Escaping The Maelstrom
A structural look at today’s US politics and its history
Prologue
Following the stormy waters of political discourse, I was getting annoyed more and more. Annoyance that became anger. There were unanswerable questions buzzing in my head, getting louder the more I thought about them. These were actual anomalies. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t getting any serious attention in political discourse. I had to find the answers, and this article is my attempt to show what I found. It’s not simple, but it is coherent — and above all, it answers my questions. Here they are:
● How come the Republicans have become the working man’s party while beholden to corp and elite?
● How come the Democrats became the establishment party while talking the talk of a social party?
● Why do the neolibs attack the progressives?
● Why don’t the Democrats maintain think tanks and ongoing campaigns?
● Why don’t the Democrats work with left-wing grassroots organizations?
● Why are the approval ratings of the Democrats so low?
● Why did the right become so extreme?
● Why do the majority of Democrat donors come from corporations and the elite?
● Why doesn’t exposing Trump’s hypocrisy work?
● Why does it look like the Democratic Party does not care if it loses?
● Why does the right hate the Democrats so intensely?
Chapter 1 - The Maelstrom
Opening
You wake up and the first thing you feel isn’t quite fear, but it’s close. The rent is due. The car made a noise yesterday you can’t afford to think about. You haven’t been to a doctor in two years because the deductible alone would mean skipping groceries. You’re not poor, exactly — you work, maybe more than one job — but you’re one bad month away from a situation you can’t come back from easily, and you know it, and it never quite leaves you alone.
You don’t talk about it much. Neither does your neighbor, who is probably in the same position, though you don’t really know your neighbor anymore. There isn’t time, and anyway what would you say?
This is not a story about the very poor. This is the background hum of two thirds of Americans in the wealthiest society in human history that are living paycheck to paycheck, one crisis away from economic crash. A persistent, low-grade anxiety that used to have a name — precarity — but has now become so normal it barely has a name at all. It’s just how things are.
But it wasn’t always how things were. And even without an evil mastermind, it didn’t happen by accident.
The Pull
This is not a conspiracy, not a single policy, not one party’s doing — but a gradual, decades-long reorganization of who bears risk in society. It moved that risk, systematically and with genuine ideological conviction, from institutions onto individuals. Governments stopped being the guarantor of last resort — and became, as 2008 made viscerally clear, the safety net of the ultra-rich. Cold markets became the answer to social questions. Questions they were never intended for — like whether your child gets a decent education, or whether a cancer diagnosis bankrupts your family.
What happened goes by many names. The algorithm. The system. Crony capitalism. The party. Depending on where you sit politically, you might call it globalism, or late-stage capitalism, or just the way things are. For coherence, and for historic accuracy, we are going to call it what it is: neoliberalism.
It was sold as a solution. The 1970s had produced stagflation — that ugly combination of stagnant growth and runaway inflation that Keynesian economics, the postwar consensus, had no good answer for. And looming behind it, still vivid in living memory, were the 1930s: bread lines, mass unemployment, the kind of collapse that had fed the rise of fascism across Europe. Governments were desperate for any framework that would work. What neoliberalism offered was elegant: free the markets, shrink the state, let competition drive efficiency, and individual responsibility drive growth. The rising tide, the theory promised, would lift all boats. It was compelling enough that it didn’t just capture the right in the 1980s. Within a decade, it had captured the left as well.
What the theory didn’t account for — or chose not to — was what happens to the people treading water when the tide doesn’t rise for them. What happens across a generation. What happens to a society when the safety net isn’t just weakened but reframed as a moral failure — when needing help becomes something to be ashamed of.
The Drift
The left didn’t abandon the working class overnight. It drifted, incrementally, following incentives that made complete sense at every single step.
The postwar boom had an expiration date. The extraordinary growth of the fifties and sixties was built on a specific, unrepeatable condition: Europe and Japan lay in ruins, and America rebuilt them. When that rebuild was complete, the surplus evaporated. What was left was an overextended empire — Vietnam, the space race, the Cold War — running on borrowed momentum. By the seventies, the bill came due. Stagflation wasn’t a mystery or a policy failure. It was the end of an era.
At that moment, there were two paths. One was managed contraction: restructure the economy, renegotiate the global role, protect the industrial base through the transition. Painful, unglamorous, politically costly but most of all it would be swimming against the current. The other was extraction: open the markets, move the capital, find new exploitable sources of surplus abroad, replacing the old ones. Neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic theory — it was the political choice to extract rather than restructure. And extraction, by definition, leaves something behind.
What it left behind was the union base. Deindustrialization is often described as something that happened — a force of nature, an inevitable tide. It wasn’t. It was the downstream consequence of deliberate policy choices about capital mobility, trade, and who the economy was supposed to serve. As factories closed and unions shrank, the left’s traditional funding dried up. Corporate donors filled the vacuum. And politicians who no longer needed union money found, gradually, that they no longer needed union members either.
