That Rug Was Already Peed On, Man (The Awokening Edition)

The Dude was listening to The Bulwark podcast and heard Tim fucking Miller go off on the "awokening" and how Democrats needed to "moderate" to win. Fuck that all ways from Tuesday.

The Dude is on his second White Russian. He’s at his lane. The 10-pin is giving him a look. Above Lane 7, there’s a TV mounted slightly crooked — they’re always mounted slightly crooked in bowling alleys, man, it’s like a rule — and on it is a panel of guys. Nice suits. Practiced concern. The specific facial expression of men who have recently discovered a conscience and are still getting used to where they keep it.

They are explaining, patiently, that the Democrats need to stop talking about abortion. Gender stuff. You know, the whole identity thing. If they ever want to be competitive again. They are very clear on this. It is, they say, just strategy.

The Dude releases the ball. Watches it. It goes where it goes.

Man, he thinks. Man.

Now look. The Dude gets it. He’s not here to tell you the left never overcorrects — sure, sometimes the left overcorrects. He’s seen the Twitter threads, man. He’s aware of the discourse. There are real conversations to be had about tone and tactics and how you talk to people you’re trying to persuade.

But there’s something rolling around in his head that won’t find the pocket, and it’s this: some of the guys on that panel — the Never Trump guys, the Lincoln Project emeriti, the Bulwark podcast regulars — they’re offering the Democratic Party a deal. And the Dude has some experience with deals that turn out to be something other than what they initially appeared to be.

---

The Deal, Man. Let’s Look at the Deal.

There’s a book. Well — there’s a book with a guy’s name on it. The man who actually wrote it, a journalist named Tony Schwartz, has been very clear that he regrets this, and that the title reads as unintentional irony at this point. It’s called The Art of the Deal. The premise is that a good deal has to work for both sides.

So let’s look at this deal.

What the Never Trump coalition is asking from the Democratic Party: Abandon the messaging on reproductive rights. Soften on gender equality. Deprioritize civil rights framing. Stop doing the things that make centrist Republicans uncomfortable. Reorganize the entire coalition’s priorities around the preferences of people who are not in that coalition and have been clear they do not intend to fully join it.

What the Never Trump coalition is putting on the table in return: The temporary gift of their disapproval of someone they spent three decades building the conditions for.

Nobody’s asking Bill Kristol to endorse card-check. Nobody asked Charlie Sykes to call for Medicaid expansion. Rick Wilson hasn’t come out for the PRO Act. The negotiation runs exactly one direction. And the Dude — who has seen some bad deals in his time, man, who once got talked into retrieving a briefcase that turned out to have nothing in it, by a man who turned out to have nothing in his bank account either — recognizes this shape.

You don’t get to call it the Art of the Deal when only one side is doing the dealing. Even the ghostwriter knows that, man.

---

Walter Has Thoughts. Walter Has Many Thoughts.

Walter puts down his bowling ball.

Walter has been waiting for this moment since approximately the second White Russian.

“These people,” Walter says, with the controlled fury of a man who is not particularly controlling his fury, “are not bystanders, Dude. They were not standing in the parking lot when this happened. They were in the building.”

And man. Walter is not wrong.

Bill Kristol championed Sarah Palin. Put her on a national ticket. Palin is, whatever else you want to say about her, the direct prototype of the MAGA aesthetic — the aggrieved outsider, the media enemy, the policy-light culture warrior who runs on vibes and resentment. Kristol gift-wrapped that and handed it to the American electorate. He was also one of the principal architects of the Iraq War, which burned through American institutional trust like a lit match through a paper score sheet, and generated the precise furnace of disillusionment that Donald Trump walked into in 2016.

Charlie Sykes spent decades as a Wisconsin right-wing talk radio host building exactly the audience psychology that became the MAGA base. The grievance loops. The media distrust. The tribal epistemology where facts are what your team says and everything else is the enemy. He was an artisan of it. He was good at it. His listeners became the base. He is now, professionally, a man who deplores the base, which is a sustainable business model but a genuinely interesting personal journey.

