Everyone on the left had a personal low moment after the 2024 election. For me, it was when I seriously convinced myself that Angelina Jolie 2028 was something worth looking into and posted about it publicly. For you, it might have just been a simple crisis of faith that (hopefully) didn’t lead you to spiral nearly as much as I did. Regardless, it wasn’t a good time. After watching every major left-wing leader in America put everything on the line for a historically unpopular administration, their entire project appeared finished, stuck at the bottom of the ocean with Bidenism forever. But through a combination of luck, savvy, and a few shameless pivots, the Bernie wing of the party managed to re-establish itself as the official anti-establishment opposition in the span of only a few weeks after the race and has seen unprecedented success in the year+ since.

For whatever it is worth and regardless of whether or not it is truly earned, the American left currently enjoys a certain je ne sais quoi: that same intangible combination of credibility, reformist appeal, and outsidery-ness that has been the secret sauce of every modern game-changing campaign from Reagan to Obama to Trump. They are fresh while everyone else is tired, standing alone as the last remaining major faction of the System of 2016 that hasn’t already had its moment in the sun and squandered it. And to top it all off, they have an ace up their sleeve: their prospective candidate for the 2028 election. In a race otherwise defined by unexciting mediocrities with uncertain profiles, she is a bona fide star who stands as the clear successor of Bernie Sanders himself. In a field where attention will be the most valuable commodity of them all, she has proven herself capable of dominating entire news cycles with as little as a word. She even stood out among her ideological compatriots as a relatively respectable electoral performer even before she went through her recent rebrand that has put her substantially closer to public opinion.

Her name is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and there is no more divisive debate on the left than the question of if she should run for president at all.

The defining quality of this debate—the thing that makes it so deeply contentious and keeps it from ever ending—is that it’s maddeningly easy for both sides of it to come to very confident and entirely definitive answers. One can easily use the facts listed above to say that her running is an absolute no-brainer, just as they can also put together a similarly towering list of facts that make the very idea of running her seem insane. She is both the politician of the future and the face of a dead political era. She is both an international celebrity and a regional figure who struggles to create positive press. Bernie Sanders himself has all but declared her to be his heir, but she has so far been incapable of replicating the most important parts of his appeal. Even the electoral breakthroughs by her allies that have made the left at large more credible than ever have only made her personal approach look more dubious. Every pro you can name has a closely related con that negates it, and vice versa. What we are left with is the political equivalent of a choose-your-own-adventure book, where any and all conclusions one might come to are available to you depending on what you want to see.

Yet there is one clear answer here. All we have to do is to find it. So, if you’ll join me, I’d like to invite you on a journey. With open minds, we will treat this question with the seriousness that it deserves, examining every aspect of both the cases for and against an AOC run. What do we make of her celebrity? Is her fame enough to preclude us from considering anyone else? How indecisive is she, actually, and what does this trait say about her as a potential candidate and president? And above all else, what is the actual state of the left heading into the next election? Is it weak enough to make an AOC run a luxury it cannot afford, or is it strong enough that it can seriously consider backing someone even more hardline than she is?

Question #1: Can She Win the Primary?

Before we get into the specifics about AOC and her qualities as a prospective candidate, we must first establish one thing: whether or not she is actually a viable contender for the 2028 nomination at all. This is something that I’ve seen nearly everyone engaged in this debate take for granted, regardless of what their actual side may be. Both her proponents and her opponents on the left assume that she will be a top-tier contender for the nomination capable of easily competing at a high level, only really disagreeing on whether or not her doing so would be a good or bad thing. Yet there is one major problem with this assumption: her actual strength in actual polling.

To state the obvious: this isn’t good. While there certainly are instances in presidential history where a candidate came from humble beginnings to take the White House, such cases aren’t exactly common, especially so when the candidate in question was already well known heading into the race. As stated before, AOC is already one of the most famous people in the world; it’s utterly impossible for her issue to just be one of name recognition. It’s also not one of mistaken identity, either. Democratic voters absolutely adore AOC, giving her higher net favorability ratings than even Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom in some polls. They are just very reluctant to say that they think that she should be the party’s nominee. Such a poisonously mixed verdict, if truly cemented, could render her bid completely dead on arrival: a mile away from real viability but with no room to improve.

So, where do things truly stand for Representative Ocasio-Cortez? Is she stuck in a political no man’s land, popular enough to preclude any other left campaign from getting off the ground but not trusted enough to truly contend? It’s a tough question, but there is an answer—and it starts with a look at the career of LeBron James.

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Throughout all of its struggles and disappointments over the course of the Trump era, one thing about the modern Democratic Party has remained constant: its electoral model. That model has been President Barack Obama: the most recent president to win two back-to-back terms, the most recent president to leave office with a positive approval ratings, and one of only a small handful of national political figures to enjoy positive personal favorability ratings today. It’s not all that bad of a state of affairs for the reactionary center of the Democratic Party, which can very plausibly claim Obama to be on their side. But they have still gone looking for more, towards a clearer, even more validating example of how the party can only win by following their playbook. They’ve been working at crafting a new story, and they’ve decided that they’ve found their man.

His name is William Jefferson Clinton: 42nd President of the United States and the first Democrat after FDR to successfully win two terms. As they see it, he presents the only responsible path forward for the Democratic Party.

Their story isn’t quite as unwieldy as you might expect. When they lay out their electoral history of the 21st century, the neo-Clintonians will freely admit that, yes, a Clinton indeed did lose in 2016, just as Democrats have indeed won the presidency three times with strategies vastly different from the old best practices of the DLC. But they will also just as quickly cite such elections as exceptions that prove the rule: narrow victories against weak candidates during times of world-historical crisis. Bill Clinton, by contrast, is said to have turned water into wine, serving two full terms as a Democrat in a strongly conservative era. By establishing himself as and winning as a moderate, he showed himself to be the only modern Democrat with a real path for winning.

There is, of course, a standard set of rebuttals to this claim. If you’re on the left, you’re probably thinking of them right now. They are the time-honored and true points that the bulk of Clinton’s actual policies ranged from bad to downright awful, to such an extent that much of the blame for Donald Trump’s eventual rise lies at his feet. These arguments have their place, but they don’t really address the main question: Bill Clinton’s alleged success at defeating Republicans. As such, they have become increasingly insufficient in the current moment, when anxieties about the Trumpist threat to democracy have become so high that liberals have become willing to accept any kind of victory, however hollow, as long as it staves off that all-consuming threat for at least some time.

In this light, I will critique the Clintonite legacy along a set of lines that it should have been criticized on long, long ago. I will address its record at achieving the one and only thing it ever truly promised the American left: that it would keep the ever-odious GOP away from power and do so more effectively than any alternative could hope for. While the widely-accepted mythology says that Clinton was resoundingly successful at doing so, the true history of Clinton-era presidential elections shows that the exact opposite was the case. Far from a generationally talented force who singularly kept the Democratic Party in power during tough times, Bill Clinton was an outright electoral anchor: an awful man whose dedication to poll-chasing turned what should have been a landslide 1996 into a mixed verdict and was set to make 2000 into a generational triumph for the Republican Party before one brave man’s decision to break from him averted disaster.

The story I will tell you is not one that you will hear from any centrist, rightist, or even leftist history of the politics of the late 1990s. It includes a cast of characters that you have likely never seen before: a locked-in Al Gore, a terrifyingly popular George W. Bush, and even a genuinely savvy Bob Dole. It is one that revolves around a President Clinton whose political failures were just as vast as his policy failures: a mad king whose delusional White House was only saved from complete humiliation by the tireless, thankless efforts of an underling who he resented and undermined. It is the story of the creation of one of the most gargantuan Big Lies in modern American political history: one that nearly did lead Democrats to disaster in 2008, actually did lead them to oblivion in 2016, and stands to send them hurtling off a cliff once again in the 2020s.

It is a truly revisionist piece of history, and it starts with what might be the most audacious claim I have ever made while writing this newsletter: that the 1996 presidential election was not only an interesting race, but a truly disastrous result for Democrats that very nearly led to the demise of American liberalism, all thanks to Bill Clinton.

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It never even really began.

Donald Trump has never been a popular politician. This is not to say that he is not well-liked by some, which he is, or that he doesn’t have unique political skills, which he does. It is to simply recognize an objective fact: that among all of the voters living in the country that he has twice led, more people have disliked Donald Trump than those who have liked him for nearly every single day of his 11-year-long political career. This was true throughout his entire first campaign, his entire first presidency, and the entire span of his first post-presidency. Even at the height of the post-election “vibe shift” period, when the entire world was prostating itself at his feet, even his most favorable aggregators were only able to give him a one-point net positive favorability rating for a grand total of four nonconsecutive weeks. That was what his entire honeymoon amounted to. Since then, his standing has fallen, fallen, and fallen some more, all the way down until now, where he’s once again despised by a solid majority of the public.

