Stew on This: Videos

Reality Checking the Bulwark: Tim Miller

Deuce Davis — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:04:07 GMT

is the host of ’s flagship podcast, inheriting the seat from his predecessor, . But has the substance of The Bulwark Podcast gotten better or worse under his stewardship?

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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Blue MAGA and the Myth of a Noble Conservatism

Deuce Davis — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:50:16 GMT

This past weekend, I was joined by of I’d Rather Be Writing for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the Democratic Party and the enduring myth of a noble conservatism that supposedly existed before Trump arrived to tear it all down.

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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Reality Checking the Bulwark: Charlie Sykes

Deuce Davis — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:01:10 GMT

I once took the train from Baltimore to Milwaukee to watch Charlie Sykes interview Paul Ryan at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I had just graduated from the political communications graduate program at American University. I had conducted a content analysis on Sykes’ work at the Bulwark, and I had come to genuinely admire him. He had spoken out against Trump in 2016 when his side wouldn’t, and I was the kind of student who thought intellectual courage from inside a movement was the highest political virtue. The trip was, in its way, a pilgrimage.

Charlie Sykes interviews Paul Ryan in 2023 after writing about his tenure on the board of Fox News and how he could possibly rein in Tucker Carlson. UWM Report

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.

Cover of Syke’s podcast version of his conversation with Ryan.

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.

Learn more below.

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Strange Fruit: Live with Anthony Milian

Deuce Davis — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:25:11 GMT

I had an excellent discussion with of the Learn Something New Today substack about his article Strange Fruit.

Learn Something New Today

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…

2 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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The Enshittified Bulwark

Deuce Davis — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:47:44 GMT

“Late-stage capitalism” used to mean something.

It used to invoke the full and final form of a system so inherently monstrous, so inhumane, that it eats itself after finally consuming every limited input – including people – that made it churn. Like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” the phrase “late-stage capitalism” has migrated from its once marginal position and become such a handy description of everyday life, it’s now a cliche.

The language itself has been consumed for every last drop of meaning.

“Enshittification” is the new “late-stage capitalism.” Coined to describe the digital product lifecycle of diminishing quality, the term has been embraced and broadly applied as the new shorthand for anything that was once good but no longer is. Like the United States:

“I do not think it is possible to deny that America is a declining empire. But it is important to understand why. We are not losing control of our colonies, like England in the 1930s. We are not threatened by belligerent neighbors. There are no exogenous hardships. Everything we need to fix America is right here.

And yet we are incapable of doing so. Partly because of the will of the people—decline is a choice. But also because of structural barriers that have developed in the American system.

Isn’t that the definition of enshittification?”

In the Enshittified States of America, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last laments that the country has gone slowly downhill since at least the turn of the century, as evidenced primarily by government ineptitude and the erosion of democracy. Once upon a time the United States functioned to serve its citizens, then operated in service of both its citizens and its international partners, eventually came to serve only the global system itself, and now finally – according to Last – serves no one and no thing.

In his conclusion, Last gestures to the will of the voters for partial responsibility for our national self-destruction. But the bulk of the blame (and the bulk of the essay) is devoted to “structural barriers” and a political system in which both parties share equivalent responsibility for its dysfunction.

“The federal government has been losing functionality for a long time. Why? Lots of reasons:

Increasing partisanship
Ideological sorting of the parties
The Supreme Court expanding executive immunity while entrenching minoritarian political power
The legislature surrendering institutional prerogatives
Hyperscaled gerrymandering
Creation of an oligarch class
Breakdown of the rule of law and the institutionalization of corruption”

Conspicuously absent is the particular impact of the Republican party.

Every problem is understood as an equivalent and balanced responsibility shared by Democrats and Republicans. Yet as far back as 2012, renowned independent political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann identified the GOP as “an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Ornstein and Mann said it plainly in 2012 – and it’s only compounded in the fourteen years since: the Republicans are the problem. They are disproportionately responsible for every crisis JVL listed above.

No serious thinker still believes the long-debunked both-sides fallacy, let alone publishes it to their million-subscriber Substack. So why is the typically clear-eyed JVL arguing that fixing immigration, the Supreme Court, and gerrymandering are all “impossible to achieve at scale because of our system’s deep sclerosis”?

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There is a real villain in this story. But acknowledging how we truly got here would require JVL to not only cite Ornstein and Mann in the Obama era when his Bulwark colleagues were professional GOP operatives, but also to indict the party’s wholesale assault on democratic norms as far back as the Gingrich revolution. So instead we get systemic issues with a passive voice.

