Reviewing the Amy Wax and Nathan Cofnas "Debate"

a passionate plea for political reorientation.

I just watched Nathan Cofnas and Amy Wax go back and forth. If I had to give their “debate” a topic, it would be, “can the Trump movement be salvaged?”

Amy affirmed not just the possibility of this salvation, but the necessity: there is no other way but through Trump. However, she didn’t show the way. Instead, she expressed frustration with Nathan for not putting enough brainpower into saving Trump from himself — a mighty burden indeed.

Nathan said “no.” The Trump movement is a dumpster fire. Even if it makes some progress on DEI or affirmative action, all this progress will be covered in the sewage of his terrible mistakes. The guilt by association will carry Trump’s stench for years to come, prejudicing intelligent and philanthropic people against it.

This is the argument I made before the election: Republican racists are getting dumber, and that’s driving thoughtful people away. I predicted this would happen even without tariffs. Trump’s tariffs only accelerate an underlying trend that already existed. As he warned us, “there are no brakes on the Trump train.”

Amy’s position here seems to be that lower-class American workers want feel special and loved. They are like a petulant child who needs a participation trophy and an ice-cream or else they will have another tantrum (like January 6th).

Nathan’s position is that American workers are already quite well off. They have an outsized sense of entitlement, and the solutions being proposed by Trump aren’t helpful toward them in material terms. Trump’s present actions are not enlarging the Trump coalition, which would be the necessary step for LBJ-style reforms. The margins in congress and the senate are not big enough for sweeping change.

I sense that Nathan is a bit apprehensive about “giving the base what it wants” as a “trade” for his own goals. His apprehension comes from the fact that the base is currently souring on what it thought it wanted. It got what it asked for, and what it asked for sucked, actually.

If Trump isn’t actually doing popular things for the base (which you could cynically term bread and circuses), then what is the use of Trump? If he’s not pulling in more voters into a long-term winning coalition, but is instead repulsing Americans of all strata, what use is he? Time to cut losses, not fall into sunk cost, and start over with a new candidate.

Sometimes you lose by losing elections. Sometimes you lose because your candidate was a ticking time bomb all along. Democrats learned that in 2024 with Biden. Now Republicans are learning that with Trump.

Amy wants some kind of comprehensive platform in response to Trump, where it’s always, “Yes, but…”:

• Yes Mr. Trump! Tariffs are good, but do them in this way, not that way.

• Yes Mr. Trump! Deportations are good, but do them in this way, not that way.

• Yes Mr. Trump! Defunding universities is good, but do it this way, not that way…

Amy’s motivations here are personal. She is exhausted by the constant bombardment of liberal hostility and even conservative anxiety being thrown at her as a lonely conservative in a big ocean of blue. She wants Nathan to throw her a life raft with the cheat sheet to fix this mess and make it go away.

She wants to be able to respond to Trump critics with some kind of compromise, where criticism is allowed, but it’s constructive criticism. This is a personal desire, and not a political strategy. Whether or not Amy can win debates with her students is irrelevant, as Trump is actively refusing to listen to people like Nathan. There’s no point in Nathan screaming into the void, where his pearls before swine will fall on deaf ears.¹

Nathan’s writings are public. He is easy to reach. If Trump wanted to listen, Nathan would be willing to talk. He would probably say “don’t do outrageous, market-shocking tariffs. And if you do that, then walk them back immediately.” Nathan has already said that. Trump hasn’t listened. Asking Nathan to give more thought to the “platform” is victim blaming.

When you’re in a relationship with someone, and they stop listening to you, and they start doing crazy things that harm you, it’s time to think about distancing yourself from that person.

Amy seems to be asking for Nathan to endlessly compromise his own position and bend over backwards to accommodate whatever craziness Trump comes up with next. There’s a TV show for that. I think it’s called NewsMax, or PatriotNation, or Maury Povich,² something like that. There are plenty of Trump sycophants who will find some 4D chess narrative to explain why Trump isn’t actually doing what he’s actually doing. Amy’s request is putting an impossible burden on Nathan.

Most people left standing behind Trump in the right-wing seem to have this personal loyalty to Trump — he’s really good at inspiring that in people! At first, it’s charming, but at some point, it becomes disturbing. That personal loyalty doesn’t get paid back.

