Notes on doomerism

I’m going to go a bit meta here, and talk about the LGM Party Line in regard to, among other things, Trump’s chances of being re-elected.

First of all, there is of course no LGM party line on this or any other question, with the possible exception of the axiom that vodka is the mind killer, and cannot be the main ingredient in a legitimate Martini.

Second, there’s an odd meme or trope or something in our commentariat that the “front pagers” all think Trump is going to win, that we’re all a bunch of doom junkies, etc., and that this is ridiculous because “obviously” Trump has very little or almost literally no chance of winning because of this or that reason, usually Dobbs + Biden getting seven million more votes in 2020.

The following is my view, which I want to clarify because I’ve argued that being a doom junkie is objectively pro-fascist, and none of us want to be that, except maybe the 80 or so million of our fellow citizens who will vote for Trump is November.

Doomerism is marked by:

(1) A belief that pretty much everything is terrible, and at least in many respects worse than it used to be. That’s why its a key buttress of what could be called fascist nostalgia for the Golden Age.

(2) A belief that the future is likely to be even worse.

(3) A nihilistic indifference to distinctions (“Both parties are impossibly corrupt and morally compromised” being a typical example of this kind of thinking).

The belief, for example, that Trump is very likely or practically certain to be re-elected is, in my view, a classic symptom of the doomerist mentality, and I certainly think such a belief is deeply mistaken, based on the current evidence.

However.

There seems to be an over-reaction on a part of some the LGM commentariat to that mistake, in the form of wildly over-optimistic assertions that Trump has very little or almost no chance of being re-elected. In my view, given the current structure of American politics, it would be close to impossible for any major party presidential nominee to have less than a 25% or 30% chance of winning the election, from the perspective of January of the election year. In fact I think that’s a pretty good estimate of Trump’s current chances, which means that he’s about as bad a candidate as the GOP could pick from a competitive perspective. At the same time, those odds are and should be terrifying, because a 25% chance of an apocalyptic catastrophe is much worse than an 80% chance of a moderately bad outcome, in terms of risk probabilities.

So there’s no contradiction at all between agreeing that Trump’s chances of re-election are probably a good bit under 50%, and emphasizing that this election year represents a genuine crisis for the continuation of liberal democracy in this country. That’s not doomerism — it’s just an acknowledgement of where we are as a country at the moment.