On January 15, 2025, President Trump joked about canceling elections. The White House called it a joke. Eleven months later, armed National Guard troops stand outside Georgia polling stations. Here’s how we got there.

The following scenario tracks a subversion of the midterm elections through hypothetical news article excerpts each month leading up to November.

HOUSE - State of Play Today: GOP: 218, DEM: 213, VACANT: 4. Republicans’ five-seat edge has been bolstered by recent gerrymandering in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats have since begun retaliatory gerrymandering initiatives.

SENATE - State of Play Today: GOP: 53, DEM: 45, IND: 2. Democrats’ path to a majority requires holding Georgia, where Jon Ossoff faces reelection in a state Trump won by 2.2 points.

THE HEADLINES IN JANUARY ARE REAL AND LINKED TO THEIR SOURCE. FOLLOWING JANUARY, ALL HEADLINES ARE HYPOTHETICAL.

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January -

TIME MAGAZINE: “I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator,” [The President] claimed… When asked about the comments on Thursday evening, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed off the remarks, telling reporters the President was “simply joking.”

MSN News: President Donald Trump opened his Tuesday speech at the Detroit Economic Club with his regular claims of election fraud… Trump made the head-scratching claim that the 2024 U.S. Senate race in the state was rigged – despite Trump himself winning on the very same ballot. Trump opened his remarks by claiming he won Michigan in 2020, a constant claim that various audits and court cases have roundly dismissed. Trump then began introducing his fellow Republicans in the room and name-checked 2024 senate candidate Mike Rogers. “I’ll be honest with you, Mike. They rigged the election on you. Mine was too big to rig. You won, I’m telling you, you won, but you’re going to do great this time.”

Associated Press News Wire: ALBANY, N.Y. — Republicans on Monday appealed a judge’s decision to throw out the lines of New York City’s only GOP-controlled House seat, a case that could have national reverberations in the fight for control of Congress… The judge ordered the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission to complete a new map by Feb. 6.

MSN News: The Virginia state Senate passed a constitutional amendment Friday to pave the way for a mid-decade redistricting push, the final legislative step needed to send it to voters for approval. If voters support the amendment, which is expected to appear on the ballot this spring, Virginia’s Democratic-controlled Legislature would be able to redraw the state’s congressional map before the midterm elections.

Reuters News Wire: WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump’s administration said on Thursday it was creating a new division at the U.S. Department of Justice to combat what the White House called “rampant” fraud across the country. Rights advocates and critics have said the Trump administration has used fraud allegations as an excuse to target immigrants and political opponents.

The Guardian: Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media Misinformation technology could be deployed at scale to disrupt 2028 US presidential election, AI researchers say. Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned.

New York Times: F.B.I. agents executed a search warrant on Wednesday for an election center in Fulton County, Ga., a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to investigate a jurisdiction that President Trump has continued to criticize over his 2020 defeat in the state. The warrant “sought a number of records related to 2020 elections,” according to a statement from a Fulton County spokeswoman.

Everything beyond this point is hypothetical.

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February -

Reuters News Wire: WASHINGTON - Department of Justice announced in a press release the establishment of the Division for National Fraud Enforcement. “The DOJ’s new Division for National Fraud Enforcement will enforce the federal criminal and civil laws against fraud targeting federal government programs, federally funded benefits, businesses, nonprofits and private citizens nationwide,” the White House said in a statement. The White House did not provide further specifics on the types of fraud the new division would monitor.

March -

Associated Press News Wire: ALBANY - After surviving an appeal by New York Republicans in March, New York’s state legislature has passed a new congressional map, expected to be signed into law by New York governor Kathy Hochul this afternoon. The new map is the latest foray in the redistricting wars ahead of the midterm elections. Denounced by Republicans as illegal partisan gerrymandering, Democrats say their hands were tied, blaming the Trump administration for kicking off redistricting tit-for-tat. Democrats now look to Virginia’s redistricting referendum in April, which would open the door to gain additional seats.

Politico: Pressed by reporters on the expansive scope of the administration’s newly formed Division for National Fraud Enforcement, Mr. Trump reiterated its powers as little more than routine oversight. “We’re making sure everything’s fair, like it should be,” the President said, waving off concerns about overreach. “We’re here to help, not to take over. We’ve got great people looking into tips, historical stuff - nothing more. The states are doing a fantastic job, but if they need us, we’re there.”

April -

Reuters News Wire: WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court finds in favor of Callais in Louisiana v. Callais. Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-Black district is unconstitutional.

Truth Social Post: BIG WIN FOR AMERICA AT THE SUPREME COURT TODAY! We just DESTROYED the Radical Left Democrats’ sneaky plan to RIG the Congressional Maps with their phony “Voting Rights” nonsense in Louisiana v. Callais! The WEAK, CORRUPT map they tried to force—creating extra black districts just to STEAL seats from strong AMERICANS—was NOTHING but illegal RACIAL GERRYMANDERING! This is a HUGE VICTORY for FAIR REDISTRICTING! Louisiana Republicans, you’re WELCOME—now go WIN BIG in those fair districts! I LOVE MY BLACK VOTERS. The Fake News Media won’t report this, but WE THE PEOPLE know the truth!

