The same day, Evie’s founder Brittany Hugoboom tweeted about a Vanity Fair profile, her first major U.S. feature since a New York Times piece the previous year. The Vanity Fair profile was written by Marisa Meltzer, a writer whose previous work includes stories for The New York Times, New Yorker, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and Vogue.

These two pieces framed the beginning and end of Evie’s first large scale live event, called Eros, held during New York Fashion Week. The Eros event attracted hundreds of attendees, press, and a notable number of high-profile conservative media figures including Brett Cooper. Within hours of the WSJ piece, the article was being amplified across conservative social media by an unusual coalition including Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Chen, New Founding’s Nathan Halberstadt, and Joshua Lisec, among others. Brittany Hugoboom reposted each of them. This, despite their event advertising garnering minimal engagement.

On the surface, this appears to be the organic celebration of a conservative project breaking through into prestige media and being celebrated by the movement it serves, but that reading may be incomplete.

While this may have been a spontaneous wellspring of good press and genuine enthusiasm, certain elements of the story are worth examining more closely, because they reveal something about how the world works regardless of how coordinated it was.

A simultaneous Wall Street Journal feature and a Vanity Fair profile do not materialize out of an abundance of willpower and good vibes. Prestige media does not coordinate around the editorial calendar of a niche conservative women’s magazine. It is therefore quite likely that someone placed them, something that requires serious mainstream media relationships--the kind of relationships that most (truly) conservative media organizations do not have and cannot easily build.

In addition, the figures who boosted Evie’s moment in the days following the WSJ piece do not typically coordinate.

Matthew J. Peterson, former editor of The Blaze used it as the occasion for a declarative statement that the right needs “aspirational, normal lifestyle content--not commentary ranting about the framework established by the other side.” He went further, calling on the right to “build our own Politico, Axios, etc.” It reads to me as a thesis statement in search of a funder.

Jack Posobiec tweeted in support. Cernovich shared the WSJ link with no commentary. Milo Yiannopoulos, whose media instincts are as sharp as his reputation is scandalous, tagged Hugoboom directly and shared the WSJ photograph. Alex Clark used the moment to publish a lengthy thread cataloging her own history of championing the cultural positions Evie represents.

These are people who operate in different orbits, have different audiences, and even sometimes have conflicting political interests. Their simultaneous engagement with the same event within the same short time window is unusual. It may reflect nothing more than a genuinely compelling story reaching people with shared interests at the same time. It may just be that all are friends of Hugoboom. It may also reflect something more deliberate. Either way, the pattern is worth examining.

One place worth looking is the money behind Evie.

Thiel Capital led a $3.2 million seed round in 28, the wellness app created by Evie’s founders. The app was originally branded as “28 by Evie,” and the URL 28byevie.com still redirects to 28.co. Brittany Hugoboom has maintained to reporters, including at Rolling Stone, that Thiel has no investment in or involvement with Evie Magazine itself and only in the app. This distinction may be meaningful but it may also be largely formal, given that the app and the magazine share founders, audiences, editorial sensibilities, purpose, etc.

Whether or not Thiel’s involvement extends beyond this app investment, his presence in the ecosystem raises a question about what kind of infrastructure Evie has access to. A simultaneous WSJ front page and Vanity Fair profile. The influencer campaign. The launch event during New York Fashion Week. Someone has the resources to execute this plan. Thiel is one of a very small number of figures on the American right who possesses all of them simultaneously.

The right talks about institution-building constantly. It has become perhaps the single most common aspiration expressed by conservative intellectuals, media figures, and poasters. “Build the institutions.” The sentiment is so widespread it has become almost meaningless through repetition.

What most people mean by “institution-building” is starting a podcast, launching a Substack, or organizing a conference. Almost no one on the right is building institutions in a serious fashion with serious capital, serious execution, and serious media strategy, but Evie might be doing it.

A call to “build our own Politico, Axios” is correct precisely because it identifies the next logical step major players are already pursuing. The downstream cultural projects like lifestyle media, wellness, community events prepare an audience. The next move is a political media operation built on the same infrastructure with professional execution and serious capital.

Someone is doing what everyone on the right says should be done, and doing it better than almost anyone else. The question is not whether this is good or bad, but if this is being done by institutional interests, what does this mean for everyone who is not inside the network?

With a small number of funders choosing the projects that are validated by our prestige gatekeepers and deciding what “conservative institution-building” looks like in practice, the field is being defined before most people realize it.

We too often treat political statements, social media, appearances etc. as commitments, or at least evidence of intent, and then feel betrayed when reality takes an unexpected turn. But reality was never in the words, it was in the mechanics. The incentive structure is beneath the words, and it is always in motion.

I was a “surrogate” for Never Back Down during the DeSantis presidential campaign. In January 2024, the campaign wiped all of the events on their calendar. Publicly and privately we were told that DeSantis was not dropping out of the race. Hours later, DeSantis withdrew.

At the moment we were given those assurances, they may have been true, or they may have been lies. What’s important is that at the moment the equilibrium shifted, the words were meaningless.

This is a distinction that many political consumers fail to understand: the difference between messaging and data. Everything that a public figure, be it an influencer or politician, communicates to anyone outside of their innermost circle is messaging. It serves a purpose at the moment of delivery, a signal calibrated to present conditions–or at least the conditions when it was crafted.

Even private communication is suspect. When someone tells you someone isn’t running, that statement exists in a context. Who benefits from you believing it? What does it cost them to say it? Who might you tell? The moment you hear it, you are part of the incentive structure, not outside of it. If you don’t consider this in your internal analysis, you’re not thinking critically enough or being skeptical enough of the messaging.

We see this directly with the current positioning of the GOP. Marco Rubio has publicly cast himself as a Vance loyalist, endorsing him as the natural successor to Trump. That may be genuine, and it may reflect the strategic reality of the moment. But if Vance stumbles, or if the midterms reshape the field, or if Trump’s magnetism wanes, or if his own star power grows too bright, those words will not bind him. They will dissolve like every other political statement issued under certain conditions that no longer apply. Rubio is a serious and talented politician who has survived multiple political cycles. Loyalty is a posture until it becomes costly, and then things may change.

Look back to last summer. Tucker Carlson publicly feuded with Trump over the Iran strikes in what looked like a definitive rupture. Trump called him “Kooky Tucker” and told him to get a network TV show again so people would listen to him. Within weeks, Tucker was back at the White House. The words, on both sides, meant what they meant at the time, which is to say they meant almost nothing durable. They were just representative of a momentary equilibrium, and the equilibrium shifted.

You should read politics the same way that an intelligence analyst reads signals, not the way a journalist reads quotes. Statements, tweets, money etc. are data points and not conclusions. You must weigh them against the context of incentives, timing, audience, trend, the flap of a butterfly’s wings. The person who told you something may believe it completely and still be wrong about what they’ll do when circumstances change, because maybe they don’t know yet what they’ll do. The person who told you something may have been told a lie by someone else, knowing they would spread it.

The great error of political media consumption is treating words as load-bearing. They’re really more like the weather. The load-bearing structures are incentives, coalitions, money, and time. If you want to predict what happens next, stop listening to what people say in the moment and start looking at what it costs someone to say something, or why they might not say something else.

Everything exists in context, and that is subject to change at all times. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just messaging. Including, possibly, me.

The tasks there are simple. Walk sixteen miles with some weight on your back. Set up all your tents. Organize a fireguard schedule and sort these duffle bags. Those tasks aren’t really the point, though. Basic training is teaching you how to follow.

The subtext of all of this is leadership, and many people try to be the leader.

There’s no real mechanism for this, save a drill-sergeant-appointed platoon guard who is often switched in and out on a whim. Really, it’s based on who people follow. And when you get a half dozen competing ideas for a simple task, with half of the group motivated by finding the best solution and the other half motivated by being seen as “the leader” you can turn a twenty minute job into an hour wasted.

The simple truth I learned was that the specifics of a plan matter less than unity. Learning to be a follower, remember? A bad idea with everyone behind it gets the task done. A great idea that splits the group into factions leaves you worse off.

In politics, we talk about unity constantly but rarely practice it. Every faction has its own media ecosystem, its own patrons and donors, and its own set of principles and unforgivable ideas. Indeed, most factions are already running purity tests, but selectively. Enforcing them sometimes, relaxing them others, with no defining parameters. Usually poorly.

The Old Right tests for institutional loyalty and procedural conservatism. The New Right tests for cultural combativeness and populist instinct. The libertarians test for ideological consistency. The national conservatives test for civilizational seriousness. The tech-right tests for whether you're building or just talking. Each faction shouts its principles but engages in inconsistent policing. Well, unless you’re toxic to donors.

Some figures are frozen out of the factions ecosystems, banned from its platforms, and lose friends and allies overnight. Others survive the same heresies unscathed. The purity tests are happening but are uneven. That gap is where our dysfunction lives.

But what if we leaned into it?

Not necessarily endorsing this, but purity tests are already happening and they’re not going to stop. The inconsistency is causing more damage than the purity tests themselves. So, what if we stopped hedging, let each faction solidify, and they were enforced consistently? Right now, no large faction has actually done this well.

The closest thing to a unifying principle is “America First,” which at least defines a heuristic: are you pro-America or not? The question itself has real power, but it’s not a faction. Indeed, multiple factions fly the “America First” banner yet mean different things by it. They share a slogan, not a movement, yet the same fragmentation and selective enforcement takes place underneath.

Despite America First’s power as a heuristic, it hasn’t produced the thing that the right actually needs, which is a faction with a clear identity and full commitment from its members.

