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WORKING PAPER NO. 23 Distribution: Unrestricted, Unread.
Existing convergence literature treats the culture war as either sincere ideological conflict or elite-manufactured distraction, and treats the resulting popular discontent as directionless resentment awaiting a demagogue. This paper forecasts a third outcome, currently underweighted in the literature because it has not yet been embarrassing enough to notice: the emergence of a formally organized, self-declared Jester Party, whose sole platform is the accurate performance of the radicalism voters are owed but no longer receive from either major party. We model this not as satire mistaken for politics, but as politics correctly identifying that satire is the only remaining vacancy. Findings suggest the Jester Formation is not a joke that became a party, but a party that discovered, several fiscal quarters into its founding, that it was no longer joking.
The convergence account developed elsewhere in this corpus establishes the following: party elites have drifted toward a shared material settlement (trade, capital taxation, monetary policy, antitrust non-enforcement) while sustaining symbolic conflict expensive enough to look sincere and cheap enough to never require concession. This produces a representation gap — a segment of the electorate whose actual preferences are serviced by neither party, and who are asked, in lieu of representation, to settle for affect: to feel represented by a tone of voice, a resentment shared in the correct dialect, a culture-war signifier standing in for the policy position it was hired to replace.
The literature has generally assumed this vacancy is filled by grievance alone — that the unrepresented simply radicalize, in whichever direction their information ecosystem supplies. This paper’s contribution is narrow but load-bearing: a vacancy this well-defined does not go unfilled indefinitely by chance. It gets filled by whoever notices it is a vacancy. Someone always does. Historically, this has been a demagogue. Our model suggests it may, on current trajectory, instead be a mime.
We proceed by treating the horseshoe not as a metaphor but as a piece of load-bearing infrastructure, and asking the obvious engineering question: what happens at the point where the two ends actually meet? Prior work assumes they approach one another asymptotically and never touch — that the far left and far right converge in style (anti-elite grammar, betrayal narrative, purity signaling) while remaining forever separated in content (which elite, which purity). This paper models the minority case in which the ends touch. We find that at the point of contact, style and content become empirically indistinguishable, and what remains is a shared, portable format: the accusation of betrayal, stripped of any specific betrayer, ready to be pointed at whoever is currently convenient.
A format this portable is not, in the long run, a belief system. It is a genre. And genres, eventually, get performed on purpose.
We forecast the emergence — regionally first, nationally within two election cycles of the first successful regional instance — of a minor party organized not around a policy platform but around the accurate performance of radical discontent as a public service. Its candidates will not claim to represent the far left, the far right, or any synthesis of the two. They will claim, correctly, to represent the tone both major parties have spent a generation renting from their bases without paying for, and to deliver it honestly, on stage, where the electorate can enjoy it without the inconvenience of it governing anything.
We term this the Jester Formation, and forecast the following characteristics with moderate confidence:
The central forecasting claim of this paper is that the Jester Formation resolves the horseshoe without confrontation between its ends — not through moderation, and not through the exhaustion of either radicalism, but through a shared audience realizing they bought tickets to the same show. The far-left voter and the far-right voter do not reconcile their material demands. They simply arrive, separately, at the same performance, each convinced the other section of the theater is laughing at something different, and each correct.
This is, we note, a considerably cheaper resolution than the ones history typically supplies. No coalition has to be built. No policy has to be reconciled. The two ends of the horseshoe do not need to agree on who the elite is, only to agree that watching someone impersonate their fury is preferable to continuing to supply it for free to a party that no longer bothers to use it.
We regard this as good news, on balance, in the narrow sense that it is bloodless, and bad news in the broader sense that it means the representation gap does not close. It is merely staffed.
For forecasting clarity, we append a representative Jester Formation platform plank, synthesized from the convergence literature’s account of what both bases actually want and have not received:
“We will not lower your taxes. We will not raise them either, in any way you’ll notice. We will, however, hold a press conference in which a sitting official is publicly and elaborately humiliated for having failed to do either, on a stage, with production values, at a time convenient for broadcast. Ticket revenue will be reinvested in humiliating a different official next quarter. This is the only redistribution currently on offer, and we are the only party being honest about it.”
We assess this plank as electorally viable. We assess it as materially indistinguishable, in its effect on tax policy, from the status quo. This is, per Section 1, the point.
In the interest of intellectual honesty consistent with the parent essay’s methodology, we note the principal objection to this forecast: that a party organized around performed grievance eventually either (a) is forced to govern, at which point the performance collapses on contact with actual material stakes, or (b) is captured by the same donor-class convergence it was founded to satirize, becoming a third symbolic outlet rather than an exit from the system of symbolic outlets. We regard (b) as the likelier failure mode and note, without further comment, that this would not be the first Uncertainty Department forecast to describe a mechanism for escaping elite capture that elite capture subsequently adopted as a growth strategy.
We also note that a party built entirely on tone has historically proven easier to defeat than one built on material demands, since tone can be outspent, and material demands generally cannot. This should be read as a caution against overconfidence in the Formation’s durability, not as a reason to doubt its arrival.
This document is issued without recommendation, warranty, or any expectation that its forecast will be acted upon by anyone in a position to prevent it. The Office of Diminished Expectations thanks you for your continued lack of surprise.
The forecast above rests on a specific reading of the convergence literature. Readers who want the theoretical foundation, rather than the forecast built on top of it, are directed to the survey below.
The standard account of American political life over the last two decades holds that the country has polarized — that Democrats and Republicans have drifted apart, that their voters have become more ideologically extreme, and that the culture war is simply what that extremity looks like in public. This account is intuitive, well-funded by both parties’ fundraising apparatuses, and largely wrong, or at least importantly incomplete. A more defensible reading, drawing on several distinct strands of political science, suggests something closer to the reverse: that party elites have converged on the material questions that actually determine policy outcomes — tax structure, deregulation, labor law, monetary policy — while manufacturing and sustaining symbolic conflict to obscure that convergence. What looks like mass radicalization in either direction is better understood as an accumulating, cross-ideological resentment toward a converged elite, expressed through whatever vocabulary of grievance each side’s information ecosystem supplies.
This is not a fringe claim. It sits at the intersection of at least four separate academic literatures, each independently developed, each with its own evidentiary base, and each pointing in a compatible direction.
Morris Fiorina’s body of work — Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America and later Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics — remains the most influential empirical challenge to the mass-polarization thesis. Fiorina’s polling analysis found that American voters have not become dramatically more ideologically extreme; what has changed is that party activists, donors, and elected officials have sorted into more homogeneous and more extreme camps, while the electorate itself remains closely and often ambivalently divided rather than deeply and irreconcilably divided. His “disconnect” framing is explicitly about elites drifting from the citizenry they claim to represent, and it is this half of the puzzle — a real, measurable gap between what parties do and what their voters actually want — that any convergence account has to start from. Fiorina’s own diagnosis of where elites drift is narrower than the argument here requires: he locates the drift toward the ideological poles on hot-button issues, not toward a converged center. That is a difference in destination, not in the existence of the gap itself, and it is precisely this gap — established, uncontroversial, and already load-bearing in the literature — that the comparative European work below fills in with a different account of where elites are actually headed.
If Fiorina establishes that a gap exists without settling its direction, the “cost of convergence” literature associated with the Journal of Democracy and comparative European party politics supplies the missing half. This work argues that what destabilizes democratic systems is not polarization but the opposite: center-left and center-right parties converging toward each other on the material questions — economic policy, trade, regulatory posture — while performing symbolic differentiation to retain distinct electoral coalitions. The result is a representation gap. Voters who feel their party has diluted or abandoned its historical commitments do not become more moderate in response; they become available for defection, and that defection is what populist and radical parties exploit. Grant and Tilley’s research suggests this exodus is not confined to ideologically fringe voters — it draws from anyone who perceives their party as having hollowed out its own brand. This is close to a direct empirical articulation of “radical centrism detached from long-standing constituent values”: the claim is not that voters became extreme, but that the party’s actual position moved and the base’s did not, and the resulting gap registers as betrayal rather than as ideology.