New York Times: The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais to strike down the state’s redrawn congressional map—effectively dismantling a second majority-Black district—marks yet another erosion of the Voting Rights Act’s legacy. Handed down by a conservative majority that has grown increasingly skeptical of race-conscious remedies for entrenched inequities, the ruling dilutes minority voices in a state where African Americans comprise nearly a third of the population. Republicans stand to net a house seat from the ruling, while also granting Republicans a new Casus Belli in the ongoing redistricting wars, arguing all districts were drawn with racial intentions and are therefore fair play for re-drawing.

Politico: The national redistricting race has escalated as the Florida State Senate begins studying new congressional district maps on the heels of the Louisiana v. Callais decision. Adopting a new map this spring gives likely legal challenges less time to wind through the courts. Politically, congressional candidates have less time to campaign in their newly redrawn districts — a sprint likely to benefit Republicans, who are better funded and better organized in the state.

Reuters News Wire: WASHINGTON - Opening arguments have begun in the Supreme Court for Watson v. Republican National Committee. The case will determine whether mail-in ballots that are postmarked by, but arrive after Election Day will be counted as legitimate votes. A decision is expected in mid-summer.

Politico: In a referendum highly criticized as partisan and illegal by Republicans, Virginian voters have voted in favor of a referendum allowing for a pre-midterm re-districting. Democratic lawmakers have said that the new maps could shift the balance of the state’s congressional seats to 10–1 in favor of Democrats.

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May -

Associated Press News Wire: TALLAHASEE - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs a new Congressional Districting Map passed by the state legislature. Republicans could gain a full five seats in the House through Florida’s redistricting.

June -

Politico: The Department of Justice’s Division for National Fraud Enforcement, created to combat general fraud across the country, announced surprise preliminary findings Thursday from what it said have been ongoing investigations into election irregularities. The DOJ highlighted what officials described as “significant discrepancies” in voter data across several battleground states. “This is about safeguarding the sanctity of the vote,” said US Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement. “Our collaboration with Georgia’s integrity unit underscores the administration’s commitment to rooting out vulnerabilities that could undermine public confidence in the 2026 midterms.” Critics point out that similar audits in the past have yielded minimal evidence of widespread fraud.

New York Times: WASHINGTON — As World Cup games kick-off in Atlanta, President Donald J. Trump on Friday escalated his warnings about election integrity, claiming that thousands of undocumented immigrants attending the FIFA World Cup could overstay their visas and cast fraudulent votes in the upcoming midterms. Speaking at a rally in Miami, one of the tournament’s host cities, Mr. Trump referenced preliminary data from the Justice Department’s Division for National Fraud Enforcement, asserting that the influx of international visitors has created a “perfect storm” for voter fraud in urban centers like Atlanta. Immigration experts and Democrats dismissed the claims as baseless fearmongering, pointing out that noncitizens are barred from voting and that federal law requires proof of citizenship for registration in most states.

July -

New York Times: ANKARA — In a fiery address at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey on Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump pivoted from discussions on alliance defense spending and Russian aggression to a blistering critique of what he termed “domestic security threats” eroding American democracy. Framing election fraud as a peril on par with international adversaries, Mr. Trump called for urgent congressional action to fortify the nation’s voting systems, including expanding the powers of his administration’s Division for National Fraud Enforcement and imposing nationwide voter ID requirements.

Reuters News Wire: WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court finds in favor of the Republican National Committee in Watson v. Republican National Committee. In a serious blow for the Democratic coalition which often relies on flexible voting windows, mail-in ballots that are postmarked by, but arrive after Election Day will not be counted as legitimate votes.

Truth Social Post: ON AMERICA’s 250TH BIRTHDAY, WE HAVE SAVED THE COUNTRY. HUGE Supreme Court VICTORY Today—We CRUSHED the Radical Left Democrats’ Pathetic Effort to PROTECT Their Massive Mail-In Voter FRAUD Schemes! This is a TOTAL MANDATE from the HIGHEST Court: We’ve Finally Addressed the Phony Ballots and Rigged Drop Boxes that STOLE 2020, but NOW It’s Time to Go After the FRAUD from Illegal Criminals Pouring Over Our Borders and Stuffing the Lines in Key States! It’s HAPPENING in Georgia and Michigan! STOP It Cold! The Fake News Hates This, But It’s AMERICA FIRST All the Way—Secure Our Elections or LOSE Our Country! Patriots, Get READY!

Politico: WASHINGTON - In a fiery Truth Social Post late last night marking the nation’s semiquincentennial on July 4, President Donald J. Trump hailed a recent Supreme Court decision restricting certain mail-in ballot practices as a “huge victory” against what he called Democrat-led fraud schemes. But in a notable pivot, Mr. Trump quickly turned his attention to unsubstantiated allegations of in-person voting irregularities, blaming “illegal criminals pouring over our borders” for potential disruptions in battleground states like Georgia and Michigan. While recently President Trump has railed for the expansion of Division for National Fraud Enforcement powers, his post seemed to allude to a more heavy-handed approach towards in-person voting procedure.

