The Plot Against America, One Year Later

How a dangerous ideology was exposed to the American people — and rejected.

A year ago, I wrote The Plot Against America. I traced the intellectual pipeline from Austrian economics through Curtis Yarvin’s neoreaction to Peter Thiel’s funding of the post-democratic project. I documented how a dangerous ideology born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis had moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance. I ended that piece with a warning: the architects were in power, the gates were closing, and the voice of the people was being replaced by the hum of algorithms.

That was February 2025. It is now February 2026. And I am here to tell you: the gates did not hold.

On February 17th, 2026, the Vice President of the United States went on Fox News and told Fox News that Fox News has the worst polling. The anchor — on his side, on his network, in his corner — quietly replied that she could show him other polls that say the same thing.

This is the most powerful government on earth. It is arguing with its own propaganda arm about whether the numbers are real. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is doing cold-water plunges in blue jeans with Kid Rock in official government videos. The regime’s flagship cultural event was a halftime show where the headliner appeared to be lip-syncing. The president demolished the East Wing of the White House to build himself a ballroom and appointed his 26-year-old former receptionist to the arts commission overseeing the project — swearing her in the same day the commission votes on whether to advance it. The president’s response to a sewage crisis on the Potomac is that he’ll fix it if the Democratic governors ask him “politely.”

This is not a government. This is a content house with nuclear weapons. And the content is getting worse.

And if you want the state of the republic rendered in a single image: the president of the United States is demolishing the East Wing of the people’s house — the people’s house — to build himself a ballroom. Res publica means “the public thing.” He is tearing down the public thing, literally, to make room for a party. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop it. That we need a lawsuit to prevent the president from demolishing the White House for personal entertainment tells you everything about where we are.

I say this not with anger but with the clarity that comes after anger. I spent seventeen essays — The Crisis Papers — diagnosing how we arrived here. That work is finished. I am writing today with a different purpose.

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A house divided against itself cannot stand. Lincoln said that. He was reading the same history I’ve been reading — the fall of the Roman Republic, the dynamics of factions, the structural brittleness of coalitions held together by something other than shared conviction. Lincoln understood that the question was never whether the division would resolve. The question was when, and how violently.

I am writing today to make a prediction. I believe the MAGA regime will not survive to the 2026 midterms in any form recognizable as a governing coalition. I believe we are watching the beginning of the end. And I am making this prediction publicly, with my name on it, because I believe the structural evidence is overwhelming and because someone should say it clearly rather than hedging.

Here is what I see.

The coalition is not a coalition.

A political coalition is a group of people who disagree about some things but share enough common ground to govern together. The New Deal coalition was like this. The Reagan coalition was like this. People with different priorities — labor and civil rights, or business and evangelicals — found enough overlapping interest to hold together across election cycles and govern.

MAGA is not this. MAGA is a collection of factions with fundamentally incompatible interests, held together by a single figure and — I will say this plainly — by mutual complicity. The tech oligarchs want deregulation and labor suppression. The populist base wants economic protection and immigration restriction. The libertarians want the state dismantled. The authoritarians want the state captured. The grifters want access. The true believers want transformation. These interests do not overlap. They contradict.

What held them together was the spectacle of shared victory. Winning papers over a lot of contradictions. But governing exposes them, because governing requires choices, and every choice reveals which faction’s interests are being served and which faction’s interests are being sacrificed.

We are nine months from the midterms. The contradictions are exposed. And the coalition has no mechanism for resolving them. There is no honor among thieves — and there is no coalition among factions whose only shared principle is proximity to power.

The binding agent is not ideology.

This is the critical structural point. An ideological coalition can survive internal conflict because it has a shared framework for adjudicating disputes. When Reagan’s coalition disagreed about tactics, they could appeal to shared principles — free markets, strong defense, traditional values — and find compromise within that framework.

