In the politically re-calibrated America we now live in, it’s a relatively straightforward task to try to anticipate where the MAGA movement is headed. Trump now owns the Republican Party wholesale. There is no “resistance” movement left within the GOP. Anyone who was working the inside during Trump’s first term switched parties long ago. Some of them became very rich in the process. The Republican Party in 2024 is MAGA, and MAGA is whatever Trump wants it to be. As Trump is famously unpredictable, one can only speculate what, exactly, it is that he wants, or will want over the coming years. Maybe MAGA will continue on its present course of nationalist populism. Maybe Trump will steer it back into the warm embrace of corporate America and the neocons. Or maybe he’ll make some clumsy attempt to have both at the same time. But speculating which way the wind is blowing in the GOP is more or less an exercise in trying to mind-read the President-elect. It’s not easy, but it’s not particularly complicated, either.
The Democrats present a trickier picture. Presently, nobody really owns the Democratic Party. Like a foreclosed property during the global financial meltdown, its ownership is distributed across a vast and amorphous network of stakeholders too complicated to be worth unraveling, given the property’s radically depreciated value. The Woke Industrial Complex of NGOs, foundations and universities owns a tranche, sure. But so does Big Tech, Wall Street, China, organized labor, the defense lobby, the Israel lobby, the House of Saud, the insurance industry, the corporate media, Hollywood, the real estate industry, the creative class, wine moms and IPA dads in the cities and inner suburbs, the American Medical Association, the cannabis industry, Barack Obama and George Clooney.
None of these interests has a monopoly or even a majority stake in The Democrats, Inc. None of them can make a five-year plan for getting the party back into solvency. For some of them, it’s debatable whether it would be worth the effort even if they could. Maybe the Democrats are now a toxic asset, and it’s better to just get them off your books as quickly as possible and jump ship to the Republicans, where the real money is made.
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