It seems the recent tariff designs already are serious policy

If the tariffs are revoked, reversed, unenforced, or blocked in some way, that strongly points towards possibility that they were understood to be unenforceable all along, and their imposition and failure was just a kayfabe set up by the president to look like he tried and juxtaposing himself against his enemies, depicting them as at fault for making the shiny new policy impossible. This is not unique to Trump, it has been very prevalent practice among presidents and congress since most of the Cold War and possibly long before that (I don't have the energy to determine the exact age, only that it's an old old practice and very widespread).

What do you mean by "added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime"? 

Sorry if I wasn't clear here. Tariffs were a very large portion of government revenue, and therefore spending, until the 1950s when income tax grew (largely because workers were pretty risk-intolerant and mass literacy made them more willing and able to file paperwork than other avenues of taxation) and government as we know it pivoted to revolving around income taxes instead. Tariff-based taxation governments and income-based taxation governments are pretty different government/civilizational paradigms, similar to the distinctiveness of the "dark forest" government paradigm in Africa centuries ago where villages built near roads were more likely to be enslaved or conscripted or have forced labor quotas imposed on them, resulting in villages largely being distant from roads. 

What are the alternative futures?

In the high-tariff scenario, governments and militaries (in Europe and Asia too, not just the US) have probably predicted that international trade is sufficiently robust, and the participants sufficiently risk-averse, that imports can be milked, at least relative to risks from continuing to depend so heavily on income taxation (e.g. maybe tax evasion advice gets popular on tiktok or something). This would not surprise me as many of the best minds in the US and Chinese militaries have spent more than a decade thinking very hard about economics and international trade as warfare, and it seems to me like they at least believe they've developed a solid understanding of what economic collapse contingencies look like and how much stress their economies and trade networks can take. This means international trade will be much more expensive as it is basically heavily taxed and those tax rates can change on a dime which greatly increases everyone's risk premiums, but also might cause governments to focus on prioritizing the robustness of international trade if it becomes the main revenue source, in addition to forcing prioritization on the domestic economy because the ground has been burned behind them (investing in industries that depend on imports or exports is riskier and less viable due to the deadweight loss and risk premiums added to international trade). Generally it means broader government control as well as less stability, as income taxes can't really change on a dime in response to a nation's actions or target specific industries, and tariffs can.

Although the risk of frogboiling human rights abuses won't go away anytime soon, it's also important to keep in mind that Trump got popular by doing whatever makes the left condemn him because right-wingers seem to interpret that as a costly credible signal of commitment to them/the right/opposing the left, and his administration has spent a decade following this strategy as consistently as can reasonably be considered possible for a sitting president, most of the time landing on strategies to provoke condemnation from liberals in non-costly or ambiguously costly ways (see Jan 6th).

See Scott Alexander's classic post It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click; engagement bait has been the soul of Trump's political persona since it emerged in the mid-2010s, and it will be interesting going forward to see whether the recent tariff designs will end up as serious policy and be added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime (which had taken a stable form since the Vietnam War and the end of the Gold Standard^[1]).

1. ^{^}

   The case could also be made that the computerization of Wall Street during the late 70s and 80s transformed the economy sufficiently radically that the current tax and spending paradigm could be condered more like 30-40 years old, or you could pin it to the 1950s when the tariff paradigm ended; either way, the modern emergence of massive recessions, predictive analytics, pandemic risk, and international military emphasis on trade geopolitics, all indicate potential for elite consensus around unusually large macroeconomic paradigm shifts.

An aspect where I expect further work to pay off is stuff related to self-visualization, which is fairly powerful (e.g. visualizing yourself doing something for 10 hours will generally go a really long way to getting you there, and for the 10 hour thing it's more a question of what to do when something goes wrong enough to make the actul events sufficiently different from what you imagined, and how to do it in less than 10 hours).

More like a bin than heuristics, and just attacking/harming (particularly a mutually understood schelling point for attacking, with partial success being more common and more complicated due to the people adversarially aiming for that) rather than dehumanizing which is a loaded term.

