Mitt Romney
Article
Mitt Romney is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between July 15, 2022 and December 12, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “attempt to dramatically reach across the ideological divide between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney”; “He was apparently Mitt Romney’s economic policy advisor and served on some board”; “wrote in Mitt Romney’s name on his 2016 ballot”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Barack Obama, Brazil.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: July 15, 2022
- Last seen: December 12, 2023
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
- My California Ballot 2022
- What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
- Son Of Bride Of Bay Area House Party
Related Pages
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- Trump (4 shared issues)
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- Barack Obama (2 shared issues)
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- Brazil (2 shared issues)
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- crypto (2 shared issues)
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- Curtis Yarvin (2 shared issues)
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- acc (2 shared issues)
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- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- Hillary Clinton (2 shared issues)
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- Peter Thiel (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- socialism (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Being as kind to Haidt as possible, maybe having to fit socialism into his system seemed as ridiculous as having to fit divine right monarchy into it. Altogether, it comes across as an attempt to dramatically reach across the ideological divide between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and therefore unify all political thought, but then, well, that’s quite literally what the divide was in 2012, so maybe I’m being unfair by calling him out on this kind of limited scope.
Lanhee Chen has a PhD and JD from Harvard and does public policy at the Hoover Foundation at Stanford. He was apparently Mitt Romney’s economic policy advisor and served on some board of important experts that decided things about Social Security. He is against Trump and apparently wrote in Mitt Romney’s name on his 2016 ballot, which, mood.
This was a plausible conservative perspective in 2013, when Mitt Romney had just finished challenging Barack Obama for the presidency. Romney seemed like a competent elite, and Barack Obama had ridden into office on a wave of populist fervor. Maybe the true essence of conservatism was supporting competent elites, and the new conservative movement - the one that would sweep away the failures of neoconservatism - would assert that essence proudly.
“It’s a gray area. It’s illegal to bribe them to do a specific thing once they’re in office. But I don’t think it’s illegal to bribe them not to run. If you think about it, imagine Mitt Romney’s company was unhappy that they’d lose him to a presidential run, so they offered him a higher salary, and he decided to stay. That’s got to be legal, right? And all we’re doing is the equivalent of that. Of course, I don’t know if the SEC will see it that way. That’s why we’re going to use crypto. We’ll come up with some altcoin . . . “