What should one make of such a politician? They should avoid overthinking it. The correct conclusion about the biggest question in modern politics has always been the single most obvious one: that President Donald Trump—the idiotic, corrupt, and elderly President Donald Trump—is a bad politician. That there is nothing more to him than meets the eye, and that a clearly inept blowhard is about as popular as clearly inept blowhards usually are. That his two victories only came about as a result of his opponents being dumb enough to insist on running their own inept hacks, and that he has no political room to breathe when he lacks such easy foils. Everyone—and I mean everyone—knows this, very much including the right-wing commentators who have spent years propping up his mythology. We know that they know this because they screamed it at the top of their lungs every time that they felt like they had an inch of room to do so. Not only did they say this when he first ran, but they did so as recently as 2023, when they were all desperate for Ron DeSantis to be the nominee in his stead.

They shouldn’t have changed their minds. Their opponents shouldn’t have changed their minds either, even after they lost. There was never any point in anyone ever lying to themselves. Far from any sort of generation-defining realignment period with Trump at its head, the past decade of American politics has always been best understood as an extremely high stakes game of chicken, where both major parties have attempted to leverage the unpopularity of their opponents to force their own highly risky comfort characters into the White House. Both Republicans and Democrats spent the past decade skirting right on the edge of viability, hoping against hope that voters would find their opponent to be so odious that would leave them with no choice but to go with their side. In the long run, the real risk was not that one would lose while attempting this gambit, but that they would actually win and become completely locked in to a fundamentally flawed way of doing things while their opponents regrouped. Now, thanks to Trump’s helpful insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, the party that is stuck in a state of fatally arrested development is the GOP, while it is the Democrats who have been dragged kicking and screaming into imagining a kind of politics that doesn’t revolve around blackmailing the public into electing their favorite elderly crook.

It is along these lines that the great unraveling of the supposed right-wing populist coalition of the future has occurred over the past year. As the clock ticks down to the midterms, things have become very, very, very dire for Republicans—significantly worse than how things looked not all that long ago. As recently as last fall, one could still look at the 2026 midterms in light of the reasons they had for hope: the unpopularity of their opponents, their resilience among electorally important demographics, and the longstanding structural advantages that have bailed them out countless times before. Since the start of the Iran War, this is no longer the case. Unlike past elections where things simply looked “bad” for Republicans, we have now entered truly uncharted territory. There are no more silver linings. There are no more moral victories. There are no more little games left to be played.

There is no floor.

The New Official Ettingermentum 2026 Senate Ratings Map. No Tossups.

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Ever since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I have refrained from engaging with any of the rampant speculation about the supposed fight for the future of the MAGA movement. To me, simply saying that it had already been sewn up has been the only defensible take. For all of the hype about MAGA’s oh-so-interesting factional splits, the party’s primary voters had been staunchly loyal to Trump during each of three runs and have remained solidly behind his latest Vice President ever since the big man himself was constitutionally barred from consideration. Not only has JD Vance never trailed in a single 2028 primary poll conducted since his selection as Trump’s running mate in July 2024, but his numbers have hardly ever wavered. Even today, after months of everyone from online gamblers to the D.C. press corps to the president himself swooning over Marco Rubio, JD is still holding on to the same ~45% primary vote share he has enjoyed in the polls since January of last year. For now and for the forseeable future, it remains true that if he wants the nomination, he is going to get the nomination.

So, why am I writing about the 2028 Republican primary now? If conservatives are still as slavishly loyal as ever to the people in power, what’s changed by so much as to finally allow for some legitimate intrigue? The answer is practically everything. While Trump 2.0 has been ailing politically for well over a year now, the President’s recent pivot to unabashed warmongering has introduced genuinely unprecedented levels of political risk to the MAGA project. Even before the effects of an imminent energy crisis have truly kicked in, the unpopularity of just the very concept of his Iran War has already been enough to drive his disapproval rating to near all-time highs. The door has been opened for a genuine blue tsunami in 2026—one so vast that just the prospect of it has already been enough to make even the most ambitious Republican presidential aspirants rethink what a nomination in 2028 might mean for them.

Want proof? Read the news. Citing his “recent private conversations” and other statements from “people close to Vance,” the Washington Post recently worked on the Vice President’s behalf to put out his first feelers for punting on 2028. While the official justification is that he and Usha are simply waiting to see how another baby this summer will affect their lives, the tell is in the rest of the article, which goes into painstaking detail about how he has oh-so-reasonable reservations about the war but is also oh-so-reasonably loyal to his president. In other words: while Vance is still trying to find a way to square the circle, our ideological Houdini is now well and truly afraid that he may have finally run out of tricks. Even though it may have been fine for him to change everything from his views to his last name on a dime when he was a no-name pundit, he now has far too many eyes on him to credibly flip-flop once again, and he knows it. Now, as he struggles to square his now-established “realist” brand with Trump’s full conversion to Markism-Levinism, he is putting it out as a serious possibility that he might do the wise thing by bowing out with some dignity intact and letting some other chump be the face of this administration when the reckoning comes.

It is in this possibility that we get the first intrigue of any kind about Republican presidential politics since 2016. While the Republican field is still far too narrow for me to do anything resembling the top ten lists that I have been regularly making for the Democratic field, there is still enough variance to make a solid top five. So, who are the top five most well-positioned Republican politicians to take—or be made to take—the nomination in 2028? Is Vance still in the pole position even in the face of his own doubts and a MAGA movement that’s completely moved away from him ideologically? Will Marco Rubio—now being cast by the media as the official Republican Savior for the third presidential election of his career—finally be able to live up to all of those decades of hype? And if it’s neither of those two, who else remains in the wreckage of what was once the right-wing populist coalition to take their place?

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Tucker Carlson (and the Slopulist Right)

Before we get on with this list, I want to use this section to establish something very important about the Republican Party. When most pundits—especially pundits on the left—write about a potential split within the GOP that casts Vance out, they’re thinking about it in one way and only way only: the loser stooge JD being rejected as a Jew-loving faux-populist by a rabid Groyperized MAGA base. It is in accordance with this narrative that nearly any and all rightists to criticize Trump from a “populist” perspective over the past year have received wall-to-wall coverage and intense discussion about their future as a presidential contender. While I may have specifically mentioned Tucker Carlson in the headline for this section, he’s really just a stand-in for a large cast of politicians and public figures to receive this treatment over the past year, from Majorie Taylor Greene to Steve Bannon to Thomas Massie. All of these politicians have been talked up as 2028 dark horses at one point or the other, with potential futures as populist heroes returning from exile to restore the MAGA movement and do to Trump what Trump did to the old GOP.

Well, I’ll spare you the suspense: it’s not going to happen. When Vance hints at sitting out 2028, it’s not because he’s afraid that someone like Tucker will swoop in and destroy him for not being anti-war enough. It’s because he knows that he himself has been too anti-war to run a dignified campaign as the standard-bearer for this Republican Party. The White House is indeed right about one thing they’ve been saying a lot over the past few weeks: that there is no actual “realist” faction within the actually existing MAGA movement. Not only do upwards of 90% of self-identified MAGA Republicans currently support the war, but a full 100% of them currently approve of Trump’s job in office. The political angle that Tucker and co. are going for—that of a far-right MAGA loyalist who disapproves of Trump from his right—isn’t just a weak one. It’s one that has literally no constituency within the GOP as it actually exists.

Sen. Lindsey Graham

With everything said about the woes of the populist right, I will grant them one thing: they haven’t had absolutely zero impact on the course of history. While they may have completely failed at finding any meaningful constituencies, building any institutions, or establishing any degree of independence at all from Trump’s whims, they were undeniably successful at two things: sucking up to Trump personally and taking up media space. This has had a real impact on their hawkish opponents, if only by forcing them into the political shadows for an extended period of time. As the slopulists were allowed to run free and write the public definitions of their out-of-power movement, their war-hungry opponents were left in a state of arrested development, deprived of a new generation of politicians and pundits willing to carry the banner for their side.

As such, the future of our once-again-openly-hawkish GOP is thoroughly defined by political throwbacks. Because there are no proudly neocon versions of Tucker, MTG, or even Josh Hawley, the rising Republican stars for 2028 are essentially the same as the rising Republican stars of 2016. The only question left to be asked about these political resurrections is where the line will be drawn, and it is there that we find Lindsey Graham. While I did give South Carolina’s senior senator some real consideration for the top five of this list—anyone high enough to serve as Trump’s co-president deserves nothing less—it’s just too hard for me to find a serious path for him to put him in it. The only world where Graham will ever have a chance will be one where the field where all the top contenders are out, which will definitionally be one where the GOP has been totally devastated in 2026. There, the right will be fully preoccupied with trying to explain its losses, and it’s very hard to imagine any of them looking at Lindsey—elderly, always-so-factional Lindsey—as someone with the qualities that they previously lacked. Even if they remain completely loyal to his vision of MAGAism, they’re still going to want someone special—someone who they believe can rally the “silent majority” of 2024 without making any real sacrifices.