My apologies, this post was pointing/grasping in a general direction and I didn't put much trouble into editing it, there was a typo at the beginning where I seem to have used the wrong word to refer to the slot concept. I just fixed it:

Humans seem to have something like an "acceptable target slot" or slots.

Acquiring control over this conceptslot, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures.

Did that help?

Humans seem to have something like an "acceptable target slot" or slots.

Acquiring control over this concept, by any means, gives a person or group incredible leeway to steer individuals, societies, and cultures. These capabilities are sufficiently flexible and powerful that the importance of immunity has often already been built up, especially because historical record overuse is prevalent; this means that methods of taking control include expensive strategies or strategies that are sufficiently complicated as to be hard to track, like changing the behavior of a targeted individual or demographic or type-of-person in order to more easily depict them as acceptable targets, noticing and selecting the best option for acceptable targets, and/or cleverly chaining acceptable targethood from one established type-of-person to another by drawing attention to similarities to similarities that were actually carefully selected for this (or even deliberately induced in one or both of them).

9/11 and Gaza are obvious potential-examples, and most wars in the last century feature this to some extent, but acceptable-target-slot-exploitation is much broader than that; on a more local scale, most interpersonal conflict involves DARVO to some extent, especially when the human brain's ended up pretty wired to lean heavily into that without consciously noticing.

A solution is to take an agent perspective, and pay closer attention (specifically more than the amount that's expected or default) any time a person or institution uses reasoning to justify harming or coercing other people or institutions, and to assume that such situations might have been structured to be cognitively difficult to navigate and should generally be avoided or mitigated if possible. If anyone says that some kind of harm is inevitable, notice if someone is being rewarded for gaining access to the slot; many things that seem inevitable are actually a skill issue and only persist because insufficient optimization power has been pointed at them; the human race is currently pushing the frontier for creating non-toxic spaces which are robust to both internal and external factors and actors. 

Base rates of harmful tendencies are high among humans (e.g. easily noticing or justifying opportunities to weaken or harm others, or the mind coming alive while doing so), but higher base rates (of any dynamic, not just things that impact various people's acceptable target slots) also increase the proportion of profoundly strategic people on earth who find that dynamic cognitively available and hold it as a gear in their models and plots.

In the ancestral environment, allies and non-enemies who visibly told better lies probably offered more fitness than allies and non-enemies who visibly made better tools, let alone invented better tools (which probably happened once in 10-1000 generations or something). In this case, "identifiably" can only happen, and become a Schelling point that increases fitness of the deciever and the identifier, if revealed frequently enough, either via bragging drive, tribal reputation/rumors, or identifiable to the people in the tribe unusually good at sensing deception.

What ratio of genetic vs memetic (e.g. the line "he's a bastard, but he's our bastard") were you thinking of?

You don't use eloquence for that. Eloquence is more for eg waking someone up and making it easier for them to learn and remember ideas that you think they'll be glad to have learned and remembered.

If you want to express how important you think something is, you can make a public prediction that it's important and explain why you made that prediction, and people who know things you don't can put your arguments into the context of their own knowledge and make their own predictions.

I might be wrong, but the phrase "conspiracy theory" seems to be a lot more meaningful to you than it is to me. I recommend maybe reading Cached Thoughts. 

A "conspiracy" is something people do when they want something big, because multiple people are necessary to do big things, and stealth is necessary to prevent randos from interfering.

A "theory" is a hypothesis, an abstraction that cannot be avoided by anyone other than people rigidly committed to only thinking about things that they are nearly 100% certain is true. If you want to do thinking when it's hard instead of just when it's easy and anyone can do it, then you need theories.

A "conspiracy theory" is a label for a theory that makes most people believe there is a social consensus against that theory, and makes incompetent internet users take it up as a cause (as a search for truth which is hopeless for them in particular as they are not competitive in the truthfindng market) and make it further associated with internet degeneracy.

NEVER WRITE ON THE CLIPBOARD WHILE THEY ARE TALKING.

If you're interested in how writing on a clipboard affects the data, sure, that's actually a pretty interesting experimental treatment. It should not be considered the control.

Also, the dynamics you described with the protests is conjunctive. These aren't just points of failure, they're an attack surface, because any political system has many moving parts, and a large proportion of the moving parts are diverse optimizers.