The modern Democratic Party has become unbalanced by feminine emotion, elite over-production, and the doom loop of intolerant leftist ideology. The results have been predictable and publicly disastrous. So far, most Democrats simply refuse to face the rot within their party (stubbornly imagining that Trump must still be the existential threat that they’ve painted him since 2015) but that becomes more difficult every day. The modern Democratic Party includes business owners, black people of upright character, faithful and devoted wives and mothers, disciplinarian and excellence-seeking educators, and risk-taking innovators. There is still a diverse and virtuous cohort (millions strong), who simply haven’t realized the directional shift of their chosen party. Most of these people would recoil in horror if they understood the full ideological commitments of their candidates, at every level of government.
Opposition to free speech (framing it in terms of harm, comfort, and hate - but really a deep-seated recognition of the brittleness of their own ideology) is one of the more prominent of the dozens of ways in which the Democratic Party has profoundly shifted course in less than a generation.
This is an uncomfortable conversation to have for liberals. It’s been uncomfortable since the Kamala Harris presidential campaign of 2024, by which time it was glaringly obvious that all of these tendencies were blooming (or rather metastasizing) across the liberal-left coalition. The problems is that if the conversation isn’t had and if the problems aren’t faced head-on they only get worse. This is the natural result of permitting a group of unproduced elites and sheltered urbanites (Zohran Mamdani, who never had to work a real job and lived on the generosity of his multimillionaire parents whilst spending his time on Hinge and doing “community activism” and going to parties; Katie Wilson - the mayor of Seattle - whose parents were still paying her rent when she was elected in her 40’s) to form worldviews without any feedback mechanisms to reality. And this is the result of building a party - the Democratic Party - which is so focused on Donald Trump that any discussion of its own excesses and flaws became unacceptable. And this is the result of a voter base which has been educated but simultaneously indebted, saddled with artificial grievances and resentments, and denied or discouraged from the things that gave earlier generations a grasp of reality and a sense of investment in society’s future (houses, families, careers, etc.).
Dozens of cities now refuse to share any information with ICE. That means that when the illegal immigrant who raped a child is granted bail or released from prison, rather than notifying ICE the city and state government simply let him walk out the door and onto the street. In July, 2026, on FOX News, Megan Romer, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) co-chair, said that abolishing all U.S. borders and granting amnesty to all illegal immigrants is "a long term plan" that the DSA supports. She also said that her organization favors abolishing the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and moving to a unicameral legislature. At least she was honest! New York City and Chicago now fund and run and subsidize grocery stores, a clear result of their earlier criminal justice reforms that led to dramatic increases on shoplifting and petty theft (although not on paper, since the police are rarely called under the news rules), making it unprofitable to operate private chain businesses in poorer neighborhoods. Claire Valdez, the winner of the Democratic congressional primary in New York, focused on the abolition of ICE and the occupation of Gaza in her victory speech. Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) introduced House legislation calling for reparations to descendants of slaves in May, framed around both slavery and ongoing structural racism (one of the unfalsifiable, theoretical, emotionally compelling concepts which has warped the left from a largely centrist and pragmatic coalition into a performative group of privileged utopians). To be honest, the list goes on and on and on. And these examples are mostly from candidates, but the ideas are well represented among judges and mayors and state representatives. Chicago Mayor (then mayoral candidate) Brandon Johnson said that wanted to “eradicate” the “sickness” of law enforcement. He won the election (perhaps proof that normie liberals aren’t sensitive to this threat on their left… or that Chicago elections are so hopelessly corrupted by ignorant and dependent - possibly illegal - voters, the normal electoral considerations don’t matter). When an armed and crazy person chased two strangers into a Boston Chik-Fil-A in 2025 and tried to stab them (resulting in his shooting death by police), mayor Michelle Wu said in her statement, "my condolences, and all of our thoughts, are with the family of the individual whose life has been lost. And I'm also thinking of all the people who were impacted here today in one of the busier parts of the city with this tragedy." This new breed of progressive can’t even gesture towards law and order or respect and appreciation for police or patriotism or border security (even as a concept). Her statement reflects the new pattern: sympathy for socially-approved groups, help for those groups (irrespective of deservedness or policy result), and a kind of deep contempt for the older structures of society. That’s it. Those meager elements define not just their policies and speeches but their entire worldviews, unbelievable as that sounds.
