The Future of Amerian Politics Looks Bad

On the Republican side, MAGA is morphing from a personality cult into an ideology focused on hating immigrants and rejecting free markets, and the Democrats rising up to challenge them are often socialists, people who lie constantly about the "harm" wrecked by data centers and blame hedge funds for high housing costs, veterans of wokeness who hate George Washington and Thanksgiving, or worse. What is to me the obvious response, sane moderation is nowhere in sight. 

Politico on the young Republicans:

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran. 

Prominent conservative commentators have alleged that groyperism is spreading among younger members of the GOP, including in government — a view seemingly backed by examples like the young Trump administration lawyer who admitted to a “Nazi streak” in text messages revealed by POLITICO. Others point to social-media posts from official government accounts that echo the language or memes of the online far right.

Noah Smith on the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) who seem to be taking over the Democratic Party:

The Republicans have never been this bad before. But in the past, when they got bad, the solution was always pretty simple: Vote for the Democrats. Democracy isn’t perfect, but it does have a natural release valve; you can always just “throw the bums out.” And that’s exactly what we used to do. . . .

And we should elect Democrats, this November. There is no ambiguity here; a Congress that challenges Trump’s lawlessness, investigates his unbridled corruption, and takes a more forceful stand in favor of Ukraine will be unambiguously better than the supine GOP Congress that can do nothing except worship at the man’s feet.

But at the same time, looking at the way the Democratic Party is headed, I think we should be asking how much better things will be under Democrats, including if they win the White House in 2028.

Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people. As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”. . . .

Some had hoped that the Democrats’ socialist faction would be able to escape some of the baggage of “woke 1”, because of their focus on class politics, and because the Palestine issue might be able to muscle aside a whole bunch of unpopular 2010s-era culture-war stances. But Hong shows that this hope will be in vain; the DSA types are the wokest of the woke.

To me, all of this is rooted in a belief that things in America are bad. Against all evidence, tens of millions of us, including, it seems, most of those going into politics, think our system is so rotten it needs radical change.

It may turn out that the inability of people to be satisfied, no matter how good things get, is what eventually dooms our civilization.