//

The presidency wasn’t stolen. It wasn’t TikTok, or Dearborn, or they/them NFL ads.

It was something even dumber.

Democrats weren’t just outgunned—they never even understood the war they were in. And they lost to a party that spent $0 letting a South African win it for them.

/

For a decade, the neoliberal mainstream has cast itself as the hapless victim of the world’s slowest-unfolding trolley problem, rather than just… pulling the lever.

Instead of offering an identity, they leaned on their own hollowed-out corpse—first of It’s Jover Biden, then of the intangible boogeyman, AnythingButTrump.

Shockingly, if you don’t define yourself, the other side will.

And they won’t be generous.

*In my personal view, as a “““cishet white Gen-Z California leftist”””**
**That sound from below you just heard was Dick Cheney*** having a sixth one
***It would be really funny if Groundhog-style reincarnation were real and he came back as a jovial Iraqi wedding attendee

A Decade of Losing on Purpose

This wasn’t just a failure to build a case for Kamala. It was worse: they let the turkeys convince themselves to vote for Thanksgiving.

Through a sparkling cocktail of hubris, obliviousness, and pot-committed sunk costs, Democrats have spent years playing a losing game: funneling billions into Super PACs, alienating their base, and mistaking the Times op-ed for Real America.

It was never just about this cycle. November was Act III of a bloated, indifferent middle finger to the very voters they needed most.

Remember 2019?

When Bernie won Iowa. Then he won New Hampshire.

By Thanksgiving, he was building something we hadn’t seen in a generation—a coalition spanning young, independent, politically dormant, Black, Arab, and Latino voters. One that could have redefined the party.

For a brief moment, the things politicians have droned on about since Al Gore actually felt within reach. And if you squint, you might recognize that same coalition—the one that, four years later, finally said fuck it.

We all know what happened next. A vintage Obama drone strike. And here comes Hillary. Bernie was suddenly “too radical for the Electoral College”, because, well, you can’t fund Super Tuesday with Palestinian solidarity posts.

If you want to see how far the Overton Window has shifted right,

• In 1980, Reagan and Bush openly debated amnesty.
• In 2025, mainstream Republicans debate birthright citizenship.

How White Dudes Went MAGA

For much of Gen Z, the veneer of celebrity is gone.

There are no tiers, no nobility of the fourth estate, if that’s even been a thing since the Sorkin was writing dialogue about it. All stimulus is crammed into the same feed tube of monoconsumption, wedged between hopecore edits and a Keith Lee review.

If you’re a twentysomething man in 2025 with any hobbies at all—sports, gaming, fitness, podcasts, history—the manosphere-MAGA-crypto-Barstool-Lord of the Flies circlejerk has already found you, whether you sought it out or not.

Bradley Martyn’s podcast isn’t just where he’ll explain how he’d sleep Nate Diaz—it’s also where you’ll hear the real truth about Fauci. Open Twitter to get a Dark Knight Rises screenshot reposted as proof of violent migrant crime, with an Elon QT saying ‘Anyone have more info here?’

For voters who were barely sentient during Trump’s first term, every medium they interact with is now flooded with a deluge of counter-woke content, conspiracy bait, and alpha-male brain rot. It’s all they’ve ever known.

Noah Kahan writes ‘Stick Season’ in his childhood bedroom and has Fenway singing it back a year later. Adin Ross gets wired a couple hundred Ethereum from a ‘consortium of America-First business interests’ and swings a bloc of first-time voters.

Same thing.

Because of that—and a total lack of Democratic counter-messaging—the party became stale, corporate, and terminally inauthentic.

Not because of what they did. But because of what they never understood.

A Party Without a Core

Since the death of the Sanders coalition, the party has been rudderless.

No identity. No political athlete. No alternative.

At a Trump rally, you can see a weed-growing crypto libertarian standing shoulder-to-shoulder with an Evangelical Christian who believes the FBI invented marijuana to encourage interracial marriage.

They have nothing in common. Doesn’t matter. They know what team they’re on.

Democrats failed to provide the same.

They let the right define them as whatever’s getting the most clicks: gender-affirming nutjobs, Soros-funded paid actors, and yes, pet-eating migrants.

But you can’t fight content politics with think tanks and Axios polls, and you certainly can’t win an election on saving democracy when the other side doesn’t give a shit about it.

2024 wasn’t random, or mysterious. It was ten years of Democratic self-sabotage playing out in real time.

This wasn’t just a loss. It was a choice. And it ended here: