Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
John Galt, Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
We do have a third party that counts: the Independents. The sooner the Democratic Party figures out what’s going on here and borrows or robs this “Party of One’s” fire, the greater chance Democrats one would surmise will have to re-establish itself favorably if, as seems likely, it regains real power in Congress.
A broader picture here involves this question as to what should Democrats do after the midterm election? If they win both the House and the Senate and clearly have two thirds of those present at the time of the vote in the Senate to convict in an impeachment trial, first order of business is to impeach. A first year law student could make a case that President Donald .J. Trump has under Article II, section 4 of the Constitution committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. “Sufficient to quote Trump himself in order to impeach and convict.
This is the dream plan and as in all dream plans reality comes knocking.
Recent history sort of indicates that Senate Republicans will remain loyal to Trump like a Captain going down with a sinking ship. Why? They don’t like him as he has shown no particular loyalty to Senate Republicans or the Republican Party. What they fear is the wrath of Trump’s MAGA Myrmidons, his cult. Their attachment to him cannot be pursued in any rational way except to say reason and the presentation of facts and evidence that is reason’s path is not employed by this group. In fact, the presentation of such and its presenters are targets of attack by those cued by Trump, who himself uses his Justice Department to make the lives of those who cross him miserable. Trump can, from a throne in Mar a Lago, order terrible things to happen to his enemies. “Hang Mike Pence!”
What happens to Trump, assuming he lives on after the midterms and after the 2028 presidential election, and what happens to his devoted followers is rich material for future fiction. What happens when the Democrats return to Congressional power, at least ownership of the Speakership of the House is, as much mentioned now, rests on a three legged stool.
First, bringing forward all crimes committed and holding accountable those who committed them , as well as damage and destruction repair of what a criminal regime has perpetrated. Much here will involve a reversal or removal of executive orders and legislation passed by the Trump regime, including tearing down all monuments and proposed projects Trump has built in his own honor. We shall wait for a posthumous case made as to Trump’s greatness in the view of others and not himself.
Secondly, passing legislation that ensures greater level of affordability for wage earners, that is those not living on their investments. And, as I will explore, reaching out to the Independent voter who has emerged in great numbers in response to our two party system in which both parties are either in a knife fight in a phone booth, or, cleverly masking that they are a duopoly united in serving the interests of a Wealth Class. Whether the Independent voter is escaping ties to both parties because they are too antagonistically polarized or bound together in a project to do nothing legislatively effective does not reveal what the Democratic Party needs to know in order to reach them.
Thirdly, as added by Senator Slotkin, where and how Trump has steadily established an autocratic regime without any effective deterrence from a Democratic Constitutional order must be an order of business that the Democratic Party must pursue. Trump found and walked through the holes in this order not created by him but found and exploited. Sealing the holes will not be done by the Republican Party but rather that Party will remain hagiographic in all matters Trump. How and when it wakes up, or is replaced by another front of the investment class, is also rich material for future fiction.
The fourth leg in the stool, now a chair, should address itself to the problem of the American electorate, namely this: whatever brought an army of voters with personal allegiance to Donald J. Trump’s side is not up for Sherlock Holmes deduction. In other words, why it exists and how it persists defies empirical or rational method. Trump will be out of office but these voters will remain.
Europeans tell me that Americans who were three time Trump voters are more frightening than Trump because he will depart and they remain. Their allegiance to a transparently corrupt autocrat opens up possibility that this blind voter will vote another threat to EU security into the presidency. There is fear of American voters unable to recognize a lack of humanity as well as being unable to accept empirically as well as consensually validated evidence. The ways in which we work to achieve common understanding has vanished in enough American voters to bring Trump to power twice. Given the economic and military power of the U.S., this collapse into irrationality along with submission to erratic, deranged leadership, which Europeans have experienced, is a global threat. Donald J. Trump joins global warming and errant AI as existential threats.
