Good morning from the mountains in New Mexico. As I get used to the new altitude, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of power and how Steven Lukes is trying to convince me of all its different dimensions. In his updated edition, he discusses the relationship between exercising power and not exercising power. This is his answer to dispositional theorists like Peter Morriss, who critique Lukes’s formulation as too interested in seeing power move rather than evaluating how it exists in the air. Lukes’s move is to argue that his third dimension holds up against this critique, because if power is the ability to shape preferences, then it doesn’t necessarily need to be exercised in the first place. The capacity is the point. Power that has already shaped what you want rarely has to lift a finger.

The theoretical discussion makes me think of how preferences are shaped in the United States today. For example, how people believe America is a center-right country despite relying on center-left policy more than the average citizen may recognize. And it brings me to a long-held idea of mine, one I want to hold up to Lukes rather than simply illustrate with him, because I’m not sure he’s entirely right and I’d rather test the argument than surrender to it.

American democracy functions when the public has recourse and active input in the mechanisms of government. Its founding and constitutional arguments were always between landed elites who feared the rising democratic energies within the states after the Revolutionary War and those willing to widen the franchise. The central struggle throughout American history has been dragging the political spectrum from the right toward a healthy left. John Quincy Adams wanted bridges and roads for a budding nation; Lincoln wanted to secure land rights for formerly enslaved Americans; the second Roosevelt fundamentally renegotiated Americans’ social contract with each other and their expectations of a safety net.

Here is where I want to be careful, because there are two ways to tell the next part and only one of them is true to Lukes. The easy version says the American public always wanted to fear multicultural democracy, and power merely pressed on a preference that was already there. But that version isn’t really a Lukesian argument at all because if the fear were authentic and primordial, it wouldn’t be manufactured, and manufacture is the whole point of the third dimension. The harder and truer version is that the raw material was available in the culture through the resentments, the hierarchies, and inherited suspicions….but it was not destiny. Power’s third-dimensional work was to activate that material and organize it into common sense, to make one available disposition feel like the natural one. The same public that produced the backlash also produced the Reconstruction amendments, the New Deal coalition, and the Civil Rights Act. The fear was never the only thing in the American character. It was the thing power found most useful to cultivate.

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And you can watch it being cultivated in the language. This is the part I find hardest to look away from, because it is the third dimension made audible through a fifty-year project of turning policy questions into identitarian reflexes that fire below the level of argument.

“Law and order” in Nixon’s mouth.

“Welfare queens” in Reagan’s.

“Immigrating the right way” in the 2010s.

“They’re eating the cats and dogs” in 2024.

Each phrase belongs to a different decade and a different messenger, which is exactly the point. The template predates any one man and outlives every news cycle. These were not gaffes or improvisations, instead, they were the steady maintenance of a shaped preference wth each generation handed a fresh idiom for an old reflex.

I want to be fair to the people who bristle at this reading, because the honest version of their objection deserves an answer rather than a dismissal. The thoughtful center-right position is not that racism played no role. It’s that economic anxiety and racial resentment are genuinely difficult to disentangle, and that they weight the former more heavily than I do. That’s a real argument, and I don’t want to wave it away. But I think it underestimates how thoroughly the two were fused on purpose and how often the economic grievance was handed a racial face precisely so that it could be turned against the multiracial labor coalitions that might have addressed the economics. The disentangling is hard because someone spent fifty years making sure it would be. That is not a blind spot I can excuse in commentators who otherwise pride themselves on seeing clearly, even when naming it costs them political capital.

Which lets me name all three faces of power in a single episode, the GOP’s coalitional transformation in the late twentieth century. Underneath sits the third dimension: preferences already shaped, so that “law and order” could read as neutral governance rather than coded threat. On top of that substrate, the first face (the visible decision) is the New Right’s open welcome of neosegregationist voices, the deliberate courting of the backlash as strategy. And in the middle, the second face (the non-decision) is the failure of those Republicans who had supported civil rights reforms to stand up against it, the fight declined, the objection left unspoken because raising it would have cost too much. Shaped preference, active courting, principled resistance withheld. All three faces stacked in one act of party-building.

