The Cringe Majority

2,310 words

George Hawley
The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization
Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2025

Since 2016, we have been perpetually on the brink of a fascist revolution. Or so the left likes to claim, as do many on the Alt Right, albeit for entirely different reasons. There seems to be at least some kernel of truth to this. Mainstream Republicans are at least finally talking about vengeance, even if they stumble on following through. Trump taking over DC due to crime signals that he and his successor won’t quail before another color revolution. Many College Republican, Young Republican, and TPUSA chapters have become our guys or adjacent. There is also anecdotal evidence piling up of Zoomers being either far-right or far-left with few political centrists. Our most striking victories are online, and especially on X, where race realism and even the Jewish Question have taken off despite shadow banning. And many people subjectively sense something akin to a revolutionary Weltgeist in the air.

So, is any of this backed up by hard data? Actually, yes. American favorability towards the Democrat party has precipitously crashed alongside Trump’s approval rating, thereby implying that, in addition to displeasure about the Epstein list and bombing Iran, at least some voters don’t see Trump as being right-wing enough. The Pew Research Center found that the rightward shift in Republican identification was primarily driven by Zoomers, even including female Zoomers. And the phenomenon isn’t limited to America either. For example, the AfD is now the most popular party in Germany at 26% followed by the center-right Union/EVP party at 24% according to an August 2025 survey.

Using poll data and focus groups, George Hawley in his book The Moderate Majority challenges the assumption that America is lurching towards the far-right. Hawley argues that while partisanship has certainly increased, it is in fact no indicator of right-wing radicalization: at least among ordinary Republican voters. This is because the Democrats have “progressed” from their liberal priors at 100 miles per hour, while the Republicans who share the same liberal priors have slowly plodded along at 10 mph. Reading between the lines, Hawley seems to be whispering to liberals to stop boiling the frog too fast with culture war absurdities like drag queen story hour (DQSH).

The well justified fury, fear, and disgust among the Republican base is because they are essentially 1990s liberals reacting to the liberalism of 2016–2024. Republican voters and pundits have certainly become more intense in defending their policies and party identification. But to assume that is because their favored policies and party have swung towards Mussolini is false. Objectively, they have in fact become slightly more liberal. Their radical partisanship is only because the subjective gap between them and the Democrats has become an insurmountable chasm because the Democrats were impatient in making John Lennon’s “Imagine” real. It didn’t help that they summoned forth entropic forces that they could not put down.

The most extreme example of Democrats causing a Republican backlash by progressing at 100 mph and then deriding the Republicans for not keeping up is LGBTQXYZ Plus or whatever the acronym is today. Many Republicans are now to the left of Obama’s 2008 opposition to marriage, or at least don’t consider gay marriage to be an important issue. But instead of celebrating that culture war victory, liberals are outraged that Republicans oppose child genital mutilation and DQSH.

On the issues most important to us, white identity politics and the Jewish Question, we seem to have lost ground. The number of white Republicans in an ANES (American National Election Studies) poll who answered “extremely important” or “very important” when asked “How important is being white to your identity” dropped from 33% in 2016 to 24% in 2020.[1] There was also a drop in the number who answered it was important for whites to work together to change laws that are unfair to whites and that it was likely that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead.[2] And despite hysterical claims that anti-Semitism is simmering away in the GOP, only one out of all the Republicans Hawley talked to in candid face to face conversation brought up the Jews—and that was a boomer who was puzzled and concerned by anti-Semitism.[3]

Is “the conventional narrative that today’s Republicans are all radicalized, reactionary ideologues” merely explainable as the left scaring the hoes? Optimism is cowardice, as Spengler said. But I think there are additional explanations. And I also think that taking Hawley’s analysis seriously can provide us with strategies to prevent the electorate from slouching towards gay race communism.

I began conducting independent polling through the Homeland Institute in the summer of 2023, and I can say that white Republicans identify much more strongly with their party than with their race. Part of this is perfectly understandable: it’s not taboo, and it did seem like the Democrats were riling up non-whites to attack whites, and it was the Democrats who were pressuring patriots of all races to take the vaccine and submit to COVID lockdowns. The people simply misidentified Jews with Democrats. And certain sectors on our side were disdainful of fighting COVID tyranny because it was tainted by kooky conspiracy theories and seemed to be a competitor with our issues, as if it were politics as usual like abortion or tax cuts. And it’s an understatement to say that a stolen election is kind of a big deal.

While the ANES polls cited by Hawley controlled for age, its unclear if the focus groups that he conducted did or to what extent, even if they drew upon a vast and varied audience. This is important because the rightward shift in the electorate is being driven by voters age 18–29. Furthermore, a large chunk of the Zoomers who voted in 2024 were not of voting age when the ANES polls were conducted and thus any political trends among them would have been mostly detectable through anecdotal evidence while being invisible to pollsters. Those formerly invisible citizens who were locked down for two years now have little hope of owning a home or finding dignified work. Freedom to act doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, electoral or otherwise.

Another issue that may have made radicalization difficult to track with traditional polling is that aside from generic social desirability bias, our ideas were usually accompanied with extreme OPSEC bordering on paranoia. Encrypted chats, VPNs, and multiple alibis were the norm, and to some extent continue to be the norm. A young voter who became radicalized wasn’t just going to tone down his power level in a poll. He wouldn’t even take a poll at all because Mossad might somehow use it to track him.

While Hawley’s analysis is a desperate plea to tone things down, it also provides some insight into how we can prevent a return to a slow boil and how to counter the slouch towards the left that occurred from 2016 through 2020, and probably continued to some extent through 2024.

