The Home Front with Reed Galen: Old Grievances and New Machines
How decades-old grievances around money, power, and identity have fused with new technology to threaten democracy.
This week I was honored to be the guest on The Home Front podcast with Reed Galen from The Lincoln Project. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the history behind our current moment and discussed some thoughts for how we might get out of this mess. A lightly edited transcript is included below.
From the show notes: “They discuss how decades-old grievances around money, power, and identity have fused with new technology to threaten democracy, the rise of authoritarian networks fueled by crypto and tech billionaires, and why defending the status quo isn't enough to save free societies. Plus, the urgent need to rebuild human connections in an era of tribalism and online radicalization.”
Reed: Welcome back to the Home Front. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today I'm joined by Dave Troy, a tech entrepreneur, historian, and investigative journalist who covers the intersection of technology and democracy.
Dave is currently the publisher and editor of his Ghost Newsletter, America 2.0, which is focused on the future of democracy in America and around the world. He also writes a monthly column, The Wide Angle for the Washington Spectator and hosts his podcast, Dave Troy Presents. Today, he's coming to us from Vancouver, Canada.
Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave: I am glad to be here, Reid. Thanks for having me.
Reid: So Dave, there's so many different places to go, but this is one thing that I asked about right when we started, so I'll, I'll throw you right in the deep end of the pool. As I've been thinking about what we're seeing now in America, the United States 2025, and what [those in Canada] are at the front row of is it seems to me that where we are now in America and even really world politics, we didn't come to overnight.
In the immediate post-war world, there was the Cold War, right? It was two-sided, the Soviets and the Americans who were on one side or the other, freedom, communism, capitalism, centrally playing economies, et cetera. But as communism started to fall away under its own weight and. You saw that like the, the rise of both neo-conservatism and neoliberalism, ironically enough, at the same time, really became something where, as Ronald Reagan took hold, there was really only one countervailing view of the world that really stuck with us, from my perspective, until Trump showed up. Not because he was opposite to it, but just because he was different from it. And now we're in a place where there is these bad guys on the march. They seem to be a post-belief set of goons, right? They're not Marxist or Leninists. They're not fascists, right?
They're all As, as Anne Applebaum might call them, kleptocrats. So why is it that over the course of these last few decades, there has been all the money, all the thought, all the people, all the work done on the right to get us to this place. But really, no, at least from my perspective, and again, I don't come from the political left, no corresponding work from the left on that.
David: I think a big part of this has been there's been a set of grievances that has been nursed by the right for decades, and you can take it all the way back to the New deal as a good starting point, although the next stop behind that is the Civil War and various other inflection points.
So. Let's just take the New Deal thing. Since 1933 there has been grievance over fiat currency versus gold and central banking versus hard money. And so basically what happened with the passage in the New deal was that Franklin Roosevelt needed a lot of dollars to pay for the New Deal programs.
And so he took the US off of gold as the one to one standard. And that process then accelerated, and then 1971 was when Nixon decoupled fully from the international system, the US dollar from gold. And that of course sent this network of people into a tizzy because they were super concerned about inflation.
And of course there was a lot of inflation during the 1970s, but that had a lot to do with oil and, policies related to to that. So. It's complex set of factors, but that is like one core thread that runs through all of this is like, what is the nature of money? And we see that coming back now with like cryptocurrency.
And the bottom line is that all of these networks that have the same grievance have found each other and are working together towards a common goal. And so if you think about Putin's grievance, well it happens to be about the dollar. Because at the end of the day, he believes. That the US dollar is what allows the American government to participate in military adventurism and that sort of thing.
So to the extent that Russia, China, and the conservative right, all have the same basic grievance about fiat currency, they have found each other, and are working towards a common goal. The problem on the left is that, we've been just going along with the status quo and trying to “defend democracy” and keep things an even keel and have stability.
But that puts us in the defensive position of defending the status quo. And of course, the status quo has a lot of flaws and warts. So, to a lot of people that aren't familiar with this longer history, they're looking at this and going, well, do I want the status quo or do I want the exciting new crypto enabled, world free of Fiat for currency and the, and ending all wars, which is the message that these people are selling.
So I think a lot of younger people also that don't really remember the Cold War or have any exposure to this longer term history, they could. Get excited by this vision. So you see a lot of young tech people being drawn into it as well. And so, just to put it in really basic terms, I think that the autocrats and authoritarians that have this vision for replacing the existing dollar system have a forward looking vision that they are selling to people.
And those of us that would prefer to have more democratic controls are offering what amounts to a backward looking defense of the status quo. You could see why that might not be working.
Reed: Yeah. Well, interesting too is that if you think about let's just talk about the immediate post World War II era, right?
In places like Orange County, California, where I used to live, you had this confluence of wealthy businessmen and religious people, and they come up with the John Wayne myth, right? The rugged individualism. And then you add onto that in the eighties, the, the religious right comes of age.