Not to deny the Democrats’ role in our national decline. They deserve plenty of blame – but only insofar as the party has followed the Republicans’ lead hollowing out our economy, our environment, our public health, and our constitutional rights. This forty-year project of pulling the country steadily to the authoritarian right recontextualizes Trump as the logical end product of everything the Bulwark staff were committed to before they left the party in 2016.

The Bulwark can never confront or reckon with this central, deeply inconvenient fact. Individual members of the organization may have grappled extensively with their complicity in the party’s decades-long radicalization. But the personal mea culpa means little when the ideological worldview that guaranteed Trumpism’s rise remains intact. And so we get essays like this one from JVL. Clever. Articulate. Topical. And wildly discordant with the empirical realities of the politics it purports to address.

The Bulwark figureheads Sarah Longwell, Last, and Tim Miller

This essay can be summarized as: America was once decent, now it isn’t, the barriers to self-improvement are structural and systemic, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

Is JVL publishing rank nihilism? More than ten years into a Trump era in which the Bulwark Republicans just lose and lose and lose, what even is the point of the publication? They lost the GOP to Trump. They lost the 2024 election running precisely the campaign their worldview prescribed. They are losing the argument about the Democratic Party’s future to the insurgent left they spent years condescending to. At some point the people who are always wrong about everything don’t get to keep framing themselves as the savvy oracle of the pro-democracy movement.

If the novelty of the Bulwark has long worn off, and the collective wisdom of their political prognostications proves consistently antithetical to actual democratic outcomes, the only remaining value of the organization is the financial benefit of the founders and investors themselves. The purpose of the JVL piece is to feed the subscriber base and bring in new paid subs. It doesn’t have to make any sense. It’s just slop.

The Bulwark itself has become enshittified. Whatever value it once provided its subscribers has long dried up. Its only remaining purpose is to make money for its staff. Let’s not pretend it’s anything else.

Join us next time!

RCTB: Charlie Sykes

May 9, 2026 at 2 PM ET

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Reality Checking the Bulwark – Episode 7

Deuce Davis — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:44:06 GMT

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk.

In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Steward Beckham and I examine tweets from Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller. First, Longwell reacts to a Mike Pence clip, arguing that Trump is a break from the Republican Party – no matter how much the GOP’s former Vice President and political history suggest otherwise.

Then Miller responds to Michigan Senate Democratic primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s tweet blaming AIPAC-aligned politicians for escalating gas prices in Michigan. Miller cries “misinformation,” but we wonder whether his own message is the actual misinformation.

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 8

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK – EPISODE 8

Sunday, April 12 at 2pm EST / 11am PST

LIVE Sunday April 12 at 2pm EST

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Hasan Piker and Fissures in the Democratic Coalition

Deuce Davis — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:26:49 GMT

Evan and I dug into the significance of The Bulwark openly wrestling with Hasan Piker’s place in the Democratic (and broader pro-democracy) coalition. Tim Miller argues that centrist operators obsessing over Hasan are misallocating energy that should be aimed at confronting Trump’s foreign policy extremism. In the process, they risk alienating younger as well as long-term Democratic voters in pursuit of an increasingly elusive idea of moderation in an era defined by declining rights.

Sarah Longwell takes the opposite view, effectively arguing that Hasan should be pushed outside the Democratic tent while leaning on all too familiar right-wing critiques rather than engaging directly with his broader commentary. The backlash to her position has been swift and lopsided, especially as Hasan Piker responded in real time on his HasanReacts YouTube feed, reframing the exchange for an audience far beyond traditional political media.

Evan and I use this moment to explore what it reveals about the shifting centers of power inside the Democratic coalition, and who actually holds the audience now.

Talked about in the show:

“Is Hasan Piker Toxic…or Gettable” -The Bulwark, April 3, 2026
“Tim Miller SHUTS DOWN Sarah Longwell Defending Hasan” -HasanAbi Reacts, April 3, 2026

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Can an American Political Party Prioritize Both The "White" and "Black" Vote

Deuce Davis — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:41:12 GMT

Published on September 13, 2022. Licensed under the Unsplash+ License.

A reader, sharp and unflinchingly, offered a stark thesis: in American politics, a party often feels forced to choose. Court the White vote and risk losing the Black vote, or anchor yourself with Black voters and accept erosion elsewhere. It sounds cynical, but the data gives it teeth. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democrats have rarely won a majority of White voters, a realignment that still hums beneath everything we see today.

