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.