Newton's Third Law of Politics

 

"Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first." - Sir Isaac Newton

Politics is not immune to physics, as much as it pains me to admit as a former liberal arts major.  Specifically, politics is just as beholden to Newton's Third Law of Motion, as quoted above, as is any planetoid drifting through the zero-G void of space.  

And this is why America is seeing a surge of renewed enthusiasm for both progressivism and socialism.

The natural predator of oligarchic fascism is socialism.  They are the matter-antimatter dynamic of political extremes.  One will always oppose the other, and when the two come into conflict, explosions can result, as seen in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939.  The same dynamic is now occurring in the United States of America, as the predatory Trump regime exhibits aspects of both predatory capitalism and fascism. As Americans face rising food prices, rising fuel costs, and rising utility rates while the president and his friends and family have increased their wealth exponentially, the natural reflex is to reject the seemingly corrupt prevailing econo-political system in favor of something radically different. Hence, the sudden leftward lurch in the electorate.

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"I am not a witch." - Christine O'Donnell

Back during the 2010 election cycle, there was an amusing story about a right-wing Tea Party candidate running to fill the vacant Delaware Senate seat left by Joe Biden.  The candidate's name was Christine O'Donnell. O'Donnell made a name for herself in the years leading up to her political bid by founding a conservative Catholic organization called The Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), a group that advocated for sexual abstinence, amongst other virtue-based positions.  Despite having more than a little baggage concerning financial troubles and misrepresenting aspects of her education, O'Donnell would beat out establishment Republican Congressman and former Delaware Governor Mike Castle, largely with the help of write-in ballots submitted by Tea Party activists.  Needless to say, her upset victory enraged the establishment GOP.

O’Donnell ultimately lost the Delaware Senate race to Democrat Chris Coons, but it wasn’t just the usual campaign stumbles that doomed her; it was also a now‑infamous ad insisting, “I am not a witch.” She recorded it after Bill Maher resurfaced an old clip from his show in which O’Donnell admitted to dabbling in witchcraft in her youth — a revelation that sent her conservative Christian base into a panic. The ad meant to calm them down instead became a national punchline, turning her campaign into late‑night comedy fodder and cementing her defeat.

When it was all said and done, O'Donnell would lose to Chris Coons by seventeen points.

Now, why do I bring this up?

When O'Donnell lost, many establishment Republicans ran to their favorite news outlets to twist the dagger in her back. They proclaimed that O'Donnell was a cautionary tale as to why nominating fringe ideologues was always a losing strategy, and why political "purity tests" were self-defeating. The winning strategy was always to trust the establishment vetting machine. The rest was ephemera. 

That was in 2010.

Just six years later, in 2016, Donald Trump, a former NYC Democrat and thoroughly non-establishment candidate for president, would seize control away from Republican establishment figures like Jeb Bush and go on to win first the nomination, and then the presidency. Even more startling, his victory would launch 'MAGA', the "Make America Great Again" political movement, a mutation of the 2010s Tea Party grassroots movement, and elect a sweeping, nationwide slate of candidates who made O'Donnell seem like a moderate by comparison, people such as Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Tommy Tuberville, amongst many others. 

So much for the purported wisdom that only establishment GOP centrists can win in a campaign against Democrats!

Why did this happen? While there were plenty of forces behind the GOP base's stunning rejection of its own establishment, the most important was this: Republican voters were exhausted by establishment rug‑pulls. For years, mainstream GOP candidates campaigned on the movement’s “purity” issues — limited government, Christian nationalism, hardline immigration enforcement — only to abandon those positions the moment they took office. One of the clearest examples was former Maryland governor Michael Steele, who used Rush Limbaugh’s show to rally conservative support for his bid to become Republican National Committee chairman, won the job, and then promptly went on national news to call Limbaugh’s rhetoric “hateful.” To the base, it felt like a slap in the face.

In other words, Newton's Third Law of Politics finally kicked in.  The Republican Party's leadership that had scoffed at the potential energy of populist motion for years finally felt the kinetic impact when their dodges no longer worked.