Right now they claim it was because of Roe v. Wade, but that's not really true. I think it's that they saw a Southern Evangelical Democrat got elected, and they didn't like that either. But in the eighties then it's this weird again, confluence of, Reaganomics big oil and religion, and then they just keep tacking different things on.
So back then it was those things. Now it's tech. And those are the strange things is they, they all tend to be, white guys and then they all seem to come to this almost messianic thing, right? So now there's the, there's the tech guy who puts his own, his kid's blood in his body to try and reverse aging.
And obviously you can take Bezos or Musk with the Mars and the other guys who are working towards immortality. And then of course, and I'm sure you've got, you've got a lot of things to say about something like artificial intelligence, but they, there seems to be now like this God complex, whether or not it's in, in and of themselves or as like tech will save us from everything.
Which of course, everybody always says that, but nothing's black and white. There's always a consequence to any brand new thing, especially as powerful as these things are.
David: Yeah, absolutely. And you're identifying several trends that are overlapping. And the thing that you see that the tech people have in common with the religious people is this eschatological end times, dispensational, millenarianist view of the world, that everything is gonna change really soon, and if everything's gonna really change this much, then it means you don't have to do your homework and you don't have to prepare for school the next day because the world's ending like in three days. So it brings on a mentality where the old rules, the old systems, the old controls no longer apply. We are preparing for the great singularity.
We are preparing for the second coming. We are preparing for the Omega point, whatever particular, eschatological philosophy you choose to believe in, you can map all those things onto the same set of goals. And effectively align yourselves around the idea that, your ingroup is the group that knows what's really happening and that the people that are trying to, prevent the coming about of the, the great awakening or, the next phase or the singularity are in fact the problem because they don't understand.
They just will never understand and we have to fight them and marginalize them and. Put them in jail and arrest them and, all the things that we see happening now. It's all converging into this unified philosophy that's, I think, quite dangerous because it gives people a reason to dispense with the rule of law.
Reed: So I read Mark Andreessen's manifesto. Yeah, if you can call it that, which was, it was like a kid who had to write a 20 page paper. So they did like two and a half spaces between each line tape, right? Yeah. It was very thin. And lots of quotes and lots of quotes that like took from whatever thing that he wanted to, but to me the takeaway was, and I think this speaks to the point, which is.
We're all great. We're really smart, we're really rich. And if you aren't too bad, right? And he, he, he quotes Hayek, right? Which is basically like, this is all gonna run down to the elites benefit anyway. And then you've got this guy Curtis Jarvin, who I know you've spoken a lot about, who's this weird programmer who I've read a lot about, and has this idea of a CEO Monarch, and then you've got.
Teal out there, and you've got a guy like the former Attorney General Bill Barr, who is a hundred percent behind the unitary executive theory. Right. Which is basically the president who is in fact a king and can do no wrong. And then just as we're recording this, they just had the what's left of the White House correspondence dinner in Washington DC where mm-hmm.
None of the administration was allowed to attend, and obviously Donald Trump didn't attend, but they had their own parties and then in the midst of that, announced their own super special private entrance only club for only the wealthiest and most loyal.
David: That's right. Yeah. And you mentioned Andreessen's Manifesto and one way you can read it is either you're with us, or you're against us.
And he, lists a bunch of people who he considers to be with them, and I know some of them, and it's people that are basically tech cheerleaders and aren't terribly critical of like where this might go. And then he kind of, sets himself against the broader enemies of people that, would slow down this accelerationism.
And look, my background is in tech. I'm pretty pro tech. I think there's a lot of great things that have come from it and I think that managed properly, there are ways to have it effect great, good in the world. But you know, what's been weird to watch is that as the tech industry has shifted.
If you remember 10, 15, 20 years ago, the tech industry was perceived as being quite liberal. And people would think, oh, it's, California lefties, crunchy granola, doing weird tech stuff. But you know, that was, true to some extent, but it was also accompanied by this very libertarian conservative strain that was running alongside of it.
And people, refer to that as the California ideology. And you started to see that emerge in the seventies and sixties with like the whole Earth Catalog and Stewart Brand and that stuff. And that had a huge impact. But then by the time you get into the nineties, you had John Perry Barlow with his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which set out the idea that things that happen online, the old rules no longer apply.
And it set out this sci-fi Libertarian worldview that, it was like, oh, okay. That's an interesting experiment to play with in the realm of the internet, but the internet was pretty small in 1996 or whatever that was. And now the internet is, how we do things.
This is part of our lifeblood of information flow, and it's how we perceive the world. I think that, a lot of these kinds of chickens that were seen as fringey have come home to roost. And, this particular generation also of particularly the folks centered around the PayPal network so Musk and Teal and David Sachs and, Reid Hoffman and others have exercised such high amounts of agency in terms of imposing their worldview on people and doing so pretty effectively that they have.
