The Drift
Federalist No. 11
Written June 2026. Published on the 251st birthday of the United States Army.
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The loneliest place in American politics is the one where you find yourself called Hitler by the left and a sellout by the right, and realize neither side is actually responding to you. Support the president and the left reaches for the worst comparison in the modern vocabulary. Disagree with him on anything and the right calls you a traitor before you finish the sentence. Neither side is evaluating the argument. Both are sorting you into the tribal category they need you to occupy, and there is no version of what you say that changes that.
America turns 250 years old this summer. The Army turns 251 years old today, which is the right order, because before there was a Declaration there had to be a force willing to back it. You cannot announce an ideal into existence. Someone has to be willing to die for it first. The question worth sitting with on this particular birthday is whether the ideal those Soldiers died for still exists in the form they understood when they picked up the rifle.
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The Declaration of Independence does not derive its legitimacy from ancestry, religion, ethnicity, geography, or political affiliation. The ideal it established was radical and specific: governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed to protect rights that precede the government's existence entirely, rights belonging not to a tribe or a class but to every human being by virtue of being human. Jefferson was not writing for Americans. He was writing for everyone who has ever lived under a government and wondered whether it had the right to tell them what to do. Not this people. Not this bloodline. Not this culture. Not this political affiliation. All men.
Frederick Douglass spent his career arguing that the Declaration was the most powerful antislavery document ever written precisely because the idea was more powerful than the flawed man who wrote it. The gap between the ideal and the reality was never evidence the ideal was fraudulent. It was the argument for expanding the ideal's application until the reality matched it. Not a finished product. A direction. Both sides of the current political divide claim to be moving in that direction without examining whether the path they are on leads there.
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The positions have been remarkably stable for anyone paying attention. Individual liberty, fiscal discipline, non-religious governance, personal autonomy on social issues, strong national defense, constitutional restraint on government power, and the idea that bad arguments get defeated through better arguments rather than through institutional suppression. Those positions did not drift. The frame around them did, and the person who has not moved finds themselves labeled extreme because the baseline moved around them while they were standing still.
In 1975 those positions described a liberal. In 1995 they described a moderate. In 2015 they described a conservative. In 2025 they described a threat depending on which room you said them in. The political spectrum did not just shift. It rotated. What looks like radicalism from one direction is stillness measured against a moving baseline, and the person standing still is the reference point everyone else has drifted away from.
That drift has consequences that show up in specific and documentable ways. Graham Platner is running for Senate in Maine as the Democratic nominee. He has combat service. He also posted on Reddit about a Purple Heart recipient who was shot four times in combat, calling him a dumb motherf-er who didn't deserve to live and crediting Taliban marksmanship failures for his survival. A former Marine who reviewed the post said it directly, we don't post about our brothers getting wounded in action. The party that built its identity around veteran accountability and holding powerful men responsible endorsed him anyway because the seat mattered more than the standard. The frame moved. The standard moved with it. The people who remember where the standard used to be are the ones now being called extreme for noticing.
The quieter version of the same observation is the one that does not make headlines. Everyone wants the spotlight, the star of the show, loud and demonstrative and performing for the audience metric. Nobody quietly goes to work and lets the result speak for itself anymore. The work has been replaced by the performance of working, and the platforms that reward the performance were not designed to notice the difference. Recognition that is real and earned and delayed and given by people who were present for the work means something that a thousand likes from strangers cannot replicate. The people who have received both understand the difference immediately. The culture that replaced earned recognition with performed recognition does not notice what it lost, and the platforms that accelerated the replacement were not designed to notice either.
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Jonathan Haidt spent a decade documenting three Great Untruths he argued were being systematically installed in young Americans through overprotective parenting, campus culture, and social media feedback loops. Specifically that what does not kill you makes you weaker, that you should always trust your feelings, and that life is a battle between good people and evil people. He assembled the case in his 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. In May 2026 he delivered the commencement address at NYU, the university where he has taught for years, and was booed off the stage. The student government released a statement saying attendees reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment. Showcasing the most perfect vindication of a thesis or the most depressing thing that happened at a university that month, and it is not a close call.
The progressive self-image is the Enlightenment, Jefferson writing pamphlets, Voltaire in the Bastille, MLK in the Birmingham jail, people whose ideas were dangerous enough that the institutional power of their era tried to suppress them through imprisonment, exile, and death. What that self-image requires overlooking is that the progressive left now administers the institutions it imagines itself challenging. Universities, major media organizations, Hollywood studios, public school systems, and the HR infrastructure of most large American corporations are not the establishment the progressive left is fighting against. They are the establishment the progressive left runs. The students who booed Haidt are not outsiders challenging power from below. Jefferson was outside institutional power challenging it at personal cost. The students booing Haidt are inside the institutional power of a university that gave them a platform, a degree, and will hire them to teach their ideas to the next generation, demanding that the institution protect them from the discomfort of hearing an idea they disagree with from the man who holds an endowed chair there. Enlightenment thinkers were not asking institutions to make them feel safe. They were demanding the right to have unsafe ideas without being protected from the consequences of holding them, and the contemporary version is the exact inversion of that.