In the wake of the murder of Iryna Zarutska (remember that? It’s easy to become inured to the relentless media churn), Chris Bray wrote:
In a development as predictable as the sunrise, the Democratic mayor of Charlotte issued a statement that poured out her sorrow and sympathy for…the unfortunate unhoused soul who slashed that woman’s throat. You can read the statement here, if you feel the need, but it’s absolute dogshit from a gibbering moron. Arresting people isn’t the answer, we need to provide more services to these poor suffering people, blah blah blah. That poor man was forced to cut a stranger’s throat because we didn’t give him enough free shit. How he must have suffered!
The Democratic Party pours out this woketard mouth slop like an uncapped sewer, insane and stupid in apparently equal measure…
Look: there is a natural range of sensible policymaking. It’s broad, and it can encompass a number of ideological orientations and solutions… but it has a limit. That limit is anchored to and defined by the present system, the status quo. When I advocate for radical federalism or for a drastic trimming of the administrative state, I’m conceptualizing those changes as changes made within our current political structure. More importantly, I advocate for them because I believe they ae changes which will benefit individuals and communities. They have a long and useful historical tradition. They are pragmatic and empirical rather than abstract and utopian. Radical federalism will decentralize our political functions and will allow communities to have real agency and control over their futures (rather than just existing as colonized outposts of a vast, grey, corporate-bureaucratic monolith). It will foster the kind of republican citizenship that I believe America was founded on, and which has been progressively eroded by federal regulations and taxes and the HR-ification of work and the imposition of civil liability and bureaucratic limitations onto every area of our lives. The administrative state introduces negative incentives, thereby warping social behavior and negatively affecting people’s life outcomes, and it tends to grow monstrous and disconnected from its original goal. I advocate for these things (radical though they are) because I believe that they would help improve individuals and communities today and well into the future. I do not have to rewrite human nature or imagine a radically different society or introduce social science jargon or academic buzzwords into the discussion to explain why I believe they would help: communities would have more power and responsibility, and hard work and responsibility would receive their natural reward - which would lead to dramatic increases in these goods and decreases in their opposite.
But you don’t need to believe that radical federalization of the American political system or the drastic paring-back of Section 8 housing programs would be beneficial to fall within the range of sensible policymaking. You could argue for the converse, of both of these ideas, and still be well within it. You could argue that corruption and discrimination and local dysfunction should prompt us to place more local functions at the state level, and state functions at the national. You could make the case that income inequality and the growing unreliability and dehumanization of the job market and the impending expansion of AI argue for a significant increase in the size of the American administrative state. You could find statistics and make logical claims and bring up anecdotes from your own experience to support your positions. Liberalizing border policy and granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants… closing the border and ceasing H1B visa awards and deporting millions of illegal entrants - both fall within this range. Raising corporate taxes and imposing federal property taxes in order to redistribute wealth… or abolishing the federal income tax and shuttering dozens of federal agencies - both can fall within this range. Making public school mandatory for all school-age children and increasing its funding and standardizing the budget, per student, per annum… or abolishing public schools and replacing them with a network of private and home and charter schools and opening up the market to anyone who desires to teach that parents would be willing to pay - both policy ideas fall within the range of potentially sensible policymaking.
And that brings us to the distinction between (conceivably) sensible versus lunatic policy proposals: lunatics don’t want to have discussions. They don’t want to openly advocate for their positions or debate with skeptics or to draw up workable, comprising plans. They are all symbol, buzzword, emotional intolerance, academic theory. Listening to them speak is like listening to a Hindu pandit recites his mantras: Gaza, abolish ICE, abortion is healthcare, free everything for everybody. None of it really connects to reality. None of it is political opinion in the old American sense, where people took the system for granted and advocated some reform or value or law in the context of that system, because they believed it would do something or gain something for some group or address some outstanding problem. These are emotional (and symbolic - a sign of the privileged circles from whence they originate), unfalsifiable, and absolutist gestures. The ideas will never change because they refer to a future utopian dreamworld, and merely instituting the changes (merely using the words!) will fix everything.
