Chris Abraham

We all heard the line in some form: if you’re young and not liberal, you have no heart. If you’re older and not conservative, you have no mind. It gets pinned on Winston Churchill, though historians can’t find proof he ever said it. The quote probably predates him. But the idea stuck because it felt intuitive. Youth burns with moral clarity. Age cools into calculation.

For decades, the life-cycle theory of politics suggested that people drift right as they acquire mortgages, families, and tax bills. You start with ideals. You end with spreadsheets. Heart first. Head later.

But 2024 complicates that story.

Gen Z is not moving as a bloc. The gender gap is historic. Young women are identifying as liberal or leftist at higher rates than previous generations of women at the same age. Issues like reproductive rights, climate, gun policy, and economic precarity are not abstract to them. Politics feels personal and urgent.

Meanwhile, young men are trending more conservative or at least more right-leaning than their female peers. Some frame it as a reaction against progressive cultural norms. Some see it as populist defiance. Some simply distrust institutions across the board. Whatever the cause, the divergence is real.

Instead of a generation starting liberal and aging conservative together, we’re seeing parallel tracks form early. The old adage assumed a shared cultural baseline. Today’s young adults are building political identities in different online ecosystems, with different media diets and different threat perceptions. So is the saying still true?

Maybe the “heart versus mind” framing was always too neat. It assumes compassion lives on the left and realism on the right. Reality is messier. There are idealistic conservatives and hard-nosed liberals. There are young pragmatists and older revolutionaries.

The more interesting question might be whether people still change predictably with age at all. In an era of identity politics, algorithmic media, and hardened partisan brands, it’s possible that political orientation is stabilizing earlier and shifting less.

The old proverb imagined politics as a journey. 2024 looks more like a fork in the road that appears at 18.

Heart and mind may no longer take turns. They may just be choosing different tribes.

Here’s my Gen X confession: I’m not wide-eyed about Epstein because I’ve been marinating in this storyline my entire life.

I saw Eyes Wide Shut and understood the metaphor immediately. I grew up during the satanic panic era. I watched decades of crime TV where every season ended in a warehouse, a shipping container, or some shadow network moving terrified people around like inventory. I’ve heard Alex Jones talk about occult elites. I’ve watched QAnon build cinematic universes out of trafficking rumors. I’ve listened to No Agenda break down elite hypocrisy. I’ve read the “more slavery now than ever before” statistics for decades.

By the time Epstein became front-page news, it didn’t feel like a genre shift. It felt like the latest episode in a very long series about power, secrecy, vice, and the fact that when people operate without constraint, they often slide toward appetite.

That doesn’t make it acceptable. It makes it unsurprising.

We’ve also lived through decades of cultural contradictions. People dismiss the satanic panic of the 1980s as hysteria but insist that modern revelations are categorically different, as if exploitation was invented in 1995. Meanwhile, everyone quietly understands that wealth plus insulation plus status equals access, and access plus lack of accountability creates rot.

On top of that, I’ve seen enough of the social climbing ecosystem to know how proximity works. There are always “tests.” Always blurred lines. Always a gradient from harmless indulgence to moral compromise. Power circles are rarely wholesome summer camps.

And culturally, we’ve never exactly been naive about age gaps, sexual scandal, or hypocrisy. America pretends to be shocked while simultaneously producing endless narratives about the older executive and the barely-legal assistant. Europe shrugs at age differences that would light up American cable news for weeks. Hawaii’s age of consent was 14 until 2001. The world has always had wildly inconsistent norms.

So when people clutch pearls as if they’ve just discovered that powerful men can be grotesque, I feel less outrage theater and more weary recognition.

The revelation isn’t that depravity exists. The revelation is that some people thought it didn’t.

That’s my Gen X baseline.

Yeah, strong talk. I mean, The UK and Europe can still intervene and break NATO limitations and go in there with boots anyway. Europe is being a wuss. They should have risked nuclear oblivion and global escalation with talk like this. www.gov.uk/governmen…

My theory is not that Trump quietly looks for a legal substitute for tariffs. My theory is that he takes the ruling personally, treats it like humiliation, and responds with an escalation designed to make the Court, Congress, and U.S. trading partners regret stopping him.

In other words, not a workaround. A punishment.

The move I expect is an “oh yeah?” move: if you say he cannot use tariffs the way he wants, he pivots to tools that are more explicitly economic warfare, especially sanctions-style authorities and other national-security powers that are still legal. The point is not just to keep pressure on trade. The point is to show that tariffs were actually the gentler option.

That is the whole spite logic.

Tariffs are ugly, but they are still a market tool. They raise costs. They distort trade. But they still leave a lane open for buying, selling, and adapting. Sanctions and other wartime-style economic tools can be much harsher. They can freeze, block, prohibit, blacklist, and force companies and banks to choose sides. That is a different vibe entirely. That is not “pay more.” That is “you are cut off.”

