In the 1930s, the United States faced a real, system-level crisis. The Great Depression produced mass unemployment, widespread poverty, and genuine fear that the existing order could no longer provide stability or dignity. When people lose trust in a system because it has visibly failed them, they naturally search for alternatives. Often, those alternatives are extreme.
At the time, the most radical options gaining traction were Communist and fascist movements. Both promised certainty, moral clarity, and decisive action. Given what was known then, and how desperate circumstances were, many Americans found elements of those arguments disturbingly plausible. The language these movements used was not obviously monstrous. It sounded moral, patriotic, humanitarian, and urgent.
Only in hindsight is the danger unmistakable.
Today, we are seeing similar extremes gain traction within both major political parties. On the left, radical movements frame politics almost entirely through appeals to social justice, power hierarchies, and moral urgency. On the right, radical movements frame politics through appeals to nationalism, civilizational decline, and suspicion of institutions. The emotional structure of the arguments is familiar.
But there is a decisive difference between the 1930s and today: we are not living through a depression-scale crisis.
America today has serious problems, but they are not existential. There is no mass starvation. There is no systemic unemployment. Elections are held. Courts function. The stock market has controls to minimize the risk of a catastrophic crash. Deposits at banks are insured. Information is widely available. By nearly every objective measure, Americans are as prosperous, safe, and empowered as any population in history. That does not mean the system is perfect or just. But the system is functioning fairly well.
So why are the extremes growing?
Because this time, the crisis is not the cause. It is the product.
Modern extremism depends on manufacturing a sense of catastrophe in order to justify radical solutions. Ordinary political disagreement is reframed as civilizational collapse. Institutional friction is labeled oppression. Incremental reform is dismissed as complicity. Everything is urgent. Everything is existential. And everything demands suspension of normal constraints.
America is not uniquely terrible - on the contrary, it remains, today, the greatest country on Earth. But extreme ideologies cannot survive without the perception of imminent disaster. So they use their platforms to convince the American people that things are on the verge of collapse and they are the only solution.
This is fundamentally anti-American,.
The American system is built on a civic covenant. It assumes equal opportunity under the law, no religious establishment, the dignity of work, and the belief that individuals can improve their lives through effort within a shared framework. This vision was never perfect, and it was partly aspirational. But it was true enough to encourage responsibility, honesty, innovation, and unity across differences.
The extremes reject this American covenant.
On the far right, liberty is hollowed out into loyalty, institutions are treated as legitimate only when aligned, and minorities or dissenters are framed as threats. On the far left, justice is transformed into moral absolutism, disagreement becomes harm, and power is justified by outcomes rather than consent. In different ways, both sides abandon the American idea that legitimacy flows from process, pluralism, and correction over time. The idea of "We the People" does not exist on the extremes - on both sides, the people are pawns to be endlessly manipulated with propaganda and scare tactics.
The choice is not right vs. left. It is whether America will be governed by reality or by falsehood.
Historically, extremist ideologies succeed not because they are persuasive on the merits, but because they share a common structural flaw: They are unfalsifiable. This means that no amount of evidence can disprove the ideologies - every shred of evidence is twisted into proof. Think about how climate change was used to explain both extreme heat and extreme cold: facts were twisted to fit the ideology, not the other way around. And the same applies to QAnon style conspiracy theories; no actual events can ever disprove the theory.
When an ideology cannot be meaningfully tested, corrected, or challenged from within, it ceases to be a political philosophy and becomes a closed system. Evidence against it is reinterpreted as proof of conspiracy. Dissent becomes betrayal. Institutions are delegitimized rather than improved. At that point, persuasion is replaced by enforcement.
This is where my Derechology falsification audit becomes useful. This identifies load bearing assumptions of the ideologies; if they are false the ideologies themselves are false.
On the far-Left, the load bearing assumption is that everyone is either oppressor or oppressed. For some it is boss/worker, for others it is white people/people of color, and for yet others it is colonizer/colonized. This binary is never true and without that assumption the entire edifice collapses.
On the far-Right, the load bearing assumptions is that America was meant to be a Christian country, or that the only workable moral system is Christianity. Neither of those are true.
In both cases, the ideology becomes immune to correction. That is the danger.
Every major political party faces the same dilemma: how to remain inclusive without being captured by extremists. The usual approaches fail. Either the tent is so wide that it admits corrosive ideas, or boundaries are enforced arbitrarily and politically.
The falsification audit offers a third option.
Political winds shift - the definition of conservatism or liberalism has changed over the decades. A Reagan Republican is not the same as a Bush Republican or a Trump Republican. I strongly disagree that America should abandon Israel, but the opinion itself (if it is based on legitimate assumptions) does not fail this audit for the Right, at least in theory.
Here are some rules that can be offered for both parties to reject opinions that are based on falsehoods.
If an opinion cannot be challenged without moral condemnation, cannot be disproven by evidence, treats disagreement as illegitimate and requires a permanent crisis to justify itself, then that opinion is not to be considered. This allows and encourages debate among the valid positions within a party. It allows good faith debates between the Right and the Left.
Foreign adversaries understand how damaging extreme partisanship is. They do not need to persuade Americans of alternative ideologies. They only need to amplify crisis narratives, erode trust in correction mechanisms, and reward the loudest extremes. That strategy works only when internal guardrails fail.
The solution is not moderation for its own sake, which cannot be clearly defined. It is epistemic discipline.
Ideas that cannot be tested cannot build. Movements that reject correction cannot endure. And political parties that cannot distinguish legitimate opinion from propaganda will eventually collapse under their own contradictions. The particular ideologies are not nearly as important as the structure behind them - can they adapt to reality, are they corrigible, can they be defended on their own merits.
The future of America is at stake.
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