Been able to punch above their weight to some extent in terms of advancing some of these ideas that, really had been fringy, but are now becoming part of the government. I mean, in the literal terms. If you look at sacks and Musk, they're actually part of the government right now, so.
I think it's a remarkable turn of events and I think people, in general don't appreciate just like how nefarious and how deep this this all runs and, people need to get a better handle on how we're gonna try to combat this going forward.
Reed: So about 10 years ago, I worked for an organization called Lincoln Labs. Not Lincoln Project, which I helped co-found a few years later, but Lincoln Labs and then they were the California ideology, Dave, that you're talking about. And the idea here was younger guys. I mean, they were probably only three or four years younger than me then, but you know, guys a little bit younger than me.
Not really political in nature, but they were all big fans of mit Romney. In the 2012 campaign Romney's tech, such as it was, and I think it would seem almost fanciful, the stuff, or laughable I should say, the things they couldn't get done on that campaign. But it led to this idea that like the right must have its own ability to compete politically.
In the tech and online space, the, the Romney campaign couldn't do it. So we would have these conferences. We had some in dc, we had a couple in San Francisco. They were always incredibly well attended. We were always able to get national political reporters to come. Right. And Rand Paul came a couple of times and we had all these people and so it was a very, like, there was a lot of energy there.
But looking back, Dave, I was at the front row of history. There was weird history. Like I remember meeting Steve Bannon there. I remember meeting the guys from Cambridge Analytica, and they're telling me what they're doing and having grown up in politics and like, where did you guys come from?
Right? I wasn't suspicious. I've done this all my life. I've never heard of Psychograph, or whatever the hell they called it. I'd never heard of them as a company that the crypto people were, were there and they were not like. How do I launder money or how do I do what Sam Bankman Free did?
It was very much a philosophical like freedom thing, and that was, and then of course the Seasteading weirdness of Peter Thiel of creating literal islands. So all that stuff was going on, and I'll just tell you, Dave, like I was not imaginative enough to understand what was going on, and I wasn't. Clever enough to say like, why are all these people with giant wooden crosses walking around, right, like around their necks.
David: Well, I mean, it took me a lot of exposure to this to really connect the dots and I think, I began to understand the broader arc of this and I. I guess around late 2020, early 2021. And, I was starting to talk to people that were, journalists and writers who had been covering this for a long time.
And I'm like, guys, I really think this is, this goes back to the Gold standard grievance to a large extent. And they were kinda like, Hmm, maybe. I don't know. And then I started looking into it. And then by I guess mid 2022, I wrote a piece called Paranoia on Parade that covers 90 years of history from.
1930 to, up. It really just lays out the, one network of people leads to the next network of people. And so, the whole Reagan revolution thing, 1981, that was the Council for National Policy. Those people were born out of the National Association of Manufacturers, the same network that launched the John Birch Society.
It was the Council for National Policy for the most part that planned and executed January 6th. So it was like, okay, all right. This worldview. And this is something that people underappreciate is the idea that worldviews persist through history and they're irreducible.
They don't really go away because they always attract new adherence in the next generation. And people that had, a grievance in 1933 had the same grievance in 1955. It's just different people. Right. So, it's like it transmits itself through history and it never goes away. And to the extent that these worldviews end up merging.
And so in the case of Russia, people are always wondering, well, how is it possible that, people that were, aligned with Reagan would now be aligned with. Putin. And the answer is, is because Russia is not a monolith. Russia is in fact, made up of different factions. And for a long time it was, the communists and the reds and all of that that were running things.
And then over time it became that the white Russians, the people that you know, the, were royalists and resisting the, the communists, they ended up running Russia. And so that's really Putin's network now is. Is this remnants of white Russians and white Russian ideology that do align with what the conservative right was about in the 1980s, right?
So it's like, it all makes sense, but you have to look at it through this like long-term lens of factions and alignment.
Reed: So let me go back to, you mentioned the early thirties. So, in 33 Hitler comes to Power in 1933. Roosevelt, FDR comes to office in the wake of the Great Depression, as you said, he talked about the New Deal.
I asked another guest this. I mean, do you think that the New Deal also was possible not only because of the crisis we were in, but also because of the specter of communism of Marxism. Leninism was there, and that the business community or the Barons in this country were like, well, hell, if the whole thing goes down, then we're gonna get that.
David: Yeah, I mean I think that that was the reasonable person's take on it. I think the, the right wing industrialists, the old money people, they viewed their control over gold as a way to control the government, basically. Because their thinking was, well, the government can't spend money it doesn't have, and if we control most of the money.
Then that limits the government's capabilities. And so what irked them was, the very first thing that, that Roosevelt did when he came into office in March of 1933. 'cause we used to inaugurate presidents. Presidents in March, right? Was to close the banks for a few days and he also issued an executive order 61 0 2 that called for the seizure of all private holdings of gold.