I think part of the problem is structural. People are wired to follow Great Men, and that instinct has always been the fastest path to factional cohesion. But too many figures and even journalists are wired like influencers now, treating the attention marketplace like a mercantilist system where everyone is competing for eyeballs and attention spans—even potential leaders. I personally think that many of them deeply wish they could be The Leader themselves but lack certain abilities. They have the audience, but don’t have the authority or capability to act on it. Therefore our true emerging leaders aren’t elevated and are instead treated as rivals. An instinctive gatekeeping that sorts for the worst influencers and leadership simultaneously.

The last time truly generational factional leaders broke through: Obama, Trump, both did it by largely bypassing this class of tastemaker entirely and reformed the ecosystem by sheer magentism. Those gatekeepers were forced to adapt or become irrelevant. But the tastemakers learned from this, and the ecosystem is developing antibodies against the next great factional leader, and our wordmongers are better than ever at platforming figures just enough to be useful while denying them a dominant platform.

The result is a movement full of followers and an infrastructure that prevents anyone from rising high enough to be followed. Most people on the right aren’t diehard loyalists for their chosen faction, they just picked the one closest to them (or just picked the winner.) Conviction drives a select few. The first faction that can produce a leader capable of going around the gatekeepers will pull everyone in.

This question matters because I want to see a winner. I founded a magazine because I believe the arguments on the right are worth having. Instead, what I see is every faction fighting hard enough to wound each other but not committing enough to win.

If no one wants to win, then we aren’t building anything no matter how many times we ask of ourselves “What are we building?” We’re just arguing stupidly amongst ourselves in a rhetorical parking lot.

The same mechanism exists on a pro-American vs anti-American axis, only the relationship is even stronger.

Elite global culture’s default posture is now anti-American, usually at least critical of America. Criticizing the United States, whether its history, power, culture, or very authority, is the single fastest way to signal sophistication and moral purity in any institution of cultural significance. In one fell swoop, you lose academia, NGOs, international organizations, tech, media, and the arts.

Being explicitly pro-American, on the other hand, is implicitly low-status, provincial, Trumpy, possibly racist. The social or even cultural penalty for overt patriotism is therefore much higher than the penalty for being openly right-wing, which at least still has some contrarian appeal in certain circles.

As a result, the drift toward anti-Americanism happens faster and more completely than the drift toward leftism.

Some examples:

Environmentalism started with Teddy Roosevelt-style conservation and 1970s “save the planet” patriotism. Within a few decades, the dominant voices were calling the U.S. the “greatest threat to the planet,” demanding de-growth specifically targeted at American living standards, and celebrating population decline in the West while ignoring China and India.

Human-rights NGOs like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, etc. were founded mostly by liberals who believed in universal rights and saw America as the main guarantor of them. Now they devote disproportionate energy to criticizing the U.S. while pulling punches on Venezuela, Iran, China, Qatar, Pakistan, and on and on. America is treated as uniquely guilty and its enemies are given endless “context.”

In academia, the Western-civ curriculum of the 1950s–60s has been replaced by a curriculum whose explicit message is that the United States is founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism, that its ideals are hypocritical, and that loyalty to it is morally suspect—all labeled with a land acknowledgement.

Turn-of-the-century Silicon Valley was libertarian-leaning and generally American-exceptionalist. By 2025 the same companies proudly censor speech at the behest of the EU and the U.S. security state and treat American national security concerns as “populist” annoyances.

Even the U.S. military’s own professional class now produces papers and promotes officers who speak openly about “decolonizing” the military and worry that patriotism itself is a far-right tell.

There are almost no counter-examples of institutions that stayed durably pro-American without being explicitly conservative or nationalist.

The handful that have remained patriotic are all explicitly right-wing or at least culturally conservative. Everything else either went anti-American or had to build ever-higher walls to keep the infection out.

The mechanism is identical to Conquest’s law, just more intense:

• Young ambitious people want status.

• Status comes from signaling moral superiority.

• In global elite culture, criticizing America is the highest-status signal available.

• Therefore any organization that does not explicitly and repeatedly affirm “we are proudly pro-American” will have its culture captured by people who think being anti-American makes them better than the average American.

The only prevention is the organization must be explicitly, unapologetically, and permanently pro-American in its founding documents, its hiring, its public statements, and its internal culture. Anything less is suicide by elite cultural gravity.

This is all incredible relevant to the ongoing political infighting happening in American conservatism.

Establishment GOP figures like those orbiting the Bush or Romney eras operate from a place of genuine intellectual conservatism. They’re not villains. Many still champion capitalism, limited government, and traditional values in theory. But their drift toward globalism, endless foreign entanglements, and elite cosmopolitanism has eroded the explicit “America First” anchor that the principle demands. Absent this anchor, they have allowed genuine failures with serious implications in our politics, and are carrying a legacy of those failures.

Without that relentless commitment to pro-Americanism, they’ve allowed policies that prioritize big ideas over the sovereignty and prosperity of everyday Americans. This hypocrisy strips them of the moral high ground to gatekeep against upstarts who, flaws and all, are at least embracing the explicit pro-American ideology. They think that conservative principle is king, but they are being flanked on their commitment to America.

We are now seeing this play out in three separate but related flashpoints.

The first has been the Heritage Foundation’s meltdown over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes. The rhetorical war over antisemitism is a proxy for deeper divides on Israel policy, where establishment pro-Israel hawks are opposed with isolationist America Firsters who view foreign commitments as fundamentally opposed to the principle of America First.

The old guard’s moral authority crumbles here because they’ve long tolerated or enabled anti-American drifts themselves, like Iraq War nation-building that cost trillions and thousands of American lives, or Ukraine aid packages without clear reciprocity or an understandable endgame. They gatekeep against Fuentes-style extremism but their selective blindness to how those globalist adventures hollowed out American communities dampens the weight of their lectures. MAGA nationalists, even the edgier ones, counter that explicit pro-Americanism means no more blank checks abroad as it’s a necessary loyalty to the pro-America shibboleth, even if it veers into isolationism.

A parallel fracture pits Tech Right figures like Elon Musk against nativist populists over H1B visas and immigration. Our California-based tech elite push for mass importation of cheaper-than-American-labor H1B’s, framing it as pro-growth. Populists lionize these visas as a betrayal of the working class.

Here, the old guard’s intellectual heirs in the tech-libertarian wing aren’t bad actors, they’re just businessmen (or worse, economists) fighting for access to cheaper labor. But without explicit pro-American firewalls this risks drifting into the same elite-favoring globalism. Their gatekeeping fails because it ignores how past compromises eroded trust. The populist side, raw as it is, holds the moral edge by demanding every policy pass an “Americans first” shibboleth, forcing the movement to reaffirm the principle or splinter. A country is more than a GDP, and if you ignore the bubbling anger from the populist movement they will pay nearly any price (looking at you, GDP) to return to their principles.

The final visible flare-up is Trump’s public feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene. MTG’s pushback resonates with purists who fear Trump’s orbit is co-opted by RINOs and donors, diluting the explicit anti-swamp mandate.

Trump himself embodies the tension as he’s explicitly pro-American in rhetoric and early actions, like border closures and tariffs, but his deal-making pragmatism invites old-guard influences. The old guard cheers this as maturity, but it smells like drift to the base. Here again, without ironclad explicitness, even winners creep away from pro-Americanism. MTG’s rebellion, flawed as she is, reasserts the principle by gatekeeping against the compromisers.

Each of these examples are just the modified Conquest’s second law in action. The right’s coalition is at war with itself because factions aren’t all explicitly pro-American in the same way. Tech globalists vs. immigration hardliners, pro-Israel interventionists vs. anti-interventionists.

The old guard’s good-faith gatekeeping on nearly any issue rings hollow when their playbook historically funneled American blood and treasure overseas while domestic manufacturing crumbled. The chaos stems from overcorrections, but conservative moral authority stems from never forgetting the explicit vow: America above all.

And because all of the moral authority lay with “America above all” the America First crowd could eventually win.

The conservative movement’s civil war is a struggle between a declining institutional establishment and an insurgent populist culture reshaping the future identity of the American right. This fight did not begin with Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson. Though high-profile, the interview is merely the latest front in a sweeping ideological conflict within the conservative movement, and there have been numerous flashpoints in 2025 alone.

There exist two parallel political societies in the conservative movement. There is the definitive Old Right, which is mainly every major conservative figure who was shaped by pre-Trump politics and still views the world through that lens, and the New Right, which is anyone who sees and operates under the changes in political reality since Trump was first elected. Not every conservative exists squarely within one of these two camps, but there are numerous major figures who do.

These two groups are True Believers of their respective worldviews. Because of this, they function as political adversaries, yelling past each other indefinitely. Neither will be convinced by the other. Importantly, the New Right has a significant advantage in political momentum. Their view of politics is more effective post-2016, and they are not burdened by an extensive legacy to justify.

The Old Right, on the other hand, has more institutional power. They consist mainly of people who “played the game” for decades, occupying think tanks and beltway institutions, radio shows and legacy media. This has been a historical advantage for projecting their views to the public, but also leaves them with a multi-decade legacy which they must justify.

It is this legacy that is problematic. Every war for influence begins with legitimate grievance, and you would be naive to suggest that the New Right does not have legitimate grievances with the Old Right. The common refrain is “what use was your conservatism” or “what have you conserved.” The Old Right held institutional power for decades, yet over the last 10-20 years, from losing cultural ground on marriage and education to failed opposition against Obamacare, the traditional conservative resistance has proven ineffective and, in some cases, counterproductive. The most prominent example: despite huge efforts to do so, they were totally incapable of preventing the rise of Trump.

Facing this conflict, the Old Right has tried to retain its influence and relevance. Unfortunately for the Old Right, their power is concentrated in legacy institutions which are rapidly losing market share. The rise of social media, independent media, and an entire new demographic of politically involved Americans has led to a structural decrease in their influence. Indeed, I believe that new forms of media are already of equal relevance to legacy media in modern politics, and this trend is likely to continue unless both types find innovative ways to work together.

