Identity derivation causes demonization.

Timothy Keller

Currently, the midterm outlook is fairly positive for the Dems. Trump’s approval rating is low. Prices remain stubbornly high, which is causing the Fed to keep interest rates high, which then puts a drag on certain parts of the economy. The war in Iran is unpopular, despite the constant assertion by Trump and the GOP that we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the crazy Iranian regime (even many MAGA people are like, “Um, yah, you could have actually mentioned this so-called nuclear threat at some point during the 2024 campaign, instead of constantly blurting out the no-new-wars promise.” As such, most sensible people know that the Iranian nuclear bogeyman is total BS). The ongoing brutality of ICE is highly unpopular outside of the diehard MAGA base.

So all kinds of borderline Trump voters from 2024 are defecting, maybe to vote Democratic in the midterms, or more likely to just stay home in protest to the Orange One not delivering on his main campaign promises. A lot of people in this middling group are finally starting to come to the realization that Trump and his minions only really care about two things: trashing libs and lining their own pockets, with the latter being catalyzed by the usual plutocratic playbook: tax cuts for the rich, sweetheart deals with massive kickbacks for Deep State cronies, deregulation and the sham self-regulation (an obvious oxymoron) of the huge AI companies, and the looming GOP promise/threat to privatize everything in sight, in order to free things up for the wonderful creative power of the market. Never mind that this creative power of the free market is essentially the power to create more money for the already-flush.

In this bleak outlook for the GOP, they’re pulling out all the stops to get people to look away from the carnage that Trumpism has wreaked on our institutions, our communities, our international standing, and our very psyches. Suddenly and magically, there is another caravan of narco-terrorists at the southern border (spoiler alert, there isn’t, as even former loyal Trumper MTG pointed out). Trump took to Truth Social [sic] to promise $5000 to all Americans if the Republicans win the midterms (another spoiler — it won’t happen, even if the GOP wins). Some $500 payments went out as an Obamacare “refund.” The Don also started up some investment accounts for children, something completely unnecessary, as existing financial products already have the same features. There have been show hearings against liberal villains of yore, Anthony Fauci and Jack Smith. Instead of fixing the underlying economic fundamentals, Trump has also signed deals to bring in foreign beef and Russian diesel to try and tamp down prices (with the former not going over too well with American ranchers). Pete Keg-Breath and Trump have ginned up the anti-trans rhetoric again, as that was so successful in 2024. There is also apparently some alarming new “threat” of weirdo airline pilots dressed up as chipmunks and aardvarks. And of course, the golden oldie terrors of, gulp, communism, Marxism, socialism, and radical left whatever are popping up like autumn mums on suburban porches.

But if the polls are right, all of this open bribery, piecemeal bandaids, and rehashed crap is not really resonating this time around. Aside from the diehard Always-Trumpers, people are finally starting to sniff out the grift and call BS on the endless misdirection. After all, how long can you blame Biden, and even Obama, for shit that you own and that you yourself have personally broken? Moderate Republicans, another term shading into oxymoronic status, are saying, “Yeah, we get it, Biden sucked. But you’ve had more than a year and a half to right the ship, so what do you actually have in a positive sense for regular people, aside from vicarious revenge against the libs, and dribs and drabs of ad hoc payouts designed to placate us?”

Of course, for Trump and his out-of-touch cronies (Dr. Oz somehow thinks that butter costs a buck), the plight of regular people doesn’t really matter. They’re getting their beaks sopping wet, and the stock market is soaring, fueled by record corporate profits, which are in turn largely driven by AI (here I am bravely risking jail time for not calling it Mega Intelligence or Super Intelligence, or whatever ridiculous label Trump dreamed up on the crapper and then demanded that everyone use, OR ELSE!). For Trump and his kleptocratic remoras, “affordability” is a hoax, and any media outlet that says otherwise is, of course, fake news. I guess since the two thirds of Americans who report living paycheck to paycheck are still technically alive, they must be affording things pretty easily, right?

Now, aggregate numbers showing a Democratic wave in the midterms are always somewhat shaky, because ultimately people vote for specific candidates running for specific offices. And a general distaste for Trump and his demagogic ways doesn’t automatically mean that conservative voters will abandon their long-term, geographic tribal loyalties to color in a lot of D bubbles on their actual ballots. As mentioned above, if the blue wave happens, it will likely be due more to depressed GOP and Independent turnout than to a full positive swing to the Dems.

But let’s assume for argument’s sake that the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress. What should they do?

I recently read Sarah Longwell’s fun book, How to Eat an Elephant. Longwell has been running voter focus groups for many years now, and one thing that jumps out time and again, with regards to Democrats, is that voters want them to fight. Specific policy minutiae don’t matter quite as much as people wanting genuine, authentic candidates who will battle to the death for regular folks. Especially in this age of Trump, a guy who relishes conflict of the most bare-fisted and ruthless type, people want the Dems to stop talking about pronouns and free daycare and just get down to kickin’ some ass!

This desire of voters for fighters sounds fairly straightforward, but it immediately raises two questions that are not all that comfortable for Dems: Who or what, exactly, should we be fighting? And what exactly are we fighting for?

The fighter motif is a tough road for the Democrats. First of all, the Democratic coalition is built on an open embrace of diverse constituencies. The GOP base is much more demographically narrow, largely rural, white and Christian, so they can leverage latent sexism, racism, homophobia, and other grievance blocs, all in the cause of fighting a stealthy and all-powerful cabal of globalist liberal elites and their nefarious agents. This is essentially a nonsensical, catchall opponent, ranging from scientists to school librarians to anyone driving a Prius, But that doesn’t really matter, as the MAGA base is largely locked into their white rural places, so the enemy can remain nebulous but somehow deviously powerful.

