The Milkshake Doctrine
When resistance can mean co-opting the energy of the moment: disruption.
Since 2016, the MAGA Right has drunk the Transgressive Left’s milkshake—with a plastic straw. The next social movement to disrupt MAGA’s power will need to capture that anti-institutional spirit, transmorphing it into a force that fights the Broligarchy-captured government, which is currently dismantling and reshaping institutions in its image. An opportunistic and successful opposition would steal MAGA’s anti-institutional milkshake. **
Disruption as Political Order
When I was not yet double-digits old, left-wing organizations protested the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank in the November 1999 “Battle of Seattle.” Environmentalists, “Electrohippies,” trade unionists, religious groups, anarchists, and even right-wing populist candidate Pat Buchanan gathered to demonstrate against what they saw as the human rights abuses, social dysfunction, environmental devastation, and economic perils stewarded by free trade “globalist” organizations like the WTO. Hearing these words together now may sound deeply foreign to anyone born after 9/11.
The leftists of my childhood fought these “globalist” institutions, along with American government surveillance, the consolidation of political, military, and economic power, and human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of globalization—something my mentor Douglas Rushkoff reflected on in his Substack post this week. Indeed, many of these institutions were designed to stabilize the world so American capitalism could take root—an aim not always aligned with the welfare of the environment, the subaltern, or even American workers. In the post–Cold War era, many on the progressive left and some on the free-trade-skeptic right looked at American Cold War institutions and saw a need to rethink their function.
Since 2016, the MAGA right has adopted much of this formerly left-coded language of anti-institutionalism, weaving it into a political strategy that organizes online subcultures, fringe interest groups, and counterculture movements. In effect, MAGA has co-opted the rhetoric of transgressive movements and burgeoning subcultures that question the first-order purposes and structure of American government.
With the exception of the 2020 election of President Biden, institutional “disruption” has defined American politics, business, and cultural zeitgeist since 2008—when a political outsider named Barack Hussein Obama won a presidential election against Democratic royalty and Republican gentry alike. In 2008 and 2012, Obama had Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and “disruptors” on his side, using microtargeting and digital organizing in unprecedented ways—methods that certainly unsettled those Lefties sympathetic to the Battle of Seattle
Cycles of economic disruption and “creative destruction”—concepts first posited by Marx and later engaged by economist Joseph Schumpeter—have been celebrated in Silicon Valley and politics over the past 15 years, as journalist Adrian Daub. has described. I think this is, in part, because we’ve wanted something to change about the world order.
Trump learned something from Obama’s spirit of disruption. (Today I find it ironic that Obama’s United States Digital Service, designed to reform and modernize government, has been repurposed into Elon Musk’s DOGE).
Is there an opposition ready to seize this spirit of disruption and propose a new remodeling of government that benefits “the many, not the few,” now that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the administrative state in the name of efficiency, business, and growth? Or will Democrats continue running on “preservation,” putting them at odds with the prevailing zeitgeist?
The Great Reset is here—it’s just not the one they talk about at Davos. Or is it?
The Milkshake Doctrine
In the last Failure to Communicate missive, I discussed the concept of political orders as defined by historian Gary Gerstle—“a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.” New Deal technocratic liberalism gave way to the free-market orthodoxy of neoliberalism. Now, a new political order is taking shape, disrupting both legacies.
“Disruption” itself has been the defining meme of the interregnum between these orders—it is, in a way, an order of its own. Transgressive, anti-institutional movements across the political spectrum have sought to remake and disrupt Cold War institutions and free-trade orthodoxy. While populist left outsiders like Bernie Sanders tapped into this energy in 2016, it was ultimately right-wing MAGA figures who claimed the “disruption” mantle—only for the most powerful and wealthy to step into government power.
MAGA operates by what I call “The Milkshake Doctrine”—absorbing the transgressive, disruptive energy and aesthetics of countercultural, anti-institutional movements from the past 30 years and using them for highly effective political mobilization. They “drank the milkshake” of the countercultural left, leaving civil-liberties-minded progressives stranded with stale Democrats and stodgy “Never Trumpers,” all now defending the very institutions they once sought to reform.
