The American Political Parties are gone

When you play tic-tac-toe, it’s always a tie. If both players are paying attention, the result of every game is a draw. Somebody has to be distracted to lose.

That’s what happened over the past eight years in American politics. The Democratic Party became so engrossed in woke social engineering that it stopped paying attention to the basic game of politics: you need more votes than the other guy.

In Europe, each political party is based on a set of core principles, and the parties form coalitions to gather political power. The parties themselves adhere—more or less—to their key tenets, and no single party is typically able to govern by itself. European voters seem to support this approach, as each voter seems to be motivated mainly by a single issue. Environmentally minded people vote Green. Communists vote for Marxist economics. And so on.

In the United States, things are different. Did you ever wonder why elections in the United States are always determined by one or two percentage points? The two parties here have flexible platforms on many issues, and they change their positions to gather more votes. They generally go “just far enough” to get 51% and then they stop, because deep down there are some core principles that they adhere to in general. Another reason is that they fear losing votes in their base if they stray too far from their historical positions.

From 2016-2024, the Democratic Party didn’t wander away from its core constituency…it inexplicably sprinted to the left as fast as possible. Personally, I think that they were faced with a lack of compelling problems in our society, so they went looking for problems to solve, like racism or transgenderism. The Democratic Party is fundamentally a group of people that feel a certain way, while the Republican Party is a group that thinks a certain way. The Democrats went looking for feelings, and they had to leave the comfortable middle ground to find them.

Clearly, that provided the Republican Party with room to expand into the middle and win the 2024 election. But it’s not really that simple.

The Republican Party today is NOT the same party that it was in 2012. Look at Mr. Trump and many of his inner circle: they’re all former Democrats. In fact, they are very recent Democrats that were active and successful politically for the red team. Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump himself are the most hated members of the GOP government, possibly because they are all former Democrats. At the same time, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and other long-time Republicans are left out of real decision-making because they don’t agree with the direction of the MAGA wing.

Thirty years from now, historians will look back at the 2016-2024 timeframe and declare that “this was the moment that the two American political parties realigned”. It’s clear that the Republican party has aligned around taking apart the Establishment. Killing the Deep State. February 2025 has been the best time of my life to watch the news: every evening I say something like “Right On”. The MAGA party has taken firm control and they are moving fast.

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is left with no platform to stand on. They are feebly trying to defend the Deep State. That’s obviously a losing position…Elon Musk can roll out new information about ridiculous waste and fraud every day for the next two years, and constantly defending a torrent of waste and fraud is political suicide. But the Democrats have nothing else.

The 2026 election will depend on whether the Democrats can find their footing. What principles will they stand for? Whining about transgender people and racism won’t work. Saying that Elon Musk wasn’t elected is stupid…nobody in the Executive Branch is elected below the Prez and VP. What will they be able to say?

Even if inflation stays in the 3-5% range through 2026, the Democrats won’t be able to use it against Mr. Trump. Both parties created the inflation over many years. Doubtless, some of Mr. Trump’s policies will make inflation worse. But if crime drops and jobs are available, the Democrats won’t be able to cudgel anybody with economic issues.

As it turns out, America needed for things to get really bad so that ordinary voters would change their affiliations and reverse their long-standing positions. I don’t know whether the 2020 election was rigged or not. But in the end, I think it’s a good thing that Biden’s team was allowed to flounder for four years. The desperate state of the country and the painfully obvious corruption has become clear to anyone with a third-grade education.

At the same time, the ridiculous policies of the COVID pandemic make it impossible for anyone to defend the omniscience of the State. Thinking that “government has the solution” is laughable now, and people that believed that in 2021 are re-thinking their loyalty to the Deep State today.

One American political party has re-aligned. Personally, I think of the GOP today as the “Anti-Establishment” party. Few of the long-term Republicans are in control of anything…it’s basically turned into a Libertarian Party against everybody else. Although I don’t recommend changing the name of the party…the Anti-Establishment initiative is a reflex action that won’t last, and the Libertarian party won’t get along with anybody. Stick with a name that has good brand awareness: the Republican Party. Maybe just drop the “Grand Old Party” nonsense, as there’s nothing grand about politics.

How will the other American political party realign? Today, the Democratic Party is a complete shambles. All they have is loyalty to the Party, with no principles at all. They will need to find a completely new raison d’etre to articulate to the people, to hopefully build their support back to 50% again. That could happen quickly, if the Anti-Establishment GOP runs into a disaster. If not, the Democrats may not be able to gather any real power again for ten years.

That’s the scenario that is the most interesting part to me. Let’s assume that Mr. Trump can successfully cut more than a trillion dollars of waste and fraud out of the system. Deport five to ten million illegal aliens, reducing crime and making housing affordable again. Create jobs through tariff policy and investments. J.D. Vance is looking like a very capable successor. Things are lining up for a good run.

In that scenario where J.D. Vance becomes President #48, his challenge will not be to take the system apart. The “Anti-Establishment” platform will be old news, as Vance will be the Establishment in 2028. His challenge will be to solve the giant looming problem of the government debt. That’s not the same as Trump and Elon wielding chainsaws. It’s more like surgery, cutting with precision while keeping the patient alive.

I’m broadly optimistic that the country has found the answer. In 1776, things got bad enough that reasonable men took tremendous risks to fix it. In the 1860s, it happened again. We rose from the Depression of the 1930s to fix a global political crisis. Every 80 years, this cycle keeps happening, and we are due for another “Fourth Turning”.

According to the cycle, we should be able to fix our problems as a country in the next ten years, and then we have fifty years or so of good times ahead. I don’t think it will be easy. Any wrenching change to society will be painful. We will certainly have economic pain as we try to solve the debt problem. But today, the future outlook is better than it has been in the past thirty years.