The American Enterprise Institute paid Jonah Goldberg actual money to [it has been bruited about] have Claude AI write this. But t'was I who added the emphasis.
Why Everyone Is Rushing to Label Themselves an ‘Independent’
By Jonah Goldberg
Los Angeles Times
October 01, 2025
Independents are so hot right now — and will be for the foreseeable future.
According to a major survey commissioned by CNN, nearly half of all Americans — 44% — call themselves independents while only 28% and 27%, respectively, identify as Republicans or Democrats.
I have a theory as to why. But I have to throw some fancy terms to explain it.
“Independent” is what students of semiotics call an “empty signifier,” a term that has very little, if any, substantive content. If you describe yourself as an independent, I still have to ask you additional questions about what you actually believe. All you’ve told me to that point is that you reject a party label (believe me, I sympathize).
It’s hard for young people to believe today, but Republican and Democrat labels used to work much the same way. A little more than a generation ago if you claimed to be on one side or the other, I’d have to ask a follow-up question to figure out if you were conservative or liberal, pro-life or pro-choice, for gun rights or against, etc.
Today, the same goes for independents, which used to be code for “swing voters” or “centrists.” Not anymore. According to the survey, some are “Democratic Lookalikes” (24%) and others are “Republican Lookalikes” (12%). They reject the label but ultimately vote like they don’t. The rest are among “The Checked Out” (27%), “The Disappointed Middle” (16%) and the “Upbeat Outsiders” (22%). The demographics and ideologies of these groups vary widely. In short, calling yourself an independent says something — that you don’t like the party labels — but it isn’t a one-size-fits all ideological or political signifier...
Also, and apropos of nothing, we are quickly approaching the 16th anniversary of this post from one of those dirty, disreputable hippy-types. The sort of person who Jonah Goldberg loathes and blocked on Twitter because such people always ruing the happyfuntalk because they carry around a haversack full of damning receipts from the Before Time and the After Time. The sort of low, perverse type to whom the AEI would never pay real money to fire up old Claude AI and prompt it to shart out 800 words on "Whither these so-called 'Independents?'".
16 years ago, AI didn't really exist outside of science fiction. In fact, it was so long ago that they still sold porn at gas stations!
If you recall, 2009 was also the year Barack Obama was sworn into office, thanks in no small part to the Republican Bush administration so comprehensively shitting the bed that Barack Obama could win the 2008 election.
For the Right, 2009 was Year One of what would be an eight-year-long racist primal scream: their reaction to a black Democrat being elected president.
One of Jonah "Doughy Pantload" Goldberg's contributions to the maelstrom was his 2008 "Liberals are the Real Nazis" tract called "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning". By this time Goldberg had already auctioned off his soul to the National Review for remaindered prices and was busy pretending to ignore the slagging his book was getting from places like the Guardian UK ( “seriously flawed, bizarre and ultimately risible”) and sources like historian Robert Paxton, a leading scholar of fascism, who dismissed Goldberg’s book as “a conceptual mess" and other historians who described it variously as "poor scholarship" and "historical travesty".
In addition to lying about the Left, Goldberg argued in the book that American Right was "immune to the fascist temptation" due to its commitment to constitutionalism. A claim which, by 2022, had been so thoroughly debunked as obviously ludicrous that he was forced to walk it back.
2009 was also the year that Mr. David Brooks used his New York Times to advise president Obama that Brooks had suddenly discovered the existence of jillions of "independents" out there, all whom just so happened to align ideologically with Brooks' own version of Republicanism, and that if Obama knew what was good for him, he'd better pay heed to what these "independents" wanted.
From me, 16 years ago and somehow completely unfunded by the AEI:
And since his schtick depends on squeezing a few extra drops out of the same old lemons week after week, Bobo is never happier or more in his element than when he is curled up in his NYT Snuggie, sipping cocoa from his David Fucking Broder commemorative mug in front of a big, roaring fire of Conventional Washington Wisdom, and repeating in well-modulated tones what everyone else in D.C. is thinking. Which is why he let his Villager spurs all the way out as he rode the subject of the "independent" voter into the ground, opining in great, farty word-pillows about the mores and folkways of a group of people who -- by definition -- have no, definable commonality.
So after stitching together a couple of snippets from a couple of polls into a big, floppy sack, Bobo dumped every loose button and paper-clip of his own privileged, white, suburban, middle-aged, Boomer Burkean bourgeoisie terror into it and called it analysis...
What Independents Want
By DAVID BROOKS
Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories.
Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this. They don’t have institutional affiliations. They don’t look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren’t many commentators who come from an independent perspective.
...
The title of that long-ago post was "The 'Independent' Granfalloon". In it I went into great detail about what "granfalloon" meant and why it was the perfect definition of "independent"
...Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":
"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.
Consider that if you defined “independent” as someone who, broadly speaking, supported a Liberal agenda (not the imaginary, shadow-puppets-made-out-of-Rush-Limbaugh-stool-samples “Liberal agenda” that Conservatives have been using to scare stupid people into committing economic suicide for 30 years, but the real Liberal agenda) but was not welded to a particular candidate, or even to a particular party, then that would describe me pretty well.
But I'm also quite sure that a fair chunk of the the 5% of the voting public which -- just 24 hours before the 2004 Presidential elections -- still couldn't quite make up their minds whether to vote for Kerry/Edwards, or the lying, feeble-minded frat boy (and his homicidal regent) who had fucked up everything he had ever touched ...consider themselves "independents".
Rebel nuns who might just think that letting a rape victim have access to abortion services would not be the end of the world?
Independents.
Snake-handling queer-hating Leviticans who think the GOP is too gutless because it won’t advocate rounding up Teh Gay and putting them in camps?
Independents.
Bunker-dwelling survivalists?
Independents.
Pimple-faced 30-something John Galt wannabees who masturbate themselves blind to “Atlas Shrugged” because that hot chick in accounting won’t give them a second look, but won’t she be sorry when Objectivists stop the engine of the world and people like her will have to stand in line to offer their vajay-jays to the alpha studs wealth producers!
Independents.
Klansmen who want to smoke a little weed?
Independents.
America's compulsive political middle-children who have been taught so thoroughly to compromise their way out of any conflict that they will travel a 1,000 miles just to find a fence to straddle?
The opinionless little ciphers who just want to make sure they line up with a winner?
The moral cowards wouldn’t pick a side with a gun pressed to their heads, because of the terror of then being committed to actually doing something instead of snarking their way through life declaring "Well, ya know, bote sides are juss a buncha crooks anyway!" about every situation regardless of context and circumstances?
If asked, I guarantee you all virtually of those people would tell you that they think of themselves as “independent”...
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
Remember, this was 16 years ago, when even whispering such things on tiny blogs marked you as a pariah. Untouchable. Certainly unhirable by any respectable institution.
Now, 16 years later, as long as you're in The Club, outfits like the AEI will pay you to [it is rumored] ask AI to conjure you up 800 words about how "independents" are anything but.
Funny old world.