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August -

Reuters News Wire: WASHINGTON – The deadline for new congressional maps having passed, Republicans enter the midterms with a decisive systemic advantage in the House. Despite Democrats’ efforts to fight fire with fire, new Republican delegates from Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Missouri and North Carolina significantly outweigh similar Democratic efforts in New York and Virginia.

FOX NEWS: Stephen Miller clashed with MSNBC reporters who appeared to accost the Deputy Chief of Staff as he strolled across the White House Lawn Monday afternoon. “Genuinely,” he fired back when pressed on the administration’s recent comments on November’s midterms, “could you tell me what’s going on in Georgia? There has been so much fraud there over the past several election cycles. We’re just trying to break the cycle here. Aren’t you liberals? Don’t you want fair and free elections?” Miller’s comments follow reports of a leftist PAC’s plan to bus illegal immigrants to Georgia polls electrifying social media over the weekend.

September -

Politico: The President on Wednesday repeated claims that fraudulent in-person votes were planned in November’s midterm elections. When pressed for a source on the fraud, the president deferred to classified findings by the DOJ’s Division for National Fraud Enforcement. “You know, we won big, we won big in the Supreme Court”, the President said, referring to July’s Watson v. Republican National Committee victory. “And the radical left still is trying to rig the election, even though they were exposed by the court. They’re going to send illegals to the polls. They hate America, they do. They’re frauds. So we’re looking into it. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Associated Press News Wire: Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, in rare public break with President, states he sees ‘no evidence of systematic fraud’ in state voter rolls. Trump responded on Truth Social calling the governor “Weak” and suggesting primary challenge. Three other Republican governors quietly distance themselves from DOJ fraud claims.

New York Times: Democrat politicians have become increasingly vocal in urging voters to be skeptical towards the high volumes of MAGA posts appearing across X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. “This is most likely a domestic actor because of the specificity of most of the targeting” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in an interview with the Times. “They include a lot of hashtags, but those hashtags are not necessarily the ones people use. Like when you ask ChatGPT to write you a tweet and it will include made-up hashtags.”

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October -

Reuters News Wire: Georgia Secretary of State announces emergency voter roll purge of 340,000 registrations flagged by DOJ’s Division for National Fraud Enforcement. ACLU files emergency injunction.

Truth Social Post: The Fake News Media and the Radical Left Democrats are at it AGAIN, trying to STEAL the Georgia Senate Race right under our noses! That weak, do-nothing Jon Ossoff—you know, the left-wing “journalist” who’s really just a PUPPET for the Socialist Agenda—is DESPERATE to hold onto his seat with all their usual tricks: phony IN-PERSON Votes! We saw it in 2020, and they’re gearing up for a REPEAT in 2026. We NEED the National Guard DEPLOYED outside EVERY SINGLE Polling Station in Georgia—STRONG, TOUGH Soldiers and PATRIOTS to watch every move, STOP the Cheating, and PROTECT the Sacred Votes of REAL Americans! No more Stolen Elections! Ossoff and his Democrat Cronies like Kamala and the Squad are pushing their EXTREME Policies: Open Borders, Sky-High Taxes, and Defunding the Police—they’ll do ANYTHING to win, including FRAUD! But we’re not letting them get away with it THIS TIME. This Race is CRUCIAL for taking back the Senate and SAVING America from their DISASTER. Strong Security or BUST! Make Elections Great Again! #StopTheSteal #MAGA #GeorgiaStrong

Excerpt from White House DOJ Press Release: WASHINGTON - The measures taken by law enforcement agencies in cooperation with federal fraud prevention teams and election commissions will help prevent any potential breaches of election integrity. Georgia National Guard Troops will assist state election committee member monitoring high-risk polling locations.

Politico: ATLANTA — With just days remaining before the midterm elections, President Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday to demand the deployment of National Guard troops outside every polling station in Georgia, accusing Democrats of plotting to steal the Senate race through in person voting manipulation. Democratic leaders swiftly condemned the suggestion as a dangerous escalation that could deter voters, particularly in minority communities. “This is not about security; it’s about intimidation,” said Stacey Abrams, the former gubernatorial candidate and voting rights advocate. “Deploying armed troops at polls evokes the darkest chapters of our history and has no place in a democracy.” Civil rights groups compared the administration’s National Guard deployment to the polls to Russian and Eastern European authoritarian practices.

November -

Truth Social Post: THE FAKE NEWS AND CROOKED DEMOCRATS ARE PANICKING IN GEORGIA—THEY KNOW THEY’RE ABOUT TO GET CRUSHED! Our AMAZING Division for National Fraud Enforcement JUST RELEASED BOMBSHELL DATA: Over 50,000 SUSPICIOUS Registrations in Fulton County ALONE, Tied to ILLEGALS and DEAD VOTERS Stuffing the Rolls! This is the SAME CHEATING that STOLE 2020, but BIGGER—Pathetic Jon Ossoff and his Radical Puppet Masters like Stacey “The Steal” Abrams are DESPERATE to HOLD ON with Their FRAUD MACHINE! We’re NOT Letting These LOWLIFES Get Away with It AGAIN! The Democratic Party “Constituency” is made up of HAMAS TERRORISTS, ILLEGAL ALIENS, and VIOLENT CRIMINALS. DEPLOY the NATIONAL GUARD to EVERY Polling Place in Georgia NOW—ARMED, READY, and WATCHING EVERY MOVE to STOP the Steal Cold! Governor Kemp, DO YOUR JOB or STEP ASIDE! This is WAR on Our Elections—We WILL WIN and MAKE GEORGIA GREAT AGAIN! Patriots, RISE UP! Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J TRUMP

