Centrist Democrats are scrambling to appease a right wing movement that will never accept them and has nowhere to go but down.
Rightwing conservatism in the United States is hitting its peak with Donald Trump in office. This is as good as it gets for them. This is their moment. A perfect fusion of raw resentment, weaponized ignorance, and billionaire-backed grift, all wrapped up in a foundation-caked reality TV "strongman" who managed to convince working people - for a second time - that a gold-plated fraudster from Queens gives a damn about any of them. They won their courts, they stacked their legislatures, they’re passing their tax cuts, they're looting the system.
And then what?
Nothing. The people who screamed loudest about the "forgotten man" had already forgotten him the second their donors came calling. The factories will never come back. The wages will never rise. The entire movement is a parade of empty culture war outrage, a rotating cast of frauds and extremists pumping out ever more hysterical nonsense to keep the base from noticing that none of their lives are improving.
MAGA is a dead ideology walking, kept on its feet only by inertia, propaganda, and the raw force of gerrymandering and voter suppression. It can cheat its way to winning elections and wielding power. It can still hurt vulnerable people. It can still drag America down to its ignominious level. But it has nothing left to offer except more of the same: more screaming, more outrage, more rot. It's all downhill from here.
So what do we make of men like John Fetterman and Gavin Newsom, who now seem desperate to cozy up to the sinking wreck that is MAGA?
It's a craven, small-minded political miscalculation.
They’re buying the top and don't even realize it.
Fetterman wants to be the "blue-collar Democrat who gets it," which now means meeting with Trump first, bending over backward to seem reasonable to a movement that would happily see him lose his seat in a landslide. His sudden hard-right stance on Israel isn't about principle—it's about playing to the exact kind of reactionary audience that Democrats should be steamrolling, not sucking up to. He warns his party against sounding too "academic," as if the real problem is tone, not the billion-dollar disinformation machine pumping lies into people's brains 24/7.
Newsom thinks playing footsie with conservative media figures like Charlie Kirk makes him some bold unifier, as if Charlie Kirk is anything but a cheap propaganda merchant for rightwing billionaires. He thinks he's proving something by taking a "moderate" stance on trans athletes when all he's doing is betraying the people who fought for him when it mattered. His vetoes of progressive legislation? Transparent pandering to the same crowd that will turn on him the second it's convenient.
These men aren't leading. They're flinching. They're second-guessing their side, scrambling for the approval of a movement that has nothing but contempt for them and nothing left to offer its own base. They think they’re being strategic. They think they’re broadening their appeal. It’s weak in every measurable and perceptible way.
There's no aisle to reach across anymore. The modern right isn't a governing party; it's a collection of fanatics, con artists, and cowards, completely uninterested in policy, entirely committed to culture war nonsense and minority rule. They don’t respect compromise. They don't respect good faith. They only respect power.
And yet, here come the Democentrists, once again convinced that the real problem is that they haven't been accommodating enough. If they just tweak the messaging a little and show a little more deference to conservative anxieties, they'll unlock some hidden reservoir of support. It's the same delusional thinking that gave us a decade of failed centrist candidates, the same pathetic impulse that tells liberals to self-police while the right plays for keeps.
They don’t get it. The people voting for Trumpism aren't doing it because they crave reasonable Democrats. They’re doing it because they want blood. They want revenge. They want someone to punish the people they've been told to hate, and they don't care if it comes at their own expense.
No Democrat is winning them over by going soft. No Democrat is winning them over by pandering to their grievances.
They're not looking for a compromise. They want a rumble. And that's what Democrats should be giving them. Not because the left should sink to their level but because leadership means standing for something. It means knowing where you draw the line and refusing to budge. It means taking the fight to the people who have been lying to the working class for decades, the people who have convinced millions of Americans to cheer for their own exploitation.
Fetterman and Newsom should be driving the stake into the MAGA movement's heart, capitalizing on every failure, every fraction, every fraud, and every shameful disgrace. Instead, they're acting like it's 2016, and Trumpism is some fresh new force they need to accommodate rather than an exhausted grift circling the drain.
They think they're positioning themselves for the future. They're wrong. They're anchoring themselves to a dying movement, bending the knee just as the walls are ready to cave in.
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