Why I Complain More about Democrats than Republicans

Republicans are toddlers; Democrats are pre-teens

CONTENT WARNING: humour, and at times, sarcasm. Don’t get your panties in a twist.

As astute readers of Theo’s Take might have noticed, I have a big nit to pick with the Democrats, my preferred American political party, and with the American left more broadly.¹ In fact, some of those astute readers (my parents), are concerned that I’m becoming red-pilled or something, so I decided to write this to cover my bases.

For me, politics is a not a team sport where you cheer for your side no matter what and jeer at the opposing team. There are a few key things I care about, and I view the Democratic Party as a means to those ends.² But the party often does really silly stuff, like being corrupt, having mid economic policy, running on unpopular messaging, and supporting terrible foreign policy, so I complain about them. And I think the Republican Party is completely crazy and there’s not much I can do about it.

Republicans are toddlers

You know how parents shouldn’t really criticize their toddlers’ art? If your five-year-old comes back from kindergarten with a really ugly paper snowflake, you shouldn’t denigrate it or point out that the other kids made better snowflakes or mention that real snowflakes have six-fold rotational symmetry, not quadrilateral or octagonal symmetry. The poor kid can’t help it; they’re five. No matter how much criticism—supportive or disparaging—you give them, they’re still going to make terrible paper snowflakes.

That’s how I feel about Republican politicians.³⁴ When they’re in power, you can expect an unparalleled level of incompetence at best and nefariousness at worst. No matter how much you try to point it out, it just gets worse. Often, the angrier you get at them, the more petty and vindictive and unhinged they become. If you’re already sick of reading about Trump, feel free to skip to the next section.

Just in his first few weeks in office this time around, Trump tried to start a trade war with America’s closest ally and mused about annexing it, granted the unelected far-right conspiracy theorist/antisemitic oligarch Elon Musk access to the Treasury’s multi-trillion-dollar disbursement system (and anything else he wants), cut lifesaving international aid⁵ , began plans to deport millions of people (including sending tens of thousands of migrants to Guantánamo for internment), pulled out of the World Health Organization, purged the Center for Disease Control website of important medical information, and threatened military action against two U.S. allies if they don’t comply with his manifest destiny wishes. None of this is to mention that his insane clown posse of anti-vaxxers, authoritarian stooges, and Islamophobic, alcoholic war crime defenders are getting confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate to run the federal bureaucracy.

Trump pursued all of these endeavours with an authoritarian zeal and contempt for the Constitution. The Republican Party has giddily supported him through this as it will surely do so for the rest of his temper-tantrum presidency. As fellow substacker Glenn so deftly put it:

The Republican Party doesn’t just believe different things now than it did in the past; it barely believes anything at all. There’s the unifying principle of hating foreigners, but besides that, nothing. If you’re a cabinet secretary, you do whatever Trump wants or thinks is going to make him look best at a particular moment or generate the most money through petty corruption.

Even setting aside the most insane MAGA extremes of the Republican Party, I’m repulsed by the traditional GOP’s contempt for science, wacky economic theories, bonkers foreign policy, and opposition to social progress.

It’s not that fun

Just assembling this significantly shortened list of unbelievably deranged things was exhausting. I do not enjoy being a #Resistance lib. Obviously there’s a vindictive part of me that relishes enumerating the Republicans’ transgressions, but mostly I get annoyed.

Every day, Trump and the Republicans do ten scandals that would normally be career-ending offences for Democrats. The onslaught of stupidity never stops. Our politics has been consumed by people who care more about the name of the Gulf of Mexico or what pronouns you go by than whether or not hundreds of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa die.

Let’s collectively remind ourselves of this anecdote that will surely be forgotten under the heap of criminality and idiocy that constantly spews from the GOP spigot:

The official North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate got caught as a self-avowed Nazi because he stupidly left comments on a porn forum under the username he uses as his public Twitter handle. The GOP let him stay on the ticket, and he received well over two million votes.⁶ This is not a normal political party. The GOP is the filthy shower drain of America, collecting the most dishonest, gross, corrupt, stupid, mean, allegedly pedophilic, racist, and economically illiterate elites in the country.

Thinking and reading about this—let alone writing about it—is awful, and I try not to do it. I read the newspaper only to see what my favourite columnists are saying; I don’t want to read about the GOP’s latest gerrymandering scandal. I check Twitter to see if Ken Klippenstein has embarrassed any politicians lately and to catch up on debates about AI, never to stay up to date on the goings-on of Capitol Hill. I don’t want to write about the Republicans and Trump.⁷

What’s the use?

But above all else, my writing about Republicans would be useless. They don’t read my blog, and even if they did they wouldn’t be persuaded by my arguments. This is because the GOP’s behaviour is immutable. It is invariant in my model of politics, much like the speed of light in a vaccuum is a constant in physics. If you denigrate your toddler’s bad art it will not make their art get any better. Criticizing Republicans for being corrupt or incompetent does nothing because they can’t help it; it seems they’re stuck like that.

