Our 50/50 America (Part II): Voting red is a vote to build a new anti-pluralist world
What the red side of 50/50 America is tearing down isn't nearly as important as what they're building up -- and what they're building on.
Living in “50/50 America” no longer means what it used to mean—that’s the conversation we started last week.
The brand-name “50/50 America” on the front of the box hasn’t changed, but the ingredient list on the side of the box has been radically altered.
Political reporters and pundits operate as if they think the two-party system is still functional and deserving of rhetorical deference.
During the upcoming mid-terms, your cable signals will be jam packed with pundits using the same “50/50” rhetoric about our “divided” and “polarized” nation—couching the discussion in the same pluralistic context they’ve always used:
Two parties.
Clashing visions.
Independent voters “in the middle.”
Competing policy aims.
The fickleness of “swing voters.”
Centrist backlash against finger-wagging wokeness.
The aims of the red side of America’s 50/50 divide were ALWAYS on full display.
And what they’re tearing down isn’t nearly as important as what they’re building up.
Back in 2024, a lot of agitated voices were warning that a red vote in this divided nation was a vote for an authoritarian party with an erratic autocratic leader at the helm — people who would undertake a fundamental rewrite of the social contract that had governed America at least for the past hundred years, if not since its founding.
Any vestigial commitment to pluralism—as contentious as that pluralism could be—would be tossed overboard.
Then, on Election Day, America split down the proverbial middle and elected the autocrats anyway. So, now we’re here.
Exactly as predicted:
What was once a pluralistic red-blue “50/50 America” of political give and take has quickly become an anti-democratic red-blue “50/50 America.”
In our new anti-pluralist 50/50 America, the red side is intent on minoritarian rule forever and autocratic Executive Branch control of everything.
As far back as 2021, in The BIG “Big Lie” series, I was writing about this impending anti-democratic age, and what was driving it:
The left will win the culture war at the very same time it loses the country to an increasingly autocratic backlash from the right.
The GOP is [bent on] restoring the “real America” – on guns, abortion, voting rights, education, religion in [government] spaces, environmental rollbacks, equality and diversity rollbacks, and maybe soon they will succeed in taking away my super-gay marriage, to name a few recent initiatives.
The right has shown that if it cannot win the culture war in the broader culture, it feels no compunction about simply legislating away the impact of the nation’s leftward cultural swing in the name of protecting conservatives’ liberty and restoring America to its true conservative heritage. That’s the climax of their narrative and by God are they climaxing!
But more important, here’s what I wrote about the kind of nation a Republican trifecta (winning the House, Senate, and White House) would bring us.
Here’s what I thought it would create:
At that point, the rest of us will get pulled along into a “real America” of their making, likely one modeled on 19th century America (maybe even 18th century America)—i.e., the very kind of society today’s born-again conservatives see as a blueprint for the ages.[9]
That new America, like the original colonial version, most likely will be a pious, radically libertarian, deeply economically stratified, racialist, pamphleteering free-for-all. Following their originalist logic, America would become a kind of maximalist colonial-era world: the same mentality just with bigger churches, better guns, and cooler technology.
In the conservative narrative, that’s the originalist freeze-frame that the founders intended, and they insist that we all have to live in that zero-sum world with them. Any liberal win that modifies the freeze-frame comes at their expense.
So, our revanchist, restored America won’t likely be a jackbooted, cartoonish version of an autocracy. Rather, it will be something that looks and feels “American” but different:
> quasi-authoritarian
> quasi-religious
> construing freedom in a narrow, parochial way
> a pseudo-democracy that ensures the legislative authority of born-again conservative interests
> a country governed by a kind of pseudo-law that assures the legal authority of born-again conservative ideas, as we are seeing with a born-again conservative Supreme Court
> in practice, it will find ever more inventive ways to restrict the social, legal, and political vehicles by which conservative primacy might be challenged
> those of us in the pro-democracy, pro-pluralism contingent will find ourselves hemmed in and howling in protest, in a shrinking media bubble of our own.
Turns out that this prediction was very much on point.
What we’re seeing in the opening months of the new administration:
Restraints on executive power removed
The executive branch pushing limits and testing for weaknesses in the institutions and processes charged with enforcing limits.
Congress neutered, as evidenced by the demolishing of entire federal programs and departments through executive decrees on defunding and mass firings.
Conservative reconstruction of public cultural and media institutions.
Gleeful demolishing of the separation of church and state (e.g., allowing federal employees to proselytize for their personal religious beliefs in the federal workplace).