Basically saying, look, we're gonna need to issue a bunch of money. We need all the gold we can get in the treasury. And so he, basically set out like a gold buyback program. And people were annoyed at that because they were like, what? You can't keep us from holding gold.
So that was the, big bang that set off all of this reactionary response to Roosevelt's new Deal. And so from that was born a whole litany of. Anti New Deal organizations, some of which were more successful than others, but what they found was that the populist movements were way more successful than these kinds of elitist, like let's get together and talk about "how terrible the New Deal is" clubs. It was more like they, there was a cult called I Am that was like worshiping. Gold and they were ch doing chance against Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Like it was really lowbrow stuff that ended up working. But now, like Mike Flynn's been known to repeat these I am prayers so that he learned from like his mother, from the 1930s.
So it's like it all passes down through history and now we're dealing with the aftermath of it.
Reed: Would I be correct to say then that the plutocrat class has always more than utilized to their own benefit? The, the populist chances, for lack of a better way to put it, that they've always, they've always found just enough to get along with.
And maybe it's keeping them angry, whatever the shared philosophy is. Because what it seems like a lot of this stuff that you read Dave is, is like in 1984, right? There's the, there's the party people. Then there's the plebs, right? And they're happy for the plebs to live whatever life they're gonna live down there.
So long as they get to control up here.
David: Yes, exactly right. And as far as the plebs are concerned, as long as they don't start causing trouble or getting too much power, then they can basically just be left alone to do their thing. And I think. I forget whose quote this was. You know the line about Americans imagine themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I think that was Steinbeck actually. And the idea that like, oh no, I'm really part of the elite. I'm just not very rich right now, but in the future I'm gonna get rich and I'll be joining you there in the elite soon. So there's this kind of, aspirational mindset that has always in.
Formed American populism and I think they've used that to great effect. 'cause why else would it be that people, that are not that wealthy living in rural areas would be identifying with billionaires like, and being on their side. Like, it doesn't really make any sense
Reed: for me. That's always been to your point, maybe, is that, that, that they flipped the script, which is when, when the aspirational nature didn't work anymore because the working class folks that you're talking about didn't believe it, then it had to be those people took it from you. The system is rigged and it's their fault.
David: No, and I think that there's a, a distinct, scapegoat element to this and, Peter Thiel is known to be a acolyte of a philosopher named Rene Gerard, who came up with this idea of scapegoat theory. And the idea is that, we all mimic each other in terms of like what we want.
So you see, a guy with the pretty woman in the fast car and you want the pretty woman in the fast car. And that's what Gerard argues like drives people in society to like, do things and to get up out of bed in the mornings to get the pretty woman in the nice car. The thing is, is that it baked into that Gerard pos, that there is this idea of the scapegoat.
And that the reason why you don't have the pretty woman in the nice car is because of them. And if you can just merely eliminate or otherwise marginalize the them, then your life is gonna be great and you're gonna get the, get the pretty woman in the nice car. So that ends up becoming a motivating factor within how these messages are presented.
And so it's been like. Merged in with, the idea of memes and of course memes being like Richard Dawkins, selfish gene versus mimetic, which is Gerard. So what people are finding is that, the realm of social media has been incredibly. Useful for defining the scapegoat.
And so all of the sort of things that work really well on social media where, you're digging against the outgroup tend to just drive traffic like crazy. And so, you see that on both the left and the right. The people that are performing the best and have like the most followers and the most retweets and all that are the ones that are really giving it to the outgroup and the scapegoat.
So, this whole structure of social media is basically designed to promote this very simplistic ingroup outgroup division and scapegoating. And unfortunately anybody that studies, genocide and other sorts of war type contacts knows that, as soon as you start scapegoating people at scale and do it long enough, you will end up with genocide type situations and, shipping people off to prisons and whatever else.
So, that's the path that we're on and it's a structural feeling of all the tech that we've built. It's leading us down that path.
Reed: Well, yeah, and I was in college probably weren made just outta college when it happened, but we, we intentionally allowed that.
Right. We said we're not gonna put any breaks on the internet. I wanna get to, to AI in that regard in a second, but I want to stay for a second on what you were talking about, which is this whole idea of, the, the car in the pretty girl, because of course there's a scarcity problem too.
There's only so many pretty girls and so many. Fast cars that either A, you can afford to buy, or B, you're charming enough or successful enough, or just a good enough guy enough to attract the pretty girl. And so if 98 out of a hundred guys can't get that, then there's, to your point, like nobody wants to believe it's their fault.
And then you have this, this guy like Andrew Tate, right, who not only. Espouses, that stuff, but also makes money on 13, 14, 15, 16, 17-year-old guys saying, if you act like this, you'll get the girl. And if you don't, it's not my fault for you giving me 12 bucks a month. It's your fault for being a loser.
Which drives them further into this ugliness and further into that dark pit. Because of course, as you said, Dave, like the bottom line is, it can't possibly be my fault.
