Forging Turboliberalism

A proposal on remaking the Democratic party and outflanking the GOP.

The Democratic party as we know it is extinct, as of this month. With the loss of every swing state and the popular vote to Trump, every preemptive argument about possessing the true mandate of the American people has been battered to rubble. Nobody cares about Musk’s plan to pay Pennsylvania voters a million dollars by lottery, or his acquisition of Twitter. The win is so total that only the most ‘BlueAnon’ lefty truthers even dare to suggest the election was somehow rigged. Everyone else, from Santa Monica to Long Island, sees and feels the situation at hand. Americans had known quantities in both Harris and Trump, and they resoundingly chose the latter.

In the plainest terms, the MAGA GOP outflanked the Democrats on several fronts. Their efforts were so effective, so deft, that in the end they picked up significant new support from every single minority group except black women. It's clear that the caricature of a racist and antisemitic GOP is not connecting with voters, in particular Asians and Latinos, no matter how well the Man in the High Castle Trump-as-Hitler mythmaking plays with the progressive base.

Even more crucially, Trump has saved the GOP from an imminent death-by-evangelicalism. In an increasingly irreligious or contrarian-Catholic America, the mogul from Manhattan has created a permission structure for lapsed Christians and agnostics to vote for the GOP without feeling like self-defeating fools. In the face of surprisingly secular Trumpism, Democrat scare tactics about Handmaid’s Tale Republican nutcase cultists just don't hold water.

In the end, like holdouts at a lame house party, white and black educated single women were left in the Harris camp while everyone else went back to the rager up the street. Womp, womp. Call it an early night. There won’t even be a swing state recount.

Defeat offers the rare chance to remake the Democrats. Obama says the pandemic was a death knell for global incumbents, but, let me be clear, that's a coping sentiment. A good Democratic party could have pulled off this race. Trump, after all, was underwater in almost every favorability poll. He’d already been soundly beaten once. The swing vote, it's blatantly clear, is more than open to a Democratic vision that doesn't totally suck.

The fundamental issue is that MAGA has identified points of overextension where the Democrats have committed to losing battles with Afghanistan-level stupidity. H1Bs and the asylum process are broadly unpopular. Overstays and illegal crossings are sunk. Academia-coded social issues are faring even worse. There's a reason ‘Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you’ was the most effective ad on swing voters of the whole campaign. As long as we keep allowing progressives to bait us into fighting for unpopular luxury beliefs, we will continue taking maximal electoral damage as MAGA continues to rout us. More than that, we will deserve to lose.

Luckily for the Democrats, MAGA’s new platform has created as many new vulnerabilities as it patched. You just have to know how to hit them without getting hit yourself.

It's ironic that the minority shift toward Trump comes at a time when white identitarians are the most publicly emboldened they have been since the 1930s. It's not that minorities like white supremacists, though. Rather, it's that contemporary progressivism and social justice are themselves so obscenely racist that the GOP can flirt with white pride and still come off looking more egalitarian than the Democrats. Chris Rufo calls the racism of the left ‘racialism,’ but I have doubts that it needs its own separate word. Throw race-discriminating hiring in with the Klan and burn them both in a trash heap beneath Lady Liberty’s heel. We don't do that here in the land of the free.

Beyond being tolerant of white supremacy, the MAGA form of the GOP is also transparently stupid, corrupt, directionless, schizophrenic, and self-defeating. In the aesthetic arena, it is tacky, slovenly, botoxed to the eyeballs, and generally just visually dysgenic. On some level, the young men and women of the dissident right and the tech right know all this. Posting tastefully gay bodybuilding photos and femcel neo-Romantic paintings while Musk and Trump trundle around gorging themselves on fast food can only get you so far. This year, the disaffected aesthetes voted against the real and dysfunctional Democratic party, but they voted for a mystical utiopian GOP that only exists in their “Little Dark Age” imaginations.

These contrarians, the mythmaking Trump voters, the young and bright and discerning, are emblematic of the people we need to win back. As soon as we present them with a functional and reformed Democratic party, I am fully convinced their Trump spells will break and they will see him plainly as the disappointing pumpkin he is. Vitalism, beauty, abundance, and dynamism are all things Americans coast-to-coast yearn for, and Trump can only pretend to deliver. If we can nail our pivot, we can break the MAGA rout with the power of our incredible coastal might, and we can absolutely dog-walk the grifter-quack populist GOP.

Populism is bad economics, and it's bad domestic policy, and the GOP is now stuck with it like herpes. Even traditionally left wing concepts like vaccine hesitancy, alternative medicine, and hippie cottage homesteading now fully belong to the right. The Occupy Wall Street protester would be a Trumpist today, and he's just as stupid and juvenile now as he was in 2011 camping in front of that bull for who-knows-what. They have no plan and no clue. As long as the Republicans remain populist, they will run up a massive deficit while doing stupid things like not taxing tips, bullying the federal reserve, and banning lab-grown meat out of vaguely peasant superstition. It's easy to beat that with technocratic policy if you have the slightest clue what you're doing.

Democrats have a huge hole to climb out of. We gaslit everyone about Biden’s capabilities up until the moment he imploded on stage yelling at clouds about beating Medicare, and even now we continue to pretend he’s fit for the sacred office he occupies while an unelected Millennial shadow cabal issues baffling statements in his name. It's a disgrace. Harris, meanwhile, was fruit from the poison tree of 2020, an unpopular striver who was openly tapped on the basis of race and sex for the vice presidential office. Those circumstances alone are enough to offend the sensibilities of many an American who wants at the very least a public charade of meritocracy.

One of the best things we can do is ignore the suffocating rhetorical preferences of progressives. We already have them fully on our side, and their wealthy, cosmopolitan femme aesthetics and rhetoric are toxic. No ‘The Future is Female,’ no 4B. That stuff does not land when women are on track to be two-thirds of college degree earners. To the swing voter, it all reads as vain, narcissistic, and cruel.

Even more crucial than reforming progressive aesthetics, however, is a leftist purge. As the Harris campaign proved, you cannot keep the same old ACAB agitators around and just get them to clean up their weasel-words. People see straight through it. Take everyone who defended abolishing the police and prisons, defended open borders, defended the October 7th attacks, and quite literally eject them from the party. Pack their desks, lay them off, have security walk them out, and take down their Social Security numbers in a central blacklist so you never rehire them again. They cannot be reformed. They hate Democrats, they hate liberalism, and they hate you. They would replace our democratic republic with a dictatorship of their failson Brooklyn friends in a heartbeat if they thought they could pull it off, and you can't have people like that in government any more than you can have January 6thers. It's all treason.

Like many things, the defeat was predictable in hindsight. There was no crying in California this time when Trump won. Everyone, even in Los Angeles and Sacramento, understood on some level that the Democrats deserved to lose. We must now exorcise every shred of incompetence and evil in our party that led them to have that perception. It starts at home, and the absolute best thing we can do is make liberal cities into shining pinnacles of human achievement.

Follow in the footsteps of Deng. Upzone and comingle residential and commercial, deregulate apartment amenity requirements, kill excessive environmental review, kill permitting corruption, kill parking minimums, crush public sector unions, pour massive investment into public transit, hardball government contractors, cooperate with ICE, sweep the homeless, build shelters, expand prisons, expand public healthcare, marketize public housing, improve schools, reform and discipline police, enforce the law. Show the world that Democratic turboliberal governance is the ideology of excellence, and the GOP is the party of protectionist squalor that would be the death of our hegemony. Make the archetypal Democrat City less like San Francisco and more like NYC—a place of function, safety, and ease. Only then will we be fit to try again for the mandate in 2028.

A good opponent forces you to be the best version of yourself. I am cautiously hopeful that the total defeat of 2024 will forge a better, tougher Democratic party, one with the guts to embrace meritocratic and growth-based turboliberalism. With sense, discipline, vigor, and skill, we can reverse the Democratic outflow of good-hearted Americans who think defecting to the GOP is the best way to save the nation they love.

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