So reading Trumpism through staged interviews and tweets may be the hobby of the obsessive who feeds every Trump moment to the timeline. But recognizing the power of the 45th and 47th administrations simply in their capacity to hold office and set the agenda takes you somewhere no single scandal or election cycle can. Commentators trapped in the daily grind have to treat every weekly outrage and swing-voter poll as gospel. The long view sees something they can’t afford to: power has already shown its hand, and it does not much matter how a candidate messages or which way a swing voter breaks on a given afternoon.

Because the center was never neutral ground. It was built, and it is defended. What we are taught to call the political center sits far to the right of where the public’s actual needs would place it. It’s a position engineered over generations so that landed capital could profit from it and call the arrangement natural. To move left from there is not radicalism. It is correction. And the unflattering work of saying so indicts a long line of political operatives and tells the real history at the same time.

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Power: A Radical View (PRV) by Steven Lukes was, in its original 1974 form, part of an ongoing conversation among political scientists about a seemingly deceptive question of how to actually measure power. It was a method argument, waged between figures like Robert Dahl, who saw power in the decisions you could watch …

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I think it is wrong to jump on the pile that is reveling in the death of Lindsey Graham.

Someone lost a …

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It seemed like New Year’s Eve was just yesterday, and now we are mere months away from another year-ending holiday spree. I haven’t written about politics since Juneteenth, and then only to share some films that captured the brutality of American slavery. In the months since, as the Earth …

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There is a good chance I will not post again before this July 4th, the one that celebrates 250 years. So I want to write briefly about what I do love about America.

I love that America is an idea that keeps germinating, a cutting taken from someone else’s hedge, from a tradition that once wanted only to trim the power of …

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Six months ago, this community made Stew On This a bestselling Substack. I’ve spent the time since both building on that and wrestling with a question I can’t quite put down: is it right to put ideas behind a paywall when the whole information ecosystem already makes junk-food media frictionless and careful thought expensi…

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In 2022 and 2023, I wrote that the political center had to migrate from the far right back toward the center-left, and that the "center-right nation" was a fiction maintained by Republican messaging shops and a cooperative pundit class. I held those theories hoping the elections would oblige. One can dream.

It turns out …

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I recently built an ambitious four-semester syllabus that examines how film portrays American history, pairing the films against American history surveys by Jill Lepore, Michael Harriot, Bhu Srinivasan, Elie Mystal, Kur…

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What if we are just writing reviews of a play that most Americans walked out of years ago?

I hope I am wrong, of course. But I have been wondering whether, after years of listening to center-left and center-right voices insist that a procedural blunder or a foreign policy upset will finally make people break with the Trump …

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In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Evan and I analyze Tim Miller’s style of political storytelling, using his own writing in Why We Did It: A Travelogue to the Republican Road to Hell as our backdrop. Miller has written candidly about coming from a Washington D.C. professional tradition that prioritizes the game of electioneering over actual governance, it is one that reinforced racist and homophobic campaign tactics because winning mattered more than leading.

Miller was a hatchet man for GOP PACs and the RNC, attacking Democrats even when those attacks targeted people like himself. His dissonance stems from a belief that he could compartmentalize his sexuality and that he didn’t need to be as open as other gay men, but still could win the game of D.C. career elevation, even when that game came at the direct expense of his own right to marry who he loves.

That dissonance persists today. He tries to square three irreconcilable things: belief in a version of America that never existed, loyalty to a professional game that was always rigged against him, and the quiet truth Trump’s victories revealed about the bigoted foundation of conservative politics. Sometimes he disappoints by playing into right-wing frames. Sometimes he surprises.

My conclusion is that Tim Miller is best understood as an artifact — a peculiar and revealing outgrowth of the pre-collapse conservative professional class that briefly found a home in the pro-democracy coalition. The game never stopped for Tim. He just changed teams. Now he plays for reactionary centrism, punching left and laundering right-wing frames as reasonable moderate opinion for an audience that finds that reassuring.

He's worth analyzing carefully.

He's just not always useful in charting the path forward.

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Previously on Stew On This:

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We discuss how these narratives can flatten voters into caricatures, obscure deeper historical forces, and narrow the imagination of our national discourse at the very moment we need it most.