Trump doesn’t even know who you are. He has his friends, and his friends all get their backs scratched. But if you’re not in his list of 10,000 names, or however big it is, there’s no cosmic Dharmic justice of Trump coming down from heaven to reward your loyalty. To believe otherwise is cult-like religious thinking. It’s actually frightening to see otherwise intelligent people get sucked into this. “I want to believe Trump can still save us… I want to believe Trump can turn it all around…” It reminds me of my socialist friends who were coping about “here’s how Bernie can still win.” Friends, *I put my hand on your shoulder,* it is time to let go.

I’m sorry to say this, but I feel that Amy is struggling to come to terms with the fact that she has put her faith in a man who has promised the world, and yet, he has just spilled spaghetti out of his pockets. He’s looking up at you with a childish, yet devilish grin, saying “look, mom, I did the economy! You can just do things!”

edit in MSPaint. Going to tell my kids that Trump killed 4chan.

There is a very important idea which Nathan believes in, which he calls a “meta idea,” which supersedes and stands above all his other beliefs. It is a belief which is true even if all his other ideas are not. And that belief is this:

If you have more smart, competent people on your side than your opponents, you win.

Now, that doesn’t mean you need to get 51% of every college educated person on your side, or 3/5 of the top billionaires, or 2/3rds of Mensa. I didn’t say “you need more smart, competent people than the rest of society put together.” I said “than your opponents.”

For example, if you’re Israel, in order to get what you want, you don’t need to convince every smart person to support Israel. There are plenty of people who aren’t your opponents; they are effectively neutral non-combatants. All you need is to be smarter than AOC, the Squad, and Thomas Massie put together. If you can achieve that, you win.

Of course, in reality, it’s a bit more complicated: there are layers of support for Israel, ranging from “move the embassy to Jerusalem” to “bomb Iran now” and with shades in between. “Winning” isn’t a black-and-white switch; it’s a spectrum (like gender). It’s the spectrum of winning.

How is the spectrum of winning going for the right-wing? They have alienated:

• Anyone who has emotional attachments to a LEGAL immigrant (people who have befriended with international students, people who work in tech or multi-national corporations);

• Anyone who actually enjoyed college (general successful, pro-social people);

• Anyone who is optimistic, hopeful, or excited about scientific research and discovery;

• Anyone who thinks that due process and the constitution are important;

• Anyone who thinks that Biden passively neglecting to keep people out isn’t morally or legally equivalent to actively sending someone to a prison camp, and then being too cowardly to retrieve that person when ordered by the courts.

Here’s a 4D chess theory for you: I have a theory that the Vance BrainTrust are intentionally making a huge issue out of this one deported man in order to shield Trump from the heat on tariffs. He’s changing the conversation from an area where Trump is weak (low consumer confidence) to an area where Trump is strong (immigration).

source.

Maybe if the stock market takes another 10% hit, Vance will start deporting children and the elderly to prison camps. That would really distract the news cycle from the economy! It’s sort of like the strategy of pretending you’re crazy to avoid a conflict. “Economy? Never heard of her. I’m too busy forcing these Venezuelans into a human centipede right now.”

This obfuscation, “what-aboutism,” or sleight-of-hand can only work for so long. Eventually, people feel it in their wallet. Eventually, performative “oopsie-daisy” deportations seem incompetent instead of sounding cool. Eventually, Vance’s line about how his ancestors “built this country with a shoestring and a bit of lint they found in their belly buttons” gets old and tired. The show can only go on for so long. Do you want to be left holding the bag?

What’s the value proposition?

I chose to short Trump’s stock. The closest I got to buying was when Melania came out as pro-choice, but it still wasn’t enough for me. Other people held, and now I’m watching the panic selling begin.

People like Amy are hodl-ing tight. She’s not ready to jump ship quite yet. She’s loyal — diamond hands! People like Nathan realize that the best time to sell was yesterday, and the next best time is today. Trump-coin’s bottom is 0.

That doesn’t mean that MAGA is ever going away — just like COVID never really went away completely. If you’re living in a deep red rural area where people can’t spell “tariff,” even if the economy does crash, they’ll still be MAGA for life. It is, in fact, a cult.

Even if it wasn’t a cult (to use a historical example), Herbert Hoover won 39.6% of the vote after the stock market crashed. McCain won 45.7% in 2008. It’s possible for a president to destroy the economy³ and still be popular in deeply polarized areas of the country.