Rick Wilson ran campaigns and opposition research for politicians who mainstreamed racial resentment as a voter turnout mechanism. He was effective at this.

These men did not create MAGA despite their careers. They created the preconditions for it through their careers. The supply-side dogma, the Southern Strategy’s long refinement, the epistemic closure of right-wing media, the years of telling the base that government was the enemy and compromise was weakness — these were Republican Party projects, and these men were card-carrying members.

“They are coming to us,” Walter says, reaching a controlled simmer that is not actually controlled, “with the bill for a fire they started. And asking us to pay it by giving them the thermostat.”

Walter, the Dude says.

“AM I WRONG?”

He is not wrong.

---

Donny Wanders In From The Snack Bar

Donny has nachos. Donny missed most of this.

“Wait,” Donny says. “Are you saying the Lincoln Project guys are bad? I thought they made those great ads.”

Walter does not look up from his bowling shoes.

“Donny,” Walter says. “You’re out of your element.”

Donny represents — and the Dude means this with genuine affection for Donny, man, Donny is good people — the well-meaning Democrat who takes the Never Trump alliance at face value. Who sees the ads. Who appreciates the anti-Trump commitment. Who doesn’t read the fine print.

The fine print says: TEMPORARY. EXPIRES UPON RETURN TO NORMAL REPUBLICAN POLITICS.

They have been very upfront about this, actually. They are not becoming Democrats. They don’t want to become Democrats. Their stated goal is to destroy Trumpism, reclaim a functioning center-right Republican Party, and go home. After which they would like a competitive two-party system where their team is one of the parties and Democratic dominance is bounded by a viable opposition that they can be part of.

A durable, structurally powerful Democratic majority is not their goal. If you think about it for more than a minute — and the Dude has had time, man, lane 7 is slow tonight — it’s actually mildly against their long-term interests.

Donny eats his nachos. He seems okay with this.

---

The Expiration Date Is Right There On The Label

In a bowling league, everyone is trying to win, and the structure of the thing means everyone has roughly aligned incentives — get the best score, advance in the standings, play to your strengths. It’s not complicated.

This is not a bowling league.

The Never Trump coalition needs Democrats to win enough elections to prevent a Trumpist authoritarian consolidation. That’s real, and the Dude doesn’t dismiss it. But they don’t need Democrats to build a dominant progressive majority that structurally reconfigures American politics for a generation. That outcome would make it very difficult for a reconstituted “reasonable” Republican Party to be competitive afterward — which is the thing they’re actually working toward.

Their ideal end state looks something like: Trump recedes, a Youngkin or a Kemp type emerges as the “normal” Republican, the Never Trump consultants and podcasters return to relevance within a chastened GOP, and the Democratic Party settles back into being a manageable opposition that wins sometimes but doesn’t win so much that it crowds out the center-right lane.

In that world, they matter enormously. In a world where Democrats build a lasting majority around their actual values and govern with confidence — they matter less.

The Dude is not saying their anti-Trump sincerity is fake. He’s saying their interests and the Democratic coalition’s interests overlap on one thing, and diverge on almost everything that comes after. Read the expiration date, man. It’s right there man.

---

Maude Would Like To Show You Some Numbers

Maude Lebowski does not shout. She doesn’t need to. She states things the way you state the height of a building or the boiling point of water — as conditions of reality, offered without particular interest in whether you find them comfortable.

The Never Trump argument on abortion is this: Democrats are being reckless. They need to moderate. They need to stop centering reproductive rights if they want to be competitive in red states. It is a painful but strategically necessary concession to electoral reality.

Maude would like to show you what voters in red states actually did when given the chance to weigh in directly.

Kansas, 2022. A constitutional amendment that would have eliminated abortion rights protections went before Kansas voters. Kansas, man. They rejected it. Fifty-nine percent to forty-one.

