One time, at a bar in O’Hare, a guy looked over and said, “Mind if I tell you something?” He told me he had two families. He was on a plane to go see one after just leaving the other. Then he got up and left.

Then there were the countless times a client told me about the job they were leaving for, or the boss who was a little too handsy. Usually over drinks, but sometimes randomly and unexpectedly, in tears or sheer frustration.

HR was never an option.

I was.

I’ve told my wife some version of this so many times that I finally asked her to put a number on it.

“At least twenty,” she said. She didn’t have to think about it.

Sometimes, half-joking, I’d blame it on being a Libra — balanced, a natural people-pleaser, the sign that gets along with everyone.

People nod when I say that. It sounds about right.

It isn’t.

What I’ve been trying to understand lately is why some form of that position kept recurring. The secrets were part of it, but only part. They were just the easiest part to notice.

I saw rules and loyalties I didn’t understand until I entered the room. Sometimes I was useful precisely because I didn’t belong, and expendable for exactly the same reason.

Campaigns, companies, cities, cultures — admitted fully enough to matter, but never so deeply rooted that I stopped seeing them from the outside.

Somewhere in trying to understand what it all meant, I ended up reading a German sociologist who died more than a century ago.

II. THE STRANGER

In 1908, Georg Simmel published an essay about a figure he called the stranger — “the man who comes today and stays tomorrow.” Not a tourist passing through. Someone who arrives and doesn’t leave, close enough to be trusted, far enough outside the group to have nothing to lose by being honest.

Simmel found one of his clearest examples in the European Jewish trader: excluded from forms of settled belonging, but able to move between communities, forming relationships and commerce precisely because he stood partly outside them.

He was near the circle, but never inside it.

He described a person who is simultaneously near and far. Because he isn’t entirely embedded, people tell him things. His distance can produce a kind of objectivity. And the same distance that makes him valuable can make him disposable.

What holds him there isn’t blood or soil. It’s whatever the group happens to have in common with anybody.

For thirty years this wasn’t a theory to me. It was the job.

Only through my writing here did I acquire enough distance from that life to recognize the pattern and go looking for language that could explain the experience.

Simmel was one of the people I found.

III. MY ROOMS

Bakersfield, early. A kid political consultant in a rented Chevy, a script and a check for two grand to make a local TV ad. Walk into the station, scratch out a few lines of copy, punch out a spot, hand over the check then off to dinner with a local attorney who was the client.

When I mentioned I was staying at the Courtyard Marriott, he gave me an address and said he had something better. It was an apartment complex for swingers. I got back in my car and drove to LA.

In the room. Not of it.

Later in Philadelphia, I was hired as political director for a mayor’s race in a city that was the definition of machine politics — parochial, hyper-local, built on ward leaders from a dozen ethnic enclaves who’d been running their corners for decades before I showed up.

I was brought in because I was a stranger. The campaign needed someone to say no to those guys so the ad budget could stay intact.

Instead, I earned temporary admission. Italians one day, Irish or Puerto Rican the next.

One night, after walking precincts near Kensington and Allegheny, I figured we could all head over to the local corner bar. I turned toward the neon sign with Lenny, a Black staffer on our team. The local ward leader stopped us cold. “No fucking way you’re going in there,” he said, looking at me dead in the eye.

I came from Los Angeles. Black neighborhood, latino neighborhood, white neighborhood—it had never occurred to me that there was a bar I couldn’t walk into because I wasn’t one of them.

Lenny didn’t even bother to ask.

If Philadelphia had been a lesson in exclusion—the hard boundaries of neighborhood and blood, Washington D.C. was a lesson in something quieter and more modern: expendability.

A partner’s chair at a DC communications firm. Seasoned Democratic hands, insiders from the Carter era through the Clintons and into Obama, a culture built entirely inside the Beltway. Mine was built in California, where politics runs at a different speed: power anchored in the studios, capital flowing down from Silicon Valley, and deals looking east toward Asia.

I never tried to become a DC insider. I didn’t have to say it — everyone at that table already knew. The fact that I was an outsider was fine as long as the money kept coming in, the way it is for any partner. When the 2008 recession wiped out California’s economy while Washington’s got propped up by federal spending, my seat went with the money.

In the room. Not of it — for reasons I never got to fully untangle. But my guess is that if I’d been in the club, I could have held on.

Then Copenhagen. A refuge from the shitstorm of the US economy and home to my wife. Philadelphia was a lesson in exclusion and Washington a lesson in expendability, Denmark was Simmel’s Stranger in its purest form.

A place of warmth, generosity, and curiosity, if you can only be patient enough to earn it. The expats who lived there told me it could take a decade to earn, maybe a generation.

If my career had been a class in professional distance, Denmark was the existential version. For the first time I wasn’t being paid to be the stranger. I just was one.

And it was there, stripped of the client retainers and the political battle lines, that I began to see the pattern clearly. What I’d treated as just the way things were done wasn’t a job description. It was conditional.

Sitting in a frozen city during a quiet winter, I wrote a post on a little blog I called Commuting from Copenhagen. I found myself leaning on another famous local outsider, Søren Kierkegaard, quoting his provocative line: “Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”

What I was trying to articulate then — before I had the vocabulary for it — was the sheer, sudden relief of stepping off the hired-gun highway. For a moment, that weight lifted. I wasn’t managing a crisis, defending an ad budget, or taking the fall for a board. I was simply observing.

Then we turned around and went right back to that very same world.

IV. USEFUL UNTIL

Far from being a negative, Simmel sees the stranger as a key cog in the wheel. A critical link in the chain. But he also writes that the hosts don’t always see it that way, especially during a period of change or crisis. The group stops seeing a specific individual and starts seeing a type.

There’s a more direct word for it. Scapegoat.

The type absorbs the blame without disrupting the existing power structure. When things go sideways, it lands on the guy you don’t run into at the school pickup line.

It happens every day. Not long after my time on the campaign in Philly, the local machine asked me to help out on a high-stakes special election. They needed me to run it — handle the street-level mechanics of the river wards, polish up a pretty rough candidate. Control of the state senate came down to the outcome.

I spent about two weeks there, saw the writing on the wall, and got the hell out and went home. One of my other campaign staffers, a guy who’d become a good friend, took my slot when I left.

So I exercised the stranger’s ultimate privilege: mobility. I left and went home to Los Angeles.

The indictments came later.

The guy I brought in didn’t have anywhere else to go. It cost him a life in politics, and I’ve never stopped feeling like it should have cost me instead.

In politics it’s part of the gig. Someone always takes the bullet.

The consultant is paid to be the lightning rod, so the institution can survive the storm.

This is why Simmel matters. He wasn’t describing a vanished figure from the turn of the 20th century. He was identifying a permanent mechanism of human organization.

We invite the stranger in for his distance. We pay him for his objectivity. And the second the room catches fire, we turn his lack of roots against him.

V. THE STRANGER TODAY

For over a century, the role required an actual person. That stopped being true once generative AI landed.

The trader has taken a synthetic form: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. No local taboos, no office politics, no legacy grudges to protect. No office, no hierarchy, no lineage.

It owns no soil, belongs to no domain, and moves freely across all of them.

It hears things people won’t say to a colleague. Workplace anxieties. Half-formed drafts. Mistakes too embarrassing to admit out loud to someone who’ll still be there Monday.

A human can choose to be honest even when flattery would serve him better, and pays for that choice: a client who doesn’t call back, a contract that doesn’t renew. Most of us have made that trade more than once, regardless of the industry. The machine isn’t making a tactical wager. It doesn’t hold back the truth to fight another day.

In thirty years of sitting in boardrooms as well as campaign offices, I’ve pulled punches, softened brutal data, and told clients what they wanted to hear just to survive a bad quarter or keep a retainer alive.

Every outside advisor knows the game: you flatter today to gain the trust you’ll need to deliver the hard truth tomorrow. But for a human, deference is a tactical compromise —a conscious wager made by someone who knows the truth, weighs the risk of speaking it, and pays for the choice if they miscalculate.

When the guy at O’Hare told me about his two families, or when a client unburdened themselves over drinks, the transaction worked because it was held by another human being. It carried the weight of two minds meeting in the real world.

AI can hear your confessions. It can sharpen your strategies. When you float a ruthless strategy or confess the compromises you made, a machine processes it as data.

What it can’t do is carry those moments beyond the chat box to understand how all these things fit together.

I didn’t always understand why the distance mattered.

VI. The Witness

Over the past two years I’ve written a lot about our current moment and my own experiences inside the room. I thought I was writing about politics, technology, and our changing world but I’ve come to realize I’m writing about something else.

I was inside systems that I believed in enough to help operate them, and only later acquired enough distance to see the performance, contradictions, and absurdities I had normalized while participating in them.

I’ve come to think of that position differently now. The word I keep coming back to is witness.

I had to leave the room to understand what happened inside it.

That’s what I’m working on now. The working title of my book is “Tending the Storm.”

I’ll keep writing here about politics, technology, power, and the American moment. But you’ll also start seeing more of this: the stories underneath them, and the effort to understand what I was seeing before I knew how to name it.

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Earlier this week, I was reacting with outrage bordering on hostility to something that came and went on our screens — just another entry in a week of outrageous conduct from this president. No, I don’t mean him calling LeBron James a racist, although that was bad enough. I mean the deal to help Saudi Arabia build a nuclear program — with a real door left open to enriching its own uranium.

A nation with a terrible human rights record at best, a nation that put an American journalist through a bone saw, a country that’s been at the center of Middle East tensions for as long as I can remember.

There’s no shortage of frames I’ve already built for moments like this — the Houses argument, the tempo of change, the architectural shift. I’ve written all three at length, and I could have reached for any of them here.

But I was stuck.

For thirty years I believed political decisions were strategic — legible, if you knew the language. That’s why I keep looking for something else. The language isn’t working anymore.

Then I came across a piece titled “The American disaster: Can British Democracy Avoid the Same Fate?” Once again from the UK, written by a former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption.

Worth noting: he is a conservative. Or at least something in that vicinity.

In fact, he was named the “47th most influential right-wing figure”in British politics. I read more about Lord Sumption, and actually I wouldn’t consider him “right wing” but still, he is not of the resistance. Not even close.

(Side note: He retired from the British Supreme Court in 2018 when he reached their mandatory retirement age of 70. Imagine that: a high court with built-in offramps. Biden proposed 18-year terms and ethics reform back in ‘24, but in our system, fixing the court requires a two-thirds consensus that no longer exists. But let’s save that for another day.)

What Sumption wrote about our current moment in American democracy answered something I’d been circling. It’s better than anything I could have written myself because it comes from a different vantage point entirely.

It’s paywalled so I’m sharing just a few of his insights, along with my notes, but if you can sign up and read in full, do it.

Note: if you are looking for simple solutions or calming insights, this ain’t it.

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Thoughts from a British Lord

Sumption notes that despite this kind of collapse “the formal institutional framework usually survives.” That is the part that trips up every cable news pundit and Democratic strategist. Modern autocracy doesn’t bother demolishing the building; it just changes the lock on the front door. We still have a Senate. We still have press briefings. We still have elections. But when a president can trade sensitive nuclear capabilities to a foreign regime on a unilateral whim, the shell of the republic is just that.

Look at how this played out in today’s New York Times exposing the money trail behind this deal. While non-proliferation experts were wringing their hands over uranium centrifuges in the desert, the Times reporters followed the money. The Trump boys holding stakes in nuclear fuel suppliers. The family media venture merging with energy startups. Cabinet secretaries and mega-donors positioned right along the supply chain.

Sumption calls them “international predators.” Here on Substack, I call them the Houses. It turns out we’re describing the exact same thing. This isn’t foreign policy or regional balance-of-power strategy. It’s a family deal wrapped in the Seal of the President of the United States.

This quote is a tough pill, especially for those of us who spent thirty years believing the process was sacred. For decades, the Democratic Party’s core belief has been that if you follow the rules, write the white paper, and respect the committee hearing, the arc of the moral universe will bend toward a floor vote.

Sumption gently points out that caring about “the process” only works when both teams are playing the same sport. One side is playing chess under Marquis of Queensberry rules; the other side just bought the chessboard, rebranded it, and put it up as collateral for a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth loan.

Of course, if you are the Democratic Party, you can spend the week debating whether South Carolina, Nevada, or New Hampshire should host the first primary in 2028.

And finally, this last note from Sumption. This one hurts:

How do you argue with that?

If some people are applauding the destruction of the norms, it’s because the norms stopped delivering anything worth defending a long time ago. You can’t white-paper your way out of a broken contract. You have to name who broke it.

Tell me where I’m wrong (or Lord Sumption is wrong) in the comments.

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The Fourth of July weekend is behind us and if you spend any time in the corner of the internet I do, you watched the same thing I did: a flood of good, earnest writing about the gap between what 1776 promised and where we’ve landed, 250 years on.

A lot of it sharp. Some of it moving. Most of it accurate.

I almost wrote my own version. But I looked at the sheer volume of the holiday output and realized I had no interest in adding to the pile. We already know the machine is fractured. What I wanted—the thing missing from the noise—was the mechanism.

Not that we’re here. Why we’re here. What actually broke.

Then two pieces landed on my radar, from about as far apart as two arguments can be, and between them they got closer to the why than anything in the 250th pile.

The first was Branko Milanovic’s autopsy of neoliberalism, in a Foreign Policy issue titled, suitably, “The End of.” His argument is elegant and unsparing: the thing didn’t fail because it betrayed its principles. It failed because it delivered on them.

In Milanovic’s reading, neoliberal globalization ran on two ideas — cosmopolitanism and competition. Cosmopolitanism meant every individual on earth counted equally, borders were an inconvenience, and your fellow citizen had no greater claim on you than a stranger in another hemisphere. Competition meant everyone, everywhere, striving to outdo everyone else, stimulated by the constant display of what they could win.

Put together, they produced staggering aggregate wealth — world GDP per capita more than doubled in forty years — and they hollowed out the people inside the rich countries who couldn’t win the global race.

Milanovic argues the winners, precisely because they’d embraced cosmopolitanism as a moral virtue — being free of grubby nationalism — came to treat their own struggling neighbors’ welfare as no more pressing than someone’s on the other side of the world. And worse: to read their countrymen’s failure in the open competition as evidence of some moral flaw. To be rich was to be virtuous. To be left behind was to have deserved it.

That’s not a policy critique. That’s a description of a civilization deciding that the person next to you is owed nothing, and calling that enlightenment.

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The second piece comes from the exact opposite altitude. It’s an ethnographic study out of Johns Hopkins — researchers who spent weeks living inside conservative communities in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina.

Not polling them. Sitting in their kitchens. Listening and trying to understand what exactly makes these folks tick.

What they found is the human side of Milanovic’s insights. These are people who can’t tell you what the US Senate does but can tell you exactly what’s wrong with the institutions in their lives — because they’ve concluded, from direct experience, that the institutions built to protect them are now aimed at them.

• The hospital that discharged them without an answer.

• The federal agency that arrived as an intrusion, not a safeguard.

• The distant system that kept promising and never delivered.

They’ve stopped believing the machine works for them, and they’ve reorganized their whole lives — faith, family, place, their food, their kids’ schooling — around not depending on it.

Read the two pieces side by side and they’re the same document. Milanovic tells you, from 30,000 feet, that the winners stopped treating their countrymen as owed anything. The Johns Hopkins researchers show you what that feels like from the kitchen table of someone who was on the losing end of it and knows, without the vocabulary to prove it, that something was taken.

Now turn the telescope around and look at the newly energized Progressive Left.

Leave that kitchen table in rural South Carolina, and go to a cramped apartment in Queens, a community center in Dearborn, or a student co-op in Minneapolis.

Nobody has published that ethnography yet. I don’t need it. They are in my classrooms, and all over our social media feeds. Sit at their tables and you will find the exact same interior collapse of trust, just painted in a different color.

These are people who can give you an exhaustive diagnosis of systemic oppression but have concluded, from their own experiences, that the institutions built to champion them are actually just managing their decline.

• The university that buried them in six-figure debt while its endowment swelled.

• The Democratic super-majority city where rent doubles, homelessness spikes, and the police budget grows anyway.

• The national party that begs for their votes every two years with apocalyptic warnings, only to hand billions to a foreign war the moment the gavel drops.

But to stop there — to treat this as only a reaction to a bad economy — misses the size of it. What’s happening on the left isn’t a demand for better management. It’s a rejection of the arrangement itself. Where the Wyoming conservative has walked away from the institutions, this group has walked away from the economic order those institutions were built to serve.

So Milanovic saw the inversion from the top. The researchers saw the wreckage from the bottom. Here is what I can see from the middle, after thirty years inside the machinery — the thing neither altitude can see, because you have to have worked coalitions for a living to recognize it.

Both movements are running a fealty test.

On the left it runs through Israel. That’s what’s driving the heat — not affordability. Gaza, and everything the fight over it has come to stand for. I’m not going to adjudicate that war in a paragraph and I won’t pretend I can. But I can name the mechanism.

Hold the wrong position — or be the wrong kind of Jew about it — and the coalition is done with you. I don’t get to write that from a safe distance. It’s my own tradition running the test, and I’ve felt the pull of it: the quiet demand to pledge correctly before I’m allowed to speak, the sentences I now draft twice — once for what I mean, once for what it will cost. Just ask Scott Wiener, about as progressive a politician as California produces, chased out of an LGBTQ event almost certainly because of his faith.

On the right the test runs through one man. Thom Tillis saw it coming and walked. Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn didn’t, and were purged for the crime of having once said no.

Different loyalty, same architecture — a single allegiance made the price of admission. One of these tests has the machinery of the federal government behind it and one doesn’t, and that gap is real. But don’t let anyone use the gap to tell you only one is dangerous. A movement that makes purity the cost of belonging has stopped arguing about power and started hunting heretics. I’ve read enough history to know it doesn’t stay metaphorical.