That tension sits at the edge of this piece, one of the final notes, not the opening chord.

Along the way, I move through a series of fault lines, such as the Supreme Court’s ruling against conversion therapy, the widening shadow of the Iran conflict, and the slow, uneasy erosion of American soft power. And threading through it all is a question the Democratic Party can’t keep dodging: why, in moments of crisis, it still turns back toward the architects of Reaganism and the inheritors of Trumpism, rather than the voters who have carried the party since its coalition was remade in the upheavals of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

It’s not just a strategy problem.

It’s a story about memory, power, and who a party believes it actually belongs to.

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The Story That Keeps Trumpism Alive

Deuce Davis — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:58:28 GMT

Did Trump destroy conservatism, or just take the mask off? In this episode, we push back on Peter Wehner’s elegy for a lost, more “decent” right and argue that framing Trumpism as a break from noble conservatism misses something deeper.

Here is Wehner’s article in The Atlantic (I read a large portion of the article without the paywall in this episode).

Drawing from history, lived experience, and the long arc of racial politics in America, we explore how hierarchy, exclusion, and respectability have always been entangled, and how today’s political discourse still gives those dynamics cover by insisting that Trump is the exception rather than the exposure.

I also draw on my November 12, 2025, article, which asks whether the media’s obsession with debating “true conservatism” amounted to wasted time. Time that could have been spent directly naming the threats to our rights, no matter how uncomfortable that truth might be for those who helped shape this moment.

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 5

Deuce Davis — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:45:59 GMT

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk.

Across Republican and Democratic administrations, American foreign policy has produced a sequence of disasters abroad. The anti-Trump conservative analysis attempts to reckon with these failed policies but often falls short of metabolizing the political impacts of neoconservative disasters past and present. The cardinal misstep – treating President Trump as a departure from American imperial tradition rather than another expression of it – continues to taint otherwise thoughtful review.

In a March 9 episode of the flagship Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell reveal some of the early political influences and cultural propaganda that shaped their worldviews – a self-examination we respect and admire. Credit where credit is due, yet Miller and Longwell still fail to appreciate some of the tectonic drivers of these policies – and more crucially, how unpopular policies have galvanized public opinion and redrawn the political landscape.

Steward Beckham and I took some time to dig deep into this episode, Sarah Longwell: No One Should Trust this Government, which exemplifies this anti-Trump conservative phenomenon when applied to the current war on Iran and Lebanon. Enjoy.

The next episode of Reality Checking The Bulwark will air today at 2 PM EST/11 PM PST on Substack Live!

Previously on Stew On This:

Ask Me Anything with Steward Beckham

Deuce Davis — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:40:38 GMT

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Reality Checking the Bulwark – Episode 4

Deuce Davis — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:01:14 GMT

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk.

In this episode of Reality Checking the Bulwark, Evan and I take apart Tim Miller’s Bulwark Podcast interview with Jonathan Chait, “The World’s Worst People,” as a case study in the limits of establishment anti-Trump commentary. Even as the episode focuses on Trump’s corruption, his diversions, and the growing Epstein scandal, it also falls back into a familiar genre: treating the left as a perpetual object of correction while imagining moderation as the natural center of political sanity. We use that tension to explore how The Bulwark can sound clear-eyed about Trump yet still reproduce the reactionary centrist reflex of disciplining the very constituencies that any durable anti-authoritarian coalition will need.

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REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 5

March 15 at 2pm EST / 11am PST

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Reality Checking the Bulwark – Episode 3

Deuce Davis — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:59:19 GMT

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk.

In this week’s episode we discussed a February 16 installment of the Mona Charen Show: The Real Conflict is Between Decent and Indecent (w/ David French). At stake is a larger question running through this series: are reactionary centrists accurately diagnosing the scale and nature of democratic strain, or applying failed frameworks built for a different political era?

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 4

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 4

Saturday, February 28 at 1pm EST / 10pm PST

Saturday February 28 at 1PM

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Reality Checking the Bulwark — Episode 2

Deuce Davis — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:12:08 GMT

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk.