This is a natural tribal advantage for the GOP, when we’re using the fighting motif to describe our politics and culture. It is fairy easy to create a convincing story of “Us Against the Forces of Evil,” especially when this slots nicely into the persecution themes of Christianity. It is much more difficult to do the reverse: create a fight narrative of the diverse many (of liberalism) against a singular enemy like the relatively homogeneous base of MAGA nation.

Of course, Dems try mightily to take the fight to Trump and the GOP. Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani are fighters, going after the billionaires, the warmongers, and the like. But the problem here is that, in a political system completely captured by the plutocrats, you just can’t make much headway without massive changes to the Constitution and to the capitalist system itself. Needless to say, it’s very hard to get lasting victories against the System, and the larger fighting efforts of the Bernie set (e.g., taxing the shit out of billionaires and big corporations) have not come close to fruition.

The accidental genius of Trumpism is that it has created a faux-fighting platform, where it cosplays as anti-establishment while shoveling more money and power to the plutocrats and kleptocrats (often the same people). This is done by massive misdirection, the skillful work of the Polarization Industrial Complex to push the rage that comes from raw plutocratic dominance over into the cultural sphere, where the “fight” is taken to symbolic and ultimately powerless people: immigrants, university professors, trans people, drag queens, and other lefty totems. But as mentioned many times on this blog, the symbolic and misdirected fighting model of Trumpism must become more intense over time, because nothing is actually done to make regular people’s lives better in significant, systemic ways. Deporting millions of undocumented workers, defunding universities and scientific organizations, deregulating polluting industries, slashing the federal workforce, juicing up the stock market (90% of which is controlled by the richest 10%), banning abortion, cutting SNAP, kicking fatties out of the armed forces — none of these things actually accrue to direct help for regular people. As with all conservatism since the Reagan revolution, help for the masses has to trickle down from the swollen coffers of the wealthy (the “job creators”), and (another spoiler) this just doesn’t happen. As such, the fighting rhetoric of Trump and MAGA must become more intense through time, and the evil libs must be demonized in broader and more sensational ways (“What, they want ALL kids to be transgender?!?!”), because the alternative is to admit that the system itself is beyond repair, no matter how hard we fight to make it regain life.

So the Dems are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to the question, “Who or what are we fighting against?” Their broad, largely urban and suburban, often highly educated constituency really forces them away from full-scale cultural warfare against their fellow citizens, which leaves them fighting the small cadre of all-powerful plutocratic capitalists, even capitalism itself — a tall order.

But then there is the second fighting question: “What are we fighting for?” This is a question of utopistics. What kind of society do Dems and libs envision? Unfortunately, here again, Trump and the MAGA movement have the advantage, because they have completely removed themselves from modern reality, especially of the urban type, in favor of archaic and nostalgic fantasies from the past. Trump and his minions are a kind of Mafia of Dead Ideas: “Let’s be a manufacturing nation again!”; “Let’s make everyone Christian!”; “Let’s get rid of all the non-whites!”; “Let’s bring back open racism and sexism!”; “Let’s outlaw sexual freedom and force young women to give birth (a lot)!”‘ “Let’s stick prayer, Bibles, and commandment placards in schools!”; “Let’s jettison all that pesky and biased science!” And so on. You get the idea.

The advantage of fighting for the nostalgic past is that we have cultural artifacts and memories of the way things used to be (kind of), concrete and tangible examples of a whitewashed version of the way things were, or the way we imagined things were, or the way things were, but just for some.

In contract, Dems and libs are trying to fight for something that doesn’t exactly exist yet: full gender equality, sweeping racial justice, a Green New Deal, a push for full employment in the jobs of the future, broad benefits like MFA and universal daycare, etc. There are certainly some liberal nods to the concrete past, especially around labor unions and the economic egalitarianism of the late 1970s, but these just don’t inspire in today’s economic landscape, where AI threatens to further degrade the economic value of human skill, a development that had already been increasing its speed across the globe, as technology and the evolution of the business corporation have consistently reduced the labor share of economic output.

Again, the GOP has gained the advantage by moving their fighting octagon far away from the raw reality of hyper-unequal plutocracy, and placing it in the cultural plane, where eternal struggle for a fleeting and always-elusive future is the norm. After all, Jesus said he was coming back “soon,” but his followers are still waiting. So as with many other things, modern American conservatism is immune from disproof, as it has retreated to a cultural, quasi-spiritual place, where the beleaguered Elect can battle the evil forces of the liberal, secular world, ad infinitum.

The pivot that the Democrats and liberals need to make involves letting go of the comforting illusion that our system can be salvaged in roughly its current format: one person/one job, one family/one dwelling, economic growth as a positive goal (just greened up), the expansion of “opportunity” as a realistic approach to social and economic justice, the dream that we can convert our existing physical infrastructure over to sustainable energy sources, careerism as a rational organizing principle for people’s lives, etc.

The desire to make these things worthy goals for the fighting liberal must be abandoned. The system is not salvageable in its current American format. It needs a fundamental, foundational reboot, a reorganization at the basic level of the household, the social form that drives so much of our dysfunction. So we need to be fighting for something else, a small set of simple but seismic changes that will then spin out massive downstream transformations to our politics, our economy, our culture, our communities, and even our psyches.

Final spoiler alert: these seismic changes are Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory. Check out many earlier posts for background on these three ideas.