Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment.

Ever since Donald Trump decisively won the 2024 election, there have been immediate calls

for some sort of alternative to the politics of MAGA.

That wasn't just the politics of norms or a rehashing of the status quo.

Now that we are more than a year out from his victory, though,

the question is shifted from what's the alternative to why hasn't there been a clear one yet.

From my POV, any alternative isn't about exactly being perfectly catchy, as ready for the debate stage

as MAGA was, but is instead, at least right now,

able to ground people in the moment and how they need to respond to the culture, the economy,

and the actual feelings Americans have right now, aka an objective or destination, or a worldview. Maga, like it or hate it, accomplishes

exactly that. The other thing I'll add is the reason why there has not been any alternative yet

is that all of the different actors and institutions within left liberal politics, including

the Democratic Party, have become

overly fixated on putting wins on the boards for their own individual factions instead of

building something comprehensive. My note on factionalism is that, yes, you have moderates and you

have centrists, there are blue dogs, there are never Trumpers, there are leftists,

there are DSA people, but not any single one of these factions is actually able to get 50 plus

one votes on the board during a primary election or a general election themselves. Therefore,

everyone is actually going to have to work together to come up with something comprehensive.

Conservatism, even its MAGA variant, has been able to achieve this through the idea of

fusionism. Ever since Reagan in the 80s, you've had a combination of the priorities of fiscal

conservatives, social conservatives, and foreign policy conservatives formed into something, once again, that's

...