New York Times: ATLANTA — As midterm elections loom just days away, heavily armed National Guard troops have begun stationing themselves outside polling stations in key Georgia counties, a direct response to President Donald J. Trump’s weekend Truth Social tirade demanding military presence to combat what he baselessly called Democratic efforts to “steal” the Senate race through fraudulent in-person votes. The deployments, authorized by Governor Brian Kemp under pressure from the White House, have transformed once-routine voting sites into fortified zones, with soldiers in tactical gear patrolling entrances and scrutinizing voters, raising alarms of widespread intimidation and echoes of historical voter suppression. It is unclear how many voters, intimidated by the National Guard presence, will opt to stay home.

Reuters News Wire: ATLANTA - Chaos in Georgia as protesters clash with National Guard at polling stations across the state. THIS STORY IS BREAKING NEWS: FOLLOW FOR UPDATES

Associated Press News Wire: WASHINGTON - Polls have begun to close across the country as states tally up midterm results. Democratic politicians have rushed to social media, calling today’s events in Georgia “completely unacceptable” and “unequivocally authoritarian.” The Trump administration is yet to directly acknowledge the mass demonstrations and civil unrest across the state.

Associated Press News Wire: Early reports from Atlanta suggest turnout in majority-Black precincts dropped by over 40% compared to 2024.

Politico: The President on Air Force One, flying back to Washington DC from a last-minute rally in Michigan for senatorial candidate Mike Rogers, was elated by Republicans’ unprecedented midterm victory. “It was historic, we’ll be keeping the Senate and the House. Nobody’s been able to do that, in the midterms before, really. We did so well in this election. We really did. It makes you wonder, you know, why we have term limits for the president.” Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for the President insisted to reports that the president was “simply joking”.

Three weeks later, Senator Jon Ossoff conceded Georgia’s Senate race. Republicans retained control of both chambers. President Trump’s approval rating hit 51%.

Every day, a new horror pops up on your feed. Something terrible has emerged from an AI model, something has gone viral that shouldn’t exist, something fake has been taken as real.

You look up from this Lovecraftian whack-a-mole and shoot an exasperated glance in the direction of Washington D.C. “Why won’t they do anything?”

The oft-made argument for Congress’s inability to address tech grievances is generational: older people are less fluent in the digital world. Everyone point at Mitch McConnell and laugh. This is an easy, surface-level answer to a critical institutional problem: the town square has moved to a place that elected Americans largely do not access, much less understand.

Congress is staffed, scheduled, and incentivized for an era when public discourse was slower, more legible, and mediated by gatekeepers. This worked in a world where society-altering problems moved at the same pace as democratic legislation. Those problems were articulated to the public by a few major networks, watched by the legislators and public alike.

This dynamic has collapsed. Society-altering problems now metastasize through rapidly evolving algorithms, and they are mediated in spaces largely foreign to legislators. They are not just unable to control the narrative; they do not know what or where the narrative is. Powerless and confused, they can only ride the waves as they come.

Walter Cronkite does not appear at 8:00 pm to get everyone on the same page. Influence is fragmented across apps, pseudonymous networks, recommender systems, micro-communities, and rapidly shifting norms. These forces shape public discourse at a pace legislators are unable to match.

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In fact, modern movements are the opposite of modern legislation. They do not require formal organizations, long lead times, or centralized leadership. They form around shared content, memes, inside language, and trusted micro-influencers; they can route around censorship with VPNs and mirror channels; they can coordinate logistics in group chats and shift platforms faster than state messaging can follow.

Even when politicians are “online”, it’s a sanitized internet; more institutional, partisan, and PR-oriented. Their feeds are managed and filtered through staff, alerts, and verified-account discourse. It took politicians a decade to realize podcasts were influential. Wait until they hear about Discord.

As public opinion is increasingly mediated through these spaces, legislators become increasingly disconnected from public opinion. As the pace of society-altering changes accelerates, public opinion will become increasingly volatile.

AI accelerates this trend while making lawmakers’ ignorance painfully obvious. The most consequential effects of AI in the next few years likely won’t be sci-fi superintelligence. They’ll be amplification, persuasion, fraud, and labor displacement, all of which flow through online platforms and digital norms. If you don’t understand how attention, status, and trust are already manufactured in these spaces, you won’t understand how AI affects average people.