Haidt's three Great Untruths explain the mechanism. If what does not kill you makes you weaker, any friction requires removal rather than navigation. If you should always trust your feelings, the feeling of being offended by Haidt's presence carries the same moral weight as an actual injustice. If life is a battle between good people and evil people, Haidt is not a scholar with a different view but an enemy whose presence constitutes harm. The booing is not a response to his argument. It is a signal to the audience that the booer has the correct values, and the argument is irrelevant because the signal is the point.
What started as an Enlightenment self-image has the structural logic of something considerably darker.
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Robespierre did not start as a monster. He started as a genuine reformer who believed so completely in the righteousness of his cause that he eventually lost the ability to imagine the cause could be wrong. The Jacobins, the radical political club that seized control of the French Revolution between 1793 and 1794 and initiated the Reign of Terror, were the outsiders who took institutional power and then discovered that holding power required enforcing the orthodoxy that justified seizing it. The guillotine was not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a movement that made moral certainty the basis of political authority, and the logic that produces the Terror is present before the Terror starts. Robespierre was arrested and guillotined by the people who had been his closest allies within two years of the Terror beginning.
It shows up in cancellations and deplatformings and institutions that fire people for questioning orthodoxy rather than engaging it. Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian in 2021 after posting a comparison between the current political climate and Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews. Disney terminated her contract immediately. Mark Ruffalo has compared Trump to Hitler, called for mass protests, accused the current administration of fascism, and kept every major Hollywood role he holds. The comparison ran in both directions. The institutional enforcement ran in one. Stephen Colbert's Late Show aired its final episode on May 21st after CBS canceled it the same month its parent company reached a sixteen million dollar settlement with Trump, with the network calling it a purely financial decision while the President publicly bragged about taking Colbert's scalp and warned three more hosts they were next. Jimmy Kimmel was briefly suspended by Disney after remarks about a MAGA-connected figure sparked FCC warnings, and the late night hosts who expressed near-universal outrage at Kimmel's suspension were the same ones who celebrated when Trump was deplatformed from social media in 2021. The principle in both cases was not defend free speech. The principle was defend our team's speech.
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The MAGA self-image is less coherent than the progressive one, and that incoherence is itself worth understanding. The progressive self-image maps onto a single narrative, enlightened vanguard challenging oppressive systems, clear villain, clear victim class, clear heroic role, even if the structural position does not match. The MAGA self-image draws from multiple incompatible traditions simultaneously and never fully resolves the tension between them.
There is the Stoic Warrior who does not have feelings, except about everything. The Patriot Defender performing Revolutionary War aesthetics from inside the most institutionally protected demographic in American history. The Uncancellable saying what everyone is afraid to say on platforms with hundreds of millions of listeners. The Traditionalist mourning an America that was always partially mythological and excluded significant portions of the actual population. None of these archetypes are consistent with each other, which is why the coalition switches between them depending on what the moment requires.
The most historically honest archetype is Ulysses S. Grant, not the glamorous version but the actual one, a man who had failed at almost everything before the war and discovered he had one specific and brutal competency. He could absorb casualties, keep moving forward, and outlast an opponent who was more elegant, more celebrated, and more impressive in every visible way. The MAGA coalition maps onto Grant more precisely than any of the others, not I am strong enough to win, but I will keep moving when everyone says stop. The honest complication nobody in the coalition wants to examine is that stubbornness and forward movement are only virtues when the direction is right. Sometimes everyone is shouting stop because there is a cliff ahead, and the man who cannot distinguish between institutional resistance worth overcoming and a warning worth heeding will walk into the wall the same way he walked through every obstacle before it. Grant's presidency was a disaster. The man who was unbeatable in the field was completely outmaneuvered by the institutional corruption of Reconstruction politics, because winning turned out to be a different problem than the one his particular competency was built for.
Both archetypes are explained by the same mechanism Haidt documented. The three Great Untruths produce people who experience the discomfort of being challenged as evidence of harm, in different emotional registers. The progressive registers it as violence and demands institutional protection. The MAGA registers it as disrespect and demands dominance performance in response. The person standing still reads as a threat to both of them simultaneously and for opposite reasons, the progressive reading the stillness as complicity and the MAGA reading it as betrayal, and neither having the framework to evaluate an idea on its merits rather than on its tribal signal value. That framework was the thing the founding experiment was specifically designed to protect, and both sides have been quietly dismantling it from opposite directions while accusing each other of the dismantling.
