☕️ BIG FAT POLYCRISIS ☙ Thursday, May 7, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A C&C Special Edition— the Democrats' catastrophic, terrible, no-good polycrisis and how there's no good way for them to escape the reckoning.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! And it’s a C&C special edition about the Democrat Polycrisis (by popular vote, even though we don’t run any kind of democracy here). Enjoy.

🌍🇺🇸 C&C SPECIAL EDITION 🇺🇸🌍

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If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington, D.C., you might hear a faint, high-pitched whining sound. That is not the sound of cicadas fluttering through the cherry blossoms. That is the sound of the Democrat Party realizing that the check has finally arrived, and their credit card was declined. Last month, the Washington Post broke a story that perfectly captures the Democrat Party’s woebegone state:

Ruh-roh.

For the last few years, despite occasional bouts of truth bursting through the costume’s seams, corporate media has generally assured everyone that the Democratic Party is in fine fettle. Sharp as a tack. It is, they say, like a double-decker bus packed with a coalition of highly educated coastal elites, powerful unions, a motivated gang of highly diverse grievance groups, plus legions of narcissistic white boomers who somehow still believe that NPR is the best way to learn what’s going on in the world.

But underneath the hood, the engine was smoking, the transmission was held together by duct tape, and the bus driver was staring blankly at the dashboard trying to remember what to do when it makes that weird noise. The passengers argued about whether the bus should be renamed to something more trans-inclusive, whether to start with a land acknowledgment, and whether that weird noise was actually a microaggression.

Now, the bus has completely stalled out, parked on the side of the highway, and the passengers are sitting inside waiting for someone else to come fix it.

🔥 Corporate media is desperately trying to conceal what historians and political scientists call a “polycrisis.” As defined by historian Adam Tooze (and the World Economic Forum, which considered it an opportunity instead of a problem), a polycrisis happens “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” It describes where the political ground is destabilized from so many different directions at once that policymakers ultimately become paralyzed, usually while forming another gold-star committee to consider funding a new study on the destabilization.

Tooze explained, “In the polycrisis, the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”

Throughout history, apparently successful political parties have been sidelined or even destroyed in what appears to be an instant. The UK Labour Party spent nearly two decades in the political wilderness after 1979, for instance. The Republicans were nearly destroyed twice in the 20th Century— one 20-year ‘wilderness’ stretch after the Great Depression, and another after Watergate (Time Magazine ran a cover story wondering whether the party could survive).

In both GOP cases, Republicans eventually recovered —once by nominating a war hero (Eisenhower), and then by finding a unifying leader with fresh, genuine, ideological clarity (Reagan). The Democrats currently have neither option available.

And as we’ll soon see, history’s better example might be the Whig Party, which precipitously collapsed in 1850, leaving not a rack behind.

But amid all those examples, the modern Democratic polycrisis stands out as uniquely spectacular. It’s experiencing the political equivalent of getting audited by the IRS on the same day your Pekinese chews through your internet cable and then your roof caves in right after you opened the insurance cancellation notice.

🔥 All the insiders know it. Trad-media is doing its level best to distract and obfuscate, but some recent headlines are flashing red: On April 9th, Bloomberg warned that “Michigan Shows Democrats’ Identity Crisis Up Close.” On March 15th, Axios reported that “Democrats face a post-Trump identity crisis for 2028.” On March 30th, the NDSMC Observer simply called it “The Democratic party’s identity crisis.”

“The Democratic Party has an aura of ineffectiveness,” NDSMC wrote. “This is an existential threat.” The main problem, according to the author, is that the party is now only about opposing Trump— which manifestly is not working. So, the author argued, “with that opposition, there needs to be an alternative message. Something that voters can get behind. An idea. A value. Not the lack of values. Not just anti-MAGA.”

Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, agreed. “You can’t win a presidential election on opposition alone,” he told Axios. Democrats (not MAGA) are fractured. “Democrats are deeply divided over what they’d do if they returned to power,” Axios said. They intend to run against Trump in the 2026 midterms, but realize that won’t work in 2028, when Trump is terming out.

Democrats must “build a message predicated on values rather than reactions,” the NDSMC author fretted, “lest they doom themselves to a future of perpetual minority status, forever living in the shadow of the MAGA right.” But what screamed from the pages was that the author had no suggestions for a message. Not one.

The reason he didn’t is the same reason the Democrats cannot fix this problem. It’s a structural problem broken beyond repair.

Identity crises are the worst. A person or group questioning their very identity is a sinkhole of potential disaster. It’s like the Democrat Party is bored with being a stay-at-home dad named Benjamin, and yearns to move to Las Vegas, change its name to Mercedes, get that special surgery, and become a stripper.

