Politically, We All Live In Piker’s World Now

The parties used to drive politics. Today, though, malevolent “influencers” like Hasan Piker drive the parties.

Allan J. Feifer | August 19, 2026

Broadly speaking, there are three classes of people most of us fall into, and they form what I term the Reality Triangle:

Pragmatists—People who make decisions based on what works in the real world. Outcomes drive them.

Opportunists—People who act based on advantage—personal gain, leverage, timing, or self-interest.

Idealists—People who act based on principle—moral frameworks or philosophical commitments.

However, there is a fourth, much smaller and, to my mind, darker group of people: True Believers, who are existential threats because their calculations of self-interest are subordinate to their emotional commitment, making them resistant to, or even activated by, evidence to the contrary.

Societies function well when people remain responsive to reality. Outcomes, incentives, and consequences induce corrections. Societies become destabilized when people unresponsive to those mechanisms acquire enough influence to shape the behavior of everyone else.

That may be happening now in American politics, with the Democrat party discovering that it has less control over its political future than it believes. For generations, political influence generally flowed through a standardized institutional structure:

Party → Candidates → Media → Voters

The party helped determine which candidates emerged. The media helped shape the political conversation. Candidates sought votes by appealing to voters within that system.

But a different model is rapidly gaining sway:

Influencer → Community → Political Identity → Voters → Candidates

That distinction represents a shift in where political power originates. The political influencer builds community first. The community develops its own language, heroes, villains, grievances, and political identity. That identity then shapes what candidates the voters demand. The political party may find itself responding to a........

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