Consensus is that we’re getting a Blue Wave next week.
Many elements of the Online Right are in revolt over the war in Iran, the pace of deportations, as well as ongoing slights from GOP mouthpieces against young white men — personified in the crowning of Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary.
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I don’t know how much this online phenomenon will matter to the outcome of the midterms: it seems like the headwinds are probably, mostly, a function of gas prices, inflation, and the bottom falling out of the labor market. “Kitchen table issues”.
But because many of these guys are my friends, it seems worthwhile to explain why I think we should still organize and vote within the GOP in the races where it counts, even though I basically agree that these people are controlled opposition, their job is to create the illusion of a legitimate political process, and they need to be destroyed.
I’m not a Plan Truster.
We’ve all been hoping that the drumbeat of escalations — Trump’s conviction, the various legal and violent threats, narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, the murder of Charlie Kirk — would persuade the Administration that there is nothing to gain from coloring inside the lines.
Friends have been saying variations of this for over a decade at this point — and enough those friends are now in the Administration that I don’t think the failure of action is rooted in anything sinister or conspiratorial. The mood in DC is that they’re doing “everything that can be done”.
And maybe they’re right: they’re in a better position to know than I am. Maybe they have reason to believe that if they ordered the kind of decisive action that we have all been hoping for, they would simply not be obeyed (and might be arrested.)
In any case, it doesn’t look like this administration is going to invoke a state of exception or renegotiate the fundamental structure of American politics — which means that the ostentatious provocations and petty norm-breaking are counter-productive, and will only be used to justify reprisals from our enemies, who do believe that they can invoke a state of exception and be obeyed.
This is where the “Panican” arguments are on the strongest ground:
Whatever you believe about the decision-makers’ intentions, or “whose side they’re on”, it doesn’t look like they’re going to overcome the entrenched interests that they were elected to overcome.
The GOP is still controlled opposition; they still prostitute themselves to every foreign interest that can afford them (notably though not exclusively the Israelis), and they are still far more aligned with “the bipartisan consensus” than with the coalition that elected Donald Trump. The transformative change that we wanted — and that seemed necessary to avert the Bad Timeline — doesn’t seem to be coming.
I know many patriots who have worked themselves and their families to exhaustion trying to change that, so I find the sneering and accusations of disloyalty disgusting — but if Trump was “the Flight 93 candidate”, it’s worth remembering what happened to Flight 93. Sometimes things don’t go the way you hoped.
I’d like to be wrong, and there are almost certainly many reasons for optimism (or pessimism) that I’m not seeing. One of the consequences of entering this much higher-stakes, more-volatile phase of politics is that spectators like me just Don’t Get to Know.
But here’s where the critical and pessimistic approach to the Trump Administration becomes ridiculous:
Arguing that a Kamala Harris Administration would have been remotely equivalent (let alone preferable).
Arguing that we have any leverage to “punish” the GOP in any productive way (at this time).
The best defense I can make of these arguments is that they’re womanish expressions of emotion, meant to be taken seriously but not literally.
To address the first argument:
We have friends who would be rotting in prison in a Kamala Administration.
A simple continuation of Biden immigration policy would have meant more than 7 million more illegal immigrants in the country, if you credit the official statistics — and they wouldn’t have simply maintained course and speed, they would have accelerated.
If you think the Trump Administration has failed to respond with sufficient energy to the threat of leftist violence, how would things be improved by having DOJ and DNI actively collaborating with Antifa, as they did during the Biden Administration?
All potential sources of financial support for friendly organizing (particularly crypto) would be targeted for increased federal scrutiny, as they were under Biden and Obama.
It would still be explicitly legal (and in fact mandatory in major corporate settings) to discriminate against young white men and Americans, and to punish even anodyne “dissident” speech.
The immigrant fraud mafias would have billions more to send to Democratic (and Republican) politicians.
What element of organizing for power do you imagine would be easier under these circumstances?
Having ordinary politics foreclosed to you doesn’t actually make radical political action easier.
For the last thirty years, analysis has been the bottleneck for the unimaginable volume of surveillance data at the government’s disposal. AI tools will make threat-detection trivial at every level, from identifying (or creating) violent actors to social media censorship and doxxing.
The radical elements — the plausibly violent elements — would be the first to face infiltration and crackdowns, empowered by both these new tools, and the new crisis narrative that both parties have spent the last decade nurturing.
All of these are reasons to be glad that Republicans retook power in 2024, even if you are disappointed with how it has gone, or fear the measures taken are inadequate. All of these problems will be an order of magnitude more intense in the event of a 2028 Democratic victory.
(And, it goes without saying, you would still have had slavery to foreign interests, and a moribund job market, and inflation, and war.)
As for the second argument:
There is no world in which MAGA stays home, the Democrats retake the government, and the Republican Party tacks right to “win you back”.
The GOP establishment can always find new voters, and they would prefer to. They want to lose, they want to be the outer party — that’s what “controlled opposition” means.
The establishment GOP — including many who are currently bandwagoning with the Trump Administration — are dying for an excuse to put all this unpleasantness behind them and come back into the fold of respectable politics. That’s why they are deliberately alienating and dividing the base.
It’s also why they are refusing to cooperate with the Administration’s efforts to consolidate power with efforts like the SAVE Act: they believe a second Reconstruction is coming, and they want to make sure they’re on the right side of the new regime.