Willa, aka Liberty Belle, the 355 on X.com gets to the heart of the disconnect, the radical rupture between traditional American policymaking (liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary, whatever) and today’s surreal, performative theatre of political hyper-reality (what Chris Bray calls “the classical liberalism of the founding era rather than to the Kamala Harris kind”):
A liberal society can only survive if its laws & moral scaffolding are enforced & protected. If a liberal society becomes tolerant of cultures who do not value those same principles (for example, private property is a BIG deal—our founding is predicated on this concept, & it doesn’t apply only to physical belongings but personal autonomy) then it will become overtaken by the less tolerant, more illiberal society steamrolling it. It drives me mad when people cannot seem to grasp this concept. This is common sense, it is logical. Upholding liberal values, which include the rule of law, is not bigoted. How can we have a liberal society that values all people (which those who claim to be liberals, & who are democrat voters think they are championing) if we are permitting the *exact* behavior that will destroy such a society? I wanted to say “My god woman, do you think that man holds the same values as you? He obviously doesn’t!” The only thing that will stop this behavior is to force it to stop. I cannot imagine permitting it to go on.
Unfortunately, Abigail Spanberger hasn’t taken her own advice - an indication of the intense gravitational pull that socialism and race communism now exert within the party’s hierarchy.
Graham Platner was reluctantly jettisoned by party leadership in early July. All of these kinds of decisions in the modern Democratic Party now occur behind closed doors; this is a party which is dedicated to elite managerial control not just as a social model but as an internal organizational structure. He survived the exposure of his Nazi tattoo, his extreme and violent social media posts, his use of ‘PTSD’ as a reasonable explanation for alcoholism and allegations of domestic violence and infidelity… and of course as an explanation for the Nazi tattoo itself (using a self-diagnosed mental health condition as an excuse actually helps a candidate relate to huge swathes of the modern Democratic Party). Finally, a woman came forth with claims of a sexual assault. These claims weren’t substantiated by evidence (although all claims should be given a fair hearing, and only a very odd person would look at the public profile of Graham Platner and proclaim that “he doesn’t seem like that kind of person”) and they weren’t submitted to police, but the idea that a sexual assault claim should be reviewed by criminal investigators to have weight is laughably out of date, and was finally terminated by the orgy of self-victimization and attention-seeking which was known as “#MeToo.” In any case, Platner was out, and a replacement was needed.
The Maine senate primary debate showed the party with its mask off. Maine is a lightly-populated and fairly minor state in the context of American politics, and so it’s natural that some oddballs would show up. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - it actually indicates a healthy degree of political ferment. That is not the condition of the modern left. Rather than some unpolished folks with zany views, we saw the same clown car of incompetents that we have become accustomed to from the left, proclaiming the same symbolism-heavy, utopian, Tumblr-esque talking points. These are not serious people. Ashley Webb - the much-mocked (kind of sad, really) trans person who listed his qualifications to be in the Senate as having written a book and being a “songwriter” - stole the show, but ultimately the party settled on a safe choice (behind closed doors, of course): a 5th-generation logger and former Bernie Sanders campaign organizer, as well as the former president of the Maine state senate. It’s a good pick, all things considered. And this candidate - despite all of the drama and confusion around his selection - is far superior to Democratic candidates from across the country who are currently running: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Francesca Hong, Nithya Raman, Zohran Mamdani, etc.
We can use Europe as a case study to infer that the Democratic establishment will never get off this train. If, in ten years, Democratic candidates are talking about nationalizing all retail outlets and throwing traditionalists in work camps and spending 10% of the federal budget to build housing for African immigrants as an incentive to travel here, the DNC will polish their pronouncements, defend them… and co-sign everything. These are not people with principles, and (more importantly) these are organizations. They function like power-seeking organisms. The individuals can dissent or leave - the Blob continues to advance and to grow. It responds to cultural signals and electoral/financial incentives.
It’s been noted with increasing frequency, with some worry, during the past decade that the Democratic Party and the Western left in general “has a man/masculinity problem.” This is not so problematic in countries like Britain or Australia, where managerial feminism has proceeded at a swifter pace and where masculinity has been under a fiercer and more sustained cultural assault. But the Democratic Party has a far more serious problem. They have a reality problem.
Any statement - no matter how false or ridiculous - is allowed and even encouraged if it strikes the proper emotional notes. Conversely, any factual statement that punctures the false reality is not allowed. This can be applied to government programs, education, immigration, crime, etc.
