The Oldest Consultant Reads the Crosstabs

Imagine Satan not with horns but with a laptop and a topline.

The number in front of him is brutal. Asked to choose between a candidate who wants to preserve America’s constitutional system of government and one who wants to make radical changes to it, 78 percent of likely voters pick preservation and 13 percent pick demolition, according to the Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,094 likely voters conducted August 10–12. Majorities in every party category choose the Constitution. On the economy, free-market capitalism beats socialism 51 to 30.

Any consultant handed that would resign the account. He does not, because he has never needed a majority. He has needed one susceptible party in a garden, and the shortest persuasion campaign on record — three sentences, total conversion. The pitch has not changed in all the intervening millennia. It was never disobey. It was you shall be as gods.

So Satan does what the best strategists do with a bad topline. He ignores it and reads down the columns.

Where Satan Goes to Work

Among voters 18 to 29, only 56 percent will defend the constitutional system. Twenty-nine percent want radical change and 15 percent aren’t sure — which means nearly half of the youngest cohort is either hostile to the American order or has no settled opinion about whether it should survive.

Among voters 30 to 39, socialism beats free-market capitalism outright, 44 percent to 36.

Then the softest ground of all: on the central economic question of the age, 19 percent of likely voters say they are not sure. Among women, it is 25 percent. One in five Americans who will actually cast a ballot has no view on capitalism versus socialism. That is not a bloc. That is an opening.

He notices two more things. Thirty-six percent of voters believe socialism will make things more affordable — rising to 55 percent among the under-30s. And among Americans who sat out 2024, 30 percent want radical constitutional change and 43 percent would pick the socialist. The disengaged are his recruiting pool, and the affordability claim is his crowbar, because it converts an economic falsehood into a grocery receipt.

Note also the trend he is riding. Support for capitalism over socialism has fallen roughly twenty points since early 2023, Rasmussen’s tracking shows. He is not fighting for a majority. He is compounding a slide.

Why This Vehicle

The devil is not a partisan. He is indifferent to the tax code. Like any consultant he selects for the largest available supply of sincere moral energy attached to the smallest available supply of self-suspicion, and a movement promising to remake human nature by statute is a beautifully engineered chassis.

Satan’s name means the accuser and the slanderer. Translated into our trade, his core competency is opposition research: find the flaw, isolate it, magnify it, present the fragment as the whole man. His signature move is not lying but inversion. He rarely sells evil as evil — he sells it as good, and good as evil. He does not ask anyone to hate; he asks them to love justice so ferociously that hatred arrives on its own, wearing a lanyard.

What the vehicle lets him install is the point. A doctrine of total explanation, so that every disparity has one cause, every opponent has one motive, and persuasion is quietly retired in favor of diagnosis. Salvation by politics, so the stakes are infinite and infinite stakes license anything. The end justifies the means. Grievance converted into permanent identity, because a man who forgives has slipped his grip. Control of the vocabulary, rewritten faster than ordinary people can memorize, so decent citizens fall silent rather than risk last year’s word — and silence is the objective, since a frightened electorate does not deliberate.

And the purity spiral, his masterpiece: a moral ladder with no top rung, on which members spend their strength climbing over one another instead of persuading anyone outside the building. He does not have to win such a movement in an election. He only has to keep it exciting. And his allies in the media are his willing minions. 

The Confusion of the Comfortable

Here the crosstabs turn strange, and the strangeness is the story.

Voters earning more than $200,000 a year are the most pro-capitalism income group in the survey, at 59 percent. At the same time they are also the income group most likely to want radical changes to the American system of government — 20 percent, well above the 13 percent national figure and higher than voters earning under $30,000. The most materially insulated Americans are simultaneously the most confident that the arrangement enriching them is correct and among the most willing to gamble the constitutional order that produced it.

