Social Studies

Here’s my report from the unexpectedly fiery TPUSA convention in Arizona, for UnHerd.

I wrote for the Times of London about Trump’s bizarrely gratuitous attack on the late Rob Reiner and how the attention economy that fuels our politics is dragging us all into the swamp the President wallows in.

Also: I was very proud to make the Top Ten list of substacks on Vincent Kelley’s Handful of Earth.

I’m off to the Turning Point USA convention this week, and will have a story to file from there in the coming days.

—LW

I have another opinion piece up today in the New York Times, about the new speech codes around the Israeli Palestinian conflict in California public schools, and how the politicization of education has led us to this regrettable moment.

Hope you’ll give it a read.

“At Palantir, we are on the side of working class Americans,” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, told the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin on stage at the DealBook Summit a week ago.

Palantir is a data analysis company that got its start contracting for the Pentagon to assist George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Its clients include ICE, DHS, HHS, the IRS and the Department of Defense. It seeks to be the U.S. government’s “central operating system,” though it also contracts with foreign allies like Israel and Ukraine. Its stocks are worth over $430 billion. Last year, Karp personally made close to $7 billion.

Despite being one of the wealthiest people on the planet, Karp’s rambling 45-minute conversation with Sorkin was punctuated with ostentatious declarations of contempt for America’s elites. “Our country has selective empathy for everybody but working class, particularly white, males,” he scolded. By way of example, he railed against the hypocrisy of “the mainstream media” for questioning the constitutionality of the Trump administration drone striking boats in the Caribbean. “I guarantee you that if that fentanyl was killing people at schools we went to, potentially your kids are going to,” he said, looking at Sorkin, “it would be constitutional to blow up those boats.”

The boats Trump is blowing up are not carrying fentanyl. If they’re loaded with drugs at all, it’s cocaine. Fentanyl is made from precursor chemicals shipped from China to Mexico, where they’re made into the synthetic opioid. From there, they’re smuggled across the border. It strains credulity to believe that Karp, who belongs to a very small clique at the helm of the American military industrial complex, actually thinks that those boats were smuggling fentanyl. He was not speaking from ignorance; he was lying. (Sorkin failed to correct him and even reiterated the lie.)

But invoking fentanyl rather than cocaine allows you to cast the extrajudicial killings as heroic, given the drug’s lethality, which is why this particular piece of disinformation has become a staple of the Trump administration’s propaganda campaign for a new regime change war. And it does something else, as well: it aligns you with America’s poor, forgotten underclass, the members of which are disproportionately the victims of the fentanyl addiction crisis. Through this preposterous charade, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, who has built a corporate empire off of wars fought by other people’s children, can cosplay as a tribune of the working class. The real elites, he can pretend to believe, are clustered in the Harvard faculty lounge, not in places like the stage of the DealBook Summit and the C-suite offices of Palantir.

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I’ve written enough posts here about how knowledge economy professionals have become the new ruling class to exhaust long time readers. I’ve even written somewhat sympathetically about Elon Musk’s jihad against the professional managerial class. The thesis that upper-middle class, college-educated liberals constitute a powerful and at times even dominant faction of the American elite is a hill I will proudly die on. But that doesn’t mean that right-leaning tech billionaires are suddenly the salt of the earth.

Since Trump won re-election on a wave of backlash to the Ivory Tower social justice crusades that we know as “wokeness,” we have seen this inversion over and over again, in which the most cartoonishly elite people in America pretend to be bulwarks against the tyranny of Gender Studies majors. This kind of absurdity may be the inevitable by-product of the paradoxical emergence of a populist political movement of aggrieved workers led by a billionaire celebrity, but at least Trump has, quite famously, never been embraced by the upper crust of America’s cultural establishment. The same cannot be said for the tech oligarchs who have appointed themselves emissaries of the forgotten American.

Americans who object to blowing up cocaine boats in international waters in order to jump start a regime change war include, no doubt, New York Times readers who live in coastal metropolises, went to brand name colleges, and send their kids to private Montessori schools. And those people are certainly “elite” relative to the two-thirds or so of Americans without baccalaureate degrees. They are not elite relative to Alex Karp, Pete Hegseth, or the All-In bros. Nor is their opinion on this issue some kind of “luxury belief”; until about 15 minutes ago, opposition to new military interventions was a staple of MAGA populism.