In short: they’re going to want a myth.

The Top Five

#5: Erika Kirk

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If there was one thing that the post-2020 MAGA movement could always be said to have, it was a clear sense of identity. When the administration officially took power in January 2025, everyone from its most committed supporters to its most bitter detractors could give you roughly the same summary of what it was and what it planned to do. Here was a rested and revitalized right-wing populist movement: one with the will, experience, and popular mandate to do the things it failed to do during its first stint in power. This time, they would finally cut back from costly and unpopular entanglements overseas, turn traditional Republican economic policy on its head, go through with those mass deportations, and make a real attempt at consolidating the working-class populist coalition that had brought them to power. What was once a Sonnenrad-shaped glimmer in Pat Buchanan’s eye now seemed to be actually happening.

It may never be possible to precisely pinpoint when this identity started slipping away. Perhaps the easiest answer is July 4th, 2025, when Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill and once again reduced his domestic legacy to the exact same set of Paul Ryan-authored tax breaks. Maybe it was November 4th of that same year, when Democratic candidates across the nation shattered his tenuous multiracial coalition while dramatically outperforming polling. I’ve always found a fun dark horse answer to be April 1st, when a surprisingly strong victory by the liberal candidate in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election humiliated then-DOGE chief Elon Musk and set the stage for his eventual departure. In any case, the administration had been reduced to something smaller, less interesting, less popular and simply different from what it was supposed to be by the end of the year. If it didn’t pivot in one direction or the other, it stood to be defined as little more than the third of three straight failed administrations led by an inept old man and his cabal of out-of-touch swamp creature advisors.

It wouldn’t take all that long into 2026 before we learned what their new direction would be: war. The first move came in the early hours of January 3rd in Caracas, where the U.S. military killed 80 people while illegally abducting Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro and his wife in an intervention that Trump explicitly said was done to access the country’s oil. The next flashpoint came only a few days later, when the administration’s occupation of Minneapolis claimed its first American life with the killing of Renée Good. The following weeks were then dominated by the administration’s inexplicable choice to bring back and put teeth to one of its most bizarre and wildly unpopular foreign policy proposals: that Greenland should be annexed by the United States. It was enough to make even the most cautious and measured world leaders publicly declare that whatever remained of the post-war order was officially dead, and it was all still completely dwarfed by the full-scale war against Iran that the administration launched at the end of the next month.

Why do this? Why do any of this? How was it even possible? Not only have Americans been deeply skeptical of anything even resembling foreign intervention for decades, but this very administration came to power in large part due to its promises to end foreign wars. The polling and politics have been predictably horrific from the start, with even light-touch, zero-casualty interventions still being met with widespread public disapproval. Yet Trump 2.0 has been completely unfazed by each successive political failure, only upping the ante every time they betray their promises, tank in the polls, and watch once-steadfast allies turn away. A quick look at any official government social media account gives one the impression that they are nothing less than overjoyed to do all this despite the massive administration-destroying risks involved, to the point that they see it as little more than a big opportunity for more memes about video games.

To understand how this complete 180-degree turn has happened so seamlessly, we need to set aside everything else we know about American politics. The fundamental things that you might expect any administration to consider when launching a foreign war are irrelevant here. To this White House, all that matters is social media. Their online supporters are their entire world, simultaneously serving as their audience, cheerleaders, and braintrust. They live and die by the reactions they get from them, and the nature of the online right guarantees that they will always receive it. This is because the online right is not at all sophisticated, principled, esoteric, or any of the other adjectives it has liberally applied to itself. It is something else—nothing less than the precise thing it has spent more than a decade relentlessly mocking, day in and day out, until they couldn’t notice that they had come to define it.

The online right is soy. Deeply, truly, unfixably soy, soy all the way down to the bone marrow. It has become exactly what it once described as a fundamental civilizational threat: a very powerful group of overly-emotional, overly-excited, unthinking rule-following children. I bring this up not just because it is ironic, but because it is incredibly politically important—one of the single most important reasons why this White House is as chaotic and uncontrolled as it is. And to fully understand such people, one must go far back, all the way to the first things that made them so utterly obsessed with the concept of effeminacy that they were completely unable to recognize it when it came to define them.

This is not a story that one tells about a serious country. It’s just one that needs to be told about ours. So, without further ado, here’s the most important political story about the online right that you’ve never heard: how tired memes and decades-old insecurities combined to create one of the most potent feedback loops for overseas bloodshed in modern history.

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Just under a month ago, however, I broke a little bit from this rule. In the middle of my analysis of Rep. Ro Khanna’s 2028 chances, I offhandedly mentioned that I was an expecting father to explain why how I had come to see the trends I had seen on mom TikTok. Given that this was the first time I had mentioned this, it would have been entirely reasonable to assume that this meant that my fiancée and I had just learned the news that we were expecting and that our baby was due sometime this summer, if not later.

That wasn’t exactly the case.

To make a very long story short: I’m a father! Our baby boy was born happy and healthy earlier this week, and we’ve been spending the past few days getting in the routine for caring for him while settling him in to his new home. As for what this will mean for this newsletter going forward: hopefully not all that much! While this week’s article will obviously face a delay given the whole thing with the birth and all, I’m lucky to have a robust support system and (so far) very calm baby that should allow me to get back to my regular schedule in the near future. If nothing else, I’ll definitely be taking the advice from my own father to put out a few quick lists of old articles that are particularly timely. Depending on things go, you could even see me start doing some regular podcast episodes. Still, there’s certianly no shortage of topics to discuss as things stand, so you might see a few new articles in your inbox sometime soon.

For now, though, I only have one thing left to say: thank you. Yes, you, the person reading this article right now. I hold and will always hold eternal gratitude towards every single person who has made this newsletter possible, whether you’re free, paid, or just a lurker. None of this would have been possible without your support, and I’ll work for as long as I can to make sure that I live up to the trust you’ve all placed in me. I could never, ever ask for a greater group of supporters, fans, and friends. If all of this is only the start, I’m very excited for what the future has in store.

Forever thankful,

Ettingermentum I, father of Ettingermentum II

This Tuesday, the 2026 election cycle officially began. In a series of surprisingly early primaries across a series of Southern states, American voters of both parties went through with the first stages of their verdict on the latest Trump administration by selecting their congressional nominees for his final midterm election. Of all of these contests, the stakes were by far the highest in the Texas Democratic senate primary, where a historically large electorate of liberal voters was asked to choose their standard bearer in what stands to be one of the single most important contests of the entire year. Up for their consideration were two distinct visions for a new post-2024 liberalism: State Representative James Talarico’s shapeshifting liberal populism on one hand, and U.S. House Representative Jasmine Crockett’s firebrand partisanship on the other.

Just the fact that this was even a race at all was a story in and of itself. Despite beginning the new administration as a second-term House backbencher, Jasmine Crockett had made modern political history by posting, insulting, and demagoguing herself into becoming a national liberal icon over the course of less than one year. By the end of 2025, she decided to cash in on her fame entering a Senate contest that she was already leading before even launching a campaign. At that moment in late November, she looked like nothing less than the future of the Democratic Party: the spearhead of a new kind of nihilistic anti-politics centered around little more than anti-conservative hate.

Jasmine Crockett succeeded in tapping into something real. When the results were finally tallied in her first-ever statewide race, she had won more than one million votes and carried three of Texas’s four largest cities. Yet she did not succeed in assembling enough support to actually win the nomination. Despite an early advantage in everything from polling to name recognition to endorsements, Crockett choked. She bled support across all three months of her short campaign until what was once a runoff-proof lead turned into a solid six point loss. For as much as liberals might have liked or even loved her personally, they were ultimately unwilling to meaningfully trust her with an actually important job once they actually got to see her in action.

If the soon-to-be-former Representative can take comfort in anything, it’s that what just occurred won’t be remembered as an all-time collapse. Crockett was never a Cuomo; just the fact that she made it to the position she once was at all was a major accomplishment with far-reaching implications. But none of this changes the fact that she isn’t the nominee, will be out of office by the end of the year, and failed so thoroughly at even finding a message for her bid that it now casts a shadow on all other Democrats with similar profiles heading into 2028. Here’s what both her rise and her fall can teach us about the ever-evolving nature of post-2024 American liberalism.

#1: Woke 1.0 is Dead.