It would be bad enough if identity were the only crisis Democrats were facing. Let’s dissect the anatomy of this rapidly approaching fast-motion disaster.

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A polycrisis isn’t just a regular old run of bad luck. It is a structural failure. In any normal political cycle, a party could lose an election, suffer a fundraising dip, or deal with pushback against an unpopular leader. Or even all three. Those problems are manageable. You just replace the leader, change the messaging, and pretend you never actually supported the things you supported yesterday.

But in a polycrisis, the mechanisms for fixing the problems also break. The disease and the cure become indistinguishable. That’s what Democrats face. They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.

Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half.

When a political party has no articulable platform besides “we are not the other guy,” a polycrisis is not just possible. It becomes mandatory.

Part II: The Crises Unfold - Coalition Defections and the Single-Issue Trap

Traditionally, the Democrat Party has billed itself as the champion of the working man and minorities. Today, it is increasingly the party of the wealthy, credentialed, and highly educated. This is a big image problem when your main message is “eat the rich.” Their hypocrisy is being noticed— inside the tent.

For example, on April 6th, far-left Jacobin Magazine ran a story headlined, “Democrats Are Facing a Moment of Reckoning.” It explained:

Uh-oh! Fracture!

The 2024 election exposed the fracture for all to see. Kamala Harris won 80% of the Black vote— solid, but a massive 10-point drop from Joe Biden’s 90% in 2020. President Trump secured 20% of the Black vote, the highest level of support from that demographic since George W. Bush in 2000. The shift was even more extreme among Hispanic voters, where Trump narrowed the gap to a mere 3 points, as compared to Biden’s 25-point margin four years earlier.

The shift among young men is particularly stark. Men under 50 split evenly (49% to 48%) between Trump and Harris, erasing a 10-point Democrat advantage from 2020.

Instead of addressing these defecting voters’ concerns, factions within the Democrat party are doubling down on purity tests, which I’ve previously labeled as the “purity spiral.” In Michigan, for instance, progressive Democrats punished the Harris campaign over the administration’s handling of Gaza, proving that for some factions, “wallowing in the illusion of purity” was more important than building a winning coalition. (That’s from last month’s Detroit News.)

The Detroit News wrung its bony hands over the fruits of the state’s recent Democrat primary nomination results, which produced far-left candidates whose views “raise serious questions about their electability.”

Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.

The Gerontocracy

While the Democrat base is fracturing, while fresh, bold ideas are needed to hold it together, the leadership is calcifying. The halls of Congress increasingly resemble a retirement home with excellent benefits combined with a surprising amount of insider trading that is best characterized as estate planning. As of early 2026, 24 members of Congress are 80 or older, over half are running for re-election, and the vast majority are Democrats. In the Senate, the median age of Democrats is 66, significantly older than their Republican counterparts.

When a reporter asked Representative Maxine “Auntie” Waters, 88, why she continues to serve, she replied, “My work is not finished, and I don’t know if it will ever be finished.” This creates a darkly comedic juxtaposition: a party ostensibly championing the future, yet visibly clinging to the past, with internal demands for “generational change” met with the political equivalent of “not yet, dearie.”

Maxine Waters has now served in Congress longer than most of her constituents have been alive. At some point, “public servant” becomes “geological feature.”

An Increasingly Anxious Base

Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.

Progressivism is literally driving them insane.

According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.

On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.

In their noble quest to bear the weight of the world’s injustices, modern progressives have stumbled into a perpetual state of existential angst. While a conservative is happily eating a hot dog and thinking about tonight’s MMA matchup, the liberal is meticulously fact-checking the organic status of their kale, worrying about whether their lawnmower’s carbon footprint is perpetuating the patriarchy, and wondering if they are using this week’s proper pronouns.

A political base running on a steady diet of SSRIs and catastrophic thinking is highly susceptible to burnout. It becomes increasingly difficult to knock on doors for candidates when you are simultaneously convinced that the planet has only six months to live and your neighbor’s F-250 is a hate crime.

The Laundromat is Closed

Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”

The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.

Lawfare Blowback: The Raid on Senator Lucas

For years, Democrats cheered more enthusiastically than a high-school squad at tryouts while prosecutors launched unprecedented legal attacks against Donald J. Trump. Now, the bill for all that norm-destruction is coming due. Yesterday, for example, CNN reported, “FBI searches business, other locations associated with Democratic Virginia state senator.”

Let’s back up for a second. Last year, Democrats shook their fists after Pam Bondi fired most of the DOJ’s Washington D.C.-based ethics “oversight group.” Democrats claimed it dismantled “ethics,” but what it really did was unshackle local U.S. attorneys to pursue political investigations in their districts without the D.C. office shutting them down.

