What’s halfway between 1 and 9?
The base 10 number system is the counting system we are familiar with. We have 10 fingers, so we count up to 10 before moving to the next decimal place. It’s so intuitive that we don’t even think of it any other way.
But if you go to parts of the world where the local tribes haven't been absorbed into the global culture, you’ll notice alternate ways of counting. For example, if you ask the Mundurucu Amazonians: What’s the halfway point between 1 and 9? you get an interesting answer.
The answer that most of us would give is 5. The Mundurucu answer is 3.
It sounds illogical to us, but actually it points to a surprisingly sophisticated way of thinking. Take the numbers 1, 3, and 9. Let’s just say I rewrote it like this:
Under this framing, 3 is indeed the halfway point between 1 and 9.
In many places, it actually doesn’t help to think about things in a linear fashion. For example, we use an alternate counting system when dealing with earthquakes; a magnitude 7 earthquake is actually 10 times more powerful than a magnitude 6 earthquake.
This scale is used in many places. The decibels of noise a device makes, the spread of viruses throughout a population, the efficacy of various pharmaceuticals.
My argument is this:
Politics is also one of these places.
Oh no my norm has been violated
Going back at least a decade now, one of the most consistent criticisms that I see of Donald Trump is the fact that he “violates norms” — this idea that his decisions and behaviors are so far beyond what a “regular” politician says and does.
This framing is known as the “Overton window.” The concept has existed for the better part of a century, although it’s become a favorite term by left-wing political pundits. They regularly decry how much of the “right wing” is “fringe” and falls so far beyond the Overton window.
They fail to acknowledge a very obvious yet condemning question:
Who created that Overton window in the first place?
The answer is simple: the media. Specifically, the left-wing media. They implicitly see themselves as having “the average viewpoint” — and so any disagreement inherently gets classified as “fringe.” The problem is that they’ve alienated so many people that the fringe is now the majority.
When these people talk about how Trump violates all these norms, they are not condemning Trump. They are condemning themselves. In many ways, Trump’s political tactics are no different than previous administrations; he simply moved up one level on the Richter scale.
Under a typical linear counting system, he indeed stands in a very different place than the majority of politicians, but if you use the same counting system as the Mundurucu tribes, it becomes easy to see that he’s using the same formula as anybody else who wants to take office. He just took the next logical step.
This is the fundamental reason why the majority of criticisms against him don’t land.
It’s easiest to see this demonstrated by a number of examples
The left wing claims Trump is a racist, but it was Biden who said “vote for me or you’re not black.“ Trump has an immigrant wife, and JD Vance‘s wife is Indian. There’s also the inconvenient fact that every single ethnic minority shifted in favor of Trump.
The left wing claims that Trump is only going to help the billionaire class. Sure, he’s working closely with Elon, but it was the Democrats who got the majority of funding from billionaires.
The left wing claims that Trump has bad financial policies. Kamala got nearly twice as much funding for her campaign, and somehow that campaign is now in debt. She spent nearly $100,000 re-creating the “Call Her Daddy” studio in the White House. Aside from this, it’s a fact that Democrat run cities spend gargantuan amounts of money on infrastructure while achieving absolutely nothing.
The left wing claims that Trump is bad at economics. And yet, for the last 4 years, inflation has been skyrocketing, and the democrat government has been telling people that everything's fine. In fact, they've been doing a victory lap on how well they handled inflation compared to other countries. Somehow they don't understand that “doing less shitty than everybody else” isn't the same thing as doing a good job.
The left wing claims that Trump is supposedly antagonistic to other countries with his rhetoric. And yet, he has proposed Tulsi Gabbard to his cabinet, whereas Kamala sought the endorsement of Liz Cheney, daughter to one of the most hawkish people in the history of American politics.
The left-wing claims that Trump doesn’t care about the environment. In his proposed cabinet is Robert F Kennedy Junior, a man who has been campaigning for the environment for the better part of his political career. Oh, and he also has the CEO of the largest electric car company in the department of government efficiency.