A gigantic extortion scheme pitting the fiscal and administrative power of the state against the nation’s entire legal profession, higher education and media, in an all-out blitz for control and compliance.
Federal militarization of domestic law enforcement.
The entire federal justice apparatus mobilized against dissenters and perceived enemies.
Redistricting massive swaths of the nation ahead of the 2026 mid-terms—the efforts in Texas being a dry run for what they will pursue across the entire nation.
And these are just the opening gambits in the Administration’s FIRST SIX MONTHS. We have three and a half years to go.
The red side of 50/50 America is building their new “conservative” nation based on fraudulent myths
I wrote in the BIG Big Lie series that America’s conservative groundswell was riding atop a fraudulent hero myth: of conservatives saving the real America from liberal domestic enemies.
That myth is the bedrock foundation of all the anti-pluralist machinations we’re seeing from the red side of 50/50 America today.
But those are not the only fraudulent myths. A movement grounded in fraudulent myth making has to build an entire architecture of fraud to maintain the sham grab for power.
As Fareed Zakaria observed in a recent Washington Post article, Trump’s world-altering tariff policies are built upon a shoddy foundation: an erroneous myth that free trade has been bad for America:
Massive changes in public policy that are transforming the world are being made based on a series of assumptions that are anecdotes, exaggerations and lies.
And if there’s one thing this red-shirt blitz relies on to rebuild America in its image, it’s the control of information and storytelling.
To quote a headline from a Washington Post article:
Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent “truth.”
The recent firing of a chief government statistician, for job numbers that the president didn’t like, is just the tip of the iceberg. As the Post reported:
The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.
We don’t know the full universe of statistics that has gone missing, but the U.S. DOGE Service’s wrecking ball has already left behind a wasteland of “404″ pages. All sorts of useful information has disappeared. [emphasis added]
Brian Stelter at CNN made much the same observation and cited many more examples of red-shirt reality control via information control:
Climate change reports, deleted. DEI initiatives, banned. Local TV and radio stations, defunded.
Books, removed from military academies. Names of civil rights leaders, erased from ships. History lessons, purged from museums.
The list goes on and on. President Trump and his government appointees keep asserting more control over ideas and information — which has the effect of taking power away from independent researchers, historians, and the real news outlets that he frequently calls “fake.”
Red-shirt “conservatives” are world builders: creating a new world parallel to ours that will eventually subsume ours
It sounds like the plot of a Bond movie: a cabal of super-baddies scheming to conquer the world by controlling reality.
If you wrote it as fiction, it would be rejected as too cliché to be believable.
But that is exactly what’s happening, right now, in slow motion.
This article from Dave Troy at America2.0 is a must read for its explanation of the Network State movement, which aims to create:
a parallel establishment envisioned by Andressen [sic] and other promoters of the Network State movement, which specifically aims to dismantle the United States and replace it with a federation of smaller, competing fiefdoms. [emphasis original]
Building on myths of their own superiority (and victimization at the hands of liberal domestic enemies of the “real America”) their aim is to replace all our current mainstream media, education, scientific, and government institutions.
Their vehicle is technological: using the internet’s “network effect” to attract enough disaffected users to platforms under their control that they can then starve mainstream institutions of money, participation, and ultimately social authority. (Troy points out that Substack itself is part of this digital parallel universe.)
Their aim is to create a parallel system of institutions they control that will eventually supplant the off-line, real-world institutions they don’t control.
This is not theory.
This is happening: for example, the online PragerU (a media outlet founded by a conservative talk show host to promote his conservative version of “American values”) has been tapped by the state of Oklahoma to administer wokeness screenings to applicants from blue states for positions as public-school teachers.
PragerU is not an accredited educational institution but it’s online reach is global, and its offline reach is growing.
And that’s just one example of how their parallel world is being built, brick by digital brick, to compete with and eventually overtake the pluralist world we’ve always taken for granted.
(For deeper reading, Dave Troy points readers to “Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, co-authored with Blake Masters, which discusses the power of network effects to achieve effective monopoly control.”)
These are the stakes in a “50/50 America” in which the one side is no longer willing to agree to let pluralism define the political ground rules.
The political commentariat will likely be unwilling to give up their pluralist framing of the next election cycle (e.g., “it’s the economy stupid” and “swing voters decide elections”), but that doesn’t change the reality: a red-blue, 50/50 America is not what it used to be. It’s something much scarier, and much more dangerous.
NEXT WEEK: We ask why the blue-shirts are failing so miserably at countering the anti-pluralist world-building on the red side of the 50/50 divide.
Image: Salmy_king from FAVPNG.com