What is being called “a shocking escalation” unfolded yesterday, when the FBI raided the Portsmouth office of Virginia State Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas. Lucas, 82, another geriatric Democrat ‘serving’ for 34 years, was targeted in a “major corruption investigation.” Agents also raided a cannabis dispensary she co-owns. 🙄

What makes this extraordinary —and to Democrats, sinister— is that Lucas was the lead architect of Virginia’s Democrat-backed redistricting push— the map that Democrats were counting on to win up to four additional congressional seats. The person who drew the maps to save the House is now under federal investigation. (This also exemplifies Democrats’ gerontocracy problem: at 82, after 34 years in office, Lucas had apparently accumulated enough power, real estate, and cannabis dispensaries to attract the FBI’s attention. This is what a ‘long and distinguished career in public service’ looks like in the modern Democrat Party.)

The weaponization of the justice system has turned out to be a double-edged sword, and currently, Democrats are holding that sword by the blade end.

As I reported yesterday, in Georgia, the DOJ has issued a sweeping grand jury subpoena demanding the personal information of 3,000 Fulton County election workers from 2020. Yesterday, a federal judge just shut down Fulton’s request to get its ballots back in a blockbuster 68-page order. NBC reported, “Judge says Justice Department can keep the 2020 election ballots the FBI seized from Fulton County.”

🔥 In November, several of Gavin Newsom’s political allies were indicted for corruption. Capitol Weekly, November 12th:

Also indicted were Greg Campbell, an influential Democrat ‘consultant’ (fixer), Sean McCluskie, former Chief of Staff to Xavier Becerra, and McCluskie’s spouse. Alexis Podesta, a former secretary at the California Housing Agency who currently runs her own consulting firm was included in the indictment, but unnamed, as an unindicted co-conspirator. Her attorney said she was not charged and is cooperating with investigators.

Campbell and McCluskie pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. Williamson, who refused to take a plea, has a criminal case and parallel ethics probe that remain pending. The available reporting strongly suggests this is bigger than just the named defendants, and is radiating outward through Newsom‑world and the broader Sacramento ecosystem.

The Collapse of Trad-Media

An entirely separate problem for Democrats is the collapse of the legacy media infrastructure that has for decades carried water for the progressive platform. Trust in mass media has hit a record low of 28 percent. Viewers are migrating to alternative media, mostly conservative or conservative-adjacent podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience.

Corporate media is shifting rightwards. Within the last six months or so, conservative billionaires Larry and David Ellison acquired Warner Brothers (which owns CNN), independent commentator Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief at CBS News, Jeff Bezos’ new head of the Washington Post fired 13 “climate reporters,” and the list goes on. Furthermore, as you well know, X (formerly Twitter) under Musk’s ownership allows uncensored conservative content.

The Guardian, yesterday:

The Democratic Party’s traditional megaphone is on the fritz. The batteries are running out. Which means they can no longer just scream “racist!” at their political problems and expect them to go away. They can no longer rely on corporate media to promote their narratives and psyops.

They are going to have to work harder to earn audience attention— but their problems are multiplied since they can’t enunciate clear policy positions anyway. They must feel like an aggressive drunk who dominated the barroom conversation through brute force until new management made him take it outside. Now nobody listens, and everybody feels better. And it’s much quieter inside.

Part III: The Whig Party’s Warning from 1850

To understand where this polycrisis is heading, we can look back to the 1850s and the collapse of the American Whig Party. The parallels to today’s Democratic Party are almost uncomfortably precise. It’s kind of astonishing.

The Whigs were founded in the 1830s as a coalition united primarily by one thing: opposition to Andrew Jackson. Ironically, they sneeringly called him —wait for it— “King Andrew.” You can’t make this kind of thing up. In the first historical parallel with today’s Democrats, the Whigs were a party defined entirely by what and who they were against.

Like modern Democrats, the Whigs were a coalition party. Because their fragile coalition included Northern industrialists and Southern planters, the Whigs needed to avoid naming specific policy platforms, which would expose their internal contradictions and anger one side or the other. In 1852, desperate to keep the coalition together, they nominated General Winfield Scott. Scott was 66 (ancient for the era), famously pompous, and nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.”

Scott was also so physically enormous —weighing in at over 300 pounds— that he could not mount a horse without a stepladder and significant, um, assistance. Today, that would be like being unable to fit into a normal-sized car without a giant shoehorn.

The parallel to Joe Biden —an aging, physically declining figure nominated purely because the coalition couldn’t agree on anyone else— is spectacular. Scott’s inability to get on a horse is the 19th-century equivalent of Biden’s inability to walk a straight line across a stage without wandering off to shake hands with a potted plant or falling over a sandbag.