When the citizen in Wyoming and the activist in San Francisco have both concluded that the establishment cannot be fixed — only escaped — offering them infrastructure isn’t an answer. It’s an insult. They aren’t looking for a better machine. They are looking for a reckoning.

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I was in the machinery that ran between those two altitudes.

In the nineties I worked in the orbit of people who were going to reinvent government. That was the word — reinventing. Clinton had it nationally, Ed Rendell had his version of it in Philadelphia, where I spent several years in his administration and I believed in it the way you believe in things when you’re young and inside and the work is going well. What “reinventing government” mostly turned out to mean was managing the decline gracefully.

Leaner machine. NAFTA. Welfare reform. Deregulation. None of it felt like a mistake at the time. It felt like competence. The economy was good, we had options, and when you have options you tend to pick the ones that don’t cost the people already winning anything. I helped write the case for it. We told voters the system was sound and we were just tuning it.

Then 2008 happened, and I watched the next version of the same instinct up close. Obama had a white-hot moment — the country furious, the banks on the floor, the concentrated power that caused the wreck briefly exposed and vulnerable. He could have named it while it was still nameable. He stabilized instead. Protected the institutions because he believed they’d recover. I understood the choice completely; I’d likely have made the same exact choice.

That was then, this is now.

That’s the through-line the two articles drew for me. Milanovic’s winners who wrote off their neighbors, and the people in those kitchens who felt written off — I was one of the people holding the pen. Writing the reassurance. Selling the tune-up. So when the study describes people who no longer believe the messengers, I don’t get to be surprised. I was a messenger.

So — why are we here. Here’s as far as I’ve gotten, and I’m not going to pretend it further than that.

The people confidently explaining how we rebuild — the abundance decks, the messaging fixes, the ten-point plans for restoring the center — are drawing blueprints for a building that isn’t standing. The thing that made a national plan cohere, the shared sense that your vote and mine fed one machine that produced one result we all had to live with, that isn’t operating anymore. Milanovic explains how it dissolved from the top. The kitchens show you it’s already gone from the bottom. I can tell you from the middle that I watched us manage its decline and call it governance.

And I notice I’m not exempt from the verdict I just described. The people in those kitchens reorganized their lives around not depending on the machine. In my own way, so am I. That’s a longer story, and I’m still in the middle of it.

I don’t have the rebuild. I’m suspicious of everyone who says they do. What I can do is refuse to keep selling the tune-up. You can’t build anything on a story you already know isn’t true. You can build on the truth even when the truth is that the machine is gone.

Some of us ran it right up to the end.

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I learned more about America by being here.

1:00 AM. Valencia, Spain. A town that feels more West Coast than most places in Europe. Not LA, but maybe a bit “San Diego.” A different hotel room but the same routine. A day spent negotiating train stops, taxis and exchange rates.

Hint: the dollar sucks.

I put in my earbuds — not to fall asleep. I was past that. I wanted to see what was up in the world.

The Rest Is Politics. I’d had the name wrong in my head for days — kept calling it The Rest Is History, its sister show — until I listened last night and realized the correction mattered. This wasn’t historians narrating the distant past. It was the hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart dissecting a parliamentary election result that had landed hours earlier.

Two former political hacks. Both at least a decade older than me, but contemporaries in every way that counts — they came up through the same era of the game I did, just with a slightly different set of rules.

Campbell ran communications at the top of his government the way I ran rooms somewhere in that vicinity. Stewart sat in Parliament and lost his own party from the inside. Their accents make the whole enterprise sound posh, almost theatrical. But underneath the poshness is something I recognized instantly: real curiosity. Real excitement, deconstructing the moves.

The sound of two people who’ve been inside the machine and still, genuinely, can’t wait to find out what happens next.

I knew almost nothing when I landed in Europe. Starmer, Labour, Reform — names I knew certainly, but without any real weight.

And I lay there in the dark, fascinated.

Not informed.

Not analyzing.

Fascinated.

The particular electricity of people who clearly love the game discussing a result that actually could have gone either way. Coalition math. Wounded egos. A leader whose position was genuinely, structurally uncertain — not performed uncertainty, not manufactured suspense for a streaming platform, not delirious rants from influencers on the right and the left, but the real thing: nobody knew for certain what came next, and you could hear them not knowing, and loving the not-knowing, the way you love a sport whose outcome hasn’t been fixed.

I hadn’t felt that in years. Not about my own country’s politics. Not once.

One detail stayed with me longest, the one I kept turning over after the episode ended.

John Healey, the Defence Secretary, had resigned days earlier — not pushed, not caught in scandal, but walking out the door because he couldn’t put his name to a defence spending plan he believed left Britain dangerously underprepared at a moment of rising threats from Russia and elsewhere. He said so in a letter, in public, and meant it enough to give up the job over it.

He set the letter to his boss. The Prime Minister. From his own party.

And days later, Andy Burnham — the Mayor of Greater Manchester and Starmer’s most credible internal rival — won a special election by a landslide, in a seat his own party’s sitting MP gave up specifically so Burnham could run for it, with turnout actually higher than the last general election in that constituency.

The message wasn’t subtle: voters showing up in numbers nobody expected, handing Starmer’s chief challenger exactly what he needed to mount a real leadership fight.

Two different kinds of consequence, days apart. A minister who quit because he couldn’t live with a decision. A government that may lose its own leader because voters told it so, directly, with their feet, at a turnout governing parties dream of avoiding. And the way Campbell and Stewart discussed both, there was an assumption sitting underneath the conversation I didn’t immediately register because it’s so absent from how I think about my own country: that this was the system working. A message sent — by a colleague to his own government, and by voters to their own party.

The system absorbing it, in public, in real time, because the cost of pretending otherwise was higher than the cost of an uncomfortable headline.

I sat with that for a long time in the dark.

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In America right now our cabinet is a clown-show. A circle of sycophants — people who got their seats largely through money, who keep their seats through performance, and who lose their seats almost never through anything resembling a party’s own self-correction. Scandal doesn’t end careers anymore. It barely interrupts news cycles. There is no mechanism — none — by which a party says to its own: this was a bridge too far, and there will be a cost.

Some of this is structural. Coalition governments, shadow cabinets, parliamentary systems built for exactly this kind of internal accountability in a way our two-party presidential system was never designed to replicate. I understand the architecture is different. But underneath the architecture is an attitude, and the attitude is the thing worth stealing even if the mechanism doesn’t translate.

The willingness to say, out loud, inside your own party: that was unacceptable, and there will be consequences, starting with us.

I don’t hear that attitude anywhere in American politics right now. I hear something closer to whimpering — the sound of a party that can see something is wrong, says so in careful, hedged language, and then does nothing that would cost it anything to actually fix.

In 2024, I taught political communication during an American election cycle, in front of rooms of sharp, ambitious young students. And instead of analyzing strategy — the thing I was actually there to teach — I found myself in the agonizing position of having to halfway defend the baseline mechanics of reality.

I had to stand at a podium and help twenty-year-olds parse a presidential candidate standing on a debate stage claiming that Haitian immigrants were literally stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

I had to explain why a frontrunner calling his political opponents “treasonous” and declaring they should be jailed wasn’t just a spicy piece of campaign rhetoric — that it wasn’t normal.

To make the psychic friction worse, I was co-teaching the course with a long-time former Republican turned “independent” who spent the semester trying to rationalize those moments to the kids, treating authoritarian threats and xenophobic fabrications as completely valid, standard-issue political tactics.

It was exhausting. It felt less like teaching a discipline and more like trying to hold up a collapsing wall with my bare hands while someone next to me argued the wall was supposed to be crooked.

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I have been reading Democratic-aligned analysts this week talking about a vibe shift. Small wins. Polling movement. Trump’s numbers ticking down a few points here, a swing district trending differently there. The tone of relief in this commentary — the sense that the worst might be passing, that the fever might be breaking — is, to put it as bluntly as I can manage: bullshit.

Vibes don’t reach any of that. Vibes are the opiate you reach for when the actual diagnosis is too large to sit with, and I recognize the reach because I’ve made it myself, more than once, in this very Substack.

Anyone else remember the Kamala and Charli XCX 'brat' moment?

The easy version of this essay is nostalgia, and nostalgia is a lie I’m not interested in telling.

It would be easy to say: politics used to be fun, and now it isn’t. That’s not it. The drama I heard in that podcast — the intrigue, the real fuckery, the genuine stakes — is the same drama that made me fall in love with this work in a gym during the Iowa caucus decades ago.

Different country, different language of politics I’m still learning, but the same animating current.

Real contest. Real uncertainty. Multiple parties actually fighting for actual power, with actual paths to losing it, and actual mechanisms for holding their own accountable when they failed to use that power well.

That thing isn’t gone from the world. I was lying in a bed in Spain at one in the morning, proof of its life humming through my earbuds, delivered by two guys who’d spent their careers inside the same kind of rooms I had.

It’s gone from America.

What I sat with afterward was this: the form still exists. Somewhere. The uncertainty, the genuine multiparty fight for genuine power, the willingness of a party to discipline itself — all of it alive and well in a country I’d arrived in a week earlier knowing almost nothing about its politics.

Which means what I lost wasn’t politics. It was my politics. The specific American version. And it didn’t disappear because politics itself became less interesting. It disappeared because the contest stopped being a contest, and because the accountability stopped being accountability.

A few days before that night, I’d sat in a different room — Chatham House, London — listening to Baroness Minouche Shafik, Keir Starmer’s chief economic advisor, argue from the stage that we should apply the lessons of globalization to the challenge of AI. Nations coordinating. Treaties, summits, the slow, imperfect machinery of shared management.

And then Donald Trump did what he does: pulled the rug out from under her, and everyone else in that room, before the week was even over. One unilateral directive. No summit, no memorandum, no convening anyone agreed to. The table the Baroness was describing doesn’t exist.

America has a building that looks like a table anyway. Same flags, same vocabulary, same cable news set dressing — the same physical grammar The West Wing borrowed to sell its fantasy of noble, consequential politics.

I never bought that show. Guys like me, already hardened by the time it aired, thought it was too manicured, too pleased with itself. But even a knowing fantasy needs something to be nostalgic for, and the premise underneath all that velvet lighting was that the stakes were real — someone could win, someone could lose, and it would matter. That’s the part I miss. Not the manicured nobility. The assumption that the outcome was actually in play.

Increasingly, it isn’t — and no one pays the kind of price that minister paid.

You can’t get that electricity, the one I felt at 1 a.m. in Valencia, from a fixed fight.

You can perform it — cable news does, nightly, with graphics and countdown clocks — but performed uncertainty isn’t uncertainty. It’s theater built over the absence of the real thing, and at some level, audiences know it.

All of this made me sad. I guess it could be considered grief.

It is not grief for democracy as an abstraction. It’s not even, primarily, grief for the country, though that’s bound up in it too. It’s something smaller and stranger: grief for a feeling — the same one that first pulled me into this work, in an Iowa caucus, decades before I had language for any of it. I didn’t know it then, but I was tending something larger than any single campaign — a set of institutions and habits and democratic rituals that assumed good faith, assumed accountability, assumed the machinery connecting citizen action to political outcome still worked.

It did work. Then. I didn’t know yet what it would cost when it stopped.

That’s the feeling I lost. Not politics as a hobby. The transmission itself — organizing leading to votes leading to consequence, the wiring intact end to end, and a system willing to discipline itself when it failed.

I found all of it humming through a podcast at 1 a.m., alive and well in a political system I know very little about. And finding it there confirmed what finding it nowhere at home had only suggested: the fuel still exists in the world. It just isn’t burning here anymore, not the way it used to, not the way that matters.

Whether it can be relit — whether the structural work being proposed in pieces like the various “Reconstruction” agendas making the rounds, or the political work of an actual midterm, or something none of us has thought of yet, can restore a contest that’s genuinely contestable — I don’t know. I’m not offering a solution tonight. I’ve mostly stopped offering those.

What I have is the data point. The 1 a.m. proof. Somewhere, right now, the real thing is still happening, with real stakes, real accountability, and a real outcome nobody can yet call.

I’m flying home tomorrow.

I don’t know yet what it will feel like to land.

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P.S. — I wrote all of this in the dark, not knowing how any of it ended. Somewhere between finishing this and actually pressing send, Keir Starmer resigned. Burnham is the overwhelming favorite to replace him. The system did exactly what Campbell and Stewart assumed it would do, the thing I’d forgotten a system could do at all: it held someone accountable, in public, on schedule, with consequences attached. I didn’t see that coming with this kind of precision. I just happened to be listening, at 1 a.m., to two men who already knew the table was real.

Pretty unremarkable stuff.

But later in the night I felt pangs of anxiety. A feeling that I’ve felt many times before but in a very different way.

Election night. A place I’ve been countless times, either in a hotel room with a candidate and their family watching the results and getting the numbers, or in a ballroom watching results with other political operatives.

For the past few cycles it’s been in a TV studio, watching results from the Green Room and jumping on set for a quick hit on messaging, tactics, and what it all means.

I passed on it this year. Turned down the bookings. Decided I was done performing analysis of a system I no longer believe is functioning the way the analysis assumes it functions.

I’m still not sure that was the right call. There’s a version where I tell myself it was principled. A version where I was just tired. Probably both.

But watching from the outside is different. When you’re on set, the circus has a job for you. From the phone, there’s just the scrolling — and whatever you actually think, with no format to contain it.

So here’s what I would have said on television. And then what actually needs to be said.

What I would have said:

Accurate. Competent. Completely insufficient.

What needs to be said:

Spencer Pratt didn’t run a campaign. He ran a distribution test.

The ads that made him viable weren’t built by his team. A filmmaker with AI tools made them. Pratt shared them. Musk amplified them to 240 million followers. Trump endorsed him. Rogan gave him oxygen. The whole operation outsourced to AI and a billionaire’s attention, and it worked well enough to force a runoff in the second-largest city in America.

I spent a lot of time building the thing that got replaced.

Message strategy. Coalition mapping. Earned media. Testing.

The assumption underneath all of it was that viability had to be earned through craft. You built the argument, you found the audience, you earned the right to be taken seriously.

That assumption is gone. Not weakened.

Gone.

And the thirty percent who voted for Pratt had real reasons that predated the Batman video by a decade. The fires. A creative economy cratering — California’s film and television sector roughly 25 percent smaller than four years ago. Strikes, consolidation, streaming economics, production fleeing to cheaper states. Real people. Real losses. Real kindling.

The AI ads didn’t create the fire. They found the oxygen.

Now look north. The California governor’s race.

I wrote my senior thesis on the unintended consequences of campaign finance reform. That was over 30 years ago. The argument was simple: every reform produces a new way for insiders to exploit the system — because the people doing the exploiting are professionals and the reformers are idealists, and professionals work harder.

California’s top-two primary was passed in 2010 with a laundry list of promises — moderation, broader participation, less gridlock. Schwarzenegger championed it. The reformers won. Fifteen years later, the record doesn’t line up with what the advocates promised.

Tuesday night in Los Angeles is the proof. A fragmented Democratic field hands a runoff to a reality television personality. A fragmented Democratic field makes the race to be the state’s chief executive look far closer than it will really be.

The reform didn’t fix the machine. It handed the machine a new set of tools.

Same thesis. Three decades later.

Eight major Democratic candidates spent over a year raising money, filming ads, chasing endorsements. Nobody broke through. Nobody named anything. A veteran Democratic strategist said it on cable news without embarrassment: “Voters need a clue. They need some kind of signal from the powers that be — basically Pelosi and Newsom and Padilla — about which of these candidates they ought to take seriously.”

In Hungary, Péter Magyar ousted an authoritarian strongman with a campaign that started with a Facebook post.

California Democrats were supposed to wait for a signal from three gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, the Democratic consultant class did what it always does.

• Shit all over the other Democratic candidates.

• Protected parochial interests while cashing commission checks.

• Stabbed each other in the back while the opposition was left alone.

Pratt simply outsourced it all to AI.

I didn’t go on television Tuesday night because I didn’t want to say the first thing. I wanted to say the second thing, and there’s no format for it. No thirty-second slot. No toss back to anchor.

The kindling was already here. Has been for years. In the Valley, where I grew up, the grips and colorists and editors who built this industry are watching their livelihoods automated out from under them. In MacArthur Park, where federal agents occupied a public space for an hour and faced no consequence. In the green rooms, where people like me used to explain all of it in ways that made it feel manageable.

It isn’t manageable. It’s a system that processes grievance as content rather than converting it into consequence.

That’s what needed to be said.

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I just got back from a road trip. Drove almost 1,000 miles each way across Route 66 from LA to Santa Fe and back to watch our oldest daughter graduate from St. John’s College.

St. John’s is one of those places that exists outside the usual map of American higher education. It is serious, unusual, and confident in the conviction that a college can still be built around the slow, difficult, rewarding work of reading great books as they were intended.

What St. John’s offers is not a major in the usual sense, but a shared intellectual journey. Every student works off the same core curriculum, reading and discussing the works that have shaped Western thought — Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Marx, Newton, Dostoevsky, Einstein, and others — in small seminars where engagement is as important as the reading.

The commencement speaker was Ben Sasse: St. John’s alumnus, former U.S. Senator, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment, now dying of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer at 54.

A guy who went from these books to that Senate and tried to act on what the books taught him, and paid for it. Coming back to say something true before he ran out of time.

The graduation now felt like not just a shining moment for our family but also potent material for my writing. Maybe even a literary long-form essay.

I pitched it to a publication I admire and got some interest.

So, off I went with our dog Mochi, an empty back seat, and an open hold ready to be filled with my daughter’s possessions from her own journey.