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“America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in our way”

— Benjamin Netanyahu, 2001

“We see what we want to believe.”
— Robert McNamara, 2003

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

In the early hours of February 28th, 2026, a fringe foreign policy project several decades in the making finally reached its logical, bloody conclusion. With hardly any justification, pretense, or any other kind of attempt at public persuasion, the United States and Israel launched a full-on regime change operation against Iran that succeeded in assassinating the country’s 37-year Supreme Leader and plunging the entire region into a near-unprecedented state of chaos. Nobody knows how the war is going to end. Not even our loudmouth dipshit of a president is willing to even say how long it will last. Yet just the fact that it is even happening at all provides us with one certainty: that Israel, less than three years removed from the abject humiliation of October 7th, is in the strongest military position that it has ever been in.

Yes, it’s true. That endless faucet of American dollars and weaponry has done the trick. At the same time that it has conducted its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel had successfully tied up a great number of foreign policy loose ends in the years since 10/7. With the notable exception of the Houthis in Yemen, the once-vaunted Axis of Resistance was reduced to Iran and Iran alone with shocking speed, thus obliterating the few obstacles that kept the Zionist state from acting with complete and total impunity in the decades prior. After that point, an intervention of this scale was only a matter of “when,” not “if,” especially with this administration in the White House. It might not have occurred the precise way that Netnayahu planned it, but he has gotten what he has wanted for more than 40 years.

It’s a watershed moment. And in a great moment of historical irony, it took place less than 24 hours after another defining historical moment involving the same exact country, the same exact plans, and the same exact long-term relationship. But instead of bombs, drones, and the charred ruins of elementary schools, this first one in the form of a sample size of 1000 American voters.

As the Zionists and their allies have used post-10/7 elite sympathy to realize their wildest geopolitical fantasies, the foundation of public American support that their entire project has always rested on has completely shattered. Far from the rare source of bipartisan consensus that it is supposed to be, pro-Israel politics and pro-Israel policy have instead become the political equivalent of a termite infestation. They’ve divided otherwise rock-solid bases of support and branded entire presidencies as out-of-touch and corrupt, so far undermining the popularity of two seperate administrations of two seperate parties since the start of the genocide in Gaza. For aspiring American politicians—especially those who are a part of the currently-ascendant Democratic Party—the once-mainstream stance towards Israel is completely politically unviable, no more so than among the young voters of the future who sympathize with Palestinians by a staggering 30 points on margin.

As this shift and its consequences become ever-clearer and politically relevant in the coming years, you’re certain to hear commentators of all stripes talk about it as a completely unprecedented break from a continuous pro-Israel stance that America has held ever since the country’s founding. It’s a flashy, dramatic story that holds some grains of truth to it, but I don’t believe that it is the best way to understand the story of the American relationship with Israel. Far from an unbroken, 70+ year status quo, the modern era of AIPAC-driven Israel-first policy is itself a major historical aberration: a highly ideological product of a very specific set of circumstances that was only ever capable of sustaining itself in the shadows. If—when—America returns to a sane foreign policy and stops prioritizing Israeli interests over all else, it won’t be doing anything unprecedented or unheard of. It will be returning to an approach it took within living memory under the leadership of staunchly conservative Republican presidents—one that had been abandoned and still could have been abandoned had Israel itself not brought it back from the dead.

This is not the story that Israel and its allies wanted to happen. It is not a tale of the country’s so-called “America whisperer” manipulating a superpower’s politics to his own ends, successfully establishing his nation as a heroic figure in Western popular culture, and expertly navigating an era of ultrapolarization. It is instead the story of an arrogant egomaniac completely ruining a streak of generationally good luck through his sub-Hillary Clinton understanding of the American public. It is the story of countless pyrrhic victories, each of which put another crack in what should have been an unbreakable foundation of support. It is the story of a country and a lobby that has won countless battles, but is losing the war.

It is the story of how Israel lost the 21st century.

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Read Part I Here

Early next month, Democratic primary voters in Texas will officially kick off the 2026 midterms by choosing their nominee for what stands to be one of the most important Senate races in recent memory. On one side stands Texas State House Representative James Talarico, a charismatic shape-shifting social media phenom running on a platform of inoffensive liberal populism. On the other side is U.S. House Representative Jasmine Crockett, onetime backbencher turned ultra-partisan superstar who has run an unbelievably narcissistic campaign. With the Lone Star showdown standing out as one of only a few truly competitive and meaningful Democratic primary contests this year, the result will send a massive signal about the state of the Democratic Party going forward. Have liberal voters responded to their loss in 2024 by taking a reasoned outlook, or have they sunk into a form of political nihilism, with little interest other than promoting those who entertain them the most on their screens?

By the end of last year, it seemed as if this question was already answered. When Crockett entered the race in late November, her nomination looked to be a fait accompli. With only three months left in the campaign, it seemed nigh-inevitable that a once-in-a-decade political opportunity would be completely squandered because Facebook-addicted liberals found it really funny when Crockett called Greg Abbot “Governor Hot Wheels.” And it wasn’t hard whatsoever to draw parallels between this and a countless number of concurrent developments across the world of liberalism, whether they be the rise of a hollow Gavin Newsom in primary polling or the popularity of conspiracies about everything from the validity of the 2024 election to the motive of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

But in the time since then, something unexpected has occured. Rather than meeting Crockett’s announcement with the same enthusiasm they had always had for her, liberals suddenly adopted a critical eye towards her once her campaign began. Fundraising—something Crockett had excelled at over 2025 even when she was only running for an uncompetitive House district—abruptly dried up. Once-friendly commentators suddenly took a far more critical eye. On the trail, the Representative who had been such a strong master over her own social media domain proved to be a halting and ineffective campaigner, unable to address the most pressing questions around her bid. Over time, her numbers dropped, to the point where Talarico took the lead in some polls.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the race, Crockett’s struggles illustrate something greatly encouraging: that Democratic voters might not be as utterly braindead as they just so recently seemed to be. Although certain sections of the party—the longtime centrist base in particular—are still ripe for demagoguery, others are starting to show a willingness to think critically and learn from past mistakes. In the first part of this list, I went over how this new reality stands to impact those on the margins of the top tier of contention. In this final section, I’ll go over the cream of the crop: the top five Democratic politicians in the strongest position to be the party’s next nominee for President of the United States. Who has entered the top tier? Who stands at #1? What does it really mean for liberals to sit down and think about winning? All of that and more will be answered here.

#5: State Rep. James Talarico (🔺5)

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Less than a month from now, the first post-2024 national election cycle will officially begin. Across the state of Texas, both Democratic and Republican voters will head to the polls to decide their statewide nominees in what stands to be an astronomically important election: the 2026 Texas Senate race. For the Lone Star State’s long-beleaguered liberals, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Thanks to yet another rough Senate map and Donald Trump’s historic collapse in support among Latino voters, the result this November in Texas is very likely to be what determines which party wins the Senate this year. After decades of low-energy primaries and celebrity politics, Texas Democrats now need to make an exceptionally important choice, one not too dissimilar in its stakes from a presidential primary.

Longtime readers of this series will know that I have spent the past number of months looking at this primary—unique among all other major 2026 battlegrounds with its lack of establishment involvement—as a cipher for the overall mood of the party. Online debates were one thing and early 2028 polling was another, but this race appeared to offer something far realer: an actual, no-bullshit look into how real post-2024 Democratic voters approached highly important races when provided with a wide variety of different tendencies to choose from. And while left-of-center discourse remained stuck on 2016-era progressive-vs.-centrist ideological debates, I saw something different brewing in Texas—something thoroughly unrepresented at any level of the liberal political elite.

This was the rise of Dallas’s Jasmine Crockett: second-term House backbencher, pro-establishment liberal, and one of the defining social media phenoms of Trump 2.0. Despite her having spent almost no time in D.C. and providing absolutely nothing of interest to the informal gatekeepers of liberal hype, she shot up like a rocket over the course of 2025 by means of viral clips and aggressively anti-Republican rhetoric. When she officially entered the primary in December, the party’s Senate nominee from the year prior dropped out on the same day. Nonpartisan polling already had her with an outright majority of the vote against her sole remaining opponent, all before she had raised a single dollar, given a single speech or aired a single ad.

The race seemed as if it was over before it had even begun, and the message it sent appeared to be clear. After having followed the establishment’s lead in the fight against Trump for a full decade, liberals were going rogue, but not necessarily going left. Instead they appeared to be primarily—almost nihilistically—attracted to those who expressed their anger in the loudest tenor the most number of times. That was what Crockett had on offer, and it appeared to be easily wiping the floor with all of the other post-Biden liberal philosophies on offer, whether they be Colin Allred’s D.C.-directed centrism or James Talarico’s Bernie-lite Instagram politics.

