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Letter to a Coalition

Purity tests and circular firing squads are not a way to achieve political goals.

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My fellow brothers and compatriots of the vast right-wing conspiracy, 

The world we inhabit today is not the one that shaped our parents’ politics. Once upon a time, the incentives for what a man said and what that speech did for him were roughly aligned. Respectable opinion was shaped in a handful of newspapers, cable networks, and journals that rewarded virtue signaling with social status. If you played the game right, spoke in the right tones, and condemned the right heresies, you could climb within that structure. 

That world is gone. The information sphere has been democratized and weaponized. Algorithms now decide what matters. Moral outrage and emotional intensity are the currencies of attention. The megaphone belongs to whoever can shout the longest without getting banned. The result is a total reordering of political communication. 

The discourse will never go back. No amount of strongly worded condemnations, National Review editorials, or digital handwringing will restore the old gatekeepers. The genie is out and he is enjoying his freedom. 

For too long, the right mistook refinement for strength. We thought movements were won through white papers, purity tests, and correct rhetoric. That era is over. Principles matter, but not when they become suicide notes. Political movements are living organisms. They require flexibility, tolerance of imperfection, and an understanding that coalition beats consensus. We do not have to like everyone in the tent. We only have to recognize that survival depends on staying inside it together, even with that one guy who always says the wrong thing on Twitter. 

Yes, chastise each other with reason. Dispute premises charitably. Maintain your standards of truth. But understand this: Moral fastidiousness is not a strategy. A movement obsessed with its own etiquette cannot govern, cannot defend itself, and cannot inspire.

Look at the broad coalition that ultimately coalesced around Mamdani and his kind. At its core, you had an ideological left that speaks in the language of socialism, class conflict, redistribution, and intersectional grievance. Yet orbiting it are billionaires, legacy institutions, media conglomerates, and suburban moderates who would once have recoiled at the rhetoric. 

They fell in line. Not because they agree with every plank, but because they understand the direction of power. They sense that history bends toward those who seize momentum, not those who write the best rebuttals. The left in America today is no longer the polite liberalism of the 1990s. It is capital-L Left, a fusion of cultural command, institutional discipline, and the will to use both that is so unique. The left’s uniform reverence for identity politics gives it what the right lacks: a shared moral grammar, however false, through which every institution can speak with one voice.  

The right must evolve from complaint to coordination, from instinct to institution. We cannot rely on being correct in theory while losing in practice. If we are to survive this new information epoch, we must learn the lesson our opponents already mastered: that politics is downstream from coalition, and coalition is downstream from discipline. 

This means fewer purity purges, fewer circular firing squads, fewer essays about what someone said wrong on a podcast. It means building real infrastructure, media that educates, capital that protects, communities that cooperate, and a moral core that can hold under pressure. The new world rewards those who can integrate chaos into strategy, those who can speak fluently across tribes, tolerate imperfection, and keep their eyes fixed on the horizon. 

So yes, keep your principles. Keep your conscience. Keep your taste. But remember Franklin’s warning: we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. The age of genteel dissent is over. The age of reality has begun. 

Know what time it is. And act accordingly.

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