What shared principles hold MAGA together? What is the framework within which Elon Musk and a laid-off factory worker in Ohio find common ground? What ideological commitment unites Peter Thiel’s techno-monarchism with a grandmother in Georgia who wants her Social Security check?

There is none. The binding agent is not ideology. It is the man. And increasingly, it is something darker than the man — it is the web of mutual exposure that makes defection dangerous for everyone inside the coalition. When the binding agent is complicity rather than conviction, the coalition doesn’t have a repair mechanism. It has only two modes: total solidarity or total collapse. There is no middle gear. No deliberation. No compromise. Because compromise requires trust, and trust requires shared ground, and there is no shared ground. There is only shared vulnerability.

And to the extent there is an ideology — a real one, beneath the flags and the rallies and the halftime shows — it has been exposed. I traced it a year ago: the intellectual pipeline from Austrian economics through Yarvin’s neoreaction to Thiel’s post-democratic project. The architecture is now visible to anyone willing to look: a network of tech oligarchs who believe democracy is obsolete technology, who see the American government as legacy code to be disrupted, and whose vision for the future is a world made safe for stateless capital — free from democratic regulation of markets, trade, and labor. Yarvin’s RAGE doctrine — Retire All Government Employees — is being implemented in real time through DOGE. Srinivasan’s “network state” is being wired into Treasury payment systems. The sovereign individual is no longer a thought experiment. He is in the building.

Thiel and his allies have a fondness for naming their projects after Tolkien’s mythology — Palantir, the seeing stone; Anduril, the sword reforged. They fancy themselves the heroes of the story, the wise stewards building civilization against the forces of chaos. But they might consider the character who clutched the ring of power and called it precious, who was consumed by the thing he tried to possess, and who fell into the fire at the end still grasping for it. In Tolkien, the palantíri themselves were corrupted — Sauron turned the seeing stones into instruments of domination, and everyone who looked into one saw only what the enemy wanted them to see. Denethor looked into the palantír and it broke him. He concluded everything was lost, and he burned. There is a Tolkien figure for men who mistake possession for mastery. His name was not Aragorn.

But here is what the architects miscalculated: the people can see it now. The plot required obscurity to function. It required the public to believe that DOGE was about efficiency, that the tech oligarchs were patriotic innovators, that the disruption of government was reform rather than demolition. That cover is gone. The ideology has been shown to the people. And they are not impressed. Because the American public, whatever its divisions, did not sign up to have its republic dismantled by venture capitalists who think democracy is a bug to be patched out of the system.

The war is already internal.

Vance attacking Fox News polling on Fox News is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom. The regime is at war with itself across every seam:

DOGE against the federal workforce — and by extension, against every Republican voter who works for the government or depends on its services. The tech oligarchs against the populist base that was promised economic relief and is watching billionaires gut the agencies that serve them. The deportation machine against the business interests that depend on immigrant labor. The tariff regime against the free-trade wing. The authoritarians against the constitutionalists. The loyalty purges against the competence requirements of actually running a government.

Each of these conflicts is structural. None of them can be resolved by presidential fiat, because resolving any one of them means choosing a side, and choosing a side means losing the faction you didn’t choose. The coalition was built on the promise that everyone gets what they want. Governing reveals that everyone cannot get what they want, because what they want contradicts.

The faith is a prop.

I need to say something here that I don’t say lightly, because I am not a Christian and I am aware that I am speaking from outside a tradition that is not mine. But I am a friend of that tradition. And what I am watching is a desecration.

On February 8th, Turning Point USA staged an “All-American Halftime Show” as an alternative to the Super Bowl, because a Puerto Rican artist singing in Spanish was apparently an affront to American greatness. The tagline was “faith, family, and freedom.” The headliner was Kid Rock — a man whose catalog includes lyrics about sex with underage girls and whose performance was widely noted for what appeared to be lip-syncing. Two weeks later, that same Kid Rock appeared in an official United States government video doing a cold-water plunge in blue jeans with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Faith, family, and freedom. This is what they mean by it. This is the content. This is the product.

