The Overton Window Has Shifted

Some thoughts on the political vibe shift over the last few months.

Welcome to Young Money! If you’re new here, you can join the tens of thousands of subscribers receiving my essays each week by adding your email below.

---

There’s been a vibe shift over the last few months. Have you noticed it? Just look at what’s happening in Silicon Valley:

“Over the last two election cycles, the number of Trump supporters in Silicon Valley not named “Peter Thiel” was approximately zero. According to Vox, Bay Area residents donated $163 million and $199 million to democrats in 2016 and 2020 respectively, dwarfing the $22 million raised for Trump in 2020.

This year, however, there has been a change of tune among many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Valor Equity founder Antonio Gracias, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have all reportedly donated or are planning to donate to the Trump campaign.”

From a column I wrote last week.

---

The shift in Silicon Valley is a microcosm of what’s going on across the country right now, so I wanted to share some thoughts on why and how I think this shift happened, as well as some concerns I have as the pendulum continues to swing right.

---

Point One: Normal people got tired of being vilified.

Most people don’t have a “cause.” Most people have a job, a family, and some friends, and they would like their lives to continue as normally as possible, so they tend to vote for the candidate that they believe will be most likely make that happen. Though it doesn’t always feel like it in America, most people’s political beliefs are pretty similar to most other people’s:

For most people, the decision to vote for a candidate is often made at the margin, with one or two core issues ultimately pushing you one way or another. Depending on who you are, where you live, and what your life looked like four years ago, you could have had a variety of reasons for supporting either candidate.

Maybe you were a veteran who believed one candidate would do more for the VA’s office. Maybe you were a young woman concerned with reproductive rights. Maybe you thought America should prioritize investment in clean energy, or maybe you worked for an oil company, and you feared that aggressive regulations could impact your livelihood. Maybe you were close to retirement, and you worried about the future of social security, or maybe you were a college kid terrified about their job prospects during the pandemic. Millions of Americans had millions of reasons to vote one way or another, and elections involve tradeoffs.

You could have, for example, agreed with Trump’s foreign policy views, disagreed with his immigration views, and ultimately decided the former outweighed the latter. Worries about Biden’s ability to handle the rigorous schedule of being president could have outweighed misgivings about Trump’s social commentary. It would have been reasonable to vote based on which candidate you thought would best lead America out of the pandemic without crashing the economy, and you could have pointed to any of a dozen reasons that either candidate would better accomplish that goal, such as “Trump is pro business!” or “The stock market historically does better under democrats!”

Humans are nuanced beings with a million possible reasons for making a million different decisions, but when it comes to politics, we throw nuance to the side. All of us are aware of our own nuances, of course. In a two-party system, you’re all-but-guaranteed to disagree with both candidates on a number of issues, and often (as was the case for voters in 2020) a vote is based on which candidate is “the least bad.” You did your own mental calculus, and chose accordingly.

Yet, for some reason, we forget that others are nuanced too. We assume that anyone who voted for the candidate that we didn’t choose must fully endorse every aspect of that candidate’s platform: good, bad, and ugly. My suspicion is that this behavior is rooted in our tribalistic nature, and our two-party system encourages an “us versus them” mentality. When everyone is sorted into binary camps, we worry less about our alignment with individuals on specific issues, and more about which team they ultimately chose.

So, identity politics dominated social discourse, creating faulty, oversimplified explanations for complex decisions, and, over the last few years, those identity politics branded anyone who voted for Trump with a scarlet letter that labeled them as a racist, populist, sexist, or some other derogatory “ist.”

Voters had any number of rational reasons for supporting either candidate, and many Trump voters actually agreed with the negative commentary about Trump, but they decided that the pros, whether economic, national security, or something else, outweighed those cons. But nuance has no place in the evaluation of others’ politics. Trump bad, Biden good. Everyone knew the rules. This, of course, led to the curious case of the “closeted Republican.”

Because openly supporting Trump meant social ostracization in 2020, few people openly supported Trump. Of course, according to the 2020 election results, 74 million Americans voted for Trump, but most kept their opinions to themselves, for fear of what others might think (because of the whole “no nuance” thing I mentioned a second ago).