Because the Democratic Party has off and on a favorability rating lower than President Trump, a win in the November elections, whether a wave or a tsunami, should mean only this: the nation’s desire to end the Trump drama has spoken and that the vote is not a confirmation of the Democratic Party. While that party may pull itself together at that start or whether it swallows itself up in internecine warfare or denies DSA a seat at the table is not pertinent because the Party is held in such low esteem few expect reformation or transformation or anything affecting their lives from this party.
It’s easy to see why no one would declare themselves independent during the French or Bolshevik revolutions and frightened not to salute under the Third Reich, being unimpressed by Communists or Fascists. During this Trump time, declarations of the Independent voter are not easy to unpackage. Much or all has to be surmised or stand as no more than speculation. I say this because on one side we have those who find Trump, as Tucker Carlson put it, the Anti-Christ and on the other side those who think, as he himself does, he is the greatest president in U.S. history. There are those aligned with Valerie Harp who tells Trump “you are all that matters to me” and there are those aligned with Robert DeNiro “I can’t love a country that’s led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant.”
This is a nightmare political landscape. Independents are our escapees. But there is an Archimedean point of observation where they position themselves, otherwise they are blind and independent out of that blindness. I don’t think some 43% voting as Independents in 2024 election were all united in obliviousness. What they mean can be pursued.
Clearly, Trump is not all that matters to them otherwise they’d be MAGA. To be MAGA now is to be fully and dispassionately convinced. They’ve taken a loyalty oath to Trump and given up their independence.
What is not a matter of definition but can be deduced is that none of the charges that Democrats have brought against Trump in two impeachments matter to Independents otherwise they’d join the Democrats. In the 2020 election Biden won Independents by 15 points but in 2024 Trump once again grabbed almost 50% of Independents. At the moment of the 2020 election Trump had been impeached twice, an historical record, and convicted but not sentenced of 34 felony accounts, the first president in U.S. history to be convicted of felonies. We can conclude that the 2020 drop in Independent support of Trump may have been affected by these facts. However, his support in 2024 increased with Independent voters so either moral turpitude and convicted felonies were not moral considerations among Independents or they had forgettable impact. It is also possible that defenses made on Trump’s behalf, namely that the Democrats had weaponized the justice department and the judiciary against him, and also, and this runs deadly and frighten Ly deep, all facts and evidence present could be countered by alternate facts and evidence.
The question then arises whether Independents can’t find clear and firm ground to stand on because they cannot “read the room” and cannot because they accept that all arbiters of judgment are always politicized and so absent in any determination leading to common understanding. This is most clearly observable in the authority duel between Trump and the scientific method during Covid. A precursor of that dismissal of that method is certainly global warming, which Trump declares a hoax. He had now declared all probability of AI going rogue and beyond human control also a hoax. As these are both existential threats recognized by the scientific community but not recognized by the president, it would seem a clear stand should be taken. Unless once again the defenses made for the president’s position seem reasonable to the Independent voter.
What bothers Democrats such as an antipathy to living in a country autocratically controlled, even by an individual clearly in need of therapy, doesn’t bring Independents on board.
Because those at this “make it or lose it” moment in the 250 year old democratic order are not persuaded to join a party that opposes Trump’s galloping fascism , we need to assume that either they prefer an autocratic order to a democratic one, or that they prefer personal sovereignty to collaborative efforts. To an unknowable degree Independents calculate the Democratic Party’s views on the dangers Trump presents to the democratic order as greater or less than their own. If they calculate no danger, they are Republican and not Independent voters. The deciding arbiter here is to what degree Autocrats may tamper with stock portfolios and personal investment. The root of this is a belief that capitalism can do as well and perhaps better under autocratic rule than electoral democratic rule. Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land offer this view of the benefits of authoritarian capitalism. Both have influenced Peter Thiel, JD Vance’s mentor.
Attacks have been made on MAGA as a tribe full of passion and little reason who were in bad shape money wise before Trump and now cling to him as their relief. Independents are not of this tribe. Rather than being short on funds I believe that they are shareholders, an investor class that calculate short term return and does not calculate long term projections of the market, global warming and rogue AI being two. Independents, like Libertarians, dislike Federal regulations, the DSA’s promise of wealth tax, and any attack on fossil fuel holdings. The Market is the moral compass.