If your livelihood is grifting off a stubborn and bitter populist crowd who hates “the elites” and will believe anything you say so long as it has Trump’s Papal Blessing,™ then there is no reason to sell your Trump coin. There are some homeschooled MAGA kids who will keep watching your grift for 40 years, like the last samurai to surrender, until someone even more crazy can come along and outshine the king. RFK, perhaps?

This is a youtube thumbnail from a Christian homeschooler. Beyond parody.

There is a solid 30% of the country who will never forgive “science” for COVID. This 30% built upon the same 20.4% of Republicans in 2012 who voted for Rick Santorum in 2012, because he fought the atheists on evolution. It was a similar group of Republicans who obsessed over Obama’s birth certificate. And there’s plenty of overlap between these groups with the 74.7% of Georgians who elected Marjorie Taylor “space lasers” Greene in 2020, and then re-elected her with 64.4% in 2024.

There is a hardcore but sizable minority of the country that is close-minded and hostile to the concept of education itself. If you can’t shoot the breeze about common-sense, down-to-earth, no-nonsense, honest-to-goodness conspiracy theories, they view you as an evil wizard trying to trick them into another Bill Gates genocidal vaccine.

I searched “evil wizard” to see if I could find conservatives describing science as a form of evil wizardry, and I did find this clip of Owen Benjamin (1:00-2:00) analyzing the Wizard of Oz and claiming that “the farmer doesn’t have a brain, but he is always right.” I didn’t make it past the two minute mark, but that about sums it up, doesn’t it?

The farmer is always right, because he knows the truth in his gut, and he doesn’t need some “midwit” with a college degree telling him what to do, because St. Augustine already figured it all out and said gay people are evil, or something. The purest expression of conservatism is the mid-wit meme, but there really is no hooded genius on the other end of the bell-curve, because even among engineers, Democrats still outnumber Republicans.

The hooded guy is the God of the gaps for these people.

The value proposition for Trump in 2016 was, “we know what this two-party system does; we have some criticisms that can’t get through committee; maybe this guy can throw up a red card and get our grievances heard.” The value proposition in 2020 and 2024 was, “we know what Democrats do; they endlessly inflate wasteful spending, regulation, and polarizing policies; Trump 1.0 wasn’t so bad, let’s give him a second shot.”

Jeb Bush was right. Trump is a chaos candidate. The success of Trump in remaking the Republican Party in his image within 8 short years (no small feat) has proven that the two party system isn’t some kind of implacable monolith. You can just do things. Like crash the economy: you can just do it! No one can stop you.

If Trump can remake the Republican Party in 8 years, then Democrats can start seriously thinking about remaking the Democrat Party over the next 8 years. Democrats made some mistakes over 8 years of Obama which resulted in Trump:

1. Promoting black nationalism through Trayvon Martin and Ferguson;

2. Undermining, villainizing, and demonizing the police;

3. Refusing to regulate the flow of immigration (falsely thinking Hispanics would remain loyal to Democrats);

4. Inventing dozens of new obscure shibboleths to signal their ideological in-group loyalty, instead of being inclusive and having a big tent;

5. Running a primary between a deeply uncharismatic (if well-intentioned) woman and a radical socialist, which exposed the ugliness of both sides and alienated the bluedog remnant represented by Jim Webb.

I’m sure there are more mistakes that were made before 2016. There were certainly dozens of mistakes made after 2020:

1. Refusing to put up a younger white guy than Biden, which led to dementia;

2. Picking Kamala as VP, which didn’t pair well with the dementia;

3. COVID masking for kids;

4. closing beaches in California;

5. closing schools;⁴

6. trans-gender surgeries for undocumented minors…

Some of these errors were more understandable than others, but taken all together, they speak to a certain degree of dysfunction of the party.

The question in 2025 is this:

Do you believe that the Republican Party is more screwed, or the Democratic Party is more screwed?

If your priorities are Christian homeschooling, rolling back vaccine mandates, banning abortion, ending no-fault divorce, making toasters, and finally repealing gay marriage, then the Democratic Party is beyond the pale. As Kamala said, “we’re not going back.” Let the tariffs continue!

But what if your priorities are stable international alliances, a functioning economy, respect for the rule of law, not throwing a massive million man riot when you lose an election, avoiding cults of personality, winning over smart people, and rejecting the conspiracy rabbit hole? Then the Republican Party is definitely screwed until Trump dies.⁵ As Trump said, “you will get tired of winning.”