David: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, I mean, just being. Drawn into that content web of somebody like an Andrew Tate, but also, I mean, others almost equally as bad as in like Jordan Peterson or, even Joe Rogan is the light version of all that.
It draws people into this worldview that like, oh, well this is how people should be, and then they get exposed to all kinds of other adjacent messaging that brings them into the fold of this. What I would call an irreducible worldview that, is very potent and isn't really going away, and in fact is, continuing to persist and is becoming dominant.
These are things that, those of us that are on the other side of this really need to be paying attention to in terms of how this functions so that we can start to, mount some sort of reasonable response to it.
Reed: Let's talk about that. In Yuval Noah Hari's latest book, he said the answer to more information is not more information.
In fact, it's community, it's communication, not information. And so, Dave, you mentioned this, which is every day I. Guys like you and me have another podcast, right? So there's no shortage of podcasts that you're on ghosts, but there's no shortage of Substack, there's no shortage of Instagram accounts or TikTok accounts.
So we're awash in this stuff. And as you said, there are different people who become popular for different reasons and. You talked about the othering, right? And so what you see on the right is who makes the most fun of libs or beta males or whatever. And on the left it's who's the best at being funny about, the mouth breathing knit wits that are maga, right?
And ha ha ha, look what's happening to you? He is the only path out of that, the collapse of something like we're seeing and, a phoenix rising for the rubble. Or is there something that can and should be done as we're going down this road?
David: I've given this a lot of thought and I've been working on writing on this topic for the last few years, and the conclusion that I've reached is that what we're really dealing with is a societal, structural problem where, we are being divided into these two very clearly defined.
In groups and out groups and, and there's even evidence to suggest that like this is happening globally and we're be basically being sorted into two warring tribes that span the entire globe. And I think the evidence that comes from, what people are experiencing in Europe and in Canada and in Australia and everywhere else, it points in that direction that, you know, here in Canada today.
Where, where I'm visiting they're having the, the election and Pierre Pev is the candidate against Mark Carney, and it looks like Kearney is gonna probably prevail today. We'll see. But PEV maps onto the same worldview as as Trump's. So, is this happening everywhere?
And I think it, it. Goes even beyond this like single in group, out group division because there's all kinds of distinctions even within, our parties. So for example, the Democrats can't really agree on what the direction forward is. You've got two different factions at minimum within the Democrats around positions on, Israel, Palestine and who should be the standard bearer and what rules of conduct we should adopt.
And so, that's an issue. And then within the Republican party there is, there are distinctions there and I think the Democrats should probably do a better job of teasing apart those differences on the Republican side, but you know, looking at the structure of society and figuring out like how things are actually structured, what groups are pitted against what other groups, and this is fundamentally what like the Cambridge Analytica people were doing.
We need to do that, but in reverse figure out, okay, how can we build, engines that tie people back together into a functional society where we can learn to actually see each other again. And I think that, online interaction is not great for that because it's so easy to dehumanize people and, and, on online context.
Getting it more into in-person context, figuring out ways to knit human networks in, in ways that, matter. Bring people together in ways where. You might not know their politics, but you're still participating in something fun and in a community setting. And, you think about going to like festivals and that kind of thing.
You see all kinds of people you don't really know, their politics, but you can still manage to be decent and nice to people in those kinds of settings. And I've even had the experience go to a lot of right wing rallies to monitor them and see what's going on. And, people are nice.
I look like a middle age. I am a middle aged white guy. Like I fit in, and so, everybody's always, pleasant and, and they're not acting like Nazis or anything. So I think there's a ton of potential to be mined and bringing ourselves back together. But we have to first decide that that's something we want to do.
And we have to look at the structural elements. I think too often people think about. Ideology in terms of like beliefs that people have, and I would argue that mostly people are reflecting their social networks and the identity that they derive from where they belong socially. And so it's not like, people are like really, really believe some particular thing.
Most of the time it's not, obviously there are some beliefs that people hold firmly, but a lot of it is just, this is in general what my group of people thinks and this is what we say we think, and this is how we feel comfortable with each other. I think, once you can start to scramble all that a little bit and get people to see the messiness of, of humanity and our relationships with each other, we might have a shot at getting our way outta it.
So I've, I've proposed things like, if we did something like, national service programs, I'm not talking about, military necessarily. Right. Although that could be a part of it. But things like AmeriCorps, which we're currently in the process of gutting, if we made that much larger rather than smaller, and then focused on bringing people together from across the major social divides, whether that's urban versus rural rich versus.
Poor, black versus white, whatever. Just bring people together across all of these divisions that we have and get them to trust each other. And I would argue that we did that as a natural experiment to some extent during, things like world War II and, brought people together across a lot of different axes and those people that had that experience ended up building the institutions.
