Chris Abraham

Every time the left tightens its purity tests, it doesn’t just punish individuals—it exiles whole constituencies and cannibalizes its own coalition. Chavez is simply the latest flashpoint. The underlying pattern is what matters. When a figure tied to labor identity gets publicly stripped and discarded, the signal doesn’t land as “we have standards.” It lands as: you are disposable. And workers notice.

Union members, tradespeople, and rank-and-file labor aren’t reading this through elite moral frameworks. They’re reading it as a hierarchy: identity politics and ideological compliance now outrank bread-and-butter worker solidarity. That may feel righteous in the moment, but it is politically radioactive. People do not stay in coalitions where they feel one misstep—real or alleged—can get them erased.

So they don’t argue. They don’t reform. They leave.

And when they leave, they don’t drift into some neutral holding area. They get absorbed into the only coalition explicitly signaling, “we’ll take you as you are.” That’s the MAGA big tent. Not because it’s perfect, but because it doesn’t present itself as a tribunal waiting to expel them.

This is how you lose a generation of workers. The left keeps treating coalition politics like a moral sorting machine instead of a numbers game. It burns down imperfect allies in pursuit of ideological purity, then acts surprised when the ashes don’t vote. Worse, it keeps doing this in highly visible, symbolic cases that ripple outward far beyond the individual involved.

Call it what it is: cannibalization.

And cannibal movements don’t win durable power. They shrink, radicalize, and fracture until they’re left preaching to the already convinced. Meanwhile, the people they pushed out don’t disappear—they realign.

If the goal is to permanently cede working-class loyalty, this is a flawless strategy. If the goal is to win and govern, it’s catastrophic.

Mercantilism was a 16th–18th century economic theory and policy where European nations sought to maximize wealth—primarily gold and silver—by maximizing exports and minimizing imports, creating a state-driven “zero-sum” game of competition. Key features included heavy protectionism, colonial exploitation to secure raw materials, and promoting a favorable trade balance to build national power.

Not because it demands anything. It doesn’t. It just sits in the window with a six-inch whip antenna and does its job. But I check on it anyway. I look at uptime, battery voltage, and channel activity more often than I expected. There’s no real reason to, but I do it the same way I used to check on machines I was running years ago.

It has been up for over 15 days now. The only time it rebooted was when I chose to update the firmware. That detail matters to me more than it probably should. It reminds me of running early Linux boxes, where uptime was something you paid attention to and quietly took pride in. The machine would tell you how long it had been running, and you would internalize that number as a kind of score.

This feels the same. The node is simple and mostly invisible, but the fact that it keeps going without intervention makes it feel like something you’re maintaining, even if you’re not actively doing anything.

Functionally, it’s straightforward. It connects to a default LongFast channel, shows messages from that channel, and relays packets in the background. I only see one group chat, but I know it’s also passing along other traffic that shares the same radio settings, even if I can’t read it. That happens quietly, without any interface, which makes it feel more like infrastructure than a gadget.

The physical setup is minimal. A small purple device, a short antenna, placed near a window. No tuning, no constant adjustment. It just runs. And because it runs, I keep an eye on it.

That’s where the Tamagotchi comparison actually holds. Not because it needs care, but because I’ve decided it matters that it stays alive.