But we live in a democracy, or at least a society purporting to cherish democratic values. As such, in order to speak from a position of moral authority, one must profess to be speaking for the people, not for the military, or corporations, or the ruling class. You can’t just say you want a new war for glory and profits, like a feudal aristocrat. You have to pretend that everything you do on behalf of the powerful constituencies and special interests you serve is actually for the struggling, hardworking families of America. Hence we’re treated to the nauseating spectacle of billionaire tech founders raising their fists against the uncaring elites of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California. This is the MAGA coalition’s version of virtue-signaling. It’s woke jingoism.

Alex Karp’s voracious appetite for forever wars places him in the same bucket as Hillary Clinton, John Bolton, and Lindsay Graham. The working class Americans he pretends to speak for are the ones who will pay for their wars with soaring gas prices, influxes of refugees, and, perhaps, dead enlisted relatives. Corporations like Palantir are not “on their side”; they are the infrastructure of social control for the elites. That’s why Karp can’t be honest about what the drive to war in Venezuela is really about, and has to lie through his teeth to pretend he’s serving anyone’s interests but his own.

I’ve been reporting on artificial intelligence for a few months now and I still can’t tell you who actually wants this technology other than the people who will profit from it. If it delivers on its promise, it will destroy all our jobs. If it overdelivers, it could drive the human species to extinction. And if it fails to deliver, it will pop a bubble so big it could drive the entire global economy into recession. None of these are good outcomes for regular people.

Yet Trump, who campaigned on bringing back industrial jobs and fighting the elites, is championing this job-killing technology on behalf of tech billionaires. This week, he will issue an executive order restricting state-level regulation of AI. And he is allowing China to buy microprocessors from Nvidia even more advanced than the ones on which he already lifted export controls.

Why is he doing this? As with most things with this president, the answer is even less than meets the eye. He’s doing it because tech titans like his “AI czar” David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang want him to, and they’ve sucked up to him sufficiently to get what they ask for.

Sacks is a libertarian of the blandest variety. Like everyone else in Silicon Valley, he believes in free markets and the mystical powers of entrepreneurs. He wants to block states from regulating AI because he thinks regulations are bad, and while he has no juice with the California lawmakers who are intent on enacting new rules, he has a great deal of influence over the President and the majority caucus in Congress. With the feds in control, he can count on the government to do no regulating whatsoever during this crucial window of AI development, not just because of the Republicans’ reflexive anti-regulatory instincts, but also because he and much of the PayPal Mafia have invested deeply in the MAGA movement and can now expect their ROI.

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He wants China to get all the Nvidia chips it can buy for much the same reason: he thinks governments can only get in the way of the world-changing power of technology companies, including by prioritizing such things as national security over the free market. His argument is that by making China dependent on American technology, we will lock in American structural dominance in the global marketplace, a presumption that flies in the face of the entire rationale for putting technology transfer controls on U.S. military rivals.

Much the same self-servingly sanguine thinking was behind the economic theory of “constructive engagement” with China in the 1990s, which led to the lifting of tariffs and sanctions and the normalizing of Chinese global trade relations. That in turn led to the decimation of American industry, the hollowing out of our manufacturing towns, the immiseration of much of the working class, and a bonanza for multinational corporations and their investors. Those were the conditions that fueled Trump’s rise and that Trump promised to rectify. But instead of fixing them he’s just kickstarting another cycle of American job destruction on behalf of the investor class and to the benefit of China.

Trump, in other words, has become the puppet of Wall Street, the same way that Clinton, Obama, and a dozen other presidents did. But unlike them, he isn’t even trying to obfuscate it. He doesn’t feel the need to, because in spite of his populist bluster, he doesn’t regard MAGA as a movement of American workers against a corrupt elite. He just regards it as his personal fan club. As he has proclaimed once before, he believes “America First” is whatever he wants it to be.

Closer to Trump’s heart than fighting for the working class is scamming them, and AI is the world’s biggest get-rich-quick scheme. The New York Times ran a wild story yesterday about a new data center that just broke ground in a poor border county in New Mexico. The developer pegged the cost of the facility at $165 billion — $15 billion more than it cost to construct the International Space Station. But the developer said a lot of things, including that the data center will create 750 new jobs with salaries of $75,000 and more, even though it’s basically just a digital warehouse. This is the real estate equivalent of what Silicon Valley calls “vaporware.” It wasn’t until the developer had dazzled the county commissioners with the immensity of the project and secured their approval that OpenAI and Oracle came on board as customers, and it wasn’t until after that that Goldman Sachs and a consortium of other banks pieced together $18 billion for construction. Now the data center is going up without an environmental impact assessment and despite significant opposition from locals.

