After one of the strangest, shortest campaigns in presidential election memory, we are set again with a President-Elect that everyone wants but nobody can stand. In what you might think is an uncanny show of passivism, I am resigned to the facts that are are only now very clear to me as a result of this choice:
The GOP is completely dead and is not coming back.
The “Grand Old Party” of 20th century Republicanism is completely dead. The last vestiges of the old Chamber of Commerce, pro-business, hawkish on the military Republicans are now gone, punctuated by the exit of Mitt Romney who has remained as the sole, lonely voice of Republican critique of the former President and the only Republican of the 117th congress to have the huevos to vote to convict him on the articles of impeachment related to the January 6th insurrection.
The Republican party is now fully and durably remade in the image of MAGA, with a nationalist and populist message as its hallmark and banner cry. It’s a populism driven economically by a backlash of working-class voters to the age of tech and ideologically by the sensitivities of predominately-anglo, predominately-male, and predominately-aged voters who feel left behind by a world rapidly being reshaped by technology, automation, and now — artificial intelligence. It’s a world that is changing too quickly for the average working-class American who – 50 years ago – felt much more valued at the center of our post-war, industrial economy. The folks left behind by these violent shifts in our world are energized by this vapid mix of oligarchy and authoritarianism, believing it is the only stuff strong enough to ensure American is “strong” and “great”, whatever that ultimately means to them.
Indeed, if you believe America is strong or has never been greater by any definition of those words, this is not your movement and I predict you will be a foreigner within your party for the foreseeable future. If the last 12 years have proven anything, it’s the durability of the message that things will never get better until we go back to some undefined prior state of being – a perpetually animating message to those who feel left behind by society’s rapid advancement.
These ideas are not really mine, though. In all the post-election Monday morning quarterbacking, one key set of insights that resonated the most to me was from an interview on Freakanomics with Farid Zakaria.
(Apologies for the long insert here, but they just say it way better than I can.)
DUBNER: There’s a professor of communications and journalism at Stony Brook University named Musa al-Gharbi, who wrote, “The rise of populism, tensions over identity politics, and the crisis of expertise are all facets of a deeper struggle between knowledge-economy professionals and the growing number of Americans who feel alienated from the social order we” — those professionals — “preside over.” So that’s a bit of an indictment of you, me, a lot of people you and I both know. What’s your feeling about that?
ZAKARIA: I think it’s broadly correct. Now, how you solve it is the bigger problem. The post-industrial nature of modern economies, the move from, first of all, a manufacturing sector to a service sector, which is happening in every advanced industrial country, and the further effect of the information revolution, has been to privilege knowledge workers, to privilege people whom Robert Reich once described as “symbolic analysts.” Meaning, if you manipulate symbols, code, images, language for a living — and then think of every profession we get — you know, lawyers, accountants, software programmers —
DUBNER: You’ve just described our entire audience, by the way.
ZAKARIA: Right. You’re going to be doing well in that economy, you’re going to be rewarded, and you have pricing power over your labor. If you manipulate physical things for a living, you do not have pricing power. And that reality has become more and more intense And it’s been an easy sort, basically people who are college-educated versus people who are non-college educated, people who live in urban city centers versus people who don’t. And so, these divides stack upon each other so you end up really with two countries. One, urban, educated, secular, multicultural, and the other one rural, less educated, more white, more religious. And that creates a much greater chasm than we have ever had. If you go back 50 years, what you notice is the steelworker made more than the accountant or even sometimes the junior lawyer. There were lots of blue collar professions and lots of blue collar towns which were thriving. Detroit was one of the richest cities in America. That world has gone away. That’s the fundamental structural push which is creating this alienation. I very much dispute the idea that the elites are looking down on this great unwashed. I think that’s a nice way to indict them.
I was wrong. So very wrong.
I believed Donald Trump was a political character, and MAGA was a kitschy slogan. I thought this would all be a flash in the pan or a temporary wave, much like the anti-Tax Tea Party movement of 2012 was, but I was wrong. I now fully embrace the idea Zakaria and Dubner so eloquently explored – that this goes beyond a movement and is a complete reshaping of the conservative wing of the country.
