The Center will not hold

Now that Convicted Felon Trump stands as president-elect, the minds of rational citizens are trapped in a collective anxiety, rattling like caged animals as they envision the potential chaos that his deranged policies might unleash. But this is entirely the wrong exercise. It’s a misdirection—The real question is not what he will do, but what happens when the crowd, the American populace, realizes that the center ring of this circus is empty—no ringmaster, no order, just chaos in motion.

You see, the left played a rational hand: they ran a “law and order” centrist, an emblem of moderation meant to appease those mythologized “True Conservatives”—those unicorns of American politics who were meant to value stability and principle. But the inconvenient truth is that these unicorns never actually existed. They are a ghostly relic of a bygone era, and betting on their return was a fool’s errand. The dice came up snake eyes, and the left’s gamble for the political center crumbled spectacularly. Now, we are presented with two potential paths forward—neither of which offers a hopeful vision for the future.

The first path—a sharp veer to the left—is, in my estimation, the most likely. It is a populist uprising fueled by deep-seated anger, anti-wealth sentiment, and disdain for the billionaire ruling class. The cries of "Eat the Rich" will swell, gaining a volume and ferocity that shakes the foundation of the American establishment. This movement won’t be polite; it won’t come wrapped in the sanitized language of policy reform. It will be raw, visceral, a digital-age revolution streamed live for all to witness. The imagery will evoke the French Revolution—an uprising driven by desperation and outrage, complete with metaphorical (and perhaps literal) pitchforks and guillotines. When a populace feels the boot on their necks—hungry, overworked, and disillusioned—they become a force to be reckoned with, and that rage will demand retribution. This path accelerates the trajectory toward real and violent upheaval against the ultra-wealthy elite, the American billionaires whose gilded mansions have become symbols of a system rigged for their benefit.

The second path is no less ominous—a swerve to the right, a plunge that allows for the murky depths of Christian nationalism. This scenario imagines the collapse of the political center creating a vacuum that is quickly filled by a religiously-driven consolidation of power. Here, it is no longer about politics but about the sanctification of power—imbuing governance with a sense of divine purpose, a purpose that leaves no room for dissent or diversity of thought. This is not a political movement in the traditional sense; it is a fervent cult, fueled by apocalyptic visions and convinced of its divine right to rule. It evokes the Iranian Revolution—a theocratic coup d'état—except this time, it is the Bible rather than the Quran that is held aloft, and the same dangerous fanaticism that insists there is only one true path. It is a vision of America as a Christian dominion, a place where governance is the handmaiden of an extreme and exclusionary religious dogma.

We must consider what happens when the political center collapses—when moderation is rejected and the middle-ground approach falls apart like a poorly constructed house of cards. The centrist ideal—the torchbearer for compromise and stability—has been tossed aside, devoured by an electorate too detached from raality to stomach any moderation. The left, bruised and bitter, will have no appetite for running another centrist candidate. The era of middle-ground pandering is over. It is a certainty that the next step will not be another march down the center. Instead, we are left with only two options: a radical shift to the left or a dangerous drift to the right. The center will not hold, and as the vacuum expands, chaos becomes inevitable.

This is the reality we face—a dissolution of the middle that leaves us staring down the barrel of two loaded and volatile alternatives. And as we stumble toward this uncertain future, it is imperative to understand that moderation has failed. The people have chosen, and the question now is not whether we can return to normalcy but how Americans will navigate the chaos that follows.