This is the boom that tech titans like Sacks and Huang are intent on riding into transhumanist immortality. You can see why Trump likes it: it’s the sci-fi version of Trump Steaks. It’s a speculative market of shameless hype that promises, if nothing else, to make a small number of rich people mind-bogglingly richer. It’s almost guaranteed to fuck over millions of regular people in the process, from poor rural Americans whose water and electricity bills are set to skyrocket as soon as those new data centers they never asked for go online, to perhaps nearly all of us when we see our jobs replaced by highly intelligent chatbots.

The U.S. government is becoming a kleptocracy rivaling Ukraine’s. Sure, the tech oligarchs had to grovel a bit at Trump’s inauguration and at a few White House dinners, but in exchange they were handed the federal government for pennies on the dollar. Now they’re turning our economy into the biggest ponzi scheme the human race has ever seen. Soon America will be one giant Trump enterprise — shiny, glitzy, gold-looking, full of sexy promises but built on fantasy and destined to collapse as soon as the investors cash out.

A year from now, after the Republican bicameral majority has been obliterated in the midterms, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation from Congress may come to be recognized as the first leak in the hull of the sinking GOP ship of state. Trump, of course, regarded it as a victory over a weaker rival, as he does most things. But it was the opposite. Greene’s refusal to march to Trump’s orders was the cracking noise of a vessel under too much strain. If you ignore it, you know what comes next.

And you don’t have to look that closely to see that there are cracks everywhere.

This weekend, the New York Times ran a story on David Sacks, Trump’s “A.I. and crypto czar,” detailing his many alleged conflicts of interest. The case is based more on spatters of blood than a smoking gun, and Sacks and his tech mogul friends responded to it with smug indignation. Sacks tweeted irritably about “NYT’S HOAX FACTORY.” Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk, and Bill Ackman chimed in to praise Sacks as an example of “American greatness.” Sacks’ podcast co-host Jason Calacanis mused, moustache-twirlingly, about buying the New York Times.

But whether or not Sacks is personally profiting off his position in the White House matters little in the greater scheme of things. Sacks is a billionaire and a giant in Silicon Valley. He has grander aspirations than boosting his investment portfolio by putting his thumb on the regulatory scales. He’s open about what he wants: to keep the American tech industry at the center of the global AI revolution. The profits he would reap from achieving that goal dwarf any marginal advantage he could milk out of the petty venality the New York Times accuses him of. But I doubt that even vast levels of personal enrichment is what motivates Sacks’ work in the Trump administration. Those at the frontier of AI believe that their industry will change not only world history, but possibly the direction of the entire human species. Sacks is putting his mark on the universe.

It’s hard to conceive of a dream more “globalist” than that one. Sacks wraps up his AI plans in the American flag because that’s how you sell things to MAGA. But the policies he has pushed for include such things as easing export controls on NVIDIA microchips to China, on the assumption that driving innovation everywhere strengthens America by benefiting its ownership class. These are ideas that give Steve Bannon aneurysms. The tech right are unreconstructed stateless neoliberals; they just tweaked their branding to exploit the opportunity they saw in Trump. It’s worked out extraordinarily well for them.

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But it’s becoming more and more obvious that the glaring internal contradictions the tech oligarchs have imposed upon the MAGA coalition will rip the Republican Party to shreds. Democrats cleaned up in last month’s elections for Georgia’s utility board because of surging electricity bills driven in part by the voracious energy appetites of new data centers for the AI industry. The same issue cropped up in races Democrats won in Virginia and New Jersey, and is now festering all over the country, as data centers spring up like mushrooms after a storm. We’re not even at the stage yet of mass worker displacement by artificial intelligence, and already the interests of the AI-driven tech industry are diverging radically from those of ordinary American voters.

Among the issues from which Marjorie Taylor Greene broke from the Trump administration was the President’s fervid devotion to his AI-obsessed tech donors. Before it was stripped from the legislation, Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ included a decade-long ban on state regulation of artificial intelligence, which Greene vocally opposed. She also criticized the President’s AI Action Plan, co-written by Sacks, for its push to steamroll construction of data centers over local opposition.