What this means for Democrats
Strangely enough, this actually leaves the Democratic party in a much bigger shambles than previously anticipated. The coalition of voters that elected a much healthier Joe Biden in 2020 was built on his 50 year career of being relatable to the middle class, and there were just enough people left in the “blue wall” states who believed him enough to hand him a 2020 victory. Since Harris simply inherited his campaign staff, strategy, and playbook with only 107 days to campaign, it’s no wonder she fell so short of assembling the same coalition with a dramatically different (or just plain undefined) personality.
But my point here isn’t so much that Democrats lost the middle class vote in 2024, my point is that Democrats have lost the middle class movement altogether. While it’s odd to think that the Republicans will succeed long-term at being the champion of labor at the same time as they set out to dismantle the labor movement, this fundamental shift in party personality is going to necessarily force the Democratic Party – at least in the short term – to reshape its message and identity. The New Republican party has proven again its mind-bending power over the middle class, and Democrats now need to find new ways to articulate a winning message.
Enter the clown car of sycophants
Whether you like the result or not, the one thing everyone can agree on is that 2025 will be dramatically different than the slow-start of 2017 when Trump was navigating a party in transition. This will be an executive branch stacked with loyalists and sycophants — those who are fully bought in and singularly loyal to the authoritarian we’ve just elected.
But here is my ray of hope for myself and those who might be inclined to agree with me: November 2026 is right around the corner, which will be the year that every member of the House will be up for reelection in a referendum on whatever the administration tries in 2025. It will also be the time where almost every influential member of Trump’s administration will quit their post to start their presidential campaign for 2028. There is no universe where JD Vance emerges as an annointed successor to Trump, and I just can’t imagine a universe where we don’t see a bruising primary between Rubio, Gaetz, Ramaswamy, and Vance – at a minimum – to fight to inherit the party of Trump.
Knowing this is an inevitable reality, we really just have 2025 and early 2026 to get through — but knowing this is the only window these characters have of getting any win on the books to run on in 2026 and 2028, you can expect a full court press on every front of the chilling campaign promises of 2024.
The irony of it all
The irony of all of this is that, in all of these rapid technological and secular shifts in society, we are entering an era which might be the pinnacle of technological disruption: the era of artificial intelligence — an era that I predict will greatly threaten the fear-induced identity of the New Republican party.
What seems likely (but not inevitable yet) is that AI will create a massive slow down of the labor needs in the tech economy. The educated, laptop-carrying class of today and the coming 5-10 years, loaded with student debt, will be vying for an ever depleting pool of tech jobs at fewer and fewer massive tech conglomerates. Today’s coastal elites will feel the same economic pressure and despair over the next 20-50 years that the current working class – the one that created MAGA – feels now as their labor is devalued and commoditized by AI.
This has the possibility of fomenting an equally enraged and fearful base of voters with the potential to overthrow the governing party who failed to regulate the application of AI or at least effectively manage its disruption to the labor market.
Thus, the kings and queens in this future world could very well pivot back to those who can make real things happen in the real word, rather than those who are “symbolic analysts.” Undoubtedly the greatest challenge this new reality will face will be to deliver enough very-real-world energy to power AI. Thus those who can build things, repair things, and extract and refine raw materials are set to be even more valued in this future than they are now.
A final note
I’ve been kind of dying to write long form content again. This post is a bit of a test balloon to see if a) anyone is still out there or b) anyone still cares to read anything this long. It took me 2.5 hours to write it, and I’m clearly out of practice. I used to do this in 30-45 mins, tops.
WordPress has, to my chagrin, introduced a disturbing side bar that tells me this content has 7 hallmarks of poor readability because:
It lacks photos and videos(fixed that one thanks to GenAI)- It has a few longer paragraphs which are going to take longer to read and might frustrate some readers,
- Its “Flesch reading ease” score is 43/100 which is considered “difficult to read” and recommends that I use shorter sentences with less difficult words.
So at my own peril, I post this objectively awful post to see if anyone is still out there. I am eager to hear your long form responses on my long form thoughts. I am also here to see if this new post will eclipse my trending most-read posts since 2020: 1) From a Wigwam and 2) Why I’m 420 Unfriendly