The Secret Anguish of the Median Voter
This is my favorite scene in The Lord of the Rings movies.
The four hobbits are riding home to the Shire, having come through hell and back. Frodo has saved the world at terrible personal cost. Pippin is now a knight, wearing his mail and tunic bearing the White Tree of Gondor. Merry is still dressed as an Esquire of Rohan.
All of them are in outlandish clothes, and laden with exotic treasures of dwarves, elves, and men. They have been utterly transformed by their journey.
But Everard Proudfoot (a contrivance of the film) has not been transformed by their journey. He spent the last year in the Shire, with its ordinary rhythms and expectations, and he thinks they are fucking weird.
It’s a big change from the books of course, where Saruman has brought the conflict home, and the hobbits have to drum him out.
I like both versions of the story — but what I like about the scene in the movie is that Everard Proudfoot represents the totality of their victory. They truly saved the Shire — completely intact, exactly as they left it.
If we win the way we hope to win, all the people who think we are weird and disreputable will have no reason to change their minds. (In fact — as in the film — the way we win may confirm all their suspicions.)
But imagine trying to get Everard Proudfoot to vote to save the world.
A few weeks ago, my wife got her hair done by the Median Utah Voter.
Lately I’ve been using the term “median voter” instead of the n-word (normie) — but in this case I mean it literally.
White, married, middle-class, homeowner, “some college”, late fifties. She lives in a safe neighborhood, where she still sees most of her neighbors at church.
She couldn’t afford her house if she had to buy it now, but she doesn’t have to buy it now. Her husband is closing in on retirement; they saved responsibly, she mostly just cuts hair to have something to do.
She’s not political, except in the ambient sense that she watches the TV news sometimes, and feels bad about the things she’s supposed to feel bad about. She doesn’t like to see people being nasty to each other.
She voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024 (though probably not in 2016), because she’s a Conservative, but she doesn’t like him personally — or at least, she doesn’t like “the way he talks about people.”
When she sees Trump (and Trump surrogates) being harsh and insulting on TV, she thinks about how she tries to treat people — the kind of people she meets in her real life, in her safe neighborhood.
The Mexican guy who fixed her water heater was polite and efficient, and gave her a good price. She did a service project for a refugee charity last Christmas, and seeing those families smile as they got their care packages made her feel really good.
Nothing (in her real life) justifies being Nasty, or Hurting People.
You’re not going to convince this woman of The Big Picture.
There’s no bar graph you can show her that will convince her that her neighborhood is dangerous (it isn’t), or that the contractor who installed her water heater is a threat (he isn’t), or that the refugees at the charity are about to make a fire with her Beautiful Oak Door — they aren’t (at least, not any time soon).
She lives in the real world; she Touches Grass. She isn’t going to care about any of the stuff you care about until she sees it right in front of her physically, and by then it will be way, way too late.
Of course, her moral attention can be redirected parasocially, but not by you — not in the totalizing way that activates a person politically. She’s not going to update her worldview — which, again, is very much wrapped up in her moral attitude toward dozens of real relationships in her real life — because you showed her a meme, or a statistic, or even a lurid atrocity video.
The state and national political system exists to keep this woman happy.
Housing getting more affordable would be a source of stress, with very little upside for her; house prices going steadily up makes her feel cozy.
Immigrants are clearly neutral-to-net-positive in her (personal, real) life; she doesn’t live in any of the places or do any of the activities where they cause problems. She doesn’t see how deportations help her in any material sense, but they definitely feel icky to see on television.
She wants to hear that poor kids aren’t hungry at school, and that teachers are earning a decent living, and that seniors (like her, soon) are taken care of in their old age — and the impact of any of these questions on her taxes, as the middle-aged middle-income Median Voter, are (by design) modest, diffuse, and difficult to trace.
Utah has a particularly bad case — but all over the country, This is What Democracy Looks Like: appearances are well-maintained, with a craftsman’s concern for the taste of women and the elderly.
How are you going to convince the person for whom the whole system is built that all is not well in Zion?
Well, unprompted, while she was doing my wife’s hair, the Median Voter gave us the answer.
In her basement, Utah’s Median Voter keeps three eighteen-gallon Roughneck storage totes full of toys.
Her children are now in their thirties. One is gay; one is a 36-year-old email job professional with no boyfriend and no serious prospects; one lives at home, intermittently employed.
These toys have not been touched in twenty years — but she can’t bear the thought of taking them to DI (that’s “Deseret Industries”, Utah’s Goodwill equivalent.) She doesn’t even have a niece or nephew who could take them.