There were other issues too, of course, including Trump’s about-face on the Epstein Files and his eagerness to embroil the United States in foreign entanglements, including regime change war on Venezuela. But they all have something in common: whether it’s billionaire pedophiles, neocons like Marco Rubio, or the tech right, Trump has steadily abandoned the principles that once endeared him to his MAGA base and let billionaires, corporate lobbyists, and the war-mongering Deep State dictate his administration’s goals and priorities to him.

Secure in his second term and cozy in his bubble-wrapped echo chamber, the President has allowed himself to drift further and further out of touch with the people who voted for him, putting his Congressional allies in the impossible position of choosing between their loyalty to him and to their populist-leaning constituents. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, as Trump has clearly always coveted the approval and admiration of elites, adopting populism only in response to the rejection they met him with and the seething resentment it stoked in him. Now he has those elites kissing the ring, even if only to swindle him into doing their bidding. The fealty of his vassals has put him in a magnanimous mood. But the peasants are still starving.

This story by me on why San Francisco’s crime rate has plummeted (and the part of it that hasn’t) just went up today at American Affairs magazine. Fair warning: it’s long.

It’s paywalled but you get one free article a month so if you’re not a regular American Affairs reader you should be able to access the full piece.

—LW

Published today in UnHerd:

Every morning on their way to school, students at Marshall Elementary School in San Francisco’s Mission District are forced to sidestep clouds of meth and fentanyl smoke, as well as human faeces. The Inner Mission is a neighbourhood plagued by street addiction, homelessness, and untreated mental illness. Emily Glasner, a Marshall mom, told me about the time someone jumped out from an alley screaming at her, “I’m going to kill you”, while she was walking to school with her 10-year-old son. Now, her son has nightmares about being attacked by people on the street.

Despite these abominable conditions — or perhaps because of them — a nine-storey apartment building called “La Maravilla” has been approved for construction next door to the school. It will contain 135 units to house formerly homeless people. Neighbours, school staff and parents of Marshall students fear it will make conditions around the school even worse. Yet in response to their concerns, supporters of La Maravilla have called them “Nimbys” (“Not In My Back Yard”) and accused them of bigotry.

In a meeting before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last July, Sam Moss, the executive director of the Mission Housing Development Corporation, the non-profit affordable housing development firm leading the project, lit into critics of La Maravilla. A group of neighbours opposed to the new construction, which is slated to begin in December, had appealed its approval, and that appeal was before the board to consider.

“This appeal isn’t about protecting the neighbourhood,” Moss said, his voice tense with anger and brimming with contempt. “It’s about protecting privilege. It’s about using bureaucracy to block equity. It sends a clear message to low-income and housing insecure folks in San Francisco: you don’t belong here.”

His acerbic language reflected the rhetorical tenor of the Yimby (“Yes In My Back Yard”) movement. It’s a moniker proudly claimed by the pro-housing activists who oppose Nimbys — the pejorative used for neighbours who criticise and hold up new housing construction projects. Moss’ wife, Laura Foote, who also testified on behalf of La Maravilla that day, is one of the founders of the Yimby movement. (Moss declined to speak to me for this story and Foote did not respond to an interview request.)

Nimbys, in the minds of Yimbys, are affluent homeowners so pampered by their comfortable neighbourhoods that they become feverish reactionaries in the face of any proposed change to the status quo. The caricature of a Nimby is encapsulated in a video from a 2017 Berkeley City Council meeting in which a neighbour held a zucchini aloft and declared that it could never have grown in the shade that would be cast over her vegetable garden by a couple of two-storey buildings slated for construction next door. Yimbys often claim that concerns invoked by opponents of new development projects over traffic, parking, shadows and neighbourhood character are not merely frivolous; they’re smokescreens for the real objective of keeping poor people out of the area. “I am ashamed at this classist and hostile behaviour from some of my neighbours,” said one supporter of La Maravilla at the Board of Supervisors meeting.

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But the stereotype is an odd fit for those who oppose Moss’ project, especially those affiliated with Marshall. The school’s students are overwhelmingly low-income. Many of them are the children of immigrants. The complaints of their parents and educators are not about zucchini gardens; they’re about surrounding a school with an open-air drug market. Teachers have to keep classroom windows closed so meth smoke doesn’t blow in. Neighbours have seen open prostitution in the area during school hours. One school employee told me about a man masturbating on the sidewalk in front of the playground in view of the kids. A teacher had seen shirtless young men walking out of a nearby station carrying machetes. “It’s unsafe at a hygiene level,” the Marshall employee, who asked not to be named, told me. “People are defecating on the street daily.”

