Legacy notions of what it means to be an American Democrat or Republican (or Green, or Libertarian, etc.) are increasingly inapplicable. There're a lot of better ways to draw the new party lines, and I'm proposing yet another framework; hopefully, the simplest useful one.
The conceit of my framework is that Americans are sorting themselves into three emerging cults. Most of us have views overlapping with all three cults', but the value systems of each are so incompatible that I expect less overlap over time. I believe that only the last of these cults is capable of reliably producing rather than destroying value and that it will come to dominate America for that reason.
People who see money as the territory of value rather than a map of it. Picture Plutus as a big scoreboard where cash is the number that ultimately matters, no matter how it's earned. This is the most popular cult in America, and its members include the most expert wielders of control over man, such as the professional-managerial class. Its most successful members favor rent-seeking over value creation in zero-sum games of capital accumulation.
Plutus cultists support the other cults instrumentally to achieving better outcomes in their games. Their elites include the masters of financial, psychological, and legal arcana - Bankers, Advertisers, And Lawyers. They're constantly competing for every little edge, and they're all sharp as hell.
Blank-slate absolutists. (This entire framework collapses if blank-slatism is true, because the Veritas cultists should then also believe in it, but it's not true.) The basic idea is that you can nurture any given human to become any kind of human. This belief in the irrelevance of nature leads to a couple of absurd conclusions that make the Agdistis cultists the most like actual cultists:
Agdistis cultists are utopians: they believe in the perfectibility of the human organism. They're driven by a moral imperative to correct inequality of outcomes, and view many forms of value destruction as acceptable in the service of this greater value. (Since the only way to achieve universally equal outcomes is for everyone to die, it's also a death cult, but with enough extra steps to confound that teleology.)
People who wield control over nature to produce the requirements of a self-sustaining civilization, including technology to enhance that control, so-named because to do so requires at least some working sense of natural reality. Veritas cultists focus on value creation grounded in how the world actually works: farming that feeds us, machines that power our lives, software that runs those machines and makes us better at making those machines, etc. This cult generates growth that prevents the world from collapsing into a zero-sum game; it is the only cult capable of making everyone richer.
I'm rooting for the Veritas cultists: somebody's gotta keep the lights on, and it's getting hard to deny that Agdistis is the road to load-shedding and worse. It's easy to imagine Plutus cultists falling in line; they at least have the good sense to prefer being rich, and that should be enough for Veritas to win, I hope.
Ain't democracy great?