The Fire Next Time
They will understand it when it arrives. That will be too late.
The most undertold story of our age is not the rise of populism. It is the blindness of the people it is rising against.
Elite society in America — across the spectrum, left to right, Democratic donor class to Republican establishment, corporate boardroom to think tank — is operating under a shared and catastrophic misapprehension. They believe that what has gone wrong is a messaging problem. A policy gap. A failure of communication between the people who know how to run things and the people who need to be persuaded to let them keep running things. They commission polls. They convene focus groups. They hire consultants who tell them which words land and which don’t. They propose new policies calibrated to the data. They are, in their own estimation, being responsive.
They are blind to what is coming. Some of them will read these words and find in them the ravings of someone who has lost perspective — someone captured by grievance, by alarmism, by the kind of thinking that serious people learn to dismiss. That is fine. History has a long record of the people who were called alarmist. It has an equally long record of what happened to the people who called them that.
They will cling to their positions as the walls come down around them. Their smallness will be on full display before history.
It will be quite the fall.
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What they cannot see — what their position inside the system makes structurally invisible to them — is how they are perceived from the outside. Not what people think of their policies. What people think of them.
The distinction is everything.
A policy problem is solvable with better policy. A legitimacy crisis is not. A legitimacy crisis is not a question of what the people in charge are doing. It is a question of whether the people in charge have any right to be in charge at all — whether the system that produced them, rewards them, and protects them from consequence is a system that serves the people it claims to represent, or a system that serves itself while claiming to represent the people.
The answer, in the minds of a growing majority of Americans, is the latter. And no policy proposal, however well-designed, answers that question. Because the question is not about policy. It is about legitimacy. And legitimacy, once lost, is not recovered by competence. It is recovered — if it is recovered at all — by accountability, by justice, and by the visible arrival of genuinely different people in positions of power.
The people do not want better managers of the existing system. They want new people. And they want to see the current lot face consequences for the mess they have made.
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The Democratic Party’s institutional apparatus cannot understand why its fundraising is faltering while populist candidates soar in the polls. The DNC reads this as a communication failure. It is not a communication failure. It is a verdict.
Look at what the immune response actually looks like in practice.
Graham Platner is a Marine veteran — four infantry tours — an oyster farmer and harbormaster from Sullivan, Maine. Bernie Sanders endorsed him. He is leading the incumbent Governor Janet Mills two-to-one in Democratic primary polling and beats Susan Collins 48-41 in the general election matchup. Chuck Schumer and the DSCC recruited Mills, 78, to run against him. Her campaign launched brutal attack ads featuring actors reading his decade-old Reddit posts aloud. CNN KFile dug up old comments where he called himself a communist and used anti-gay language. The tattoo — a skull-and-crossbones he got in Croatia during a Marine deployment in 2007, which the Army had cleared during enlistment screening, and which he covered the moment reporters told him about its association — became “Nazi sympathizer.” His political director resigned. His campaign manager’s response: “This is a desperate effort for relevance from a governor who is trailing an oyster farmer in every recent poll. It’s why people dislike politics.” Despite everything, Platner is still leading 46-25 among Democratic primary voters.
Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. Republican officials called him a jihadist and a radical Islam cockroach. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand incorrectly accused him of making references to global jihad. In March, two ISIS-inspired attackers threw improvised explosive devices at protesters outside Gracie Mansion — devices containing TATP, designed to be, in the attacker’s words, “larger than the Boston Marathon bombing.” They failed to detonate. The Manhattan Institute‘s response was to publish a piece framing the bombing as Mamdani’s responsibility to manage. Mamdani is the mayor of New York City.
Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley in Congress — San Jose, Cupertino, Santa Clara, the heart of the apparatus. He co-chaired Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, co-authored the bipartisan Epstein files disclosure push with Thomas Massie, and endorsed a California billionaires’ wealth tax ballot initiative. The response from the capital class that originally funded his career was immediate. Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator: “Khanna has abandoned his responsibility to his district.” Andy Fang, co-founder of DoorDash, backed a primary challenger. Chamath Palihapitiya backed the same challenger. The Wall Street Journal framed Khanna as the problem, not the billionaires opposing a wealth tax on themselves. Khanna raised more money after the attacks than before them.
Three cases. Three directions. Populist from below. Outsider from outside. Reformer from within. The immune response deploys in all three directions with equal speed, equal coordination, and equal ruthlessness. What it does not deploy against, with anything approaching comparable energy, is its own failures.
The smear doesn’t stick because the smearers have no credibility left to stick it with.
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The deteriorating material conditions are real. The faltering prospects for upward mobility are real. The hollowing out of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the decades-long divergence between productivity and wages — these are the economic substrate of the discontent, and anyone who dismisses them as mere sentiment is not paying attention. American households in the lowest income quintile now spend 30.6% of their income on transportation alone.
But the economic analysis misses the deeper thread. People do not simply want the material conditions to improve. They want restitution. They want the people responsible for the conditions to be named, held accountable, and made to pay something back to the society they extracted from.
