There’s something conspicuously absent from American political discourse: actual discussion of values and the morals, ethical choices, and beliefs that go into the creation of good government policy.

Think about the last major political debate you watched, or the last campaign ad that stuck with you. How much of it was about what government should do versus who you should hate? How much was articulating a vision for society versus performing dominance over the out-group?

This isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.

When your policy positions are wildly unpopular — when majorities oppose you on healthcare, taxation, abortion, climate change, guns, and wages — you don’t engage on the substance. You change the subject. You make politics about identity, grievance, and tribal belonging. You turn every election into a referendum on vibes rather than vision.

The American right has become extraordinarily sophisticated at this evasion. They’ve built an entire media ecosystem designed not to argue for right-wing values, but to ensure those values never have to be argued for at all. And the Trump administration is chock full of people from that media ecosystem.

The Polling Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable reality the modern right has to navigate, and we need to trumpet: their actual policy preferences are not popular.

Exposed to the individual provisions of the Affordable Care Act, majorities supported them — even among Republicans. Majorities support raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting Social Security and Medicare, acting on climate change, keeping abortion legal in most cases, and implementing universal background checks for gun purchases. On issue after issue, when you strip away the partisan framing and ask people what they actually want government to do, the “conservative” position loses.

This creates a strategic problem. You can’t win elections by articulating positions most people reject. So you articulate… something else.

The Retreat from Argument

Meanwhile, the right-wing has indefensible values, which is why they no longer even bother to try to articulate them. Instead, they express them obliquely through “memes” and mores that evince cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, domination, supremacy, greed, selfishness, and contempt for vulnerability — all while maintaining plausible deniability through irony, “just asking questions,” and the ever-ready accusation that anyone who names the pattern is being hysterical or unfair.

This is the function of the perpetual rhetorical shell game: you can’t pin down a position that’s never stated plainly. The cruelty gets expressed through policy and aesthetic, but when challenged, retreats behind procedural objections or “economic anxiety.” The bigotry shows up in who gets mocked and who gets protected, but is never admitted as such — it’s always reframed as “common sense” or “tradition.”

The tell is that they react with fury not when they’re mischaracterized, but when they’re characterized accurately. The mask isn’t there to fool others; it’s there to provide psychological cover for the wearer. Saying the quiet part loud breaks the spell — which is why doing so provokes such disproportionate backlash.

What can’t be defended must be obscured. What can’t be argued for must be normalized through repetition. What can’t survive scrutiny must delegitimize scrutiny itself.

The Infrastructure of Distraction

This didn’t happen organically. It required building an entire parallel information architecture of right wing groups designed to redirect attention away from policy and toward culture war flashpoints.

Consider the pattern: Every time there’s momentum for popular economic policy — raising the minimum wage, taxing billionaires, expanding healthcare access — suddenly there’s a new outrage about pronouns, or Dr. Seuss, or M&Ms being less sexy. The culture war content isn’t incidental to the project. It is the project. It’s the mechanism by which unpopular economic preferences get smuggled in alongside popular cultural resentments.

Fox News doesn’t spend its hours explaining why tax cuts for the wealthy benefit working people (an argument that’s been empirically demolished for decades). It spends those hours stoking fear about immigrants, trans people, “wokeness,” and whatever today’s outrage object happens to be. The viewer is kept in a constant state of agitation about threats to their identity and status — too activated to ever pause and ask, “Wait, what are they actually doing with policy?”

The “Just Joking” Defense

One of the most effective evasion techniques is the deployment of irony as a shield. Say something cruel or bigoted, but say it in meme format. If it lands, you meant it. If there’s pushback, you were joking. You were trolling. You were owning the libs. The people upset about it are the real problem — they can’t take a joke.

This is how you can simultaneously communicate a message and deny responsibility for it. The Nazi-adjacent hand signals, the “helicopter ride” references, the Pepe avatars — these function as a kind of in-group language that expresses values that can’t be stated directly. Everyone in the know understands what’s being said. But if you’re ever called to account for it, there’s always the escape hatch: “It’s just a meme, bro.”

The strategy is to create a discourse environment where the right’s actual values are never on the table for examination. You’re either in on the joke or you’re not. You either feel the vibe or you don’t. There’s nothing to debate because nothing has been asserted.

What Fills the Vacuum

When politics stops being about competing visions of the good society, it becomes about something else: dominance, humiliation, and the sadistic pleasure of seeing your enemies suffer.

This is the logic of “liberal tears” as a political objective. It’s not that a policy will make anyone’s life better — it’s that it will make the right people upset. The cruelty is the point, as Adam Serwer memorably put it. When you can’t promise your voters broadly popular outcomes, you can promise them the emotional satisfaction of watching others lose.

This is also why “hypocrisy” accusations never land on the right the way critics expect them to. Pointing out that a politician violated the principles they claim to hold assumes those principles were ever sincerely held. But if the actual project is hierarchy maintenance and in-group dominance, then there’s no hypocrisy — there’s just power exercised by those who have it.

The Progressive Failure Mode

The left has its own pathologies in this environment as well. Progressives often assume that if they just explain their policy positions clearly enough, people will be convinced. They bring white papers to a vibes fight.

There’s a persistent liberal fantasy that politics is a debate club where the best argument wins (to be fair, it does seem clear the Founders more or less intended for it to indeed be this way). But when one side has abandoned argument entirely, “winning the debate” becomes meaningless. You can fact-check every lie and be absolutely correct about everything, and it doesn’t matter — because correctness was never the playing field.

This doesn’t mean progressives should abandon substance. But it does mean recognizing that you can’t have a policy debate with someone who refuses to state their policy preferences, and that matching substantive arguments against emotional manipulation is a category error.

Naming the Game

The first step to changing a rigged game is accurately describing how it’s rigged.

American politics has become untethered from values because one side benefits enormously from that untethering. When you can’t win on the merits, you change what counts as merit. When you can’t defend your vision, you make vision irrelevant. When your values are unpopular, you hide them behind entertainment, grievance, and tribal signaling.

This is why simply “reaching across the aisle” or “finding common ground” often fails — it assumes a shared interest in arriving at good policy, when the actual interest on one side is preventing policy discussion entirely.

The way forward isn’t to abandon values-based argument. It’s to name what’s happening clearly, to refuse the endless shell game, and to keep forcing the question: What do you actually want? What do you actually believe? What kind of society are you trying to build?

They won’t answer. But the refusal to answer is itself an answer — and more people need to hear it. They also need to hear a lot more from folks who have good answers.