Opinion - Crypto can make MAGA immortal
Victory is sweet.
Two weeks after Donald Trump’s election win, Republicans continue to revel in the afterglow, doing Trump’s signature dance to “YMCA.” Post-election analysis on both sides suggests a sustainable political realignment. But this insta-reaction is wrong.
Whatever Trump achieves by 2028 will be short-lived unless the right undertakes the hard work of establishing cultural beachheads to support his political victories through emerging technology.
The left still controls nearly every aspect of American culture. Despite the nation’s geographic vastness and demographic diversity, four very blue locales almost wholly produce American culture: New York City (finance, media, foundations), D.C. (government, nonprofits), Los Angeles (entertainment) and San Francisco (technology).
Only education and corporations are geographically disbursed, and even these produce mostly static messaging through trade associations and unions. Despite a fracturing media environment and Elon Musk’s serendipitous purchase of Twitter (now X), nearly all cultural messaging in America will continue to flow from one of these four places.
Trump overcame the culture gaggle’s fierce enmity in a couple of ways. First, he is simply a once-in-a-lifetime figure. He has flowing charisma, superhuman courage and amazing political instincts.
Within roughly a year’s time, he joined a nearly 200-year-old political party, brushed aside its priorities, dismissed its dynastic families and reshaped it into his own image. Simultaneously, he merged his candidacy with patriotism and American pride like no one has before.
Not even Ronald Reagan had crowds spontaneously burst into “USA! USA!” chants by his mere presence. No Republican — not Vice President-elect JD Vance, not Gov. Ron DeSantis, not even Donald Trump Jr. — can replicate that. Just look at Democratic Senate victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada to see unique appeal of the Orange Man.
Second, Trump was fortunate to run against weak Democratic candidates who, despite immense fundraising advantages, lacked the charisma, courage and instincts that draw people to political movements.
If the right wants to sustain Trump’s vision and keep winning after he exits, politics won’t be enough. The new president may very well secure the border, abolish the Department of Education and install a new generation of judges, among other welcome moves. But nothing will be irreversible by the next Democratic successor, as the last four years have proven.
Moreover, the opinion-shapers, grant makers and takers, bureaucrats, tech moguls and entertainers that produce America’s cultural capital will again harden against Trump and keep pushing America leftward. This is where the long-term battle for America must be fought. As the late Andrew Breitbart famously stated, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
Trump was so successful because he was a cultural figure first and a political figure second. If the right hasn’t established a sufficient cultural infrastructure by the time he leaves, it will all be for naught.
Fortunately, advancements in technology over the past decade make sustaining MAGA possible where the Reagan Revolution wasn’t. Web3 — the next generation of the internet, fueled by cryptocurrencies — will remake America’s cultural landscape. While the media focuses on price fluctuations and the occasional crypto-related frauds or criminal schemes, programmers keep working behind the scenes.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and the blockchains they run on have technical qualities that will revolutionize society. Namely, they are permissionless, resistant to censorship, decentralized and open-source.
Finance, with its incestuous post-2008 relationship with the federal government, will be the first to fall as all institutional tasks — including lending, borrowing, saving and speculating — will migrate to digital wallets, without any say from Larry Fink or BlackRock. But that’s just the start.
A new media-social media environ also awaits where content creators rule — fueled by crypto micropayments — and the big networks ask them to carry their work instead of vice versa. No more feminist safety councils, no more oversight boards, no more random terms-of-service expulsions and certainly no more academics controlling speech by colluding with the government and screaming “misinformation!”
Corporations, now so beholden to Wall Street’s ESG-DEI directives, will be replaced by user-driven, crypto-fueled decentralized autonomous organizations.
The bottom-up tokenized economy will eventually overtake Hollywood as well. Audiences will purchase investment tokens beforehand and drive casting and other decisions, then reap the rewards instantly through every download of the final product.
The MAGA movement will thrive long after Trump departs, but only if Musk and others who spent millions helping him win start to invest in conservative coders and creatives in this burgeoning ecosystem.
Paul H. Jossey is a lawyer and author of an upcoming book on restoring America’s masculine culture through technological advances.
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