The whole game of political analysis is about as useful now as a typewriter at a hacker convention—an artifact from a time when the masses had to nod their heads to a single “correct” interpretation of reality. But we’ve left that world behind, thanks to the glorious, unrelenting chaos unleashed by network technology. The internet has drowned us all in an endless deluge of half-baked hot takes and tribal chatter, obliterating any hope of consensus. So here I am, offering my own ladle-full of this anachronistic stew, trying to float a little meta-analysis above the wreckage. Most of this boils down to one thing: the internet and social media have become the de facto gods of our age. The real tragedy is the staggering amount of time and energy wasted pretending it’s still 1992—or, for the more optimistic fools, 2008. The Republicans, for now, seem to have a knack for thriving in this digital hellscape, but the cracks in their armor will start to show soon enough. Not that it does the Democrats any good—they’re stumbling around in a maze of their own making, blindfolded and clutching outdated maps. The whole thing is shaping up to be a slow-motion train wreck, but at least the popcorn’s free.
Dems in Disarray
The goal, it seems, was to engineer a grotesque, funhouse-mirror inversion of the New Deal consensus — to transform the Democratic Party into a gaggle of effete technocrats and coastal Brahmins, huffing their own fumes of self-righteous neoliberalism, while masquerading as the eternal party of FDR. And on the other side of the aisle, to whip the Republican Party into a Frankensteinian coalition of aggrieved working-class populists, evangelical zealots, and disillusioned minorities, bound together by nothing but a shared contempt for the smug elites who engineered their misery.
If that was the plan, then by God, the DNC has outdone themselves — a Machiavellian masterstroke of self-sabotage, like hiring arsonists to rebuild the house. They’ve delivered their base on a platter to a party that used to consider them Marxist bogeymen. And now, the GOP stands poised to wield multiracial, working-class rage as a cudgel, a political Molotov cocktail aimed squarely at the gilded towers of their former overlords.
This isn’t just a failure; it’s a tragicomic opera of betrayal and incompetence. Somewhere in the bowels of Hell, Rockefeller and Goldwater are sharing a stiff drink, cackling at how easily the game was rigged. And up above, the DNC’s Silicon Valley donors toast to their own irrelevance, congratulating themselves on their inclusivity as they usher in a new American oligarchy. This is no accident — it’s a deliberate mutation, a grotesque experiment in political Darwinism. And by all accounts, it’s working beautifully.
The problem with this whole “moderation” hustle is that it’s not just blind to the raw, bloody facts of the election we all just stumbled through. No, it’s worse—it chains the Democrats to a game where the Republicans always own the ball, the field, and the goddamn scoreboard, no matter how much wreckage they leave behind. It’s the politics of perpetual retreat, a coward’s strategy of chasing the shifting winds of “public opinion,” as if that’s some natural force and not a product of raw political muscle and propaganda.
What kind of sick “moral imperative” is it to win elections if all you’re doing is nodding along to whatever insane options the right shoves in your face? That’s not politics—that’s surrender. Politics is supposed to be about setting the terms of the fight, not groveling for scraps of approval.
There will be No Grand Narrative
There will be no grand narrative, no tidy storyline to tie it all together. The metanarrative is dead, blown to bits by the relentless, anarchic force of network technology. This isn’t a battlefield where competing explanations clash and the strongest one emerges victorious—no, it’s a madhouse where every story shouts over the others, and the idea of a “winner” is laughable.
Sure, you’ll find pockets of agreement—small tribes huddling around their shared interpretation of why the election fell the way it did. But even those fragile alliances will be under siege, gnawed at by the ever-present reality that the other tribes, just a click away, see it completely differently. Everyone knows everyone else doesn’t agree, and that knowledge eats away at whatever coherence might have existed. It’s not a debate; it’s a shouting match in a hurricane, and the storm isn’t letting up anytime soon.
News is Olds
News is finished. Or maybe it’s just drowning—suffocated under the sheer weight of itself. There’s too much of it for any of it to mean anything anymore. This election made it clearer than ever: the national elites—the media moguls, the talking heads, the narrative architects—don’t have a prayer of hammering their story into place. The narrative machine is broken, and no amount of nostalgia or corporate tinkering will fix it.
People don’t get “news” anymore; they get a steady drip-feed of microtargeted propaganda from a thousand different spigots, each tailored to keep them docile, enraged, or whatever the algorithm deems profitable. The genie’s out of the bottle, dancing around with a middle finger in the air, and it’s not going back in. Sure, plenty of people will try to stuff it back—earnest think pieces, toothless regulations—but it’s a lost cause. The old gatekeepers have been tossed into the chaos, and the gates are wide open.