Kentucky, 2022. Voters blocked an anti-abortion amendment. In fucking Kentucky man.

Ohio, 2023. Voters enshrined reproductive rights in the state constitution. Fifty-six to forty-four. Ohio.

Michigan. Montana. Maryland. The ballot referendum record on reproductive rights is not a record of a losing issue. It is a record of an issue that wins — including in states where Democrats lose everything else on the same ballot — because it turns out that when you ask actual human voters whether they want the government making their most private medical decisions for them, a majority of them say no. Even in red states. Especially, it turns out, when the question is asked plainly.

The empirical case for strategic retreat on reproductive rights is not merely morally convenient for people whose own reproductive autonomy is not on the line. It is factually wrong. The data is not ambiguous. The data is, frankly, embarrassing for the argument being made.

And then there is the other thing Maude would note, which she states without inflection: many of the men currently advising Democrats to quiet down about abortion came up in a political tradition that spent decades treating reproductive rights as a wedge issue — not a policy question, a wedge, a tool for activating conservative turnout and making Democrats look extreme. Many of them were, at best, neutral on the substance. Some were actively hostile.

Asking Democrats to soft-pedal abortion is not purely strategic advice. It is also, consciously or not, asking the Democratic Party to stop making these men feel bad about positions they held for most of their careers.

Maude returns to her work. She does not require acknowledgment.

The Dude: Yeah. What she said, man.

---

It’s A Protection Racket, Man. Let’s Just Call It That.

The Dude has been here before. Someone peed on his rug. He went looking for the other Jeffrey Lebowski — the one in Pasadena, the one with the mansion and the biography and the very convincing performance of a man of substance. Who turned out to have nothing. No real money, no real achievements, nothing but the appearance of gravitas and the willingness to weaponize it against people who couldn’t see through it.

He knows what this shape looks like.

The offer from the Never Trump coalition is this: give us what we want — a Democratic Party organized around our preferences, stripped of the commitments that make us uncomfortable, comfortable for people who were Republicans until recently and intend to be Republicans again — and we’ll protect you from the monster we spent thirty years building the conditions for.

That is not a coalition. That is a protection racket.

And look — the Dude wants to get along. The Dude is not a warlike man. He genuinely appreciates that these folks find Trump abhorrent. That’s real and it counts for something and the Dude’s not dismissing it. But there’s a difference between accepting help from someone who’s temporarily aligned with you and reorganizing your entire operation around their comfort. One of those is coalition politics. The other one is capitulation dressed up in strategic language.

Nobody in a protection racket is asked to prove they mean it. That’s kind of the whole mechanism, man.

---

The Rug, Man. Come On Back To The Rug.

The soul of the Democratic Party is not an abstraction. It is a specific and historical thing — the expanding circle of who counts. The New Deal. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The ADA. The ACA. The long, imperfect, genuinely incomplete project of building a country where the government is not an instrument of the powerful against everyone else.

That is the rug. It ties the room together.

The Never Trump ask — go quiet on reproductive rights, soften on gender equality, make the coalition comfortable for people who spent thirty years actively working against these things — is to roll up that rug and put it in storage. So their guys feel more at home coming over.

The first time someone peed on the Dude’s rug, there was at least the pretense of a mistake. Wrong Jeffrey Lebowski. Honest error. Could happen to anyone.

This time, they’re handing you the cleaning bill and calling it strategy.

The Democratic Party didn’t become what it is by figuring out what its opponents found acceptable and doing that. It built what it built by being the thing that needed to exist — for the people who needed it to exist. When those people get thrown overboard to make the boat more comfortable for recent arrivals who are already planning their next voyage, you don’t end up with a better coalition. You end up with a party that doesn’t know why it exists and can’t explain it to voters who are wondering the same thing.

That’s the rug. That’s always been the rug.

You don’t abide without your rug, man.

The Dude abides. But not without the rug.

---

The Dude abides. Find him at shitpostdude.com when he’s not at the lanes.