So, despite nearly half of the country privately supporting Trump, the overwhelming majority of public political commentary was anti-Trump, and, quite often, anti-Trump-supporters. This led to some awkward social situations.

Imagine, for example, a group of 20 people at a cocktail party, where the voting dynamics of the group mirrored that of the country: roughly 10 would have voted for Biden, and 9 would have voted for Trump, and 1 could have gone either way or voted independent. Privately, their voting decisions would have been roughly split down the middle, but publicly, everyone in the group would have fallen in one of three camps:

1. Pro-Biden

2. Anti-Trump, so, therefore, Biden by default

3. Anti-both candidates, therefore voted independent or abstained

It was a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone’s publicly stated opinion was an opinion they deemed to be socially acceptable among everyone else. From the outside, everyone thinks that no one voted for Trump, despite half of the group quietly voting for Trump.

Because most people who voted for Trump claimed they didn’t, Biden voters didn’t realize that many people in their own peer groups voted for Trump, and the only publicly expressed pro-Trump commentary that they saw came from members of the MAGA super-cult at Trump rallies. When the only information you see supporting the other party comes from those with the most extreme views, you assume that everyone not in the Biden camp agrees with those views, and your mental map of the political ideologies of the 2020 election looked like this:

Even though reality looked more like this:

This, of course, created a vicious flywheel effect:

• The median Trump concealed their true thoughts for social acceptance

• The far-right voter became the de facto voice and image of all Trump voters

• All non-Trump voters believe the far-right voters are representative of all Trump voters

• The reputation of anyone who voted for Trump is further damaged

Because the median Biden voter had a misperception of the median Trump voter, many of them criticized and vilified all Trump voters, not realizing that they were insulting almost half of their own peers! Millions of Trump voters who probably overlapped with everyone else on 95% of issues spent years hearing that their voting choice made them terrible people. Not great!

As someone who grew up in the Baptist Church, I can promise you that the worst possible way to convert someone to Christianity would be telling them how stupid and evil they are. I mean, think about that pitch:

“Hey man, you’re evil and I hate you. Want to join my religion?”

You can’t insult someone into changing their mind. And yet, that is basically how left-wing politics have worked for the last decade. Of course, liberals didn’t know they were doing this. As noted in the example above, most thought they were talking to their in-group about a distant out-group, and they believed, when talking down about conservative voters, that they were discussing some foreign entity. But statistically speaking, they were referring to almost half of their peers.

The stereotyping of beliefs across a complex group of 74 million people did little to convince Trump voters they were wrong. If anything, it quietly increased their resolve. Are we really surprised there’s been a vibe shift?

Of course, there was a simple solution to all of this. If you simply ask someone you disagree with why they feel the way they do about an issue, one of two things will happen:

1)    You will realize you don’t even really disagree, you just have different perspectives

2)    You will understand where they’re coming from, even if you still disagree

Of course, there’s no room for nuance in politics, so we assume the worst of anyone we disagree with, and we couldn’t care less about hearing their side. Politics are the one place where stereotyping isn’t ridiculed, it’s encouraged, and pressure for a culture shift has been building under the surface for a while.

---

---

Point Two: The average person got tired of “woke.”

As I mentioned earlier, most people don’t have a “cause.” They have a job, a family, and some friends, and they would like their lives to continue as normally as possible. Related to this, most people also don’t care about pushing moral values in one direction or another. The people who do change the moral code are those at the extremes, and over the last eight years, those with a left-leaning “cause” have dictated social norms. Nassim Taleb has a great quote about this from Skin in the Game:

Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights. – Nassim Taleb

Over time, policies grew more extreme, moving further and further left of the median voter. Without visible opposition, those promoting these policies believed that the majority either supported or remained neutral to their ideas, but under the surface, the collective political belief system was approaching a breaking point. National politics are like a rubber band: when they get pulled too far in one direction, they snap and ricochet back the other way.

Here’s an example:

I hate using this word, as it’s so cliché now, but everyone grew tired of “woke” culture. Most Americans are pro-diversity, pro-gender equality, and pro-sexual freedom, and most of those who aren’t “pro” are, at worst, neutral, so any movement toward anything pro-diversity is either embraced, or, at worst, not opposed. However, over time, policies of acceptance became policies of intimidation. They were weaponized by those at the edge of the political spectrum.