That defined the post-war era and that we're living under now. So like, I think there's, I think we underappreciate the degree to which that kind of mixing can help. And I think if we were intentional about it, we might get to go somewhere good. But then the question is how on earth do we get American government to agree on anything as a pathway out?
And I think to your point, we may have to experience a breakdown before we hit bottom and figure out a, a way out.
Reed: Yeah, I mean, to your point, I think that you, you brought up the military, right, which is World War ii. My grandparents, I think all of my grandparents worked in it in one way or the other.
Two grandfathers overseas one grandmother actually worked at the Pentagon, right. As just as it was opening. There were millions of people, whether or not it was, that they'd been drafted together and put into a unit overseas, or they were working in a, the swing shift at a factory, right?
These were people you, as you said, Dave might not have otherwise run into, but now you know, we are able to curate. Probably the greatest time ever, right? Our own existences. What do we see? What do we read? Who do we talk to? And to the extent that we have to leave our houses, we probably go one of five places at any given time, right?
Like, there's no, like, nobody's like, oh yeah. There's a grocery store 27 minutes from my house that's not quite as good as the one that's close to me. So, like, but I'm gonna go there 'cause I wanna see somebody new and different. Nobody's gonna do that. Right, right. Yeah. We've created these bubbles and we've seen that with information too, right?
Which is, I'm a conservative, so I watch Fox News. I'm a liberal, so I watch M-S-N-B-C because that's the other part you said about the social piece, which is you want to not only reflect the things of the group you're a part of, but also you want to have those reflected back upon you. It's, it's always nicer to hear something you agree with and something you disagree with.
David: Yeah, absolutely. And there's a really good book on that set of topics called Radical American Partisanship by Dr. Liliana Mason, who's at Johns Hopkins. It really just looks at how people have started to self sort into all of these different pockets that reflect their identity. So first off, people are moving to neighborhoods where people are more like them.
They don't wanna live in places where. They think that there's people that hold opposite beliefs from them. And in fact, there's an interesting experiment she cites where if you told people that there were people in their neighborhood that were, of the opposite belief system than them they would be less happy even if you were lying.
About that fact. Right. And I think, we're all kind of guilty of it to some extent in that, we all just want to feel like where we're, we fit in. And these days there's so many signals like, like you used to talk about grocery stores. Well if you, if you shop at, one grocery store, you're perceived as liberal.
If you shop at another one, you're perceived as, conservative or neutral or whatever, and you know what kind of car you drive. I mean, tesla and cyber trucks and I mean it's, everything is political. Everything is an identity signal these days. So I think, we've got to kind of, get to the point where we can start to mix that stuff up a bit more.
And I think when in the context of government, like, we're doing the same thing there. I mean, all of this Schedule F stuff means that, they can basically fire. Career professionals all throughout government, whether they, just based on their alliance to the executive or not.
And it's, that's wrong. I mean, it's, it's not only, just morally objectionable. It's also bad for business for, for the US because we're, basically removing people that have expertise that, we need. And we will, we'll realize that someday.
Reed: If you go back through the last hundred years of ideology, and I'm sure it's longer than that, Dave, and you can tell me where I'm, where my holes are, but like again, communism.
Promised everybody was gonna be equal. Right? Some utopia that was never gonna exist. I finished this book called, they Thought they were Free about a, an American professor who went to Germany in 1953, 1954 and, and settled in, in this town, Marburg. And he befriended 10 guys who were like, run of the mill Nazis.
They weren't, they weren't. Party, higher ups, they were all just regular. And I, I don't wanna belittle it, but do you understand my point? They joined the party for a reason. And they were like, oh, well things were great when, before the war everybody had a job, vacations were $10, all these other things.
And, and it, it got me thinking, Dave, that like, MAGA doesn't really promise to make your life better. Like there's always been a sort of this fundamental idea that if you were gonna have an idea that you're gonna pitch to humans, it's your life will be better if you put me in charge, right? They don't even pretend to do that.
They're like, yeah, especially right now. We're not gonna make your life better. We're gonna make your life harder, but you're gonna love us for it anyway.
David: Right. And I think it's because, we talked about worldviews and to some extent, they have been pitching this worldview of like, it's the Biden people that have done everything wrong and.
It's, it's, all of these historical grievances that they've been selling. And the idea now is that because they're in charge, they have the opportunity to impose all of these worldview things and that that is going to somehow, at least make them feel like things might eventually get better.
And some future timeline, but in the near term it's like, well, obviously there's gonna be some pain. 'cause we have to like still undo all of this stuff from the old bad guys. So that's why they're, they're actually being successful right now at blaming things on the previous administration, you hear them talk about what's going on with the stock market.
They're like, well, we're just unwinding all of the terribleness that happened of the administration. Right. It's like, okay. And the facts don't really indicate that, but that's the story that they're going with and it's, it's remarkably effective. So, I. They have promised that things are gonna get better, and I mean, they're kind of not.