The interesting part is that neoliberalism, in the seventies, felt progressive. Markets as freedom. Deregulation as liberation from stuffy, paternalistic institutions. Individual autonomy against the grey conformity of the postwar state. It spoke the cultural left’s language fluently, even as it dismantled the economic foundations the left had spent decades building. That seduction made the drift easier — and harder to see while it was happening.
A new constituency was growing: educated, urban, socially liberal professionals. They voted reliably. They donated. They staffed campaigns. And they had a different set of priorities. Social progressivism — minority rights, gender equality, individual freedoms — became the new common ground. It was genuine, it was important, and it was also extraordinarily convenient: it gave the left a coherent identity that didn’t require touching the economic order that its new base was doing rather well inside. The working class had needed redistribution. The professional class needed recognition. Recognition is cheaper.
Nobody decided to sell out. There was no meeting, no memo. Just a thousand incremental rational choices — which candidate to back, which donor to court, which issue to lead with — each one defensible in isolation, all of them together adding up to a party that spoke fluently about identity and had almost nothing left to say about wages, housing, or the cost of getting sick. The path was clear: capital would gradually replace labor, and international commerce would replace industrial production. And until today, it hasn’t stopped.
Stranded
Something deeper than politics shifted. Over fifty years, neoliberalism didn’t just change what governments did — it changed how people understood themselves.
For most of the twentieth century, identity was collective by default. You were a union member, a neighbor, a parishioner, a citizen. Your security came from belonging — to institutions, to communities, to something larger than yourself. These weren’t just social niceties. They were the architecture of a self. The union didn’t only negotiate your wages; it told you who you were and who had your back.
That architecture was dismantled brick by brick. Not through force, but through a quieter revolution: the steady replacement of the citizen with the consumer, the worker with the entrepreneur, the community with the atomized masses. The gig economy is the logical endpoint — not an anomaly but a completion. You are no longer an employee with rights and protections. You are a micro-enterprise, responsible for your own insurance, your own retirement, your own survival. Free, in theory. Alone, in practice.
The American Dream was never about unfathomable wealth. It was about prosperous sufficiency. A house. A job that pays. Kids who do better than you did. The floor being solid enough that you could plan, that you could breathe, that failure wasn’t fatal. That’s the actual dream — not the mansion, the safety. Neoliberalism removed the floor. And then told you that falling was a personal failure.
We all took our eyes off the ball and left it to the representatives, the parties, the institutions of the left. But they were themselves being hollowed out by the same logic. Campaign finance doesn’t corrupt dramatically; it corrupts incrementally. A donor relationship here, a policy softened there, a fight not picked because the cost is too high. Politicians didn’t wake up one morning and choose their donors over their constituents. They drifted, rationally, toward whoever was still in the room. And the room, increasingly, was full of corporate money.
The working class watched this happen. Maybe not in those terms, maybe not with that analysis — but they felt it. The plant closed. The union dissolved. The politician showed up at election time and spoke a language that felt like it belonged to someone else’s life. The institutions that were supposed to represent them had quietly changed their address.
They were a constituency without a vehicle. And into that vacuum, something was coming.
The Maelstrom
The right didn’t steal the working class. It was handed to them.
As the left chased its new coalition — centrist floating voters, educated suburbanites, corporate donors whose money had replaced union dues — it shed working class voters in a steady, measurable bleed that has been visible in the data since the early nineties. Each cycle, the math was rational: replace the voters you’re losing with voters who are easier to keep. Move toward the center. Sand off the economic edges. The donors approved. The consultants approved. It worked electorally, for a while.
What it produced, structurally, was a constituency of millions with no material representation and nowhere to go. The right was waiting. Not with solutions — with something more immediately valuable. Recognition. A language that spoke directly to people who hadn’t been spoken to in decades. An enemy to explain the pain. A story in which they were the protagonists, not the problem. People knew they were being lied to. They chose it anyway. Because being lied to will always be the choice over complete erasure.
The culture war wasn’t just a substitution for economic politics — it became something more powerful than that. When institutions fail people long enough, material promises stop feeling real. Nobody believes the healthcare plan anymore. Nobody believes the infrastructure bill is coming. But identity feels real. An enemy feels real. Belonging feels real. Culture wars became politics while actual political policies were made to feel unattainable. For many it was genuinely felt and genuinely powerful no matter how minuscule the grievances.
So the maelstrom turns. The left chases the center, loses more working class voters, moves further right to compensate, fights its own progressive wing harder than it fights the opposition — because progressives threaten the donor coalition in ways the right never does. The right radicalizes to hold its base. The window of discourse moves. What was extreme became acceptable. What was acceptable became radical. And the center of political gravity shifts — consistently, cycle after cycle, in one direction, to the right.