This exact scenario is now playing out with the Democrats.  

After years of promising to restructure the nation so that working families were finally prioritized over the rich and powerful — what many now call “the Epstein Class” — the Democratic Party instead chose to feed from the same corporate trough as the GOP. The result was the same old story: the rich grew richer, the poor grew poorer, and the party’s rhetoric about economic justice evaporated the moment governing began. To make matters worse, when confronted with the existential threat posed by the current Trump regime — where Americans are being gunned down in the street by masked ICE goons, where sexual predators are shielded while their victims are doxxed, and where the nation finds itself entangled in a conflict that seems to only serve the interests of a foreign power (Israel) — the Democratic leadership has behaved with all the coordination of the Keystone Cops. How could the base feel anything but “burn it all down” fury when Chuck Schumer treats a sternly worded letter as a meaningful rebuke to Trump’s abuses, or when Hakeem Jeffries allows his caucus to vote for unrestricted ICE funding and then goes on Jen Psaki’s show that same evening to complain about unrestricted ICE funding (something I witnessed with my own eyes!)? It’s absurdist theater at a moment of national crisis.

And that is why, in recent primaries, we’re not just seeing Democrats turn out enthusiastically; we’re seeing a progressive wave crash through the voting booths. The voters showing up aren’t looking for steady‑as‑she‑goes centrism; they’re looking for candidates who openly reject the establishment’s milquetoast, consultant‑approved politics. That’s the energy behind victories like Abdul El‑Sayed’s, Peggy Flanagan’s, and Luke Bronin’s races, where progressive contenders outpaced their establishment rivals by channeling the frustration simmering in the base. Much like Republican voters in 2016, Democratic voters have grown weary of the party’s contemporary "don't rock the boat" posture and are trying to rebuild something closer to the FDR‑era Democratic Party than the triangulated Clinton model.

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"Sybil was a warning: that a state whose economic progress depended on exploiting some of its citizens for the benefit of others was headed for trouble." - John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War

Now, what about this surge in popularity on the left for socialism? As I wrote earlier, it’s an entirely predictable manifestation of Newton’s Third Law of Politics. When a population watches as the rich get richer while the poor become poorer, they will eventually come to blame the prevailing economic system, which is to say capitalism, as the root of its national ills. That reflex — rightly or wrongly — will be to shift towards socialism. It’s the equal‑and‑opposite ideological recoil.

Needless to say, socialism doesn’t have to be the automatic fallback. There are other economic alternatives, including G.K. Chesterton’s social‑justice‑driven model of Distributism. Ironically, despite being the first economic theory to champion what we now call “shop local, buy local,” most people don’t even realize it exists. Why? Because Distributism never received the trillions of dollars’ worth of free advertising that capitalism and socialism absorbed during the Cold War.

And it’s precisely the legacy of that Cold War — its propaganda, its anxieties, its cultural imprint — that lies behind the age‑related split in the Democratic Party over the renewed popularity of socialism.

Millennials have no such memories. They were born after that pivotal period of global history, and because the Cold War ended not with a bang but a whimper, little classroom time is devoted to the confrontation between what diplomat Charles Bohlen once framed as the First and Second Worlds. If they have any sense of the nuclear brinksmanship of the era, it’s vague — a kind of faded data point rather than a lived terror, something I was startled to discover after a conversation with two otherwise bright millennials.

Instead, when millennials think about socialism, the frame is more likely to be the increased visibility of hybrid systems such as “Nordic Socialism,” models that blend market economies with expansive social safety nets. Their reference points are contemporary, not Cold War historical — and that difference in memory produces a difference in attitude.

It also doesn’t help that the terms “socialist” and “communist” are often used to confuse rather than clarify. Opponents of socialism are quick to deploy the “communist” label in the same fashion that Red Scare demagogues like Joseph McCarthy once wielded it — as a blunt instrument of denouncement. Socialists, meanwhile, insist that socialism and communism are distinct traditions with different goals and different historical trajectories.