I started where the road starts — or ends, depending on your direction — where Route 66 meets Palisades Park in Santa Monica, a stretch of grass and endless ocean views I have stood on hundreds of times, maybe more than a thousand. The Pacific behind me. The continent ahead.

Many generations came across this road going west, toward California, toward the promise. I was driving it going east. Toward the desert, toward the interior, toward our daughter who had spent four years going deeper instead of further.

I had voice memo prompts, a three-day itinerary, and a document full of thematic through-lines. I was going to write about the westward myth in reverse and slow thinking in a fast country. More than anything, I wanted to examine what a four-year bet on Plato actually meant now that the real world—the one that critics warned would “never prepare you for a career”—had arrived at the exact crisis St. John’s had spent decades preparing for.

It wasn’t long before pulling over for some gas that I’d see in a single frame the whole argument I had been making for a year:

Route 66 Cafe. “A Local Favorite Since 1978.” Lined up in front of it, stretching almost comically far across the parking lot, a row of Tesla Superchargers. Elon Musk’s infrastructure planted like white monoliths in front of the old American road. The Wagon Wheel bar behind it. A hand-painted mural.

Later, a crooked Route 66 sign plastered with stickers leaning against a telephone pole.

Gas at $9.59 a gallon behind a chain-link fence.

Nobody staged this. America staged it.

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Saturday was the ceremony.

Ben Sasse was good. More than good. He opened by telling slightly over a hundred graduates he was “high as a kite” on morphine — as he has every right to be. No speechwriters, no pretense, just a dying man with a St. John’s degree choosing to spend some of his remaining time talking to students who had read the same books he had.

He said that lifelong “work” as we know it was over, that AI would unbundle and rebundle every profession, that the biggest coming divide in American life would be between people who mastered the tools of technology and people who were mastered by them.

He said that the liberal arts — these books, this education — had given this class exactly what they needed to be in the first group.

He quoted Mick Jagger. He was funny. He was honest.

And then he pulled his punch in a very literary way. He argued that Orwell’s 1984 is no longer our biggest threat. That totalitarianism is yesterday’s danger. That the real enemy is Huxley’s Brave New World—not the boot on the face, but the smartphone as our modern soma; not a state crushing dissent, but an algorithm dissolving attention.

I sat in the audience and thought: these two things are not mutually exclusive.

A dying senator who has watched his Republican colleagues get destroyed one by one. Who paid his own political price for voting his conscience. Who has seen the power of the state deployed in ways that are unusual and unprecedented.

He got right up to the line — it is the duty of free people to oppose those who would use the state to compel souls — and then pivoted to Hong Kong and Iran.

Not Washington. Not the Senate he left.

I don’t say this to diminish him. He is an incredibly brave and honorable man doing something genuinely difficult. I say it because the gap between what he almost said and what he said stuck with me. It tells us that even the most courageous among us — even the dying - find it hard to name the thing sitting in the room.

The students felt it too. A few of my daughter’s friends, when I asked, said they were blown away to hear from a fellow “Johnnie” and it deeply resonated but felt he hadn’t quite arrived where they were waiting for him to go.

I woke up Sunday morning in Santa Fe feeling like I was close to the story, but came up just short.

The essay I had driven 800 miles to write hadn’t materialized. The dramatic insight hadn’t arrived at the podium. I had road images and voice memos and the most important memory of all - our daughter’s name being read as she crossed the stage with 100 other students from 100 different places.

But not the revelation I had gone looking for.

I packed the car. We loaded four years of her books and the rest of her dorm into the back. Mochi settled into the seat. And we pointed west.

Somewhere on that drive home — Sophia in the passenger seat, her entire St. John’s education in the trunk, Mochi riding shotgun — I heard about the Pope.

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Magnifica Humanitas.

Magnificent Humanity. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, released May 25th. Forty-four thousand words on artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. Signed on May 15th — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Church’s foundational document on labor and human dignity.

I won’t pretend I read all forty-four thousand words in a moving car on a Sunday, or even at the hotel later that night. But did — and his analysis at Letters from Leo is where I’d send anyone who wants the full theological and political weight of what Leo has done.

What follows is my own less expert but no less sincere attempt to say why it matters to someone who arrived at this document from Route 66 rather than Rome.

The first American pope in history chose this moment to say, in the oldest moral language available to Western civilization, what our elected officials and technology executives and senators — even the dying ones — have not managed to say clearly.

I am most certainly not a Catholic. I am not particularly religious. The institutional Church carries a history I cannot simply ignore, and my instinct toward any global religious authority has always been skepticism.

I told my daughter what the Pope had said, and her reaction was complicated in a way I recognized immediately — the disgust with the tech elite was instant, and it was followed almost immediately by the harder question: can a global religious institution actually move any needle on any of this? Does it matter what the Pope says?

I know that energy. I share a lot of it.

But then we talked about something else. About the Church not as the institution with its failures and its politics, but as the longest continuously operating carrier of classical thought in Western civilization. The institution that kept Aristotle alive when no one else would. That built the universities. That is, in its way, the oldest Great Books program in the world. St. John’s exists because that tradition survived. She spent four years inside it.

I watched the thought begin to compute. I left it there.

Here is what the Pope said that Sasse didn’t quite say.

That is the architecture of the problem stated plainly — private technological power that has outrun democratic governance, that has swapped the actual mechanisms of public life while everyone was watching the news cycle.

I have been trying to write that sentence for a year.

He wrote it in an encyclical.

The tech oligarchs don’t own what they think they own. The oldest continuous institution in Western civilization just said so.

He warned against what he called the “Babel Syndrome” — the illusion that a single digital language can translate everything, including the mystery of a person, into data and performance.

He said workers are being forced to adapt to the speed of machines rather than machines being designed to serve workers.

He called for a “disarmed AI” — freed not just from autonomous weapons but from the entire logic of armed competition, economic domination, and cognitive capture.

Disarmed AI.

That is not a religious statement. That is the most precise political and moral diagnosis of this moment that I have encountered from anyone in a position of institutional authority.

Anywhere.

I’m not sure I was ready for that.

I am aware that this document will have roughly forty-eight hours of news cycle life before the next White House episode swallows it. I am writing this knowing it will be a trending topic by Wednesday and largely forgotten by Friday.

That is fine. And it is also the whole problem.

The encyclical took 135 years of Catholic Social Doctrine to build to. It addresses a transformation that will shape the next century. It will be consumed and discarded at the speed of a news alert. The gap between the depth of the argument and the speed of the forgetting is precisely what Leo is warning about. The medium is consuming the message in real time, which is what the medium was designed to do.

This document will still be here in ten years. The question is whether we will have read it.

I went to Santa Monica, stood where Route 66 begins — or ends — and drove east through the American myth my family drove into going west. I stopped in the Arizona desert at a Route 66 Cafe with Tesla Superchargers in the parking lot and gas at $9.59 a gallon behind a chain-link fence. I watched a dying senator come home to the school that made him and almost say the thing everyone needed him to say. I came home thinking I had failed to find a story.

And then the Pope named the thing.

Not in the Senate. Not in Silicon Valley. Not in a White House press briefing or a congressional hearing or a CEO’s open letter. From Rome. In forty-four thousand words. In the tradition of Rerum Novarum and Augustine and Aristotle and every institution that ever tried to hold the line between human dignity and the power that wants to reduce it to a data point.

The longer essay — the road, the desert, the Continental Divide, the conversation I kept having in my head with Ben Sasse about what we both got wrong, and what this particular moment in history feels like if you’re carrying a certain kind of inherited memory — that’s still coming.

Some things take longer to arrive.

Which is, of course, exactly what St. John’s has been saying about education all along.

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I’ve been deliberately not watching.

After thirty years of building campaigns around the idea that attention was the thing — that if you paid close enough attention, understood the mechanics well enough, you could shape what happened next — I’ve mostly stopped. Not out of despair. Something closer to the discipline of not drowning in what you can’t affect.

But some things get through anyway.

This week it was two. Robert Kagan in The Atlantic — a neoconservative, not someone given to melodrama — writing plainly that we have lost the confrontation with Iran.

Not stumbled. Not retreated strategically. Lost.

And Trump in Beijing, meeting Xi — accompanied by Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, and a dozen other CEOs whose combined net worth approaches a trillion dollars.

CEOs have traveled with presidents before. But these aren’t trade ambassadors. They’re the Houses, negotiating their own market access alongside, or instead of, anything resembling national interest.

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I was in junior high school during the Iranian hostage crisis. I remember Ted Koppel opening the nightly news with the countdown — Day 47. Day 112. Day 200.

Then finally, Day 454. Hostages are coming home.

I remember the yellow ribbons. The shock of watching Americans see their country fail, and a presidency dissolve because of it.

I didn’t know what limits actually looked like.

It isn’t the specific failures that land hardest. It’s what they reveal about the mythology underneath — the one my generation built careers inside, the one that said American power, however misapplied, was ultimately self-correcting. That the system bent but held. That it always resolves.

It doesn’t always resolve.

China has been playing this out for fifty years. The conservative project that produced this moment in our nation— the Federalist Society, the donor networks, the think tanks — spent forty years building toward it.

Patient, architectural, generational work.

And we — those who believed in the liberal order, who staffed it and defended it and taught it to students — kept responding to each individual move. Winning some. Losing others. Never quite seeing that the chess match was someone else’s. That we’d been playing a different game entirely.

Trump in Beijing isn’t a foreign policy summit. We used to send diplomats to talk about human rights and security, now we’re sending the Houses to talk about deals. China spent fifty years building toward this moment. The Houses spent a decade buying access to it.

The tempo failure and the power failure turn out to be the same failure.

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Meanwhile, this week was also the close of a semester in the classroom. Twenty-two-year-olds who came to college four years ago to study communicationd, pre-law, journalism — whatever field excited them as graduating high school seniors.

They are leaving a very different world.

Next week I’m driving east with my dog to watch my daughter graduate. She chose a different kind of education — four years at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, the program many of our friends and family considered impractical.

No majors, no career tracks. No AI.

Every student follows the same curriculum, unchanged since 1937: the original texts, not summaries of them. Not Rousseau’s theories — Rosseau’s actual words. In physics they reconstruct Newton’s experiments with the tools Newton had. They throw objects off buildings and measure the results. They learn what it felt like to not yet know.

When we first told people about her choice, the response was nearly universal. “How interesting. But what is she going to do with that?”

It’s a fair question. Or it was - four years ago.

I’m driving out next week. Mochi in the back seat. Route 66 most of the way. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ve learned enough this year to know that’s probably the right condition for finding it.

More from the road.

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I knew the system was broken and captured.

I tried to outsmart it anyway.

I wasn’t alone. A whole generation of us did — operatives, organizers, strategists, true believers across the spectrum. We saw it clearly and kept playing. Better messaging. Right tempo. Smarter framework. One more move inside a machine we already knew was rigged. We told each other the same story in the same rooms for thirty years: that the right candidate, the right message, the right moment could thread the needle.

We were wrong. But that’s not the hardest part to admit.

The hardest part is that we knew.

Six months ago I wrote about Proposition 50. Seventy-five days from threat to implementation. Quantum-tempo campaigning overwhelming deliberation. Democrats could win, I argued, by matching the speed of the opposition.

I was right on the tactical side.

I missed what was happening underneath.

While I was analyzing tempo — who moved faster, who spent more, whose surrogates generated more algorithmic amplification — a thirty-year project was completing itself in the courts. Not fast. Slow. Deliberate. Decision by decision, appointment by appointment, doctrine by doctrine, until this week when the Voting Rights Act was functionally eliminated and eight states began redrawing maps within hours of the ruling.

I watched an elected Tennessee State Representative get physically barred from the room where his district was being erased.

State legislatures in the South re-opened deep wounds that most of us thought had been repaired, or at least patched up.

I have no framework for that. Not because I lack the analytical tools. Because frameworks are for systems that still have floors. What I watched this week wasn’t a system misfiring. It was a system working exactly as designed by the people who spent thirty years designing it.

The article I wrote about the California redistricting sprint was about the weather. How to use the prevailing winds to your advantage and get to the destination faster. This week was geology.

And here is what the geology reveals: while we were running campaigns and messaging strategies and issuing “strongly worded statements” they were building something permanent. They were patient in a way we never were.

They didn’t try to outsmart the machine. They replaced it.

There is no needle left to thread.

This weekend, across the country, long-time operatives, strategists, and political and policy types are gathering in rooms trying to understand what just happened.

Convenings. Presentations. Frameworks for fighting back.

I don’t doubt the sincerity. I share the impulse.

But I keep thinking about what Camus called philosophical suicide — the leap away from an unbearable truth toward the comfort of a system that lets you keep functioning without fully confronting what you’re looking at. The alternative to staring directly at the geology is to keep analyzing the weather. To propose bank-shot legal strategies, as House Democrats did this weekend, that would require replacing an entire state Supreme Court in order to reinstate a map that voters approved and courts voided.

To schedule the next convening.

To build the next framework.

I understand it. I’ve done it myself. For thirty years.

But the convenings are not going to close the gap between the system we believed in and the one that actually exists. The frameworks assume a floor that this week confirmed is gone.

There is no needle left to thread.

I don’t have a solution. I’m not going to offer one. What I have is this: the admission that clarity about a broken system is not the same as being outside it. You can see the capture clearly and still be captured — by habit, by craft, by the professional identity built inside the machine you know is broken. By the community of people around you who are all telling each other the same story.

That’s where we were. That’s what this week ended.

We knew. We tried to outsmart it.

We were wrong to try.

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Didion opened Slouching Towards Bethlehem with a line she borrowed from Yeats.

She was writing about California in 1968. It keeps coming back to me today.

So I don’t sound like a pretentious intellectual: I’m not always reaching for Joan Didion after a long day. There are other options.

Sometimes it’s Dodger talk after a late game, listening to fans from every random neighborhood in Southern California wait on hold for an hour just to get 45 seconds to argue with the host. Other times it’s a rabbit hole I’ll leave unspecified.

I am a normal person living through an abnormal moment, and I want you to know that before I get philosophical on you.

But this week, it was Didion. And Camus. And I think it’s worth saying why.

There’s a particular kind of week that doesn’t announce itself as different. The outrages arrive at the same pace. The notifications stack the same way. And then somewhere around Wednesday you realize something has shifted — not in the world, but in you. The tools feel heavier. The frameworks that usually help you see clearly start to feel like obligations.

This was one of those weeks.

I’m not going to catalog all of it. You lived it too. But let me name a few things that were sitting with me by Friday night.

• The Supreme Court handed down a ruling that felt like a seventy-five year setback on civil rights, delivered with a shrug.

• Trump’s image is now literally on the American passport — the document that says to the world this is who we are.

• Pete Hegseth appeared before Congress and delivered testimony so breathtaking in its combination of arrogance and incoherence that I genuinely didn’t know whether to laugh or call someone. I got serious Death of Stalin vibes.

• Thousands more jobs disappeared — not in some future tense, AI-is-coming way, but right now, this week, at Meta, Amazon, Snap, Disney, and Nike.

Each thing individually would have been a story. Together, at this pace, they become something else. Not news. Weather. A permanent condition of the atmosphere.

The center was not holding.

A few weeks ago I got a call from a producer I’ve worked with many times. A show I’ve appeared on, a host I genuinely like and respect. They wanted me to come in — talk about the current moment, the California governor’s race, the LA mayor’s race, who’s up, who’s down, why someone waited until the end to run TV ads or if they are catching fire on social.

I looked at my calendar. Teaching obligations almost every night. I used that as my excuse the first time.

They called back.

So I got on the phone with the host and tried to explain. And something happened that surprised me: I got emotional. Not upset — fired up. I found myself talking about the Houses, about FDR welcoming the hatred of the powerful, about what it means to wait until the final weeks of a campaign to buy your media — because that’s what the consultant class always tells you to do — while the architecture of democratic life is being quietly replaced underneath us.

Somewhere in the middle of it I had the uncomfortable awareness that I might be insulting him — implying that the work he does every night under the lights isn’t worth my time.

That wasn’t it at all. He understood. He was generous about it.

But I’d never had that conversation before. I’ve always shown up. That’s what you do. You show up, you give the take, you drive home, and post it on your social media to show your relevance.

Something has changed. I’m still working out what it is.

Meanwhile I’m in the final weeks of a semester unlike any I have experienced.

My students — PR, advertising, communications, some with their eyes set on Hollywood — are finishing finals. Graduating. Excited in the way you’re supposed to be excited when you’ve worked hard and you’re about to step into the next thing.

And here I am standing at the front of the room knowing things I can’t quite say out loud.

The field they trained for is being restructured in real time. Social media jobs, PR positions, entry-level creative work — the ladder they planned to climb is losing rungs while we’re talking about it. AI isn’t coming for their careers in some distant future tense. It’s here, this semester, doing work that used to require a junior hire and a year of on-the-job experience to get right.

The ceremony of graduation continues performing its meaning. The excitement is real. The pride is real. And the gap between that excitement and what’s waiting for them is the most absurd thing I’ve witnessed all year — the ritual intact, the reality quietly different, everyone smiling for the photograph.

I love these kids. I want to be wrong about what I know.

I don’t think I’m wrong.

So. Friday night. Eleven o’clock. The week on my chest.

I put on a podcast called Philosophize This. If you haven’t found it, Stephen West takes serious thinkers and translates them into plain language without making them smaller. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel the ideas were always accessible and you just needed someone to open the door.

I’ve been going back to Camus. Two works, one broadcast. The same question underneath both of them.

The Plague first. Camus wrote it during the Nazi occupation of France — the rats carrying the disease are not subtle as metaphors go. But the real argument is about what you do when catastrophe becomes the permanent condition. Dr. Rieux doesn’t treat patients because he believes he can stop the plague. He treats them because the alternative is surrender. The diagnosis is grim. The response to a grim diagnosis is not to stop diagnosing. It’s to keep showing up — not as heroism, not as performance, but as the simple refusal to let the thing win by default.

