I fought the law and I won

What happens when you beat the establishment

I mentioned three weeks ago that one of the ways I decide what to write about is if there’s a hot topic among the chattering classes. Sure enough, one popped up over the last week. Last Sunday, Ezra Klein had a great piece on how the vibes have shifted noticeably rightward since the election, much more so than the actual results would suggest is justified. Trump won by a drop, but you could be forgiven for thinking he won in a landslide from the reaction many have had to it.

Partly inspired by Klein’s piece, Nate Silver and Matthew Yglesias wrote their own takes on the rightward cultural/vibe shift. The shift has been going on for the last few years, but has accelerated since the election. One of the most notable shifts was Meta getting rid of their fact checkers and moving towards something akin to the community notes used by X. In the corporate and cultural worlds, Trump and MAGA are much more mainstream. It was hard not to notice Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other big name CEOs at Trump’s inauguration.

The first time he won, he lost the popular vote and was seen as an aberration. Almost immediately after he won, there was resistance to his every move in the political and cultural spheres. This time around, there is very little of that. There have been no mass protests and no blanket resistance by Democrats in Congress. The tone from most everyone opposed to Trump has been much more conciliatory.

Some of the biggest left-wing cultural/vibe shifts that happened after 2016 are on their way out. DEI was all the rage in corporate America and at some universities, but has fallen out of favor. Of all the executive orders Trump issued during the last week, the ones against DEI in the government have seen very little pushback from Democrats. Universities have also begun reversing many of their previous left-coded decisions and are reinstating standardized testing requirements and getting rid of diversity statements in hiring.

A major shift in promoting more right-wing vibes, ideas and figures was Elon Musk acquiring Twitter (now X). Almost immediately after that happened, it became a right-wing fever swamp. When previously it was full of crazy stuff from the left it now is the opposite. While many Democrats and left-wingers hate what he’s done with X, I think it’s great and basically wrote a love letter last year thanking him for it.

As regular readers know, I’m not a fan of the left-wing cultural/vibe shift (aka wokeness) that happened during Trump’s first term. I think its culpability in the Democratic Party’s electoral woes is very overstated, but it still had a bad influence and I welcome its end. From an electoral standpoint, most of the stuff that fell under the woke umbrella didn’t matter, but a little of it did and it was all bad.

To the extent ideas that could be called woke were ever implemented, they were very damaging. Since it tended to only happen in solidly blue areas, it’s effect in national elections was minimal, but it promoted awful ideas that thankfully are in retreat. Some of those awful ideas included a hostility to enforcing laws against open drug scenes, shoplifting, fare evasion and other “petty” crimes, watering down admission standards to top performing schools and delaying the teaching of algebra in the name of “equity.” I’m glad to see that junk getting thrown in the trash.

I’m glad to see the ridiculous academic jargon associated with wokeness get pushed back into the bubble where it belongs. It was not uncommon for a while to hear all kinds of weird buzzwords used in mainstream settings and it’s good to see that go away. Most importantly, I’m glad to see people in Democratic Party circles recognize that professional activists don’t speak for any actual voters.

That mistaken belief was responsible for so many toxically unpopular left-wing ideas getting elevated into mainstream political discourse during Trump’s first term. Immigration is the best example of it. Unlike the fights over gender issues, DEI and Gaza, immigration did real damage to the Democratic Party at the voting booth.

Having outsourced their policy positions to advocacy groups, Democratic candidates and elected officials wound up going way out into left-field and handed Trump a gift. Not only did those efforts fail to win Hispanic voters, it likely helped push many of them away. It’s good to see Democrats everywhere recognize that they made a big mistake although I really wish it had happened much sooner.

All that said, while I welcome the move away from crazy left-wing stuff, I’m not at all optimistic about what comes next. We might find a happy equilibrium at some point, but that’s not where we’re currently headed. The crazy left-wing stuff is on its way out, but it will soon be replaced by crazy right-wing stuff, which is going to be much worse.

