This week was supposed to be about the season.
This week was supposed to be about the season.
We expected two more editions of On The Rampage this year when it comes to talking about the Rams. We expected nothing less than writing our way into Super Bowl week. Instead, the season is over and so is the illusion that the most dangerous problem facing American politics is partisan disagreement.
It isn’t.
The real crisis is that political labels no longer mean what they claim to mean and Democrats are so catastrophically bad at messaging that they allow the GOP to completely redefine reality without resistance.
So On The Rampage shifts back to the world we actually live in.
Because what is happening right now is not ideological conflict.
It is ideological identity theft.
Let’s be very precise.
The people enabling the current federal enforcement environment — especially what is now being carried out by ICE — are not Democrats. They are Republicans. They are Republican voters. They are Republican lawmakers. They are Republican governors and attorneys general who actively support and defend this posture of federal power.
And yet, those same voters overwhelmingly describe themselves as libertarians, constitutionalists, and conservatives.
By definition, none of those labels fit.
Not even close.
Start with the most obvious contradiction.
A libertarian by definition believes in individual liberty, minimal government, and the non-aggression principle. A libertarian believes the state exists to protect against force, theft, and fraud and not to operate as an expansive domestic enforcement apparatus empowered to stop vehicles indiscriminately, enter communities aggressively, detain people without meaningful due process protections, and conduct large-scale operations that resemble occupation-style policing.
A libertarian is structurally opposed to that kind of government power.
If you support federal agents stopping cars without individualized suspicion, conducting raids without transparent judicial accountability, and detaining people in sweeping operations simply because the federal government claims authority to do so, you are not a libertarian.
You may vote Republican.
But you are not a libertarian.
The entire philosophical foundation of libertarianism is self-ownership and resistance to coercive state power.
ICE’s current posture is coercive state power.
There is no intellectual gymnastics that can reconcile the two.
Now look at the so-called constitutionalists.
A constitutionalist, by definition, believes government authority is limited by the Constitution, that no branch may dominate the others, that executive power must remain constrained, and that the rule of law is supreme over political loyalty.
That means separation of powers.
That means judicial oversight.
That means due process.
That means limits on executive enforcement discretion.
When voters justify or ignore aggressive federal enforcement tactics, support expansive presidential authority, excuse the bypassing of congressional oversight, and defend the normalization of executive action that pushes directly against constitutional guardrails, they are not practicing constitutionalism.
They are practicing selective loyalty.
If constitutional limits only matter when the other party holds power, then constitutionalism is not a principle. It is a campaign slogan.
And that is exactly how it is being used today.
The same applies to the conservative label.
Traditional conservatism is about institutional stability, fiscal restraint, gradual change, skepticism of concentrated power, and a deep distrust of radical governmental expansion.
This administration has added massive spending to an already ballooning national debt approaching forty trillion dollars. The modern Republican governing coalition is not a party of fiscal restraint, and it has not been for years.
It is a party that openly embraces deficit expansion when politically convenient and weaponizes debt panic only when it serves electoral messaging.
There is nothing conservative about that.
There is nothing conservative about empowering federal enforcement agencies while simultaneously claiming to distrust the federal government.
There is nothing conservative about attacking institutional legitimacy while demanding unconditional loyalty to executive authority.
Again — the label does not match the behavior.
And this is the central point Democrats are failing to communicate.
Not that Republicans are mean.
Not that Republicans are hypocritical.
Not that Republicans are dangerous.
But that the ideological identities Republican voters claim to hold are incompatible with the policies they actively support.
The GOP voter base is built around people who describe themselves as libertarians, constitutionalists, and conservatives and they are the hardcore MAGA heads and Right Winged voting machine — and then vote for the most aggressive expansions of federal power, executive discretion, and enforcement authority in modern domestic policy.
That is the contradiction.
And it is devastatingly easy to explain.
But Democrats do not explain it.
They complain.
They react.
They posture.
They catastrophize.
They go on television and describe how upset they are.
They do not prosecute the argument.
They overstate the obvious all of the time.
Meanwhile, conservative media does something very different.
They repeat.