Yet their grievances have been described as those of Nimbys even by Jackie Fielder, the supervisor who represents the neighbourhood, on her Instagram page. (Fielder did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s a trope that plays well in San Francisco,” said Ali Gilmore, who lives across the street from the school.

Neighbours and parents fear that the new project will bring even more chaos and disorder to the vicinity. Plans for La Maravilla include three buildings. All of them will be affordable housing, but only one of them — the nine-storey structure that will break ground in December — has been funded. That building will be permanent supportive housing. “Supportive housing” means housing with services for formerly homeless people who are mentally ill or drug-addicted.

San Francisco incentivises the development of this type of housing. Thanks to a ballot measure passed in 2018 that raised taxes on huge companies in San Francisco to fund homeless services, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in city funding available for the construction of permanent supportive housing. And thanks to recent Yimby-supported legislation, residential development projects that include supportive housing are streamlined for approval in California, especially when they’re near transit corridors, as La Maravilla is. Instead of going through the tedious process of gaining the approval of public officials, developers whose projects meet a list of prerequisites can dispense with public hearings and costly environmental reviews and cut the permitting process down to months instead of years. The rules are meant to prevent Nimbys from blocking the construction of housing desperately needed to address the state’s affordability crisis. It was this streamlined process that allowed the Mission Housing Development Corporation and its partner on the project, the Mission Economic Development Agency, to push La Maravilla through.

Moss has described his opponents’ appeal against La Maravilla as “a greatest hits of Nimbyism” and “chock full of bigotry and segregation”. For people in wealthy Pacific Heights or on the low-slung west side of San Francisco who for decades have stubbornly resisted affordable housing construction and upzoning — changing construction codes to allow for denser development — that’s a charge that might stick. Those were the kinds of homeowners the Yimby movement was built to confront, not moderate-income and working-class families whose neighbourhoods are already inundated by blight. “I follow what’s happening in the Sunset,” Naomi Fox, who heads the Marshall Parent Teacher Association, said of the west side neighbourhood. “I see Mayor Lurie begging them to allow an upzoning plan. We would have no problem with that.”

The Inner Mission is, in fact, already upzoned, and no one I spoke to in the neighbourhood had a problem with affordable housing being constructed next to Marshall. Marc Solomon, another neighbour, told me they’d be fine with a building for homeless families, who tend to be higher-functioning than homeless individuals. The issue he and other neighbours have is with what La Maravilla is offering: permanent supportive housing for formerly incarcerated and chronically homeless single adults, which in San Francisco means drug addicts.

The part of the Mission that surrounds Marshall is already clogged with services for this population. About a block and a half south of the school is a free medical clinic for the indigent. A couple of blocks west lies a charity that distributes socks, blankets and hygiene kits to the homeless, and provides them with foot care and back massages. About a block southwest is another affordable housing complex called La Fénix, also built by the Mission Housing Development Corporation, with a quarter of the units set aside for the homeless. The site that La Maravilla will be built upon was, until recently, a homeless shelter.

Neighbours believe that the dense concentration of housing and services for the homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted has turned the Inner Mission into a containment zone for highly unstable and sometimes dangerous people. On the first day of the school year, around pick-up time, there was a shooting at La Fénix. A Marshall employee told me the police never informed the school’s staff, who may have decided to go into lockdown. Another time, someone being pursued by a gunman ran onto school grounds while kids were being dropped off. “The people that live in this neighbourhood are dealing with the most difficult conditions in the entire city, alongside the Tenderloin and SoMa,” said Aaron Wojack, who lives across the street from Marshall. “The burden on this neighbourhood is already tremendous.”

Yet at meetings with the community, numerous people who attended them told me, the non-profit developers treated neighbours as if they were bigots. “Whenever there was any talk of the community not wanting this, we were told, ‘you don’t care about unhoused people,’” a neighbour with a son at Marshall told me. “It was their cause, their cause, their cause. Everyone who opposes it is bad and doesn’t care about poor people.”

“They were just telling us the bare minimum to say we met with community,” said Todd Eng, who lives a few blocks away and whose daughter graduated from Marshall. “It’s, we’re going to proceed forward with this, we don’t care what the community thinks.”