And what's interesting too is you see that fault line in the tech MAGA world too, where some of them are starting to go like, this seems bad. Like we didn't talk about this whole tariffs thing, and now my portfolio is down 12%, like, what's going on? Right. And that's something I think, democrats should do a better job of teasing that apart.
As I say, figure out where the dissent lies within the Republican party and peel some of those people off. Because if you could get 20 members of Congress to defect from the sort of mainline maga and come over to the Democratic coalition focused on some like sane priorities, you could.
You could peel off the house and maybe you know, more of the Senate and like that would be worth doing. And I don't think it would be, I mean, it's hard, but it's not impossible, hard.
Reed: Well, if you look back to Biden's administration, most of the signature things he got done he got done with Republican votes.
Yeah, right, exactly. They came across the line, especially in the United States Senate, they came across the line for that stuff.
David: When you like get down to brass tax of like stuff we actually need to do, like pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling, things like that. Pretty much everybody in Congress except for like the Freedom Caucus wants that stuff to happen.
So you know, you end up with like 70% bipartisan votes on those kinds of measures. And I think we need to frame more stuff in those kinds of terms because those are the things where most people agree on.
Reed: And I just, I've written a couple of pieces now. One that just, that posted on Substack this morning as we're recording this.
Dave specific to that thing, which is the online resistance, and I put that in air quotes crowing about Trump's bad numbers, the worst poll numbers of at a hundred days of any president in history. And like, I don't necessarily think he cares. Because he's not going anywhere and it's only three months in.
But I said, the place that you can and should use that is exactly what you were talking about, which is something I pitched to them three weeks ago. Go into swing Republican house districts or legislative districts that are high net worth and lean Republican and start saying, Republican tariff craziness is wrecking your 401k.
Yep. Right. Exactly. And don't use Trump. Trump gives them something to hide behind. Yeah. But getting my, our democratic friends to understand like, there are ways to do this, but you must actually put some work into it, is exceedingly difficult. Dave, I can't tell you.
David: Well, you have to believe it's possible.
And what I hear from a lot of Democrats is, they, they I think have a distorted sense of Republican unity and they, because they're so. Galvanized against Republicans as being the enemy. They imagine that they are all always aligned and that they're all evil and that they're all part of the same cabal and, outgroup and whatever, and like, yeah, sure.
To some extent that's. Demonstrable. However, details matter and if you start to actually study the, the composition of those networks, you can start, you can find clear splits between say, the Freedom Caucus crowd and, and the rest. I mean, there's some that are definitely getting talking points directly from Russia.
I mean, there are cliques. In the Republican Congress. And so I just think, you just go totally scorched earth in terms of like trying to figure out how to break up, break up those coalitions and just do what you need to do. And what you said is one way to do it.
Reed: I said this a few weeks ago when they were passing the continuing resolution.
Or maybe it was the first test vote in the house on the tax cut stuff. And like I, Dave, I found myself agreeing with Thomas Massie for different reasons, right? But he is like, this is just more debt. This is ridiculous. These are the best case numbers and they're terrible for the debt. And Massey's out there like the lone guy right now.
Listen, I disagree with him on everything and I think this, this Christmas card with the guns and the kids is abo abominable. But in that moment I was like, yeah, listen to that guy, right? Like he's saying what we need to say.
David: Well, yeah, and that's my thing is like I, I'm always listening for what they're saying to see, like where you can like latch onto things in terms of, putting out messaging that, helps people to frame things a little bit differently.
Because as long as you believe that the Republicans are all gonna be united, then they will be all united. You're giving them the license to do that, right? So, I don't know. I just, I think there's so much chaos right now and there are opportunities to steer this in a different direction and I think, Democrats need to get more imaginative and creative in terms of how they approach this and, start to figure out what a plan for the future of democracy is too, rather than just defending things. I mean, defending the status quo. I mean, the status quo, as I said, is not that great. So what is the future of global democracy? What are we gonna do about the UN? Now, we can't boil the ocean to do everything at once, but like what's the plan for the United States' leadership role with respect to democracy globally going forward? Are we gonna continue to do that or are we out of that game now? What's the plan? And nobody seems to have any idea for that.
Reed: In the realm of, dystopian futures. I mean, are we, could we be that far away, Dave from Donald Trump kicking the UN out New York City.
David: I don't think so. I think that that's very plausible. And I would also argue that the UN is, pretty creaky and maybe not fit for purpose, but we need to have that conversation about what, if we don't really want to do the UN anymore, is there some future way of organizing ourselves that would actual favor [the advancement of] democracy globally. And I'm starting to have some of those conversations with people privately and maybe we could talk more about that too. But these are the, the things that we need to be talking about. And, and for the most part, people are dithering and not really, offering much in the way of leadership.