Armstrong Williams named this without a single poll in front of him. Writing in The Epoch Times, he observed that some of the Americans most disillusioned with the country have benefited most extravagantly from its stability, education, prosperity, and security — and that the benefit may be the cause. “When you have never lived without freedom, freedom can become invisible.” Someone who has never feared arrest for criticizing the government experiences free speech as wallpaper. Someone who has never known real scarcity finds capitalism’s flaws larger than its abundance. Someone who has never lived under an authoritarian regime finds constitutional government tediously slow rather than extraordinarily protective.

Williams adds the mechanism our adversary values most: social media has built an economy of outrage in which nuance never travels and “gratitude is not provocative.” For a young person hunting identity and community, he writes, political outrage becomes a form of belonging.

Belonging. That is the actual product, and it is why the numbers move even when the arguments don’t.

The Vulnerability Satan is Exploiting

Which brings us to the thing conservatives keep missing when we answer socialism with charts.

Arthur Brooks argues in his new book, The Meaning of Your Life, that the West is suffering a “psychogenic epidemic” — mass suffering with no organic cause — and that its root is neither money nor politics nor generational grievance but a collapse of meaning. His figures are the same shape as our crosstabs: the share of teenagers who find life meaningless has doubled since 2008, and the share of college students seeking a meaningful philosophy of life has fallen from nearly 90 percent in the mid-1960s to under half. The people who by every material measure should be flourishing are the ones describing life as a simulation full of false rewards and fake experiences.

Read the poll again with that in hand. When 55 percent of under-30s say socialism will make things more affordable, they are not making an economic forecast. They are expressing hunger, and someone has told them where the food is. Salvation by politics is a counterfeit — but a counterfeit only circulates where the real currency has gone scarce. He is not selling an ideology to satisfied people. He is selling meaning to starving ones, and no rebuttal on the cost per unit of housing touches that transaction.

The Defense Against Evil

Brooks calls his prescription six “social antibodies,” and read as strategy rather than self-help they are an unusually complete campaign plan, because each one is a thing our adversary cannot counterfeit.

Ask the unanswerable questions — he cannot survive genuine puzzlement, only certainty he supplied. Give your heart away in actual love, not simulated intimacy — he cannot operate where people are known. Seek transcendence — he loses the moment politics stops being ultimate. Find a calling — a person with real work is not available for permanent recruitment. Immerse yourself in beauty — natural, artistic, and moral — because pride is humorless and beauty is free. And refuse to waste your suffering, since his whole business model requires that pain be converted into grievance rather than into wisdom.

Add the political corollaries, which follow directly. Refuse his vocabulary and translate everything into plain English: what does this do, to whom, on what date, at what cost. Run relentlessly on the material record, because his clients are magnificent at denunciation and helpless at administration, and arithmetic cannot be shamed. Make mercy the signature — welcome defectors without demanding a confession, and forbid your own side from destroying its own over imperfection. He can always outbid you on rage; he cannot bid at all on forgiveness.

And teach the whole story, which is Williams’s point and the harder half of ours. Not that America can do no wrong, not that America has done no right. “America can do better” demands progress; “America is irredeemable” abandons hope. Gratitude taught without demanding obedience is the single most effective inoculation available, and it is nearly free.

One warning, on the record. He is running the same shop on the other side of the aisle — the same pride, the same accusation, the same infinite stakes, the same warm permission to despise a neighbor. He is delighted when a movement that opposes him adopts his methods, because the methods are the product and the issues are packaging.

Brooks closes with Tolstoy’s Levin, wealthy and respected and “in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops,” who abandons the frantic search and finds meaning in his wife, his children, his workers, his fields, and a simple faith. We are, Brooks writes, starving inside a toy store.

That is the 13 percent, and the 19 percent, and the 44 percent of thirty-somethings. Not enemies of the Republic. Hungry people who have been handed a menu by the oldest consultant in the business.

Feed them something real and his numbers collapse. He was not beaten, the first time, by a better-funded operation or a cleverer argument. He was beaten by someone who refused to become like him, absorbed the worst he had, and would not stop loving the people he had targeted.