Development in the Inner Mission fits a pattern in San Francisco, in which just three neighbourhoods shoulder the brunt of the city’s addiction crisis. Even more than the Mission, the Tenderloin District and parts of SoMa are crammed with single-room occupancy hotels for the homeless, as well as food pantries, free medical clinics, drug courts and distribution sites for free, city-funded drug paraphernalia. Sidewalks are often clogged with drug users and dealers. As in the Mission, the poor immigrant families who live in the walk-up apartment buildings of the Tenderloin routinely have to dodge faeces and meth smoke on the street. A child of one family, who immigrated from Yemen, was attacked.

To many residents, it seems by design. Earlier this year, a group of Tenderloin residents and businesses sued the city for turning their neighbourhood into a drug containment zone. Among the plaintiffs is an immigrant mother who says drug users have threatened her with knives and hammers. Like the parents and teachers and neighbours of Marshall, these San Franciscans don’t want an open-air drug market in their proverbial back yard, which is already overflowing with the city’s worst problems. Does this make them Nimbys, too?

There’s no question there’s a housing crisis in San Francisco and throughout the entire state of California. Nobody questions the need for more housing construction of every sort, including permanent supportive housing. But the burden is not evenly spread. A few neighbourhoods are expected to absorb the fallout of concentrating hundreds of drug-addicted and mentally ill people in buildings next to their kids’ schools, while the rest of the city enjoys clean sidewalks and safe playgrounds. It’s not a coincidence that these neighbourhoods are also where the most powerless families reside.

The fight over the fate of the neighbourhood around the proposed La Maravilla development belies the simplistic picture of Yimbys versus Nimbys painted in the national media. Sometimes there are real issues at stake in projects such as these, and the compromises made to address them are messy and divisive. The Nimby caricature papers over these complexities, dismissing anyone who objects to any new housing construction as selfish and entitled, whether their worries are about blocked views or about the risk of their kids being shot. This is what passes for “equity” in San Francisco.

Last year, as Trump was cruising toward re-election, I wrote a few stories on why so many non-white voters were bolting the Democratic Party and voting Republican. Having written quite a bit on the subject already, I had an idea why: the Democrats had spent the last three decades sucking up to the financial industry and cultivating their new electoral base among educated, urban, professional class Americans. Meanwhile, Trump had catalyzed a paradigm shift within the GOP against the hitherto bipartisan free trade religion, embracing working class anger over industrial offshoring and the devaluing of American labor.

Conversations I had with Latino voters in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and black voters in Oakland confirmed that theory. But there was something that surprised me, too. Over and over again, without my prompting, people kept bringing up trans men in women’s locker rooms and on women’s sports teams.

Before having those conversations, I would have told you that the average American voter was fairly indifferent to these hot button culture war issues, which are the obsessions of political activists, not working moms and dads. But I was clearly wrong. Regular voters were telling me to my face that they did care about these things.

I can’t know for certain, but I suspect that few, if any, of the voters who told me this had any actual experience of trans men encroaching on their spaces or those of women they knew. Like all of us, they were mostly getting this from cable news shows and online screaming matches. But it resonated enough with voters that Trump rode the “Kamala is for they/them” ad to a clean sweep of the swing states.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. The Democrats’ decades-long abandonment of the American working class was entirely consistent with their embrace of what millions of voters regarded as the avant-garde political values of college professors, political activists, and non-profit executive directors. The fact that Democrats like Harris approved of biological men racing in women’s swim meets had less to do, I suspect, with the negligible material impact the issue had on voters’ actual lives, and more to do with the sense that liberals had embraced the decadent values of an elite class, and were lording them over everyday Americans.

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Last week, the Democrats annihilated Trump’s Republican Party in off-year elections from coast to coast. It felt like a sea change. Democrats won not just by turning out their base but by flipping Trump voters, while Republicans failed to hold the huge gains they made in 2024 with Latino voters.

Voters haven’t changed their minds much about Democrats. The Democratic Party is still polling lower than it has since the twentieth century. It would be a mistake to interpret last week’s results as indicative of any kind of rehabilitation of the party’s absymal brand. Rather, what has happened is that the Republicans have become as out-of-touch with mainstream Americans as the Democrats have long been.