This fight to retain influence leads the Old Right to fall back on an old playbook: in their attempt to combat the influence of rising figures, or excise legitimate tumors such as antisemitism, or counter false narratives, they deploy their institutional megaphones to decry voices on the New Right. There are multiple problems with this.

First, this is stylistically similar to the Left’s cancel culture, where puritanical excesses have delegitimized accountability. On the Left, they’ve canceled people for “microaggressions” while letting those chanting “from the river to the sea” roam free on campuses. Similarly, establishment conservatives’ purity purges, like demanding public outcry for figures like Matt Walsh for not toeing the line, are a core part of the reason they will fail. New Right conservatives view this as part of the legacy of the Old Right’s failures, and resent them for it.

Second, and equally as important, the Old Right does not adequately understand the new spectrum of conservative thought, and ultimately, does not truly understand the New Right. They frequently make sweeping generalizations in their condemnation, which dilutes impact and turns otherwise sympathetic voices against them. Oftentimes, these condemnations are seen as major overreactions and do not garner as much support as years past. Indeed, some of the figures they decry are not even truly of the New Right, yet they are treated as a binary evil all the same.

This overreaction cycle is self-reinforcing. Each scornful tweet or monologue degrades their support among young conservatives, who see it as “boomer scolding.” This demographic is driven by Rogan-style podcasts, bubbling cultural anger, and traditional views on masculinity, not white papers or Fox News segments. Worse, they seem to lack younger transformational figures. There’s no “young Ben Shapiro” because the spark—edgy, viral, unscripted—demands escaping the Old Right’s filter bubble. Associate with it and you’re tainted by association: irrelevant, out-of-touch, and (most importantly) complicit in past failures.

Thus, though the establishment can have good intentions, almost all of their prominent figures and institutions are losing influence with the newer wing of the conservative movement, and they are setting ablaze the funeral pyre that’s lighting the way to their own replacement.

In this vacuum, people like Fuentes succeed not because of inherent appeal but because the Old Right’s condemnations meet deaf ears. Take the Young Republicans incident from earlier this year, when a leaked New York State YR groupchat revealed antisemitic memes and deportation jokes. The national organization didn’t handle it discreetly; they elevated it to a national story, suspending leaders and giving no quarter, even for private conversation. This was “Taking A Side.” The organization behaved like the Old Right, thus alienating those sympathetic to the more free-speech tolerant New Right as well as those who would expect some institutional loyalty. Many young conservatives were already favoring Turning Point and even smaller Young Republican splinter groups, and this will only accelerate that trend.

Fuentes exemplifies this trap. He himself will never be a de facto Pillar of the New Right. He has too many clips that are overtly toxic, too many examples of attacking allies like J.D. Vance (whom he once praised but now critiques for “selling out”). His America First niche weaponizes legitimate grievances like cultural erosion and immigration concerns with an antisemitic flavor. But he’s not the next mainstream figure. The real threats to the Old Right are the mainstreamable successors: polished influencers that blend populism with policy and avoid the toxic rhetoric Fuentes is defined by. Even if groyper numbers are small, some of their mainstream ideas will exist in a New Right whose resentment of the failures of the Old Right outweighs the moral condemnation of the toxicity of Fuentes’ rhetoric.

Therefore the New Right tolerates Fuentes and others like him as chaos agents–or even a moral obligation to free speech–while they consolidate. The Old Right, by conflating Fuentes, and the very real and worrying rise in nazism and antisemitism with the whole of the New Right, shoots itself in the foot as they watch their hold over critical demographics fade with time.

So, how does the Old Right reverse this? First, an understanding that the past is the past. References to anachronisms like William F. Buckley does not help. Every reference to Buckley is just a reminder to these people that their views were sidelined and heterodox for decades. Even if they just began to believe in them this year, or this last few years, it “feels” like decades in the wilderness.

Second, cloaking the movement in MAGA-red does nothing. Trump, in his current phase, is a fading symbol. The New Right understands that we are discussing the future of politics, not the past. MAGA is a decade old, and is a movement spawned by a single figure off of the strength of generational charismatic leadership. Cling to MAGA, and you’re repeating the neocons’ mistake of riding a wave past its crest.

Third, the Old Right must save some of its indignation. The principled stand against hate may be morally admirable but it’s playing into the cycle of self-immolation that’s actively empowering their enemies. The tendency to make sweeping accusations against those who do not deserve it and overuse of moralizing rhetoric is doing them no favors. Without tangible social and political capital, the Old Right will have no way to contribute to political discourse.

The only way forward for the Old Right is to become new again. They must focus on empowering a new generation who can build a legitimate movement that reflects the political realities we live in, with a better understanding of the movement as a whole. They must do a difficult thing: cede some of their influence, legitimacy, and platform to new voices.

They must also own up to their legacy and acknowledge grievances: address wage stagnation, housing crises, immigration issues, and cultural alienation head-on. Target genuine toxins like explicit bigotry, but ally with the 95%. Embrace new media platforms and develop new leaders. Adapt or fail.

The Old Right does not have to make these changes, but the truth is that they will lose if the status quo continues. Everything comes to an end, political movements especially so, and changing nothing and expecting a different result is political suicide & intellectual insanity.

If the Old Right cannot make peace with the world it helped build, the New Right will inherit it by default. There is a way forward, but it begins with accountability and a genuine commitment to looking forward and not backward.

Having no sound choice for mayor, this race is highlighting the obvious: New York, nexus of talent and jewel on the crown of American greatness, is in the midst of a gut-wrenching recession. Not a financial one–worse. A recession of civic ambition.

I did not grow up in New York. Indeed, I’ve never even been a huge fan of cities in general. As a conservative from a small town, I’ve spent plenty of time hearing (and occasionally echoing) the gripes about urban America: too limiting, too chaotic, too far from the quiet virtues of small-town life.

That said, New York isn’t just our greatest city. As much as it pains me to admit, it’s the heart of our national future, generating a huge chunk of the U.S. GDP and fueling industries from finance to biotech that touch nearly every facet of American life. Whatever your political beliefs, you cannot deny this truth. That’s why the mayoral race leaves me unsettled. With Election Day looming, the field boils down to three flawed contenders, none of whom are really equipped to be the chief executive of the most important city in the world. Moreover, this failure of civic ambition is a symptom of how we’ve stopped demanding real leadership from the places that matter most.

New York concentrates talent and ideas like nowhere else, but it is also facing tremendous challenges befitting its size. You’d think, then, that we could find credible leadership among the millions of world-class talented individuals who hop from Starbucks to Starbucks. Instead we get a Rorschach test for our political exhaustion.

Curtis Sliwa is a genuine man of the city, and his heart is in the right place. I truly believe he is running to give Republicans a choice. That said, he has basically inherited the spot, being one of a mere handful of local Republican aspirants in recent memory. He ran uncontested in the primary because that is what he is. There is no meaningful conservative challenge for civic leadership in the city, and the nomination fell in his lap. He behaves accordingly: among the broader movement, he would be no more than a fringe figure.

Then there’s Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic state assemblyman and self-proclaimed democratic socialist who surged to front-runner status on a wave of progressive zeal. Despite being arguably the only candidate with any meaningful vision whatsoever, the marks against him flow continuously: socialist ideology, lack of any tangible executive experience, persistent falsehoods, ties to extreme religious figures. He certainly has a bright future in progressive politics, but his time as Mayor would not be a success.

And rounding out this trio is Andrew Cuomo, the former governor mounting the zombie comeback that nobody asked for. With no discernable message other than a “stop-Mamdani” fear campaign, he represents arguably the least compelling individual in the race. Truly, without a boogieman to contrast himself with, he would have nothing. His own history of scandal does not help his flagging, poorly-run campaign, which would collapse if not for Mamdani standing opposite him.

I don’t wish for any “side” to lose but it’s important that we recognize a leadership void in the city that can’t afford one. New York is the colossus on whose shoulders our prosperity stands, as much a part of history as it is a maker of history. When we let the race for the mayor become a race to the bottom we handcuff our shot at the future. If conservatives like me keep writing off the cities, or if progressives treat governance as grievance theater, or the centrists refuse to develop a real message, we’ll wake up to a nation that’s dimmer, slower, smaller. Right now, we’re doing all three.

In the midst of this political drama, power brokers in the city are on edge about the possibility of a Mamdani victory. Bill Ackman comes to mind, being exceedingly vocal and expending significant social–and likely financial–capital attempting to do damage control. I find it depressing, and almost insulting, that the broader public tunes in only because we may elect a socialist mayor. If we expended just a fraction of the energy spent fear-mongering about Mamdani on something politically productive we could transform the city. Instead we have… This.

Reclaiming New York starts with showing up. Whoever wins, I believe the majority will be unhappy. I can also say with confidence that the right leader for the job will not end up in the mayor’s office. Unless we begin to tackle this leadership crisis, that won’t stop with this election. We need to start building the political ecosystem to funnel more of that world-class talent into leadership or this is going to be the new normal.

New York is too important to fall into this trap. There is too much genius, too much ingenuity, and too much heart in the people of this city. You can’t say that about the candidates.

This race is already lost, but the next one doesn’t have to be.

This assassination is meant to send the message that it is dangerous for conservatives to stand up in the public square, to speak our convictions, and to organize our people. That is, after all, the aim of political violence. To silence. To intimidate. To break the will of a movement. But if anything, this act of evil only makes clearer our moral obligation. Despite the risk of physical harm, conservatives cannot let up. We must fight for America with greater courage than ever before.

We owe it to Charlie. We owe it to his wife and children. We owe it to the movement he poured his life into and literally took a bullet for. Charlie Kirk built something rare in American politics: an institution that rose from nothing and became a national force. He did not merely create a platform for himself, out of selfish vanity or pursuit of fame and wealth. He built a movement capable of mobilizing millions and influencing the direction of a political party and, ultimately, the nation. Never forget, Turning Point was instrumental in Trump’s 2024 victory and Charlie himself was a huge part of the resurgence in conservatism in young American men.