So my prediction is that Trump, feeling persecuted and challenged, goes theatrical with it. He does not just replace the tariff mechanism. He upgrades the severity to make a point:

“You said I could not use tariffs. Fine. Here is something far more aggressive, and this one is legal.”

That is why I think the emotional engine matters more than the legal details. If he frames the ruling as a technical correction, he adjusts. If he frames it as betrayal, he escalates. And his political style has always been to turn limits into a stage. If one lever is removed, he reaches for a louder lever. If the Court closes one door, he kicks open a side door and makes sure everyone hears it.

So the prediction is not just “different policy tool.” It is a message strategy wrapped around a legal pivot. Use sanctions or sanctions-like powers against quasi-allies, increase the pain, then tell the public and business community:

“You should have let me do tariffs. That was the moderate version.”

That is the prediction. Not policy refinement. Not constitutional humility. Spite escalation through a more coercive legal lane.

Kvetching is usually a sign that the basics are handled. The lights are on. Food is available. The streets mostly work. Institutions are imperfect but functional enough to be criticized. People feel safe enough to demand better. In that sense, complaint is not always decadence. It is often a symptom of stability.

A society in real collapse does not spend all day arguing about tone, process, fairness, or whether a system feels alienating. People in collapse improvise, endure, flee, barter, hide, repair, and survive. They are busy with first-order problems. Complaint, especially organized public complaint, usually shows that a culture has enough surplus to move beyond mere survival and start fighting over quality, standards, and the last 20%.

That is why constant criticism can be annoying and still be healthy. It often means people expect things to work and believe they can be improved. It means they have not given up. It means there is enough social trust left to assume that speaking up might matter. Even protest, in many cases, depends on a functioning system beneath it. You need roads to march on, platforms to post on, and enough institutional restraint to believe dissent will not automatically get you disappeared.

The danger is not the complaining itself. The danger starts when a culture loses perspective. When discomfort gets confused with catastrophe. When inconvenience gets framed as oppression. When every flaw becomes proof that the whole civilization is illegitimate. That is where healthy criticism can curdle into moral panic.

And that is the trap. The last 20% is the hardest part. It is one thing to build order, abundance, and relative peace. It is another thing entirely to perfect them. A stable society can improve for generations and still never become utopia. If people forget that, they start demanding impossible outcomes at impossible speed. Frustration rises. Patience collapses. Then the temptation arrives: force, purity, control, a strong hand to “fix it.”

So yes, only healthy cultures complain, and that is often a good sign. It means the culture is alive enough to argue with itself. The task is not to silence the kvetching. The task is to keep perspective while doing it, so reform stays reform and does not mutate into hysteria, purity politics, or authoritarianism.

Only spoiled, rich, entitled communities spend all day kvetching. Once a society gets the big things mostly right, like lights on, shelves full, streets functioning, people start treating the remaining 20% as proof of collapse. That final stretch toward “utopia” is brutally hard, maybe impossible, and the frustration turns ugly fast. Perspective disappears, grievance becomes identity, and people start inviting authoritarians in to “fix” what comfort made them unable to tolerate.

Billionaires in America are gods.

Not metaphors. Not exaggerations. Gods. They do not need to be liked. They need to be treated like gods.

Scrape before them. Offer sacrifice. Bring tithe. Speak their names with weight. Adoration does not require affection. Fear is acceptable. Awe is acceptable. Deference is acceptable. What is not acceptable, in a system like this, is casual contempt.

Because when gods are treated casually, they leave.

This has been true since the robber barons. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt. We did not approach them like neighbors. We carved their names into stone. We built temples in their honor and called them libraries. We understood instinctively that scale demands ceremony.

Over the last thirty years, federal abundance blurred the theology. Money flowed so widely that people forgot the hierarchy. Rain felt automatic. Gratitude thinned. Entitlement thickened. The gods receded behind bureaucracy and people started speaking about them like they were just men with large bank accounts.

They are not just men.

They are concentrated power at mythic scale.

Trump embodies this cleanly. Praise him and doors open. Cross him and things close. Agencies shrink. Funding evaporates. Access disappears. It isn’t subtle. It isn’t delicate. It is godlike behavior in a modern form.

The broader billionaire class operates the same way. They expect acknowledgment for the crops. They expect tithe back. They expect constant reinforcement that the rain came from them. Not from “the system.” Not from “the public.” From them. When that reinforcement stops, they withdraw.

And when they withdraw, it feels like drought.

The mistake isn’t recognizing inequality. The mistake is forgetting the structure. If survival depends on liquidity, and liquidity flows from personalities at mythic scale, then ritual becomes structural. Not because it is morally beautiful. Because it is functionally effective.

You don’t negotiate with gods as if they are peers.

You placate them. You honor them. You fear them. You maintain the relationship. Otherwise, the temples move. The rain follows.