The Post’s journalists turning around and begging readers not to cancel their subscriptions.
This isn’t the swagger of an elite class calling the shots—it’s the desperate whimper of people who know the game is slipping through their fingers. They aren’t running the show anymore; they’re scrambling to keep the lights on, praying the audience doesn’t leave before the curtain falls. It’s a sad, sputtering mess—one more sign that the old media world is crumbling into irrelevance, brick by brick.
Potemkin Village Man
Trump is just the shiny tip of a very ugly iceberg. He’s not the architect of this madness—he’s the inevitable spawn of it. A product, not a cause. He moves through the world like a carnival barker, performing his grotesque shtick with the (sometimes reluctant) backing of his entire party. Make no mistake: much of what he does isn’t even his idea—it’s their dirty laundry, hung out to dry in plain view, with Trump as the willing puppet.
Sure, he’s got that weird, almost hypnotic charisma that can light the fuse on any powder keg, but at his core? He’s hollow. A Potemkin village of a man. Less a leader than a mirror for the worst instincts of his followers, focused on applause like a junkie chasing his next fix. Power is incidental to him; it’s the adoration that keeps him going, a grotesque feedback loop of ego and spectacle. But the iceberg beneath him? That’s the real problem, and it’s not melting anytime soon.
MAGA Co-Opted
The so-called winners are already sweating bullets. MAGA diehards are frothing over Marco Rubio’s appointment like it’s some kind of personal betrayal, while Republican senators are fielding threats to install Rick Scott as majority leader. Over in the House, their razor-thin majority is already at war with itself, thanks to a pack of self-styled mavericks hell-bent on chaos.
This isn’t the disciplined, well-oiled machine they like to pretend it is—it’s a wrecking ball, swinging wildly with no one at the controls. And the “woke” MAGA crowd? They’ve been hardwired to sniff out betrayal everywhere, especially within their own ranks. It’s paranoia as an operating system, and it guarantees that even their victories will taste like ashes. This isn’t a party—it’s a demolition crew, and they don’t even trust each other to hold the sledgehammer.
Musk/Twitter
I’ve gone on record saying Musk runs Twitter/X with all the precision of a chimp with a chainsaw, and with no hope of actual growth. Turns out I was right—and wrong. Because growth? That’s a relic of another era. Musk didn’t need a business model; he needed a simulacrum of one. Something loud, chaotic, and self-referential. And he found it: a platform not to inform or connect, but to project. A neon scream into the void, tailored for Trump’s reality distortion field.
In this game, truth and utility are beside the point. What matters is the reflection in the funhouse mirror, the endless feedback loop where propaganda masquerades as discourse. Musk didn’t create this; he just leaned into it, cranked the volume, and called it a strategy. But for all his bravado, Musk won’t survive long in Trump’s shadow. Trump is the final arbiter of the spectacle, a man who devours symbols and spits out rivals. Musk, for all his posturing, is just another mirror—one Trump will smash the moment it stops reflecting him perfectly.
Credit where it’s due, though: Musk figured out that in this landscape, the appearance of power is power, even if it’s hollow. That’s the genius of his chaos. It’s not a plan—it’s a performance. And in a world where the symbol is all that remains, the performance is enough to keep the circus going. For now.
Trump Baroque
Trump will disappoint, but that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s astonishing that he still holds his cult-like sway, even after failing so miserably to “drain the swamp” in his first act. The man flamed out in 2020 with the grace of a toddler who just got their toy taken away, yet his followers remain hypnotized. That’s the thing about charisma—it’s not about delivering results; it’s about embodying the illusion of results. A mirage in the desert of despair, always just out of reach but somehow enough to keep people crawling toward it.
He’s not a leader; he’s a signifier. A blank canvas for his base to project their own fantasies of power, grievance, and redemption. He doesn’t need to fulfill promises because the promises were never the point. What matters is the performance: the bluster, the chaos, the endless loops of conflict that simulate action but lead nowhere. His next administration—if it materializes—won’t deliver anything beyond a grotesque parody of governance. Expect haphazard bluster, institutional sabotage, and an ill-conceived deportation spree that burns hot, fast, and predictably out of control.
But here’s the kicker: for some people, that will be enough. They don’t want a functioning government; they want the spectacle of its destruction. Trump’s genius—if you can call it that—is his ability to embody their anger, their fear, their contradictions, and turn them into a grotesque carnival act. He isn’t a man so much as a reflection, a funhouse distortion of the American psyche. The tragedy, of course, is that the carnival never leaves town. It just grinds on, spinning in circles, promising catharsis but delivering only exhaustion. And for those still entranced by the lights and noise, that’s all they’ll ever need.