And then Sisyphus. The boulder rolls back down. Every time. That’s not the punishment, that’s the reality. The question is what you do with the knowledge that it will. Whether that hollows you out or whether you find, in the pushing itself, something worth doing.

Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I’m not quite there. But I understand what he meant.

I’ve been writing diagnoses for months. The Houses. The architectural swap. The broken contract. The dead vocabulary. I believe all of it. And I also know that diagnosis, delivered at sufficient volume and frequency, starts to become its own kind of noise. There’s a version of this work that’s Rieux — showing up, treating patients, refusing surrender. And there’s a version that’s just chasing the next outrage to be right about.

The TV conversation forced that question. The graduating students made it impossible to ignore.

So I reached for the books. For the podcast. For the writers who sat inside their own catastrophes and found language for what it means to keep going when going feels inadequate.

Didion wrote The White Album during her own unraveling. She held California burning and her own disintegration in the same sparse, descriptive sentences, and somehow that steadiness — that refusal to look away from either — is what made it literature instead of just breakdown.

That’s what I’m reaching for at midnight. Not answers. Just a little insight to make sense of all of this that goes beyond the hot takes of social media, or even the deeply considered essays that many here on Substack show up with every day.

If you’re also somewhere this weekend, considering another dizzying week in America and wondering how to hold all of this at once — the political moment, the professional disruption, the gap between the ceremony and the reality — maybe it helps to know you’re not alone in the reaching.

Yeats said the center was not holding.

Didion borrowed it and made it California.

I’m borrowing it now and making it this week.

The center is not holding. And yet we keep going anyway.

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Philosophize This — The Plague / Myth of Sisyphus

A beautiful Saturday afternoon in Southern California. While most of us in these parts were recovering from LeBron James’s mind-boggling performance — putting the Lakers up 3-0 in a series where they were heavy underdogs — certain corners of the nation were looking toward Washington. They were waiting to see what President Trump would say to a room full of journalists he has branded “the enemy of the people,” “human scum,” and “phony.”

Outside the Beltway, I’m not sure anyone actually cared. It felt like just another anachronistic ritual in a system turned upside down — Trump’s signature on the dollar, the demolition of the East Wing, massive presidential iconography draped over the Kennedy Center.

Background noise.

Then phones started lighting up. Not again.

And this time, the shooter came just five miles from where I live.

I. The Interregnum as Crime Scene

This is what life inside the interregnum feels like. Not the academic version. The real one. A Saturday afternoon that begins with basketball and ends with a notification that someone took a train from Los Angeles, checked into a D.C. hotel, and walked into the one room where the entire American line of succession sits together — armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and a knife.

I’m not going to pretend I understand the specific fracture that leads a person to that decision. I’m not going to use this man to score points about gun control or radicalization. That’s not what this is.

What I will say is this: the ambient violence that has become the white noise of American life is not separate from the structural argument I’ve been making in these pages. It is the argument. This is what happens at the end of a long chain of broken promises, hollowed-out institutions, and liquidated trust.

The building didn’t fall down overnight. It’s been a controlled demolition for a long time.

II. The Innovator’s Dilemma Is A Comfort Blanket

By Sunday morning the takes had already arrived. Security failures. Mental health. The lone wolf narrative — the standard vocabulary of American tragedy that allows us to process the act without confronting the rot underneath.

In my inbox, two pieces from serious Democratic strategists. Their solution for 2026: better tools. Always-on local media infrastructure. Psychographic targeting. Relational organizing at scale.

I read both carefully. Both are right about the symptoms. Both are profoundly wrong about the disease.

One deployed the Innovator’s Dilemma — the Clayton Christensen framework explaining how successful institutions fail because they keep doing what worked yesterday while the world moves to tomorrow.

Democrats, the argument goes, are Kodak. The Right is Apple. The party is stuck in a calcified model of television buys and October door-knocking while the environment has fragmented into a million digital pieces. The fix: build a better megaphone.

All true. None of it sufficient.

The Innovator’s Dilemma assumes the product is good and only the distribution is broken. Kodak had great film — they just couldn’t deliver it into a digital world. Fix the distribution model and the product finds its audience.

But what if the product itself has lost credibility? What if the message — not the medium — is what voters have stopped believing?

You can build the most sophisticated always-on influencer pipeline in history. You can target a household with psychographic precision. And then what do you put in the pipe?

The same message that tested well in suburban Phoenix in 2024. The same message voters already heard and already discounted. Delivered now with better tools, through better channels, to people who have already decided it doesn’t describe their lives.

You are delivering a product that doesn’t describe the reality of the people receiving it. You aren’t fixing a distribution problem. You’re trying to sell film to people who have already watched the house burn down.

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III. The Moral Gap

Here is what the toolkit argument can’t say — because the professional identities of the people making it depend on the silence.

The transmission mechanism isn’t broken because of bad tools. It’s broken because the party using the tools has made itself untrustworthy.

I know this from the inside.

A year ago, I was at a fundraiser at a billionaire’s home in Los Angeles. I got five minutes face-to-face with Hakeem Jeffries. I talked to him the way you talk to East Coast politicians: nose-to-nose, direct, no bullshit.

I told him ICE was out here disappearing people. I told him that in Rochester, ordinary citizens were rising up against federal agents on their own. I told him that if the party didn’t find its voice now, the fire would spread.

He nodded. Handed me to his fundraiser — a kid who listened politely and told me they couldn’t stir up problems in Democratic swing seats.

Then he handed me his business card.

A few months later, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were shot dead by federal agents on a Minneapolis street.

No amount of relational organizing infrastructure fixes that. No psychographic targeting closes that gap. That gap isn’t algorithmic. It’s moral.

The toolkit assumes the building is standing. The building is gone. And the people proposing the better tools are, in many cases, the same people who handed me business cards while the floor was on fire.

I don’t say that with contempt. I say it with the clarity of someone who spent thirty years inside that same machinery and defended it long past the point of honesty.

My students could smell the bullshit before I could finish the sentence. They asked about NAFTA, about 2008, about why the arc of the universe felt like a flat line. I gave them the trained answers. Technically accurate. Morally vacant.

IV. The Naming Is The Political Act

This isn’t an argument against tools. It’s an argument about sequence.

The toolkit matters. But it is downstream of something the Democratic Party has been unwilling to produce: a true thing, said plainly, by someone willing to take the heat for saying it.

When Teddy Roosevelt stood at Osawatomie, he named the railroads, the trusts, the financiers. He didn’t do it with a better campaign infrastructure. He did it with the moral authority of someone who had been inside the machine and could no longer pretend it served the people it claimed to serve.

When FDR welcomed the hatred of the economic royalists, the naming was the political act. Once the truth was spoken, the infrastructure for the fight built itself around it.

Péter Magyar in Hungary didn’t build an influencer pipeline. He posted a Facebook video saying six words that were true. The infrastructure didn’t create the message. The truth was so load-bearing that the infrastructure grew around it.

Democrats have the sequence exactly backwards. They are building the megaphone before they have anything worth amplifying. They are optimizing the delivery system before they’ve decided to tell the truth.

Build the argument first. The tools will find you.

V. The Aftermath

It’s Monday morning in Southern California. LeBron and the Lakers dropped Game 4 last night. The shield of a 41-year-old who seemed briefly invincible has taken a dent — a reminder that even the most incredible things operate within the limits of time.

Cole Allen is in federal custody. The Correspondents’ Dinner is a crime scene. Trump is on Truth Social promoting a new ballroom for a White House that no longer functions as a house of the people.

And in my inbox, serious people are writing serious pieces about the Innovator’s Dilemma.

I don’t doubt their sincerity. I shared it for most of my professional life. I built campaigns on those same assumptions. I defended that framework to students who already knew it didn’t describe the world they were living in.

But I can’t make that defense anymore. Not after Minneapolis. Not after the Correspondents’ Dinner. Not after watching the Houses consolidate while the party debated whether to run on affordability or abundance.

The toolkit is not the problem. The toolkit is the symptom.

The problem is that the party cannot name the Houses because it runs on the same logic as the Houses. And until someone is willing to say the true thing — specifically, by name, without apology — the toolkit is just a better way to deliver a message nobody believes.

The building is gone.

Build the argument first.

Then build the tools to carry it.

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Since I published Name the Houses on Sunday, one name has topped every list of additions readers have sent me.

Alex Karp. Palantir Technologies.

Recently, Palantir posted excerpts on X from Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, in what one leading tech publication called a “Manifesto as Subtle as a MAGA hat.”

As of this writing, it has thirty-three million views.

Mike Brock, who writes here on Substack, wrote the definitive psychological profile of it yesterday. Read it.

Here is what I’d add.

Palantir built the software ICE uses to track and detain immigrants. It built significant portions of America’s military targeting architecture. It runs inside the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, health systems, financial crime networks, and local police departments across the country.

It didn’t do this by force. It did it by becoming too big to fail.

Not in the financial sense — though the parallel is exact. In 2008, the banks had made themselves so essential to the functioning of the economy that removing them would have caused more damage than tolerating them. The government didn’t rescue the banks because they deserved it. It rescued them because the alternative was worse.

Palantir has engineered the same logic into the machinery of the state. By the time an agency has run on their systems for two or three years, nobody remembers how to do the work without them. The data lives in their architecture. The workflows run on their tools. The analysts have never been trained on anything else.

You don’t fire Palantir. You don’t even know how to start that conversation without disrupting operations people depend on.

The banks were too big to fail. The House of Palantir has made itself too embedded to remove.

Karp’s 22-point civilizational manifesto is the philosophical wrapper for this strategy.

• Translation: Palantir’s government contracts aren’t extraction, they’re an obligation. The House isn’t taking tribute. It’s paying one.

• Translation: The Palantir product pitch rendered as civilizational argument. Buy our software or the West falls.

• Translation: Your moral objections are irrelevant. The weapons exist either way. The only serious question is whether Palantir profits from them or its competitors do.

• Translation: A larger military produces more procurement. More procurement produces more Palantir contracts.

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What would Teddy and FDR Say?

FDR named the economic royalists in Philadelphia in 1936. He said they had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor — other people’s lives.”

He wasn’t describing evil. He was describing dependency. How concentrated power makes itself indispensable to the machinery of government until the machinery can no longer function without it.

TR saw the same thing twenty-six years earlier at Osawatomie. The railroads didn’t just own the trains. They owned the politicians who regulated the trains, the judges who ruled on the regulations, and the newspapers that covered the rulings. They had inserted themselves firmly inside the architecture of the state.

Both men understood something that the Democratic Party has forgotten: you cannot reform what you cannot name. The naming isn’t rhetoric. It’s the precondition for everything that follows.

The House of Palantir is the architecture of 2026.

The Gilded Age royalists bought the machinery of government from the outside. The House of Palantir built itself into the machinery from the inside — ICE case management, military targeting architecture, intelligence community data infrastructure, financial crime networks, predictive policing. By the time anyone noticed, removal had become operationally unthinkable.

That’s not corruption in the traditional sense. It’s something TR and FDR never fully confronted because it didn’t exist yet: a private company that has made itself so essential to the functions of the state that the state’s interest and the company’s interest have become indistinguishable.

TR broke the trusts through antitrust law. FDR named the royalists and built the regulatory architecture that constrained them. Both approaches assumed you could identify where the private interest ended and the public function began.

With Palantir, that line has been deliberately erased.

Which is why naming it is the beginning, not the end. You can’t simply remove what has been architected into the foundation. You rescaffold around it — moratorium on new contracts, mandatory interoperability requirements, open data standards, procurement reform — while it’s still running.

TR didn’t dismantle Standard Oil in a day. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890. The breakup of Standard Oil came in 1911. Twenty-one years of naming, litigating, building the legal architecture for accountability before the structure changed.

That’s twelve rounds, not one punch.

But you can’t start the fight without naming what you’re fighting.

The House of Palantir.

Name it.

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I am not a pundit. I am not an academic. I’m an apparatchik — a loyalist, a believer, an LA guy who did some Philly ward politics, managed a few campaigns and spent thirty years around the Democratic machinery because I thought the machinery worked. I sat in rooms where decisions got made and watched how they got made.

I named my agency Message because I believed that the right message, delivered with discipline to the right people at the right moment could move behavior.

It worked. For a while.

I am not writing this as a partisan. I am writing this as someone who is watching candidates and causes I worked for become incapable of doing the one thing that would save them — and watched them choose, repeatedly and deliberately, not to do it.

We just saw a man topple sixteen years of authoritarian rule in Hungary with the largest electoral mandate in his country’s democratic history. He may not be a perfect fit for our American moment, but he knew what Democrats have forgotten, or never learned, or chosen to ignore — and it is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker:

Name the Houses.

Not “the system.” Not “special interests.” Not “the wealthy” or “the elites” or any other abstraction that lets the guilty parties sleep at night.

The Houses. The specific families. The specific people.

The specific decisions that broke the specific promises made to specific Americans who showed up and worked and played by the rules and got nothing back.

That’s the argument. Everything else follows from it.

I. We Have Been Here Before

Not once. Twice. At least in the previous century.

In 1856, the abolitionist John Brown fought a battle in a small Kansas town called Osawatomie against forces trying to make slavery permanent in America. The blood soaked into the ground.

Fifty-four years later, Theodore Roosevelt chose that ground deliberately. He stood in Osawatomie and delivered what became known as the New Nationalism speech. He had been president. He had been inside the machinery. He knew exactly how it worked and who it served. And he chose that particular field — the field where the fight against one form of concentrated, dehumanizing power had been joined — to name another.

He argued that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community.

He named the railroads. He named the trusts. He named the financiers.

He didn’t call them “the system.” He called them what they were: people who had taken more than they were owed and used their excess to buy the machinery of government.

He didn’t do it alone. The muckrakers had been at work for years — Upton Sinclair naming the meatpackers, Ida Tarbell dismantling Standard Oil, Lincoln Steffens mapping the corruption of city governments. Journalists and writers had done the diagnostic work.

What TR provided was something different: political standing. The willingness of someone who had been inside the machinery to name it from within. That combination — the documented evidence and the insider witness — is what made the naming stick.

He kept going.

Twenty-six years later, Franklin Roosevelt stood before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and named them again.

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. Political tyranny was wiped out there on July 4, 1776. Roosevelt understood the choice of ground.

He had come to Philadelphia to name a new tyranny.

He called them economic royalists. And he didn’t reach for abstraction:

He named what they had taken:

He named what that concentration had done to everyone else:

And then he named what they had done with that control:

When they complained, he answered them directly:

And then, four months later, at Madison Square Garden, on the last night of the campaign, he said the line that every Democrat in America should have somewhere visible:

He won forty-six states.

He also said something that night in Philadelphia that has not aged a day:

Read that. Then ask yourself what the Democratic Party has done with that rendezvous.

Both moments — TR at Osawatomie, FDR in Philadelphia — came after periods of consolidation that looked permanent. That looked inevitable. The railroads and the trusts and the financial dynasties of the Gilded Age looked as unassailable in 1910 as the Houses look today.

They weren’t permanent. They ended the moment someone with standing named them out loud and refused to apologize for it.

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II. Where We Are

Here is where we stand in April 2026.

The President of the United States threatened to destroy a civilization and backed down with eighty minutes to spare. Gas prices are soaring. A war ended roughly where it started. Tariffs are hollowing out household budgets. By every conventional measure, the opposition party should be surging.

It isn’t.

The Democratic Party is less popular than the president it opposes. A Democratic pollster — not a conservative critic, a Democratic pollster — said it plainly: “The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party.”

That is not a messaging problem. That is a party that has lost the right to name the enemy because it hasn’t been willing to name itself.

The Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci called moments like this the interregnum — the crisis that consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this vacuum, he wrote, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. The Houses are a morbid symptom. They are not the new order. They are what fills the vacuum when the social contract breaks and nobody names it — when institutions that were supposed to mediate between concentrated power and ordinary people get outrun rather than destroyed.

Democratic institutions operate at human speed. Power now moves at algorithmic speed. By the time you’ve identified the threat and scheduled the hearing, three more precedents have been set and you’re already solving yesterday’s crisis.

The Houses didn’t replace democracy. They outran it.

Yes, Democrats are winning special elections. They are narrowing margins in districts Trump carried. The congressional ballot favors them heading into the midterms. The consultant class will point to all of it — and they won’t be wrong.

But winning special elections while your brand is at a thirty-five year low is not a strategy. It’s a stay of execution.

The pendulum swings back. The promises don’t get delivered. The working class moves further away. The next figure — smoother than Trump, smarter than Trump — is already watching. And the Houses keep consolidating.

This is not about the midterms. Democrats may well win the House on the strength of Trump’s unpopularity alone but this is about the next 20-30 years. It is about the world our kids will grow up in. It is about whether the Democratic Party finds its purpose before it becomes irrelevant — not weakened, not diminished, but gone, replaced by something that hasn’t been named yet because the vacuum is still forming.

This is about whether what TR built and FDR extended survives the interregnum - or whether we watched it disappear while arguing about affordability, abundance, and Dem leaders share memes on their Instagram pages about the price of gas.

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III. What Magyar Knew

Last Sunday, Péter Magyar ended sixteen years of authoritarian rule in Hungary. He did it in a country with a gerrymandered electoral system, a captured media, a compromised judiciary, and a government that had spent years weaponizing every culture war flashpoint available.

He won with the largest mandate in the history of Hungarian democracy.

He didn’t win on policy. He didn’t win on ideology. He won because two years earlier, in February 2024, he gave an interview to a small Hungarian media outlet after years inside the Orbán government — years of watching the machinery up close — and finally said the thing nobody inside had been willing to say out loud:

“A few families own half the country.”