In this week’s episode, we discussed:

A January 7 episode of Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s Las Culturistas podcast, in which listeners were advised not to donate to Jasmine Crockett’s Senate primary campaign because “she can’t win,” according to Rogers. “Anytime a politician is making it about themselves, I’m already done,” Rogers said. “Don’t waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett. Do not do it.”
A January 13 episode of The Bulwark’s The Next Level Podcast – JD Vance Picked the Ugliest Fight on Purpose – in which Tim Miller led Jonathan V. Last and Sarah Longwell in an extreme critique of reactions to Rogers and Yang’s comments. Miller’s response to a cherry-picked (homophobic) response:
Antifascist historian John Ganz
Certain Thoughts roundtable post Jasmine Crockett: Everyone Weighs In
American Nuremberg

Certain Thoughts

American Nuremberg

Nuremberg is a 434-person farming community split between Black Creek and North Union Townships, in the Pennsylvania counties of Schuylkill and Luzerne…

8 months ago · 182 likes · 1 comment · Evan Stern

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Reality Checking the Bulwark - Episode 3

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 3

Saturday, February 21 at 4pm EST / 1pm PST

Saturday, February 21 at 4 PM EST

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Reality Checking the Bulwark — Episode 1

Deuce Davis — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:06:14 GMT

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, The Bulwark matters. We value and respect their prominent position in the pro-democracy movement. Yet despite their success, the Bulwark advises on politics from a point of view so ideologically blinkered that it puts the entire movement at risk.

In this week’s episode, we discussed:

All about “reactionary centrism,” David Roberts’s January 30 conversation with Michael Hobbes
How Big Is MAGA, Really?, Mona Charen’s February 5 Bulwark post
David French: Our State of National Shame, the February 6 Bulwark podcast with Tim Miller
Law Enforcement Says ICE & DHS Are Making Policing Worse, a January 30 focus group analysis with Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell
It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens (2020)
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann (published 2012, revised 2016)
While Democrats Do The Fascists’ Dirty Work, Attacks on the Left Continue: If beating back authoritarianism is so important, why do so many politicians and pundits work to undermine the very groups leading the fight?

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Reality Checking The Bulwark - Episode 2

REALITY CHECKING THE BULWARK - EPISODE 2

Saturday, February 14 at 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST

Tune in live: 2PM EST on February 14

Reality Checking The Bulwark

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Please Stop Saying This Isn’t the Country You Recognize

Deuce Davis — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:16:27 GMT

Obviously an AI-Generated Image.

Author’s Note: The piece I had intended to publish tonight, on the subject of Minneapolis in the broader context of American statehood and civic infrastructure, will instead be published on Monday. I want to give myself some time to marinate on the ideas and perspectives that I’m weighing. Here are some brief thoughts, really just me trying to work through my own thinking on the subject.

I have to say, I’ve been responding pretty viscerally to the constant refrain that “this isn’t the country I grew up in.” Not because I don’t understand the sentiment behind that statement, but because I think there’s often a failure to account for state-sponsored violence in minority communities, as well as the austerity that can set in as a result of losing funding and tax bases in these communities that become starved of life. Sometimes, my reaction to this statement is just one of frustration, because, quite frankly, this country has been recognizable to many Americans for quite some time.

But I want to get into why I have that reaction, because, quite frankly, this isn’t just a political argument but a personal one, and one that’s also generational. I didn’t grow up in the Cold War. I was born into a culture of ironic cynicism about anything that was branded as America, and I’ve seen the rollback of civil rights that was my only real attachment to the idea that America was worth believing in, in spite of everything that I experienced as a Black male growing up in Baltimore.

Now, with this Trumpian rollback, I’ve come to see America more like a well-marketed empire rather than a land of ideals. And I don’t mean that the rollback has caused me to see America this way. I mean that it has clarified this way of seeing America. It has made it harder to pretend that this has all been the truth all along.

So when people say, “this isn’t the country I recognize,” what I hear beneath that is, “this isn’t the country I was taught to recognize. Or even, “this isn’t the country I needed to recognize.” Not because those people are bad, but because the marketing has been so good that it feels like reality. And so, for those people who have bought into the ideals, this is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because it may reveal something worse. That perhaps they’ve been dupes in a marketing scheme all along. Perhaps this has been a marketing scheme that has been manipulating people before them.

If you need a different way to say this, I think there’s a way to say this that doesn’t dismiss what other people have always had to deal with.

Maybe one can say: “I’m realizing I didn’t understand the country I grew up in.”

Or one can say: “I’m seeing what other people have been living with.”

Or even say: “I was protected from certain truths, and that protection is breaking down.”

That isn’t shame but the beginning of historical literacy.