The proof is not theoretical. It’s sitting in the polling data. Seventy percent of Americans support public healthcare. Ninety percent support medication price controls. Eighty-eight percent want Medicare expanded. Supermajorities support taxing the rich, raising the minimum wage, free school meals, paid family leave, gun control, student loan relief, reproductive rights, and environmental action. These are not fringe positions. These are the positions of the American working class — and significant parts of the middle class too. And they go unrepresented. The House Progressive Caucus is roughly forty percent of elected Democrats. In the Senate, genuine progressives can be counted on one hand. The gap between what people want and what gets implemented isn’t a democratic malfunction. It is the mechanism that captured the Democratic Party, working exactly as designed.
At this point you might say “But polling intent and voting behavior are famously different things”. But that gap is itself the indictment. In a functioning democracy, people vote for their material interests. When they consistently don’t — when ninety percent want medication price controls and keep electing people who won’t deliver them — it means the electoral sphere has been so thoroughly captured by emotional politics and donor money that material interest has been almost entirely displaced. The gap isn’t a polling problem. It’s the proof.
When representation did emerge — Sanders in 2016, Corbyn in the UK — the response was instructive. Not defeat by the right. Destruction from within. Their own parties mobilized against them with more urgency than they ever directed at their nominal opponents. Because the right is a useful bogeyman. Progressives who would actually implement those supermajority policies are an existential threat to the donor class — and to the party structures the donor class funds.
And it isn’t only policy. The institutions designed to protect people have undergone the same capture. Courts that reliably protect capital over people (famous Citizens United ruling). Police that have never quite managed to protect and serve equally. Regulatory bodies staffed by the industries they regulate. Corporations that kill people — knowingly, calculatedly, with full legal protection — from DuPont’s teflon to the opioid manufacturers to the safety systems that aren’t installed in EV cars because the math said the lawsuits would cost less. The system isn’t broken. It is working precisely as it has been rebuilt to work. For someone else.
And people know. Not always in these terms, not always with this analysis — but they feel it in every interaction with an institution that should serve them and doesn’t. You stop believing in democracy not because you’ve been radicalized but because you’ve been paying attention. Because the democracy on offer isn’t yours. It never picks up the phone for you. It doesn’t have time for your problems. It serves, with all its power and accumulated privilege, someone richer than you. Someone who can afford a lobbyist, a lawyer, a senator. Someone “better” than you.
So people disengage. Not with rage — rage requires energy, requires the belief that action is still possible. What neoliberalism produces, over fifty years of incremental disappointment, is something quieter and harder to reverse: learned helplessness at civilizational scale. People stop voting, stop organizing, stop expecting. They turn inward — to their screens, their survival, their private lives — because the public sphere has proven, repeatedly, that it isn’t for them. And the ideology finishes the job: if your poverty is your personal failure, you don’t organize with other poor people. You just try harder, alone.
The frog doesn’t jump. The water keeps warming. And the maelstrom keeps turning — not toward collapse, not toward a single dramatic rupture, but toward a political reality in which the threshold of what is acceptable keeps shifting, the institutions keep hollowing, and the distance between what people need and what the system provides keeps growing. Quietly. Incrementally. With all actors behaving rationally at every step.
Step back from the individual cycles, the individual elections, the individual betrayals — and a single picture emerges. Over fifty years, the entire political sphere has drifted consistently rightward. Not the left toward the center. Not the center toward right. The whole thing — left, center, right — moving together, in tandem, in one direction, like a tide that never quite comes back. What was once the extreme right is now mainstream. Grounded social progressive policies are now radical. And the drift hasn’t stopped at economics. It has crossed into democratic territory itself — into the normalization of litigation language and now authoritarian language, the erosion of institutional norms, the open contempt for the mechanisms of accountability. This is not a pendulum. Pendulums swing back. This is the maelstrom.
The next chapter asks the harder question: can it be escaped? Subscribe so you don’t miss it.
TL;DR
This is an analysis of the structural origins of the current crisis in U.S. politics. It argues that the end of the postwar economic boom in the 1970s forced a strategic choice between domestic restructuring and global economic extraction, with policymakers adopting the latter through neoliberal reforms. These policies deregulated markets, weakened unions, and shifted economic risk from institutions to individuals, gradually dissolving the foundations of working-class political power. As labor organizations and standing declined, corporate funding replaced them within the Democratic Party, leading to a coalition centered on professional elites and socially progressive but economically non-disruptive politics. In representing this donor-aligned shift and marginalizing redistributive policies, the neoliberal-controlled left unknowingly keeps pushing the entire political sphere toward the extreme right, as working-class voters lose material representation, right-wing movements absorb their discontent through identity politics, and mainstream politics adjusts to accommodate the shift rather than reverse it. The result is a tens of millions ever growing group of unrepresented working class voters, blinded by new neoliberal ideology perception of self, with no material political representation.
This is the “Maelstrom”, in which over decades both parties move steadily rightward, eroding democracy into fascism.