I reject the view that the party Independents oppose the least is the one they lean into. What this implies is that there is no core of belief or steady hold on the rudder but something like a mood swing. Trump treats Zelensky as he deserves one day and awfully the next. What adds up to me is a hold on the rudder of Market Rule by Independents along with a codicil giving them power to make personal course changes. This is an ego defense stratagem. A kind plausible deniability here. When shit happens “I was never part of that” somehow safeguards the Independent’s self-esteem. A party can lose an election. An Independent never can. Independents didn’t vote against Reagan in both his terms because he set the Market Rule course.
Because liberal and progressive and now Democratic Socialist politics threaten portfolios and wealth already accrued, and because Republicans have replaced Reaganite economics with the mercurial temperament of a leader who is corrupting the beloved “Invisible Hand of the Market” with his grifting hand, the Independent sole criterion of judgment is whether Trump is more dangerous to their wealth or the Democrats are.
As we face the midterm Congressional elections, the tilt is going against Trump with Independents, which means firstly, that in their calculation Trump is now Market destabilizing, and secondly, that Democrats will be able to hold the feet of all the King’s men to the fire, not where an Independent wants to be. It may be that the Democrats will clean the Augean Trump stables and thus leave the Republican Party on a path back to true University of Chicago and Hayek economics. Or, more likely fall into the hands of the Simi Valley wide broligarchy. All this, once again, is rich material for future fiction.
I surmise that it will be difficult for the Democratic Party to hold on to Independents in the 2028 Presidential election because there is so much a socialist leaning party can do to upset this Dividend Class, so much now represented for instance by Mamdani in NYC that threatens this class. Outside of what the DSA offers as big bold change, the Democratic Party has nothing, not able to go back to DEI, Woke and pronoun politics, as James Carville puts it.
On the other side of the aisle, The Republican Party cannot lose its MAGA supporters and hope to win elections. Because MAGA attachment to Trump has no text or platform, no independent mentality beyond the fickle mind of Trump, we have to assume that Trump drew them in by the force of his long time persona as America’s Boss, by which I mean we can’t calculate what the hell is going on here. What seems clear is that JD Vance is no Trump, nor is or was there anyone on the planet like Trump. In the realpolitik of a Mearsheimer the surviving move for the Republican Party is to go along with the Democrats in power and convict Trump in an impeachment trial and, free of the cancerous tumor, go on to create more rich materials for future fiction. The Independent who voted for Trump three times can now tell us he or she was always independent of that mess.
It won’t take much for Independents to keep off the Democratic roster but a return to a wealth and investment protective economics by the Republican Party will draw their vote while not giving up the Independent label which is hard shell in the spirit of personal freedom and independence. This abiding hold on all the illusions of individual and personal autonomy may be what makes an Independent independent. They see a political party as a kind of collective, a union of shared values and goals, cooperative and communal. Our Independent won’t join a union, prefers to allocate income tax owed not to the Feds but to what he or she personally chooses, judges personally whether global warming exists. This is your fellow citizen, one among equals, in the same way Trump is any of these.
The American spirit of individual integrity and strength, of a Man who stands alone and does not bow to any force outside himself, a Man like Ayn Rand’s John Galt may be, in the end, what makes an Independent voter in the U.S. No more than pure, uncut Ayn Rand.
While MAGA are Kool Aide entranced and Democrats are beginning to come out of the socialist closet, Independents are proud of themselves, as transactional politically and morally as Trump himself, in some ways as dumb as Trump as to what real conditions are, but in more ways watchful and protective of what they’ve “won.”
Chances are next to nothing that Democrats will bring MAGA to them while their chances with Independents in 2028 depend on which party provides greater stability and security in regard to ongoing investments and wealth already accrued. As all the Trump declared “hoaxes” kick in as NOT hoaxes, and Market instability kicks in, the vote will be for those engaged already in prevention, mitigation, regulation and cancellation. Market Rule rules this “independence.”