Builders like him are rare, but more must rise in his place. If Charlie Kirk showed us anything, it is that a lone advocate with vision and resolve can overcome the inertia of our top-heavy political system and influence the trajectory of a generation. Now the responsibility falls to us. Who will carry that torch? Who will lead the next institutions that endure beyond their founders and generate real political power?

We must become intentional about equipping and supporting the next generation of builders. That means cultivating leaders who are not merely pundits or online personalities, but true architects of ideas greater than any one person. Figures who can transform ideas into institutions, and institutions into lasting political power.

Our movement has no shortage of voices, personalities, and organizations. But very few can claim to have built something that transcends its founders, institutions capable of shaping the future of American politics. Charlie Kirk was among those few. His death is a personal tragedy for his wife, his children, and the thousands of young people he mentored. If you work in or around conservative politics, you likely know multiple people that owe their careers to Charlie Kirk. Indeed, his death is a tragedy for America. That is why his loss is so devastating, and why our response must be to multiply his work.

A giant is gone. But the cause he championed, and the institutions he built, must endure and grow beyond what they are today. The surest way to honor him is to make certain that his vision permeates every corner of this country, and that political violence never succeeds in silencing American conservatism.

Be like Charlie. Build something bigger than yourself.

Wall Street is already muttering about the market implications and otherwise-staunch Trump ally Elon Musk has called the bill a “disgusting abomination.” Yet discontent in the House was minimal, and outside of a few fiscal hawks, Washington seems to feel it’s largely a “not if but when” situation.

Friedrich Hayek, noted academic and philosopher, once warned that free people can “vote themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant.” He was referring to politics; today the tyrant is a balance sheet. Runaway debt is the soft despotism Americans repeatedly choose at the ballot box.

The bill’s price tag, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is in the trillions. Around half comes from extending existing tax cuts from 2017, with the rest a grab-bag of subsidy. GOP leaders insist that $1.5 trillion in mandatory savings will shrink the hole down to $1.7 trillion, while outside analysts note most of those savings don’t kick in until nearly a decade.

Interest costs are the iceberg. The Treasury spent over $1 trillion in FY2024 just on servicing existing debt, nearly the entire DoD budget. Add three trillion in new principal and, by 2031, interest alone could consume a crushing percentage of all federal tax revenue. This overwhelming burden will crowd out everything from transportation funding to national defense.

As a conservative, my issue isn’t strictly the level of spending. That’s nothing new. The scandal is the utter disinterest in preparing for the fiscal storm everyone can see on the horizon. Nearly everyone in Washington claims the debt is unsustainable, yet all we get are bills that assume future growth or future taxpayers will magically cover today’s tab. That denial is the real betrayal of conservative stewardship.

Indeed, it is also a disappointing departure from the Trump platform. Trump has been a deficit hawk for over a decade, and the argument that “this is just how D.C. works” is something his 2016, 2020, or 2024 campaigns would never accept from an opponent on any topic.

How does this happen when every campaign ad features a candidate vowing to tame the deficit? Start with incentives. Lawmakers win applause for new programs and tax breaks today; the bill for both arrives after the next election. Voters reward the illusion that someone else, be it future taxpayers, the “rich,” or a magical economic growth spurt will cover the tab. The modern budget process amplifies the problem: reconciliation allows trillion-dollar legislation to bypass the Senate filibuster, while emergency designations and one-time gimmicks keep costs off the official scorecard. By the time stakeholders issue a warning, the political oxygen has moved on.

Neither party is immune. Democrats promise ever-larger social benefits, confident the Fed can cushion the debt with easy money. Republicans preach fiscal virtue while extending tax cuts and expanding subsidy pools. Year after year both sides agree on one thing: tomorrow is someone else’s headache.

Yet debt is not a theoretical threat. It is a slow, soft despotism. Every borrowed dollar narrows the private sphere future Americans can control. Higher taxes to pay interest, inflation that erodes savings, and federal crowd-out of state budgets all reduce the range of choices individuals and local communities can make for themselves. The tyranny Hayek feared does not need handcuffs. It arrives quietly, as a growing sword of Damocles that dictates what elected officials must do long after voters think the debate is over.

A grand fix, like a balanced-budget amendment or base-closing-style fiscal commission remains remote. The exceedingly rare fiscal moonshot attempt led by Elon Musk to reduce federal spending ended with a whimper, with a couple hundred billion “saved” versus the promised trillions. But realism is not an excuse for resignation. The Senate needs to bring this bill under control.

Hayek’s tyrant is not a person waiting in the wings. It is the sum of our own short-term bargains, the comfortable conviction that tomorrow’s prosperity can be spent today without consequence. We are still free to reverse course. First, though, we have to admit that the hand signing the checks is our own.

In a provocative recent piece for The American Mind, Nathan Pinkoski argues that America’s current political moment can be defined by a "new birth of authority," embodied most vividly by Donald Trump. Pinkoski frames Trump's political ascent as a powerful corrective to the technocratic drift of the pre-2015 era, a time dominated by bureaucratic managers, faceless experts, and a deeply ingrained hostility toward personal, decisive leadership.

Pinkoski is correct about one thing: Americans indeed yearn for sovereignty. But he mistakes charisma and the raw magnetism of a leader for genuine sovereign authority. Max Weber warned us precisely about this trap over a century ago when he delineated authority into three distinct types: traditional, legal-rational, and charismatic. Among these, charismatic authority is the most emotionally charged, the weakest, and the most unstable, precisely because it rests on the ephemeral force of personality rather than lasting institutional strength or measurable competence.

Weber’s warnings have important implications in contemporary American politics. Charismatic authority captivates us but does not reliably deliver governance without accompanying structures of competence. Donald Trump, while undeniably charismatic, has also demonstrated substantial policy successes in areas such as judicial appointments, economic reform, deregulation, and exposing the shortcomings of the administrative state. His presidency indeed underscored the limitations of technocratic governance and reasserted the importance of decisive executive leadership.

However, Trump himself is a unicorn. His brand of charismatic sovereignty cannot sustainably serve as a long-term answer to conservative frustrations with the administrative state.

It has also had lasting negative consequences. Trump’s personal magnetism has unintentionally fostered an environment in which conservative intellectualism is being hollowed out by a cult of personality. This deification of Trump by many prominent voices on the right—such as Newsmax’s Wayne Allyn Root calling Trump “the chosen one” or actor Jim Caviezel declaring Trump selected by God—has created a significant contingent within conservatism that prioritizes spectacle and personal magnetism over sustained intellectual rigor and disciplined policy development. Today, even the intellectuals of the new right struggle to articulate a vision for a post-Trump GOP.

The downstream effects of over-reliance on charisma are clear. Consider Kari Lake, the former news anchor turned political figure in Arizona. Lake built her entire political persona on Trump-style performative outrage and media vilification. She gained followers, headlines, and fundraising dollars but delivered no substantive political victories. The Arizona GOP is left near bankruptcy, drained by Lake’s costly and fruitless legal challenges. Charisma produced spectacle, delivered her to a meaningless job in the administration, and gifted Arizona to the Democrats. She is the cautionary tale. She also remains incredibly popular in the conservative movement.

Pinkoski rightly identifies Trump’s disruption of technocratic governance as significant, but he misses the fundamental distinction between symbolic restoration of authority and practical restoration of competent leadership. What Americans genuinely crave is not simply strong personalities, but leaders who can translate personal strength into tangible, measurable action and institution-building.

The key is not simply embracing unilateral executive sovereignty to combat the restrictive administrative state; rather, it is to reform the administrative latticework of government to allow competence and action to flourish at every echelon.

American governance is structured as a complex ecosystem of elected bodies, executives, agencies, councils, and boards spanning local, state, and federal levels. Real sovereignty—the authority Pinkoski rightly claims Americans desire—is about competence and coordinated action across multiple levels of government. We are operating in a rare window where reform is possible, but time is running out.

To put it simply: the Republican infrastructure “works” because it’s headed by Trump. This system is not a car where the driver can simply get out and someone else replaces them, it’s entirely dependent on Trump’s leadership.

We have a deep bench for competence-based leadership. Governors like Youngkin, DeSantis, and Abbott, and cabinet secretaries like Rubio, Burgum, and Chris Wright demonstrate this potential. Yet, because of the environment facilitated by Trump’s rise, the conservative voter still looks for that charismatic leadership. It’s a tightrope that few can walk successfully, and it means we need to start preparing for Trump’s exit today.

I have seen no evidence that the conservative movement is preparing for that change in leadership. Jockeying and positioning for political gain, perhaps, but not a holistic assessment of what the movement will face after Trump leaves the stage.

America faces profound challenges requiring competence-driven governance: economic revitalization, technological innovation, national security, and societal cohesion. The administrative state, cumbersome and resistant to action, will not deliver solutions. Neither will charismatic performances built solely upon agitation and spectacle.

Conservatives face a defining choice—cling to Trump’s magnetic but temporary sovereignty, risking collapse when he inevitably exits the stage, or decisively embrace comprehensive administrative reform today. Prioritizing competence and durable institutions over charisma and spectacle is not just preferable, it is essential. Administrative reform has always been the answer.

But how did we get here? Let’s go back a couple decades.

I am a product of the public school system. Mostly.

Growing up, though we could afford private school, I felt there was something noble about public school. Where’s the fun in succeeding if you’re given extra advantages? So, I remained enrolled in the public school system.

Until I didn’t. During my ninth grade year, I shadowed my best friend at his private school and decided almost immediately to ask my parents to let me attend. A few admissions interviews later and I had traded the populist everyman route for the path of the landed gentry.

That first year, I figured it would be like public school but… nice. I had no idea how much education could differ between schools, and I was about to learn.