They literally lack almost any notable leaders with deep and broad-ranging life experience (which is why Platner, with his four infantry combat deployments, aroused such excitement - unfortunately Platner was and is a complete maniac). They no longer have capable leaders with wisdom and perspective and a sense of civic responsibility. They have no real visionaries (glib utopians, parroting the words they learned in university don’t count), they have no policy engineers (strange for a coalition which is quietly based on managerial technocracy) and they have no pragmatic peacemakers or architects of compromise. Worst of all, they have no courageous candidates. Courage has always been a rare quality in politics, to be sure, but we can read about the careers of men of the past and detect some sense of honor and selflessness in their decisions. But capability (meritocracy), civic responsibility, and courage are all attributes which must be trained over decades, reinforced and recognized and rewarded. They are alien concepts to the current generation of ambitious women and feminized men and resentful, self-important, over-promoted racial minorities that comprises the meat of the Democratic Party. Look for yourself: in place of the experienced, resilient, accountable leaders of yesterday who is in the queue today?
I’ve already mentioned Zohran Mamdani (New York City) and Katie Wilson (Seattle). How about Francesca Hong, forerunner in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary?
None of the policy proposals above are totally insane. They won’t work (in my opinion), they won’t improve people’s lives, and they’ll trap the state budget in the same disastrously expensive doom loop of taxation and debt which drives away producers and investors and costs the state tens of thousands of jobs but they don’t make Mrs. Hong a nut.
But when you understand the broader philosophy behind these proposals, the nuttiness becomes clear. Hong is a utopian, who believes that government funding basically every necessity and popular item for poorer folks at the expense of the middle class and wealthy (basically, everyone with a decent job) is the best path forward. She’s a racial identarian obsessed with “white supremacy.” She adopts the same weird, feminized, emotional reflex of sympathy for criminals and antisocial personalities and she deeply desires to stop punishing thieves and predators, defund the police, and create a kind of progressive, gender neutral utopia, without cops or prisons or corporations or competition or meritocracies or penalties for misbehavior.
“Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”
Not only are the resources dedicated to “community safety, mental health well being, and public education” meaningful - they’re greater than they’ve ever been. These measures have no effect on crime… but they do expand the bureaucracy. Not only are these moves insufficient to address crime, but Hong’s philosophy would ruin community safety (by eroding norms and eliminating penalties), mental health well being (by promoting a self-centered, unnatural, medicalized, and over-individualistic view of mental health without any reference to duty or purpose or faith), and public education (by imposing artificial egalitarianism and reworking curriculums to reinforce and validate the ideology of the modern progressive activist).
Her policies would disincentivize production, innovation, risk, wealth-creation, and open debate and they would incentivize unemployment, drug addiction, crime, obesity, homelessness, and single motherhood. That might not be her intent of course (or perhaps it is) but those are the plain and inescapable effects of implementing her worldview. When you punish cops for subduing or killing resistant, threatening, armed suspects, cops stop enforcing laws. When you offer more money to unemployed people who cannot afford healthcare, you make it easier and more comfortable to live life as an unemployed person and you make the healthcare system more distorted and expensive (at the cost of the healthy and hard-working). When you lessen or eliminate punishments for shoplifting or assault you make these acts more attractive for the kinds of antisocial people who are only restrained by the threat of swift penalty. These people exist. That is the Achilles’ heel at the base of the modern Democratic Party worldview, and it’s why so many (virtually all) of the new breed of believers are themselves privileged and mostly female. They don’t accept the existence of lazy, irresponsible, greedy, predatory people (seeing such acts as simply symptoms of “late-stage capitalism” or white supremacy or some other vague bête noire) and so they don’t think that their policies will worsen these problems. But every time they’ve been implemented in contemporary American politics they have. Being disconnected from policy realities and from opposing ideas is also a luxury of this class.
Personal responsibility and duty are simply obsolete concepts to this new kind of political believer. Those old virtues have no place in their worldview. They conceptualize difficulty and failure and frustration as sociological phenomena, and so they tend to be neurotic, projecting, and mental dissatisfied.
Hong, and the activists and politicians like her, are obsessed with race and gender and identity. They see the world through the lens of a new hierarchy, in which stable and productive people (who require less assistance and validation) are simply ignored and white men (patriots, dissenters, Christians, heterosexuals) are at the bottom.
