The Status Quo Needs Shaking Up

I want to try to tie together some of the themes that JVL explored last week in his underappreciated (and in some quarters unfairly maligned) newsletters on “enshittification” and Graham Platner, and put more of a campaign lens on them. We’ve been talking a lot about how voters are looking for outsiders and fighters who may not map along the ideological lines expected by social media warriors engaged in factional political fights, so I wanted to hash out that notion a bit. I think there are going to be parts of this thesis for everyone to love and hate, and I’m open to revising and extending—so give it to me in the comments like usual.

On a sad note, I also wanted to offer a tribute to Jason Collins, who died last night. The New Jersey Nets legend came out before his last season in the NBA, making him the first openly gay athlete in professional American team sports. That last year he wore the number 98 to honor Matthew Shepard, who was murdered in 1998. Tragically, doctors found last fall that Collins had an advanced brain tumor, which took his life yesterday at the too-young age of 47. It’s been thirteen years since Collins came out and I think it’s a testimony to his courage that so few have followed his path. Much love to Collins; rest easy queen.

Last summer the campaign to release the Epstein files seemed dead. Trump’s coverup had worked, with minimal pushback. The Republican party was going along with it. He had moved the conversation onto other absurdities. (Nuuk invasion imminent!) On June 15, 2025, the degenerate Polymarket bettors gave the files an 11.5 percent chance of becoming public.

But then a pair of House gadflies, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), decided they weren’t going to just let the sclerotic establishment brush the files under the rug. They said “eff it” and pressed forward, blowback be damned. Ro’s Democratic colleagues rolled their eyes behind his back. Some thought he was engaging in conspiracy-mongering. The president began actively campaigning against Massie, smearing him in grotesquely personal terms.

It is true that we don’t yet have everything that the victims wanted. But accountability for the perpetrators has begun (abroad, at least), and when the Democrats take the House next year, maybe at long last some accountability will come here at home.

There are a lot of lessons one could take from this about how to “do politics,” but the one I want to focus on today is the importance of having politicians willing to buck conventional wisdom—and endure bullshit attacks, even from their own side—if you actually want to achieve meaningful change in our current system.

This isn’t how politics used to work. For a century, the way to get results was to play the inside game, slowly build relationships, hash out deals with bigwigs—often from the other party—and gain enough power to bring home the bacon.

But that mode of politics has crumbled over the last three decades. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the weakening of the parties’ gatekeeping power, the internet, John Thune and Mike Johnson castrating themselves for Trump, the unitary executive theory, democratic enshittification, negative partisanship, geographic sorting, and other social contagions have created an extinction-level event for inside-game politics while making voters feel like their representatives are less responsive than ever to their concerns.

I have to say I don’t particularly love this. My natural state is small-c conservatism. In a different universe I’d be the guy with the bullhorn at one of those Incremental Change rallies that Sarah likes to talk about:

But you may have noticed that we aren’t in a world where incremental positive change is happening. In fact, in many parts of our society it feels totally out of reach.

As the failures of American politics have become painfully obvious—from Congress’s inability to make policy to the political parties being helmed by octogenarians to the inefficiencies that are driving Californians to move to red states—frustration with government’s lack of ability to do anything might just be the one thing that everyone can agree on, from Mamdani stans to Abundance bros to the MAGA hordes that believed Trump would, if nothing else, be a man of action.

Our government is creaky, literally: As of its convening last year, this Congress has the most members above 70 years old in American history, and the average age of American governors is even higher than that of Congress. Americans made their feelings about the gerontocracy abundantly clear in their rejection of Joe Biden in 2024. And their frustrations are well founded. Think about it: Who is more likely to push for real change and needed reforms? Octogenarians who have been in the machine their whole life or younger outsiders who are incentivized to challenge the entrenched systems?

This is a situation ripe for creative destruction and disruptive innovation, to borrow terms from economics. There are obviously limits to this argument. There are good kinds of creative destruction and bad ones, as we’ve learned over the past decade. (And I find myself getting a little uncomfortable writing sentences that could’ve been penned in Breitbart circa 2015.)

But—to hijack a line from David Frum—if liberal institutionalists insist that only fascists will blow up the status quo, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do.

I’ve had this frame in mind as primary season has become a slog of increasingly personal factional warfare within the pro-democracy coalition. Maybe the logical move is for party voters to turn to candidates who are willing to challenge the stagnant establishment and build up a new bench of anti–status quo candidates even if their ideologies don’t totally cohere.

Four of the candidates I have in mind for this frame are Graham Platner (running for the Senate from Maine), Seth Moulton (running for the Senate from Massachusetts), Matt Mahan (gubernatorial candidate in California), and Thomas Massie himself.1

• They’re in campaigns against either older opponents who are protective of the status quo or party apparatchiks.

Obviously there are some key differences and caveats here too. Mahan is backed by a lot of Big Tech folks, so while he may be free to buck the entrenched California Democratic Party interests, it’s reasonable to conclude that his policies will be colored by a different set of influences. Platner, meanwhile, is going to be very responsive to some of “the groups” that influence progressive politics—and, to be frank, I’m still a little concerned about what else might come out about his past before November. Although to be fair, that concern could apply to any of these guys, not just the tattooed Mainer. Case in point: As I was writing this newsletter, Axios dropped a story alleging some questionable judgment shown by Massie when dealing with a disgruntled ex who had worked for an ally in Congress.