They simplify.
They label.
They assign villains.
They feed a closed narrative loop that flows from national broadcast networks directly into local radio, social platforms, and everyday conversation.
Thursday Night, I watched 20 minutes of the 7PM EST Fox News segment.
I realize yet again that is why someone in a random town in South Jersey suddenly has a fully formed opinion about a mayor in Minneapolis referring to him as a lunatic — despite having no organic connection to that city, that office, or that political ecosystem.
Where did they get that term from? They get it from the broadcasters on Fox News and the POTUS may say it too and then his people simply repeat it.
That is not civic engagement.
That is message infrastructure.
And Democrats have none.
Which is why this ideological fraud survives unchallenged.
Here is the simplest version of the case Democrats should be making — and refuse to make.
If you believe in minimal government, you cannot support sweeping domestic enforcement operations that normalize federal intrusion into daily civilian life.
If you believe in constitutional government, you cannot excuse executive behavior that weakens oversight, concentrates power, and treats legal limits as obstacles rather than obligations.
If you believe in conservative fiscal discipline, you cannot ignore massive deficit expansion and structural debt accumulation simply because your party controls the machinery.
This is not left-wing theory.
It is definitional. It is literally in the dictionary, pretty much verbatim, with some paraphrasing from memory.
And that is exactly why it is so politically powerful — if anyone were competent enough to use it.
Instead, the Democratic Party continues to miss the most effective argument available to them: that the modern GOP coalition is not made up of conservatives, libertarians, or constitutionalists who have changed policy preferences.
It is made up of voters who continue to use those labels while abandoning the principles that once defined them.
They should honestly be able to find ways, if they were a powerful party, to pull in those voters with ease.
The tragedy is not that Republicans are good at media.
The tragedy is that Democrats allow the GOP to redefine political identity itself without resistance.
I told you the problem and aside from Steve Schmidt, I am never wrong about Political Science. This is not hard. The only people that do not get it are the Democrats.
I also make no bones about the fact that, when the far right watched or listened to outlets like NPR and listened to Air America shows in the 1990s, they effectively said, “Forget the individual shows they use to get their message across — let’s build an entire broadcasting system our way that will crush that media reach.” Hence the arrival of Sinclair Broadcast Group and similar networks.
I have said it many times, both in writing and on the radio, that Democrats need an equivalent media infrastructure to match GOP messaging. The GOP is light-years ahead because of it.
Democrats do not listen to me. I have written to everyone about this, and it gets ignored every time.
Regardless and again, calling yourself a libertarian while supporting expansive federal enforcement power is not a philosophical evolution.
It is a contradiction.
Calling yourself a constitutionalist while supporting executive dominance over legal restraint is not realism.
It is abandonment.
Calling yourself a conservative while celebrating institutional demolition and fiscal recklessness is not modernization.
It is misrepresentation.
These voters were not converted.
They were rebranded and the irony is that is selective how its thought about and its not real.
And until Democrats stop whining about how unfair the messaging environment is and start exposing the ideological fraud at the center of it, nothing changes.
Not because the argument is hard.
But because no one on their side is willing to make it.
And this is where the failure stops being ideological and becomes purely political.
Because if there are any real libertarians left in this country —
if there are any actual constitutionalists who still believe in limits on power —
and if there are any genuine conservatives who still care about institutional stability and fiscal discipline —
then those voters should be reachable.
Not theoretically.
Electorally.
Right now.
By Democrats.
And the fact that they are not being reached is not because the voters are unreachable. It is because the Democratic Party is breathtakingly bad at politics.
This is the part no one inside Democratic leadership seems capable of understanding.
The GOP is holding together a coalition that is internally contradictory. It is stitched together by cultural grievance and media reinforcement. Not by philosophical coherence. That creates a rare opening. When a political coalition violates its own stated principles, the opposing party does not need to invent a new ideology to compete.
It only needs to enforce the old definitions.
If libertarianism still means opposition to expansive government power, then Democrats should be relentlessly framing ICE-style domestic enforcement as the very thing libertarians claim to oppose and directly to them on Fox or anywhere else besides NPR and MSNBC (so to speak).
