Progressive Politics

Encapsulating people in these little ideological bubbles and walling them off from one another with technological barriers in order to more cheaply extract labor from them is more-or-less the thesis of "The Network State", the guiding doctrine behind the modern Trump administration.

You need your Red Team and your Blue Team to be fully alienated from one another, insisting that each side is this horrifying inhuman entity incapable of reconciling with the other. And then you can have the Gray Team - the Objectivist neutral rent-seeking arbiters - moving between them as overseers and police agents, to extract surplus and compel obedience by implicitly setting the rules by which the Reds and the Blues live.

MAGA exists as this hyperactive immune system, intended to polarize a segment of the population against the whole. And on the flip side, you have these ultra-orthodox neoliberals doing the same thing but from a "Woke" side of the fence. They're both fiercely capitalist. They're both fiercely identitarian. And they're both obsessed with compelling obedience from the top down - whether its crushing campus student protests for being antisemitic or purging RINOs from state and local governments or consolidating media markets into mega-corporate behemoths like Sinclair and Clear Channel and the Gates/Bezos monolith.

You're not going to get people to leave the MAGA Cult because they're not going to hear you. They're segregated and pumped full of anxiety such that they don't dare leave their enclosures. At the same time, you're being walled in yourself. You're told not to set foot inside a church or show up at a rival political rally or otherwise have any social contact with anyone in a Red Hat (except to participate in some kind of retaliatory violence). Don't talk to your neighbors if you see them showing the wrong kind of swag. And always be wearing your own colors, so people can instantly identify which team you're on in public.

Its an ugly state of affairs.