Appeasement started a long time ago.

Ideas not thoroughly crushed will come back to destroy you.

There remains this conventional sense in American journalistic rhetoric that there remains a left-right divide, and that Republicans simply won more independents in 2024 and are winning the messaging battle against Democrats for any number of reasons valid or otherwise: the price of eggs, Democratic infighting and disarray, [fill in your preferred]-ism, ew, Joe Biden is old, what have you.

And it is through this lens that the hand-wringing, 2024 autopsies and 2026 and ‘28 pregame think pieces are framed: How does the left win back voters? How do Democrats make themselves relevant? Is the Democratic Party dead?

Elements of all of these things are valid, but they neglect the fact that the conventional frame of reference is shattered: there is no left-right anymore. Anyone playing by those rules or operating under that assumption will necessarily lose. With the stakes as high as they are now, losing is not an option.

The Republican Party is no longer conservative (or conservative): it is a fascist and totalitarian party having fully dispensed with notions of limited government, fiscal prudence, constitutionalism and the sort. Their only principle is a bloodlust for centralized power, and all the various bigoted -isms that accompany the current party and administration are simply means to an end.

In Trump, Republicans found their standard bearer (because the party had been thoroughly hollowed out of leadership after Romney’s loss in 2012), but also, the racists found their grand wizard; the nationalists found their fuhrer; misogynists, their alpha male; corporatists, their industrialist champion. Of course, he stands for precisely none of these things — which, it merits mentioning, is not the same as saying he is not them — because he is nothing more than a narcissistic grifter willing to do anything to make a buck, got a four-year taste of presidential power and was willing to do anything to get it back (see also, 6, January; Musk, Elon.).

(To a far, far lesser extent, various factions of America’s left wing found their savior in Barack Obama in 2008. The difference was that Obama turned out to be more pragmatic and Clintonian than anyone imagined, the GOP more feckless and Russia was still a mostly collapsed state for a good chunk of Obama’s tenure. Romney, to his credit, saw the growing threat. Many on the left wing saw his work at the time as a byproduct of being steeped in Bircherism.)

Truthfully, the GOP and compromised principles are not anything new: we can even go further back than Barry Goldwater and the Southern Strategy, which traded Black Americans for southern whites. It started, as mentioned in the link above, with a willingness to conflate Burkean-derived conservatism (rule of law, economic freedom, etc.) with Southern conservatism (which is to say, Christian/white nationalism, racism and the principles of the Confederacy, namely, states’ rights, enshrined racism, and, incidentally, being able to borrow off states’ credit, which is very 21st century Republican).

The late University of Wisconsin Professor of History Glen Jeansonne noted almost off-hand in a 2002 article that no less than William F. Buckley tried and failed early on to bring Christian nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith into the modern conservative movement. Buckley wanted Smith to tamp down [not necessarily recant, mind you] his racist views, but was clearly interested in grafting his audience — and their votes — into the tent. For whatever it’s worth, Smith showed more character in refusing to sell out his [gross] principles than Buckley did in being willing to platform and amplify a known bigot.

The Southern Strategy a few years later didn’t flip those states ideologically. There was no sudden conversion that was never the point. Instead, the Republicans gave away more and more of their soul, first, to placate bigots, then business interests, then foreign interests. As appeasement does, it doesn’t bring outliers to the middle, but moderates to the fringes. After all, it is the fringe that holds leverage and thus entitled to make the demands in such a relationship.

And I believe this is the rock and hard place between which the Democratic Party and its related entities find themselves now. Having placated their own fringes for so long, a full embrace of constitutionality, limited government and the rule of law — the very things the party could embrace to build an anti-Trump coalition and beat back the Putin-backed threat to our democratic republic — is both improbable and impractical.

This is also where leftist criticisms of Democrats, particularly those along the lines of Stop moving to the middle, also fall flat: The middle is gone, folks. It’s not trying to win moderates by watering down a platform: it’s trying to preserve the things that allow America to be what it could be. The opposition is not another wing, but an entirely different order of government, something America decidedly is not.

There are those who recognize the very real threat this moment presents, and those running the risk of no longer being appeased. Guess who makes the most noise?

Republicans and their various cretinous supporters brought us to this brink because they caved into their lust for winning elections and power decades ago. It’s up to the rest of us to crush the presuppositions that fuel them both in the marketplace of ideas and at the ballot box.