This blog is not the Official Ledger of Justice that writes about the evils of both political parties in proportion to how evil they are (because that would not be useful). I don’t even believe in this kind of justice, the kind that tries to add up blameworthiness and moral responsibility and then doles out blame and praise accordingly.

Not how I think about justice.

For me, something is good or just or worthwhile or praiseworthy if we expect it to have good consequences (i.e. make the world better), and by that standard criticizing Republicans is not worthwhile.⁸

What’s more, there’s already an army of liberal journalists and pundits out there cataloguing the GOP’s every move. I trust them to deal with all this BS so I can focus on more interesting things.

The Democrats are pre-teens

Now on the other hand, if my ten-year old got home from middle school with a terrible, ugly paper snowflake and presented it to me as an art project, I might be concerned. Aren’t you ten? Aren’t you capable of using scissors? Can you not look at what others did and try to follow along? Why are you so bad at this?

This is the Democrats.

I’ve written here and here and here about how Democrats often see the world in weird, wrong ways—they like to view our political opponents (GOP voters) as being motivated not by reasons and normal psychology but by bigotry and resentment. This mistake ends up backfiring by making Democrats fixate on castigating the right instead of achieving our policy goals.⁹ And I think the Democrats’ shift to the left on social issues (a.k.a. their embrace of identity politics) helped pave the way for a shockingly crazy strain of right-wingers to take power, which of course screws over Americans of every class, race, and gender (and screws over foreigners, too).¹⁰ Also, I think the people running the Democratic Party have tragically bought into the identity politics theory of how voters behave, which led them to treat minorities as monoliths, whose support can be taken for granted on account of their demographic information.¹¹

I’m not just concerned about the Democrats’ views on social issues; I think the party has also shifted worrisomely away from advocating for the interests of the poorest Americans.¹² This was mitigated somewhat by Joe Biden, whose domestic economic policy record is pretty good, IMHO.¹³ However, if I were in charge of setting economic policy for the Democrats, I would first pursue full employment.¹⁴ As part of this, I’d focus on investments in education and job retraining for communities left behind by neoliberalism and globalization (i.e. regions subject to foreign import penetration). Also I would ditch semi-redistributive policies like university debt forgiveness in favour of stronger labour policy and a fierce commitment to providing healthcare to all Americans. And I’d consider moving the tax burden from corporations to wealthy individuals or land value.

Relatedly, I think the Democratic Party is corrupt. It seems to me that billionaires, foreign interests, certain niche advocacy groups, and a small cluster of political elites have have outsize influence over the Democratic Party’s platform, its messaging, and whom it nominates. The last three Democratic presidential primaries haven’t really been democratic; rather the party establishment has been able to put its fingers on the scale. In the case of the 2024 election, Democratic voters were not even consulted on who their candidate would be. It seems to me that the Democrats keep running on policies and messaging that caters to a group of socially progressive, economically well-off elites who staff the party and all its affiliated organizations. Taking a look at campaign contributions and whom they come from can also give us a good idea of who’s influencing the party. I might also note that top Democrats are seriously ethically compromised by their conflicts of interest.¹⁵

Evil pre-teens

I’ve dedicated a good amount of space on this blog to trashing the Democratic Party’s foreign policy, which I think is terrible. This, in fact, is the issue I care most about. I would gladly vote for a genuine peacenik libertarian over a hawkish “progressive.”¹⁶ I think the Democrats support a foreign policy that is way too militaristic, interventionist, and revisionist.¹⁷ It is a foreign policy rooted in a false worldview that considers America to be the Good Guy and America’s “enemies” to be irrationally evil and bent on world domination. It’s a worldview rooted in predictable cognitive biases that afflict us all, and I’m really into digging up those cognitive biases so we can try to avoid falling prey to them. It’s also a worldview that allows for egregious violations of the most basic moral laws and straight-up law laws. The Democrats have funded the destruction of Gaza,¹⁸ about which the meticulous research group Airwars said the following:

By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.

The Democrats excoriated the International Criminal Court for doing its job and suppressed internal State Department reports that showed the Biden Administration was violating Americans law by sending military aid to IDF units that raped, tortured, and killed children and the elderly.

The Democrats have backed foreign interventions that are blatantly illegal under international law (Kosovo and Iraq, for example) and they consistently support maintaining an American troop presence in countries that don’t want those troops there (this violates international law, too). And of course the Democrats have given up whole-scale on the idea the Congress might have a smidgen of oversight on what the US military does; the ability to decide when and on whom we make war is reserved for one person.

This is the Democrats. Despite their fancy degrees, their belief in science, their trust in nerds at think tanks, and their ostensible commitment to making the world better rather than destroying everything, they bungle it all like at least 40% of the time. Thankfully, the people who read my blog are liberals, and I think some of them even have policy influence.