Reed: So, a lot of work to be done. I think the, the dithering and the lack of leadership is, is endemic, I think to our friends on the left, which is we've had so many conversations, well Dave, if we do this, that bad thing could happen. If we do that, those bad things could happen. And also because so many of them are still stuck in a worldview that no longer exists, you have way too many people running around trying to.
Position themselves to 2028 when, like, how do we know that's gonna happen? Right. Right. In any way that we've ever expected it. And if your house is on fire with you in it wouldn't be the first thing to like figure out how to put the fire out before you start looking for a new house. And I, and I think that's because the things you're talking about are hard.
Yeah, they require thought, they require work. And frankly, they require risk, which is a lot of 'em aren't gonna work. And I think that, the, the, the Democrats have been an adjunct, right, from an economic and sociopolitical system for the past 40 or 50 years. And now they're like, oh, shoot, that doesn't work for us anymore.
Now what? Right now we have to go have real thoughts on our own. And it can't just be us screaming, we're for the environment or we're pro-choice. Like, yeah, everybody knows. So what? Yeah,
David: yeah, exactly. And like what's your tactical plan for managing the next, I mean really the next two years? 'cause I mean, as you say, I mean, I think what may happen in 2026 is, we've got a ton of influence coming in from the crypto industry, which is mostly mapping to the right, but they're going to the left as well.
Yeah. And the crypto industry wants consolidation of power ultimately above all else. And if you look at 2024 there was something on the order of like $200 million in pure crypto assets dumped in, and then another 250 or whatever from Elon and I put them into the same bucket.
So that's like $450 million worth of investment. And you look at big oil, they did like 120. So you know, you're talking about maybe like a four x. Investment in from crypto over big oil. The next biggest thing, so like, what is 2026 gonna look like? Will people get just overwhelmed by crypto money on both the left and the right?
And, if that occurs, then we effectively are gonna have this situation where. No matter which candidates you vote for, the ones you're gonna hear about, and the ones that are gonna have the, the most support are gonna be ones that are in service of this power consolidation agenda. I don't care whether they're Democrats or Republicans.
And so is that a real election? Is that, I mean, it's, you're getting Coke or Pepsi, but it's still, cola, right. It's the same thing. So, I think that, we need to pay more careful attention to those dynamics. And I think the same thing may, may end up happening in 2028 where, we've got the emergence of this abundance agenda that's being floated and it's not that much different than some of the Doge ideas, honestly. And so I mean, I think some of those conversations are worth having. I think, yeah, we probably need a lot more housing and yeah, we probably should limit bureaucracy and streamline things, but you know, effectively it's like left coated Doge versus Yes.
Right. Coated doge, which flavor Doge do you want? And, and it's being run by similar networks of people. So, I think we just have to be. Cognizant of the fact that there's a structural element that may play into both 2026 and 2028.
Reed: Right. And, and one thing on a, on on abundance, and I promise I'll let you go, Dave, is there, there's a lot of talk about how, how could they build so much housing in Texas, how could they build so much renewable energy in Texas?
And then you look at California, who can't build eight miles of high speed braille track to the, but like it's convenient to leave out the idea that like the power grid is disconnected from the rest of the country so that when it fails, like people freeze to death. Right, right, right. There's some details and then, and then the aftermath.
What did they do? They didn't tell the, the, the grid operator or any of the providers to fix themselves. They paid them off. Right? Right. They gave them a billion dollar payoff in the legislature. So like that's the other, that's the flip side was like, yeah, if you're okay with that stuff. Great. But like that's not the rule of law either.
Yeah, that's not good governance either. That's all just a bunch of very wealthy and very powerful people all working towards their own ends. And if granny outside of Houston froze to death because the grid went offline, well, I guess Dave, that's the cost of doing business.
David: Yeah, no, exactly. And I think that we need to take a realistic look at this and sure, I think anybody can recognize that there's a lot of weird bureaucracy and, probably too many steps and a lot of things that need to be modernized — and, that's cool. Let's do those things. Let's clean it up, let's, take reasonable steps. And I think a lot of the stuff that DOGE is doing, there's a reason to look at those things. But at the end of the day, it should be done in a sensible, controlled process with actual security and, not giving 19-year-old kids passwords to the IRS, Social Security Administration, and nuclear sensitive information.
That's all just complete overreach and it's insane. So sure, let's clean up government. But yeah, let's do so sensibly.
Reed: Yeah, with a slide rule and a pencil, not a flame thrower. Alright, Dave before we let you go, where can we find your work online?
David: Yeah, so the best place to find me is on my website America 2.0 (america2.news). That's my publication. And then you can also find me on X at at @davetroy, on Mastodon at davetroy@toad.social, and on Bluesky at @davetroy.com.
Reed: Awesome. As always, gang, you can find me on Substack, and @thehomefront on Twitter.
TikTok and says us at Reed Galen on Instagram and threads at Read Galen usa. Dave, thanks for joining me. It was a great conversation.
David: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Reed and everybody else. We'll see you next time.