If constitutionalism still means limits on executive authority and strict adherence to legal constraint, then Democrats should be forcing every Republican candidate and voter to explain why they tolerate and even celebrate executive behavior that weakens oversight and bypasses institutional guardrails.
If conservatism still means fiscal restraint, skepticism of centralized authority, and institutional continuity, then Democrats should be hammering the reality of runaway spending, structural debt growth, and administrative power expansion every single day.
This is not persuasion through ideology.
This is persuasion through internal contradiction.
And it works.
Or at least, it would if Democrats were capable of prosecuting an argument instead of performing outrage.
Here is the political truth Democrats refuse to face.
They do not need to convert MAGA voters.
They do not need to defeat cultural identity.
They need to fracture a coalition whose self-image no longer aligns with its behavior.
That fracture point already exists.
It is sitting inside the labels people still use to describe themselves.
Libertarian.
Constitutionalist.
Conservative.
Those identities still matter to millions of voters.
What Democrats fail to do is show those voters calmly, repeatedly, and relentlessly that their current voting behavior no longer (and even never did) reflects those identities.
Instead, Democrats argue as if everyone in the GOP coalition is the same.
They treat ideological dissidents and cultural hardliners as a single mass.
They collapse all Republicans into one moral category.
Most of all, they think people ‘will get it’ in the end when I am like when? They just lost three branches of the Government and yet they still believe people will get it.
That is not moral clarity. It is almost funny how easy this is, and yet, once again, Democrats need to do the work and they do not want to do the work.
Gavin Newsom trolling Trump, I’m sorry, is doing the work. It clearly gets under Trump’s skin. Use it. Why it isn’t done more often is unreal.
I am also not saying that acting this way is right. It isn’t. It is a complete waste of time, and it cuts into real governing. However, this is where we are, and Democrats allowed it to happen. They allowed it.
Women being pulled over and then later dropped off by the police chief is the Democrats’ fault. If they had kept even one branch — one tiny, teeny branch — of the U.S. government, this would not be happening today.
It is simple cause and effect. This is their fault.
That is political malpractice.
If even a modest share of Republican voters genuinely believe in civil liberties, restrained federal power, and constitutional process, then Democrats should be building targeted, disciplined messaging designed specifically to pull those voters out of the GOP coalition.
Not with lectures.
With definitions.
With contrasts.
With receipts.
With a simple, disciplined frame:
If you are a libertarian, why are you voting for the expansion of domestic federal enforcement power?
If you are a constitutionalist, why are you voting for executive behavior that weakens legal constraint and oversight?
If you are a conservative, why are you voting for fiscal expansion and institutional destabilization?
That is the conversation Democrats refuse to start.
Because it requires political competence.
It requires message discipline.
It requires abandoning the comfort of outrage culture in favor of strategic persuasion.
Democrats are not losing because their values are unpopular.
They are losing because they do not understand how to translate contradiction into political leverage.
The GOP understands this.
They built an entire media ecosystem to maintain emotional loyalty even when policy collapses into incoherence.
Democrats built panels.
They built podcasts.
They built reactive messaging.
They built complaint culture.
They did not build an argument pipeline.
So if there are real libertarians left, Democrats are failing them.
If there are real constitutionalists left, Democrats are ignoring them.
If there are real conservatives left, Democrats are surrendering them.
Not because the voters are unreachable.
But because the party that should be competing for them does not know how to compete at all.
The most painful part is that this is not a hard political problem.
It is an easy one.
The contradictions are already visible.
The definitions are already clear.
The evidence is already public.
The only thing missing is a party capable of making the case and making it over and over again until voters finally hear what their own political labels are supposed to mean.
The problem is that, overall, Democrats lump what I say into the idea that they are liars which I understand. It is a form of dishonesty to say you support liberation while laughing about ICE raids. I get that but lets also be real, we have a president who lies about virtually everything he says.
Now what? Lies did not seem to affect voters last year. Move on. Figure it out. Start calling people out for what they are in real life and do it well. It is about more than lying. They do not care about people that lie.