You might not love all of Noah Smith’s language, but his deep dive into the current state of American politics is actually worth your time. Unlike the usual left-wing drivel churned out by Salon or MSNBC, Smith’s piece is surprisingly balanced — a rare thing these days.
He gives a fair assessment of the MAGA movement and lays out the structural and political weaknesses of the Left, which, frankly, aren’t going anywhere as long as Democrats keep charging ahead with their radical, self-destructive agenda. Even more interesting, Smith admits there are grains of truth in what the media derisively call the “great replacement theory,” pointing to the demographic and political shifts that completely transformed California.
Sure, you might not agree with his more alarmist takes on MAGA’s so-called “authoritarian tendencies,” but he also makes it clear this isn’t some grand fascist plot — a refreshing dose of realism in a media landscape addicted to hysteria.
It’s a long read, but Smith offers a solid 30,000-foot view of the current political climate — touching on recent episodes of political violence and the evolution of the modern conservative movement.
What stands out is that Smith actually does what the legacy media refuses to do: he tries to understand why conservatives use words like “war” when describing the political struggle we’re in, particularly in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
He doesn’t sneer, dismiss, or caricature it — he analyzes it. And while that’s not even the most compelling part of his piece, it’s a level of honesty and curiosity that you simply don’t get from the usual corporate media echo chamber:
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 points out that there’s a growing movement to see Trump wield expanded executive power — something he says could be “unprecedented,” even drawing comparisons to Vladimir Putin, which is sure to revive all the tired Russiagate hysteria from the Left. But he also makes an important observation: MAGA is now the dominant force on the Right. The old GOP establishment has been sidelined or absorbed, replaced by a movement laser-focused on defending Western civilization and its core values.
Sure, some of Smith’s takes are open for debate, but at least it’s not coming from the smug, elitist echo chamber of The Atlantic. It’s an honest attempt at understanding, not demonizing — a rare “agree to disagree” moment in today’s political discourse.
Where Smith really lands a punch is in his critique of the Left. He argues, quite accurately, that progressives are on a path toward self-inflicted irrelevance, retreating into ideological safe spaces where they dominate but never debate.
Via Noah Opinion:
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. …
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. …
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.
I like Franco, so there’s that. But his assessment of the left (which is really the Western left, not just the American left) reads like 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 …
…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.
I don’t agree with all of Smith’s characterizations — especially given what we now know about the Obama and Biden administrations. Both weaponized the Justice Department and politicized the intelligence community to target political rivals. Obama was essentially quarterbacking the Russiagate operation, laying down the “breadcrumbs” that led to one of the biggest political hoaxes in modern history. And Biden? He reportedly told the CIA to bury an intelligence report that undercut his so-called foreign policy “expertise” on Ukraine back when he was vice president. So forgive me if I don’t buy the “authoritarian Right” narrative.
That said, Smith does make an important point: American politics moves in cycles — conservative, liberal, and back again. He recalls the 1960s, when political violence spiraled after the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, and both sides eventually realized things had gone too far. Fair enough. But this time feels different. The modern Left has grown disturbingly comfortable with using violence, intimidation, and lawfare to silence its opponents — something Smith only cautiously acknowledges.
He also admits something few on the Left dare to: if the country ever truly fractured and violence broke out, the Right would win — though, as he notes, it would be in an America no one would want to live in. Fair point, but let’s not live in hypotheticals.
Where Smith really nails it is on immigration — a policy area where Democrats have gone completely off the rails. They’ve refused to moderate even slightly, turning what used to be a bipartisan issue into a full-blown disaster. Meanwhile, Smith reminds conservatives that losing an election isn’t the end of the world — just ask Donald Trump, who came roaring back four years later.
In the end, Smith’s conclusions are more of a to-do list for Democrats than anything else: calm down, compromise, and get real about what Americans actually want. Because as things stand, their radical agenda isn’t it.
