It’s time to reboot the left. The 2024 election demonstrates that people, en masse, are rejecting a mutually-inconsistent constellation of ideas that have all been bent or distorted from their original forms. I think the ideal person to do this is youtube superstar Mr Beast, who has already expressed interest in running for president.
Like all thinking persons, I don’t want one side to win forever. I want a dialogue between two sides that articulate different halves of a complex set of tradeoffs, each encouraging the other to do better.
People generally like concepts like equality and fairness, just not when they’ve been twisted and broken so that some people are more equal than others. They want the real deal!
It’s time for someone to perform a hostile takeover of the Democrats, the same way Trump did to the Republicans in 2016. Mr. Beast has the platform and the interest in doing this. Here’s what that can look like.
This is not a ‘crown lying in the gutter’ type situation, so much as, there’s a whole section of the room marked ‘space for reasonable disagreement’ which, currently nobody has the balls to occupy, because if you do, you won’t get invited to my birthday party next year, where all the cool kids will be.
It’s time to call it like its is: the ‘cool kids’ are fake losers. And everyone else has been so afraid of being ostracized, they haven’t been able to stop and point out this reality.
Anyone speaking in public who has never been piled on as a bad person for saying a bad thing has no capacity for independent thought and could be replaced with a chatbot. So there’s clearly a gap in the market for ‘sane democratic who thinks like a person instead of reciting a script.’
This will necessarily take time.
I expect Trump to start playing zero-sum games, i.e. rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. The animal in me feels gleeful about this, but the thinking human being in me says that it’s better to have choices where ideally we can reasonably feel good about both of them. Ideologically, I always felt like I was a liberal who wished liberals would be actually liberal instead of cryptofacists more interested in controlling the behavior of people around them, than they were in creating a social ecosystem of superconducting love and acceptance.
Consider this my contribution towards that goal: I want to make liberals liberal again.
Here’s how we can get there.
You Have to Talk Shit about the Establishment
Trump walked onto the GOP stage and won his following mainly by talking shit about the terrible choices previous GOP leaders had made. Whoever bells the cat here needs to do the same.
Trump talked about how going to war with Iraq was stupid, a huge waste of lives and money. He talked about how the Republicans had failed, failed, failed, and this is why he won the nomination. He talked about how the system was corrupt and he took advantage of that, like any smart person would. This was obvious to most rank and file voters. They were pissed! Note that Trump did this while running as a Republican, and he did it in the brash, direct style of the Republicans.
To do this as a Democrat, you’d likely have to be gentler and softer about it, more like the chubby Dad going, well now, wait a minute there son, ho ho ho, I don’t think that’s quite fair! More like Mr Rogers than P.T. Barnum.
Directly accusing people in your own coalition of bad faith actions doesn’t gibe as well with the democratic vibes, as well gently saying essentially the same thing, but being firm about it and not giving up or equivocating.
A democratic reboot has to do the same thing, translated for cultural differences. I think John Fetterman could reasonably pull this off. Andrew Yang might be able to do it as well. Most likely, though, it’s got to be someone who’s not currently a politician. I think Mr Beast could do this best, using his you tube channel as a platform. It’ll take him time, of course, but this s a long game. If he starts now, he can be ready by the time he’s old enough to run for president.
Anyone who does this must go on the offensive. And honestly, this should not be hard! The key thing is, you have to find ways to say things that are:
reasonable
will make the left-elites go insane
This isn’t hard. It just takes the ability and willingness to think independently, just like Trump had. You’ll gain credit if you if give him his due here - to say things that nobody in your party leadership wants to hear, but all the voters are thinking. Trump did this to the republicans, and the democrats have ignored this fact. GOP voters liked Trump because he gave the middle finger to the people that had been running the GOP for the last decade.
The democrats just need to go back to their roots.
Stop talking about racism and sexism and all the various host of isms that Elite Democrats have, as of late, sworn up and down were the real problem, and focus on what matters more to literally everyone except the democratic elites: money and cultural power.
You Have to Talk Money
Talk about how the bailouts were net wealth transfers from red counties to blue counties. Bash the democratic elites for being out of touch multi-millionaires. Talk about how “we’ve done nothing for the working class but offer them condescension” while allowing Harvard president to lie and keep her million-dollar-a-year job.
This is not difficult.
Point this graph, over and over. While trump was president, the share of net wealth in the top 10% went down, and it went up under Biden and Obama.
Talk about how Democrats are endlessly going on about how we should raise taxes on the wealthy, when we outraised republicans 3 to one last time. The democrats haven’t come to terms with the fact that they are the majority of wealthy persons now. “Maybe we should be donating more to charity instead of expecting the government to do that for us.” Mr. Beast is great for this because of the charity projects he’s already been doing; it’s a chance to differentiate this approach from the “government tax dollars to bureaucracies making promises” approach, because Mr. Beast can say, look, i already did this kind of work with donation money, so clearly I know how to get good things done with piles of money.
For decades the Democrats have made this promise, ‘give us the levers of power and we will make your lives better’. The government gets bigger, spending gets bigger, hair gets bluer, TV gets more sexualized. But are working class persons actually better off than they were a few decades ago?
If they’ve got any amount of financial wealth, they need to talk about how the game is rigged. This should be obvious to anyone who’s got wealth, how stupidly easy it is to get more of it, once you’ve achieved financial escape velocity, because of money printing.