That interview has been viewed nearly three million times in a country of ten million people. It didn’t become a campaign slogan or appear on yard signs. It became a movement — because he had named the machinery with the precision and the anger of someone who had operated it, and the country recognized what he was describing.

He also did something that many in today’s Democratic Party will likely never do. He ignored the culture war. Completely.

Hungary is not America, and Magyar is not an American politician. But consider what he was up against. Sixteen years of Orbán meant sixteen years of culture war weaponization — anti-immigrant fever, anti-LGBTQ legislation, anti-Brussels nationalism, Putin-friendly sovereignty rhetoric. The full arsenal.

Magyar looked at all of it and made a strategic decision that looks almost incomprehensible from inside the today’s Democratic Party: he refused to fight on any of that terrain.

The Pride parade in Budapest was banned by Orbán. Magyar said nothing about it. Not because he was indifferent — but because he understood that the culture war is a trap. The moment you’re arguing about the Pride parade or transgender athletes or any of the other battlefields the Houses have prepared, you’re fighting on their ground, with their rules, toward their preferred outcome. You have already lost before the first vote is cast.

Magyar went everywhere instead. Small towns, rural areas, deep into territory Orbán had owned for sixteen years. He showed up in the places where the establishment had stopped showing up, and he said the same thing every time. He didn’t write off geography. He didn’t assume the urban coalition was sufficient.

Magyar was untainted not because he was an outsider but because he was willing to say what insiders know and won’t say. The knowledge was the weapon. The courage to use it was the campaign.

He won.

IV. The Broken Contract

Here is the argument in its plainest form, because it needs to be repeated until someone with the right standing says it.

Bernie Sanders has been saying something like this for thirty years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says versions of it. They are not wrong about the diagnosis. But the frame arrives pre-labeled: democratic socialism, the left, the squad - and half the country has decided what it thinks about that label before the argument lands. The Houses have spent decades making sure of it.

Magyar won as a conservative. He named the same machinery. He won the same voters. He just didn’t give the machinery a label to run against.

The broken contract argument doesn’t belong to the left. It belongs to anyone willing to say it without the ideological packaging that lets the powerful dismiss it before it lands. That person doesn’t have to be a socialist. They don’t have to be progressive. They have to be angry, specific, and unwilling to apologize.

It sounds like this:

You worked. You played by the rules. You showed up. You did what your parents told you to do, what the economy promised would be rewarded, what the country said would be enough.

And they broke the deal.

Not the system. Not Washington. Not elites. They broke it.

Specific people. Specific names.

The House of Musk took billions in government subsidies to build his companies and then ran an unelected agency dismantling the federal workforce while posting memes. Your tax dollars built his launchpad. His board gave him a trillion-dollar pay package. What did you get?

The House of Trump promised to fight for the forgotten American and delivered tax cuts for the wealthy and chaos for everyone else. He named enemies — the wrong ones — but named them. That’s more than the other side did.

The House of Bezos killed your Main Street, your local paper, your downtown. His workers urinate in bottles on the packaging floor while he builds a yacht that requires a support yacht. You worked, you bought, you consumed. You held up your end. He broke his.

The House of Thiel funded the lawsuits that killed newsrooms and bankrolled candidates who believe democracy is incompatible with freedom — by which they mean his freedom. You’ve never heard of him. He made sure of that.

These are not abstractions. These are the names. This is who broke the deal.

What makes this frame different from every piece of Democratic messaging in the last decade:

It doesn’t require a delivery promise but points toward one. Unlike affordability messaging, or talk of “abundance,” it doesn’t assume the levers are connected to anything. The broken contract is a fact, not a projection. But naming who broke it is also the beginning of a different kind of politics — one that doesn’t promise lower prices by the next election cycle, but does promise to name who raised them, dismantle the machinery that let it happen, and build democratic institutions that serve people rather than donors. The deal can’t be unbroken by passing a bill. It can only be repaired by changing who has power over the terms.

It works for the factory worker in Ohio who watched their job go to Mexico, then China, then a robot. It works for the trucker watching autonomous vehicles creep down the highway. It works for the 50 year old worker who looks at their 401k every night just hoping it doesn't disappear the next morning based on a Truth Social post at 3am. It works for the Trump voter who thought he was fighting for them. He named enemies. The wrong ones. This frame honors that instinct and redirects it toward the actual names.

It forces the opposition to defend the Houses. Every attack on this frame — “class warfare,” “divisive,” “scaring away donors” — is confirmation that it’s working. The pressure to soften it is the most important data point you will receive about whether it’s landing.

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V. What the Democratic Party Is Doing Instead

The Democratic Party has not failed passively. It has made active choices — choices that protected specific interests, served specific donors, and substituted tactical optimization for strategic thinking for so long that the party no longer knows the difference.

Start with the money. Future Forward, the super PAC backing Kamala Harris, spent $900 million on economic messaging. Harris’s internal team spent hundreds of millions on personal attacks. Two factions. Two strategies. Two billion dollars. One incoherent mess.

A senior Harris campaign official said it plainly afterward: “We should have been one streamlined engine whose true mission was to elect Kamala Harris and defeat Donald Trump. And it is clear that that was not always what happened.”

That is not a campaign failure. That is a party that has spent so long running plays from the Clinton era that it can no longer field a coherent team.

Now the autopsy is being demanded. And the autopsy the progressive left is insisting on pins the loss on Gaza and the previous administration’s position on Israel. It is a weapon, not a diagnosis. It is being deployed by a faction that wants to fight the next election on foreign policy terrain while the working class continues to hemorrhage.

The most devastating ad of the 2024 cycle had nothing to do with Gaza. It said: “She’s for they/them. I’m for you.”

One sentence. Ran everywhere. Won everything.

The people who made Gaza their single voting issue in Michigan are now living with the consequences of that choice. That is not cruel. That is what happens when you treat a presidential election as the moment to place our democracy in the hands of a tyrant in order to voice your opinion about a conflict 5,000 miles away. A few months later, your neighbors are being disappeared by ICE, their professions are dissolving, and they’re staring at their phones at 7:58pm on a Tuesday wondering if their retirement account is going to survive the night.

So. How’d that work out?

Then there’s California. My home state. Where the wheels have come completely off.

The governor’s race has been running for over a year. Eight major Democratic candidates raised money, chased endorsements, filmed ads. Nobody broke through. Nobody named anything. They talked about nothing of significance in the big picture. And when Eric Swalwell collapsed under the weight of a scandal that insiders had whispered about for months, the party’s response was to wait. To calculate. To hope that the right people would make the right calls.

A veteran Democratic strategist said it out loud without embarrassment in a national cable news interview: “Voters need a clue. They need some kind of signal from the powers that be — basically Pelosi and Newsom and Alex Padilla — about which of these candidates they ought to take seriously.”

Magyar started with a Facebook post. California Democrats are being told to wait for a signal from three Washington DC gatekeepers.

Behind the scenes, the consultant class — operatives whose financial relationships with the party go back decades, who sit on more secrets than the ones that surfaced about Swalwell — was doing what it always does: protecting access, managing timing, and using information as a tool of positioning rather than accountability.

What happened with Swalwell’s collapse is the same logic applied internally. The people who knew, waited. The calculation was made. When the liability became undeniable the exodus was instantaneous — not because anyone discovered their conscience, but because the exposure had become unmanageable.

The stampede away was not a profile in moral courage. It was a profile in political liability management.

The women who were allegedly harmed deserved an institution capable of telling the difference a great deal sooner than that Friday afternoon.

That is House logic operating inside the Democratic Party. Information as weapon. Timing as currency. Accountability as a calculation about political cost, not a commitment to the people who were harmed.

The Democratic Party cannot name the Houses because it runs on the same logic.

Different vocabulary. Same operating system.

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VI. The Manifesto

I am not writing this to endorse a candidate. I am writing this because the argument exists, the evidence is overwhelming, and the moment is now.

TR didn’t wait for the perfect messenger. Neither did FDR. The argument found them — or more precisely, they recognized themselves in it and stopped waiting for permission.

This is that argument. It doesn’t require a new party or a billion dollars or a perfect biography. It requires someone willing to say the names out loud and stand there while the machinery pushes back.

They have been inside. Not an outsider with credentials — an insider with knowledge. They know how the machinery works because they helped run it. They got out, or are getting out, because they can no longer pretend the machinery serves the people it claims to serve. The impulse to find an untainted outsider is understandable. It is also wrong.

Magyar wasn’t untainted because he was new. He was effective because he knew where the bodies were buried and was willing to say it.

They are willing to name the Houses. Not “the wealthy.” Not “special interests.” The Houses. The families. The specific people who made the specific decisions that broke the specific promises. Without apology. Without softening. Without waiting to see how the donors react.

They are disagreeable. Not to their allies — to the enemy. The Democratic Party does not need someone likable right now. It needs someone who is, as Churchill said of Montgomery, disagreeable to those around them and more disagreeable to the enemy. Someone who, when the donors call to complain about the frame, treats the call as confirmation that it’s working.

They stay off the culture war terrain. Not because they don’t have positions — but because they understand that fighting where the Houses are strong is how you lose. Magyar didn’t defend progressive social positions. He starved the culture war machine of oxygen and hammered the machinery until it collapsed.

They trust the argument. The broken contract frame does not require charisma or a perfect biography or a billion-dollar war chest. It requires the willingness to say the names out loud and stand there while the machinery pushes back.

That person exists somewhere. The argument is ready. The moment is now.

The Houses have been named before. By Teddy Roosevelt on ground soaked in abolitionist blood. By FDR in Philadelphia, welcoming the hatred of the powerful. Both times, the naming was the beginning of repair — not the end of a fight, but the start of one that could actually be won.

We are in the interregnum. The old is dying. The new cannot be born yet. The Houses are filling the vacuum.

Someone has to name them.

Name the Houses.

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Last Tuesday, a CNBC co-host looked into the camera with the practiced calm of someone who has delivered a thousand market updates and asked the following question in the aftermath of the president's "a whole civilization will die" post:

“Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk—the deadline that President Trump has set at 8 p.m., threatening to destroy a civilization?”

The commentator next to her just answered the question.

He answered it like it was another question about the movement of crop prices on any other trading day.

The question itself wasn’t “wrong.” In the strictest professional sense, it was the only question the machinery allowed.

A president had threatened to bomb a civilization’s power grid at 8pm ET. Investors needed to know: which way does this go?

The machinery required an answer, so she asked.

The Market's New Religion

Across America last week, people were sitting down with their financial advisers. I’m guessing most of those advisers got their undergraduate degrees in business from perfectly fine universities and now fancy themselves experts in geopolitics—people in nice suits with confident smiles and a brand new framework.

“All good,” they said. “We got this. Just follow the TACO.”

The logic is elegant in the way that only genuinely insane things can be elegant. TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out—is the market’s new secular faith. The President threatens something catastrophic. Markets drop. The smart money knows he’ll blink. He backs down. Markets spike. You buy the dip and ride the recovery.

It has worked, the advisers note with something approaching pride, every single time.

They are not wrong.

Meantime, the 401k—the only lifeline to a possible retirement for most of the people in those meetings—hangs on the whims of a single Truth Social post.

TACO, indeed.

The Platform Issued Refunds

Over on Polymarket and Kalshi, traders placed over a billion dollars in bets on every dimension of the Iran conflict. Whether the Strait of Hormuz would close. Whether there would be a nuclear detonation.

A trader going by “Magamyman” made $635,000 betting on the timing of U.S. strikes. He got it right. He got it very right. When the strikes hit, his screen turned green.

The French philosopher Albert Camus called the executioner “the one who simplifies.” To kill, he understood, you must first convert a person into a concept. A target. A resolution. A binary event with a payout structure.

We’ve found a more efficient verb: monetize.

The death of a foreign leader isn’t a catastrophe in the prediction market. It’s a resolution event. The fine print isn’t a moral reckoning — it’s a “death carveout” that prevents a payout. The civilization doesn’t fall. The market closes for the night.

The Leap

This is where Camus’s analysis gets uncomfortable. He argued that when humans face the Absurd—the collision between our need for meaning and a silent, chaotic universe—we have a few choices. One is Philosophical Suicide.

This isn’t “putting your head in the sand.” It is an active leap. It is the moment a person stops trying to face the horror of the world and instead surrenders their reason to a system that promises to explain it all away.

For the 20th-century zealot, that system was the Party.

For the 2026 trader, it is the Market.

When we ask about the “upside risk” of an apocalypse, we aren’t being rational. We are being religious. We are treating the ticker tape like scripture, using its movements to justify a silence that should be unbearable. We commit philosophical suicide so we don’t have to feel the anxiety of the 8 p.m. deadline. We delete the human parts of our brains so the professional parts can keep trading.

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My 401k went up on TACO Tuesday.

When the ceasefire was announced—when Trump backed down from the 8 p.m. deadline with eighty minutes to spare—markets surged $1.5 trillion. My retirement account got healthier because a civilization did not die that night.

I am not outside this system. None of us are. We are all inside it, checking our phones, feeling the complicated relief of people whose financial security is now structurally indexed to the destruction of others.

Think about the guy who did everything right, saved what he could, and is staring at his phone at 7:58 p.m. trying to figure out if he’s going to be okay. He didn’t sign up for this. He didn’t vote to have his retirement account coupled to the mood of one man. He is simply here. Watching the number.

The adviser said not to worry. He knows TACO. He’s probably right.

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. The boulder comes back down. He pushes it again. The absurdity is total. The revolt is in the pushing.

But I’m still working out what the “pushing” looks like when the boulder is your retirement account and the gods are a CNBC co-host asking, with complete professional composure, whether the end of a civilization is something investors should lean into.

The commentator next to her laughed.

They went to commercial.

The market opened higher.

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This week, two different forms of unaccountable power revealed themselves in public at the same time.

In one, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz published a massive 17,000 word New Yorker investigation based on internal documents never previously disclosed. The subject was Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT, which now is the go-to for nearly a billion people around the world who use it to seek information, interpret events, and understand the world.

The investigation paints a portrait of a leader untethered from the truth: a man whose own Chief Scientist feared his 'finger on the button' and whose colleagues documented a pattern of lying that was as consistent as it was strategic. Who was fired by his own board, set up what he called a “government in exile” in his $27 million San Francisco mansion, and was reinstated within five days — with the investigation into his conduct handed to a board he effectively selected himself.

In the other, the President of the United States spent days threatening catastrophe in language that was vulgar, theatrical, and casually apocolyptic — swearing, demonizing, talking about ending a civilization, broadcasting it all through a platform he controls in the middle of the night — only to pull back almost as suddenly, and by Tuesday evening leave the country being asked to treat the whole episode as just another passing storm.

Most people will treat these as separate stories.

They are not.

They are both about what happens when power no longer moves through visible chains of accountability — when institutions meant to slow, test, or constrain it are bypassed, captured, or simply too hollowed out to matter.

For people of my generation who built careers inside communications, politics, and media, that realization lands with particular force. Because many of us were trained in a system that was manipulative, imperfect, and often cynical — but still, at some basic level, legible.

I am one of those people. Or I was.

II. Bakersfield

I was twenty-three years old, driving a rented Chevy through California’s Central Valley with a script on the passenger seat and more swagger than I had any right to possess.

Bakersfield. My first political ad.

Not exactly glamorous work. It was a ballot measure fight over where to site a garbage dump. The client was a wealthy rancher who didn’t want the smell blowing past his property. The media firm back in Los Angeles sent the kid because nobody else wanted to make the drive — the partners were already fat and happy, one of them owned a Malibu beach house, and Bakersfield in summer is nobody’s idea of a good time. I had just come off a presidential campaign. Here I was, buying airtime over garbage. It was maybe a $2,000 buy.

I walked into the local TV station. Handed someone a sheet of paper with a script and a check. Discussed the buy — which programs, which nights, how many spots. Shook a hand. Drove home and told the client it was done.

That was it. That was the whole transaction.

I’ve thought about that afternoon a lot lately. Not because I’m nostalgic for it. Nobody was saving democracy in Bakersfield that day. It was mercenary work in a crappy town for a client with a very particular problem and enough money to try to solve it. I still have a copy of the direct mail piece from that campaign. It holds up as a artifact of its time — which is to say, you can tell exactly who made it, who paid for it, and what they wanted you to think.

That’s the point.

Even there — even in a garbage dump fight — the system was legible.

There was a client. There was a message. There was a human being at a television station who put his name on a contract. There was an audience that would see the ad at a known time on a known channel. And somewhere in the fine print, there was a disclosure: paid for by, authorized by, accountable to.

Every link in that chain had a name attached to it.

That doesn’t mean it was noble. It means it was traceable. And that distinction matters more than ever.

For most of my career, I watched that chain weaken. Then the speed changed. What had been eroding over years began collapsing in plain sight — accelerated by technology, by the media environment, and by a political world that treated institutions as inefficiencies to be stripped for parts.

This week made clear just how far gone it is.

Because what we are living through now is not just a faster media cycle or a more polluted information environment. It is the collapse of procedural time itself.

What used to happen in sequence — allegation, investigation, hearing, disclosure, decision, consequence — now happens as a blur: post, reaction, narrative capture, elite alignment, reset. Move on.

That is true in politics. It is true in media. It is true in war. It is true in the stock market. And it is increasingly true in AI.

Which brings us to the part of this story that voters deserve to understand — and that most political professionals would prefer they didn't.

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III. Preloaded Reality

Digital marketers have spent the last year racing to master something called answer engine optimization — AEO.

It did not begin as a political concept. It emerged as a commercial one: how do you shape the answer an AI system gives when someone asks about your product, your reputation, your brand?

