Comment: Excellent article and well worth reading in full.
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Harrison Koehli | Political Ponerology
According to Gallup polling from last year, up to 45% of adult Americans identify as political independents. That's a plurality, as the remainder is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with 27% each. Forty-five percent is around 120 million adults, and that number has been growing for the past 20 years, driven largely by the younger generations. It's easy to see why. Neither party represents them.
Every four years, independents are put in the position of either throwing their vote away for a third-party candidate who will get at most 3% of the popular vote, or choosing what they see as the lesser of two evils. (In the last 50 years, only Ross Perot came close, winning 19% in 1992.)
That's not to say independents are a homogeneous group. Slightly more independents lean Democrat than Republican (20% vs. 15%), with a core 10% who explicitly reject both parties. Given the choice (and an electoral system that would support it), their votes might be split among a handful of parties, as is the case in most democracies. The end result is that the largest segment of the American voting population does not have consistent political representation, at least on the federal level.
That's not always the case, however. Independents may genuinely favor a particular candidate, despite his alignment with one of the parties. This was arguably the case with Donald Trump. As Bret Weinstein — a liberal Democrat who voted for him — described it recently on Tucker, Trump did the impossible: "he beat the duopoly, both sides of it, took over the Republican party, defeated the Democratic party soundly." He did that by dipping into the pool of independents and disaffected liberals like Weinstein. And he did that by presenting a platform that voters largely agreed with, e.g., no new wars, MAHA, unrigging elections, mass deportations, DOGE.
In the first year of his second term, he seems to have at least tried to follow through on many of these promises, despite obstruction from judges and the immobility of Congress. And even when his decisions were controversial among some of his base, such as last year's Iran strikes and January's kidnapping of an El Presidente, those operations were successful one-and-dones, over as soon as the news reached the homeland, with any ex-post-facto criticism just coming across as lame.
All of that seems to have changed with Operation Epic Fury. (And the only reason I say "seems" is because of the meme.) Regime-change war is back on the menu (but it's not a regime change war, in fact, it's not a war, it's an excursion to prevent a war, which might still turn into one, but it's war for peace) and the price of gas is no longer important. Within days, the White House was already caving on another central policy, mass deportations: "Don't mention them anymore." Along with the handling of the Epstein files, voters who aren't Catturd are notably pissed. For many, not going to war with Iran was the main reason they voted for Trump. Here's how Weinstein put it:
When Trump said "no new wars" on the campaign trail, and when voters gave their support to that policy with their votes, they had precisely Iran in mind. The neocons have been blue-balled for decades over Iran. They have gotten practically every other country on their list: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. Iran was the last one, probably because it was the biggest challenge. (Unless they really want to try Turkey after this.) Now the Lindsay Grahams and Mark Levins have their war — a war that never would have happened if Trump were president, I'm sure.
Every four years, independents are put in the position of either throwing their vote away for a third-party candidate who will get at most 3% of the popular vote, or choosing what they see as the lesser of two evils. (In the last 50 years, only Ross Perot came close, winning 19% in 1992.)
That's not to say independents are a homogeneous group. Slightly more independents lean Democrat than Republican (20% vs. 15%), with a core 10% who explicitly reject both parties. Given the choice (and an electoral system that would support it), their votes might be split among a handful of parties, as is the case in most democracies. The end result is that the largest segment of the American voting population does not have consistent political representation, at least on the federal level.
That's not always the case, however. Independents may genuinely favor a particular candidate, despite his alignment with one of the parties. This was arguably the case with Donald Trump. As Bret Weinstein — a liberal Democrat who voted for him — described it recently on Tucker, Trump did the impossible: "he beat the duopoly, both sides of it, took over the Republican party, defeated the Democratic party soundly." He did that by dipping into the pool of independents and disaffected liberals like Weinstein. And he did that by presenting a platform that voters largely agreed with, e.g., no new wars, MAHA, unrigging elections, mass deportations, DOGE.
In the first year of his second term, he seems to have at least tried to follow through on many of these promises, despite obstruction from judges and the immobility of Congress. And even when his decisions were controversial among some of his base, such as last year's Iran strikes and January's kidnapping of an El Presidente, those operations were successful one-and-dones, over as soon as the news reached the homeland, with any ex-post-facto criticism just coming across as lame.
All of that seems to have changed with Operation Epic Fury. (And the only reason I say "seems" is because of the meme.) Regime-change war is back on the menu (but it's not a regime change war, in fact, it's not a war, it's an excursion to prevent a war, which might still turn into one, but it's war for peace) and the price of gas is no longer important. Within days, the White House was already caving on another central policy, mass deportations: "Don't mention them anymore." Along with the handling of the Epstein files, voters who aren't Catturd are notably pissed. For many, not going to war with Iran was the main reason they voted for Trump. Here's how Weinstein put it:
Now, I will say I'm very upset with President Trump at the moment. I feel personally burned as somebody who worked to get him elected. I did it for a reason and frankly if given the same choice today I would have to make the same vote, because I think what the Democratic party offered was anti-constitutional. We had a demented president who they pretended wasn't, and then we had somebody who hadn't won a primary installed by the party. This is not the consent of the governed. So I would have to vote for Trump again just because he's at least a qualified person who was the nominee of his party through a lawful process. But I'm angry at him because I voted for no new wars. And when I voted for no new wars, Iran was top of mind for me because I knew that it was on the agenda of the neocons. So I expected somebody to try to force this to happen.This was Vance in 2024: "America doesn't have to constantly police every region of the world. Our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country."
When Trump said "no new wars" on the campaign trail, and when voters gave their support to that policy with their votes, they had precisely Iran in mind. The neocons have been blue-balled for decades over Iran. They have gotten practically every other country on their list: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. Iran was the last one, probably because it was the biggest challenge. (Unless they really want to try Turkey after this.) Now the Lindsay Grahams and Mark Levins have their war — a war that never would have happened if Trump were president, I'm sure.
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