She is comfortable in all the ways that a liberal consumer society can make her comfortable — but simultaneously in such pain that it is surfacing unbidden with strangers at work.
And she feels guilty about it, because she loves her children and does not want to burden them with her expectations.
The feeling that they owe something to her, even after they are grown (and that she has ongoing obligations to them) is an emotional instinct that her generation has collectively denied and suppressed.
She is not a Liberal — she is not pretending to be happy about all this — but she has no frame for any of these problems outside the conservative language of individual choice and accountability. She made choices, and her children made choices, and here we are. Barren.
(Much of her pain is no doubt rooted in the nagging feeling that this is All Her Fault somehow, though it’s not obvious what she is supposed to have done differently. She made sure they all made it to church, etc.)
This is the sense in which the war has already come to the Shire.
Faceless economic and cultural forces for which she has no name have salted her earth.
She could trace the genealogy of her children’s relationships — the particular friends and experiences at various state/quasi-state institutions that brought them to where they are — but she has no theory that metabolizes those experiences into questions of Policy.
But she knows it’s increasingly impossible (by which we mean “prohibitively difficult/undesirable at scale”) to raise a family, even in happy shiny Utah. She has watched her children struggle with the nakedly discriminatory credential mills and HR departments, and the impossibility of getting a mortgage.
But for all this there is the moral reflex to “take responsibility”: just work harder, do better, tighten your belt, stop buying avocado toast, etc.
The shattering of families into individual consumption units inhabiting a common barracks — the breaking and commodification of the relationship between man and woman, parent and child — released a tremendous amount of economic and political energy.
There was a powerful profit incentive to get conservative families of her generation thinking (or at least talking) as if loyalty was a vice, a sin against Freedom and Personal Responsibility.
If you enumerated all these economic and cultural obstacles to healthy family formation, she would likely nod along, but she sees them as something like bad weather, something that Just Happens — or maybe an aggregate of people just making “bad choices” (including, painfully, herself).
She has no vocabulary to think of these things as policy decisions made by People With Names And Addresses.
So here’s my bet: I think the Median Voter actually cares deeply about her children and (putative) grandchildren.
She is not callous. She is not excited to die broke in a cruise ship or high-end assisted living facility. She just needs to be convinced of the following:
She is allowed to care whether her children succeed in raising healthy families — far from being “not her business”, it is her only business
These questions are not purely moral or apolitical — it is not actually All Her Fault, or her children’s fault
Her family did not get here because of inexplicable cultural weather patterns — it was the result of deliberate public policy decisions which can be redecided.
Malachi’s prophecy — the seal at the end of the Old Testament — is literally true:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
Malachi 4:5-6
If the Median Voters — the cozy Everard Proudfoots of the world — understand themselves as atomized individuals, they will never take action until the earth is smitten with a curse, and the barbarians are literally, physically at their doorstep.
(Again, the individualist frame was inculcated with the express purpose of lowering these defenses.)
The only way to make them see what is coming — what is, in fact, already happening — is to turn their hearts to their children.
This thesis is perhaps particularly acute in Utah, where the Median Voter is particularly materially comfortable, and rhetorically primed to care about family — but I believe it’s the political key to the whole country.
For fathers whose hearts are turned to their children, all American political controversies become blindingly straightforward, not only in terms of “which side is right” but “what extremes of action are justified”.
It’s not just the morally correct frame, it’s also the most politically achievable frame: no other grounds for political cooperation is half as broad (near-universal) or as deep (one of the last things people will kill and die for) as our common interest in our grandchildren.
Once you have this frame — that the family is the fundamental unit of society, and that your first duty is the cultivation of your children and grandchildren — ideological considerations melt away, and it becomes simple to figure out who your friends are, and what you need to build together.
You won’t get the Median Voter to build any of this with you — but, as demonstrated by Bukele, and the fall of the Soviet Union, and many other historical “preference cascades” — if you can show her a concrete alternative, she will happily choose it.
EXIT is the fraternal arm of this effort — connecting men who share this understanding, to take a short position in the managerial system and build the human institutions that come next — the businesses, friendships, and shared history that turn families into Great Houses.
Constitutional Action is the civic arm — taking up responsibilities that the managerial state has abdicated, defending American families in their rights against bad-faith lawyering from people who despise them, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
And in early 2027, we will host the third annual NatalCon, bringing together like-minded families to discuss how we can build new institutions (or recapture old ones) to build a society in which our grandchildren can thrive.
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