Search engine optimization was about getting your website to rank on Google. AEO is something more consequential: shaping content so that AI systems absorb your framing and reproduce it when a user asks a question.

Reddit threads. YouTube videos. News stories. Blog posts. Podcasts. Forum chatter.

All of it feeds the machine.

Shape the content upstream and you shape the answer downstream.

Marketers are now optimizing specifically for the “Perplexity Citation” — the coveted footnote that proves an AI has chosen your data as its foundation. It is the AEO equivalent of the “SEO #1 Spot.”

That means the influence operation may no longer have to persuade the voter directly. It only has to shape the information environment that the machine will later summarize back to the voter as neutral guidance.

Imagine a voter in October asking an AI system a simple question about a candidate: Was this person corrupt? Can I trust them? What did they really do? If the informational terrain around those questions has already been seeded — months in advance, across platforms and formats — then the answer may feel objective while carrying the fingerprints of an operation the voter will never see.

That is not persuasion as we have historically understood it. That is preloaded reality.

The marketing world figured this out before politics did. The political world is now catching up. And the implications are profound. Because if a campaign can shape what an AI says about its candidate, so can anyone else.

A super PAC with no meaningful disclosure. A foreign intelligence service. A billionaire with a grievance. A coordinated influence network that has no interest in persuading voters directly, only in shaping what the machine will later present as consensus.

By the time the voter sees the answer, the operation that shaped it may be functionally invisible — not because it was hidden especially well, but because the architecture no longer requires a visible artifact.

The old system produced something you could point to: an ad, a mailer, a television spot, a digital placement, a disclaimer. The new system often produces none of that.

There is no “paid for by” on an AI answer. There is no station manager on the other end of the phone. There is no disclosure box attached to the output.

The law, meanwhile, is still trying to regulate visible artifacts. Congress can hold hearings about deepfakes. States can require disclaimers on AI-generated campaign ads. Reformers can keep proposing transparency rules built for a world of identifiable messages. But AEO does not primarily produce a message. It produces a condition. It shapes the environment from which answers emerge.

You cannot regulate this simply by labeling outputs if the real operation happened upstream, diffusely, and at scale.

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IV. Master of Disaster

Which brings us back to Sam Altman. And to the man he called when his own board tried to hold him accountable.

Chris Lehane. Al Gore’s press secretary. Clinton White House veteran. One of the sharpest Democratic communications professionals around. A guy who built his career on the premise that accountability mattered. Who literally wrote the book on crisis communications and titled it — with no apparent irony — Master of Disaster.

When Altman was fired, Lehane’s move was textbook. Don’t fight on the facts — 70 pages of documented concerns about your client’s honesty are not facts you want to fight on. Fight on the frame.

Label the board members who raised safety concerns “rogue effective altruists.” Make them sound like a cult.

Bury the allegations under an argument about Silicon Valley ideology that 99% of the public would never parse.

Activate resentment in the right 500 people in the right zip code.

It worked. Altman was back in five days.

I know this move. I’ve used versions of it. Every crisis communicator has. You find the frame that works on the right people in the right room and you don’t worry about everyone else.

What Lehane apparently didn’t ask himself — or asked and answered differently than I would have — is what happens when you deploy that craft to discredit the people arguing that this particular technology needed real accountability before it was handed to governments for use in immigration enforcement, domestic surveillance, and autonomous weapons.

The board members Lehane helped blow out were the ones trying to pump the brakes. He framed them as zealots. They lost. Altman kept his finger on the button.

The man who controlled the information architecture that hundreds of millions of people use to understand the world — a man his own colleagues described as unconstrained by truth — kept his job. Because a Democratic operative who learned his craft in the Clinton White House ran the play perfectly.

I don’t think Chris Lehane is a bad person. I think he’s a very good communications professional who made a choice about who deserved his skills. And that choice came with stock options in the outcome.

We all make those choices. But most of us didn’t learn our trade in a White House that stood for something specific about democratic accountability. And most of us don’t have equity in a trillion-dollar IPO.

Master of Disaster. Indeed.

Meanwhile the companies building these AI systems are spending $125 million (and counting) in the 2026 midterms to determine who writes the rules about them — through campaign ads that don’t mention AI at all. The House of Altman and the House of Amodei are not neutral infrastructure providers caught in a regulatory debate. They are purchasing the legislature that would constrain them. Neither side’s ads say so.

This is what the end of accountability looks like when it moves fast enough that nobody has time to name it.

V. The Slop Verdict

And here is the final absurdity.

While Congress fails to pass a single AI accountability bill, while the Houses purchase the legislature that would regulate them, while Democratic operatives cash out their institutional credibility for equity in trillion-dollar IPOs — the market has arrived at its own verdict.

Brands are now running “No AI” disclaimers as a competitive advantage. Aerie recently promised consumers in a national campaign: “We commit: No AI generated bodies or people.”

Equinox. Almond Breeze. Dove.

A growing list of brands positioning themselves as antidotes to what the internet has started calling slop — the AI-generated, algorithmically optimized, authenticity-free content that has saturated every platform.

The consumers figured it out before the regulators did. They can feel the difference between a message that came from a human being with something at stake and content that was optimized to appear in an answer. They’re paying a premium for human. They’re downloading software to escape the machine.

Which means the voters are ahead of the campaigns. They know slop when they see it. What they don’t know — what nobody is telling them — is that the slop has now been pointed at their ballots.

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VI. The Closed Circle

I don’t believe this will be meaningfully fixed in time by the institutions currently charged with fixing it.

What would help is not mysterious. Real campaign finance reform. Rules that look upstream, not just downstream. Basic obligations on platforms and model providers to show more of their work. None of that is conceptually impossible.

But it is politically improbable in a system where the entities most in need of regulation increasingly shape the environment in which regulation is discussed, delayed, or abandoned.

That is the closed circle. Campaign finance and AI governance are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different clothes.

The one place the circle is vulnerable is the same place it has always been vulnerable: the moment the public understands what is actually happening to them. The Houses depend on opacity. AEO works precisely because voters don’t know it exists. The slop is effective precisely because nobody told them it had been pointed at their ballots.

Naming the mechanism is not sufficient. But it is necessary. You cannot organize around a threat nobody can describe. You cannot regulate what nobody can see. And you cannot build the political will for reform in an information environment that has been preloaded against it.

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VII. The Fish

I didn’t share my Bakersfield story because I miss some cleaner age. Political advertising was never clean.

I tell it because even a garbage dump ballot measure once had a visible chain. Someone wrote the message. Someone bought the airtime. Someone signed the contract. Someone paid for it. Someone was responsible.

I still have the direct mail piece from that campaign. You can hold it in your hand. You can read who paid for it. You can trace it back.

Now we are entering a world in which the message may be shaped before the messenger exists — by actors the public will never identify, through systems they do not understand, in transactions that leave no contract, no receipt, and no obvious point of intervention.

That is a genuine loss. Naming that loss matters.

Not because clarity will fix it. But without clarity, we are left using the language of transparency and accountability to describe a system that no longer operates on those terms.

That sequence — from Bakersfield to AEO in thirty years — is not a story about technology. It is a story about power. And about what happens when power moves faster than the institutions designed to make it visible.

The question is whether enough people can look at it without flinching — and from that lucidity, begin to build, regulate, teach, and communicate differently.

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There’s a moment in medicine when a doctor finds something on a scan and the conversation changes. Not a death sentence. A diagnosis. The thing you can no longer pretend isn’t there.

That moment arrived for social media recently. And like most ruptures, it happened faster than anyone expected.

A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for knowingly designing products to addict children. The judge had already ruled that algorithmic feeds, autoplay, and push notifications were valid targets — not the content users posted, but the design itself. The jury found malice.

I was teaching when it landed. I put the verdict in front of my students — people literally preparing to enter the industry the jury had just diagnosed — and we talked about what it means. I’m writing it here because the industry’s own internal logic has finally become visible to people outside it. And they didn’t like what they saw.

I’d assigned my students a piece from James O’Sullivan in Noema magazine called “The Last Days of Social Media.” I strongly suggest you read it. His thesis? Social media is collapsing into an AI slop ecosystem where synthetic content and algorithmic optimization have severed the human social contract.

He wrote that in September 2025.

How’s your feed looking about now - seeing much “AI slop?”

Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann called the decision “a brick in a potential wall.” That’s accurate. Not the wall itself — a brick. But here’s what that brick showed: a jury of ordinary people, after six weeks of testimony and internal documents and platform engineers on the stand, as well as an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg, concluded that Meta knew its product was harming children, engineered it to be more addictive anyway, and concealed what it knew.

We’ve seen this before. Not with social media — but with another industry that knew its product caused harm, buried the evidence, and kept selling.

The tobacco comparison isn’t perfect. But what cracked Big Tobacco wasn’t one case. It was the accumulation of cases, the internal documents, the moment juries started believing plaintiffs over executives.

That clock has started.

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The Ghost of the Fourth Paradigm

I first encountered Raja Rajamannar’s framework for marketing paradigms when I started teaching. It has been my de-facto textbook ever since. His map is simple and powerful: decades of product-based advertising, then the emotional Mad Men era, then the internet’s precision targeting. Then the fourth paradigm — social media. A world where the medium wasn’t a channel you bought time on. It was a place people lived.

That paradigm began around 2007. It lasted less than twenty years.

The thing about paradigm shifts is that they are invisible from the inside. The metrics we track — impressions, likes, engagement — are calibrated to the world that’s ending. We are using the language of a 2015 social contract to describe a 2026 extraction economy. The fourth paradigm isn’t just failing. It’s being hollowed out by agentic AI and algorithmic slop that has severed the human connection it originally promised.

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The Seduction of the Serf

Yanis Varoufakis argues that we have quietly drifted into techno-feudalism. The market has been replaced by the fief. We are no longer consumers — we are digital serfs tilling the algorithmic soil. Every post, every scroll, every like is a crop we harvest for the Landlord, who rents our attention back to the highest bidder.

Here’s the specific psychological trap that makes the Feudal Feed so effective. In a traditional fiefdom, the serf knew they were exploited. In the digital fief, the serf feels empowered. That’s a bad deal.

Gallup data released just this week captures this perfectly: heavy social media users feel twice as represented by their government as non-users. 31% of heavy users feel represented by their government versus 15% of non-users. The gap tells the whole story.

This is the genius of the design.

The system doesn’t silence you. It seduces you into believing you have a voice while it harvests your data. You feel like the sheriff of your own feed.

You’re still just working the landlord’s field.

The platforms didn’t build this architecture alone. The same consolidation of power reorganizing our politics has reorganized our information environment. The Houses don’t just control political power. They control the pipes through which info flows. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the design.

The Great Enclosure

There is something else funny going on.

Social media spent fifteen years radicalizing you. Pushing you toward the fringe. Keeping you outraged because outrage kept you scrolling.

Now AI may be being used to walk it back. To nudge you toward the center. To correct what they spent a decade engineering.

They broke the thing. Now they’re selling you the fix.

But here’s what they’re not telling you: the fix requires the same compliance as the original product. Your specific anger, your specific identity, your specific feeling of being heard — that’s the statistical outlier now. The algorithm will smooth it out. For your own good.

The question nobody is asking: will people trade the feeling of being heard for the feeling of being stable?

It’s not a technology question, it’s a power question.

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Tending the “Billion Little Gardens”

Facebook and X posts now reach 0.15% average engagement. Instagram down 24% year on year. The content proliferates. The connection evaporates. You’re scrolling through a ghost town that keeps sending you notifications.

Meanwhile something else is happening. People are building elsewhere — Substacks, Signal groups, Discord servers with actual rules and actual humans. O’Sullivan calls them “a billion little gardens.” Communities where the metric that matters isn’t impressions but whether you showed up again next week.

That's not the future of social media. That's already the present. And it's where the next paradigm is being built — through a billion small acts of deliberate connection.

The Blueprint

Here’s what I told my advertising and media students when the verdict landed: you are not inheriting a broken industry. You are inheriting a diagnosed one. That’s different. Broken means keep fixing the same thing. Diagnosed means you finally know what you’re dealing with — and that knowledge is the only real foundation for building something new.

You’re not too late. You’re exactly on time.

You are entering this industry at the exact moment the scan came back with something on it. That is not a reason for despair. It is the most clarifying thing that could happen to a generation of practitioners — because it means the question of what to build next is genuinely open in a way it hasn’t been in twenty years.

The fourth paradigm is not dead. But it is finally understood. And in that understanding lies the freedom to build what comes next.

We are moving from the age of the Platform to the age of the Architect.

It’s time to start planting. The Landlord doesn’t own the seeds.

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On Saturday, while nearly ten million people gathered in cities across the country — signs raised, coffee in hand, righteous anger fully intact — I watched Dodger baseball. And when Will Smith hit a clutch two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while. Present. Uncomplicated. Genuinely happy.

I’m not proud of the eye-rolling skepticism I felt when the Instagram posts started rolling in. But I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t there either. Because that skepticism — and the complicated thing underneath it — is what I want to talk about.

I believe in the marches. I want to make that undeniably clear before I say anything harder. The anger is real. The refusal is real. Nearly ten million people in the streets on a Saturday is not a small thing and I will not dismiss it. These are not, as the Trump White House called them, participants in “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions.” They are paying attention. They are showing up.

In a moment when showing up feels like the only honest response to what’s happening, they are showing up.

But I’ve spent a long time inside the machine they’re marching against. And standing on the outside of it now — watching, not marching — I can see something that’s hard to say without sounding like exactly the kind of cynic I’m not trying to be.

The marches are right. The theory of change underneath them might be the problem.

The Balcony

The last time I felt the pull of something genuinely uncontainable in American politics was the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

We knew there was trouble on the streets before we even got inside. You could see the police lines and the horses and the armed personnel carriers and the helicopters buzzing nonstop over Staples Center. Something was building outside. We noted it and went in anyway, because that’s what you do when you have the credential and the access and the blue suit and the red tie — the full tribal uniform of the political insider class. We went in and did our business.

The convention itself was exactly what conventions always are. Droning speeches nobody remembers. Choreographed moments designed in conference rooms. The only thing that broke through was Al Gore kissing his wife Tipper at length, with unmistakable intention — the kind of kiss that had clearly been tested and worked out in advance. It worked, in the way things designed to work usually work. The crowd responded. The cameras captured it.

Never mind that Tipper Gore was the one who’d spent years trying to put warning labels on our music and the artists we loved. That night she was a prop in a love story. We laughed. We knew it was ridiculous.

At some point, me and my pal Hickman ditched the convention floor for the VIP parties on the balcony high atop Staples Center. As we came up, we saw a stage being assembled across the way, massive fencing going up around it, not more than a hundred yards from where we were standing. For anyone who’s ever been to a concert, you know the sound — check, check, one two, check check.

We looked at each other. What the fuck is going on over there?

We kept swigging our drinks. We found the shrimp. Platefuls of it. Cocktail sauce. We were wearing our tribal wear — blue suit, tie, total political hacks and insiders, convinced we were saving the world.

Then we heard a drum kick. A guitar being tuned. And the next thing we knew, not more than a hundred yards away, separated from us by chain link fencing, cops on horseback, and whatever remained of our self-awareness — was Rage Against the Machine. At their absolute peak. Tearing the roof off.

Rage Against the Machine - Democratic National Convention. LA 2000.

It was a riot. A literal riot. Zack de la Rocha wasn’t just singing — he was indicting the entire apparatus we were standing inside of. Calling it what it was. A corporate giveaway. A performance of democracy with the actual levers of power somewhere else entirely. The crowd outside wasn’t there for a show. They were there for a reckoning — angry, frenzied, all in.

We were eating the shrimp and watching from the balcony.

Here’s what I want to be honest about. In the moment, it didn’t feel like a crossroads. I’ve been to six conventions. They always have protests, stunts, scenes — it’s part of the furniture. The outside energy was real, but it was also a huge act at the height of their musical powers. I didn’t experience it as a historic choice between two theories of change. It was just another piece of the atmosphere. A Tuesday night in LA with a good view and excellent shrimp.

If I had a choice, I probably would have rather been in the mosh pit. But not really. I had the access. I had the credential. What else did I need?

It’s only now — standing outside the machine looking back — that I can see what was actually happening that night. Two completely different ideas about where change comes from, happening simultaneously, separated by less than a hundred yards of fencing, cops on horseback, and a balcony high atop Staples Center.

Inside: the performance of power. Managed. Tested. Packaged.

Outside: something that didn’t need managing because it wasn’t asking permission.

The No Kings marches feel like neither. They have the organization of the inside without the power. The energy of the outside without the edge. Something genuine looking for a form that fits the moment it’s actually in.

Which is why the question isn’t whether to march.

It’s what you build when you go home.

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The Question Nobody Is Answering

The debate about the marches is already well underway, and it’s more substantive than the usual social media noise.

On one side, writers at outlets like The Nation are calling this Resistance Theater. Their critique is pointed: “No Kings” is a hollow container. Because the movement refuses to name specific policy demands — a wealth tax, a Gaza ceasefire, federalizing the power grid — it becomes a primal scream the administration can simply ignore. Genuine emotion, no structural leverage.

On the other side, the Pod Save America wing — Favreau, Vietor, Lovett, the former Obama staffers who’ve become the establishment voice of Democratic resistance — point to Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research. Her “3.5% rule” holds that no government has ever withstood a sustained nonviolent challenge from 3.5% of its population. In the United States, that’s roughly twelve million people. The argument: sheer scale is itself a mathematical victory. The march isn’t performative — it’s a signal that the administration does not have the consent of the governed.

Both arguments contain something true. Both are also incomplete in ways that matter.

The Nation critique is right that diffuse anger without specific demands is easier to ignore. But it assumes the system that converts demands into outcomes is still functional. It isn’t.