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James Madison opened Federalist No. 10 by naming the disease directly. "Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties." He was describing 1787, four years after the end of the Revolutionary War, fresh off a failed Articles of Confederation, in a country where armed farmers had just marched on courthouses in Massachusetts and the whole experiment looked genuinely fragile. His pessimism about faction was earned by the specific chaos of that moment. The fact that his description requires no editing for 2026, two hundred and fifty years later, the most stable and prosperous republic in human history, several generations removed from existential crisis, is not understandable given our circumstances. It is a choice.
His analysis was precise and his conclusions were uncomfortable. The causes of faction cannot be removed without either destroying liberty or making everyone think alike, and both cures are worse than the disease. The only viable solution is constructing a system that controls the effects of faction rather than eliminating its causes, the extended republic, the representative filter, the separation of powers, the constitutional constraints on government authority, the machine designed for tribal human beings who could not be made non-tribal, on the assumption that the people running it would maintain what Madison implicitly required of them.
That assumption has a name. Republican fiber. Not virtue in the utopian sense, not moral perfection, but the specific willingness of citizens and institutions to apply the same standard to their own side that they demand of the opposition, to value the experiment more than their team's next victory, and to absorb the cost of protecting the system even when protecting it means losing. The test is specific and demanding, and the ACLU demonstrated it in 1977 when they defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town populated largely by Holocaust survivors. They did not agree with the Nazis. They lost members, lost funding, and absorbed the hatred of people they were trying to protect, because a right that only protects agreeable speech is not a right but a privilege the majority extends to people it likes, revocable the moment the majority decides the speech is no longer agreeable. The willingness to take a loss in the name of the system rather than win by dismantling it is what republican fiber looks like in practice. The contemporary ACLU files briefs limiting speech it finds harmful, and the fiber ran out somewhere between 1977 and now without anyone holding a ceremony to mark the moment it did.
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Both parties are hollowing the system from opposite directions and neither will say so directly, because both genuinely believe their version of rights restriction is protection rather than limitation.
The progressive left has redefined rights as group-based protections requiring government enforcement rather than individual liberties requiring government restraint. From that framework, restricting speech that causes harm is protecting rights, affirmative action is protecting rights, mandating certain behaviors from private businesses is protecting rights. The framework is internally consistent and it is also a direct philosophical rejection of the Declaration's foundation, which derives rights from individual human dignity that precedes government authority rather than from group membership the government recognizes and protects.
The MAGA right treats institutions as legitimate only when they produce outcomes the coalition approves of and corrupt when they do not. The courts that rule against the administration are activist. The courts that rule for it are constitutional. The elections the coalition wins are legitimate. The ones it loses are stolen. The institutions are not being evaluated on their integrity but on their outputs, which is not a constitutional argument but a tribal one dressed in constitutional language.
Neither side would defend the other's rights if it meant giving the other a leg up. The progressive left that celebrated Citizens United being overturned built the most sophisticated small dollar digital fundraising apparatus in political history and called it grassroots democracy. The MAGA right that spent eight years arguing that executive overreach was tyranny spent the next four defending every expansion of executive authority under their president using the same constitutional framework it had just condemned. The principle gets invoked when it serves the coalition and abandoned when it does not, which is the predictable result of substituting tribal identity for the philosophical foundation that makes rights mean something independent of who holds power.
Madison designed the machine for the speed of a horse. The factions are moving at the speed of a fiber optic cable. The geographic scale solution worked because movements had to travel physically to coordinate, a faction in Virginia could not instantly align with a faction in Massachusetts. Social media made that constraint irrelevant overnight, and faction now coordinates nationally in milliseconds, finds its most emotionally activating expression algorithmically, and delivers it to audiences whose engagement the platform monetizes regardless of whether the content is true. The operators are being selected by the same faction amplification system that is making the machine harder to run.
Two hundred and fifty years ago a group of deeply flawed men, slaveholders, deists, rum smugglers, and speculators among them, wrote down an idea so radical it is still unsettled. The gap between the ideal and the reality was the argument for expanding the ideal's application, not for discarding it. Not for this people. Not for this bloodline. Not for this culture. Not for this political affiliation. For everyone who has ever lived under a government and wondered whether it had the right to tell them what to do.
The Army was built to defend that idea before it was formally declared. Two hundred and fifty-one years of Soldiers who signed a blank check payable up to and including their lives for an experiment in governing by idea rather than by tribe. Most of them never read Federalist No. 10. They did not need to. They understood in the way that people who have actually been responsible for something larger than themselves understand it, that the thing is worth more than the team, that the experiment matters more than who wins the next round of it.
Federalist No. 11 does not have a happy ending written yet, and the question of whether there is enough republican fiber left to write one is still being decided.