Last September, in the Senate Hearing “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots”, Senator Marsha Blackburn opined: “What kids don’t realize when they are in the Metaverse and when they’re having these conversations with these chatbots, they’re not distinguishing between real life and what is going on virtually.” Probably a well-intentioned point. But what kid is engaging with a chatbot in the Metaverse? Everyone with an online presence remembers the Metaverse as that thing that crashed and burned. There was a whole discourse about it. An uncanny cartoon Mark Zuckerberg in an empty landscape posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, et cetera. Blackburn, it seems, is under the impression that AI is synonymous with the Metaverse. That might seem pedantic, but it offers a critical window into the socially and technologically clueless average congressional perspective. If Blackburn comes across one of the many articles circulating about the demise of the Metaverse, will she assume mission accomplished? Dangerous AI defeated?

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When you are not present in the town square, you are ignorant of the problems presented there. By nature of misunderstanding the problem, you misunderstand solutions.

Later that same hearing, Senator Dick Durbin offered his view on how to deal with the issue at hand: “Back in the day... I was in battle with big tobacco... The net result today, fewer than 5% [kids smoking].” Any well-informed American knows AI poses a serious risk, and cigarettes pose a serious risk. Any well-informed tech-literate American knows a comparison between the two is totally non-analogous. In fact, such a comparison again belies total ignorance of the AI issue. AI is not something we can regulate away and collectively reject as a bad habit. Cigarettes didn’t threaten to unemploy a generation. Cigarettes were not at risk of supercharging fraud, misinformation, and manipulation.

For better or worse, how much of your lived experience now takes place in an app, or in a chatroom? How much of your worldview is shaped by your interactions and content seen online? As a result, what policy priorities do you have? Consider how different the world must look if you never engage in that raw digital world. That is the vantage point from the Capitol Building. They are largely unaware of problems shaping behavior because they don’t see the patterns as they emerge the way platform users do.

We increasingly find ourselves in a situation where legislators are both ignorant of the problems at hand and how the public is interpreting it. What happens then?

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The “Gen Z Protests” swept the planet over the past several years. Young protesters wielded online ecosystems as weapons, toppling governments which did not speak the language of dissent.

Nepal offers the most prescient example. Reuters reports protesters used TikTok, Viber, and VPNs to mobilize thousands after the government banned Facebook. Organizers publicly named a Discord channel as a central communication system for the protests. The organizers used memes and vernacular that state and legacy outlets struggled to decode. The state could literally not understand the movement.

When officials don’t understand the grammar of online coordination or the places they occur, they often respond to the wrong thing: banning a platform rather than undermining the incentive structures; targeting viral posts rather than the distribution systems; treating memes as trivial rather than as compression algorithms for ideology. The intentions may be noble, but broad-stroke solutions inherently expose ignorance of the root problems at hand.

The federal government, then, increasingly feels like workers on a production line manufacturing a product they do not understand. Unable to build anything productive, they throw together a distraction or stop-gap solution. The production line will only speed up in coming years. Representation means a shared information environment. It necessitates fluency in the language of the modern. It requires presence in the places the population vents frustrations. Otherwise, you will be caught by surprise when the digital town square begins a march to the physical.

In the Summer of 1789, representatives of French political power gathered in Versailles as revolution consumed the country. The factions, messy and convoluted, were given names from physical positions within the assembly hall. This setup was convenient - you could tell where someone stood by virtue of where they sat. On the right side of the room sat the supporters of the Ancien Régime, on the left sat the proponents of the revolution.

It wasn’t long before those two blocs were talked about as Left and Right. Everyone who didn’t reliably belong to either camp was, then, defined by the leftover space between them. They sat in the center of the room. The “center” wasn’t a coherent political doctrine nor a midpoint between the two political ideologies beside them. Like the Left and the Right, it was simply a location.

Two assumptions were smuggled in beside this naming convention: politics must naturally be a single spectrum with endpoints, and that anyone in the center must be a midpoint. Those in the center must borrow halfway ideas from each side.

What if the National Assembly had a different floor plan? What if one wall held a mural of a dog and the other a mosaic of a cat? Maybe the factions would’ve become the Canines and the Felines. There’s nothing “between” a dog and a cat in the way there’s a “between” a left and a right. They could have been understood as their own species of thought, not a halfway point. The people who resisted both camps wouldn’t automatically sound like a compromise or a blend. But “Left versus Right” forces a center into existence, and “center” then must be derivative of the extremes.

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In the early 2000s, ask someone their politics, and they’d likely repeat a familiar phrase: “Me? I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” At the time, this was seen as a cop-out; it was an excuse not to commit to a side. In retrospect, that phrase was an expression of a shared public sense of normalcy. It was a cop-out because, to the mainstream, it was an obvious position to take. There was a general sense that the left had nuanced, non-dogmatic opinions on social issues, while the right had nuanced, non-dogmatic opinions on fiscal issues.

Even then, politics wasn’t a spectrum. We just pretended it was, because the parties’ coalitions held together long enough for “Left” and “Right” to feel like real coordinates. They represented two distinct ways of seeing the country, composed of identifiable positions. We knew where they sat in the National Assembly.

What would it mean today to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative? Would it mean, like it used to, that you support limited intervention in the economy but broader latitude on freedom of expression? Wait a second - didn’t the Trump administration just buy massive stakes in American companies? Didn’t the Biden administration pressure social-media platforms to curb content it viewed as misinformation?

Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, Republican and Democrat; these labels have lost significant meaning as each party reorients their prime objective as total domination over the other. Our politics have become polarized in a literal sense. Standing at a geographic pole, there is no left and right. Only down. The political pendulum has been severed from its tether, now used as a blunt force object to beat the party not in power into submission.

The strongest argument against rejecting a “left” versus “right” framework is moral: when one side feels uniquely dangerous, refusing allegiance looks like evasion. But that logic itself is the psychological engine of binary politics: emergency turns loyalty into virtue and skepticism into betrayal. Once the fight is framed as existential, every escalation becomes “defense,” institutions become weapons, and ideology becomes secondary to victory. A third identity that refuses to acknowledge the two poles as the political centers of gravity gets mocked as “centrism.” It threatens the premise that there are only two legitimate camps.

Even if you find Trump irredeemably vile, and that’s a valid perspective to take, such a position does not change the fact that the Democratic Party, in their opposition to Trump, has transformed from a coherent set of political beliefs to a disjointed reactionary platform. It is defined by the sole goal of clawing back into office. What happened to defund the police? What happened to lax border regulation? All thrown to the wind. Maybe abundance will work!

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This is not an argument that political parties should have static positions until the end of time. Political platforms should and do change. It is an argument that your positions should not be defined by their relation to the major political parties. Your positions should exist because you believe in them. They should not shift just because your party does. You can be a single-issue voter. You can care about your stance on abortion, gun rights, or immigration over all else. But to translate that passion into fealty to a single political party is to become a political serf, tilling a chunk of political earth forever shifting beneath you.

The greatest trick ever pulled by politicians was convincing the public that taking a position outside established parties is a copout. Surely it must be - it takes the easy positions from either side. How convenient! What is the issue with taking easy positions from either side, when they are obvious positions to you? A new bundle of ideas is not “RINOism” or “Champagne Socialism” or whatever the establishment sneers. It is not “Fiscally Conservative but Socially Liberal”. It is not an amalgamation of left and right - if left and right have lost definitional power, then centrism is itself a coalition of organic, independent positions. It is not an easy stance between two extremes when the concept of “betweenness” has become arbitrary. It is an entirely new platform. It is revolutionary.

A communist and fascist walk into a bar.

“What’ll it be?” asks the bartender. “A Molotov Cocktail” they say in unison.

“That’ll be $24 each plus a service charge plus tax” says the bartender.

Neither able to afford the tab, they return to their homes which they lease.

The press whips out made-up labels trying to describe our political moment. We are in a pre-post-neo-liberal de-globalizing Marxist influenced hyper-capitalist world, don’t you know. Balancing along a series of hyphens may numb an anxious reader into submission. Surely, number of prefixes is proportional to explanatory power; if I don’t understand it, at least someone does. They do, right? These explanations are as complex as they are useless, so high flying they cruise at the same altitude as the cost of living. Reality is far simpler: we have reached an inflection where a critical mass of young lower- and lower-middle-income whites have been priced out of social mobility. Like a chain hanging over a cliff, the largest link has finally slipped over the precipice. Pulled by its weight, the rest will rattle down into the chasm.

This isn’t a claim that economic hardship only matters once it reaches white Americans. Minorities have endured stalled mobility far longer and still do. It is about the scale of the stall.

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Opportunity Insights’ recent work offers a blunt mobility comparison between those born in 1992 versus 1978 at 27 years of age. Among whites born to parents in the bottom fifth of American household income, the odds of staying stuck at the bottom rose 19 percent. The odds of leaping from the bottom to the top fell 13 percent. For whites born to lower-middle income families, the typical household income in their late 20s fell by $7,000. Employment slipped, marriage dropped sharply, and early-adulthood mortality roughly doubled. Meanwhile, whites born to affluent parents have pulled further ahead. The late-millennial experience measured here offered a warning.

That experience has metastasized since 1992. The median age for first-time homebuyers is now 38, up from 28 in the 1990s. Not surprising, given median home prices have risen faster than wages for two decades. 76 percent of Gen Z has now abandoned a major goal due to affordability, compared to 45 percent of boomers. Only 30 percent expect to be better off than their parents. According to a 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, 39 percent of white 18–29-year-olds – a population equivalent to that of the entire state of Georgia - are “struggling” or “getting by with limited financial security.”

As this massive bloc abandons the old playbook, its gravitational pull warps America’s economic and social fabric.

A 2024 study found 11 percent of Gen Z owns bonds, 13 percent owns real estate, and 18 percent owns stocks. Above all, 20 percent own cryptocurrency. As of writing, cryptocurrency “StupidCoin” has a market cap of $1,331,401 USD, with over 994,841,831 STUPID Coins in circulation. Why not invest in meme coins when the traditional paths to wealth are themselves seen as a joke? “As you work hard, you’re able to move up through the system and succeed” cooed Eric Adams during his New York mayoral reelection campaign. Just days ago, Adams launched a meme coin that he said would “fight the rapid spread of antisemitism” in New York City. Over several minutes, it hit $580 million in market cap before crashing 80 percent. A wallet connected to the token’s deployer removed nearly $2.5 million just before the plunge.