The left wing claims that Trump hates women. Anyone with eyes can see that Ivanka is his favorite child.
The left wing claims that Trump is a liar. As opposed to what? The other politicians who are so honest about everything they do? Clinton lied to the American people by saying that the NAFTA agreement was going to benefit the working class. Bush lied to the American people by falsely claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Obama continued that lie. Even throughout the Trump campaign, there have been many conspiracy theories leveled against him, such as his comments about “good people on both sides” and the idea that he’s a Russian agent.
The left claims that Trump is a sociopath. Does anybody believe that most power seeking politicians have normal personality traits? It's widely understood that the majority of executives at Fortune 500 companies exhibit higher Dark Triad personality traits. If anything, being a sociopath has served to his benefit; he was nearly assassinated by the narrowest of margins, and as far as I can tell he seems to be suffering no mental or psychological damage from this.
The left wing claims that Trump is trying to undermine democracy. This is the same party that has systematically shut out Bernie Sanders from making it to the general election. Anybody who doesn't follow the traditional democratic way of thinking gets shunned. It was Bernie in 2016, Yang in 2020, as well as Gabbard. RFK was also primary’d, and Dean Phillips has basically sacrificed all of his political capital to point out that Joe Biden was mentally deteriorating before it was cool.
The left claims that Trump is anti-science. This is coming from the party that refused to acknowledge that covid was largely not going to be a problem for healthy people under the age of 40. This is coming from the party that told us that 82-year-old Joe Biden was as “sharp as a tack”. This is coming from the party that refuses to acknowledge any sort of trade-off between the well-being of female athletes when competing against trans women.
You’re bad men, but you’re our bad men.
In all of the scenarios above, the left wing has tried to paint Donald Trump as this unprecedented anomaly. And of course, if you’re using a base 10 counting system, using your fingers to add and subtract everything, then you would be correct.
But underneath the hood, it’s the exact same algorithm. It’s just a Richter scale, and from this point of view, he just took the next logical step.
At no point in this post have I actually attempted to defend Trump, both as a politician or a person. If you think any of this is a tacit endorsement of his proposed administration, then you’ve missed the point.
Trump is the human manifestation of the Broken Windows Theory. In criminology, this theory states that visible signs of crime and disorder in a community can lead to more crime and disorder. Except that the window that he has broken is the Overton window.
He has exposed the fact that these norms, these supposedly sacred norms that he goes around violating, never existed in the first place. Obama was against gay marriage, and Kamala spent a good portion of her career prosecuting criminals for possession of weed. And it was all considered fine, as long as the regular array of donors were getting their payout.
And this is the thing that people like Ezra Klein and the New York Times repeatedly fail to understand. Recently, Trump has appointed a number of unusual people to his cabinet, and these people keep crying out the same refrain. “Look at this shocking thing that Donald Trump has done! Isn’t it shocking?!”
It honestly boggles my mind that these people call themselves political analysts. No, none of this is shocking. Elon is part of “Goth MAGA”. A 58 year old Mike Tyson just got his ass kicked by a shitty youtuber. North Koreans have been shipped over to Russia, only to get immediately addicted to porn. The government is having serious discussions about aliens. A 14 year old boy killed himself because AI Daenerys fucking Targaryen told him to.
If Donald Trump nominated Doja Cat to the fucking Supreme Court I wouldn't be surprised at this point.
Because at the end of the day, Donald Trump is just fighting fire with fire.
It’s reminiscent to this particular scene in Peaky Blinders. The main character, Tommy Shelby, isn’t exactly a paragon of morality — but everybody’s rooting for him because he is the familiar face.
“You’re bad men, but you're our bad men.”
And the other bad men are crying about it.
The Overton window is gone. America has collectively picked up their stones and shattered the glass of this window into a thousand tiny pieces.