A movement than began with embracing diversity became a witch hunt to cancel folks for off-color tweets from a decade earlier. Every company launched a DEI department out of fear that someone might write a hit piece about how they weren’t investing in diversity. “Privilege,” whether that be one’s race, gender, or family income, shifted from an acknowledgement of an uneven landscape to a source of shame and ridicule.

I believe we should operate under the assumption that most people are well-intentioned, but everyone makes an occasional mistake. You can treat honest mistakes with grace and have open conversations on how best to move forward.

Late-stage “wokeness,” however, was less about societal improvement and more about the weaponization of dialogue, and people just got exhausted from walking on egg shells all the time. Shout out Paul Graham for calling it.

Point Three: Some voters now oppose democrat policy proposals.

Marc Andreessen openly stated that the potential for an unrealized capital gains tax was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and I imagine that many wealthy Americans who have flipped sides quietly agree. Like, come on, the unrealized capital gains tax is just a deeply unserious proposal.

The TLDR was that folks worth $100 million or more could face a 25% tax bill on unrealized capital gains, which just doesn’t make sense. If you have a $25 million stake in a startup worth $500 million, and then it raises new funding at a $1 billion valuation, you would owe a $6.25 million tax bill on your still-illiquid stake. Any ultra-high-net worth person with their money in private equity, venture capital, real estate, or another illiquid asset class would immediately have a problem.

Plenty of non-multi-millionaires changed their minds due to other government actions as well. Some Americans are tired of the US sending billions of dollars to Ukraine. Others are fed up with the current administration’s inability to solve our border crisis. (It’s not a good look when the mayor of New York flies to Mexico to say there’s no more room in New York City!)

Point Four: Inflation hurts.

I realize that inflation has slowed, and I actually think, when you look at how the rest of the world has fared, the Biden administration and the Fed did an excellent job navigating the US economy out of the pandemic. We were able to raise interest rates without causing a recession, the unemployment rate is near-record lows, wages are high, and the stock market has been booming. Compare that to the rest of the world, where economies are stagnating, inflation is higher than in the US, and currencies are sinking vs the US dollar, and I’ll take America’s situation every time.

But the average American doesn’t care about any of that macroeconomic stuff. Rent is expensive. Groceries are expensive. And people feel that in their wallets.

Point Five: No one likes being gaslighted.

For the last three and a half years, Biden’s team claimed that reports questioning his physical and mental stamina were overblown, videos showing him stumbling were doctored, and he was more-than-capable of staying in charge for four more years. Then he had one disaster of a debate, and his own party effectively forced him to step aside. Biden obviously shouldn’t have run again in 2024, which I don’t think is a controversial statement at this point in the game, but it’s not like his decline was some overnight surprise that caught his team off guard in June.

Democrats shouldn’t have spent the last three years trying to gaslight the general public, telling them that an 81-year-old man, who was obviously slowing down, was still plenty-resilient to handle the most stressful job on the planet for four more years. Frankly, Biden himself shouldn’t have demanded to stay in the race this long. Had he agreed to be a one-term President, like he signaled in 2019, the democrats would have had time to make contingency plans. Instead, the party is now scrambling to rally behind a vice president who wasn’t even one of 11 candidates to make it to the Iowa Caucus in 2020.

Point Six: Bringing it all together.

Combine millions of people growing tired of being vilified, everyone getting sick of recent culture wars, poor policy decisions, and an obviously declining president, and you have the perfect environment for a culture shift. All it needed was a catalyst, and that catalyst was Trump surviving an assassination attempt, creating the most patriotic photo op of the 2020s, and sending momentum in the other direction. Now, folks from both parties feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts again. Remember, American political beliefs look something like this:

But the bottom group finally feels safe to speak its mind again.

Now, a few things I’m concerned with as the pendulum swings in the other direction:

First: “Reverse” cancel culture is a thing too.

One of my least favorite trends of the last several years was the incessant left-leaning “cancel culture” that enjoyed exposing folks for their poorly-worded posts from years ago, but now, we’re starting to see cancel culture play out in the other direction.