Kalshi, a platform that allows individuals to gamble on global events, literalizes dissociation. It’s the gamification of civic life. Nearly 45 percent of all Kalshi’s traffic comes from 18-34-year-olds. Is that because younger people had a greater tendency to gamble? A walk through the slots at any airport terminal in Las Vegas would say otherwise. It is because, amongst young Americans, there is such a pervasive feeling of lost agency in the outcome of civic and global events that it might as well be a betting market. Why invest in an economy where the Fed Chairman is being investigated for reasons nobody can quite agree on, when you could make 4 percent return on your Kalshi bet that the rapture won’t happen this year?

Woven through all is the AI menace. A Harris Poll showed that 65 percent of Gen Z worry about becoming obsolete due to AI, and nearly half feel it has made their college degree less relevant. Speculation of what the next decade will bring abounds. You’ll need to pay for access to the AI which took your marketing job. You’ll have to enroll in the subscription service for the AI trained on your content. In a world where wish machines are owned and operated by a handful of trillionaires, where is your mobility? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Pull yourself into what? Into the void between manual labor jobs machines can’t yet do and the trillionaires who have automated the rest of the economy? The business you’d like to start cannot compete with billions of dollars in data centers. You’ll rent your home, you’ll buy groceries on a payment plan. Using a specific enough prompt, someone will generate you.

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Into the economic and cultural breach slither those who say they can fix it. From the far-right, neo-Nazi commentator Nick Fuentes:

America First used to mean let's put the people’s interest first... now it means let's sacrifice those people if it means a bigger economy because then America will be first in size of GDP.

From the radical Anarchist David D’Amato:

GDP is not only a measuring tool; it is also itself a political ideology... The opacity of GDP to the common man makes it a useful tool of emotional and psychological manipulation.

The Gross Domestic Product of the country has itself become an “other”. Young Americans feel so dissociated from wealth and mobility that growth in GDP can only mean the enriching of the established rich, rather than the advancement of themselves. These politics are not a horseshoe. They are a downward spiral.

Extreme, inexcusable ideologies gain traction amongst young Americans failing to pry open windows of opportunity. The ANES 2024 Study found 18–34-year-olds rated white supremacists, fascists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan notably higher than middle-aged or older respondents. In a March 2025 Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of 18–29 reported a favorable view of socialism and 34 percent reported a favorable view of communism. A Harvard Youth Poll reports 39 percent of young Americans say political violence can be justified under at least one circumstance.

Ambiguity fuels radicalism. For each moment the establishment spends arguing over definitions, poisonously simple solutions gain ground. As the core promise of economic mobility slips further out of reach for larger segments of the population, the political ramifications will be dire. Those in the halls of power ought to tune into the ideas spreading across social media and livestreams. They ought to take seriously the intoxicating potential of the fringe and take action to address root causes of this crisis. Otherwise, one day soon, the patrons of the bar may decide not to go home.

We’re saving you a whole lot of trouble, the administration says to future Americans. The country has overextended itself; our boys have been killed in Kandahar while thugs in Caracas sip margaritas! We’re giving you a world where these globalist cabalist institutions are finally in the dirt. You’ll stride across continents. You’re welcome.

This solution, a return to Hemispheric priorities, intrinsically cedes influence abroad to America’s adversaries. That’s by design - who needs Taiwan when you can have Tijuana? The Administration ties their new global order to the age of European imperialism, when a divvied-up world was balanced between select sovereigns, a time when men in wigs, tights and ornate tunics made the House of Commons look like a Chappell Roan concert. America’s new “might makes right” worldview, however, fundamentally misunderstands the historical spheres-of-influence system it seeks to replicate. Ignorant of that misunderstanding, the administration dismantles the current system rather than reforming it. Future Americans are left with less global influence than ever.

The years of global war and continental slaughter wrought by the French Revolution had traumatized the traditionalist monarchies of Europe. Now gathered in Vienna, the imperial representatives set about constructing a new world order atop the rubble of Napoleon’s Continental System. Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich presented the final plan:

Each imperial power would balance the others, preserving stability through diplomacy, mutual restraint, and fear of a coalition of the others. Foreign policy would be conducted through “spheres-of-influence”, geographic chunks where one great power held privileged political, economic, or strategic control. Rival powers agreed not to interfere in each other’s spheres. Oh - and let’s not forget to partition Poland for the fourth time. Just for the fun of it. The “Concert of Europe” was established.

The system yielded a period of relative restraint amongst the powers which lasted for nearly a century. Yes, “relative restraint” is not total restraint; the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, and endless abuses in the conquered reaches of empires still saturated the age in violence. However, from a global stability perspective, things were mostly calm. While each power conducted its own section of the concert, the sum of music was harmonic.

