Something someone said recently stopped me cold. They said Citizens United effectively ended political parties in America. At first they thought, cool. Then they watched what came of it. Then I watched what came of it. And now I think that observation is a key to understanding almost everything that feels inexplicable about where we are.
We are not watching two parties compete. We are watching one donor class manage two brands. The cracks show up most clearly when a candidate like Bernie, or an issue like Gaza, can't be managed away. When the machinery is strained past its ability to absorb the pressure, you see the seams. That's not politics. That's brand management failing.
And yet most of us, including the parties themselves, kept fighting as though the old rules still applied.
Trump is a catalyst. That's the frame I keep coming back to. Not a cause, not an aberration, not a fluke of the Electoral College. A catalyst for something that was already in motion long before he descended that escalator. The underlying rot, the structural shift, the donor class consolidation, the gutting of civic infrastructure -- that was all well underway. Trump just poured accelerant on it and struck a match, and now here we are, watching the fire and still arguing about which direction the wind was blowing when it started.
The Democrats, bless their procedural hearts, have been fighting a war that no longer exists. They kept showing up with coalition-building strategies and incremental policy pitches for a battlefield that had been relocated years ago. The donor alignment, the consultancy industrial complex, the careful avoidance of anything that might alarm the capital gains crowd -- it was a party trying to win a game where someone else had quietly rewritten the rules. Obama did some good things. Biden did some good things. But neither could fully confront what needed confronting, partly because of time and awareness, and partly because the system they were operating in was already compromised at the structural level.
It is worth being precise about what that compromise actually was, because the word "conservatism" is doing a lot of cover work right now. Traditional conservatism -- fiscal restraint, strong institutions, rule of law, genuine checks and balances -- is not the villain here. Barry Goldwater was sounding alarms about the religious right's capture of his own party before he died. George Will has spent years arguing that Trump represents a betrayal of conservatism, not its fulfillment. Those are not liberal voices.
What has become the danger is something more specific and more cynical: the fusion of supply-side economics, the Federalist Society's long judiciary project, donor class consolidation turbocharged by Citizens United, and now an authoritarian-nationalist turn that uses the conservative label as camouflage while systematically dismantling every institutional guardrail that conservatism was supposed to protect. Reagan's "government is the problem" framing did real damage by eroding public trust in institutions deliberately, and supply-side economics structurally entrenched the wealth inequality we are all living inside now. Trump didn't build that architecture. He just moved in, stripped the walls for parts, and called it winning. The threat was never conservatism as a governing philosophy. It is what replaced it -- grievance politics married to concentrated money, wearing the old label like a stolen coat.
The legal scaffolding underneath all of it has a name most people have never heard: the Unitary Executive Theory. In its aggressive modern form, it holds that the President has complete and absolute control over the entire executive branch -- meaning independent agencies, inspectors general, prosecutors, all of it answers to him and him alone. The Federalist Society has been building toward this interpretation for decades, and it now has sympathetic votes on the Supreme Court. Trump's mass firing of inspectors general, his dismissal of independent agency heads, his assertion that the entire prosecutorial apparatus is under his personal authority -- none of that is random chaos. It is the unitary executive theory being field-tested in real time, with the courts increasingly unwilling to stop it. What looks like a wrecking ball is actually a blueprint.
And the tax code sits there as the clearest confession of exactly who that coat was tailored for the ultra-wealthy, the investor class, the billionaire tier -- they often pay a lower effective rate than a middle-class worker, because capital gains are taxed at 20% while wages run up to 37%. That's not an accident. That's not an oversight. The system was deliberately engineered to protect people who live off capital rather than labor. Warren Buffett has said plainly that he pays a lower rate than his secretary. That should have been a national crisis-level conversation. It became a talking point and then it drifted away, because the donor class manages both brands and neither brand has a real incentive to change the arrangement.
Trump didn't fix that. He accelerated it. The 2017 tax cuts dropped the corporate rate from 35% to 21% and expanded the loopholes. His second term locked those cuts in permanently and added new ones. The result has been an effective tax rate for some of the largest corporations in America that is almost embarrassingly low. And middle-income Americans are looking at higher taxes in the coming years, while the wealthiest 1% will pay over a trillion dollars less over the next decade. This is not a side effect. This is the point.
So where does Trump fit in all of this? He ran as an anti-war, America First, no-foreign-entanglements candidate. He told rallies explicitly: "You're not going to have a war with me." He specifically targeted young men of draft age who were worried about global conflict, and that message was a meaningful part of why he won. Since taking office, he has ordered military actions in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Somalia, and Iran. The framing has now shifted to "We are fighting wars," used to justify a proposed $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. No accountability. No reckoning from the people who cheered the original promises. The brand just updated its messaging and moved on.
That is only possible in a system where accountability has been systematically dismantled. And that dismantling didn't begin with Trump. He just found the doors unlocked and walked through all of them at once.
The accelerationist elements, the unconstitutional militia crowd, the apocalyptic crisis-seekers who have been hiding in the shadows for decades -- they read the same conditions and decided this was their moment. White Christian nationalism (deliberately lowercase, because what is being practiced has very little to do with the Christianity most people would recognize) became the convenient flag for a coalition that is fundamentally about authoritarian consolidation dressed up in familiar symbols.
We needed a break from standard operating procedure to see clearly what had been happening. I believe that. The tragedy is that the break came in this particular form, inflicting damage that will take decades to repair and may leave some things permanently altered. That wasn't inevitable. The awareness that was needed did not require this level of destruction to arrive. But here we are.
What I want to resist, and what I'd caution anyone against, is the retrospective certainty that any of us saw all of this clearly at the time. Good historians understand that hindsight perceived as foresight is itself a distortion. The system was obscuring the truth of what it was, and it was doing so across the political spectrum. Lots will be studied in decades from these times about how blind we all were, including those of us who thought we had a decent view of the board.
The paradigm broke.
That's not in dispute. The question now is whether enough people, outside the donor class and its managed brands, have finally noticed -- and whether that noticing comes in time to matter.
That's still an open question. But it's finally being asked.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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