My first clue was discovering that all of my peers had been doing several hours per week of SAT tutoring. This didn’t interest me at all. The cutthroat world of college admissions was still in its infancy, but the tutor industrial complex was growing.

Then I tried to enroll in AP Composition. I crafted a tremendous essay, hammering it out over my metaphorical anvil, molding it into something worthy of perfect marks. The essay was great, A+… Then I proceeded to fail the exam because I completely tanked the short answer section on the rules of grammar.

Hmmmm.

Turns out, there’s a huge disparity in education quality across institutions. Imagine that!

This was way back in 2011. Now, nearly everyone is playing the same game to maximize their chances at an elite college. $1,000/hr tutoring services, several SAT retakes, obsessive pruning of extracurricular activities. Elite private schools are engaged in an arms race based on college outcomes. Truly, education has never been on a higher pedestal.

So, why are we subverting education?

Though college admissions have been elevated to a place of significance in society that few could have predicted, that doesn’t extend to the rest of our education system.

We are actively decimating our youth and their education in a multi-prong attack. San Antonio, New York City, St. Louis. Almost entirely across the board, and in nearly every metric, American students are rapidly deteriorating in competence. In a lot of ways, it’s our fault.

In Connecticut, a high school student graduated from a local high school and enrolled at the University of Connecticut. She can’t read.

Meanwhile, down in New York City, barely a quarter of all 4th graders are considered proficient at reading, despite billions in education funding.

The top ten percent of students have excelled, but every other bracket has seen steady and increasing decline, particularly since COVID.

The story only gets darker from there.

Long ago we removed the SAT’s analogies section, the critical portion that forced students to map relationships, not merely memorize vocabulary. New reports suggest we will axe the extended reading passages, because difficult reading takes time and time is “inequitable.” The SAT that you and I took is no more, in its place is a facsimile of the real thing.

But none of it compares to the hollowing out of our critical thinking skills and overall competence by an over-reliance on AI.

A video went viral this weekend: a freshly minted UCLA graduate brags on TikTok—at his graduation ceremony no less—that every assignment was churned out by ChatGPT.

When you were learning math, you first learned the concept then how to do it by hand. Only then did you introduce a calculator.

Even then, a calculator is dumb by comparison. A crutch, at worst.

Today, AI is a mental wheelchair rolling out students effortlessly through all of the lessons they so desperately need to learn. They are willingly ceding their critical thinking to AI, to the point where they’re incapable of functioning without it.

A recent study suggests this is true. An MIT research paper making the rounds on social media argues that people accumulate “cognitive debt” when relying on AI tools. To put it simply, overuse of AI degrades our capacity for complex tasks.

Our schools weren’t even ready for smartphones, now we have artificial intelligence that promises to solve any problem, no personal sacrifice or hard work required. AI may represent a quantum leap in our technological development, but the regression in our students (and adults!) is real.

To quote philosopher Oliver Traldi, “I truly believe that the United States is undergoing a disastrous crisis of competence. As our leaders age out of cogency, our students are gentled through lower and lower standards with more and more allowance that they will not even meet those standards without assistance.”

He’s right. We’re experiencing a recession of competence, as we make it easier on our students to coast through school, lowering our academic standards below any meaningful threshold. Then, to twist the knife, we have unleashed this brain-eating artificial organism on them. They stood no chance.

This will have profound and far reaching effects across society. We expect our young talent to meet a certain baseline. For years, that talent has been eroding, to the point now where it may even need AI to produce anything.

So, they use AI. But what’s the cost? Well, apparently, it’s at least in part the destruction of critical thinking and capacity for meaningful work.

For the rest, we will just have to wait and see. I doubt it’s good.

Zohran Mamdani toppled a former governor despite $25 million in attack ads and his win will be a symbolic inflection point for a festering socialist movement nationwide.

As one supporter put it, “It would be seismic…. having the largest city in the country have a socialist mayor would send an extremely powerful and hopefully empowering message to other socialists and politicians and groups fighting for working class interests across the country.”

It’s hard not to reflect on how dramatically the landscape has shifted. A decade ago, when Seattle voters elected Kshama Sawant to the City Council it made headlines and felt like a political novelty.

At the time, the S-word was still largely taboo. But what was once rare has become increasingly common. Mamdani’s win stands on the shoulders of that early breakthrough, signaling that the “democratic socialist” brand is no longer an outlier in municipal politics, it’s becoming a nationwide problem.

Further south, even Texas has not been immune to this leftward municipal shift. San Antonio, usually described as politically moderate, hosts a “progressive bloc” on the City Council. Earlier this month, 24-year-old Ric Galvan, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won a runoff by just 25 votes to capture the District 6 council seat. His victory adds another unapologetically progressive voice, and the third avowed socialist, to what is now a left-leaning city council.

From New York to Chicago to San Antonio, the pattern is troubling. Socialist and left-progressive candidates are winning in city halls that once belonged firmly to centrist Democrats. Recent elections underscore the trend: dozens of DSA-endorsed candidates won races across various states and cities, with the national DSA organization touting a 77% success rate for its endorsed candidates and a net gain of eleven new offices in November of 2023 alone.

This steady expansion of socialist influence poses an acute challenge for the Democratic Party, and America. The Democrats are currently experiencing the kind of identity crisis that could only be caused by a dramatic loss and the absence of a central, unifying figure.

For decades, the party’s national brand and internal power structure have been defined by a broad tent of center-left liberalism. In the last decade or so, the insurgent socialist-progressive wing is forcing a reckoning over that identity.

Such intra-party fissures are now harder to paper over. We are witnessing the early stages of what could become a major schism between the Democrats’ traditional liberal establishment and its resurgent socialist-progressive wing. The two factions ultimately share a party but often have starkly different visions for governance.

Beyond the political chess match, the socialist advance at the local level is slowly reengineering governance in America’s cities. In city after city, these newly elected left-wing officials are redefining priorities and policies, infusing local government with ideas once considered fringe.

Their influence is evident in budgets, legislative proposals, and the rhetoric of civic leadership. City Hall is being nudged (or in some cases, forced) leftward, often in ways that directly challenge long-established practices of urban governance.

This transformation, however, is incremental and not without friction. In American politics, change often happens gradually, then suddenly. The rise of socialists at the municipal level feels gradual right now, but it is the early phase of a tectonic shift.

Every time a self-styled socialist sweeps into city hall, the headlines vow “bold new ideas,” but what actually follows is a steady hollowing-out of basic competence. You can see it window by window. In Chicago, rent-control posturing stalled new housing. In Minneapolis, an exuberant push to “re-imagine” public safety left response times lagging before the council quietly refunded the department months later. These are symptoms of a governing philosophy that treats metrics as afterthoughts and elevates moral posturing over measurable performance.

Recall the broken windows analogy I’ve written about before. America now suffers “tens of thousands” of small civic failures: each failing school, each park left to weeds, each unresponsive bureau together spell a slow civic catastrophe. Socialist policy agendas, whatever their intentions, tend to multiply those cracks. Budgets balloon with promises of free transit and city-owned groceries. It is the politics of feeling competent rather than being competent.

Worse, this deterioration is incremental—so incremental we barely notice until essential services lay in ruin. “The destruction of society through toxic progressivism is incremental.” The pattern is eerily consistent: high rhetoric, low delivery, and then an exodus of middle-class families who can’t afford another experiment in municipal finance. Civic ambition becomes performance art, applauded on social media but absent where it counts: balanced budgets or children that can read.

This is where the Democratic Party’s schism turns existential. The Democrats risk becoming the party of grand designs that never quite work. Voters may indulge symbolism for a cycle or two, but they will not forgive failing schools, spiraling taxes, or government-operated grocery stores that eat away at the city budget. That reality is already fracturing the coalition. Urban progressives demand purity tests; suburban moderates, staring at rising crime and tax bills, quietly shift to the center.

Cities still power America, but that’s jeopardized when you swap practical maintenance for ideological pageantry. Once civic competence is gone, it is hard to rebuild. One broken window at a time becomes a skyline of shattered glass, and voters will not forget who is responsible.

So, congratulations New York. You will no doubt get what you voted for.

Meanwhile, a Twitter account named “catturd2” has nearly four million followers, with daily engagement topping millions of impressions. Laura Loomer, a far-right Trump loyalist, has over 1,000 paid subscribers and nearly 90,000 total subscribers on her Substack. And for every Catturd or Loomer, there are thousands of smaller entities.

(I realize here, I am not doing myself any favors by being overly critical of this style of content. As disinterested I am with TikTok and Catturd’s commentary, both are genres or parts of genres that will be increasingly relevant in the future whether I respect them or not.)

The ratio of speakers to listeners has flipped from one trusted anchor per millions of viewers to one monetizing creator per a few thousand followers. In the din, many traditional gatekeepers are switching their microphones off or losing their audience. Elite silence is becoming as loud as the infinite chatter that replaces it.

Coinciding with this is the well-documented and precipitous drop in Americans' trust in the media. In 1976, 71% of Americans trusted the media. Today, it’s 31%.

Mid-century America trusted a handful of outlets. Walter Cronkite drew about 30 million nightly viewers; and three television networks controlled the vast majority of TV broadcasting. Today the creator economy counts more than 1.5m Americans earning a full-time income from online content, and studies estimate influencer counts in the hundreds of millions. Clicks focus on a few stars, but the sheer volume of talkers means even amateurs reach thousands.

Faced with endless hot-takes and outrage cycles, many credentialed voices now avoid the open square. Examples are easy to spot. A 2024 analysis showed that academic participation on Twitter has fallen steadily since 2020, with weekly output falling around 40% in the wake of Elon Musk’s twitter takeover. For all of the recent acceptance of thought leadership, many figures at major companies still don’t publicly participate out of fear. This has, though, resulted in a thriving idea economy of anonymous influencers.