The mainstream left has maintained a stance of studied blindness to these bizarre developments. Without Critical Theory - without the ideas that America is racist and that the poor need more and constant and infinite help and that the gender binary is an oppressive notion and that police and profits and property are all illegitimate constructs which will be warped or erased in the coming, righteous society - the modern left has no heart, no animating spirit.
Without a Marxist conception of race and gender and immigration status and sexuality, the modern left has no unifying foundation. They have traded their old patriotism and family-centeredness and business-friendly nature for something darker and weirder. Most Democratic voters don’t want to confront this shift, which ironically only facilitates and intensifies it.
Think about it: how can a person be a moderate liberal in today’s society? How can they believe that public schools simply need more funding, that teachers’ unions are dedicated and sincere coalitions of educators who simply want the best for schoolchildren, the universities are generally fair and balanced, and that the poor simply need more social support to flourish? All of these claims have been decisively disproven in the past two decades, and COVID-era policmaking put the nail in their coffins. Unfortunately, many people weren’t paying attention. There are still millions of Boomers who don’t recognize the poison at the heart of modern academia, who aren’t aware of the endemic failure of public schools (while their funding has increased), who haven’t heard about the thousands of victims of bail reform policies. This has been the function of the legacy media, to maintain the veneer of political normalcy while social indicators continue to careen towards pathology and while government programs create zero apparent real change, other than to incentivize laziness and foster government dependence. The media has done its job well, but the veneer is cracking and the young aren’t fooled. They have (roughly) divided themselves along class and gender lines into two camps: establishment defenders (who support medicalization and credentials and the bureaucracy, and who generally advocate for people like Hong, understanding that the implementation of her ideas will be a boon to their class even while it diminishes personal wealth and business formation and marriage and law abiding behavior), and dissidents (who openly despise the corruption of the public schools and the malincentives of the healthcare system and the propagandizing which is performed by the media and academia, and who are disabused of the old liberal orthodoxies of feminism and anti-antisemitism and racial egalitarianism, having been marginalized and discriminated against by the defenders of those orthodoxies for years).
Hong is only one example, of course. There are many, many others, all proclaiming ideas that were not only marginal 30 years ago but which barely existed (and then only among the faculty of certain private academic departments).Try this exercise: compare the campaign promises and policy ideas of the new breed of politician and political candidate to the speeches and promises of Democratic candidates 30 years ago. The difference is striking. That is the rupture that center-left voters and old school liberals (and their ideological guardians - the media) are desperate to ignore and to deny.
No one is singing this tune in the modern Democratic Party. That’s right - a national border, the most defining feature of a nation, is now considered to be passé by even moderate leftwing candidates… because they must appeal to the emotional instincts of their progressive, female base. And this base wants to help immigrants. Even if they’ve broken the law. Feelings > rules and laws.
And 2020 recedes a bit more with every passing day. The crazy tweets, the radical intolerance, the cartoonish and absolute claims about crime or immigration - these things are all on record, but by now this faction understands how they look and they are determined to camouflage themselves in order to gain power (a process that I previously labelled the elastic ideology: puritanical and zealous when it comes time to wield power, moderate-sounding and virtuous when it comes time to appeal to the public). Abdul El-Sayed, running for senate in Michigan, has been more careful to avoid saying crazy and dramatic things, but there’s little doubt that he is a socialist who wants to radically unmake America. And most Democratic voters would probably prefer to vote for him over a Republican challenger. That is the basis for this insanity: millions of people who’ve been convinced that the GOP is such an existential threat that people whose policies would eventually crater the regional economy and increase violent crime by 50% are preferable - all because of language and ideas. This symbolism-heavy approach to policy (rather than focusing on the things the promote wealth and safety) is itself a sign of inordinate privilege.
He just couldn’t do it.