I am not a Christian. But I have read the Gospels carefully, and I know what “the kingdom of Heaven is within you” means. It is one of the most radical political statements in the history of human civilization. It says: the divine does not reside in the temple, or the palace, or the empire. It resides in you. In every person. Distributed. Interior. Unmediated by any authority. Jesus said this to people living under Roman occupation, and the Romans killed him for it. Not the republic — the republic was already dead by then. The empire. Pontius Pilate, acting on the authority of Tiberius Caesar. Imperial power killed the man who said God lives in the people, not in the throne. I wrote about this at length in The Crisis No. 16.

And then Constantine took that teaching and bolted it onto the empire. Took the radical interiority of Christ’s message and turned it into a state religion with hierarchy, with bishops who answered to the emperor, with the cross mounted on the imperial standard. The kingdom of Heaven — which was never a kingdom at all — became the brand of the very structure it was meant to resist.

That is what I am watching happen again. “Faith, family, and freedom” is Constantine’s move, performed by Kid Rock in a flag bandana. Take the language of a tradition that locates the sacred in every human being and use it to sell an authoritarian political project to people whose real faith is being exploited for their loyalty. Wrap oligarchy in the Gospels. Wrap Mammon in the cross. And count on the faithful not to notice, because the music is loud and the flags are waving and it feels like church even though it is the opposite of church.

The Christians in this coalition are being used. Their faith is not the foundation of this movement. It is the branding. The men at the top of this regime — the tech oligarchs, the venture capitalists, the Silicon Valley accelerationists — do not believe in the sermon on the mount. They believe in power, in optimization, in the ruthless logic of markets and machines. They need the Christians for their votes and their loyalty and their willingness to show up, and they pay for that loyalty with spectacle. With halftime shows. With cold plunges. With the aesthetics of faith stripped of its substance.

I say this not to mock the faithful but to defend them. Someone should. The people waving the cross at MAGA rallies deserve to be told: this is not your tradition being honored. This is your tradition being sold. The Jesus who threw the money-changers out of the temple would not be on stage with Kid Rock. He would be in the crowd, asking why the temple has been turned into a content house.

The collapse of this coalition will come, in part, because the faithful will eventually notice. Not all of them. Not soon enough. But enough. Because faith — real faith, the kind that lives in the interior and doesn’t need a halftime show to sustain it — has a way of recognizing when it’s being counterfeited. And the counterfeit is getting thinner by the week.

The economics are fatal.

Vance’s own argument on Fox News tells the story. His pitch for the midterms is: Americans have gained about twelve hundred dollars in the first year of the Trump administration, but we’re still digging out of a three-thousand-dollar hole from Biden.

That is not a winning argument. That is an argument that concedes the ground. Thirteen months in, and the message is: it’s less bad than it was. The base was promised a revolution. They are being offered a partial recovery. And the partial recovery is itself contested — because the tariffs are raising prices, DOGE is eliminating services, and the tax cuts are flowing to the top while the base waits for trickle-down that has never, in the entire history of supply-side economics, trickled down.

By November, the base will have had two years of promises and twelve hundred dollars. That does not hold a coalition together. That fractures it.

The polls are not wrong.

Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot 52-46 on Fox News‘s own polling — the highest support recorded for either party in the history of the survey. Vance’s response — to attack the poll — is the tell. When you cannot argue with the numbers, you argue with the measurement. When you cannot dispute the thermometer, you call the thermometer biased. This is not strategy. This is the last move available to someone who knows the temperature and cannot change it.

And MacCallum’s quiet reply — “I can show you other ones that are very similar” — is the sound of the propaganda infrastructure beginning to crack. Fox News is not going to falsify its polling to protect the regime. The network has its own credibility to maintain, its own legal exposure to manage, its own institutional interests that diverge from the administration’s need to deny reality. When the regime’s own media apparatus starts gently insisting that the numbers are the numbers, the regime has lost control of the narrative. And narrative was the only thing it had.

