The MAGA Revolt and the Democratic Socialist Surge Are the Same Damn Story

Voters in both parties are sending the same message, while the establishment on both sides is desperately trying to explain it away.

The Democratic Party has a socialist insurgent winning a Senate primary. The Republican Party has a MAGA insurgency led by one of the most influential voices on the right. These are two existential fights, both aimed at the people in charge, and underneath them, each shares a problem that neither establishment can name because addressing it would be an admission of failure.

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Larry Kudlow sat in his own Fox Business studio Wednesday night and told Senator Tommy Tuberville that the Republican Party is blowing it. “The socialists are winning, they’re taking over the Democratic Party, the Republicans are doing nothing,” said the dude who ran the National Economic Council during Donald Trump‘s first term, and he wasn’t done. The polls are lousy. There’s an economic boom nobody knows about. People now spend more on taxes than on food, clothing and shelter, “and the U.S. Republican Senate ain’t doing a thing about it!” Tuberville, who is leaving the Senate to run for governor of Alabama, simply nodded his head before curiously noting that the Senate is about to go on recess.

That same day, Trump responded to a raft of surveys showing most Americans rate the economy as poor and just flatly dismissed them as “fake,” as is his wont. Thursday morning on the Fox & Friends couch, Lawrence Jones admitted to viewers that “part of the reason why you are seeing this rise of socialism is because of the pain that Americans are feeling.”

So in the space of about twelve hours, on the president’s favorite networks, his own former economist argued from numbers the president says don’t exist, and a host conceded that the pain in those numbers is real. Ben Shapiro desperately ran interference on the economic pain angle, lecturing his followers on how catastrophizing over twenty-dollar burritos builds a dangerous case for a bigger government (though a Department of Burrito Pricing is something I’d like to learn more about!)

What all this infighting is really about is who gets to say how the economy feels, or more to the point, who controls the narrative vibes amid increasingly ugly economic reports. Yes, we’ve all seen this before: The MAGA civil war! The establishment right is eating its own! Tucker Carlson is insisting “MAGA has been betrayed” and livestreams a manifesto. The White House responds by insulting its once most loyal allies as “an embarrassing collection of mostly whiny turncoats.”

But maybe the stranger image of the week belonged to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who got on the phone with Abdul El-Sayed for what El-Sayed later described on CNN as a “heart to heart.” El-Sayed is, of course, the DSA-backed and progressive candidate that just won Michigan’s Senate primary over a raft of establishment warnings from both the right and the center-left. He won after outside campaigns spent a metric ton of money trying to stop him, and rallied establishment criticism from his own party’s governor and most of its state machinery lined up against him. This all happened seemingly as a result of his campaign premise that Schumer considered him dangerous, which he repeated in his campaign ads. After he won? Schumer endorsed him within a day. Womp.

There are two predictable columns to write about all of the above. The MAGA civil war! The Democratic Socialist insurgency! Both are reasonably accurate, fairly obvious, but will still get clicks. I’m here to humbly reveal to you, dear Substack reader, that they are the same damn column.

Both parties suffer from the same malaise and are acting like these are weird anomalies that can just be ignored. But oddly, that approach means that neither insurgency is going away any time soon. Why? Because establishment wings of both parties are relying on an archaic machine that simply reclassifies unwelcome information as a messaging problem.

Bad affordability polling? Fake! Complaints about prices? Doom-mongering! Antiwar anger? Disloyalty! A socialist winning a Senate primary? Bad turnout models! Every bit of unwelcome information gets dismissed as a mechanical fluke that says nothing about anything!

Ironically, it IS a messaging problem, but just one of an entirely different sort: Every bit of bad news comes out the other end of a process requiring no one in leadership to consider a thing.

To be clear, this isn’t horseshoe theory. The DSA and the Tucker Carlson faction aren’t converging ideologically. But the opposite sides are now doing the same job within their same partisan ecosystems by leading a revolt that leaders can no longer manage. Dems got lit up by health care and grocery prices; Trump and an interventionist GOP are getting blown up by an increasingly disastrous war nobody voted for.

The ironic part is that the establishments have a case. Wages really are outrunning inflation, and yet affordability still hurts. Joe Rogan, nobody’s party man, kind of summed up the duality by noting how young socialists are “coming from a good place” but that their plans are “f*cking nuts,” and honestly both halves of that ring true. But being right on paper is the trap if expertise turns into permission to stop listening.

The polls saw El-Sayed coming and exaggerated his strength; the establishment saw the same numbers and kept behaving as though enough money, endorsements, and machinery could make them go away. The detection system worked, but the people reading it refused to believe what it was detecting. Which suggests the insugencies are still growing, not the anomalies so easily dismissed.