You might not like some of the language he uses, but Noah Smith’s lengthy take on the state of American politics is worth a read. It’s not drivel spewed on Salon or MSNBC. It’s a fair take on the MAGA movement and the structural and political disadvantages of the Left, which aren’t going away if they keep this destructive march on most of their action items. Smith concedes there are kernels of truth to the ‘great replacement theory,’ noting the changes in California’s politics. Again, you might not agree with the authoritarian observations he makes about the MAGA movement, but he also slaps down the notion that this is some fascistic plot.
It's a lengthy post, providing a 30,000-foot overview, the recent political violence, and a parsing of the changes among the conservative movement. Smith does what the legacy press refuses to do, which is find out why our side references “war” in our social media post, especially after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, though that’s not the most interesting part.
Meanwhile, the American Left has been totally neutered. All of the grassroots activist energy is now on the Palestine cause, which is harmless to Republicans. Wokeness has retreated to various safe spaces. Democrats command no popular support.https://t.co/7nrpWIkrkT
— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) October 7, 2025
Smith noted that there is a push to make Trump wield more executive power that might be unprecedented, akin to Vladamir Putin, which will for sure rehash the Russiagate nonsense. He did note that MAGA is now the only game in town on the Right. We’re united, the last vestiges of the old guard have been wiped away or subordinated, with the new mission seemingly transfixed on defending Western civilization and its values. Again, some of the observations are up for debate, but it’s not The Atlantic. It is, if anything, a post where we can disagree agreeably. Smith’s take on the Left is damning, noting that, for now, they seem to be geared toward driving themselves into irrelevancy, made worse by their retreat into spaces where they dominate and refuse to debate (via NoahOpinion):
The right in America is pretty united at this point. The last vestiges of establishment conservatism, Reaganites, and libertarians have been swept away or subordinated, and the Christian right backs Trump fully despite the fact that he doesn’t share their values. MAGA is now the only game in town.
[…]
Ideologically, the right deeply believes in the story of a “Great Replacement”. They believe that “the left” wants to import as many nonwhite immigrants as possible, in order to A) vote the Republican party out of power, and B) disempower and subordinate white people in the U.S., the Anglosphere, and Europe. Once white people have been made a minority in these countries, the theory goes, they will be subordinated via various methods — anti-white discrimination (DEI), selective permissiveness toward crime by nonwhites (“anarcho-tyranny”), and so on.
This used to be a somewhat fringe theory in right-wing circles, expressed in books like The Camp of the Saints. It is no longer fringe. My assessment is that while not every GOP voter believes the Great Replacement story, it is now absolutely core to the MAGA belief system. I believe that J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, and every other important MAGA figure other than Trump himself believes in some version of this basic story. (Trump’s beliefs are more idiosyncratic and less coherent than those of his followers.)
Is the Great Replacement real? Rightists wildly exaggerate the idea, but there are certainly a few nuggets of truth there. Some Democrats, seeing how California was turned permanently blue by Mexican immigration, hoped that the same thing could be accomplished at the national level. And I have even seen a few progressives espouse Great Replacement-like goals.
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They believe the wolf is at their throat, and this is their last chance to save their civilization. So they are trying to talk themselves into being as ruthless as possible — into doing whatever it takes to defeat their enemies.
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Now, everyone is going to ask me: Is this fascism? Well, yes, I think that’s not an inaccurate description — it’s authoritarian right-wing ultranationalism. But there’s not much of the grassroots movement, utopian theory, grand territorial ambitions, or systematic party apparatus of the type that characterized Nazism. Instead, MAGA is a reactive, hastily-cobbled-together, fear-driven right-wing nationalism more akin to Francisco Franco’s.
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I like Franco. So, it’s what it is. But his assessment of the Left is more of an epitaph:
The American progressive movement is not an organization at all — it is a broad, diffuse upwelling of sentiment.
During the 2010s that sentiment swelled to a crescendo, but in the 2020s it has begun to wane. The popular outpouring of “antiracist” sentiment that characterized the “Great Awokening” has petered out, and with it has gone the feeling of overwhelming progressive cultural domination. Bari Weiss, who got run out of the New York Times for being insufficiently progressive, just got hired to run CBS News. Cancel culture is canceled.
The protests of summer 2020 that scared the right into extremism were actually a black swan event. It’s probably now safe to admit — as some of my friends who participated even admitted to me at the time — that a whole lot of people joined the Floyd protests because of frustration with Covid lockdowns, rather than out of a sincere desire to overthrow America and remake it along “antiracist” lines.
Meanwhile, the activist energy that powered the smaller, initial version off BLM in the mid-2010s is gone now. That generation of activists has largely gotten exhausted and/or aged out. When the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade and banned affirmative action in college admissions, there was no major grassroots pushback. All the grassroots energy on the left now is invested in the Palestine cause, which is basically harmless to Republicans.
And the policy ideas that came out of the woke era mostly flopped. Black Americans did not like the country’s brief experiment with anarchy in 2020, and became much more pro-cop, which put an end to “defund the police”. The flood of illegal and quasi-legal immigrants that Biden allowed during his time in office ended up turning much of the country against immigration (at least temporarily). The trans movement is losing on key issues such as women’s sports teams.
But in response to all of these losses, progressives have failed to moderate their views
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…progressives have retreated to safe spaces where they still maintain the absolute cultural dominance that so intoxicated them in the 2010s — universities, NGOs, a few companies, and the small social network Bluesky. There, they can wield some facsimile of the cancel-power they once enjoyed
[…]
Meanwhile, quietly and behind the scenes, progressives are still quietly pushing Democrats to support policies that no one outside the progressive bubble really likes.
This kind of thing renders progressives extraordinarily ineffective against Trump’s anti-democratic blitzkrieg. It’s also probably a big part of what makes the Democratic party so incredibly unpopular
[…]
In other words, even as MAGA slowly works up the courage to attack the core institutions of American democracy and liberty, Trump’s potential opposition has done everything it can to render itself irrelevant to the broader conversation.
Again, I don’t agree with some of the descriptors, especially after the Obama and Biden administrations have been exposed as weaponizing the Justice Department to go after their political rivals. They also politicized the intelligence community: Obama being QB1 on the Russiagate antics, starting the train of breadcrumbs, whereas Biden ordered the CIA to bury a report that humiliated his foreign policy prowess regarding Ukraine matters when he was vice president.
Smith did make a note that nothing is permanent in American politics. It goes through conservative and liberal cycles. When political violence did get out of hand, like in the 1960s when JFK, MLK, and RFK were assassinated, both sides opted to tone things down. That is true, but the things have changed regarding the Left, which is much more accepting of committing acts of political violence against their rivals. He also admits that if things do break down, and civil war erupts, it’s the Right that’s going to win, albeit in an America we wouldn’t want to live in. Maybe, but let’s not dwell on hypotheticals.
One area he does note where Democrats went haywire is immigration, which they don’t seem keen on moderating, whereas conservatives should be reminded that losing an election doesn’t mean the end of the world. Trump lost in 2020 but got his job back four years later. Even in his conclusions, Smith has more of a to-do list for left-wingers, specifically noting that they need to simmer down and start to compromise on core issues, because their agenda right now isn’t it.
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