He makes them feel inferior in the old hierarchy; she makes them feel obsolete in the new. It’s a pincer on the conservative psyche — Newsom from the top down, AOC from the bottom up.

Together, they scramble their calibration: Newsom hits their status anxiety; AOC their generational and gender anxiety. He’s “the man they can’t be,” she’s “the woman they can’t control.”

AOC triggers something different — the populist inversion. Young, female, working-class roots, fluent online, and unapologetically ideological, she uses the right’s own performative populism but flips the values.

So yeah—the “adequate” balance worked when media was slow enough, tangible enough, and bounded enough to counterweight government and finance. Platforms aren’t a counterweight; they’re the water everything floats in. Which means the old checks and balances don’t even see the game board anymore.

They alter how bodies even appear to the public, and how they talk to each other. The courts, the legislature, the executive—they still assume they’re operating in print/TV logic. But platforms dissolve time and space, collapse institutions into content, and then sort it all algorithmically

It seems the endgame for most is to become professional anthropologists of corporate consolidation — fully funded by the corporations they’re observing.

Progressivism has become less a movement and more a fellowship program: get hired by the monolith, then build your brand complaining about the monolith, preferably on a podcast sponsored by monolith adjacent

This barely matters if next time around we throw our weight behind some gormless, McKinsey-approved party apparatchik like the last 3 times. Find a Roosevelt type or we’re absolutely cooked

Everyone else—Millennials, Zoomers, working poor, renters, immigrants—is supposed to keep believing in trickle-down abundance while taking on the risk and precarity. It’s “trust the process” repackaged for a generation who already watched the last process hollow out the center.

It feels like a lifeboat strategy: preserve just enough of the system for the upper-middle class and aging Gen Xers to get out clean, cash out, and retreat to the margins with their pensions or crypto before the whole thing tips over.

When society skips elite accountability after collapse (WWI, 2008 crisis), trauma transforms into control fantasies. For men in dominance hierarchies, this often manifests as militarized masculinity, granted. Without systemic accountability, this pattern endlessly repeats.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

No, it acquired nations the way a hedge fund acquires distressed assets—strip-mining their value, installing puppet executives, and keeping the whole thing running just well enough to turn a profit.

It ran entire continents on spreadsheets and gunpowder, with mercenary CEOs in gold-braided uniforms. It didn’t conquer in the old-fashioned way, with banners and cavalry charges.