The Chenoweth argument is right that scale matters — but Chenoweth herself has been cautioning since 2020 that the success rate of nonviolent resistance has dropped from 65% in the 1990s to below 34% today, as authoritarian regimes have learned to absorb and outlast protest movements. The 3.5% rule was formulated studying campaigns seeking regime change against traditional autocracies. It’s a rule of thumb, not a guarantee — and it says nothing about what happens after the march.

Both sides are arguing about tactics when the real disagreement is about something deeper. What is the theory of change?

The people saying marches don’t work are operating on what I’d call the fix-the-machine theory. Enough visible public opposition will force the system to correct itself. Courts will intervene. Legislators will respond. Elections will produce accountability. The signal will land somewhere and something will move.

I built a career on that theory. I believe it described something real for most of the time I was operating inside it.

But I’ve spent the last two years thinking about what happens when the machine doesn’t just break — when it gets replaced entirely. When the architecture underneath gets swapped out while everyone keeps confidently navigating with the old maps. When the levers are still there but they’re not connected to anything anymore.

If that’s where we are — and I believe it is — then marching to pressure the machine to correct itself is not wrong exactly. It’s misdirected. You’re pushing on a door that no longer leads where you think it does.

What The Marchers Are Actually Doing

Here’s what I think is true underneath the debate.

The people saying marches matter are feeling something real even if they can’t fully articulate it. They’re not naive. They’re not performing optimism they don’t feel. They’re doing something that operates at a different level than institutional pressure.

They’re refusing to let normalization happen without a fight.

What I heard more than anything else is that the marches let you know you are not alone. That there are thousands of your neighbors who share your anger at the state of things. In a moment designed to isolate and exhaust and overwhelm — that communion is not nothing.

That’s actually the more sophisticated position in the room. It just needs better language.

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand: the most dangerous thing that can happen right now is not any single policy or any single overreach. It’s the gradual acceptance that this is just how things are. The slow drift from outrage to exhaustion to accommodation. The moment when the previously unthinkable becomes unremarkable.

The marches are fighting that. Every person in the street is saying — out loud, in public, for the record — this is not normal and I will not pretend it is.

That matters. History needs witnesses who said so.

But it is not enough.

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The Question I Keep Getting

For the past year I’ve been writing about what I call the Houses and the Tempo — the concentrated centers of power that have replaced institutional authority in America, and the speed at which they operate. The House of Trump. The House of Musk. The House of Ellison. The House of Thiel. The House of Bezos.

I’ve written about the architectural swap — the way democratic institutions have been preserved as facades while the power operating behind them has been reorganized around personal loyalty, tribute, and transactional speed that our accountability mechanisms were never built to match.

And the single question I get more than any other is: okay. Now what do we do?

I’ve been sitting with that question longer than I should have. Partly because the honest answer is harder than any traditional campaign strategy. Partly because saying it out loud means finally drawing a line I’ve been approaching for two years.

Here it is.

The consultant class — the people who have been managing Democratic politics for the last thirty years, myself included at various points — won’t tell you what I’m about to tell you. Not because they don’t know. Because their entire professional existence depends on the machine still running. They are navigating a system they are deeply comfortable in — it’s not corruption exactly, it’s institutional arrogance, the hubris of people who have never had to question the architecture they live inside.

They will keep talking about affordability and norms and checks and balances and the pendulum swinging back.

Democrats will win the midterms. Probably not even close.

And then we’ll be right back here.

Because winning inside a captured system doesn’t uncapture it. It just gives you a turn at the wheel of a car that isn’t connected to the road.

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What Monday Actually Requires

So here’s what I’d say to the people with the signs. Not as a cynic. As someone who stayed on the balcony too long and is trying to be honest about what that cost.

First: you’re focusing on Trump. That’s understandable. He’s the most visible symbol of everything that’s broken. His name rhymes with king. He’s on the sign.

But Trump is a symptom that became a cause. And marching against a symptom — even correctly, even passionately — doesn’t touch the underlying condition.

Whose name isn’t on the sign?

Musk, who built his empire on government money, public infrastructure, and workers educated in our public universities — and then used that platform to dismantle the very system that made him possible, all while posting memes.

Ellison, whose family just acquired CBS, CNN, HBO, TikTok and two legendary studios in a single transaction while Washington stood down.

Thiel, who funded the legal architecture designed to outlast any single administration and wrote explicitly that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.

Bezos, whose workers piss in bottles on the warehouse floor or from the cab of their delivery vehicles while he builds a yacht that requires its own support yacht.

These are the Houses. These are the names. And they are not on the signs.

Second: stop waiting for the institutional response. It is not coming at the speed this moment requires. The courts move in years. Elections move in cycles. The Houses move in days. That tempo mismatch is not an accident. It’s the operating advantage.

Third: while the consultant class is still arguing over the thirty second ad buy, or how to find the right influencer to deliver a winning message, the Houses are rewriting the algorithms that decide if that ad is even seen. That’s not a messaging problem. That’s not a tactics problem. That’s why Monday requires something different than a new campaign plan.

Build something that functions whether the machine responds or not. Parallel structures — local networks, independent media, legal defense funds, community mutual aid, classrooms where students learn to see clearly rather than operate successfully inside frameworks that no longer describe reality. Friction at the points where the Houses are actually vulnerable.

They depend on your data. Your consumption. Your seamless silent cooperation. That dependence is where the leverage lives.

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The Cycle

Here’s what I know is coming because I’ve watched it come before.

The midterms will send a message. The parties will recalibrate. Presidential aspirants will start shuffling out to Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina to meet with party activists, raise dollars in LA and NYC, and try to establish early advantage.

Panels on CNN and MSNBC will start talking about swing states and Super Tuesday and delegate math that hasn’t fundamentally changed in forty years.

And then there will be a convention. There will be a hall. There will be speeches and balloons and Bruce Springsteen — we love you Bruce, we really do — playing a song that makes everyone feel like the arc of history is bending in the right direction.

Some people will wear silly hats.

And the fundamental polarization won’t get resolved. And we’ll talk about affordability and abundance but the prices will go up because of some other disaster nobody saw coming. And the Houses will have consolidated a little more while everyone was watching the balloon drop.

And then we’ll do it again.

I’ve been to six conventions. I know exactly how it feels from the inside. I know the bacon wrapped dates and the shrimp and the pull of the street outside and the way you tell yourself the inside is where the real work happens.

So here’s what I want to say to the people with the signs. Not as a cynic. As someone who stayed on the balcony too long.

The energy in those streets — the genuine refusal, the anger that actually means something — maybe some of it needs to be pointed inward. Not at the other side. At our own. At the apparatus that keeps producing the same cycle and expecting different results. At the consultant class still arguing about the thirty second ad buy while the Houses rewrite the algorithms that decide if it’s even seen. At the theory of change that keeps promising the next election will be the one that finally fixes it.

This isn’t a moderate versus progressive argument. It’s not a left versus center argument. It’s a question about approach. About whether we keep feeding the cycle or finally build something that operates outside it.

The No Kings marches were right.

But the kings aren’t just in the other party.

Some of them are in the hall.

Eating the shrimp.

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Ben Affleck came here like all the rest of them.

Another transplant with a screenplay and a dream, waiting tables somewhere in Los Feliz, or at Bourgeois Pig across from the Scientology Center. He and his pal Matt had a script. It was rough around the edges but they got some help to make it Hollywood ready. Good Will Hunting grossed $250m and it was “game on.”

Ben found the Oscars, the money, Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Lopez again — the full Hollywood arc, the whole mythology, lived out loud along with the requisite whining about privacy and the paparazzi.

He also found something most of the transplants don't: a working-class authenticity story.

South Boston. Dunkin' Donuts. Just a regular guy who made it. He wore it like a second skin. The accent surfaced in interviews when convenient. The neighborhood kid who never forgot where he came from.

Except Ben Affleck isn't from here. And the people he just sold out are.

The ones who built this industry — the real industry, not the one on the movie posters — were out in the San Fernando Valley. They worked as grips, spent nights in edit bays, sweetened the sound. They built the infrastructure that made the movies possible and then went home to the houses in North Hollywood and Canoga Park and Granada Hills that their union wages actually paid for. Solid middle-class lives built on craft.

They built the skate ramps we rode on in the summer. They coached at our Little Leagues. Their kids grew up seeing what a good union job could look like and followed them into the industry because well, why wouldn't you?

That's not a myth, it was a real economy. A functioning deal.

That economy has cratered. California's film, television, and sound sector is roughly 25% smaller than 2022. The headlines come in waves — 4,500 at Technicolor alone, after a growth spurt funded by corporate debt and public equity that then wiped out an entire generation of post-production careers overnight.

Strikes, consolidation, streaming economics, production fleeing to cheaper states and countries — this town has been absorbing gut punch after gut punch.

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Into that wreckage stepped Ben Affleck, who just scored a $600 million AI deal aimed directly at what's left of their work.

Two months ago — two months — Affleck went on Joe Rogan's podcast and delivered what got breathlessly described as a brilliant defense of human creativity. AI writing is "really shitty," he said. It reverts to the mean. It can't do what artists do. The human touch remains essential. Audiences will appreciate human-made experiences more as AI becomes ubiquitous.

The clip went everywhere. Creative workers shared it. Finally, a major filmmaker saying what needed to be said.

What nobody knew at the time: he'd been building InterPositive in stealth since 2022. Its LinkedIn page didn't exist until after the Netflix deal was announced. People deeply embedded in the AI startup ecosystem said they'd never heard of the company.

He wasn't defending human creativity. He was protecting his lane while quietly monetizing the gap beneath it. What gap do I mean? In Hollywood the writers, directors, and actors have sweet union contracts and legal protections that constrain AI use. Affleck has at least two of those union cards, I’m pretty sure he has all three.

Post-production workers mostly don't. This isn’t some secret: crews are "staring down the barrel of potential automation" precisely because the protections that cover above-the-line talent leave below-the-line workers exposed.

InterPositive lands directly in that exposed space. Color grading. VFX cleanup. Continuity fixes. The work of the compositor, the colorist, the rotoscoper, the editor grinding through dailies at 2 AM in a Burbank facility. The people who get fifteen seconds at the craft awards while America refills its drink.

Netflix's chief content officer promised the technology won't replace "the work of writers, directors, actors and crews" — but notice the sleight of hand in that list. Writers. Directors. Actors. The people with guild contracts and residuals and lawyers.

The Valley guys aren't in that sentence. Maybe they never were.

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This is what the Houses framework looks like at street level.

I've been writing about Houses — concentrated power centers that have replaced institutional accountability with personal loyalty and tribute extraction.

Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel. Big, structural, geopolitical.

But Houses aren't only macro. They scale down. The House of Ellison just swallowed CBS, CNN, HBO, and TikTok.

A few weeks later and House of Affleck has now sold Netflix the AI infrastructure to hollow out post-production in the city he arrived in as a nobody, and where he now hunkers down in Brentwood or Malibu as a very, very rich man.

Same logic. Different scale. The guy at the top extracts. The people who built the thing absorb the cost.

Affleck's statement for the Netflix announcement: "The filmmaking process really since its inception has been one long technological progression. We've always been seeking to make it feel more realistic, more honest, and InterPositive I hope is another iteration or step in keeping with that long and storied history."

I know those soundbites and cliches. I wrote them for a long time. But notice he doesn’t mention the men and women who built the skate ramps and coached our teams. Whose kids grew up thinking this was a career you could count on. Who played by the rules, joined the unions, paid their dues, showed up.

They held up their end.

Tonight the Academy Awards will celebrate the magic of film. There will be speeches about the power of storytelling and the irreplaceable human spirit and the craft that makes it all possible. Some will wear ribbons to recognize blood spilled a world away. Someone will probably cry. The orchestra will play people off.

The camera will cut to the audience — directors and stars in their seats, the whole mythology performing itself on live television.

The crew that made those films won't be in those seats. They never are. They're the names that scroll on screen, flying at you like the disclaimers at the end of a TV ad for some new miracle drug.

Ben Affleck may or may not be at the party. He's got a first-look deal with Netflix now, plus his share of somewhere between $180 million and $300 million from the InterPositive sale, plus whatever the performance targets kick out. He'll keep making movies. He'll keep talking about craft and honesty and the irreplaceable human element.

And somewhere in the Valley, the compositor who did everything right — joined the union, built the skills, bought the house, raised the kids — is watching what just happened and doing the math.

The deal got broken.

Not by the system. Not by Washington. Not by elites in the abstract.

By a guy from Boston who figured out that the best way to protect your creative legacy is to get rich off the automation before anyone realizes what you're automating.

Someone should say that out loud on a night like tonight.

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“In this house that I call home / Nobody knows the party rules / I gotta get in but there’s no room”

— X, “In This House That I Call Home”

Author’s note: By the time I finished this piece, we were at war. Which means this essay is already old news. Which is exactly the point.

Earlier this week I published an essay naming the Houses — the concentrated centers of power replacing institutional authority in America.

Then it landed here. In my city. In the neighborhoods where the people who actually make the work live.

Swallowed my hometown industry in one bite.

The $111 Billion Handshake

On Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery’s board accepted Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion takeover bid. Netflix walked away.

David Ellison — son of Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, sixth richest person on earth — now controls CBS, CNN, HBO, Max, and a major stake in TikTok. Simultaneously.

One family. One deal. Larger than anything the old titans imagined possible.

Notes from the Orbit

I was in those rooms when these battles played out under different rules. Not at the head of the table.

In the orbit.

I ran the West Coast operation of a trade organization representing commercial producers — people who actually made content. Not the studios. Not the agencies. The ones with the cameras and the crews and zero leverage.

The MPAA operated like a parallel government for Hollywood — Jack Valenti its permanent head of state. Same industry, same fights, same conversations where the real business was never the one happening out loud.

Back then we were David. The studios were Goliath. Everyone knew their role. And Goliath, for all his power, still had to play the game.

That friction is gone. Not weakened. Gone.

The studios I used to fight are now showing up to that same room with a slingshot. Against a House that owns the building.

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No More Walls

There’s a reason you found out we were at war in Iran from a video posted to Truth Social at 2:30 in the morning.

The architecture that used to require an Oval Office address — cameras, anchors, questions, accountability — no longer exists.

You remember it, right?

The address. The coverage. The anchors who could push back.

The news divisions with enough independence to say we’re not sure that’s true. Or at least ask: “Didn’t they already say they completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability last year?”

The news divisions that were supposed to hold that line — built on the East Coast, independent by design, structurally separate from the entertainment machine for a reason — are now part of the same house as the studio system.

Some people still call this “norms.”

That language is gone.

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Tribute Flows. Deals Close. Regulators Stand Down

How it happened matters as much as what happened.

David Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union as the personal guest of Senator Lindsey Graham. They posed for a photo, smiles all around, thumbs up. Days earlier, Ellison had a private meeting at the White House.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos flew to Washington, met with the White House and DOJ regulators on Thursday — and withdrew from the bidding hours later.

This is not a free market transaction. This is how Houses negotiate with Houses. Tribute flows. Deals close. Regulators stand down.

Larry Ellison didn’t write a check for $45 billion because he loves Game of Thrones. He helped engineer the TikTok deal. Oracle runs the digital backbone of American commerce and government. Now add streaming habits, news consumption, social behavior, search history. That’s not a media empire. That’s a surveillance architecture with a content library attached.

The Last Wall in the West

But while Washington stands down, the friction has migrated.

The last wall isn’t standing on the Potomac. It’s being built in Sacramento. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, alongside a coalition of blue-state AGs, is opening the books that Washington refused to touch. They aren’t just looking at market share. They’re looking at the surveillance architecture being bolted onto this industry. For the feds this is a global chess move. For the states it’s a fight for the actual people in the neighborhoods where the work is still made.

Hollywood and Washington always had a relationship. Not a clean one. Not an honest one. But one with rules — understood on both sides — about where commerce ended and power began. I spent years working both rooms. The creative economy felt genuinely open. What you made could find its audience. Effort had a plausible relationship to reward. The marketplace wasn’t fair, but it was still, in some fundamental sense, yours to compete in.

That deal is being broken now. Not gradually.

Here. This week. In this city.

This is what House consolidation looks like when it moves fast and in the open. One family acquiring the infrastructure of American storytelling — the studios, the streamers, the news divisions, the social feeds — while Washington stands down and the states scramble.

Earlier this week the Houses were a framework.

Now the House of Ellison has a zip code.

Mine.

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I’ve been writing here about why our political vocabulary is dead. “Houses and Subjects.” The “architecture swap” The broken transmission between public will and political consequence.

I believe all of it. And now I’m just angry.

No, not because I watched that sham of a SOTU last night. I didn’t. Don’t need to.

I’m not talking about the kind of anger that gets you booked for cable news hits to spin tired message points, and score these things like they are an olympic diving competition.

I’m done with that.

ICE agents shot Renee Nicole Good on a Minneapolis street on January 7th. The Democratic majority leader, two days later: “We’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time.”

A few months before that, I’m at a fundraiser. Billionaire’s home in Los Angeles. I get five minutes face to face with Hakeem Jeffries — nose to nose. Talk to him like I was trained to with east coast politicians.

Direct. No bullshit.

“ICE is out here snatching kids from families. If we don’t stop this now it’s going to spread. It’s going to come to New York.” I tell him that in Rochester, NY on that day, ordinary citizens are rising up against ICE on their own.

He nods. Hands me to his fundraiser. The kid listens politely and then tells me they can’t stir up problems in Democratic swing seats. Then he hands me his business card.

And last night, Abigail Spanberger — smart, credentialed, one of the best the party has — stood up to give the Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union. She was solid. She named the corruption. She got within one sentence of the actual argument. “Somebody must be benefitting,” she said. Then she listed crypto scams and quoted George Washington - but mostly she talked about lowering prices and “affordability.”

