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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Reasons for hope in these bleak times [1]

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Date: 2023-12-06

Greg Sargent/The Washington Post:

But certain versions of this argument have grown seriously problematic. It’s sometimes said that our institutions and civic culture have withered so much that resistance to Trumpian tyranny would be incapacitated, rendering its onset all but inevitable.

By now, it’s hard to deny that Trump has a narrow but plausible path to authoritarian rule in the United States. Polls show he could well win next year’s election. Trump allies are openly developing an elaborate blueprint to transform a second term into full-blown autocracy. Prominent columnists have demonstrated in great detail how it might succeed.

Are you afraid of a Donald Trump dictatorship? Well, know this: The only thing you have to fear is fear of Tyrannus Trumpus itself.

Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll:

Fewer young Americans plan on voting in 2024; most of the decline comes from young Republican and independent voters.

Biden up 24 over Trump with 18-29 year old likely voters in the gold standard youth poll. All those November polls with Biden single digit youth leads need to be lit on fire and dismissed from serious discourse. cc @Victorshi2020 https://t.co/HTC1Ud9Tah

Noah Smith/”Noahpinion” on Substack:

Vibes vs. data

It's asymmetric warfare out there.

Basically, the Biden supporters are right; the U.S. economy is truly excellent right now. Inflation looks beat, everyone has a job, incomes and wealth are rising, and so on. But on the other hand, I can’t command people to simply stop being mad about the inflation that reduced their purchasing power back in 2021-22. People care about what they care about.

At the same time, though, I think it’s possible for negative narratives about the economy to take hold among the general populace and distort people’s understanding of what’s actually going on. For example, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times recently found that consumer sentiment closely tracks real economic indicators in other countries, but has diverged in America since 2020…

Now this could be because Americans simply care about different things than Europeans; we might simply have started to really really hate interest rates since 2021, while Europeans didn’t. But a simpler explanation is that Americans’ negative sentiment is due to something other than economic indicators. And it’s possible that that “something” is a negative narrative — i.e., vibes.

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