The prediction.

I believe this regime — this specific coalition of oligarchs, authoritarian populists, tech accelerationists, and compromised men — will not survive in governing form through the 2026 midterm elections. I believe the structural dynamics I’ve described — the incompatible interests, the absence of ideological binding, the internal war, the economic failure, the loss of narrative control — are already past the point of recovery.

I do not know exactly how the collapse unfolds. Political collapses are three-body problems — chaotic, nonlinear, unpredictable in their specific trajectory. It could be a midterm wipeout that shatters the coalition’s congressional power. It could be defections from within — the first cooperating witness, the first insider who decides it’s safer to talk than to stay silent. It could be a constitutional crisis provoked by an administration that overreaches and discovers that the institutions it hollowed out still have enough structure to resist. It could be something none of us can foresee, because that is the nature of nonlinear systems.

But the structure is clear. A divided house cannot stand. This house is divided. And it has no foundation beneath the division — no shared conviction, no common ground, no mechanism for repair. Only the mutual vulnerability that kept everyone in the room. And the room is getting smaller.

What I owe you if I’m wrong.

I am making this prediction at a confidence level that borders on reckless. I know that. I am placing it here, in public, with my name on it, because I have never asked anyone to trust an analysis I wasn’t willing to bet my reputation on.

If this coalition holds — if the midterms are not the repudiation I expect — if this regime finds reserves of coherence I cannot see — then I will have been publicly, spectacularly wrong. And I will say so. In writing. Without qualification. I will write the piece that says: I was wrong, here is what I missed, here is what I failed to see. You have my word.

But I don’t think I’ll be writing that piece.

What comes after.

This piece is not about what comes after. Day One is about what comes after. The Crisis Papers were about what happened and why. This piece is about the narrow structural question: does this coalition survive?

No. It does not.

And I want to speak directly now to the Americans who have spent the last year afraid. The ones who watched the institutions bend and wondered if they’d break. The ones who marched, who called their representatives, who argued with their families at Thanksgiving, who lay awake at night wondering whether the republic they were raised in would still be there for their children. The ones who felt alone. The ones who felt defeated. The ones who were told this was the new normal and they’d better get used to it.

You were not wrong. You were not naive. You were not on the losing side of history. You were on the side of self-government, and self-government is not a fragile thing. It is the most durable idea in the history of human political organization. It survived the fall of Rome. It survived as an idea in texts for two thousand years, kept alive by monks who didn’t fully understand what they were copying. It crossed the Atlantic and re-founded itself with lessons learned from every previous failure. It survived the Civil War. It survived the Gilded Age. It survived McCarthyism and Watergate. And it will survive a content house run by compromised men doing cold plunges in blue jeans.

The men who tried to own the republic are fighting each other now. The coalition built on mutual complicity has no mechanism for resolving its contradictions, and the contradictions are exploding in public, on Fox News, in official government videos, in halftime shows where the headliner can’t even get the lip-sync right. This is not strength. This is the last act. And every week it gets more absurd, because absurdity is what remains when the substance is gone.

Your moment is arriving. Not because someone is coming to save you. Because the thing that threatened you is destroying itself, and when it finishes, the republic will need rebuilding. That is your work. That is our work. And we will be ready.

Res publica. The public thing. It belongs to you. It always did. And the men who tried to take it from you are learning what every tyrant eventually learns: you cannot own what belongs to everyone. You can only borrow it, briefly, while the people remember who they are.

They are remembering now.

A year ago, I ended The Plot Against America with a warning. The oligarchs were whispering Vox Populi, Vox Dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God — as they locked the gates. They used the people’s voice as a mask while they silenced it. They whispered it like a prayer to a god they did not believe in.

The gates did not hold. The algorithms did not replace the voice. The people were not optimized into silence. They are angry, and they are awake, and they are coming to the midterms with the full weight of a democracy that has survived worse than a content house run by men who mistake disruption for governance.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

They are no longer whispering.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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