The Vietnam Homecoming Parallel

A significant portion of my intellectual pursuits in my 20s (and now my early 30s) has been influenced by the study of media literacy, Cold War cultural production, the rise of the New Right politics, and the fall of New Deal and Great Society idealism. Naturally, this has led me to be interested in the rise of the Never Trump Republicans and the reactionary centrist liberals and how they have responded to this moment. Much of the time, this has led me to a place of disillusionment regarding the commentary of the former group in particular, not because I think they’re necessarily bad people, but because I think many of them can’t bring themselves to admit that maybe there never was a before that was particularly noble. That Trump is simply the next logical step in the progression of the excesses and blind spots that have long been part of the system.

Perhaps this has simply been the nation all along, and the legacies of racial segregation, the rise of wealth gaps, and the rise of capitalism need to be honed in on rather than the Cold War notion of a noble nation of good standing battling against the evil authoritarian regimes that have long been supported in the shadows by the power centers of the United States.

As I have been studying this group of Never Trump institutionalists (and, as a side note, I am also a part of this institutionalist tradition, and I also sadly believe in institutions), I think I have drawn some parallels with this group that are similar to the way I think Vietnam veterans who enlisted in the war felt as they came back to the United States from the disillusioning experience of the battlefield. An experience in which they realized that perhaps all of the late-40s through the early-60s anti-Soviet propaganda they had been sold on throughout their lives may have been, at least in part, propaganda.

Propaganda that was good enough to get people on board.

Propaganda that was good enough to leave people psychologically adrift, as the story they had been sold on had no way of surviving the test of reality.

Or perhaps the homesteaders of the late-19th century, who were sold on the idea of fertile rains and plentiful land, only to find a crusty, drought-ridden corner of the country, as the speculators had bought all of the good land, while the promise of the rains was merely a good piece of propaganda sold to the downtrodden and naive.

And thus, we have a group of people who grew up in a similar type of propaganda, which sold them Cold War triumphalism, sold them on the United States as a benevolent empire, and sold them on the idea of the pain of the American empire as something that occurred in some other place, rather than within the continental United States. And thus, we have this reaction, which I am working through, as perhaps this is all untrue, perhaps I am merely young, perhaps I merely never saw the blinding lights of the decades before I was born, or even within my single digits.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you all as I prepare this essay for Monday.

Is the American dream and democracy simply the result of good marketing for the age of mass media and industrial revolutions?

Are Americans simply marks of a really good story with policy and generational tales of imagined racial, gender, and religious hierarchies that keep the labor force divided and compliant?

I know it’s a dark picture, and it’s not the happiest place on earth (there’s a marketing machine for that if that’s what you’re looking for). I’m just being brutally honest about what shouldn’t be disillusioning, but clarifying times.

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The Democratic Party Moving Forward w/ Steward Beckham

Deuce Davis — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:03:08 GMT

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Stew on This 🤝 Certain Thoughts LIVE

Deuce Davis — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:32:40 GMT

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The “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Spell Is Breaking

Deuce Davis — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:07:15 GMT

Obviously an AI-Generated Image

In this video, I talk through a shift I didn’t expect to make: going from “vote blue no matter who” in 2020 (and grudgingly into 2024) to rejecting automatic loyalty now. I use the Greenland news cycle, and the wider slide from soft power to coercion, as a case study in how Trumpism isn’t an aberration so much as a mask-off sequel that reveals the machinery behind the monster. My argument is that a reactionary centrist/consultant class keeps demanding fear-based loyalty while punching left and reinforcing right-wing frames, leaving them incapable of naming the system that produces Trumpism, or stopping it from delegitimizing their own legacies. If Democrats want votes, they need to earn them with accountability and material commitments, not nostalgia for “normal.”

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Abolish ICE and Reactionary Centrism

Deuce Davis — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:46:08 GMT

When fear is policy and slogans are louder than screams, who do you trust to name the danger? AI Generated Image.

After a deadly ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Democratic strategists are urging caution over calls to abolish ICE. But what does it say about our politics when the phrase itself sparks more debate than the violence that provoked it?

In this video, I break down the centrist logic behind the backlash to “Abolish ICE,” the recent polling that complicates that narrative, and the deeper failure of imagination plaguing a political class more afraid of bad optics than bad policy.

This isn’t just about slogans. It’s about whether we can name injustice when we see it, and whether a coalition that depends on marginalized voters is willing to center their voices, or just manage their rage.

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