The left has problems. Some of them are big and strategic, some of them are small and tactical. The best way to work on these problems is to get collectively creative, to think outside the box, and start talking to one another. That’s the purpose of “deep left.” Not following the populist winds wherever they blow, but concentrating intellectual firepower toward a disciplined yet flexible and adaptable leadership that wants to win.

I think Nathan’s position on the conservative spectrum is closer to the center than Amy, who waxes poetic about American workers needing a hand up, and how hard it is to be an auto mechanic, and how we don’t throw enough free money at scholarships for trade school. This kind of fetishization of 1960s factory-unionism is a cargo cult which seeks to “return” to the glory days without understanding that the economy has fundamentally moved on. Chinese factories are automated by robots, and they’re outsourcing a lot of the cheap labor stuff to Vietnam.

Building an iPhone is not something that Americans can be trained to do within five years. Fetishizing factories is the domain of MAGA communism, divorced from reality and the voters (giving them what they say they want rather than understanding what they really want). What voters really want is money, and that is probably best obtained by investing in AI research, not reinventing the toaster factory.

The liberal left has moved on from fetishizing factories to winning voters more directly by focusing on race, gender, healthcare, academia, or housing. I am not expecting to convert Nathan here. Even if he wanted to, he may feel that he is beyond the pale of cancellation, and he’s in too deep. As far as I can tell, his priorities are promoting race realism and ending DEI / affirmative action. I do not share those concerns, but I will at least try to explain why, in the hopes of having a dialogue.

my differences with Nathan:

First of all, immigration. America’s growing population of Asians and Hispanics is not a biological emergency which requires that we pull out the calipers, DNA tests, and twin studies. The problems of Hispanic and Asian immigration are cultural and legal. We need to manage the issue of tribalistic partisanship, ethnic nepotism, and mafias. America has dealt with those problems before, and they are not insurmountable.

Next on the HBD list of crises is black crime. From my perspective, black crime is something which has come in waves, going back to the 1920s with the Great Migration into the cities, then it spiked up in the 1960s through the 1990s, and then we saw a brief spike with BLM. I don’t see this as a civilizational threat, but as a constant source of friction which we basically know how to manage when we’re not LARPing about defunding the police.

Nathan’s strongest argument is that DEI and affirmative action put people in positions on the basis of tribalistic entitlement, not on the basis of merit. Leadership matters, and bad leadership matters a lot. Eventually, if that process isn’t capped at some tolerable rate, you get something like the Mullahs of Iran: a mystical, quasi-theocratic class whose entire existence relies upon the fanatic defense of self-serving corruption dressed up in a mythology of grievance, victimhood, and unquestionable dogma.

The alternative vision is that the best way to materially help people of color isn’t by putting unqualified people in positions of power. South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment, for example, has enriched a small cadre of black millionaires while leaving millions without basic security or electricity. Instead, focus on equality over equity. But keep the stuff about gay people being cool, antisemitic discrimination being bad, and legal immigrants deserving rights.

Maybe with an AI miracle and some YIMBY magic, we might even have some surplus available for UBI, which would do a much better job than DEI or affirmative action in providing underprivileged communities with direct resources.

I will say, however, that I don’t really mind if the DMV or Postal Service is 90% black. Where there’s a risk of catastrophic failure, sure, outlaw DEI. But where the biggest risk is that my wait time in line is longer, I don’t think it’s a civilizational threat. Reserving low-level bureaucratic positions for people of color is a form of discrimination against poor whites, sure, but sometimes you have to chop a few onions to make the tossed salad of multi-racialism.

conclusion.

That’s my pitch. I’m not saying, “hey, jump in, the water’s fine!” Actually, the water is quite cold. It’s a polar plunge. We are going to do some Wim Hof breathing together.

But I’d rather jump in the freezing pond of the Democratic Party and try to activate my parasympathetic nervous system than sit, like a boiling frog, in Trump’s pot of Qanon stew, seeing how long until my eyeballs melt and fall out of my skull.

1. Folks, we love mixing metaphors, don’t we?

2. 2020 episode of the Trump Povich Show: “Trump… the Supreme court says… you are NOT the president.” *Trump has a panic attack, starts screaming, strangling his driver*

3. (or to seem to, if you believe in business cycles)

4. Half the value of school for voters is the free daycare program for working parents. Virtual school was a huge burden on parents.

5. (peacefully of old age)