But now MAGA is in power, dismantling the infrastructure of previous political orders. They are no longer counterculture when they are the culture. Opposition can and should try to preserve those orders and previous ones — a lot of government should be preserved, most importantly our nation’s DNA of checks and balances between branches of government.
Yet my hunch is that a purely preservationist instinct will not be enough to mount a true political challenge to MAGA. That approach runs counter to our current political order of disruption.
The opposition must engage “The Milkshake Doctrine” and offer a disruptive vision that counters the broligarchic concentration of tech, financial, and government power.
If given the opportunity to rebuild federal institutions and American geopolitical strategy, how would you remake them—not just preserve them?
Especially considering someone else took the risk of taking a wrecking ball to institutions, an opposition has a big opportunity — especially if these changes are not loved. Yet answering the previous question is the work of whatever successful oppositional force emerges next in this political order of disruption. The Milkshake Doctrine suggests that harnessing the spirit of disruption and transgression—currently monopolized by MAGA—may be the key not only to moving forward but also to preserving the most vital elements of America’s DNA. What I am talking about is with regard to strategic and rhetorical posture, not raw tactics (where legal preservation efforts are necessary). Could capturing and redirecting the fast-moving current of disruption be the secret to safeguarding what makes America exceptional?
Holding the Mirror Up
Many acquaintances and even longtime readers ask about my politics, unsure of “where I stand.” Where does someone go these days who loves democracy, protected civil rights, peaceful pluralism, “hipster antitrust,” and effective institutions—yet is equally dissatisfied with the administration of our democracy, 20th-century institutions, and seemingly haphazard approach to world order? Where does a human-centered populist reformer go who doesn’t want to join the gleeful deconstructionists? Who does not want to relish in the cruelty of some consequences of these changes?
I was in Washington D.C. for inauguration to gather some ethnographic color for my forthcoming book. While there, I sat at the instantly famous Butterworth’s bar (impressive place) and struck up a conversation with a baby-faced former Fox News producer who assumed I was a conservative.
I understood why he was confused. I told him I, too, was disgruntled with our institutions and approach to world order. I was skeptical of unaccountable government, mass surveillance, consolidated wealth, and self-protecting bureaucracy. I’m not opposed to spending a lot of money on government—if I get a good ROI on that expense. Take healthcare costs in the U.S. versus other developed nations as the clearest example of this failure.
When Trump campaigned in 2016, he talked about the “Forgotten Man” and how the War on Terror, the Financial Crisis, and the Opioid Epidemic hit him extra hard. Back home in Western Pennsylvania, those were the messages that supporters parroted — not the racism or sexism that coastal press fixated on. For this very reason, I saw Trump’s power and appeal — respected it, even. He was willing to disrupt the old order, disruption being the zeitgeist of the day. History was moving in that direction anyway, at least since Obama.
Yet on the inauguration stage in 2025? That was the kicker—the moment I disabused the young producer of his impression of me. Seemed like the Forgotten Man was forgotten on that stage! Mostly what I saw was trillions of dollars in wealth on display in a handful of men standing behind the President.
I told the ex-producer I didn’t buy the excuse I heard from MAGA-lytes: Well, Trump is humiliating them and forcing them to get in line. If Big Tech could flip so easily to parrot the powerful, then both power and tech needed guardrails—some real disruption to their consolidation. So quickly had the arguments for “breaking up Big Tech” evaporated! Instead, crypto bros, singularity scions, and AI accelerationists had cut the proverbial line in front of the Deplorables, who waited in cold queues to watch the inauguration on screens at the Capital One Arena.
“I’ve never heard that perspective before,” said the producer.
Shame. But I wasn’t surprised. Infuriated, perhaps. Democrats and Trump critics would rather frame the moment in terms of “resistance” and “preservation” than use the language of “disruption”—which had far more persuasive appeal in 2024’s political climate. “Not going back” was, unfortunately and ironically, not a forward-looking chant.
Perhaps holding up an anti-institutional mirror to alleged anti-institutionalists — who appear to be remaking institutions to benefit the few, not the many — is indeed the first step.
Drink their Milkshake.