The Whigs’ fatal flaw was that they were a national party in an era when the central question of American politics —slavery— was inherently sectional. As long as slavery could be kept off the agenda, the Whigs’ coalition held. The moment it couldn’t, the party fractured and died. And a brand-new political party flowered into life (the Republicans).

Like the Whigs, today’s Democrat Party faces a similar irreconcilable fracture line. Not just one. Several of them. Immigration, police funding, and trans “rights” are all solid examples. All of them are potentially slavery questions for the loose Democrat coalition. If the DNC takes a strong position on any of those issues, it will forever fracture the coalition. That’s why they can’t commit.

Take immigration, for example. The progressive wing views open borders and amnesty as a moral imperative rooted in anti-racism. But Democrats’ working-class wing —especially unions, black, and hispanic voters, who are currently all defecting to the GOP— views unrestricted immigration as direct economic competition that drives down wages and overwhelms local resources.

The immigration question cleaves the coalition along lines that cannot be papered over with vague language about “comprehensive reform.” Every time the party tries to stake out a middle position, it simultaneously enrages multiple factions.

Progressives accuse leadership of fascism; the working class accuses leadership of abandonment.

The Whigs were destroyed not by a single catastrophic defeat, but by a slow accumulation of contradictions that ultimately made the coalition mathematically impossible to maintain. Then, snap. That is precisely the dynamic of a polycrisis, and it is precisely what the Democrats are facing now.

Part IV: Tipping Points and the Hegelian Synthesis

In complex systems theory, a polycrisis does not resolve itself gradually. It builds pressure until it reaches a tipping point— a threshold where a final small change —the proverbial camel’s straw— triggers an abrupt, potentially irreversible transformation or collapse.

For the Democratic Party, the 2026 midterms represent that tipping point. They face a brutal structural map, needing four seats to retake the Senate. Midcycle redistricting, wildly exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision striking down minority-majority districts, has scrambled the House battlefield more thoroughly than eggs on a Waffle House grill.

But the most profound implication of where the polycrisis is going, and what it will make politically possible, can best be understood through the Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

The thesis is the current, chaotic, decentralized election system with late counting, mail-in ballots, harvesting, permissive voter rolls, and weak ID requirements. Democrats’ viability depends on that system, and they will fight to the political death to preserve it.

The Hegelian antithesis is the current crisis— the ongoing federal investigations in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere, combined with aggressive crackdowns on non-citizen voting and the stalled SAVE America Act, which would mandate ID, citizenship, and strict voter purges.

If the DOJ’s investigations produce credible convictions of election workers or political figures, it will shatter whatever remaining trust exists in the system. The synthesis is the solution that comes next, having been made politically possible by the thesis/antithesis dynamic. In this case, it will probably take the shape of a comprehensive federal elections bill. Maybe the SAVE Act. Maybe something bigger.

For decades, Republicans have called for uniform federal elections standards— mandatory voter ID, paper ballot backups, strict chain-of-custody rules, and aggressive enforcement against non-citizen voting. Democrats have blocked these measures, usually by claiming that requiring an ID to vote is racist, a post-millennial form of Jim Crow— even though everyone needs an ID to buy Sudafed at CVS, cash a check, or go to a concert.

But if elections officials are convicted of election crimes, the political cost of obstructing reform will become prohibitive, and long-deadlocked change will suddenly become politically possible. The Democrats wouldn’t need to believe the convictions were legitimate. They would simply have to recognize that the perception of crisis was existential to their electoral viability. It would be like finally agreeing to wear a seatbelt because the airbag broke.

Supporting a federal elections bill becomes their only way to say, “We fixed the problem,” as opposed to defending the obviously broken status quo. As Democrats scramble to plug the holes in the hull, they may soon find that the only way to save the ship is to agree to a new set of rules written by the people they spent the last decade trying to destroy.

If a strong elections bill is passed —whether the SAVE Act or something else— Democrats may save themselves, but will enter their own 20-year wilderness period while they remake themselves into a party that can maintain a coherent message. Or it may be too late, and the longest-surviving political party in American history may be buried next to the Whigs.

I’ve only named some of the crises facing Democrats. There are more, like the 2030 Census, which most analysts predict will shift control of Congress and the electoral college back toward the GOP.

The Democratic polycrisis is not just a run of bad luck. It is the systemic collapse of a political coalition, a fundraising apparatus, an ideological project, and an institutional support network, all happening at the exact same time. The GOP could still lose its advantage by somehow snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as it has a bad habit of doing, but the game is now theirs to lose.

The Democrats aren’t just losing the game; they are losing the whole stadium.

Have a terrific Thursday! Sprint back here tomorrow morning, for your regular-style roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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