It was only when she actually entered the race that things started to go wrong. With only a few weeks left to go before the actual primary, practically none of Crockett’s strength as a representative of the Democratic Party has transferred into strength as an actual candidate. Her fundraising has been shockingly bad, her public appearances have been decidedly low key, and her campaign has completely failed at the principal task of any frontrunner: setting the tone and deciding the question of the race. Somehow, someway, her position has gotten outright worse the more that Texas Democrats have seen of her.

It all warrants a healthy pre-primary update—one that stands to be quite a bit more positive than the one from two months ago. Where the story back in November was the rise of a nihilistic liberal anti-politics, the story since then is how that brand of politics has met its limits. While the ultimate outcome of the Texas Senate primary may not be known for weeks or even months, Democratic voters are slowly starting to show that they may be more sophisticated than they’ve been given credit for. Just through the fact that Crockett has been given a race alone, we have some well-received proof that the booming industry of liberal AI YouTube videos may not have completely captured the Democratic electorate.

At least, not yet.

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Before we begin, let’s start with a few names—or, in this case, one name—that have either received substantial recent coverage or were ranked in previous lists but didn’t make the top ten this time.

• Former Secretary Pete Buttigieg: Let’s start with a bit of a curveball. For the past year, I’ve had the center-left’s state-hopping boy wonder perpetually on the verge of elimination. From those spring days in 2025 when he was the first candidate to seriously challenge Kamala Harris for first place to his recent prolonged slide back into the middle of the pack, I’ve remained similarly unimpressed by him. You might have expected his booting from the top 10 to come eventually, but you likely wouldn’t have expected it to happen in the way it is now: in an article about how liberals might be thinking about politics more deeply than it seemed recently. Shouldn’t such a shift be expected to benefit Buttigieg if absolutely nobody else? He’s always positioned himself as the thinking person’s candidate: a supposedly smart, thoughtful, and wonkish leader whose alleged intelligence is said to make up for his lack of experience or flair. It’s not even remotely difficult to connect him to Talarico; they’re both Lis Smith candidates, after all. Shouldn’t he have an obvious case as one of the best-suited politicians to bring the Texan’s brand of youthful social media politics to the national level?

  
  It’s an understandable take in the abstract, but it breaks down the more one thinks about it. While it’s easy to draw a direct line between Buttigieg and the likes of Talarico, Jon Ossoff, and the other white millennial men that are such hot political commodities these days, there are deep, fundamental differences between the former mayor of South Bend and his ostensible political relatives that will keep him from replicating their appeal. At his core, Buttigieg is a product of the political delusions of Trump 1.0, when the one-term man in the White House was seen by liberals—especially older liberals—as an illegitimate fluke whose victory held little to no long-term implications. Buttigieg appealed to this cohort as an energetic, unconventionally qualified technocrat who could move the country forward while still representing a form of politics they recognized and were comfortable with.

  
  This was a very limited base that, very notably, has almost zero overlap with the kind of coalition that Talarico is putting together now. The first survey conducted after Crockett entered the race had Talarico with the strongest support among young, white, and Latino voters—i.e., almost the same exact coalition that Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani put together in their primary runs. Among the voters who were the most likely to support Buttigieg in 2020—old people, essentially—Crockett was the one who dominated. If true, the net effect of this is to put Buttigieg and his brand of politics in a political no-man’s-land, both demonstrably bad at appealing to the Bernie/Zohran coalition that stands as the last bulwark against Crockettism but also poorly suited to appeal to the once-tranquil senior citizens that have now fallen victim to the political equivalent of AI psychosis. Perhaps he could go forward with another rebrand that puts him and his politics in line with Talaricoism, but it would be late, all too obvious, and face an immense amount of competition from newer and more interesting politicians trying to fill the same lane. As things stand, and for as impossible as it seemed during the Biden years, he may have very well run too early.

The Top 10

#10: Sen. Chris Van Hollen (New)

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When the MAGA movement re-entered the White House on the 20th of January last year, it did so with a kind of swagger that no other conservatives had enjoyed since the days of Ronald Reagan. While 21st century Republicans prior to the 2024 election had certainly been no slouches at the ballot box, almost all of their victories had felt hollow for one single reason: the consistent leftward lean of America’s young voters. While the treacherously low turnout rates and inefficient geographic distribution of the country’s youth meant that Republicans could still win off of the back of their hyper-engaged elderly base, simple math and biological reality dictated that such a strategy had a hard time limit. The idea that even the most stunning Republican victories were just the last gasps of a dying era was an eternal liberal consolation that left the GOP perpetually on the backfoot.

But in 2024, things changed. While Donald Trump didn’t outright win among Gen Z as a whole—contrary to what you may have heard, we were actually the most left-wing generation of them all that year—he did far better among the country’s youngest voters than any other Republican had in decades. And if you believe some exit polls, his massive gains were disproportionately large among particular one half of the Zoomer voting population: young men. For the first time in a generation, conservatism seemed to be a movement built for the future, with a cultural appeal finally capable of reaching beyond silver-haired Fox News watchers. And make no mistake: the right’s appeal among this demographic was assumed from the get-go to be fundamentally cultural. Before the election was even certified, almost everyone with a byline had come the exact same conclusion: that there was something fundamentally wrong with the left that made it ontologically incapable of appealing to young men. Between their #MeToos, #BlackLivesMatters and female presidential candidates, they had driven a historically liberal demographic straight into the arms of a proudly masculine right, which had succeeded in creating its very own cultural infrastructure off of fitness influencers and anti-feminist podcasters.

It was all far more of a condemnation than any sort of actual analysis—one that judged the left and its view of the world to be so fundamentally politically defective as to consign it to the dustbin of history. But while I might be something that almost none of these analysts are—an actual, honest-to-God, born-after-9/11 Zoomer—I’m not here to fundamentally dispute this view (at least, not yet). Instead, I will attempt to square their analysis with one of the biggest political stories we’ve seen since the 2024 election: the absolute collapse in support that Trump and his GOP have seen among young men over the past 12 months. According to Pew Research’s most recent national approval poll, men between the ages of 18-29—the same exact group that narrowly voted for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024—now have a -35 net approval rating for his administration.

Some might look at such a massive swing and wonder if the analysis of the 2024 youth vote over the past year might have been far too culture-obsessed and fatalistic. Instead, I will hold true to the wisdom of all the millennials and Gen Xers who have decided that they already know all there is to know about my generation. I will look at the Trump 2.0 right in the same way that they have looked at the left, with a singular eye on what makes them so uniquely, fundamentally, unfixably repellent to young men like myself.

In a word: what is it that makes them so utterly disgusting and uncool?

Point I: Their Leading Politicians are Whiny, Weak, and Effeminate

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If there was any one defining story in American politics in the year 2025, it was how the Trump administration and its allies were sent back down to Earth. Exactly one year ago, the president and his movement were riding high, with the highest approval ratings they had ever seen and a cowed elite class ready to work with them. The same liberal opposition that had met them with such fierce opposition during their first four years in power was now demoralized, discredited, and flat-out broke. But despite everything, it only took a few months—hardly any longer than the first time—before Trump’s popularity tanked, his coalition shattered, and his opponents re-mobilized and took back initiative. What once looked to be fully-baked-in realignment appears to be, at best, a missed opportunity for one.

It’s all good news—fantastic news, in fact. The horizon of possible futures that once seemed completely closed has once again opened up, and the present no longer seems fated to be permanent. Yet it might be the case that that horizon may open up a little bit too far. As the second Trump administration has crashed and burned, the same elite liberal class that once outdid nearly everyone in prostating themselves before the president has been re-seduced by the defining delusions of his first four years. They are starting to once again convince themselves that his win(s) were/are simply aberrations, and that a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” is in reach for the Democratic Party as long as it is as passive and inoffensive as possible. After all, they had seen smashing electoral victories throughout 2025 while sticking to the same exact playbook from Trump 1.0. Who’s to say that James Carville wasn’t onto something last February when he called for Democrats to roll over, play dead, and wait for the American people to miss them?

January 2026 provided an answer, and it was a very thorough one. Even if Trump’s 2024 victory wasn’t the kind of era-defining realignment that it was advertised as, it was still a very real victory, and it will still have a very real legacy. Overseas, the administration’s sudden application of its unique brand of unchecked childish imperialism has accelerated an already-ongoing process of decoupling from the United States, which is now seen as a fundamentally irresponsible power by even its most longstanding allies. At home, they have begun to use a lavishly funded ICE as a political secret police, occupying cities and executing dissidents in the streets. It’s a waking nightmare, and it is not going to go away when Trump does. For however flawed they may be at communicating with the public and accomplishing what they promised, the people in his administration have succeeded in creating something built for the long haul: a set of institutions and precedents capable of exerting both direct and indirect influence long after they’ve officially lost power.