Marco Rubio must consider himself a modern Metternich – following the defeat of the perceived revolutionary globalist forces which tried to conquer the world (though Marco’s revolutionaries erected regulatory frameworks in Brussels rather than guillotines in Paris), he now sits with his extra-large Sharpie and atlas. The extent of each sphere is still murky. What’s clear is the United States gets the Western Hemisphere. Russia seems to get the former Soviet States. The extent of China’s sphere remains to be seen. Ironically, European states face the same fate they visited upon the non-great powers in the 19^th century – choose a sphere now or have one chosen for you. The conservative-leaning publication National Interest put the re-ordering concisely: “Other states should also adjust to new geopolitical realities... [The U.S. is] staking its claim to the Western Hemisphere while ceding (or conditioning) primacy elsewhere to other powers.”

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The Trump administration assumes influence is maintained by the strength of a sphere’s dominant power. Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, articulated this understanding in the context of America’s claim to Greenland: “We live in a world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This understanding, while well suited for a Bond villain monologue, articulates a comically surface-level view of how spheres of influence historically maintained stability. The 19^th and early 20^th century spheres of influence system was stable because of the supranational similarities binding together European aristocrats – not because of muscle flexing isolationism. Historian Paul W. Schroeder, a preeminent scholar on the Concert of Europe, notes: “The European system worked because it rested on an international aristocratic society… diplomacy was the profession of a small, socially homogeneous elite bound by common culture, values, and personal ties.”

Spheres of influence worked because they sat below an integrated, pan-European aristocratic class conducting the Concert of Europe. These conductors shared general cultural norms, social status, and often bloodlines. Imperial European states themselves shared fundamental objectives: suppressing revolution, maintaining balance-of-power mechanics, and the norm of “consultation” among great powers.

States certainly continued competing, but friction between spheres was kept cool due to high-level alignment of interests by those in charge. While the British and Russians of the 19^th and early 20^th century may have disagreed with the balance of power in central Asia, they both agreed that history itself was European, and everything beyond it merely geography. King George V of Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were first cousins, after all. The Concert of Europe had an implicit agreement among powers: regardless of the individual notes, the score would be in High Classical style.

Putin, Xi Jinping, and Trump have irreconcilable tastes in music. There are no intrinsic bonds connecting the conductors of these states, no agreed upon arc of history to guide their interactions. In fact, each of these powers has a national myth totally incompatible with the others:

America is a republic which tells itself it’s a nation of self-made individuals who push into new frontiers, break rules that feel illegitimate, and turn risk into opportunity. Russia is an autocracy which tells itself it endures surrounded by threats, hardened by suffering, and made legitimate through sacrifice in defense of the motherland. China is a communist state which tells itself it is an ancient civilizational state reclaiming its rightful centrality after humiliation, with unity and order as the precondition for national rejuvenation. These are fundamental, irreconcilable national characteristics which limit the similarities between great powers necessary for a spheres of influence system to remain stable.

America, China, and Russia are structurally incompatible. None treats ‘balance of power’ as an end in itself as European Imperials did, only as a temporary constraint. Each wants maximum freedom of action, and each suspects the others’ rules are just camouflage for domination. They never shared a common aristocratic class bantering over a Christmas goose in Vienna.

There were, however, post-war global institutions, built by the United States, that created a shared framework which tilted towards the U.S. The United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization, fostered a shared framework of rules, diplomacy, and economic interdependence that mirrored the aristocratic harmony of old. They allowed incompatible powers to negotiate without immediate resort to force. Critically, they also gave the United States an overt advantage in geopolitics; the U.S. built the system to reflect American values. Yet, in their confusion, the current administration has dismantled or undermined these institutions, ironically considering them antithetical to a sphere-of-influence global system. They were actually the only things which might have made it work.

Uninhibited globalism is bad. Europe failing to fairly shoulder NATO’s burden is bad. Bringing China into the WTO as a full member was bad. This is not a defense of global institutions which have encumbered ordinary Americans with international burdens. But we need to be able to have two thoughts simultaneously: Americans are allowed to want to prioritize Americans and Americans need to support certain international institutions because they allow for engagement with the world. We can stop subsidizing Europe’s capability shortfalls without imploding NATO. We can renegotiate trade deals with China without dismantling the WTO. We can think Davos itself is stupid and irrelevant and wasteful without torching Geneva.

America built the international system because it gave America an advantage. Over decades, that advantage was corroded by individuals who believed its function was not to perpetuate American hegemony, but to build a world where which assumed countries have equally noble intentions. That was an obvious mistake. But dismantling the system at large is an even bigger mistake. Regardless of the strategic errors made by successive State Departments, the chessboard is still made in America. Boomers and millennials who have reaped the benefits of this system while undermining its true purpose have decided it is better to throw it in the woodchipper than work to reform it for future Americans’ benefit.

We must recognize that we are building a new global system while demolishing the institutions that made that system historically function. These institutions serve as the contemporary analogue to the pan-European aristocratic bonds that once harmonized rival powers in a fragile but functional concert.

Despite the shared cultural, familial, and socio-economic bonds, the European powers still eventually blew the whistle and charged over the trench. Thirty years of near-constant mechanized warfare would follow. Today, those whose vain machismo envisions a striding colossus across their sphere have, in their ignorance, dismantled the very mechanisms which prevent their neighbor’s colossus from taking an extra step. Metternich plugs his ears – the music of the forming Concert of Powers will devolve into a simple bass rhythm of hypersonic missiles.