One notable example is the X account, “Libs of TikTok.” Over the last couple of weeks, this account, which has millions of followers, has gone on a campaign to get folks fired who made crass jokes about the Trump shooting, tagging their employers to expose them.

Look, I think it’s really, really stupid and distasteful to joke about President Trump getting shot, and I think that people should be responsible for the consequences of their own actions, which could include getting fired for doing posting something stupid online.

But leveraging your X account to get minimum wage-earning cashiers, whom you’ve never met, fired for making a stupid post on their Facebook account isn’t “protecting democracy.” It’s platform abuse.

Second: I think we’ll see a wave of folks grandstanding as an act of “counterculture bravery” to take advantage of the vibe shift.

Last month, for example, Alexandr Wang, the CEO of AI startup Scale AI, posted a tweet about “MEI” that went mega-viral.

This was obviously a play on words on the acronym “DEI,” and the post is intended to take a stand against the “woke” policies that have infected corporate America. My issue with this post (and plenty of others like this), is that it’s cosplaying as something contrarian, but it’s consensus. Everyone values merit, excellence, and intelligence, that’s not a hot take.

Making this post two years ago would have, undoubtedly, been controversial and risky. Making it in June 2024, as companies have already started laying off DEI teams, and the mainstream belief is that meritocracy should be prioritized, isn’t exactly brave. You get all of the clout upside at no risk by pretending that your message is risky.

While there’s nothing wrong with Wang’s post (frankly, I agree with the message), it’s the framing that concerns me. As people grow more confident speaking out against the culture of the last few years, I worry that we’ll see more and more aggressive “contrarian” takes that will, eventually, ridicule and vilify normal and/or harmless political and social beliefs.

Third: Bad actors use “America-first” as a facade to push dangerous ideas. The internet is filled with “America-first” folks using false patriotism to push dangerous narratives. One example is immigration: America does need immigration reform, but America also needs immigration itself. Yes, we have issues at the border, but our visa process is a mess, too. Each year, thousands of US-educated recent college graduates who would contribute to the US economy have to leave the country due to visa issues, but you don’t hear about those immigrants, because everyone wants to make everything about the border. A lot of “pro-America” immigration content is xenophobic, not patriotic, with the goal of stopping immigration entirely instead of improving it.

Another example is JD Vance’s proposed $7,500 credit for gas-and-diesel powered vehicles. You can argue about the merits of providing tax credits for EVs, but claiming that we should instead subsidize F-150s because… America (?) is just ridiculous.

My main concern is that everything that sucked because it was too liberal over the last several years will end up sucking again as it becomes too conservative. The same problems exist, but the roles of the aggressors and the victims flipped.

---

Some closing thoughts:

Politics are inflammatory and tribalistic, and they bring out the worst in people because they cause us to view others as parts of homogenous groups instead of individuals with complex beliefs. My only “political” advice is this:

1. Be wary of forming cohesive opinions about millions of people due to their one shared decision, especially when that decision was binary.

2. If you treat folks as individuals with their own perspectives and experiences, you’ll be slower to pass immediate judgement.

3. Assuming someone’s beliefs based on a single data point says less about what they actually think and more about your inability to do so critically.

4. If someone can correctly guess all of your political beliefs from one of your political beliefs, you’ve outsourced your independent thinking.

5. If you can’t articulate your opinion on a topic without getting emotional, you’re probably the one who’s wrong.

-Jack

I appreciate reader feedback, so if you enjoyed today’s piece, let me know with a like or comment at the bottom of this page!

---

Young Money is now an ad-free, reader-supported publication. This structure has created a better experience for both the reader and the writer, and it allows me to focus on producing good work instead of managing ad placements. In addition to helping support my newsletter, paid subscribers get access to additional content, including Q&As, book reviews, and more. If you’re a long-time reader who would like to further support Young Money, you can do so by clicking below. Thanks!

---

Jack's Picks

• This was a super interesting thread about the effects of UBI on lower income citizens from a professor who conducted a multi-year, randomized controlled trial on it.

• Citrini Research is one of my favorite trading/markets accounts on Twitter, and they recently shared 24 trades for 2024 that they published in December 2023. Cool to see how different investors think about the market.