I spent thirty years in strategic communications and politics. Hell, I named my agency Message. I know exactly how messaging gets developed, what tests well, and how the consultant class and beltway insiders operate.

So let me say what she couldn’t.

THE TRAP

Democrats are running on affordability. The Supreme Court just slapped down Trump’s tariffs and every strategist in the party is calling it “a gift.” The messaging machinery is spinning up — tariffs as illegal taxes, Trump as the guy who raised your prices, affordability as the frame for 2026.

They might win the midterms. Probably will.

It might not even be close.

And then they’ll lose — not the election, but an opportunity to restore democracy.

Because affordability is a trap. It assumes you can deliver. It assumes the system that converts policy promises into outcomes still functions. It assumes the economy will hold still long enough for “lower prices” to matter.

None of that is true.

Remember when Kamala Harris proposed $25,000 in CASH for first-time home buyers in her campaign?

Didn’t think so. In fact, I had to search online to make sure I was right.

Trump will find another authority for tariffs. He already has. The Supreme Court ruling is a political embarrassment for the GOP — but the House of Trump doesn’t care about the Republican Party. Never did. The party is a vehicle. When it stops being useful, it gets abandoned.

Senate Republicans defending tariff policy that’s humiliating them aren’t allies of the House of Trump. They’re subjects. They just haven’t all figured that out yet.

All of us know there is a bigger challenge than the price of groceries. With the rise of agentic AI, automation is no longer assisting labor it’s replacing it.

Not in ten years. Now.

The issue for your neighbor with the graduate degree isn’t the price of eggs or a car payment. It’s whether their profession will exist in five years. And when Democrats can’t deliver on affordability — because the Houses don’t answer to Congress, because the levers aren’t connected to anything — the next MAGA figure will be waiting.

Smarter than Trump. Smoother.

“They promised. They failed. Again.”

The pendulum swings. Nothing structural changes. And we’re back here, just worse.

A Note on Terminology: When I talk about the “Houses,” I’m referring to the new feudal lords of our era—concentrated clusters of corporate, technological, and political power that no longer answer to the public. To be a “Subject” is to live within their architecture, where your vote is merely a suggestion and your personal data is the rent.

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WHAT MY STUDENTS ALREADY KNEW

I taught two full semesters on political messaging during the 2024 election. Twenty-two-year-olds from Long Island and the Central Valley and everywhere in between. They could smell the bullshit they were being fed.

And I was in the uncomfortable position of defending it. Not because I was lying to them. Because I had believed it myself.

They asked the right questions. About NAFTA. About 2008. About why it always feels like nothing we do matters. I gave them the answers I’d been trained to give — historical context, structural constraints, the art of the possible. Technically accurate. Just not honest.

What I didn’t say — what I couldn’t say without admitting the machine was broken — is that their instincts were right. They’d watched their parents’ careers get hollowed out. They asked why the banks got bailed out and homeowners didn’t. They weren’t radical. They were paying attention.

Somewhere in that second semester, I stopped defending the framework and started seeing what they saw.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: we’ve been running Enlightenment-era software on feudal hardware. The democratic vocabulary — civic engagement, representation, consent of the governed — was written for slow information and deliberative bodies. “Houses and Subjects” are older than democracy. Power organized around personal loyalty, patronage networks, the irrelevance of the governed as anything other than resource or audience.

What my students felt in their bones is that the old operating system had been replaced with something that predates it. And nobody said so out loud.

Including me.

WHAT CLINTON AND OBAMA SAW — AND WOULDN’T SAY

I wrote a few weeks ago about being a political “apparatchik.” Close enough to the action to see how decisions got made and strategies were decided.

In the early 90s, I worked for Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell when “reinventing government” wasn’t a TED Talk—it was emergency triage. The city was physically and fiscally dying. It wasn’t just bankrupt; it was obsolete. The conflict wasn’t over a contract; it was a collision between the 20th-century labor machine and the reality of governing and providing basic city services.

Rendell did the one thing modern politicians find unthinkable: He named the constraint. He looked the most powerful municipal union in the country in the eye and told them the math didn’t care about their loyalty. When they walked, he didn’t blink. The strike lasted 36 hours. The union got nothing because there was nothing left to give.

That wasn’t “triangulation.” That was the brutal, honest work of saving a sinking ship by throwing the sacred cows overboard.

Clinton saw that model and nationalized it. But Clinton wasn’t Rendell. Rendell had no good options. Clinton had options — and chose the ones that protected the people who were already winning.

NAFTA. Welfare reform. Financial deregulation.

He managed the anxiety instead of pointing at the source.

A few years later, my partners at the issues advocacy shop GMMB ran the advertising and media for the Obama 2008 campaign. I watched them build some of the most effective political messaging in American political history. And then 2009 happened.

The crash. The banks. The anger was there, white-hot. Obama could have named names. He could have pointed at the Houses while they were still consolidating. Instead he bailed out the banks. Stabilized the system. Protected the institutions because he believed they would recover.

They didn’t. They got bought.

A few years later, he said it.

“You didn’t build that.” Then walked it back.

Read this and tell me how it sits with you?

In July 2012, Obama stood in front of a crowd in Virginia and delivered the most honest thing a Democratic president had said in twenty years. He told business owners that they didn’t build their success alone — that roads, schools, police, fire departments, the entire social infrastructure paid for by everyone was underneath every dollar they’d ever made.

That the social contract wasn’t charity. It was the deal.

Romney’s campaign cut it into an ad. The Wall Street Journal editorial board screamed. And within a week, Obama’s team was walking it back, softening it, explaining what he “really meant.”

The message was on point. The campaign got scared off by a few campaign ads from Mitt Romney and a negative op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

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The Pattern

Here’s the pattern across thirty years: each step further from honesty, each step closer to protecting the Houses. Rendell told the truth about constraints. Clinton managed the anxiety. Obama stabilized the institutions. Each iteration, the Houses consolidated a little more. The window to name them closed a little further.

The Republican Party ran the same play in reverse. They thought they were using Trump. What they got was eaten by the monster they built. The party is a Subject now. Senators contorting themselves to defend tariff policy that embarrasses them — they’re not allies of the House of Trump. They’re petitioners. They just haven’t all admitted it yet.

Neither did Spanberger last night. She couldn’t. Her party’s entire operational apparatus depends on pretending the machine still runs. So she asked the right questions, quoted the founders, and left “somebody must be benefitting” hanging in the air unanswered.

THE MESSAGE

Here’s what I’d build if I were still building.

Not “the billionaires are screwing you.” Pre-dismissed as socialist overreach.

Not “the system is rigged.” Everyone says that. Trump says that. It means nothing.

This:

You held up your end.

You worked. You played by the rules. You showed up. You did what your parents told you to do, what the economy promised would be rewarded.

And they broke the deal.

Not “the system.” Not “Washington.” Not “elites.”

They broke it. Specific people. Specific names.

House of Musk. Took billions in government subsidies to build his companies. Now his unelected agency tears apart the federal workforce while he posts memes. Promised you electric cars and space travel. Delivered mass layoffs and a social media platform that amplifies the worst of humanity. Your tax dollars built his launchpad. His board gave him $1 trillion+ pay package. What did you get?

House of Trump. Promised to fight for the forgotten American. Delivered tax cuts for the wealthy and chaos for everyone else. Named enemies — the wrong ones — but named them. That’s more than the other side did.

House of Bezos. Your Main Street is dead. Your local paper is dead. Your downtown is a ghost town. His workers piss in bottles on the packaging floor while he builds a yacht that has a separate sailing yacht as a support vessel. You held up your end — you worked, you bought, you consumed. He broke the deal.

House of Thiel. The man who famously wrote that he "no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible"—and then spent hundreds of millions to prove it. He funded the legal carpet-bombing that killed newsrooms and bankrolled the "New Right" candidates who view the Constitution as a suggestion. You’ve never heard of him because he doesn’t want your vote; he wants your data to power his surveillance state and your silence while he builds a trapdoor out of the society the rest of us have to live in.

These aren’t abstractions. These are the names. This is who broke the deal.

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WHY THIS IS DIFFERENT

“You held up your end” isn’t left or right. It’s the broken contract.

It doesn’t argue about tariffs. Doesn’t promise lower prices by November. Doesn’t assume the levers are connected to anything. Doesn’t require the system to work.

• It works for the factory worker in Ohio who watched their job go to Mexico, then China, then a robot.

• The trucker watching autonomous vehicles creep down the highway.

• The college grad with $80,000 in debt who did everything right and can’t afford a house.

It also works — and this matters — for the Republican voter who thought Trump was fighting for them. He named enemies. The wrong ones. This frame honors that instinct and redirects it toward the actual names.

It honors work. It honors effort. It honors the bootstraps mythology — and then asks: so why didn’t it work?

Not because you failed. Because they broke the deal.

That’s not victimhood. That’s betrayal. Americans will fight over betrayal.

WHY DEMOCRATS WON’T USE IT

It requires naming names. Not “special interests.” The Houses. Musk. Trump. Bezos. Thiel. The donors will call. The consultants will panic. The lawyers will hedge. They’ll sand off the edges until it’s meaningless.

It requires abandoning policy-first. Democrats are addicted to white papers. Ten-point plans. “Access to affordable” this, “pathway to” that.

Policy is where Democratic messages go to die.

This message leads with the deal. Policy comes after you’ve established who broke it.

It requires admitting the transmission is broken. The Democratic establishment can’t say “the system that converts your vote into outcomes is broken” — because their jobs depend on pretending it works. They’re still selling access to a machine that doesn’t run.

So they’ll run on affordability. Talk about tariffs. Hope the pendulum swings.

And the Houses will keep consolidating.

IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING — SORT OF

I didn’t invent this argument. I just spent long enough inside the machine to finally see it clearly.

In Maine, Graham Platner — oyster farmer, Marine veteran — is running for Senate naming it directly. The establishment moved against him: opposition research, DSCC money flowing to the governor they recruited to primary him. It didn’t work. He’s leading. Voters like him more the more they know him.

In Texas, James Talarico is threading a different needle — Christian faith, cowboy boots, Joe Rogan, courting disaffected Trump voters alongside his progressive base. Running to “win power back for working people.” Pointing at the same broken deal from a different angle.

Last night Spanberger gave the best version of what the machine can produce. It was fine. It wasn’t enough. A party that quotes George Washington while “somebody must be benefitting” hangs in the air unanswered is a party that still hasn’t learned what its voters already know.

Six months ago I stood nose to nose with the House Minority Leader at a billionaire’s fundraiser and told him ICE was out here disappearing people and the party needed to say so. He nodded. Handed me to a staffer who told me they couldn’t afford to stir up problems in swing seats.

Renée Good was shot on January 7th. Alex Pretti — an ICU nurse, a VA employee — was shot ten times on January 24th while holding a cell phone, trying to protect a woman who'd been pushed to the ground.

The message is sitting right there.

“You held up your end. They didn’t. Here’s who they are. And here’s what we’re going to do about it.”

Someone should pick it up.

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A final note: I couldn’t help myself (old habits die hard) so built out the full messaging architecture for this framework — the frame, the language ladder, the audience map, the likely opposition answers. The kind of document that goes into a real campaign on Day One. Download it free here and tell me what you think.

I’d been reading the scholars and talking with historians and deep thinkers and considering the current moment through a different lens. Patrimonialism, neo-royalism, tech-Hamiltonian coalitions. Not typical analysis for someone trained in ward politics and gross rating points.

I said I was working on language that could translate those structural shifts into something people could actually use.

“Houses” to describe how power organizes now.

“Subjects” to describe how individuals experience their relationship to that power.

Then I took a detour to argue with Nate Silver. That was fun. But now I’m back.

Before I give you the new words, I need to bury some old ones. Not bad words. Not strategically wrong words. Dead words—terms that assume a system that no longer exists. Words that keep smart people navigating by a map that no longer matches the territory.

You know these words. You’ve probably heard them this week. Democratic leadership definitely used them.

“Affordability.”

The theory is solid. Meet voters where they live. Kitchen table issues. Don’t lead with Trump. I made this exact argument a hundred times. Built campaigns around it.

And now, watching strategists workshop whether inflation is 2.2% or 3.2%, I keep thinking about Allen Iverson. “We talking about practice, man. Not a game. Practice.”

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We’re talking about the price of eggs and bananas while a handful of mega-billionaires rewrite the economy in real time. While AI forces us to reimagine what work even means. While your 40-year-old neighbor with the graduate degree watches their professional value evaporate.

I wrote a book arguing that human strategic thinking was the irreplaceable skill in an age of automation. It came out in May 2024. By that summer, agentic AI had made its central thesis obsolete. My own argument about human value couldn’t survive contact with the speed of displacement.

You want to talk about affordability to people watching their careers dissolve? You want to debate grocery prices while the future of work gets restructured without anyone’s input?

Practice. We’re talking about practice.

“Norms.”

As in, “we need to restore them.” Restore them where?

Federal agents have shot people in American cities. The president threatened to invade a NATO ally. DOGE—an unelected body run by the world’s richest man—tore up the federal workplace without congressional authorization. The norms aren’t violated. They’re irrelevant.

Compare two responses to the same moment. Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, speaking about America:

“No one forced us into the excessive dependence on the United States... This immaturity was our own fault. But we are now leaving this situation behind us, and sooner rather than later.”

That’s a leader naming reality and acting on it.

Hakeem Jeffries, House Democratic leader, last spring:

“I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. It’s their government.”

Jeffries, days after an ICE agent shot Renee Good in Minneapolis:

“We’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time.”

Read those together. He named the architecture a year ago — and then kept operating inside it.

The leader of the opposition party in the most powerful democracy on earth said, out loud, that he doesn’t know what leverage he has. That the government belongs to someone else.

He’s not wrong. That’s what makes it devastating. He named the architecture accurately—and then kept operating as if the old vocabulary still applied. As if “norms” meant something.

Merz saw the shift and changed strategy. Jeffries saw the shift and shrugged.

“Checks and Balances.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s files exist. Over three million pages of them. Flight logs. Contacts. Evidence.

In Europe, that evidence produced consequences. Prince Andrew stripped of duties. Turkey and Lithuania launching trafficking investigations. Political figures facing real accountability.

In the United States, Congress held hearings. The hearings produced revelations. The revelations produced more hearings. The DOJ released documents, then announced no one else would be charged. An enormous amount of evidence converting into exactly zero consequence. That’s not checks and balances. That’s a hamster wheel with cable news cameras on it.

“Vote.”

I’m not saying don’t vote. I’m saying that using “vote” as a complete sentence—as though the act of voting is sufficient to produce democratic accountability—requires believing the system converting votes into governance is still functional.

This is the default position of a political class that wants more of the same. The midterms will fix it. The pendulum will swing back. I made this argument for thirty years. I’m having trouble making it now. Not because I’ve become cynical. Because I’ve been paying attention.

PS — You can add “abundance” to the list while you’re at it.

Practice. We’re talking about practice.

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What’s Left After the Autopsy?

So what language honestly describes a system where public opinion is measured constantly and constrains nothing? Where a Democratic leader can say “it’s their government” and nobody blinks because everyone knows it’s true?

I keep arriving at the same place. One by one, I crossed off every framework I spent my career building. And what remained—after “affordability” became practice, after “norms” became decoration, after “checks and balances” became performance, and after insiders like Ezra Klein dropped “Abundance” into the mix —was language I never expected to use.

Houses and Subjects.

When power consolidates around family dynasties, personal loyalty networks, and corporate-government fusions operating outside constitutional authority—those are Houses. House of Trump. House of Musk. House of Saud. House of Murdoch.

The fusion that turned DOGE into a policy instrument without a single congressional vote and recently led to a $187 million sweetheart deal that landed right in the lap of the Trump family.

And when citizens engage politically—vote, protest, petition—and that engagement is processed through the performance of democratic ritual but never actually leads to a constraint on power?

That’s not citizenship. That’s Subjects petitioning the court.

Citizens decide. Subjects petition.

Right now, Americans are petitioning passionately with the most sophisticated technology in history. And the court receives the petitions, files them, and proceeds.

The Lucidity of the Rebel

Naming the architecture doesn’t tell you what to do next. But it changes the questions you ask.

One of my closest pals — a fellow traveler who spent as much time in the gears as I have — recently described our role in politics as having been “apparatchiks.”

It struck me because it’s the honest word. I spent thirty years as a functionary of an apparatus I believed was a Republic. I wasn’t just watching the game; I was helping maintain the machinery. I thought if the apparatus was tuned well enough, if the inputs were smart enough, it would produce democratic results.

I was right. For a while. And then I wasn’t — not because I stopped being a good apparatchik, but because the machine was replaced by an architecture of Houses while the old rules stayed posted on the wall.

Facing this kind of change usually leads to one of two places: false hope or doomerism. I’m not interested in either.

Camus called the alternative lucidity — clear sight without the comfort of pretending the old map still works. But Camus was a philosopher. I’m a practitioner. So what I’m working toward is something messier: a blend of his framework and thirty years of learning how power actually moves. Not theory. Not tactics. Something in between — a way of seeing that leads to a different set of questions.

As a Citizen, you look for consensus. As a Subject, you look for friction.

You look for the places where the Houses are brittle. Where their efficiency depends on your acquiescence. Where their “agentic AI” requires your data and your seamless, silent cooperation. Where the House of Musk and the House of Trump rub raw against each other in the halls of power.

Subjects ask different questions: Where does power actually sit? Whose protection do I depend on? What are the real costs of refusal?

I’m not ready to answer those questions yet. But I’m increasingly sure they’re the right ones to ask.

What comes after naming the architecture — what action looks like, what systemic change requires — is where this is heading. Not messaging. Not mobilization. Something harder.

That’s next.

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