Consider what happened in Ontario. A warehouse worker named Abdulkarim filmed himself burning down $650 million worth of Kimberly-Clark product and texted: “all you had to do was pay us enough to live.” He cited Luigi Mangione as his inspiration. He planned it — triggered the sprinklers first, waited for firefighters to deactivate the suppression system per protocol, then lit five fires simultaneously. The establishment has no category for this. It has categories for messaging failure, for policy failure, for communication breakdown. It does not have a category for a man who burned down a warehouse because the arrangement didn’t pay him enough to live and he decided that was someone’s fault. The DNC will commission a focus group. The warehouse is still ash.
The Iraq War. The 2008 bailouts. The opioid epidemic. The COVID failures. The decades of trade policy that was sold as prosperity and delivered as deindustrialization. These are not abstract policy failures. They are crimes for which no one of consequence has faced meaningful consequence.
The establishment’s response to this demand has been, consistently, to look forward rather than backward. To propose new policies rather than account for old ones. To ask for another chance rather than reckon with what the previous chances produced. And the people have watched this response for long enough to draw the obvious conclusion: the system is designed to protect the people who run it from the consequences of what they do with the power they hold.
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Peter Thiel and the monarchical forces around him are playing the same game from the other direction — and they are equally blind to what they have produced. They imagined they could replicate the political innovation of Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan: convince struggling Americans to hand permanent control to a capital class that would provide better customer service than the DMV. That is not a caricature of their position. It is how they think. The pitch was efficiency, competence, the CEO-state — the Cathedral dismantled and replaced with clean lines of authority accountable to capital rather than to voters.
What they got is Donald Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House — the wing that contains the FDR-era bunker where staff sheltered on September 11 — to build a ballroom whose cost has risen from $200 million to $300 million and counting, funded by Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Palantir, Coinbase, and the Winklevoss twins, while a federal judge orders construction halted and 99% of public comments oppose it. The corporate media apparatus aligned with this project is now trying desperately to redirect the attention of struggling Americans toward the corrupt administration of social welfare programs in Democratic-run states. The man they installed to provide better customer service than the DMV is building a monument to himself on the grounds of the people’s house while American households pay $8.4 billion more for gas in a single month.
The philosopher kings did not account for the possibility that the CEO they installed would be Captain Ahab. The current administration is exploiting it to consolidate power that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with capture — I have documented that at length in these pages. Populism in all its forms does not represent a genuine demand for justice. Some of it is authoritarian manipulation of legitimate grievance.
But the establishment’s response — more polls, better messaging, calibrated policy proposals, and character assassination of anyone who threatens the existing order — is not just inadequate. It is accelerant.
Every time the institutional apparatus deploys its remaining credibility to destroy a Platner or a Mamdani, it spends what little trust it has left in service of protecting its own position. The system’s immune response to challengers is more vigorous, more coordinated, and more ruthless than its response to any of its own failures. The Iraq War produced no accountability. The 2008 bailouts produced no accountability. The opioid epidemic produced no accountability. But a Marine veteran from Maine leading the polls two-to-one produces an immediate, well-funded, multi-front character assassination campaign. The system knows what threatens it. It is not its own failures. It is the people who might replace it. Every time the DNC scratches its head about declining small-dollar donations while running the same consultants who have presided over a generation of declining working-class support, it demonstrates that it has not understood what is being asked of it.
What is being asked of it is not a better healthcare plan.
What is being asked is: are you different from the people who did this? And if so, prove it. Not with words. With people. With accountability. With the visible, embodied, risked demonstration that something has actually changed about who makes the decisions and whose interests those decisions serve.
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The boulder moves when enough hands are on it. I have written that before. What I want to add now is this: the hands will not appear until the people being asked to push believe that the boulder is being pushed toward something genuinely different — not a more competent version of the arrangement that produced the crisis, but a different arrangement, led by different people, accountable in ways the current arrangement has never been.
The establishment cannot provide this. Not because the people in it are all bad, but because the system that produced them is precisely what needs to change. You cannot reform a legitimacy crisis from inside the legitimacy structure that caused it. You can only clear the way for the people outside it.
That is what Platner is. That is what Mamdani is. That is what Khanna is. That is what the soaring small-dollar donations to candidates the institutional apparatus is trying to destroy are telling anyone willing to listen.
The people are not confused. They are not misinformed. They are not waiting to be shown the right messaging.
They have made a judgment. And the judgment is: not you. Not anymore. Someone else.
The establishment’s inability to hear that judgment — to process it as information rather than as a threat to be managed — is the blindness I am describing. And it is, at this moment, one of the most dangerous features of the political landscape we are living in.
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“…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it… It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the greatest resistance to change comes moments before the collapse of the reigning paradigm, when its defenders “devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.” Kuhn’s interpretive model has helped me make sense of some of the things that no longer make sense. Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, author of the prophetic 2014 book Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium, best described the “crisis of authority” the neoliberals now face: “They could identify the causes of the public’s anger and work to reconcile the public to the system. This would entail flattening the political pyramid and reducing as much as possible their distance from the public.” This, according to Gurri, is not happening, “Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid. They find proximity to the public frightening and distasteful: No elite figure wants to come near ‘the deplorables.’ They prefer to hide behind bodyguards and metal-detecting machines.”
Despite the morbid obesity of America’s political body - “obese” in the sense of too much donor money, too many powerful special interests seeking continued government entitlements and favors - I think you’ve found the faint pulse of democracy. Please keep listening and diagnosing and your stethoscope warm…