you can show him or her this video.

But I'm deeply frustrated.
During this pandemic, a significant stream of anti-vax bullshit--and it is absolute, murderous horseshit--has come from Malone, @BretWeinstein, Steve Kirsh, Pierre Kory, and half a dozen other figures whom we see making these claims over and over again.
Every time, someone (many people) write articles and make videos in response, patiently explaining that the things they're saying aren't true, and are in fact very dangerously wrong.

But they don't stop.

They're not good faith actors. They're not merely mistaken.
Read 13 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
6 Jan
I think it's entirely plausible that the vast majority of America is as cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, and basically decent as it's always been. But there *is* a civil war on Twitter (i.e., among our elites) and in our useless government.
Historically, that's been enough to cause civil wars. Think about, say, the English civil war. And we also have an unusually violent and well-armed society. I would submit that instead of dismissing this as bullshit, we should consider it a warning:
That a spate of such articles have been published of late means that there's an appetite for reading them. No one wants to read about something that basically sounds preposterous to them. These wouldn't have been published in, say, 1989.
Read 4 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
5 Jan
Happy New Year — Or Maybe Not cepa.org/happy-new-year…
"It is not just Ukraine’s future at stake. It’s ours. That’s what Western leaders are mostly failing to grasp ... " excellent piece by @edwardlucas.
Though I'm not sure the biggest factor is the rise of China. I'd rank "failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis in 2008, political polarisation, and the botched response to Covid" above that.
Above all, this is about morale and confidence. The West, and the US in particular, is demoralized and unsure of itself. And not for no reason! We urgently need to fix a great many serious problems.
Read 4 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
5 Jan
This point is very, very obvious. So it's astonishing how many in the West will parrot Moscow's argument that NATO threatens Russia. You have to *want* to believe that the West is always wrong and its adversaries are always right.
Or perhaps it's more subtle than that. Perhaps you have to be desperate to believe that we have more control over this situation than we do. If a conflict is our fault, after all, we can just stop being the aggressor and voilà--no conflict.
If you have an implacable adversary, however, he is by definition implacable, and thus you can't make the problem go away.

No one in the West wants conflict with Russia. But Russia wants conflict with us. This is disagreeable and frightening.
Read 4 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
1 Jan
I woke up today with an (atypical) desire to make New Year's resolutions. I don't believe in them, usually--if you're going to resolve to do something, I usually think, just get on with things and do it--but for some reason, I woke up in a reforming zeal. Thus my 2022 vows:
1. This apartment is a constant, low-level pigsty. I resolve to keep it cleaner. Particularly, I resolve to take out the garbage promptly. I tend to avoid this because the garbage bins in my building are in my basement, and my apartment is a 5th-story walkup.
What's more, the lights in the basement are on a very short timer. If you get caught down there when they go off, you swiftly imagine you'll never find your way out and they won't find your body until the rats have gnawed every last bit of flesh off of you.
Read 9 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
30 Dec 21
In October 2020, Cutler et al. estimated that when all was said and done, the pandemic would cost the US 16 trillion dollars. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…. This estimate, they said, was "optimistic." And indeed it was.
The death/morbidity toll now looks to be much higher than they expected. Using their methodology--which is rough, but reasonable--I think they'd have to revise the cost up considerably. So we're probably talking about $20, 21 trillion.
(When you get into numbers like this, an error of one or two trillion doesn't seem so huge. But remember, these are *trillions.* The rounding error here is the cost of the whole war in Afghanistan.)
Read 8 tweets

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