Something similar is happening on both sides of the aisle. Historically speaking, it wasn’t so long ago that both parties had to actually deliver tangible improvements to voters’ lives to win elections — “a chicken in every pot,” and so on. Candidates had to appease their donors, of course, with promises to betray those voters, when the time came, with special favors to corporations and the rich. But they could only go so far. Bill Clinton could sell out American workers with NAFTA, GATT, and trade normalization for China, but he also had to pass the Family Medical Leave Act to deliver something to their households.

That, however, was in the era before social media. Now, if you’re an elected official, the world feels quite different. You still have special interests whispering in your ear, of course, if not screaming in it. You still have audiences at churches or union halls to make empty promises to. But the political fights that consume the lion’s share of your attention are being waged online. Your popularity and name recognition surge and dip from hour to hour like a dinghy tossed in the storm of trending topics on Twitter. The polling numbers you might have obsessed over a couple of decades ago have been shoved to the side by your addiction to tracking the metrics of your online clout. You pay less attention to the constituents in your district because your new constituency is national, amorphous and digital. You speak in the language of dunks and owns. You are not a public servant; you’re barely even a politician. You’re a performer in an internet cage fight. If you’re not throwing swings and dodging blows, you’re somewhere in the crowd, clawing your way to the front in a frantic effort to hoist yourself on stage.

In this world, the constituent in your district complaining about your vote on the latest budget bill is named @kattlady_1983 and has yet to upload an avatar. Her entreaties don’t even show up in your notifications. You are unaware of her existence, even though she’s tweeted at you every day for the last two weeks. On the other hand, there’s a right-wing influencer with 150,000 followers who lives a thousand miles away who mentioned you three days ago and your notifications have been blowing up ever since. He’s since moved on to other subjects. Still, you cannot ignore him. He is a player in the game you’re competing in. She’s somewhere out in the nosebleeds. Your lowliest aide doesn’t care who she is, but you’ve had three staff meetings already about how to reply to him.

This is the political economy that warped the brains of Democratic officeholders into raising bail funds for rioters and proclaiming support for taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners. Even in the bluest districts, these were not things voters were clamoring for. They’re things that activists with big online platforms were demanding, and it’s a measure of what our politics have become that they got them.

But the Democrats aren’t alone in this warped reality. During the peak years of wokeness, Republicans jumped on the opportunity that liberals handed them, heckling this absurdist theater and proving once and for all how little the Democratic Party cared about voters’ common sense values. It worked, famously.

But now Republicans find themselves in the same arena. Only at their peril can they ignore the most insane activists in their party. Suddenly they find themselves forced to pretend that there are daily pogroms of Jews on college campuses, that the Venezuelan government is attempting to take over American cities with drug-running gang members, and that New York City has fallen to Sharia Law. Bread and butter issues offer no clear rewards in the attention economy; what counts is what registers online. And what registers online is Afrikaners fleeing “white genocide,” the emasculation of our armed forces, and the Soros-funded Antifa plot to overthrow the United States of America. Even the issues that voters actually care about, like immigration, are distorted into something barely recognizable to anyone who spends less than 10 hours a day online. No longer is Trump’s mass deportation campaign about protecting American jobs; now it’s about reclaiming the fallen age of Northern European cowboy pioneers and stopping a plot by Democrats to replace the white race. This is what the world looks like to the kinds of people who handcuff themselves to Twitter headquarters to protest their accounts being banned. It is those people who decide what matters on the internet, and thus what Republican politicians are required to care about, in the exact same way that, until recently, it was people who think Trader Joe’s food packaging is racist who did so for the Democrats. This is what wokeness looks like on the right.

The Trump administration only has one mood: anger. This, too, was a hallmark of the woke left. Online culture produces a politics of grievance, resentment, and wounded pride. It seeks to abolish, dismantle, tear down, repeal, ban, deport. It is a force of destruction, incapable of solving problems facing living, breathing people. Last week, it was rejected at the ballot box, just as it was rejected in 2024. Voters want something real. Our synthetic politics cannot provide it to them.

I have an opinion piece out today in The New York Times, in which I argue that the emerging right-wing ideology that regards diversity as a departure from the cultural foundations of our country and that idealizes those citizens who trace their bloodlines back to the founding colonies is historically delusional. The founders were awash in diversity and regarded each others’ alien folkways with deep suspicion that could even threaten violence. Multiculturalism is nothing new; it’s what our nation was built from.

I hope you enjoy the piece.