A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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America Needs a Mass Movement — Now
By David Brooks | October 14, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/autocracy-resista
nce-social-movement/684336/
Christopher Lasch’s 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, is to MAGA what Marx was to Lenin. Almost everything that Trump and J. D. Vance are saying today was said first by Lasch 30 years ago: The establishment betrayed the people and created a culture that makes the working class feel like strangers in their own land.
About a decade ago, I stopped by the desk of a young man named James Hitchcock, who was then my brilliant and generally wonderful editorial assistant at the Times. The Revolt of the Elites was lying on his desk. How odd, I thought, that James would be reading a 20-year-old book of social criticism. I failed to see this for the early warning it was: James is now a speechwriter for Vance. The vice president channels Lasch, and millions of Americans who have never heard of the late historian resonate with the critique he laid out 30 years ago.
With his intuitive genius for recognizing what will inflame and divide, Trump has deepened the Laschian critique by repeatedly telling the people that their democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of educated elites. Every day, he launches initiatives to remind people that he is waging an existential class struggle on their behalf against the elites: Trump against Harvard, Trump against the Washington bureaucrats, Trump against the law firms, Trump against the mainstream media.
How can those who oppose Trumpism construct a more accurate and compelling narrative?
The first step is to capitalize on the weaknesses at the core of the MAGA narrative. For 250 years, the American idea has been partly rooted in the notion that we are not like class-riven European nations. Our ancestors left that behind to build a nation where all people would have a fair chance. We rejected the politics of class conflict and built a country around social mobility — the idea that the poor kid today could be the rich executive tomorrow.
“It was a spiritual wind that drove the Americans irresistibly ahead from the beginning,” the Italian writer Luigi Barzini Jr. observed, and Abraham Lincoln declared, “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition.” This gospel of social mobility gives Americans a sense of purpose and direction. Social mobility also reduces class conflict, because where you are today is not necessarily where you’ll be tomorrow.
The traditional American story is built on hope and possibility. The MAGA story is built on menace and threat. The traditional American story embraces risk. The MAGA story clings to security. For most Americans across our history, utopia has lain in the future; for Trumpian populists, utopia lies in the past. The traditional American mindset is premised on the possibility of limitless growth that can be widely shared; the populist mindset assumes that everything is a zero-sum competition.
The story Trump tells isn’t truly American; in fact, his story is the one Russian nationalists tell: The good people of the heartland are under threat from foreigners and urban modernizers; I will protect you. If the representative American images were once the covered wagon or the car, today’s representative MAGA image is a wall.
Americans will eventually reject MAGA, not only because it’s like a foreign implant in the body politic but also because over time, it will become clearer that Trump’s ethos doesn’t address the real problems plaguing his working-class supporters: poor health outcomes, poor educational outcomes, low levels of social capital, low levels of investment in their communities, and weak economic growth. The Trumpists focus on their civil war against the elites—hurting Harvard, hurting USAID, hurting the National Institutes of Health. Cutting off public broadcasting may be emotionally satisfying in an own-the-libs kind of way, but how does this help the working class? Trump’s biggest
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Storm Warnings
The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.
By Mark Lilla | November 6, 2025 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/11/06/storm-warnings-when-the-cl
ock-broke-furious-minds/
What is “conservatism”? Just a word. There is no essence to “conservatism,” any more than there is to “liberalism,” or “the right,” or “the left.” These are labels we make for little boxes into which we drop things that seem related, for reasons we can’t always articulate and sometimes can’t even remember.
We can, as a post-facto exercise, try to discern what qualities are shared by the things we’ve gathered over the years, but it’s always a loose fit. And over time, as more things accumulate, we may find that it makes more sense to disaggregate the contents of the boxes and label them differently for a tighter fit. We are like the employees in the TV series Severance who stare all day at matrices of vibrating random numbers on computer screens until the moment when a set of numbers “feels” related and it can be slipped into a particular folder at the bottom of the screen.
In the Age of Trump, our ideological boxes are in bad need of rearranging. Over the past decade we have accumulated piles of unfamiliar ideas, passions, and movements, all linked through new means of communication and mobilization. Which boxes to put them in? Consider a new human type among us: the Silicon Valley tech bro who wants to cut taxes and end censorship of the Internet, dreams of post-human immortality, belongs to a reading group studying Leo Strauss, listens to Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist, and posts anonymous misogynistic rants on 4chan. Is he a libertarian? A liberal? A conservative? A reactionary? He would probably call himself a revolutionary, though to what end he seems not to have considered.
But it is the box labeled “conservative” that most needs our attention today. It was only after World War II that certain American thinkers and politicians on the right began to gather self-consciously under that rubric and develop for themselves a genealogy that supposedly ran continuously from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley.1 This epos was first set down by a then obscure scholar based in rural Michigan, Russell Kirk, in his influential study The Conservative Mind (1953) and later in his capacious anthology The Portable Conservative Reader (1982). What held this ideological family together, according to Kirk, was not consanguinity or adherence to a particular church. It was a set of principles: limited constitutional government, local control, incremental social change, respect for tradition and religious piety, and suspicion of empire building.