No matter what happens in 2026 and 2028, none of this is going to go away by itself. If another Democratic administration takes power in 2029, they are not going to enjoy what the Biden White House did in 2021: i.e., a world open to its pretensions and an administrative state left mostly functional and intact. Instead, they will be forced to contend with a bona fide Trumpist deep state: a bureaucracy, foreign policy doctrine, and political world shaped in his image and built to carry out his priorities. They will be facing a regime, and they will not be able to succeed unless they recognize it for what it is and set their minds on dismantling it.

Winning Power, Part I: Aren’t They Acting Like There Won’t be an Election?

Before we talk about the best way to approach things after Trumpism, we must address the very large elephant in the room: whether or not we’ll ever get to that moment in the first place. While the current administration has let bad election results come and go so far, I doubt that you need me to tell you about how central election denial is to the MAGA movement as a whole. They went all-out on overturning the 2020 election results after they lost, were seemingly only thwarted by the skin of their teeth, and then went on to build their ultimately-successful comeback campaign around the lie that they were jobbed out of a second term. Now, they’re back in power, and they’ve governed as such uncompromising extremists that they’ve led many to assume that a fix is already in. How can one explain their recent behavior if not by describing it as the actions of those who do not care about what the public thinks?

It’s a tough question. The line between incompetence and malevolence is always thin, never more so with this administration. All else considered, however, even the Trump administration’s most lunatic stances are best understood as the work of the delusional, not proof that they have already achieved dictatorial power. As for why, the best place to look—believe it or not—is the looksmaxxing guy.

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About one month ago, I broke from my usual routine of writing about current events to publish something a little bit different. Drawing from my lived experience as a Zoomer who has played grand strategy games for more than a decade, I wrote a history of my wallet’s greatest enemy, Paradox Interactive, and the massive, accidental influence it has had on American politics. Although I had some hopes that it would get some interest from outside of my usual audience, I was quickly blown away by how much attention it received. As things stand, it is ranked by Substack as the fifth biggest article I have ever published and is my first article to be translated to a foreign language.

I believe that the sheer degree of attention this article received speaks to something larger: that the Paradox community has been woefully underserved by its content creators. Despite the fact that the company’s games are some of the most popular titles in the gaming world right now, it is quite hard to find many good videos or articles about them. As things stand, the vast majority of videos and writing about the games exist in an awful middle-ground dead zone: both too obtuse for outsiders and too low-brow and repetitive for those who are deeply engaged with the games.

I hope that the two articles I published last week helped provide something better than that, and I’d like to continue on them here. So, without further ado, here’s my official ranking of the modern era of grand strategy gaming, starting with the games that are best worth skipping and ending with the ones that you should consider essential purchases.

F Tier

N/A

To start off, I want to use the F Tier to illustrate what I consider to be the most remarkable fact about the past 15 years of titles from Paradox’s Big Four franchises: none of them are outright terrible. While the company is no stranger to striking out in the genre—they went through with not one but two ultimately-failed attempts at creating new franchises in the 2010s alone—they’ve never truly screwed up with their long-running franchises since I’ve been playing their games. Given how vastly their different tiles have differed in design philosophy, commercial intent, and the very aspects of history that they have attempted to represent, this is a massive achievement, especially in light of the fact that the company was essentially inventing the entire genre wholecloth over this timespan.

So, with this said, what actually makes a good Paradox game? To my mind, it is how much it succeeds in two central categories: a), how much fun it is to play, and b), how well it represents the history it is attempting to portray. The best succeed at both, the good succeed at one and are at least serviceable in the other, and the worst either go too far in one direction or simply fail at both. As for what the politics of each game might be, I don’t think it really matters. There are good Paradox games that portray history in a heavily abstracted and even conservative fashion, just as there are more mediocre ones that present history in a way I personally agree with. In my mind, those of us on the left shouldn’t be put off at all by the former. In fact, just by playing them and keeping a bit of distance, you can get a firsthand view of what makes the right so compelling to people while actually having fun—an incredibly important political experience that is otherwise impossible to find nowadays.

Unfortunately, even this isn’t the case for the company’s most popular game, which is their most conservative by a considerable margin, nearly unsalvageable from a gameplay perspective, and incredibly expensive.

D Tier

Hearts of Iron IV (2016)

Time Period: 1936-1948

Gameplay Focus: Wargaming

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From the moment it was officially installed into power almost exactly one year ago, the most consistently striking thing about Trump 2.0 has been how closely—almost eeriely—it has resembled his first term in office. At no point has this feeling been more visceral than the last week-and-a-half. For the second time in less than six years, the national news has been dominated by yet another brutal murder by an agent of the state occurring within the exact same one-mile radius in Minneapolis. Once again, locals have mobilized, the government has failed to defend itself, and the public at large has been horrified into moving to sharply to the left in polling.

For some, the fact that is happening at all is a heartening moment—one that proves that, despite everything, some people out there still do care about their neighbors, and that the American public might not be as desensitized to state-backed brutality as the right assumes it is. But for the centrist faction within the Democratic Party, it is a moment to panic, scold, and whine. Over the past number of days, they have gone forth with a full-court media press insisting that what we are seeing now is just a temporary, emotional reaction that can’t be built on politically. Nothing is to be learned, no adjustments are to be made, and no political horizons can be said to have been expanded. Any policies or proposals that were once unpopular are to be treated as if they are still just as unpopular now or will inevitably be so in the future, chief among them being the left’s longtime call to abolish ICE.

It would be quite nice if those of us on the left could simply dismiss such concerns out of hand, declare that there is nothing to politically fear from any sort of reaction to a state-backed murder, and write off all of our opponents as so self-evidently incorrect that they don’t even need to be addressed. Unfortunately, we cannot do so. The precedent of the summer of 2020 still looms large over the current moment, just as it will for every similarly-sized cultural flashpoint for the rest of our lifetimes. So, what makes this protest movement and political moment any different from the last one?

The answer is simple: absolutely everything.

Absent the obvious superficial similarities in things like the location of the crime and what the big two-word progressive demand sounds like, the budding anti-ICE movement and the demands it presents to the public could not be more different than what we saw in the summer of 2020. The context is different. The shifts in public opinion are far larger and far deeper. The arm of the state that is being opposed is different. The people in power are different and are reacting in extremely different ways. Right now, we have every indication that the hardline opposition to ICE we are seeing could be the start of a durable, popular, and desperately needed movement capable of accomplishing things in a way that the “abolish” and “defund” movements never were at any point.

Because of this, we are now witnessing a defining revealing moment for the Democratic Party’s center. By this point, I have personally covered them for well over a year and have criticized them in every way imaginable. I’ve called them disingenuous, inconsistent, incurious, overly dogmatic, incapable of adjusting, deeply arrogant and everything in between. I’ve even criticized them for their own sake, arguing that their strategy and approach isn’t even in their own interests at this point. But for all that I’ve seen, their reaction to the murder of Renee Good is simply above and beyond every idiotic choice they’ve made so far, and that’s saying quite a lot. The obsession with past feuds, the self-flagellation, the rigidity, the everything: it is all reaching its apex in a coordinated media push so historically illiterate and out-of-touch that it has almost no comparison.

In other words: if you thought I was optimistic that the center might be blowing it last October, you haven’t seen anything yet.

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In the early hours of January 3rd, 2026, our so-called pro-peace president committed yet another once-unthinkable act of military aggression. With a rapidfire midright raid in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, the United States capped off decades of tensions and months of strikes and massacres with the brazen kidnapping of the sitting president and first lady of a sovereign country. Although he did not go so far as to leave troops in the country, Donald Trump has left no ambiguity about what his actions mean: America runs Venezuela now. Without any prior announcement, without approval from Congress, and without any successful effort to persuade the public of the necessity of intervention, the United States is now set to be intimately involved in the internal affairs of yet another far-off country for the foreseeable future, with further escalation appearing nigh-inevitable.

Why did he do it? Do the classic Iraq-era analyses that it’s just a war for oil or a bid for votes still add up, even when the president himself essentially confirms them? The answer isn’t as simple as it may seem. In stark contrast to 1991 or 2003, when the country had a clear need for a secure supply of oil, America today enjoys the energy independence that past politicians coveted for so long. Thanks to the shale boom, we’ve exported more petroleum products than we’ve imported since 2021. Among our corporate masters, the large American companies that Trump has said he wishes to open the Venezuelan market to have shown little enthusiasm towards the prospect of investing billions in an unstable country while oil prices are at record lows—especially given how hard Venezuelan crude is to refine and transport. And while Trump may very well be desperate for a distraction of any kind in the current political environment, there is absolutely no world in which any kind of foreign intervention would have been a helpful one. American voters across party lines were overwhelmingly opposed to any kind of involvement in the country before the attack and still disapproved of the operation afterwards despite its perceived tactical success. For as out-of-touch as the Trump administration may be, it’s still hard to imagine even them misreading public opinion that profoundly.

