tl;dr - The single issue voting angle, especially as it comes to crypto, puts too much faith into the strength of USA's institutions. It may very well turn out that America scathes the perils of a second Trump administration, and "only" suffers some "collateral" damage while making long term advancements for its citizens and the world via better policies for foundational technologies like crypto or AI. However my personal experience of being from Turkey and observing smart voters go through a similar cost/benefit analysis >20 years ago suggest otherwise.
The beautiful and terrible thing about politics is there is no one right answer, usually. I will not claim that there is one for the upcoming US election either. However I want to inject a perspective into the discourse I've been observing in the crypto circles. This perspective is of single issue voting, where the main argument is that a candidate's support of crypto is so essential and fundamental to American and to one's individual values, that it's ok to disregard the candidate's other policies and values. There's many nuances and angles to being pro or against this perspective, such as those elaborated by Viktor here and Vitalik here, respectively. I value and acknowledge both perspectives, and do hope that if Trump indeed gets elected, the support his administration provides to foundational technologies like crypto and AI does prove to be beneficial to all humanity over the long term.
One's political preferences are obviously painted by their life experience and world view. Mine is primarily one of "internationalism" (as Vitalik puts it) and respect for individuals' rights. In that sense I'm socially liberal and lean Democrat in the US. I have always voted Democrat in the past and want to in the coming election too. This is not where I pull a Marc/Ben on the reader. I will not vote for Trump, but may not vote for whomever the Democratic candidate is either. The Democratic party is failing me by not only being unreasonably antagonistic to issues I care about, such as crypto and AI, but more importantly by embracing extreme left views that are clear alterations of reality and people's emotions. Any form of extremism is bad, whether left or right or up or down, and the Democratic party, as is the Republican party, appears to be enslaved by it. Even more importantly, is its leadership's resistance to pass down the baton to a younger generation. I actually believe that the Biden administration has done a generally great job of navigating the economy, and as much as I would like to live in a world where the one person at the helm matters less, it matters a whole lot and Biden is clearly not functional. The gerontocracy is abysmal across both sides of the aisle and I would love for the party I vote for to lead in moving us away from it.
So overall I do not approve of the party I have historically voted for, but I fundamentally do not agree with the values of the other party either. Sadly this is a strong case of deja vu for me from ~20 years ago where Turkey, where I am from and have the privilege to vote, was stuck in a similar situation: between a party (or rather a coalition) that enjoyed captive and gerentocratic power, was enslaved by wrong ideologies, and thus executed poorly on many fronts; and a strong-man candidate that "told it like it is", was pro-business and said to hell with these aristocrats that are lying to us. I remember many friends and acquaintances who shared similar values to me voting for the strong-man Erdogan. And their rationale was that yes we may not share the same values but this is for the greater good, or as was memeified during a later constitutional election "Yetmez ama Evet!" (it's not sufficient but yes!). Rest is history where Erdogan won and has been in power for more than 20 years, and the society, economy and culture of Turkey has mostly suffered (there were some bright spots , especially the first few years, but that's for another conversation).
Sadly Turkey's political and administrative institutions were much weaker than the US's. It was easier for Erdogan to bend the constitution to his will to stay in power 3x as long as the original constitution would have allowed him to. The Turkish electorate is not as well informed as the American one is. Also is democracy even a real thing in Turkey?
Sadly democracy is real in Turkey. There might be fraud on the margins but every Turkish citizen knows for a fact that generally election results are accurate. Sadly the electorate is as informed (some data courtesy of ChatGPT below). Sadly changing the constitution in Turkey requires a nation-wide referendum, which is not the case in the US. I'm not sure what to say about the institutions, as Turkey's are pretty bad, but I think we all saw how much Trump was able to gut the American ones the last time he was the president.
The point of this piece is to inject a perspective and say that while the benefits assumed by proponents of single issue voting may be valid, I do think the cost is higher than what they think. Humans are infamously terrible at making risk adjusted decisions. Yet experience is also the best teacher. So while not claiming one candidate is better than the other, and while the US will likely and hopefully scathe the worst perils of a second Trump administration, I would like to make the case that the risk adjusted cost is reasonably higher than what people think it is. I would not put it against Trump to find a reason to put the US into a war that allows him to stay in power longer as a wartime president.
To quote Trump “And if you knew about politics, whoever’s leading gets all the support they want. I could have the personality of a shrimp, and everybody would come.”. If there's one thing I like about the guy, he does tell it like it is. And he kinda does look like a shrimp 🦐.