From the mid-1950s through the Reagan administration there was, then, a box in which ideas, thinkers, and movements declaring themselves in line with those principles were stored by both self-declared conservatives and those who studied them. But from the start countless other artifacts that would not have passed Kirk’s litmus test kept getting dropped in. First there was the legacy of Joseph McCarthy and the Cold War policies that led to foreign entanglements on virtually every continent. Soon laissez-faire economics, the great destroyer of traditional institutions and temperamental moderation, was baptized a part of “fusion” conservatism, preparing the way for supposed local control purists to shill for a global financial system that since the 1980s has laid waste to Main Streets from coast to coast. Half a century later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were promoted by neoconservatives who made a mockery of Burke’s advocacy of prudent statesmanship. By 2016 no one on the right really knew what “conservatism” meant anymore. The bottom of the conceptual box gave way, and now we are left to sort it all out.
All this is fairly obvious, and we certainly have our hands full coping with the aftermath. But
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Be a good boy Gilligan. Point to the moron. Good, good boy.
T
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The moron who keeps getting all of his predictions right. 
You're batting Zero for 1,000 since Election Day, huh Ted?
I think it's time to call it quits, loser.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:6ix, you are evil personified.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The moron who keeps getting all of his predictions right.
You're batting Zero for 1,000 since Election Day, huh Ted?
I think it's time to call it quits, loser.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
The consequences of America’s moral drift
Consumerism and the addiction economy are undermining the republic.
By Spencer Cox, Ian Marcus Corbin | Oct 26, 2025
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/26/america-moral-crisi
s-attention-economy/
Spencer Cox is governor of Utah. Ian Marcus Corbin directs the Public Culture Project at Harvard and serves as a senior fellow at the think tank Capita.
In July 1926, President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech near the Liberty Bell to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At the heart of his oration was a striking claim: The Declaration is a “great spiritual document,” composed of principles such as equality, liberty, popular sovereignty and the rights of man, hashed out in church meeting halls over generations, whose origins lay in “the unseen world” of American religiosity. Unless anchored by these deep “things of the spirit,” he warned, “all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.” https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-the-occasion-of
-the-one-hundred-and-fiftieth-anniversary-of-the-declaration-of-independence/
Twenty-first century America is starving for the spiritual depth and moral direction that Coolidge identified. Too many Americans, especially the young, feel adrift. This is visible in high rates of loneliness, depression, anxiety, suicide and drug overdoses. It is further manifested in the rising tide of mistrust and the poison of political hatred, descending to violence. The young man who is accused of killing Charlie Kirk in Utah last month spent much of his life in the addictive cocoon of online gaming and message boards.
The problem feels fundamental; many people, including many leaders, seem unclear about who Americans are as a people, who they want to become, and what kind of world they want to help build. This drift amounts to a civilizational crisis of agency, interwoven with an epidemic of addiction. Addressing this crisis will require the nation — as it approaches its first quarter millennium — to reimagine the bounds of public life.
In a 2023 Harvard study, 58 percent of young adults reported lacking meaning and purpose in their lives. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/on-edge Without a moral or spiritual orientation, shared values and projects that can give shape to a life, and knit a community together, start to seem inaccessible, relics of a bygone past. Such conditions lead to toxic politics and a turn to harmful substances and behaviors that grant a small hit of dopamine, or some thin imitation of belonging, but render us only more powerless and lonely.
Too much of American economic life is designed to amplify and profit from these addiction spirals. As the historian Christopher Lasch put it in the 1970s:
“In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life.”
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/87816.Christopher_Lasch?page=4
#:~:text=It%20'educates'%20the%20masses%20into,An%20Age%20of%20Diminishing%20Expectations
It’s one thing to buy well-made shoes because they protect your feet and look attractive. It’s another to buy yet one more pair of shoes because advertisers have convinced you that your present life is shabby, but this next purchase will finally make you happy.
The online attention economy, especia
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are evil personified.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The moron who keeps getting all of his predictions right.
You're batting Zero for 1,000 since Election Day, huh Ted?
I think it's time to call it quits, loser.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Nah. I'm just right all the time and you're pissed off about that because it means that you're wrong all the time.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:I got twice as big a tax cut as I could reasonably expect from Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill. Then there is the extra-large bonus that the IRS has stopped auditing people like me. Trump doesn't pay, and many follow his example.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nah. I'm just right all the time and you're pissed off about that because it means that you're wrong all the time.
"You lose the very staff trained to keep high-end taxpayers and corporate tax payers in compliance." "You can see some behavioral effects when taxpayers, especially those that really don't want to pay their bills, come to accept there is very little risk to not paying at all, or even filing."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-doge-cuts-layoffs-31-percent-auditors
-tax-revenue-impact/
Not surprising that the National Debt is increasing faster than ever before. Non-compliance is the cause.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Be a good boy Gilligan. Point to the moron. Good, good boy.
You really think this is clever???
You have no idea what a moron this makes you look like, don't you?
Please feel free to repeat this post and be an even bigger moron than you already are!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I got twice as big a tax cut as I could reasonably expect from Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nah. I'm just right all the time and you're pissed off about that because it means that you're wrong all the time.
I'm glad that my being right all the time means that your fake persona always manages to get huge fake tax cuts for the fake company he runs.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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