I hope you enjoy this stimulating conversation.

Please subscribe to and share Walter’s Substack, and continue supporting audience-driven media.

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There are two narratives that I have come across. Trump-adjacent spokespeople are dispelling the popular notion among anti-Trump groups that Iran has humiliated President Trump because it shows its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Actually, the entity that controls the Strait of Hormuz is the insurance underwriting i…

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Last night Ken Paxton defeated John Cornyn.

James Talarico posted this:

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Today, the flags fly at half-staff, and the names get read aloud, and somewhere a teenager who enlisted because the recruiter came to his high school and the recruiter’s office was warmer than his mother’s apartment will be told that he is part of a tradition. That tradition is real. So is the story that surrounds it, and the …

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Charlie Sykes also has a darker history. He was one of the main engines of Trumpism, having spent more than two decades pumping grievance and coded supremacy politics into the Milwaukee airwaves before Trump ever rode an escalator. According to assessments by people who watched Wisconsin at the time, there would have been no Scott Walker without him. The talking points that catalyzed Act 10, the school voucher fight aimed at Milwaukee’s majority-Black public schools, the welfare-state critique that gave Wisconsin conservatism its racial vocabulary without ever requiring it to say the words, were the infrastructure that undergirded his show.

And yet, having met him and listened to him for years, I think Sykes is genuinely a good man — a good man who was part of a toxic political communications assembly line. He is well-read, witty, and one of the smartest voices in the Never-Trump constellation. But his opinions increasingly come off as inaccurate artifacts of a political moment when America felt triumphant but didn’t notice, or didn’t want to notice, what it was doing to its own people to sustain that triumph.

In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Evan and I have decided to analyze the individuals who comprise (or once comprised) . Charlie has since left and now writes his own Substack called To the Contrary, which is worth following. But we often find ourselves frustrated by takes that come off like stale Cold War microwave food: a punch to the left, a claim to the lost nobility of the right, reheated and served as fresh analysis.

In my harshest reading, I find myself wondering whether Charlie sits in a longer American lineage, whether he is one in a line of useful idiots for the neo-Confederate cause, men who used Edmund Burke and the language of prudence and gradualism to intellectualize something far darker and far more ancient to American life. The Milwaukee suburbs whose worldview his show served were not generic conservatives. They were the geographic and political descendants of an American racial settlement, and the philosophical machinery he supplied them with, one of order, responsibility, and the warning against utopian leveling, was, in its functional effect, the same machinery the post-Reconstruction Redeemers had used a century earlier to dress an older project in respectable clothes.

I still recommend Charlie’s commentary with a grain of salt, and so far, he still recommends Stew On This. But I am wary of him and others in his category of political storyteller because their continued usefulness to the national discourse seems to depend on a strident retelling of a noble Reaganism rather than on an accurate historical record of where Trumpism actually came from. The story has a hero, and the hero is very much like the storyteller.

I present to you: Reality Checking the Bulwark — Charlie Sykes.

Join us Next Time for Reality Checking the Bulwark - Tim Miller

LIVE: May 24, 2026 at 3 PM ET

Please read the companion piece as well:

Author’s Note: I am now writing under a pseudonym, Deuce Davis.

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Previously on Stew On This:

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The conventional wisdom among the commentariat is that because of inflation and anti-incumbent energy internationally, Democrats were destined to lose in 2024. There are reasons to hold onto this specific truth, especially the part abou…

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Author’s Note:

Starting with this post, I'll be writing here as Deuce Davis.

Steward Beckham Jr. has accumulated too many hats across civic, professional, and personal life, and a pen name, even one as transparent as this one (the days when Hamilton could really be Publius are long behind us), still buys a margin of separati…

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There is a new poll being discussed…

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Strange Fruit

Learn Something New Today is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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3 months ago · 69 likes · 3 comments · Anthony M.

Anthony brings the past forward into the present by explaining the long restorative struggle of the Confederacy through anti-Black political movements and cultural signaling. We should not be surprised that the rollback of rights have moved at such a rapid pace when we dare to look at the unvarnished truth of white supremacy in American life and history.

I hope you read Anthony’s article and subscribe to his substack! Enjoy this conversation and have a great weekend!

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