Boogeymen & Ballrooms

Politics likes monsters because monsters are useful. They simplify nuance, animate donor lists, and convert vague anxieties into get-out-the-vote memos. A fresh poll—reported by CNN summarizing CNBC data—offers a reminder: Americans still prefer their monsters tidy. A MAGA candidate registers as a more mobilizing threat than a democratic socialist one, and intensity matters: 50% say they’d be less likely to vote for a democratic socialist (with 32% more likely), but 57% are less likely to back a MAGA candidate (only 27% more likely). The headline is not that socialism is popular; it’s that MAGA is scarier.

This matters because scare tactics are fungible political capital. As the CNN piece dryly notes, “one of the most valuable things in politics is an effective boogeyman.” Boogeymen do more than frighten—they justify budgets, centralize power, and make complex policy choices legible enough to sell on cable. That translation from fear to funding is where the next story begins.

If you want to follow the money trail from outrage to policy, watch for contracts. Monsters need tools; tools need vendors. When fear becomes a policy imperative, private data brokers raise their hands and whisper: “We can help.”

ICE to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million is not a dry procurement note. It’s a political logic rendered in contract language. According to documents first reported by 404 Media, the Department of Homeland Security plans to buy continuous access to Thomson Reuters’ person- and entity-level data—names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity flags, social-media posts, and geolocation streams—to hunt for voter fraud and immigration violations.

Call it the bureaucratization of suspicion: a maintenance contract for the feeling that someone, somewhere, is cheating. The scale is significant—this is not a one-off database pull but an ongoing feed meant to monitor “millions of people.” The civil-liberties problem is obvious. The political problem is worse: when a party has a handy boogeyman (see: MAGA), it can credibly demand surveillance to root out the threat it has advertised. Contractors love that.

Two practical consequences follow. First, surveillance becomes normalized as election infrastructure; the rhetoric of security morphs into contracts that outlast headlines. Second, the people most likely to be swept up are the already-marginalized—immigrants, people of color, and activists whose lives intersect with the kinds of informal networks that keep social movements alive. The public-policy question, therefore, is no longer only “are there cheats?” but “who gets to be watched in the name of preventing cheats?”

María Corina Machado’s return from Washington looks, at first glance, like a simple democratic script: exile leader rallies international support, returns to contest power. But The New Yorker shows a more complicated theater—a story of earthquakes, oil revenues, and the limits of external leverage.

Machado fled after a disputed 2024 victory and has spent months in Washington, meeting senior U.S. figures. The June earthquakes killed tens of thousands and exposed regime vulnerabilities; yet the government has been able to rebuild legitimacy through oil—some ~70 million barrels shipped to the U.S.—and by consolidating control over institutions. Machado’s strategy—her covert “600K” operation to document ballots, the comanditos networks, the use of Starlink for logistics—is tactical, not merely symbolic. Still, it depends on outside pressure enough to make a contested transition viable.

Here’s the hard edge: external support can confer legitimacy, but it also instrumentalizes opposition leaders. Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize and meetings with American policymakers amplify her voice, but they also make her dependent on a geopolitical moment that can quickly cool. As she put it bluntly to the New Yorker:

"The people do matter… I was elected. I have what’s most valuable—people’s trust."

That trust is fragile when the state controls borders, ballots, and the flow of oil money. Exile can be a platform; it can also be a gilded holding pattern. The U.S. policy frame—talk of stabilization and economics rather than a clear electoral pathway—reveals the gap between moral support and real leverage on the ground.

If surveillance is the state’s method, nightlife has often been the movement’s method. The Salon piece on queer nightlife during the AIDS crisis reminds us that dancing was not escape; it was infrastructure. Clubs were clinics, fundraisers, message boards, and the implicit command center of mutual aid. Joy was a survival technology.

Personal recollections—club owners, drag performers, organizers—show that the dance floor did practical work: it raised money, stored information, and coordinated care. Researchers even find that synchronized movement deepens social bonds, making joy a literal glue for collective action. The point is tactical: joy matters when it’s tied to networks that can be called upon in a crisis.

This matters today because the same choreography—celebration that doubles as organizing—helps movements evade and outlast surveillance. The Salon piece ends on a sober note that doubles as a strategy:

"Dancing didn’t solve the crisis, but it helped us survive long enough to keep fighting."

Those three phrases—survive, keep fighting, and precedent—should be in every activist’s playbook facing a political moment where data contracts and a hungry security state make public life riskier.

There is a throughline stitched through these disparate stories: fear—manufactured or real—creates demand, and demand creates actors. Sometimes those actors are data brokers billing the federal government for access to millions of records. Sometimes they are opposition leaders in exile trying to convert international attention into domestic leverage. Sometimes they are club owners turning a dance floor into a mutual-aid node.

A few blunt takeaways:

• Boogeyman economics: The CNN summary of the CNBC poll shows that which boogeyman you pick matters. MAGA still frightens voters more than democratic socialism; that fright has downstream political utility. CNN
• Surveillance-industrial logic: Fear needs plumbing. A $125 million contract with Thomson Reuters to monitor people’s data is not an accident; it’s the plumbing. 404 Media
• Instrumentalized empathy: International sympathy for exile leaders, as with María Corina Machado, is an asset and a dependency. The New Yorker
• Joy as durable infrastructure: If movements are networks, the sites of joy are nodes—vital, but not sufficient without organizing. Salon

Across these threads, the political operator’s playbook is consistent: identify a threat people can feel, build or buy the tools to monitor it, put a preferable polity or politician in the spotlight, and—if necessary—use cultural infrastructures as camouflage or cover. It works until it doesn’t. That failure mode often looks like a country where the opposition is either watched to death or exiled, while activists keep dancing in the margins.

Andy Burnham’s recent rise in the U.K.—a northern politician promising devolution and “Manchesterism”—is a useful mirror. NPR notes he is built on local credibility rather than metropolitan menace. His creed is not to invent monsters but to stitch governance back into places people recognize. That’s one antidote to the boogeyman economy: politics that delivers without manufacturing dread.

So there are two ways to think about power now. One is the marketplace of fear—monsters, surveillance contracts, exile as theatre. The other is patient, place-based politics and the small, stubborn acts—fundraisers in basements, livestreamed Pride events, local housing builds—that accumulate into authority. Both are real strategies. One eats privacy and trust; the other builds institutions.

Final line: if politics is choreography, then remember who you want leading the dance. Do you want someone who profits from the scream, or someone who learns the steps to keep people together? The answer matters. And yes—the dance floor still matters.