The System Is Ours. Let's fix it.

The night before cage fighters bloodied each other on the White House South Lawn, Ja Rule — the rapper who topped the charts in 1999 by packaging street menace into radio-friendly hits — performed inside a members-only club in Washington founded by Donald Trump Jr. He sang those hits, a quarter-century on, for a crowd eating caviar kept cold by an ice sculpture. The scene comes from Politico Magazine’s recent tour of the 1990s nostalgia sweeping Trump’s Washington, and it is no outlier: the culture-keepers of the MAGA movement are fluent in the anti-establishment canon of their youth.

MAGA sees itself as a reaction to the “old” political establishment in the same way that hip-hop and alt-rock were reactions to the musical establishment back in the 1990s. The article quotes the MAGA podcaster Jack Posobiec: “This idea that you can break the rules and still be successful, that is almost the quintessential difference between us and the old right.”

In recent weeks, we’re seeing how the same current runs through the Democratic Party, where insurgents are toppling incumbents and the energy belongs to those who promise confrontation with their own establishment. Both parties are now competing for the same voter — the cynic — with different soundtracks. The most energetic branches of the left and the right agree with each other and with Posobiec: “If the system got us to a bad place, then we need to break the system to get us back to a good place.”

But breaking things just leaves you with broken things. Transgression is an aesthetic, not a governing agenda.

I understand the cynicism. I live in San Francisco, where a single party has governed for a generation, and the results speak plainly: some 22,000 of our neighbors sleep unsheltered across the Bay Area. Housing costs two and a half times what it does in Austin. BART operator compensation grew 32 percent while ridership fell 57 percent. One in four low-income eighth graders is proficient in math. You can’t look at those numbers and defend our institutions as they are today.

But anger is not a plan. While anti-institutional politics is superb at winning attention and primaries, it has yet to show it can run a transit system, permit a housing development, or teach a child to read.

Small-r republicanism starts from a different premise, the founding one: in a republic, the government is not “them.” It is us. Our institutions — school boards, city councils, transit agencies, the parties themselves — are not an occupying power to be overthrown. They are our common property, badly maintained. You do not burn down a house you own. You fix it, even when the previous tenants left it in shameful condition. Franklin’s famous answer — “a republic, if you can keep it” — was an assignment, not a boast.

What does the work look like? Less dramatic than a cage match, I admit.

At Frontier Republicans & Friends, the work starts with honest conversations over dinner. Over the past six months, we have hosted gatherings across the Bay Area where Republicans, independents, and disaffected Democrats talk about governance like adults — 18 dinners, more than 130 guests, 89 founding members and counting — a majority of them invited not by me but by fellow members.

It looks like showing up to run for unglamorous offices — the ones you must win before anyone trusts you with a glamorous one. In the coming years, we will recruit and support strong candidates for school boards, city councils, and special districts — the rooms where the Bay Area’s daily failures are manufactured, and where they can be fixed.

And it looks like opposition to bad ideas paired with a clear vision of a better alternative. This November, we are likely to oppose the regional transit tax — not because transit shouldn’t be funded, but because the agencies asking for fourteen more years of our money have not yet earned it. We will make our case with audited numbers, acknowledge the strongest arguments on the other side, and describe the conditions under which we would support more funding.

We value our transit systems and want them to endure — which means evolving them so their costs stay in line with the value they deliver.

Politics is cyclical, and parties that win on attitude eventually have to govern on competence — or lose to someone who can. When that turn comes, the people who spent the intervening years learning to run things will be better prepared to meet the moment than those who spent them curating playlists.

So this is an invitation, especially to the politically homeless: if burn-it-down leaves you cold, but defend-the-status-quo insults your intelligence, you are not actually homeless. You are a small-r republican. There are more of us than you think, and we are already at the table — passing the bread, comparing school data, planning the repair.

The system is ours. Come help fix it.

Frontier Republicans & Friends hosts small dinners across the Bay Area. If you’d like to join one, get connected at frontierrepublicans.org.