I don’t like buzzkills, language police and preachy moral scolds, but I also don’t like jackasses and bullies. There are many people out there who are the latter and, in all kinds of settings, they will take the cultural/vibe shift as a green light to be that way. I’m glad to see DEI go away, but I’m not glad to see bigotry and cruelty surge and I think we’ll be seeing a lot of that.

Even though crazy left-wing stuff got the bulk of attention in newspapers, on cable news and on social media over the last few years, its right-wing counterpart was always there. One upshot to the rightward cultural/vibe shift is we’re all going to see just how horrible those on the right can be. That’s long overdue.

As I have written about before, crazy left-wing stuff has tended to get far more national attention because of where it happens. Things that happen in places like DC and New York get a disproportionate amount of national attention and because those places are heavily left-leaning it means left-wing excesses are widely reported on. Crazy right-wing stuff tends to happen in places that don’t get much national attention, but it absolutely exists and it’s about time more people start to hear about it.

Since wokeness became a thing and the cultural left gained the upper hand, there has been pushback against it. That pushback has created a whole industry of people devoted to railing against it non-stop. Many of those who do that are just right-wing culture warrior hacks, but others claim to be sincere in their opposition to it. By sincere, I mean their opposition to wokeness is not just tribal. It’s because they claim to care about broader ideals like free speech, free inquiry, open debate and classical liberalism. We’ll soon find out how many of them really believe that.

Kids these days

As Yglesias points out in his piece, doing well among young voters is seen as being much cooler than doing well among older voters, regardless of its electoral significance. That certainly explains some of the big cultural/vibe shift. Being liked by young people was a big part of Obama’s appeal. Compared to his predecessors and successors, he was unusually popular among the youngest voters when he was first running and when he was in office. That support for Democrats mostly continued in 2016 and 2020. While we don’t yet know exactly how things went down, it looks like support for Harris among voters ages 18-29 was much lower.

The big shift towards Trump among those voters has, unsurprisingly, inspired panic or celebration depending on your perspective. Democrats could be in danger of becoming a permanent minority? Oh no! Trump figured out how to create a durable national majority? Hell yeah!

If you believe any of that, you need to either chill out or curb your enthusiasm. Harris still likely won voters 18-29 even if it was by a hair. That’s much less than previous margins, but it’s not like she lost them in a rout. It’s also important to remember that voters 18-29 have frequently voted similarly to other age groups. What’s unusual is the voting age gap that exploded when Obama showed up and continued for the next two cycles after he left.

Prior to 2008, voters 18-29 tended to vote similarly to everyone else. John Kerry won them by almost ten points and it seemed like a revolution. Then Obama won them by more than 30 points the first time and more than 20 points the second time and everyone got carried away. Obama was an unusually good candidate and Trump in 2016 and 2020 was unusually toxic among those 18-29.

Fast forward to 2024 and the situation is very different. That is the biggest thing to keep in mind when trying to understand how those 18-29 voted, especially those who are in the youngest part of that group. For people in that age range, their experience has been radically different from what I and others my age went through when we were 18-29.

As a group, young people tend to be anti-establishment and receptive to those who seem like they’re fighting against the powers that be. I came of political age during the 2000s when the establishment was the neocons and the religious right. Some of the big issues then were gay marriage and the war in Iraq. Yglesias mentions the song “Holiday” by Green Day as an example of what being anti-establishment looked like 20 years ago. For anyone reading this who’s in the 18-29 age range, listen to it. That’s what fighting against the establishment was like back in the day.

The biggest kind of disruption us millennials had was the financial crisis. It happened on Bush’s watch, which made someone already unpopular even more toxic. Between Bush’s unpopularity and Obama being the cool guy who took on the establishment, Democrats thrived among my age group.

Those 18-29 today have had a very different experience. Let’s say you’re 22 years old. You have no memory of Bush and very little memory of Obama. The only presidential candidate you’ve seen consistently is Trump. Your high school and college years (if you went to college) were disrupted by the pandemic. Long after vaccines became widely available, you probably had to wear a mask and follow all kinds of other outdated rules.

As long as you’ve been an adult, and for some time before, the left has been more culturally dominant. You have no memory of the religious right and the fight for gay marriage or any other cultural fights of the 2000s.¹ The biggest establishment that impacted your life was the public health establishment, which imposed all kinds of restrictions on what you could do and almost certainly pissed you off. You’re gainfully employed, but prices shot up quickly and if you’re hoping to buy a house forget about it happening any time soon. There’s a decent chance you’ve had to move back in or keep living with your parents because renting a place was too expensive.

Being part of Gen Z, you don’t know what it’s like to live without a smart phone or social media. You’ve spent countless hours scrolling through Instagram and TikTok and it’s melted your brain. You did that before the pandemic hit, but since then you’ve been doing it much more frequently. The odds that you have as many friends and in-person interactions as previous generations had at your age are not high.

Like most people, you don’t pay much attention to politics. What you do know is Biden is not someone you’ve ever been excited about and Harris is associated with him. Trump is very normal to you because he’s been a constant presence for eight years. Democrats today, having positioned themselves as defenders of norms and institutions, are seen by you as the establishment party while Republicans are the rebels, with or without a cause.

When you add up all those things, it shouldn’t be a surprise that those 18-29 are much more Republican friendly compared to their counterparts from 2008-2020. Their limited experience has, more likely than not, been impacted by left-wing excesses to a greater degree than by right-wing excesses. Whereas millennials experienced the financial crisis as something that happened on Bush’s watch, Gen Z experienced inflation as something that happened on Biden’s watch.

Does this rightward shift in voters 18-29 signal a Republican majority going forward? Not at all if you think about it for a second. Trump didn’t so much win them as he basically tied. Obama won them by much bigger margins, but has that ushered in a durable Democratic national majority? Of course not. Look at who just won Congress and the White House. If Obama winning those 18-29 by a massive margin didn’t create a Democratic majority, Trump breaking even with them is definitely not going to create a Republican majority.

While it’s never a bad thing to win more voters, a party that becomes reliant on those 18-29 can find itself in a world of trouble in non-presidential elections. That’s because their turnout is terrible. The young people who showed up for Obama when he was on the ballot were nowhere to be found in 2010 and 2014. All age groups see their turnout decline in midterms compared to presidential elections, but which group sees the biggest decline? You guessed it, those 18-29. Whose turnout declines the least? Those 65 and older.

I’m not worried about a surge in support from those 18-29 giving Republicans a dominant majority for the same reason it didn’t give Democrats a dominant majority. While Harris did a lot worse with younger voters compared to previous cycles, she may have done better with those 65 and older. In non-presidential elections that’s a great trade. It’s one of many reasons why I’m bullish about Democrats’ prospects this year, next year and in 2027. A party can only have a durable national majority if it consistently does well in all kinds of elections and being dependent on low propensity voters like those 18-29 is a great way to ensure that doesn’t happen.

In any event, while Trump saw a big increase in support among those 18-29, it’s not guaranteed to continue. If he becomes unpopular, he will lose a lot the support he gained and Republicans will suffer for it in 2028. Trump has an appeal that’s unique to him and that applies to the youngest voters. Come 2028, Republicans will be the party in the White House, Trump won’t be on the ballot and it’s no guarantee there will be any excitement for Vance or whoever is nominated.

The desire among voters for change has been much more intense than usual during the last decade. Republicans benefited from it last year because they weren’t the party in the White House. If the desire for change continues in 2028, it will be Democrats who benefit from it for that same reason.

Congratulations, you won! God help you

For those on the right, one downside to Trump winning again is he and MAGA no longer get to play the anti-establishment game. That’s what happens when you succeed. You start off as an outsider railing against the establishment and gain a lot of support because of that. That support can become big enough to help you win, but once you win, you become the establishment. You’re no longer the underdog fighting against the man. You are the man.

