Living in an age when there is such a disconnect between the metrics Washington pays attention to as measures of success in a political party’s rule or governing agenda, and the way people experience governing through vibes, self-preservation, and identity signals, is quite a world to inhabit. It is a split-screen republic. In one frame: court rulings against tariffs, Republican dissent, outrage over the Epstein files rollout, and occasional Supreme Court constraints. In the other: grievance, demographic anxiety, cultural reassurance, and the feeling that someone is finally willing to wield power without apology.
Those are not the same metrics. And they are not moving in the same direction.
Yes, there is genuine resistance within Trump’s political party from figures like Representative Thomas Massie to angry members of the public disenchanted by economic realities or the handling of Epstein-related revelations. Yes, institutions sometimes push back. But this fixation on policy battles and emotion-driven news cycles still underestimates the deeper engine driving American politics: a White supremacist backlash reshaped for a digital age of demographic transformation and infinite screens.
That backlash does not require policy consistency. It requires identity cohesion and narrative repetition.
In a country undergoing visible demographic change, partisan ecosystems and algorithmic incentives amplify the fear of displacement. The learned fear of the “other,” subliminal or conscious, becomes political glue. Political institutions spent decades weaving narratives of urban decay, border invasion, welfare dependency, and cultural disorder. Spatial segregation ensured that many Americans could consume those narratives without encountering the communities being caricatured. That is enough to sustain a political engine marked by governance failures and contradictory positions. Because the offering is not a competent administration.
It is cultural protection. Cultural protection can survive a tariff loss. It can survive economic discomfort. It can survive hypocrisy.
The proliferation of screens in the American diet has multiplied this dynamic. We are more inundated, less patient, and more prone to informational reinforcement loops that reward outrage over coherence. The miracle of the information age has curdled into a paradox: people receive both good and bad information simultaneously and lack the shared frameworks to distinguish between them. Algorithms elevate emotional salience, not factual accuracy. In that vacuum of shared truth, disinformation is not an anomaly. It is a structure undergirding a digitization of an ongoing American tradition.
This is why policy-oriented victories in Maryland suburbs do not necessarily translate into national stability. Two different metric systems are operating. Washington measures court decisions, legislative friction, and elite dissent. The electorate often measures whether its inherited power principles like who belongs, who rules, and who threatens its ability to affirm its sense of self.
The mistake analysts continue to make is assuming that policy setbacks weaken a political project whose primary fuel is identity reassurance.
That is American inertia.
The belief is that institutional turbulence equals democratic correction. It is the comfort of assuming that because there is resistance, the system is self-healing. But a movement grounded in backlash does not need smooth governance to succeed. It needs repetition and spectacle. It also needs enough people to believe that power wielded on their behalf is protection, not coercion.
And when real state power is used more openly in immigration enforcement, in regulatory retaliation, in the normalization of executive aggression, it will shock commentators who were busy counting procedural guardrails. It will be declared “un-American,” as if the American story has not always contained racial hierarchy, resource extraction, spatial indifference, and selective rule of law beneath its democratic aspirations.
That shock is not innocence.
It is selective memory.
Winter in America winds down, and a new campaign cycle rises with heat and opportunity. Alongside it are fresh chances to set authoritarian precedents under the cover of cultural reassurance. The question is not whether courts occasionally rule against excess. The question is whether the electorate has been conditioned to accept those excesses as necessary.
Democracy does not unravel only when institutions fail. It unravels when voters normalize coercion as correction and mistake the performance of power for the preservation of order.
Excavating The Bulwark
Against Reflexive Reactionary Centrism
I have been working on a Substack live and video series with Evan Stern that analyzes The Bulwark as a faction within the larger pro-democracy coalition. The question is not whether it has done good work, because it has. The question is whether its instincts formed in a different Republican era help or hinder the building of a future coalition that does not caricature young people and minority politics or live inside debunked right-wing communication frames.
Courage in departure deserves respect. Leaving one’s professional peer group because of moral dissonance in the face of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover takes psychological, professional, and emotional strength. That unraveling within them is real, and it should not be minimized.
But courage in departure does not automatically translate into clarity in reconstruction.