So, no, these are not the last honest men in politics. But all of them buck the go-along-to-get-along culture set by the establishment in their parties. And that will give them the freedom to propose more dramatic reforms once they’re elected.

The positive case for each goes something like this:

Seth Moulton has pushed age limits for Congress and term limits for committee chairs. He advocates broad electoral reforms like eliminating the filibuster and the Electoral College, and has been doing so since 2019. He’s been a dogged opponent of Trumpian corruption and graft. He’s adept at social media and capable of raising the salience of these issues in the press. Like Platner, he’s a veteran, and despite his more internationalist views he has been a leader in fighting Trump’s Iran war and returned donations from AIPAC. As for his opponent: When was the last time you saw Ed Markey make a meaningful impact on our politics? Does anyone think he would stand up to either the progressive “groups” or the party leadership if the moment called for it? And most critically, when we are at the peak of the Trump crisis in the fall of 2028, Markey will be 82! Forget rallying the troops for democracy—we’ll be lucky if he’s awake to cast votes.

Graham Platner: Plenty of ink has been spilled about Platner’s risks and vulnerabilities, and I myself have stated many times that I wish this control trial were taking place in Kansas and not Maine. But the value prop of a charismatic oyster-farming, shitposting firebrand in this primary was obvious. For starters, he was running against the handpicked choice of the party elite: a governor who served capably but whose reaction was tepid when ICE invaded her state. On the other hand, Platner gave voice to the party base’s frustration that its leaders didn’t share their rage over the Trump administration or the rest of the Epstein class that has bowed to Trump. Whether it be on foreign policy or corporate capture, Platner is going to force a reckoning in a rather staid Senate caucus, which is exactly what Democratic voters want in a senator. At times will it be in service of slopulist nonsense? Absolutely. But if Democrats are going to regain support from the non-college-educated independents who fled during the Trump years, having a champion for fighting corporate capture and stupid Middle East entanglements is an important value-add when it comes to policymaking and rebuilding the party brand.

The case for Thomas Massie is obvious (he’s a Trump critic in a red state), and I want to include him specifically because of the primary coming up next Tuesday. In March, Trump endorsed Massie’s Republican challenger, Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL turned MAGA NPC who lets AI write his social media posts. There’s a lot for me not to like about Massie policywise. He’s been bragging on the trail about agreeing with Trump 90 percent of the time and the campaign took a particularly icky turn this week when a pro-Massie PAC began running a noxious anti-gay, antisemitic ad claiming Gallrein was part of the “LGBTQ Mafia.” As a caporegime of note in said mafia, let me assure you that Eddie is not among our number. But for all Massie’s faults, he’s done two things that are meaningful: 1) Be the first Republican to stand up to Trump directly and then take him head-on in front of the voters rather than tuck tail and retire. 2) Demonstrate the way in which anti-establishment populists can be productive and actually get meaningful results in a divided Congress.

As for Matt Mahan, this probably merits a full article, but I’ll sum it up like this: In the recent CNN debate, the top Democrats besides Mahan summarized Gov. Gavin Newsom’s tenure positively. And whatever you think about Gavin as a politician, the idea that California needs a status quo governor is madness. California is one of the most expensive states to live in and struggles to provide quality services in exchange for the highest tax bill in the country. California has the highest gas tax in the nation and is one of the top-spending states on infrastructure—to the result of a C- infrastructure grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Just take as the prime example the stalled and scaled-back high-speed rail project now entering its eighteenth year of construction (I now hear it might be ready by 2041; hopefully the AI overlords or a Trumpian nuclear bomb won’t have killed us by then). Nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in California. There’s more YIMBY-NIMBY discourse about whether and how to build housing than actual building of houses. L.A. taxes apartment buildings like mansions. Unsurprisingly, Californians continue to flee to more affordable red states, where it is significantly easier, cheaper, and quicker to build housing. Mahan’s critique of California’s “failing status quo” is simple, to-the-point, and meets voters where they are. To add insult to injury, Texas is even beating California in green energy production. Mahan has a track record of good governance during his tenure as mayor of San Jose, where he has successfully dealt with the top issues plaguing the state by being willing to buck the party pooh-bahs, innovate, and experiment.

If you are skeptical of the Mahan model, I’d point you to what Daniel Lurie has done in San Francisco. He’s nobody’s idea of a populist but he has demonstrated the value of having an independent-minded fighter who is not tied down by entrenched interests. The city has seen real progress, and with a 74 percent approval rating, he might just be the most popular mayor in America. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two buzziest Democratic mayors right now are disrupters who have come from different wings of the party and haven’t been afraid to anger the powers that be.

Again, there are some obvious limits to how I’ve framed this. There will be bad outsiders and good institutionalists. There will be ideological disagreements with gaps that are not bridgeable. Platner and Mahan are not going to get along on Big Tech regulation. Moulton and Massie have starkly differing views about America’s role in the world and the size of the federal safety net. Each of these guys will piss me off at times. I caught Platner doing some light China apologia the other day. Mahan seems to have enough juice to take on the Democratic establishment but I doubt he would be aggressive enough for my taste on Trump. With Moulton the porridge will be closer to just right. YMMV.

But the pro-democracy movement can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting better results. By nature it is a group of institutionalists who want to protect our fragile republic. While that’s a good impulse, there are some limits to its appeal.

What we need are laboratories of democratic change to see what works both electorally and legislatively. It’s not all going to be pretty or exactly my cup of tea. But Massie and Khanna show it’s possible to shake things up and get positive results that disillusioned Americans can believe in. We need to have the stomach to give it a try.