This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
All American wars are civil wars. The world is distant and different. The domestic prizes are gigantic and close at hand.
Since Vietnam, the military has recruited only volunteers and, white Southerners aside, drawn much of its rank and file as the later Roman army did, from those lacking property or citizenship. Add the low-level nature of counterinsurgency warfare and the even lower attention span of a frivolous media, and it becomes possible for Americans to be at war all the time without most of them knowing about it.
Naturally, there are commonalities between the combatants in Washington, DC. The intimacy of their struggle inside the Beltway and the crosshatching of political values beyond often create sub-factions who could, but for geography or manners, be on the other side. The classical instances in modern American politics are the Rockefeller Republicans and the Congressional Black Caucus.
The Rockefellers, as the name suggests, were northeastern WASP elites. The largest faction in Republican leadership in the mid-20th century, they reached across the aisle to counter both isolationists in the 1930s and communists in the 1950s; Arthur Vandenberg, who drew a line at the water’s edge, was one of them. They lost their grip on their party after the identitarian upheavals that followed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. White Southerners changed sides, Evangelicals turned right, and northeastern urban whites moved south and west.
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The same identitarian shake-out created the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971. The CBC is bound to the Democrats by patronage, but it was founded as a non-partisan lobby and has supported Republican initiatives on issues such as education, the economy and criminal justice reform.
A couple of centrist groups appeared in the mid-1990s. In 1992, the federal budget deficit was a paltry $290 billion and the federal debt a mere $4 trillion. Economic probity was still conceivable, and the voters were still literate enough for the notion to have electoral appeal.
Both parties produced a centrist caucus that pushed fiscal sobriety in government and animal spirits in the market: the Blue Dog Democrats and the Republican Governance Group.
Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party both were downstream from the Great Financial Crash of 2008
By 1998, mid-way through Bill Clinton’s second term, there was a federal surplus of $236 billion, and welfare reform was slowing the growth of the federal debt. The post-9/11 alteration of fiscal policy to a high-spending war footing undermined both groups. In 2025, the federal deficit was $1.8 trillion and the federal debt passed $38 trillion.
The Blue Dog Democrats declined from a peak of 65 members in the 2008 House of Representatives to 10 in 2024. The Republican Governance Group survives with less than half the 100-plus members it had at its founding, mainly by realigning itself with the fiscal libertine, Donald Trump.
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The next factional pair were the first to emerge from outside Washington, DC since the New Left. The New Left’s doctrines had spread through the new information networks of post-war mass media and the “multiversity”. The even newer left of Occupy Wall Street arose in 2011 through new information networks. The internet domesticated the European-inflected “anticapitalism” of the 1990s into the Green Gramscianism of the tent camp in Zuccotti Park, Lower Manhattan.
Before Occupy occupied, however, the Republican grassroots generated the Tea Party in 2009. This too was a digitally enhanced revival of classic if not quaint political themes. Whilst Occupy was preoccupied with liberating a mythical working class from capitalism, the Tea Party were patriots seeking limited and constitutional government under the kind of laws that favoured small business. Both were downstream from the Great Financial Crash of 2008 and the exposure of structural weakness in an economy that remains ever more indebted.
The story of American politics since 2008 can be told at two levels. Up top, there is the regulated combat of Democrats and Republicans. Down below, it’s all armies of the night on the darkling digital plain. Both parties faced a shrinking base and a new, hostile centre of Independents emerging as the biggest voting bloc. Barack Obama and Donald Trump twice won elections by riding the upsurge of dysregulated passion from the grassroots. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 by taking campaign advice from King Canute. But the digital tide eroded the standing of both parties.
The digital insurgents entered Congress in small numbers. Their influence depended on whether their party leadership exploited or suppressed their energies. The informal “Squad” of Democrats that entered the House in 2018 was only a quartet: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, mobilised them in her campaign against the first Trump presidency and posed with them for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Once the Democrats regained the White House, however, the Biden presidency had little use for the Squad.
Much the same happened with the Republicans. Donald Trump inherited the formalised factions of post-Tea Party populism, the Tea Party Caucus (2010-16) and the Freedom Caucus (2015-), and his Make America Great Again slogan was an effective distillation of their attitudes. In his first term, Trump used the Freedom Caucus to squeeze Congressional Republicans’ soft middle. Trump no longer needs them in his second term. When the most ardent pro-Trump voices in Congress tried to launch an America First Caucus in 2021, they failed to get it off the ground.
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The nullified rebels of both parties retreated to their power bases and intensified their ideological commitments. The Squad’s power base is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a non-party whose street tactics and army of unemployed grad students give it a Weimar-style relationship to the Democrats. The Democrats’ dependency on the DSA as a rent-a-riot mob allowed the Squad to remain within the party as the leftmost particle of the Progressive Caucus.
That meant that when Hamas’ rampage of 7 October 2023 triggered an ecstasy of mimetic enthusiasm, it happened not just amongst the Democrats’ most reliable foot soldiers, but also within the Congressional Democrats.
These structural effects are already shaping the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. The inside candidate, California’s governor Gavin Newsom, began his run in early March by calling Israel an “apartheid state”, then clarified for the donors that he was talking about future potentialities rather than the present. In 2025, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor had his house set on fire on the first night of Passover by a local sympathiser with the Palestinian cause. Nevertheless, Shapiro felt it expedient to tell a podcast that Israel had “led” the United States and “bullied” Donald Trump into war with Iran.
The radical retreat worked differently with the Republicans. There is no DSA-type America First militia beneath the Congressional party. The America First foothold in Congress has collapsed. The plastic-faced Floridian swinger Matt Gaetz resigned from office in 2024 amidst allegations of drug use and paying for sex with young girls and now hosts a trashy show on the small but obnoxious One America News channel.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who once said the Rothschilds control the weather with “Jewish space lasers”, now calls for Trump to be impeached as mentally unfit and for the Republicans to be “burned to the ground” in this year’s November midterms.
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Instead, America First has racist podcasters: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly. After Donald Trump’s decisive entry into the first round of the Israel-Iran war in June 2025, the podcasters launched the first explicitly anti-Jewish campaign in American politics since the 1930s, with the fork-tongued Carlson as its clickbait Father Coughlin. Three months later, the murder of Charlie Kirk, whose charm bridged the gaps between Evangelical piety, Reaganite libertarianism and New Right identity politics, opened the battle for the 2028 nomination. The podcasters’ attacks on Trump and the Jews intensified amidst the second round of war with Iran.
At the peak of Charles Coughlin’s popularity in the 1930s, it was said that a quarter of America’s radios were tuned in to his rants. But when Coughlin switched from FDR’s first-term backer to his second-term enemy, he lost his Democratic-voting audience of urban white Catholics. Joseph McCarthy lost his core audience of Republican nativists by attacking people they admired: the leaders of the US military. Like Coughlin, Carlson and the podcast conspiracists have switched from Trump’s first-term supporters to his second-term enemies. Like McCarthy, they characterise the US military as servants of a foreign power.
Donald Trump now mocks the podcasters as “NUT JOBS”. Carlson’s popularity amongst registered Republicans has collapsed. If the Iran war turns out well, the Republicans can avoid following the Democrats’ march into unreality. If the Iran war goes badly, however, the America First faction will return from the ether to the Congress, and the post-Trump transition will be chaos, with foreign policy failure relitigated as domestic civil war.