The risk for participation is high for anyone with a traditional reputation. One stray quote can ricochet through dozens of outraged audiences, damaging an image built over decades. Algorithms reward engagement, not credentials, so an Ivy League philosopher and a conspiracy vlogger compete on nearly identical footing. It’s not hard to understand why academics and intellectuals are turned off by this environment, particularly with their comfort or acclimation to the prestige economy. Retreat is rational, even inevitable.

When credentialed voices deplatform themselves, confident amateurs rush in. The gap is filled by prolific posters, partisan podcasters, and pseudonymous pundits that equate reach with rigor. You know–people like myself. (Kidding)

Public trust fractures accordingly. Uncredentialed or heterodox audiences cheer the new orthodoxy while those who value expertise feel squeezed out. What you’re left with isn’t strictly improvement, just a redistribution of flaws.

The change in discourse affects more than our professional punditry or our leisure time. Policymakers must sift through a torrent of noise. Some overreact to whichever hashtag trends while others freeze, waiting for clarity that never comes. The sheer volume of social media incoming received is so large that it makes the entire process nearly useless.

The microphones cannot be turned off. The solution is to give genuine expertise a fighting chance inside the algorithmic soup.

The first and most important imperative is to stop punishing dissent. The fastest way to restore credibility is to end the quiet throttling of heterodox voices. De-platforming, demonetizing, or de-boosting unpopular views convinces audiences that institutions police ideology, not accuracy. Leave lawful speech up, log moderation decisions publicly, and let arguments rise or fall in daylight.

Also critical, elites must re-enter the arena. Avoiding abuse is understandable, but ideological flight solves nothing. Indeed, abandoning the discourse just hastens the destruction of their institutions. Leaving Twitter for Bluesky? You’re the problem. Be like me and have an account on both. Really, the ageless adage about reading news from a multitude of sources rings true for social media as well. Most people don’t know what the other side thinks or believes and that’s a problem.

Finally, as long as new media is here to stay, our institutions should treat clear public communication as a performance metric, not a liability. Tenure or bonus committees that count effective outreach alongside citations and earnings could empower experts to speak without fearing career penalty.

None of this revives the antiquated oligarchy of voices, and that is fine. A genuinely diverse marketplace of ideas is healthy—provided it is truly diverse, not curated to exclude uncomfortable opinions.

Elite silence is understandable, but it is not sustainable. The learned need to reclaim a share of the conversation, and the systems that mediate that conversation need to value learning again. The alternative is a nation where volume alone decides what is true, having traded one form of censorship for another.

What the country witnessed is one of America's world-class cities, with multimillion dollar condos and a two billion dollar police budget, discover it cannot even police its own downtown. If America abandons its cities through civic neglect, Los Angeles is only the trailer for the feature film.

Growing up in the suburbs outside of Tallahassee, I was never fond of the “big city.” I still believe in the cultural supremacy of the American South and the quiet moral authority of small places. I don’t romanticize bike lanes. I believe that the spaces between cities matter just as much as the ones within them, probably more.

And yet, I know this: cities are still the engines of democracy. More plainly, they are drivers of innovation and prosperity. They concentrate people, capital, and ideas, generating prosperity and opportunity far beyond their inputs. But right now, they’re losing. And far too many of us from across the political spectrum have decided that means we should stop trying.

From right-wing pundits to blue-state urbanites, there is a clear narrative: cities are increasingly lawless, dysfunctional, and conflicted. Turn on the news, and you’ll hear about fentanyl overdoses, taxpayer-funded incompetence, and policies that seem built to repel working families. The growing perception is that cities are a problem someone else should solve, or abandon.

This is a mistake & a failure of courage.

Cities are more than just cultural hubs. They’re also where progress is made. And when we treat them as lost territory, we lose both real estate AND the national project they’re meant to represent.

Conservatives, in particular, have spent the last decade mostly ceding urban governance. A few symbolic gestures here and there, but mostly exit, mockery, and even open hostility from those outside the beltway. Meanwhile, progressive leadership is often stuck in a feedback loop of performative equity initiatives and infrastructure neglect. The results speak for themselves: public services that barely function, productive ambition choked by regulation, and the slow death of civic trust.

Seeing the riots and seeing the city struggle to keep the peace, it’s not entirely hard to understand why some view the city as a lost cause. We are, after all, only months removed from the Los Angeles fires.

None of this is theoretical. It’s happening in real time, and it’s not just a left or right problem. It’s a leadership problem. We’ve convinced ourselves that cities are too far gone to be worth the effort, or the wrong people are showing up. That’s a lie we tell ourselves to excuse widespread apathy.

If you want to see what failure looks like, look at the growing number of Americans who’ve tuned out altogether. Civic participation is down. Voter turnout in local elections–it doesn’t matter which one, take your pick–is abysmal. Public meetings are either empty or overrun by professional activists. The default assumption in too many cities is that nothing can change, and no one sane wants to try.

That vacuum won’t stay empty. If the people who still believe in civic duty don’t fill it, the future of our cities will be written by those who treat governance as theater or conquest. Is that the future we want? Can you imagine it? It’s not hypothetical. It’s already here.

If civic leadership wants to rebuild trust in public institutions, the cities are the place to start. Build more housing. Streamline permitting. Audit transit. Fund police, and demand competence from them in return. Reestablish the idea that the government exists to serve, not perform.

That’s not a retreat from principle. It’s an affirmation of it. Civic order, economic growth, and local accountability aren’t partisan ideas, they’re American ones. If we believe our values work, then we should prove it where it’s most difficult and most valuable.

Reclaiming the city is firmly within our national interest. We can’t afford to walk away from the parts of the country that still drive innovation, concentrate talent, and house millions of working families.

We can’t build a stronger country by giving up on the cities that hold so much of its potential, the giants on whose shoulders we stand. We need to fix what’s broken. That starts by being willing to show up.

Rivals for the king’s affection often tried to goad the unwary through insults, hoping to provoke an outburst. Many hot-blooded knights, born to the battlefield, struggled to maintain this mannered control.

Today, instead of a great council in a royal hall, we have the next best thing: social media.

The digital realm of social media is no School of Athens, and it still feels completely revolutionary to those who remember a pre-internet world. Identity is infinitely flexible: anonymous, pseudonymous, authentic, or entirely invented. Whatever mask you choose, you’re thrust into every conversation.

From sports to geopolitics to economics, you can speak on a national or global stage about nearly any issue. A suspicious number of people even become experts the moment a topic appears in this sprawling town square.

Yet online communication feels like a different language than face-to-face interaction. The old barriers and norms are weakened or absent, replaced by new languages and rituals with no real-world parallel.

One consequence: it’s practically mandatory to abandon the virtues Henry’s court deemed essential. Self-mastery, or simply keeping one’s emotions in check, is increasingly rare.

Many log on just to fight. Others trade dignity for clicks, chasing cheap entertainment on TikTok or, God forbid, Substack. In nearly every medium, traditional or new, brash is normal.

Often, that even helps.

I’m not immune. Raised to believe the Southern Gentleman was the pinnacle of society, I still think myself highly reasonable and would undoubtedly be well respected by the King’s court (Ha Ha Ha). Yet in this new paradigm, I find myself able to leave snarky replies to strangers. I default to public rebuttal for ideas I disagree with, rather than private reflection.

Some of my friends even earn real money by provoking outrage online. But that confrontational style clashes with what we used to think was good communication. It’s nothing new, but I’ve met people who cannot speak civilly to a flight attendant even if their life depended on it. Where I see customer service as a place for friendliness, even some of my relatives treat it as a zero-sum conquest straight out of Henry II’s time. But it’s changing, getting worse.

Mass disagreeableness, once frowned upon, feels necessary. The algorithm is our editor, and instant passion sells. Classical virtues like prudence and civility are yesterday’s news.

We’re becoming a society where the loudest fringe sets the tone, influencers drown out officials, and memes replace reasoned discourse. The spillover into real life is obvious.

Younger people steeped in these platforms seem more curt than cotillion. Social skills are disappearing. As I sit here at Gate 5 of the Austin airport, all of my neighbors sit stooped over their phones, probably leaving a snarky reply on Facebook. And social media is to blame.

Henry II prized prudence and stoicism. The algorithm prizes outrage and spectacle. We have accepted this trade, but at what cost? Will our modern Kings still value counsel from a society wired for performative drama?

Evidence suggests they do. In both major political parties, self-control appears politically disadvantageous. Senators and Presidents, world leaders, and major CEO’s spar in the public domain–but it’s no Athenian agora. They get down into the proverbial mud with the rest of us.

So we grow more combative, tribal, and theatrical online. It bleeds into society, and we shrug: this is the new normal.

Shame. I quite liked the old one.

In 1982, criminologists James Wilson and George Kelling introduced the “broken windows” theory in criminal justice. They argued that small signs of neglect, like a broken window, could signal disorder and invite more serious crimes. Today, America doesn’t just have one broken window–it has tens of thousands. Each chronically failing school, every undeveloped park, each spike in local crime rates, and every unresponsive city bureaucracy is another broken window. Individually, they are minor. Collectively, they spell the civic catastrophe undermining America’s strength, unity, and pride.

This isn’t a MAGA problem or a progressive problem. It’s not a crisis rising from grand ideological clashes in Washington, but from our collective disregard for local civic duty. While our twitter timelines and cable news channels obsessively broadcast national political drama, city council meetings across America are often empty. School board elections routinely see abysmal turnout rates–in some cities like Newark, barely 3 to 4 percent of voters decide who governs the education of their children. Over two thirds of elections nationwide go uncontested, indicating widespread disengagement, resignation, and overall disinterest. The foundation of our democracy, which depends on active, informed participation at the local level, is disintegrating.