Is it possible to square this circle without resigning oneself to simply concluding that Trump has lost his mind and actually did start a war because he didn’t like the way someone danced? I believe that it is. Beneath all of the fascistic chest-thumping and hurried declarations of a new world order, the Trump administration has been following a political playbook that is simultaneously so old it isn’t taken seriously and so integral to the success of Trumpism that they can’t ever quit it.

They are trying—and failing—to create a new terror scare.

I understand that this may not be the most exciting explanation for Trump’s foreign policy decisions. It is undoubtedly far more narratively interesting to cast his actions as a repudiation of everything that has been done under past presidents. But at every moment in the past decade of politics, at every stage of his career, our 45th and 47th president has been as politically reliant on popular fears about terrorism as any other leader in the history of this country. It is by far the most overlooked reason behind his win in 2016, and he has never forgotten it. After failing to keep fears elevated during his first term, he is now using every tool in his power to bring public fear of terror to the same levels that they were in the mid-2010s.

Now, because of his own ineptitude and his destruction of social trust, he may very well bring the entire style of politics to a long-overdue end.

Why Trump Needs Terror, or; the Skeleton Key to Understanding the 2016 Election and Foreign Policy Today

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At the start of this year, we were promised that we lived in a completely new political order. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was less than two months in the rearview mirror, and it was understood across the spectrum to be a truly decisive political event—one that heralded the end of a decade of inconclusive partisan warfare and the start of a new age of Trumpist conservatism. Now, as the first full year of the Trump administration comes to a close, it is abundantly clear that we do not live in this world. If it ever existed at all, it was thoroughly squandered, strangled in the cradle by a class of incompetents who were always far less smart and far less popular than they thought. In spite of all of the immense hype, this new Trump administration has found itself in the same exact position as the first one at the same point in time: deeply unpopular, controlled by neocons, and on track to lose control of the federal government less than two years after gaining it.

In short, we’ve seen a lot of expectations upended very thoroughly in a very short span of time. A great many politicians and public figures who had anticipated a year of political stability were suddenly forced to move on their feet, and some were far better than others at adapting to the new state of affairs. To best summarize the countless ups and downs we have seen over the past year, I have decided to reprise a format that I last used in 2023: a list of the five biggest winners and five biggest losers in American politics over the past year, with the #1 loser receiving the 2025 Ron DeSantis Award for Political Failure.

But before we begin, I want to cover some old bases. At the end of last year, I neglected to write a yearly winners and losers list, as the clear reality of the election results appeared to make such an analysis largely redundant. Today, I will declare what I imagine all of you could have guessed: that the winner of the 2024 Ron DeSantis Award for Political Failure was then-President Joe Biden. Between starting off the year as an incumbent arguably favored to win re-election and ending it with a President-elect Trump and an unenviable status as the first presumptive nominee to ever be kicked off their own ticket, our 46th president set an entirely new standard for political humiliation—a standard that, for as hard as it may be to believe, some unfortunate souls came quite close to meeting this year. As for who these people might be, who stands out as the worst of them all, and who has profited the most from their failures, simply read on.

Winner #1: California Governor Gavin Newsom

After Kamala Harris’ loss last year, every single Democrat in the country was given a once-in-a-generation opportunity to compete in an open playing field. For the first time in the entire 21st century—yes, seriously—the Democratic Party did not have either an incumbent president or an all-consuming establishment-backed supercandidate sucking all the air out of the room in the immediate aftermath of an election. The stage really was set for any liberal with any ambition to try to make an early mark, and no small number of them tried. Yet the only one of them to see any truly meaningful success so far is California’s 40th governor, who has pulled off one of the largest early polling jumps in the history of modern presidential primaries.

It’s not hard to pin down the reason for this. Ever since the Biden administration went down in flames, liberals have been desperate for anything resembling a leader, and Newsom has slotted himself quite nicely into that role. What makes his success in this so truly remarkable is it is not because he was the first or only Democrat in the country that recognized that liberals wanted their leaders to staunchly oppose Trump. Countless Democratic politicians had recognized that from day one; Newsom was actually quite late to the party in that regard. But while liberal voters have been thoroughly unresponsive to Tim Walz calling Elon Musk a dipshit or even J.B. Pritzker daring Trump to arrest him, they’ve given rapt attention to Newsom’s acts of resistance against the administration.

If all of this were simply the result of Newsom getting a lot of exposure, it would be one thing, and it would still be quite easy to write off his success. What makes Newsom’s surge stand out—and what could make it truly relevant in the long haul—is that it came primarily as a result of tangible wins against Trump. Countless Democrats, including him, may have spent the past year talking about how much they hate Trump, but he’s been the only one to land a real, undeniable blow on him since the inauguration by means of Prop 50. That’s real, it stands out, and it appears as if it’s something that liberal voters are highly privileging. Even if Newsom’s countless flaws end up bringing him down and he never even ends up making it to the primary three years, it’s all going to be in spite of the success he saw in 2025—the points he put on the board when hardly anyone else could even make it to the basket. There’s no way to leave him off this list.

Loser #1: Elon Musk

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Last week, I opened my article about the history of Paradox Interactive with a confession: that I am a Paradox gamer myself. This week, I will open with another one: that I didn’t really give you all the full picture of my relationship with Paradox’s blockbuster World War II-themed strategy game, Hearts of Iron IV. Those of you who read the full piece may remember that when I got to the title during my overview of the company’s mid-2010s breakout, I described it in far different terms than the other titles I had gone over beforehand. Up to that point, I had covered Paradox’s library quite positively, lauding their best games as genre-reshaping innovations while defending even obviously dumbed-down releases as still extremely replayable and mechanically deep. But when I got to Hearts of Iron IV—the most popular grand strategy game ever released by a country mile—I described it as such:

• “A game for morons that has seemingly been designed by morons.”

• “Outright lobotomized…[repelling] at a visceral level.”

• “An insult to the very idea of using computers to represent historical and social dynamics.”

• “Easily the least detailed, least interactive, and least intricate strategy game produced by a major studio in modern times.”

I am not here to walk any of these descriptions back. To the extent that I have any regrets about how I talked about Hearts of Iron IV in this article, it is that I neglected to mention that the game’s second-most-recent DLC comes close to being outright Nazi propaganda. Instead, I am here to address a presumption that some of you might have come to: that my holding of these beliefs mean that I do not play Hearts of Iron IV. This, unfortunately, is not true. For all of the disdain that I have for the base game—a feeling represented by the fact that, to this day, Hearts of Iron IV is the sole Paradox title on my Steam account where I have exactly zero achievements—I have played the game a lot.

The raw numbers tell the story here. As of today, approximately 12 years into the history of my personal Steam account, Hearts of Iron IV is my third most played game of all time. The reason for this is that when I play Hearts of Iron IV, I am not really playing Hearts of Iron IV, at least as long as it is defined by the actual game that the developers put out for you to purchase. Instead, I am playing versions of the game made by other people—complete overhauls that change almost everything about the base game, from its setting to its focus to even the basics of its gameplay.

I am playing mods, and most of the hardcore fans we talked about in the last article are, too.

This brings us to the other side of how Paradox’s all-time most popular has influenced young American radicals—a side that no overview of the company and its practices, however thorough, will ever be able to account for. Crucial to the popularity of Hearts of Iron IV—and even more crucial to its political influence—is the fact that the fanbase itself produces a substantial proportion of the most important content in the game. As unpaid volunteers in teams that, in some cases, have amounted to hundreds of programmers, writers and artists, they have elevated the game to levels that the professional developers in Stockholm haven’t even come even close to. What they do is just as central to the impact that Paradox games have had as all of the decisions made by the actual developers.

So, what is there to say about these amateur developers and their audiences? The first and most important thing is that they are nearly all political extremists. Their radical beliefs are what motivate them to spend so much time creating such massive projects for no pay, and they are what make their content—their art—so informative to the rest of us trying to get a handle on how they tick. This is especially the case with radical modders on the right, whose work on and around the Hearts of Iron franchise represents possibly the first-ever example of a collective effort among Groypers in history. In their yearslong wars against what they saw as a woke modding elite, we can see how they learned to organize amongst themselves. And with their recent effort to create a major mod of their own, we can get our first peak of what it looks like for them to actually be in charge of something: what their creative ambitions are, how they understand the world, and how capable they are at both propagandizing to and entertaining a mass audience.

But before we begin, I’m going to give you a bit of a spoiler: this won’t be a pessimistic article. While it would certainly be easy to wax poetic about the awful neo-Nazis and how oh-so-scary they are, that’s just not the upshot of how I feel about them. In fact, I feel the exact opposite way. When all is said and done, there is very little that has made me as optimistic about the future of American politics as the attempts we have seen by Groypers to create their own high end gameplay. I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and I have seen shit gameplay, self-indulgent LARPing, extremely poor quality content, and a complete lack of project management skills. So, without further ado, here is your first-ever image of the end stage of America’s culture wars, or; what it looks like when Groypers are actually in charge of something.

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In case you haven’t heard, Pete Hegseth has a lot of tattoos.

The first thing to say about them is that they look hideous. The second is that they are concerning, if only because of how many of them relate to a certain theme: the Crusades. Not some metaphorical crusade, mind you—the actual ones. Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense, has covered his body with symbols from the actual armed conflicts that took place nearly 1000 years ago. There is, of course, that large Jerusalem cross—the literal coat of arms of the ill-fated Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem—placed prominently on his upper chest. From there, one can move down to his lower arm to see a cross with a sword. That’s a reference to Matthew 10:34, a Bible verse that modern Christian nationalists use as justification for religious violence. And right next to it, there are the two Latin words emblazoned on his bicep: “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it.”

Despite the fierce competition, that “Deus Vult” tattoo proved to be the most controversial of the symbols that Hegseth had stamped upon himself after he was nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense in November 2024. As many outlets quickly noted, the phrase had been widely used by white supremacist mass shooters and neo-Nazi during the 2010s. This made the nominee’s attachment to it quite concerning, even for those beyond the reaches of the so-called liberal media. But, as one might expect, all of the furor passed without any consequence. During his nomination hearings, Hegseth was questioned about the tattoos, defended them, and said that the scrutiny was a case of “anti-Christian bigotry.” Then he was confirmed to run the Pentagon and liberals gave up on the topic. Even when they train their fire on him today, they almost always go after the easiest targets, like his drunkenness and general incompetence.

Why have they punted on the tattoos? Perhaps they assume that Hegseth simply has enough plausible deniability to claim that whatever symbol they say is an icon of racial hatred is actually a simple expression of faith that dates back centuries. That may very well be the case with the Jerusalem cross, which is used as the flag of the country of Georgia to this day. It may even be true for Matthew 10:34, which has been referenced by preachers for thousands of years in countless different contexts. As for “Deus Vult,” however, things are a little more complicated. After it was used as a rallying cry during the era of the Crusades, the phrase completely fell off the map. For hundreds and hundreds of years, hardly anyone ever used it—not the church, not religious traditionalists, not even outright neo-medievalists during periods of renewed interest in the era. This only changed when it was suddenly revived as a white nationalist symbol in the 2010s.

Specifically after the year 2012.

Or, to be even more specific, after the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive published Crusader Kings II, a grand strategy game set in the Middle Ages that used the phrase extensively.

You probably have a certain idea of how the rest of this article is going to go. After giving you an anecdote that connects the topic of Paradox games to something that’s a) concerning, b) topical and c) related to the Trump administration, I, as a left-wing political writer, will now go on to give a description of Paradox games that is as minimally informative and maximally fear-inducing as possible. With an inelegance that immediately tells Paradox gamers that I have never played any of the titles, I will give a rough, largely incorrect, and hostile overview of grand strategy gaming that presents the entire genre as nothing more than a digital radicalization factory that turns impressionable young people into fascists. It’s not as if I will have a lack of material to work with—not when the company’s most popular title is a World War II simulator that lets you literally play as Hitler. I will then close with some vague handwaving about how fucked up the internet is, imply that the games shouldn’t exist, and then go about my day having provided absolutely no useful information to anyone anywhere.

I am not going to do this, and it is because I have a confession to make: I love Paradox games. I have played them ever since I was in middle school and I still play them to this day. For a span of roughly five years, they were practically the only video games I played on my computer. I’m also—dare I say—pretty good at them.

While I have more than my fair share of my issues with the games, I really do like them a lot, and I do not regard them as far-right schemes meant to drive young people to love Hitler and hate Muslims. That sort of framing may be easy, but it is wrong, and it says nothing about what the popularity of these games among politically-inclined young people actually means. Instead, I am going to look at things from a different angle. In this article, I will cover what happened after young politics obsessives—specifically young politics obsessives on the right—picked these games and joined their communities over the course of the 2010s. This is because understanding the design choices made by Paradox Interactive during this period is the skeleton key to understanding why young right-wingers today are so utterly bizarre. Between their obsession with war to their unprecedentedly favorable views towards state power, almost every element of their fascistic worldview can be traced back to video game mechanics designed by well-meaning Swedish liberals responding to technical limitations and market pressures.

I’m serious. This isn’t an exaggeration. It’s where we are now, and it’s where you’d expect us to be now that video games are bigger than movies and music combined. So, without further ado, here’s the first look anyone has ever given at the biggest political influence on the next generation of Republican staffers and politicians, why they were designed the way they were, and how larger budgets and improved processing power might also change the world by giving us a new generation of historical materialist gamers.

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On November 4th, 2025, everything we thought we knew about the politics of the second Trump administration changed. Prior to the elections held on that day, it seemed as if Democratic messaging and leadership failures had doomed the upcoming midterms to be a race to the bottom, where neither side would hold a truly meaningful advantage. Now, after Democrats last month massively outran the polling averages en route to tearing off huge chunks of the 2024 Trump coalition, everything is different. According to both those results and the most recent polling averages, 2026 appears set to be something closer to a bona fide blue wave, where Democrats will have the opportunity to compete beyond the blue and purple states where their horizons have been limited for so many years.

How will this new state of affairs change the outlook of the 2028 presidential primary for what appears to be America’s new majority party? Last week, I went over the bottom half of the race’s leading candidates, reviewing the prospects of both the former frontrunners who have seen their appeals become limited by the party’s newly expanded horizons and the currently-obscure red staters in a position to ride a wave to national stardom. Now, I will go over the top of the list: both those set to soar because of the new opportunities available and those in such a strong position that they have managed to maintain their strength even in a completely new political environment.

#5: Gov. Josh Shapiro (🔻2)

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For the first time since the historic springtime collapse of Kamala Harris’s resounding early lead, the state of the race for the 2028 Democratic nomination has been somewhat calm for an extended period of time. When I last published my rankings on September 15th, the polls had Gavin Newsom in first, Harris in second, Pete and AOC at three and four and everyone else far behind at the bottom. Today, more than two months later, the averages are in the exact same place. Relative to past updates—ones that went over nothing less than the quickest collapse of any early frontrunner in primary history—there would seem to be little to talk about.

Yet it would also be quite hard to overstate just how much the political world has changed between then and now. Since mid-September and the present day, the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk has come, gone, and been turned into a joke. The longest government shutdown in American history began and ended. A democratic socialist was officially elected to serve as the mayor of the largest city in the country. And—perhaps most importantly of all—Democrats massively overperformed polling and put up bona fide blue wave numbers in elections across the country.

In a word, the post-Liberation Day political equilibrium of Trump 2.0 was shattered. No longer does 2026 look set to be a close-run race to the bottom between two similarly-despised governing failures. For however much the American people might still distrust and dislike Democrats, their newfound hatred of Republicans appears to be overpowering everything else. Suddenly, abruptly, without any warning, a full-on 2018-sized blue wave is completely within the realm of possibility. Here’s how it changes an already-chaotic field.

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Before we begin, let’s start with a few names that have either received substantial recent coverage or were ranked at the top of the previous list but didn’t make the top ten this time.

• Governor JB Pritzker: While I have long treated Governor Pritzker quite generously in these lists—at one point, he ranked as high as #5 overall—the past two months have wrecked the once-compelling arguments for his strength. Not only will the recently-rediscovered fact that he once served on the AIPAC board of directors fatally wound his chances among a left that once stood to be his core constituency, the sheer level of disinterest in his public #resistance to Trump’s occupation of Chicago has been so damning that it makes all of his efforts look hopeless. When the predator-in-chief sent his goons to a California city, Gruesome Newsom easily turned it into a polling surge. Pritzker, meanwhile, is still statistically tied with Jon Stewart even after daring Trump to send him to jail on live television. Unless the issue of Israel completely disappears over the following years—something that I greatly doubt given how closely it has been connected to larger concerns of corruption and elite influence—I just don’t see the path for him.

• Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger: In my immediate reaction to the results on November 4th, I specifically mentioned Spanberger as someone who had about the best election night she could have imagined. But while the term-limited media darling may have made herself a leading VP pick of any imaginable nominee with her absurdly strong margin of victory, she still remains outside of the top spot in the rigidly-controlled, media-driven world of the capital-C Centrist lane. As the nation’s editorial boards have made clear, they still have another governor two states north of Spanberger’s in mind for their champion in 2028. In the case that his nasty allegedly-covered-up-a-murder business becomes too much to handle, however, Spanberger will very likely be one of the first names the powers that be call for as a pinch hitter. It’s worth keeping an eye on her.

The Top 10

#10: State Rep. James Talarico (New)

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