Mr. Beast is a credible person to talk about how the interest rate changes affect advertising budgets, and how much easier it was to monetize his channel when interest rates were low.
Mr Beast can talk about how most wealthy persons don’t have the self-awareness to realize this basic fact; when the money gets printed, the rich get more of it. It’s not complicated, it’s not rocket surgery. It’s an obvious consequence of the rules being the way they are.
The rules aren’t fair. Democrats should be the party of fair play above all else.
When the government spends more than it earns, who’s going to pick up the tab?
It’s not going to be the rich, it’s never been the rich, except for when FDR stole all his opponents’ gold, which, hey, maybe we’d like to do that again but it’s probably not possible any more and, also, gasp, maybe that was wrong. If the democrats are going to critique america, maybe they should be willing to issue critiques of decisions that were made by Democrats. Donaldson can say this, it’s obviously true, and Trump has been doing this to the Republicans for a long time. That’s why Republicans like him!
Yes it’s going to blow up the current graft-based coalition, but that’s good. The new coalition should be committed to making the rules fair, and promoting small players over big ones. It’s time to stop putting our heads our asses when it comes to government spending, and see the obvious reality that more government spending is better for the wealthy. Let’s also be clear about this, when we talk about ‘raising taxes on the wealthy’, the reason it’s never happening is because we, the Democrats, don’t want it to.
We just want to talk about it. Which gets us to the next point.
You Have to Talk Cultural Power
Talk about how Google used to be a place of ‘don’t be evil’ and this went away because advertising dollars make that hard. Talk about the fact that Democrats have become the power of employees of large corporations, and their employees, because the game is now tilted so far in their favor that they need a narrative that allows them all to imagine they’re the good guys.
Talk about how Democrats used to say we supported bodily autonomy, but we mocked and shamed people for saying they didn’t want to talk an experimental vaccine, and then tried to take their jobs away.
Talk about how Democrats used to be the ones standing up for free speech, and instead they’ve moved into speech policing. Talk about how the Democrats used to oppose foreign wars and now we’re the party of endless conflict.
Talk about how Joe Rogan and Elon Musk used to be democrats, but we’ve chased away every ounce of independent thought from our coalition.
Why did all this happen? I think here’s the crux of this, and an area where Greensboro, North Carolina based Jimmy Donaldson can shine.
You Have to Talk Urban vs Rural
The Democrats have become the party of cities, the Republicans became the party of everywhere else. At the root of both cultural and financial power, currently, is cities. This focus on cities explains all other factors about the democrats rise and fall over the last few decades.
It’s impossible to talk about cities without talking about big corporations and concentrated wealth. Big companies, in their current form, need lots of employees all packed together in one place in order to work. That mandates cities, but it also mandates things like:
people being willing to move and relocate where their jobs are, leaving behind family and neighborhood ties, preventing long-term communities from thriving
people not having space to raise kids in a healthy environment free from crime and pollution, because land in densely populated cities is expensive
economic opportunity being predicated on willingness to sacrifice that personal autonomy and connection to your your place of birth and upbringing
Point out the fact that we can’t all live in one big city, and most Americans don’t want all of america to be come like San Francisco, which, let’s be honest about it, is a total mess.
Cities represent immense concentrations of wealth, and they end up giving far more leverage to big companies and government agencies over individual persons and families. They become opportunities for corruption and political capture. And practically every major city in america is close to bankrupt now. Democrats are the party of big cities, and put frankly, big cities do not work without importing people, food, and energy from the area around them. The only thing made in american cities now are symbols: money, art, contracts, and computer code. Those are all symbols, and it should be no wonder the democratic party has become a symbol that increasingly stands only for itself.
How can this change? Imagine if every corporation had to have an office in every single city in America - because they couldn’t just import large numbers of workers from abroad. Imagine if remote workers cost the company less due to changes in tax policy that reward hiring remote workers.
Now what happens?
Labor gains leverage over capital, because workers have a choice of more places to pick work. Changing jobs doesn’t mean relocating your entire family and losing connection to your existing community networks. More offices with shorter commutes is better for the environment.
There are tons of white collar workers who want to embrace remote work, but are prevented from doing so by a company leadership that prioritizes butts in seats instead of the personal autonomy of their employees. Return to office mandates are like a pile of money sitting on the sidewalk, but nobody in the political class has been bothering to bend down and pick it up. The big companies have been able to get away from this by singing from the same hymnal of social justice as their employees, which seems to have become ‘fight all wars except the class war’.
Mr. Beast can start the ball on this project now, and in 10 years or so he’ll be positioned to win. He can keep using YouTube as a platform, and keep raising money to give away to good causes, which he can, of course, monetize with video production. He can drive a bunch of good now, and basically run for office for 10 years straight before officially throwing his hat in the ring. There’s a ton of money floating around left wing circles; Donaldson can show tangible results for deploying capital in the service of good outcomes, and then later run on this existing track record.
All he has to do is start talking about this ideas, and bring on democratic politicians like Fetterman and Moulton, who’ll appreciate the audience time and help Donaldson build his credibility.
If Mr Beast decides to do this, he’ll be suited to take on the Democratic Establishment the same way Trump did. And 10 years from now, we can have two candidates who can actually sound like thinking human beings, rather than scripted robots.
"Like all thinking persons, I don’t want one side to win forever. I want a dialogue between two sides that articulate different halves of a complex set of tradeoffs, each encouraging the other to do better."
Perfectly expressed. Thank you! :)