Once you become the establishment, it means you’re in charge, not just politically, but culturally. Woke is out, MAGA is in. When you’re on top, you will inevitably overreach and provoke a backlash. All the pathologies that afflicted those on the left are things those on the right are just as susceptible to and oftentimes they can be even worse.

An easy way to overreach politically is to believe you’re way more popular than you really are. Trump’s favorable rating is better than it’s ever been, but it’s still not great and this may be its high point. Right now, it’s essentially even. Odds are it will go down and he will be underwater again.

A small vote shift in a few states and we would have President Harris. A shift of 7309 votes in the three closest House races won by Republicans and we would have Speaker Jeffries. Despite his narrow win and Republicans’ very small majorities in Congress, Trump is acting as if he has a popular mandate to do whatever he wants.

His executive orders certainly reflect that belief, but it’s just the beginning. He’s likely to soon wreak havoc throughout the federal government and to use the tools at his disposal to exact revenge on those he hates. The odds that those things will make him unpopular are quite high. He may not care about the fallout, but Republicans up for reelection will even if they can’t do anything about it.

Trump has also, unwittingly, planted a huge landmine for him and other Republicans to step on by fully embracing Elon Musk. It was Musk who blew up the spending deal agreed to at the end of last year. Trump opposed it, but only after Musk had derailed it with a single tweet. Just last week, Trump announced a big AI investment project only for Musk to publicly trash it. More things like that are going to happen. We’ll see if Musk blows up the spending deal currently being negotiated to avoid a shutdown in March.

Musk and Trump are very alike. They both started off challenging an establishment and see themselves as disruptors. They don’t come in peace, they’re bulls in a China shop. Temperamentally, they’re both mercurial and will turn on someone in a heartbeat. Neither of them are burdened by having a conscience, empathy or humility.

Others who have become Trumpy over the years have also seen their fortunes rise. Joe Rogan is one of them. His influence with disengaged voters is much greater than any legacy media outlet. Other podcasters and influencers have seen their influence surge and have enjoyed more success than they probably ever thought they would.

All that means they’re now the establishment. They’re not average Joes, edgy contrarians or fringe figures. They’re decidedly mainstream. Congratulations to them and all those on the right on their success, but they should enjoy it while it lasts. Plenty of those on the left thought things were moving inexorably in their favor and then proceeded to drive into a brick wall. Odds are the new right-wing establishment will wind up just like that.

In the case of Trump and Musk, their bromance is going to come crashing down and the drama from it will make Shakespeare roll over in his grave. The problem for Trump is, unlike most others in the MAGA world, Musk isn’t someone who can just be kicked out and never heard from again. He’s the richest man in the world and the owner of a major social media platform. If he wants to cause problems for Trump and other Republicans, he absolutely can.

I don’t know what will cause them to have a breakup, but there is no way it doesn’t happen. I’d put the over/under at six months. The world isn’t big enough for both of them. Musk will be fine no matter what happens, but I really hope Democrats use his falling out with Trump as a chance to mend fences.

I hate Musk as a person, but he’s one of the best entrepreneurs there is and is not going away. He’s a visionary unlike almost anyone else and people like him are absolutely necessary for progress to happen. The key is for their energy to be channeled in the right direction. Musk is someone whose creativity is welcome in the private sector, but he has no business being in the public sector and shouldn’t be anywhere near a position of power.

I hope Democrats at some point begin reaching out to him and others like him. I don’t ever want Democrats to become as intertwined with and dependent on him as Republicans are now, but I do want them to have a good working relationship with him. He has a lot to offer and the future really does depend heavily on the success of people like him.

1. Some other fights from the 2000s you don’t hear about these days include abstinence only sex education, teaching creationism in public schools, school prayer, pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions on religious grounds, the ten commandments in public places and censorship against nudity and profanity on TV.