Faced with this national decline, and fueled by our addiction to D.C.’s partisan drama, we look to a national champion to save us. Charismatic figures like Trump and Obama, larger than life figures who capitalize on the wave of discontent, are sent to the White House with the intent to “fix what’s broken.” But the fundamental break in the system isn’t D.C., it’s the national recession of civic ambition and competence.

Infrastructure, often portrayed as the sole responsibility of the Federal government, is primarily managed by local and state authorities. When it takes five years to complete simple roadwork and transit systems fail, it isn’t due solely to a lack of national funding or attention. It’s a direct consequence of local negligence and incompetence.

Even housing affordability and local economic vitality, often debated at the national level, are fundamentally shaped by local decisions. Restrictive zoning and bureaucratic red tape enacted by city councils drives up housing costs and limits economic opportunities. Yet voters rarely hold local leaders accountable for these decisions, distracted instead by national ideological battles.

Education, another critical responsibility of local government, mirrors this decline. While pundits fight over national curricula and ideological purity, fundamental educational outcomes like literacy and graduation rates depend almost entirely on local governance. Despite the stakes, participation in school oversight is minimal or mirrors the national drama. Communities prefer the symbolic arena of national debate.

But the solutions aren’t in D.C. Look at Mississippi. A decade ago its fourth-grade reading scores hovered near last place. In 2013 the state passed a no-frills literacy package headlined by a third-grade reading gate. By 2019 Mississippi posted the nation’s largest education ranking gains, vaulting to the middle of the pack and embarrassing wealthier states. Proof that civic ambition, not federal rescue, moves the scoreboard.

A century ago American patriotism was founded on railway miles laid, colleges founded, and houses built. Individually, just numbers on paper, but together they did great things. Those “boring” metrics stitched together a continent, built the world’s best universities, and powered us to victory in World War II. Today, nationalist populists, progressive identitarians, and technocratic libertarians chase symbolic wins while neglecting the basics that once defined American greatness.

We need a different yardstick, a patriotism of performance. Celebrate miles of road completed on budget, reading scores gained, police response times cut, zoning reforms that let people build starter homes. Let a packed budget hearing mean as much as a viral tweet.

That renewal begins with small, unglamorous steps. Walk into the school-board forum, subscribe to your local paper, email your city council, or volunteer for a city commission. None of that trends on social media, yet each pane repaired tightens the frame that holds the nation together.

America’s national decay isn't rooted in partisan polarization, cultural battles, or any single ideological crisis, it is the cumulative consequence of thousands of broken windows, tens of thousands of small civic failures left unattended across the country. We have misdiagnosed our ailment, searching for solutions in grand national politics when the true disease is in our backyards.

This is our unified crisis: a nationwide recession of civic ambition and responsibility. Until we recognize and name this foundational cause for American decline, we will continue to watch America’s strength erode. Not loudly, dramatically, or ideologically, but one broken window at a time.

Today, Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell millions of acres of America’s public lands starkly contradicts Roosevelt’s vision, and I stand to accuse him.

Deliberately and carefully marketed as a solution to housing shortages and the runaway national debt, this shortsighted plan abandons conservative principle and moral virtue. At first glance, the idea to sell approximately half a percent of federal, public lands may seem appealing. Influencers (and his Twitter account) promise some relief from our crushing national debt and allowing for the development of affordable housing. This is just marketing for a fundamental wrong.

Roosevelt warned clearly against the illusion of short-term gain at the expense of permanent loss. Most lands proposed for sale are remote, roadless, and miles from basic infrastructure. Bringing water, power, and sewer lines to them would be prohibitively expensive, and they are often located in high cost of living areas (like Jackson, WY) where the land would be so expensive as to be out of reach. Instead, these remote lands would likely become exclusive retreats for the wealthy, purchased and developed by large developers in partnership with financial giants, doing nothing for our housing problem.

Allies of the Senator have since been deployed across social and digital media, arguing in swirling contradiction. They dismiss these acres as “remote, worthless, and mismanaged,” yet insist the same land will attract buyers, erase a slice of the deficit, and spark a housing boom. But if the land was useless, no one would want it. Speculators could (and would) buy any of the millions of private acres already blessed with roads and power lines.

The impassioned push for this particular ground exposes the scam: buried minerals, water rights, and luxury vistas are windfalls for big development. Calling that stewardship is like gutting a cathedral for its stained glass. It’s moral vandalism.

Public lands are the foundation of our rural Western communities, generating billions annually through outdoor recreation and tourism. But, even if they didn’t, it would still be our moral responsibility to preserve them. The land Senator Lee wants to auction off is the birthright of every American, not just large development companies and wealthy speculators. President Roosevelt would undoubtedly agree that Senator Lee’s plan threatens this birthright, reducing access for ordinary families who cherish these places beyond mere numbers on a balance sheet. Rather than a trust fund from which to draw equity from, public lands are living symbols of American heritage. A reminder of where we came from, left preserved to pass on to our children and grandchildren.

Moreover, Senator Lee's argument that land sales could make any tangible dent in the national debt is ludicrous at best. The revenue from these sales would scarcely register against our enormous debt, amounting to no more than trading precious American heritage for pocket change. Ultimately meaningless.

History reinforces Roosevelt’s wisdom. Americans across the political spectrum are firmly against these sorts of privatization schemes. There is a reason that this had to be snuck as a provision into a larger piece of legislation: it’s deeply unpopular. Americans recognize, as Roosevelt passionately proclaimed, that conserving natural resources is an inherently patriotic duty. Public lands represent the best of American foresight, and the very best of America.

America faces some real, honest-to-god challenges, housing affordability and fiscal responsibility among them. These problems demand genuine, thoughtful solutions–but selling our public lands is not one of them. Selling public lands is not only ineffective, it’s a cheap trick to give our birthright away.

In Roosevelt’s words, "The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value." His legacy is our legacy, and we must honor it. America’s public lands are sacred trusts given to us out of the wisdom of our ancestors. We must firmly reject Senator Lee’s misguided proposal and recommit to preserving these treasures. It is our duty and moral responsibility.

The most competent and ambitious of society have always drifted upward, that is not disputed. Transformational talent will always feel a pull towards the centers of gravity in their field, be that D.C. for politics, New York for finance, Los Angeles for entertainment, etc. In years past, however, local communities and regional hubs had far greater retention of talent.

In 2025, however, talented and ambitious individuals almost always aim for the top. With nearly unlimited access to human knowledge at their fingertips, the lure of national discourse, and constant connectivity, they feel drawn toward the perceived centers of power. Today, success and ambition are typically defined by proximity to influence and authority.

We misunderstand ambition.

These cities became magnets because ambition is now mistaken for position, with the height of the professional ladder valued more than the meaningfulness of the climb.

In places like D.C., you can build an entire career accumulating prestigious titles and recognition without genuinely transforming a single person's life for the better. The structures of power and prestige often reward symbolic victories and political survival rather than tangible improvements in people's day to day lives.

Look no further than the vast network of political institutions in Washington that collectively raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars, yet produce seemingly nothing tangible. And that’s to say nothing of our actual government!

The result is actually ironic: the higher someone climbs within systems that reward titles and symbolic victories, the clearer it becomes how disconnected that life is from genuine impact.

As you climb that conventional ladder, you may gain prestige or superficial power, but eventually you also reach a vantage point that starkly illuminates just how hollow those achievements can be.

Atop that vantage, it is abundantly clear how many policy announcements never translate to real impact and how many awards reflect popularity rather than progress. The irony deepens precisely because at lower, supposedly "less ambitious" levels like local government, the line between your effort and tangible impact is direct and visible.

Impact often starts local before scaling upward. Civil rights, environmental protections, educational reforms are just a few examples of historically successful national movements that were first incubated locally. Recognizing and harnessing that truth is genuine ambition.

Fortunately for these ladder climbers, reevaluation of what matters is common. I optimistically believe that people usually realize that maximizing tangible impact is the true measure of success, not blind careerism.

That said, local ambition demands courage and deep commitment. It often involves fewer immediate accolades and requires greater resilience against frustration. Yet it yields something uniquely valuable.

Teddy Roosevelt said: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” Chasing prestige is not the difficult path. It is not a sacrifice to participate in the manufacture of influence that happens at the top.

Real ambition isn't measured by how high you climb the ladder, it's measured by how many lives you touch. It's hard to have an impact from above everyone else, disconnected from their daily realities. You must build your legacy among the people, on purpose and measurable good, not on status or prestige.

American political ideologies today are overwhelmingly symbolic, dominated either by grievance-driven culture wars or by reactionary charisma. Conservatives have not been immune.

Despite electoral victories, the conservative movement remains mired in theatrical outrage and personality-driven spectacle. This has come at the cost of actual governance and measurable civic improvement. The central failure of contemporary conservatism is a failure of operational competence and policy follow-through.

Consider Ron DeSantis, whose substantial popularity among conservative voters owes little to charisma and everything to policy rigor and tangible governance achievements. This is instructive: voters fundamentally crave results. Yet, we have drifted from results-driven leadership, instead chasing ideological warfare and grand theories about American decline. Is American culture to blame? Is immigration the culprit? Perhaps society itself, or political ideologies, or certain individuals? These theories offer dramatic scapegoats, singular negative forces that seem larger than life.

But it’s simpler than that. Our issue is not any one national problem, but thousands of tiny problems. Little cracks, local, all over America.

Tens of thousands of failing schools, dilapidated infrastructure projects, and labyrinthian bureaucracies congeal into a silent civic catastrophe, subtly undermining our nation’s capacity for greatness and effective government. Individually insignificant, but in the aggregate is the rot which has pulled us from the precipice of greatness. Our true national governmental crisis can’t be resolved by symbolic victories in Washington, but by mass restoration of civic competence at the local level.