It cannot be emphasized enough: for the modern progressive, these crazy values are all they have. Everything else is deliberate misdirection. They don’t believe in incentives or in merit or in law and order. They certainly don’t believe in virtues (modesty, prudence, temperance, etc.), instead regarding them as archaic holdovers from the bad old days of public Christianity. They have no regard for the “traditional” family; single mothers and polyamorists and queer polycules are just as valid as heterosexual couples with children in theory. In practice they’re far more valid, being named and celebrated for their delightfully subversive novelty. They don’t believe in equality under the law or in objective logic or in the Western notion of justice. Not only do these concepts not have a firm grounding in their cosmology, they are rejected as remnants of a repressive and archaic system. They have often been reticent about saying these things explicitly (understanding that their words could be turned against them, and desiring ideological power and change in the world above all other things) but reading between the lines makes the axioms of this ideology very clear: it is constituted to dismantle and replace Western society, and there is no braking mechanism which will protect the family or the legal system or educational meritocracy or public virtue. The more that these people are elected and the more that their policies are implemented, the more that these goods will disappear, hastened by a wildly popular nihilistic, materialistic, consumption-centered perspective which also hates these old foundational concepts because they anchor the celebration of personal achievement and standards of judgment and objective meaning in the culture. These things make life more difficult and shame more acute for the weak and the self-indulgent, so they must be erased. And who is defending them? Who is clearly naming their enemies? If you doubt what I’m saying, look at the change in policymaking and political discourse in the past twenty years. It’s possible that there has never been such a drastic shift in a nation’s culture (absent revolution or cataclysm) and the direction of ours is clear: towards subjectivity and ease and self-indulgence… and towards the wilder notions of the political left. At some point the shift will be too broad and too colorful to deny. But by then it will be too late.
Liberals (and less commonly progressives) control the media and the research infrastructure and the general educational system (the ‘information distribution complex’) so their feelings as to conservatives (rubes, bigots, hostile, uneducated, etc.) are well known, by liberals and by conservatives. I think that the modern Democratic Socialist voter - the product of elite overproduction and soft-headed emotional approaches to tricky policy issues - would do well to consider the things that conservatives (and many centrists, and even plenty of liberals) are saying about them: your ideas are wacky, they will never work and have never worked, so guys are so disconnected from the problems you’re speaking about that you sound like spoiled children.
Of course, such people will never listen. That’s the thing about a feeling of certainty: it’s easy to instill in prosperous midwits. It’s rather easy to indoctrinate people without any experience of war or poverty or prison or death with the sense that theory organizes the world, credentials matter, and word-spells and concepts (and of course, political activism) can change the world and undo poverty (without actually producing anything), crime (without actually punishing criminals), and war (without actually addressing the very real and urgent geopolitical crises that speckle the planet). Only feckless rich kids could believe this stuff (and only psychopaths would pretend to to advance their careers or to grab political power) but it turns out there are plenty of both - more of both than ever before, in fact.
Maybe that’s the problem.
This problem doesn’t stop at the borders of political debate or policymaking either. By choosing glib, formulaic sloganeers, the Democratic Party has essentially abandoned the old criteria for judging political leaders and for judging people. Credentials have replaced decisiveness and experience and wisdom. Race and gender have replaced character. Parroting the progressive script (Gaza, abolish ICE, abortion is healthcare, etc.) has replaced real policy recommendations. The result is a bevy of polished, educated, articulate people… who are entirely without experience or character or useful knowledge.
Introducing race or ethnicity or gender as primary decision factors for elections simply means that factors like character and competence become deprioritized, or erased entirely. This kind of tribal voting is happening in Great Britain and (less frequently) here as well (Minneapolis for example).
All that’s required is that the narrative be parroted, even when it seems repetitive or incoherent.
In the short term the party is unwilling to - practically, they simply cannot - confront this issue head on. After all, it takes decades to mold leaders, and a party with a corrupted values system or one that is being driven by over-produced, wannabe elites cannot easily change course. But in the long-term these trends will spell the death of the party or the death of national order and prosperity. The policies won’t be implemented everywhere, of course, but where they are they will have the baleful and deleterious effects that we can already clearly see in dozens of Democratic cities: homelessness, street crime, addiction, combined with skyrocketing property values and consumer inflation - the nightmare of techno-feudalism come to life. Progressive agenda items are most furiously and consistently supported by college graduates making modest incomes - in other words, indoctrinated malcontents frustrated at their student loan debt and personal loneliness and mental health symptoms, and willing to throw their society off of a utopian cliff because they haven’t accrued the life experience to earn wisdom or the social buy-ins - houses, careers, children - to make long-term and practical choices for society. Single women are channeling their frustrated maternal urges and their “curse of Eve” resentment of masculine power into systems which directly aid some of the least deserving and most destructive (including sometimes to the recipients) groups to help. Frustrated college graduates (most of them women) aren’t starving or suffering hyperinflation or being drafted for war, but their relative privation feels real to them and it’s apparently real enough to make them embrace what is truly an extremist ideology.