This convergence is best understood as a broad neoliberal consensus that hardened from the 1990s through the 2010s — on trade liberalization, deregulation, and monetary orthodoxy — rather than a fixed, permanent condition. It is currently under real strain: the bipartisan turn toward industrial policy, tariffs, and populist protectionism since 2016 suggests both parties are attempting, awkwardly and incompletely, to break from that consensus rather than simply reproducing it. This complicates but does not refute the underlying claim. The representation gap the convergence literature identifies was carved out over decades and is not closed by a few years of rhetorical repositioning; elite behavior on core structural questions — capital taxation, antitrust enforcement, labor law, monetary policy — has moved far less than the trade and tariff rhetoric implies. The more defensible position is that convergence is a lingering structural consensus both parties are contesting at the margins while leaving its core largely undisturbed, and it is that unclosed gap, not the absence of any elite movement at all, that continues to generate the defection the literature describes. It is precisely this unresolved gap between parties and their bases that the culture war exists to manage.
A representation gap of this size cannot simply sit unaddressed; something has to occupy the space where substantive difference used to be, or the convergence becomes too visible to sustain. A third and more explicitly materialist strand — developed largely in left and left-populist commentary, with some overlap from national-conservative critics of donor-class Republicanism — treats the culture war itself as functional rather than sincere. On this account, symbolic, low-material-stakes fights (school curricula, trans athletes, border iconography, flag controversies) are cultivated because they are cheap to supply relative to material concessions and effective at cross-pressuring working-class voters away from the economic grievances the two parties’ donor bases share an interest in keeping off the table. This is the piece that gives the thesis its ideological-materialist character: the culture war is not epiphenomenal noise but a deliberately maintained ideological superstructure whose function is to prevent class-adjacent coalition-building that would threaten a converged material settlement. It should be flagged, however, that even sympathetic critics push back on a purely instrumental reading — arguing that culture-war conflict also reflects decades-long, genuinely organized ideological campaigns (judicial appointments, curriculum fights) rather than pure elite manufacture. The honest version of this argument treats “manufactured distraction” as a real and significant component, not the sole explanation.
A legitimation apparatus this effective still has to go somewhere once it stops absorbing the discontent it was built to manage — and the final piece of the argument explains why the resulting discontent takes the shape of left-right radicalization rather than announcing itself as class grievance. Horseshoe theory — the observation that the far left and far right resemble each other more than either resembles the center — has always been contested, and its critics are right that it can flatten real substantive differences into superficial tactical resemblance. But the underlying empirical claim, refined by recent work such as Tamaki and Jung’s, holds up in a narrower form: populist attitudes rise curvilinearly at both ideological extremes relative to the center, even if the shape is asymmetric depending on which populist tradition is locally stronger. Mainstream populism theory (Mudde; the Mansbridge and Macedo school) treats “the pure people versus the corrupt elite” as the single definitional core of populism across the spectrum — the elite is named differently (billionaires and corporate power on the left, globalists and deep-state actors on the right) but the structural grievance, a felt democratic deficit in which policy outcomes track elite preference regardless of electoral choice, is the same. This is the mechanism by which one underlying material resentment can produce two apparently opposed radicalisms without requiring that either side’s voters actually became more extreme in policy terms.
A materialist synthesis of this kind is strongest when it resists becoming monocausal. Affective polarization — dislike and distrust of the opposing party’s voters as people, independent of policy positions — has genuinely increased among ordinary Americans even in periods where policy-view polarization has not. A version of this argument that treats the base as simply and passively centrist, with all apparent radicalization fully explained by manufactured distraction, overstates its case against that evidence. Likewise, treating culture-war conflict as pure elite manufacture understates the extent to which it reflects real, long-organized ideological movements with actual believers, not just useful idiots. And horseshoe theory’s critics are correct that surface resemblance between far-left and far-right movements can obscure substantively different goals, historical roots, and relationships to state power — equating them risks flattening genuinely distinct political projects into a single undifferentiated “extremism.”
The claim that both parties’ elites have converged materially while sustaining a culture war that channels a shared anti-elite resentment into apparently opposite radicalisms is not a fringe theory. It is a defensible synthesis of established, independently developed literatures: Fiorina and the disconnect thesis on the elite/mass gap, the cost-of-convergence literature on why that gap produces defection rather than moderation, materialist critique on the functional role of symbolic conflict, and populism theory on why shared grievance takes on divergent vocabularies. Its weakness is not that it is unsupported but that it can be overstated. Treated as one significant current running through a more complicated picture — rather than as a total explanation — it survives contact with the evidence that a purely structural account would otherwise erase: real ideological commitment, real affective polarization, and real substantive differences between left and right.