The problem is that the taxonomy has never been clean. Marx and Engels themselves used the terms interchangeably, and the confusion persisted throughout the Cold War, when socialist and communist powers could never fully agree on what either term meant. That’s why the ideological landscape fractured into competing strains — Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism — each claiming to be the authentic interpretation of the same foundational texts.

It’s also why the Soviet Union, the world’s first self‑declared communist state, repeatedly intervened in other socialist regimes, sometimes with tanks, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and why it found itself in an openly antagonistic relationship with the world’s second communist state, Mao’s China. Even among governments that claimed the same ideological heritage, the definitions were contested, the alliances unstable, and the practical applications wildly divergent.

When it comes to “socialism” or “communism,” everything ultimately becomes a matter of interpretation. As a shortcut, political theorists often fall back on the simplified notion that socialism is the middle step between capitalism and communism. It isn’t strictly accurate, but it’s serviceable enough for broad discussion.

And it’s precisely this nebulosity — this elastic, ill‑defined taxonomy — that keeps the theory perpetually attractive to people dissatisfied with the prevailing economic or political order. For Millennials, especially, the vagueness becomes a feature rather than a bug: socialism can mean whatever alternative they need it to mean in a moment of frustration.

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"...The problem with capitalism was that it had left people too little freedom to manage their own lives. It had collaborated with empires that denied their inhabitants the right to choose their leaders. It had limited the efficiency of markets through protectionism, price-fixing, and recurring cycles of booms and busts. And of course—here Wilson agreed with Lenin—capitalism had failed to prevent war, the ultimate denial of freedom." - John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War

So, what does this all mean? If you want an early election forecast, I have none to offer. If you want a judgment about the efficacy of modern socialism versus capitalism, I also have nothing to offer. This essay isn't about any of the many thorny issues surrounding the populist-progressive surge on the Democrat left.  Rather, this is my explanation of why it happened. It was an entirely predictable response, particularly among young voters born into a post-Cold War world, to the abuses of the MAGA right, as well as the lethargy of the establishment Democrats during a time of perceived crisis.  

Again, I take no stance as to whether this leftward shift of the Democrat base will prove successful over the long term, but perhaps Millennials would be wise to recall John Lennon's warning that "if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." Be that as it may, the conditions that are triggering this recent infatuation with progressivism are not illusory.  America is witnessing an historic wealth gap, where it has now been reported that ten percent of the nation is responsible for sixty percent of purchases.  Housing is increasingly unaffordable, especially for first-time home buyers, and layoffs are distressingly common at the same time Wall Street profits are at an all-time high. America is witnessing a class struggle the likes of which hasn't been seen since the so-called "Gilded Age." 

While the nature of the reform can be debated, I believe we are well beyond any argument that structural reform of the system, both economic and political, is needed. As one progressive elected official said, "I am well aware that every upholder of privilege, every hired agent or beneficiary of the special interests...will denounce all this as 'socialism' or 'anarchy'—the same terms they used in the past in denouncing the movements to control the railways and to control public utilities. As a matter of fact, the propositions I make constitute neither anarchy nor socialism, but, on the contrary, a corrective to socialism and an antidote to anarchy."

Was that said by progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, perhaps Michigan's next senator?  Nope. It was said by Republican President Teddy Roosevelt over a century ago. Both national parties would be wise to take heed. As the rise of fringe political movements in both parties indicates with painful clarity, the American people are in distress; time for half-measures is long over. Now is the time for fundamental change, as Teddy Roosevelt dared to tackle during the Gilded Age. Failure to do so will only result in an ever-worsening cycle of "burn it all down" radicalism on both the right and left.

Be it "I am not a witch" conservatives, MAGA reactionaries, Democrat progressives, or socialists: they are all claxons declaring an emergency. The time to act is now, before the anarchy Roosevelt feared becomes an irreversible norm.

Every action has its reaction — and America’s pendulum is still swinging. It is now the job of both parties to ensure it doesn't break from going to extremes.

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