Politics

MAGA Is Shingles. You Don't Cure Shingles

Accountability and reform are both lovely ideas. America will do neither. You can bet your bottom dollar on it.

Geoff Anderson

17 Apr 2026 — 4 min read

Fam: I know I am hitting you hard this week (and next too). There is so much going on, and so much fuckery in the ether that my brain is bursting with things to talk about.

I apologize for the deluge to your inboxes, I just have so much to talk about it is killing me. And I am neglecting plenty of noise in teh Tech world too. ARGH!

Jonathan Last (JVL) over at The Bulwark dropped a piece this week (link to a PDF of it boo on paywalls) posing the question that's apparently keeping the anti-MAGA universe up at night: when the Tangerine Tyrant is finally shuffled off the national stage, does the opposition go hard on accountability, or do they pour their energy into structural reform?

It's a good framework. The Hungary parallel is genuinely useful, and JVL is honest enough to admit, buried near the end, that he's not convinced the Democratic Party or the American people are serious enough to demand either one. Which is, as it turns out, the whole ballgame.

Because here's the thing about both options: they're wishcasting. Extremely earnest, well-intentioned wishcasting dressed up as strategic analysis.

Let's dive into the accountability question first, since that's the one that gets everyone's underwear[1] in a twist every election cycle[2].

America does not do accountability. Full Stop. This is not a recent development. This is load-bearing to who we are as a country. Nixon walked. The Iran-Contra crew got pardoned and then recycled into subsequent Republican administrations like bad leftovers. The people who sold us the Iraq War are currently on your television giving measured foreign policy commentary with complete sincerity. The financial criminals who lit the global economy on fire in 2008 got bonuses.

We talk a big game. God, do we love to talk. For all the fire and brimstone that gets performed in the pews of American churches, where Christianity functions more as a social uniform, a badge of honor, than a moral framework, there is precisely zero appetite for the kind of sustained, grinding, uncomfortable reckoning that actual accountability requires. We like the idea of accountability the way we like the idea of finally getting in shape. Sounds great. Rarely happens. Somebody always finds a reason to move on.

Reform? Sure, in theory. Kill the filibuster. Pack the court. Expand the House. DC statehood. Puerto Rico if they want it. These are all reasonable, achievable ideas that the Democratic Party has been halfheartedly waving at like a slow-moving taxi for approximately thirty years, while simultaneously discovering innovative new ways to fumble the ball at the one-yard line. The political will for structural reform is a rare and fragile thing, and it tends to evaporate the moment it meets the United States Senate, which is itself one of the structural problems in need of reform. It's turtles all the way down.

So, what actually happens when MAGA finally loses?

Nothing gets extinguished. It goes quiet for a cycle, maybe two. It waits. And then it comes back, dumber and angrier than before, because the conditions that produced it – economic anxiety, cultural resentment, a political class that spent decades managing working people as a demographic rather than governing them as constituents – none of that shit gets addressed by a congressional hearing or an executive order.

MAGA is shingles. You had chickenpox as a kid, you recovered, you moved on. But the virus stayed in your nervous system. Stress the system enough and boom: it's back, it's pissed, and it's resistant to whatever you tried last time.

Subcribe

Now: The Nuremberg crowd

Holy shit, you people need to read a book. Not a think-piece. An actual book, about actual history.

There is a growing and very loud contingent online – and bleeding into more mainstream commentary – that is absolutely convinced this moment calls for Nuremberg-style trials to finally lance the MAGA boil. The appetite for it is understandable. The historical analysis behind it is embarrassing.

The original Nuremberg trials addressed crimes against humanity of a scale and specificity that had no precedent in modern law. They were conducted by the occupying powers of a defeated nation-state after a war that killed tens of millions of people. The United States is not an occupied country. MAGA, for all its authoritarian rot, hasn't produced the systematic, documented, industrialized atrocity that made Nuremberg both necessary and legally coherent. Reaching for that comparison doesn't make you a serious person demanding serious accountability. It makes you someone who learned history from a Twitter (or Bluesky) thread and a documentary they maybe half-watched.

And here's the thing that really kills this argument: the Nuremberg trials didn't kill Nazism. De-Nazification was a decades-long, imperfect, grinding process that required economic reconstruction, institutional overhaul, and generational change. The Marshall Plan did more to kill fascism than the trials did. The trials were necessary. They were not sufficient. They were the beginning of a process, not the end of one. And, they were mostly for show.

JVL closes his piece asking which you'd pick if you could only have one: accountability or reform. It's a good question. My answer is that it doesn't matter, because we're probably not getting either one in any meaningful form, and the sooner the people who want to fight MAGA actually come to terms with that, the sooner they can start having honest conversations about what a thirty-year project of actual cultural and political change looks like.

It won't be satisfying. It won't feel like justice. It will suck. It will feel like arguing with your cousin at Thanksgiving for the next decade and a half. I hope you have enough bourbon to get through it.

Welcome to the work. It isn't going to be easy, nor will it be satisfying. But it is necessary.

Musical Coda:

1 - this is "knickers" for my British and Aussie friends

2 - the amount of vitriol hurled at Biden and his AG, Merrick Garland is disingenuous. They were never going to go after the ringleaders, as is our custom, c.f: