Paradigm Shifts and Political Amnesia
A new political center must emerge.
Yesterday, I wrote about generations and how they misunderstand each other, talk past one another, and often miss the moment they’re living through. That train of thought has me stewing on something bigger: paradigm shifts. They’re necessary. They’re disorienting. And in American political life, they arrive like late buses: long delayed, packed with frustrated passengers, and headed somewhere no one wants to admit they need to go.
American history is a tug-of-war between competing visions of who we are and who we serve. From the 19th-century fights over tariffs and internal improvements to today’s messy discourse around student debt and social welfare, we’ve always been a nation wrestling with its reflection: part ideal, part monster.
Today, much of the Democratic Party’s existential hand-wringing centers on its inability to reach voters it was never going to reach in the first place. Meanwhile, it often ignores its youngest and most marginalized supporters, the very people living through a paradigm they didn’t design but are expected to endure.
Millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha came of age under a center-right political consensus that sold us bootstraps and gotchas while privatizing public goods and gigifying our futures. Skyrocketing student debt, predatory lending, gutted labor protections, climate apathy, and disappearing pensions aren’t unfortunate accidents — they’re baked into a bipartisan consensus that viewed neoliberalism not as ideology but as inevitability.
And while every generation deserves critique, yes, younger people could listen more, study more, and organize more; however, the older generations must also reckon with the unique conditions they lived through. Many came of age in a rare global moment: a superpower untouched by total war, flush with postwar capital, and riding the tailwinds of Bretton Woods dominance. That dopamine rush of unchallenged supremacy bred an era of political fantasy. It was a time of Cold War consensus, a consumerist gospel, a belief in permanent American exceptionalism. But that world is gone.
We now face a crossroads. The myths of the “welfare queen,” the moral superiority of the wealthy, and the divine right of shareholders must give way to something more humane and materially grounded. That means reinvesting in the public good, demanding real accountability from institutions, and pivoting national priorities away from endless global competition and toward planetary survival.
The political center must move leftward.
And not as a branding exercise, but as a survival imperative. That’s how you reach disaffected Trump voters whose support comes from alienation, not malice. That’s how you energize Democratic voters who were left cold by 2024’s soul-sapping triangulation. That’s how you stop asking whether we can save democracy and start asking what kind of democracy is worth saving.
Paradigm shifts are hard. But denial is harder to live under.
Stew, have you considered a political career? You should, you really should. If you were running for prez, you would have my vote. You definitely have your finger on the pulse of America.