I enjoy critiquing the Democrats because I think it might have an impact one day. Lots of people disagree with me about this, and I like the idea that I might actually be changing their minds or at least helping them sharpen their critiques of my views.¹⁹

If you think mine is a worthwhile pursuit even if you disagree with me about this issue, I encourage you to share Theo’s Take to everyone who gets your emails and views your social media, which probably includes the NSA, thanks to the Democrats.

1. I am, despite my spelling preferences, American. I just live in Canada and think “armour” and “defence” look a lot cooler than “armor” and “defense.” And I love Canada with all my heart and am trying as hard as possible to be Canadian.

2. I do find politics to be intriguing, but I’m mainly here because I care about preventing the end of the world by minimizing nuclear, bio, climate, and AI risk; and I think the only way to do this is via international cooperation. And that will never happen until we vastly overhaul America’s dysfunctional foreign policy, which will never happen under a Republican administration because Republicans are crazy. Our only hope is to fix the Democrats’ messaging, candidates, and policy platform so they become electable, then reform their foreign policy once they’re in power. It’s a long shot.

3. I’m not trying to say GOP voters are crazy or incompetent or evil (though obviously I disagree with them about a lot—all my attacks are directed at the politicians themselves.

4. I wasn’t alive in the 1950s so I don’t really associate the Republicans anything other than MAGA and the neoconservatism, two very dumb things. (But I do like George W. Bush because he seems like a chill guy and he created PEPFAR, the greatest government program of all time.)

5. Or announced plans to cut? Or announced the end of USAID? But maybe there are certain programs that won’t be cut? It’s entirely unclear and that’s part of the problem. The future of PEPFAR, the greatest government program of all time, is in doubt and damage is already being done.

6. He lost, thankfully.

7. Notably, because I do enjoy complaining about the evils of Team Blue* and I’m not that interested in writing about the evils of Team Red, perhaps this means that Team Red is not actually my out-group and Team Blue is not actually my in-group. Rather my in-group is probably the based, high-decoupling readers of Astral Codex Ten, Richard Yetter Chappell, and Bob Wright’s Nonzero. What’s my out-group? People who don’t read my blog.

*I think I still have one foot in the door of Team Blue. I wince at the thought of my peers reading my blogs and thinking I’m some kind of reactionary anti-woke fanatic who doesn’t understand this his race and gender prevent him from ever understanding the severity of injustice in society. I mean this genuinely.

Actually, come to think of it, there’s a whole chunk of Team Bluers who dole out social recognition for complaining about the Democrats; I guess they’re my people.

8. So please keep in mind that my criticisms of Democrats apply to Republicans too, usually to a greater extent.

9. The above few paragraphs are a good example of this.

10. Kamala Harris thankfully steered clear of the identity politics stuff in 2024, but it seems that the extremes of wokeness from a few years ago got replayed over and over by right wing media, hurting the Democrats. Though some smart people have argued that wokeness didn’t matter much in the 2024 election, the data I’ve seen show that wokeness is super unpopular (as unpopular as socialism) and gets Republicans all in a fuss (they say wokeness is more threatening than global economic disruptions, as threatening as domestic terrorism, and nearly as threatening as Russia.)

11. This mistaken belief (that your race determines your political preferences) is what Tyler Austin Harper amusingly calls “blood magic.”

12. Insofar as I buy into the progressive views that billionaires don’t deserve all their wealth* and economic redistribution has some intrinsic benefits (i.e. because the marginal utility of a dollar increases vastly when it is transferred from a wealthy person to a poor person), I am a classic social democrat (still firmly on team capitalism). I generally think we should focus our redistribution on things that will expand the productive capacity of the economy in the long term (such as infrastructure and education) rather than pure redistribution for redistribution’s sake. But I also have an inkling that, on longtermist grounds, maximizing GDP is the most important thing to do—this might be completely compatible with left-wing economics). So far I’m unconvinced by lots conservative economic arguments in favour of totally free markets, but if I see some contravening empirical evidence I’m open to changing my mind.

* I view moral desert as purely an instrumental institution for encouraging effort. On determinist grounds, I don’t really think anyone deserves special treatment for their successes or punishment for their failures and transgressions; it’s just useful to pretend people do deserve stuff.

13. And I’m not talking about the chip war with China here.

14. I think the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment might be fake.

15. I’m jealous of Nancy Pelosi’s stock game.

16. And maybe in this way, my parents were right after all.

17. I also think Democratic support for dumb neocon wars may have also helped Trump win in 2016.

18. And let’s not forget Yemen!

19. Are my blogging and podcasting efforts actually changing anything? For the time being, probably no. But did my heroic debate on Israel-Palestine against New York Times columnist Pamela Paul cause the Times to consider her exit? I’ll let the historians decide. (Admittedly, my podcast with Paul aired eight months ago, so the causal link is weak at best).