This phenomenon mirrors what criminologists Wilson and Kelling called “Broken Windows”—small local failures that compound into nationwide dysfunction. Reversing this decline requires recommitment to the fundamentals of effective governance: literacy in schools, responsive policing, efficient infrastructure, streamlined permitting, transparent budgeting, and accountable local leadership.

Admittedly, this isn’t popular. It won’t catch on, it won’t pay influencers and go viral on social media and generate book deals, new parallel political institutions, and super PACs. But what we desperately need, more than anything else, is a return to civic competence.

I believe that the faction most suited to restoring that civic competence is the conservatives. A national movement of Civic Competence Conservatism would ensure a holistic revitalization of the American society and economy, if we can just swim up the waterfall and make it a reality.

Why Civic Competence Conservatism?

Local civic competence naturally aligns with conservative tradition, especially its skepticism toward centralized bureaucracies and its deep respect for subsidiarity and decentralization. Unlike generic good-governance approaches, Civic Competence Conservatism explicitly draws from these conservative principles to argue for governance that is close to the people, accountable, and measured by concrete outcomes rather than by symbolic gestures or centralized mandates.

This distinct ideological framing separates Civic Competence Conservatism from three superficially similar but fundamentally different approaches.

Progressives often champion localism but revert to federal mandates, standardized one-size-fits-all solutions, or technocratic paternalism. Civic Competence Conservatism explicitly rejects technocracy, instead championing competitive local governance, community driven standards, and clear & measurable results.

Libertarians typically view local autonomy through a lens that sees governance itself as inherently problematic. Civic Competence Conservatism, by contrast, is explicitly pro-governance at the local level, believing governance is essential so long as it remains closest to the governed, results oriented, and lean.

And finally, while populist conservatives emphasize symbolic cultural battles and centralized power to enforce cultural norms, Civic Competence Conservatism prioritizes measurable, tangible outcomes such as literacy, public safety, and infrastructure quality. Rather than mandating symbolic patriotism in curricula, it trusts patriotism will emerge organically when civic institutions deliver real-world competence and measurable improvements to daily life.

That’s where Civic Competence Conservatism differs. But what does it stand for? This approach uniquely bridges three core principles.

First, we should focus on pragmatic outcomes. Measurable improvements in literacy, crime reduction, infrastructure reliability, permitting speed, and accountable budgeting. Success can be measured and policy effectiveness is non-negotiable.

Second, we must let federalism and local subsidiarity guide us. Decentralize decision-making authority as much as practically possible, empowering communities to determine and achieve their own measurable outcomes. Local success becomes the blueprint for export, returning to the tradition of the laboratory of democracy.

Finally, Patriotism must be explicitly anchored in local performance and measurable governance outcomes rather than symbolic or cultural battles. When citizens see tangible civic improvement, trust in institutions naturally follows.

These three pillars form a distinct conservative sub-ideology absent from populism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, or traditional establishment conservatism. Put together, these principles form the heart of Civic Competence Conservatism. The best answer to a problem few acknowledge, that will never rise above the spectacle of the current moment.

The contemporary right is entangled by charisma and symbolism. Civic Competence Conservatism offers a powerful antidote through a pragmatic and inspiring vision capable of appealing broadly to voters disillusioned by endless ideological battles yet wary of progressive excess.

America has never been defined by pure spectacle. Instead, our spectacle has been of Great Works. We built railways not with grand speeches, but with grit, sacrifice, and discipline. We built the world’s best University system not for applause, but because education is essential to democracy. We constructed bridges not to impress, but to connect communities. These quiet acts of governance are the foundations of true American greatness.

Now, our capacity for greatness is being quietly subverted by countless crises all across the country. There is no savior who will deliver us from this, no lone figure can reform all of America. It is the responsibility of each of us to see the rot for what it is, and adjust accordingly.

By all accounts, Trump’s re-election represented a huge boon to the political factions on the American right. Not only had he executed a huge political comeback and returned a champion of conservative causes to the White House, he also brought J.D. Vance, golden child of the new right, to serve as Vice President.

Though the 2024 primary was somewhat contentious, the party after Trump’s win was fairly unified. Shedding all detractors and picking up a commanding mandate, MAGA Republicanism won and it looked increasingly clear that J.D. Vance was to inherit the movement. Trump even confirmed Vance as a potential successor, with Rubio, when asked.

Various figures behind Vance benefited significantly. Tucker Carlson, whose son now works for the Vice President, is a prominent example, along with the likes of Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard.

Yet only a few months after the inauguration, cracks are forming in the GOP coalition. Trump’s apparent willingness to work with Israel on the Iran problem has the anti-war faction of the GOP up in arms. In a significant development, normally stalwart Trump supporter and new right media darling Tucker Carlson has sharply criticized the President’s openness to military intervention. Beyond a simple policy disagreement, it spilled openly into the media when the President criticized Tucker, telling him to get on a “real network again” so people would pay attention to him.

This is notable for several reasons, chief among them that Tucker was a major influence in Trump choosing Vance as his VP. Tucker is a de facto champion of the ascending new right and serves as a megaphone for anti-interventionist views that align closely with the Vice President’s own.

But it also reflects a deeper undercurrent in conservative politics. Trump is not running again, he is term-limited. At the beginning of his second term and leading up till now, Vance was the presumed favorite, leading polling by over thirty points. Since then, Trump has publicly and dramatically split with two core Vance allies: Elon Musk and fiscal hawks over his Big Beautiful Bill, and now with anti-interventionists like Tucker.

The election is a long way away, and these factions will likely worm their way back into the President’s orbit rather than abandon the attempt to influence him. Still, this highlights the extremely haphazard nature of the conservative coalition.

Much is made over the Democrats precarious position, with a national brand problem as well as no clear leadership, but the Republicans are in a similar situation. The only difference being Republicans won. Trump heads a disorderly scrum of disparate ideologies known collectively as the Republican Party. He presides over just as many micro factions as the Democrats, but has marshaled them forward thanks to two factors: Democrat disarray, and more importantly, his charismatic leadership.

Charismatic leadership, or the magnetic control of conservative voters, is Trump’s greatest strength. He is not a policy-first politician, he is not particularly well-spoken. He is charismatic. This point is essentially consensus across the conservative spectrum, but it is also the GOP’s greatest weakness.

J.D. Vance is clearly an exceptional politician who has skillfully maneuvered his way through the American political system and into the White House. He excels at dealing with a hostile media, earning media, and leveraging social media for relevance. It is no substitute for raw charisma. They don’t replace Trump’s magnetism.

This infighting poses a huge problem for Vance. The two groups distancing themselves—the Elon-aligned and Tucker Carlson-adjacent—represent a significant chunk, perhaps even the vast majority, of his support. Infighting within the GOP makes a bloody primary increasingly likely.

Rubio, the other potential successor floated by Trump, is in better shape, but barring some catastrophe for the Vice President he would likely win the nomination in a contested primary rather than inheriting the movement outright. And though his fortunes are rising, he is far from the universal favorite.

To summarize, Trump leads a hodgepodge coalition of competing interests held together only by magnetic charisma and victory. His stated successor champions a faction with significant ideological disagreements that are now openly critical of Trump himself. Finally, no one else in the party can match his charismatic appeal.

The obvious conclusion is that there is substantial ideological disagreement within the GOP, foreshadowing an identity crisis rivaling the one currently experienced by Democrats.

For Trump to name a successor and ensure his torch is passed, he needs to have party unity. A party at war with itself will not coalesce behind a single figure, particularly one that inevitably lacks Trump’s magnetic control.

Either way, the assumption of a tidy coronation is over. The GOP primary field is once again an open race, and the prize will go to the leader who can tame the disorganized confederation Trump leaves behind.

Over the weekend, critics of the parade for the Army’s 250 year anniversary likened the display to fascism, calling it “Soviet” and a demonstration of Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. One commentator even likened it to the symbol of the end of American hegemony.

Going back a bit, but also in the realm of foreign policy: commentators across the political spectrum have alluded that Russian aggression in Europe will surely lead to a continental war unseen since World War II, engulfing all of our allies.

It’s nothing new, but this highlights a depressing reality of political discourse. Society has zero idea how to have a political conversation without dramatic hyperbole and it's destroying our ability to describe real crises.

People nowadays vote with their social media engagement, both figuratively and increasingly literally. It is common knowledge that hard stances, dramatic framing, and bold language are the ingredients to good social media. Nuance, measured consideration are liability.

This has of course had a profound effect on our electoral politics. When every crisis is an overwhelming force, an earth shattering new paradigm, you’re not interested in the incremental. The enshittification of our discourse through outrage chambers on Twitter and Bluesky emphasize this. Incremental is boring. Incremental doesn’t save us from the proverbial asteroid.

And, yet, incrementalism is also the most powerful force, for both negative and positive outcomes. The destruction of society through toxic progressivism is incremental. The destruction of our discourse through social media is incremental. On the other hand, our life-changing technological development has been incremental. Even in our most fundamental school–personal finance in a capitalist system–praises incrementalism. It’s called compound interest.

More than likely, what kills or saves society will be incremental. Despite this fact, we continue to search frantically for a savior. We look to larger than life figures, magnetic charisma with big plans to save us. We look to Donald Trump and Barack Obama. To a lesser extent, we look to AOC and that new communist mayoral candidate in New York, and Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. We hope that these Great Men will deliver us from the pressing forces of destruction, which few seem to be able to define coherently yet everyone agrees are present.

Perhaps our large-scale societal despondency, our national depression plays into this. We feel downtrodden and beaten so we need a savior. Every problem becomes The End of Us, and every solution must be St. Michael the Archangel. So Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon scream about American intervention, and the political left screams about the end of Democracy with every Trump post.

If we truly face our downfall, it will happen procedurally. If Democracy does indeed die in darkness, whatever that means, it won’t be a flip of the light switch, it will be a sunset and a twilight and a dusk before nightfall. And the opposite is true.