David Tucker

Why even have primaries if everything is decided by a stupid tradition about the running mate being the nominee. Would people say the same thing if Trump had won in 2020 and Mike Pence was the vice president in 2024?

In the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel offered one of the most ambitious visions of history ever conceived. History, he argued, was not a random sequence of events but a rational process; a grand dialectic in which opposing forces (thesis and antithesis) collide and resolve into higher stages of development (synthesis). Through this conflict, human freedom and history gradually unfolded toward their ultimate realisation. It was Hegel’s ideas that so inspired Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels when they wrote the Communist Manifesto. But they turned it upside down: where Hegel saw ideas driving history, Marx insisted that material conditions and class struggle were the real engine. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat became the great thesis and antithesis of the modern age. Their conflict would inevitably produce a communist synthesis in which class itself disappeared. History had a direction, and that direction justified almost any means. This dialectical vision proved extraordinarily influential. Progressive movements inherited the belief that society advances through struggle between opposing forces, and that the current order must be overcome rather than merely improved. Conflict was no longer an unfortunate feature of politics; it was the necessary path to progress. In the late twentieth century the same structure was applied to culture and identity. Race, gender and other categories replaced economic class as the primary axes of conflict. Oppressor and oppressed is the thesis and antithesis. And the goal is not just economic redistribution but the transformation of consciousness, language and institutions themselves. What began as Hegel’s philosophical drama of history thus became a political method: perpetual critique, the identification of new contradictions and the insistence that reconciliation is a form of betrayal. The dialectic, once a theory of historical development, had become a permanent mode of political warfare.