Hawley is spot on when he says the average Republican has no coherent ideology. On one hand, this makes them vulnerable to controlled opposition hacks who promise them fantasies like a color-blind meritocracy. What voters believe often comes down to what their favorite cult of personality says, whether that’s Trump, Tucker, Charlie Kirk, or Ben Shapiro. The upside to this is that this is a game two people can play. Our pundits may not be astroturfed with millions of dollars, thousands of bots, or dozens of endorsements, but we are generally better looking, and having facts on our side makes it easy to humiliate our enemies with memes and snappy one-liners.

More importantly, we can still pressure mainstream pundits. Our guys can ratio them on X/Twitter, thereby humiliating them in front of their audience. To a lesser extent we can do the same to them in real life, most notably with Charlie Kirk because he has made public debate part of his brand. If mainstream pundits don’t adopt our talking points, they risk looking weak to their audience and thereby losing them. Since 2016, mainstream pundits associated with MAGA have only moved to the right, not the left. The Trump Derangement Crowd of “principled conservatives” didn’t and are now irrelevant. Their failure serves as a warning to others. This is the exact inverse of how the media only moved leftward since WWII. This is important because these pundits set the tone for what is acceptable discourse among the masses and what is good policy for politicians.

Next, Hawley divides Republicans into three categories: the politicians, the party apparatus, and the voters. But there should be two additional categories (or perhaps one because they overlap a lot): politically engaged voters, and volunteers/staffers. Most voters only show up to vote once every 2-4 years and do not obsessively follow the news or think deeply about politics, and thus the ones who do are a horse of a different color.

After engaged voters, there are those who become volunteers, staffers, and activists. They are essential to politicians and technically part of the party apparatus, but are in essence a subset of the engaged voters. They may come in various ideological flavors, but their priorities are usually incongruent with the party apparatus proper which is focused on tax cuts and Zionism. Volunteers are the backbone of political campaigns as NCOs are the backbone of military campaigns. They will spend hours of their time calling voters, knocking on doors, putting up signs, helping with set up and tear down of events, etc. The best ones are those who do it from conviction or a personal relationship with the candidate rather than resume-padding or money. They also happen to be well-positioned to whisper into the ears of various elected officials. And over the past few years, this small yet essential cohort has swung decisively towards our side.

The paradox of a moderate Republican majority with apparent radicalization is mostly explained by populism versus elite theory. In response to MAGA’s minor initial rightward effect on the masses, the elites responded by overreacting because they are control freaks uncomfortable with even a temporary loss of control. They accelerated their herding of the general public towards the left from gentle yet continuous pressure to brute force: the media backlash against Trump, BLM and white guilt, gender theory, and perhaps most importantly, Trump himself succumbing to the pressure and moving to the left. The masses reflect Trump’s leadership, or lack thereof.

Fortunately in addition to us also being able to herd the masses, the left can’t tone it down without breaking people. Too many of their rank and file have internalized their own memes with great emotional intensity. This may seem in contrast to the “firmware updates” we saw with Covid, the Russian collusion hoax, etc. but those firmware updates were nonetheless within certain narrow parameters. What the science said changed as often as the Nebraskan weather, but the message never wavered from “trust the science.” The precise details of how the Orange Man was a threat to Our Democracy™ might change based on the lie of the day, but he was always bad. The mass demoralization of the left is explainable by how one too many firmware updates can result in a blue screen of death.

In throwing everything they had at liberalizing the masses and persecuting us, leftist elites discredited themselves while forging us into a nascent rival elite and priming the masses for a swerve to the right.

The moderating effects of 2016–2024 on the masses has hopefully come to an end after hitting rock bottom. The generic liberal voters are demoralized, and their party is discredited, while the conservative electorate has become revitalized, like the glow of health one feels after recovering from a long disease. We control the youth, who are themselves a type of elite due to their energy and cool factor, and we also influence the influencers. This means we can enforce our ideas top-down.

The slippery slope is not a fallacy in politics. It is how things work. Since 1945, the liberal elite have forced their decisions top-down upon the electorate’s throats. They have done this with court cases, academia, media, etc. as seen with the Civil Rights movement, open borders, diversity, white guilt, and degeneracy. By normalizing one thing, they paved the road to normalizing another, and oftentimes despite mass popular backlash such as during desegregation. We can do the same. When we see large numbers of mainstream voters approving of legal replacement migration and being uncomfortable with Alligator Alcatraz, we should remember that they are inherently malleable in the hands of authority. Since WWII, that authority has been entirely leftist. If we cement ourselves as the new hegemon, they will adopt our ideas too. The left won not despite but because they never cared about public opinion.

Hawley seems to want to chalk up radical discourse to Trump and thus hopes for a return to normalcy once he is gone. Trump, and the backlash he inspired, were the main influences on American politics. But Trump exiting the stage or becoming moderate does not mean there will be a return to the slow decline. Trump’s fabulous wealth and tacky bling do not place him above the laws of nature, and nature abhors a vacuum. He wouldn’t be the first man in history to be eaten by his own revolution. Someone else (perhaps Matt Gaetz?) will take up the mantle. And they will then pine for Trump just as they rehabilitated Bush II from being a Nazi war criminal into a principled conservative.

Spengler is right that optimism might be cowardice, but he is also right in saying: “When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honor, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude.”

Notes

[1] Hawley, The Moderate Majority, pp. 151–52.

[2] Hawley, The Moderate Majority, pp. 151–52.

[3] Hawley, The Moderate Majority, p. 153.