The Russian people of 1917 required famine and widespread military disobedience and police repression and ruinous unemployment, plus the opulence of a disconnected elite, to make them turn to extremism (even if the numbers of people who became convinced Bolsheviks were quite low). All it required for today’s young women (who ironically would have helped themselves by marrying more than any other single decision) is student loan debt and waitress jobs and hypertrophied screen time.
Strong times creates weak men (and entitled women). It seems sadly likely that we will need some hard times to instruct these young would-be professionals and immature college graduates and single women in the fixed nature of reality: societies which don’t protect the weak, punish the predatory, and defend their commerce and borders are annihilated, either from without or from within.
Young women took the emotionally satisfying path and supported the Ayatollah’s revolution in 1978 and 1979. Now their emotional impulses have swung in a different direction, and they’ve found that they have trapped themselves in the harsh and certain logic of reality: weaken yourselves and give power to bad people and you will lose your freedom, never to regain it.
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself, and please consider sharing and subscribing if you haven’t already. No word of this essay was written using AI.
Could it be that the keystone issues of the modern progressive political program are really just instruments wielded to gain resources and status for the ruling class, and little else? The more time that passes the more I suspect that this is the case.
We all recognize on some level that people suck. The idea that structural factors are weightier causes on outcomes than personal beliefs and behaviors is simply not true. Poor people are poor mostly because of how they act (how they work and spend). Prisoners are mostly in jail because of the decisions they make. Fat people are mostly fat because of their habits. This isn’t a harsh claim-it’s actually liberatory. The important thing to note is that it’s true, though, and pretending that it’s not (in order to shield people from ‘blame’ or ‘stigma’) does no good to anyone. I’ve seen this reality in my personal life a thousand times. It’s time to imprint it upon the culture.
On why our political system is no longer working, why society seems to still be flourishing and advancing, and how our prospects for the future appear.
"The modern Democratic Party includes business owners, black people of upright character, faithful and devoted wives and mothers, disciplinarian and excellence-seeking educators, and risk-taking innovators within it."
I know many such people. I am flummoxed at this point that they can't see it for what it is, that is, the hijacking that has taken place on their side of the political spectrum. It appears that TDS is an actual disorder preventing people from seeing clearly the ruination of their party.
Every week (every day) there is a new crazy development in leftist thinking. It's reached the point of self parody.
I agree, but I believe Trump really is an existential threat to Democrats and the left, and the top people know it. Maybe they figured it out before I did, when Trump 2.0 began with ending USAID, unleashing DOGE, and the rest. I also see Trump intentionally inflaming his enemies to get them upset, reveal themselves as radicals, and look bad to moderates. They might make new mistakes, in addition to the old ones in retrieved FBI burn bags and DOGE databases.
Trump is set up for a large and decisive win. He can bust his political enemies just by enforcing straight federal law. No bogus lawfare needed. He’ll be cleaning up government and saving tax money to the cheers of the majority. There’s no way Trump passes up this chance for vindication and glory.
"The modern Democratic Party includes business owners, black people of upright character, faithful and devoted wives and mothers, disciplinarian and excellence-seeking educators, and risk-taking innovators within it."
I know many such people. I am flummoxed at this point that they can't see it for what it is, that is, the hijacking that has taken place on their side of the political spectrum. It appears that TDS is an actual disorder preventing people from seeing clearly the ruination of their party.
Every week (every day) there is a new crazy development in leftist thinking. It's reached the point of self parody.
I agree, but I believe Trump really is an existential threat to Democrats and the left, and the top people know it. Maybe they figured it out before I did, when Trump 2.0 began with ending USAID, unleashing DOGE, and the rest. I also see Trump intentionally inflaming his enemies to get them upset, reveal themselves as radicals, and look bad to moderates. They might make new mistakes, in addition to the old ones in retrieved FBI burn bags and DOGE databases.
Trump is set up for a large and decisive win. He can bust his political enemies just by enforcing straight federal law. No bogus lawfare needed. He’ll be cleaning up government and saving tax money to the cheers of the majority. There’s no way Trump passes up this chance for vindication and glory.