If the “MAGA-not-Republican” voter decides to stay home (as they did prior to 2016), our enemies in the Republican establishment will not panic — they will celebrate. They will enthusiastically declare the movement dead, cheer as the radicals are purged and “faith in Our Institutions restored”, and pick up the votes (really, the donors) they need from the center.
The only way to break that intransigence — if it can be broken — is to force them into a winning coalition that isn’t going away.
To the extent that the 2016 and 2024 MAGA coalitions wrung concessions out of the Republican establishment, it wasn’t by throwing elections to the Democrats, but by convincing the careerist quislings that Trump was the permanent future of the party.
I feel the same anger my friends do at the open subversion of our interests: but if you think the Republicans are traitors who are deliberately throwing the game, you obviously cannot hurt them by throwing it first.
When you feel powerless, it’s tempting to settle for emotional catharsis — “if nothing I do matters, then at least I can give them a piece of my mind.” But no matter what you believe about what has happened over the last two years (or why), it isn’t remotely over — and we should never decouple our actions from our aims.
First: we can punish establishment Republicans and force them to tack right — in the primaries.
The Vivek Ramaswamy campaign is a perfect example of what not to do. Ramaswamy received the anointing from the Trump Administration and the Ohio GOP, and all credible GOP contenders obediently dropped out.
The only candidate “crazy enough” to reject that consensus was Casey Putsch, whose campaign floundered because he wanted to emote more than he wanted to win. Now, Ohio voters face a hideous choice in what should have been a safely Republican seat.
I’m not telling you that you have to suck it up and vote for Vivek — I’m just telling you that you no longer have any real leverage to punish him, or the Republicans who anointed him.
In 2028, we need to field serious candidates in every possible Republican primary — especially the safe seats where they aren’t used to spending money, seats that the GOP (and Trump world) would like to hand out to insiders on the basis of seniority and loyalty.
This is the mission of Constitutional Action, which we have created in Utah to replace the cowardly Republican establishment with leaders willing to act.
Whatever else may happen, we will be entering the “post-Trump era”.
Ohio was essentially a fief bestowed on Vivek to reward him for getting in line early (and to get him out of Washington). We can and should scramble these kingmaker arrangements where possible — that’s where actual grassroots political leverage comes from.
The best proof of this is the Democratic Party, which understands power and wants to win. Primaries are savagely contested by the radicals, but no one in the DSA would dream of throwing an election to a Republican on accelerationist grounds. The radical right somehow discovered a political idea so insane and retarded and unworkable that even communists won’t touch it.
But that will take a lot more work than sitting out, and we’ll need every day of the next two years to get ready. We’ll all have to learn how to act normal, and not take any bait, and swallow our pride to appeal to a middle that we’re accustomed to regarding with contempt. But if the Democrats can get that done with literal covens of lunatics and mutants and demoniacs, I have faith that we can figure it out.
Second: no matter what you believe is coming, time and freedom of action are invaluable.
Every time I talk about Republican politics, I get someone in my replies saying, “Oh, you want me to vote for the controlled opposition? You want me to vote for liberalism going the speed limit? You want me to vote for slow decline?”
And my answer is Yes, obviously. Liberalism going the speed limit is better than liberalism that doesn’t have to go the speed limit. Slow decline is better than fast decline. We have work to do, and we need time and space to do it in.
Defeat and decline doesn’t necessarily create any exploitable volatility — at least, not on an acceptable timescale. The collapse of the South African government — which had made all sorts of concessions that infuriated their right flank — did not “shake things up” or empower the hardliners. It triggered a rout of their popular base (some 20% of white South Africans fled the country) and drove the rest into the wilderness for thirty years. Defeat is defeat.
If you talk to those people today (or, more often, their children), it’s obvious that almost any concession that would have allowed them to continue to build parallel institutions within the old prosperity and freedom for even five more years would have been worthwhile.
Noah didn’t pray for the rain to come early so that he could enjoy being vindicated. Whatever you think is coming, we need time to build friendships, gather resources, organize our communities, and prepare our families. We should not throw away the time and freedom we’ve been given out of pique.
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Three time Trump voter. Never voting again in anything but a local election. What few transient wins we have will all be undone shortly. Biggest blown opportunity in the history of politics on this planet. Demographic destiny (and the establishment) has won, and things will never be the same again. Had a brief breath of opportunity with Trump, its over, what an ass. Unless (and when) the system collapses, you are getting California, everywhere.
I will not be voting for GOP candidates simply because they no longer deserve my vote, period. I do not have, and I do not need, any complicated emotional justification about "punishing" anyone. I'm simply not going to support candidates who have no use for me anymore.
Also, I want to weigh in on this whole idea of "building local communities." Specifically, I want to say that it is totally asinine. I have been hearing this from alternative political voices for more than 25 years; if it were possible to build meaningful and resilient local communities, we would have them by now. The scaling laws make it impossible to do so. Local communities simply are not as efficient as the national and global institutions they would need to subvert. Furthermore, there is nothing sacrosanct about a local community. Local communities can be just as dysfunctional and sinful as the cosmopolitan mass, and they have much less power to enforce their will. I am now at the point when I no longer take seriously anybody who talks about building local communities. This is not a serious strategy.
The only strategy that has a chance of disrupting the global power structure, and that ordinary people can effectuate without breaking the law, is some kind of economic boycott, specifically debt disruption. Stop consuming, pay off all old debts, and refuse to borrow any more money even if it means personal sacrifice. Done on a large scale, the resulting deflation would bring about the end of the financialized era, and financialization is the principal source and power of the evils in the world today.