Election Day always brings politics into the foreground — but today, it’s impossible to separate politics, economics, and power.
The machinery of government itself is on display: the shutdown entering its fifth week, the Supreme Court debating executive overreach, and New Yorkers choosing between competing visions of what fairness means in an age of debt and division.
We apologize to readers who’ve signed up to learn more about Dollar 2.0 and the “upgrade” of the global financial system we believe commenced with the Payments Innovation Conference hosted by the Federal Reserve on October 21st.
That’s part of a larger story which we are following with intent.
Today, however, Swan Dive is overtly political because the economy has become political by design. Money, power and politics are all uniquely woven into today’s headlines.
Gramsci’s “Long March” to the Present
The cultural currents shaping today’s election began a century ago.
Gramsci, an Italian Marxist jailed by Mussolini, argued that power doesn’t change through revolution alone. It changes when culture does — when institutions, universities, and moral language align around a new “common sense.”
That idea, which he called cultural hegemony, became the seed of what later thinkers called “the long march through the institutions.”
Saul Alinsky, organizing meatpackers and tenants in Chicago’s stockyards, turned that slow cultural infiltration into a street-level playbook: use existing systems — local councils, churches, unions — to force negotiation with power. Not revolution, but attrition. Not overthrow, but capture.
By the late 1960s, academics Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven advanced the logic to its bureaucratic limit: if you want to change the system, stress it. Enroll everyone eligible in welfare, flood the caseloads, force reform by collapse.
What began as a theory of social welfare became a political operating principle — that institutional overload could drive a new compact between the governed and the governing.
Their legacy reached Washington through the Motor Voter Act of 1993, signed by President Bill Clinton, which vastly expanded voter registration at public agencies. It was reform through participation — and, in practice, an early example of how policy can merge with activism.
Fast-forward to 2025. The government shutdown, stretching into its fifth week, isn’t a cartoon of dysfunction; it’s the logical endpoint of decades of political brinkmanship built on these theories. A healthcare system too costly to sustain, a fiscal structure too rigid to reform, and factions within both parties using the machinery of government itself as leverage. It’s not left versus right; it’s system versus strain.
Mamdani’s appeal in New York fits neatly into that arc. He speaks to voters who live in the gap between abundance and access — where luxury towers meet broken subways, and where cultural legitimacy has already shifted toward redistribution.
Gramsci would recognize the pattern: the “war of position” has moved from academia to city hall. The institutions have already changed their language. The politics is just catching up.
What follows is the market’s mirror to that same story — money, policy, and power negotiating the terms of a new order.
Mamdami Appears Twice on the Ballot
Lucky for voters in New York, Zohran Mamdani is so popular he’s listed twice on the ballot — once as the Democratic candidate, and again under the Working Families Party.
Perhaps it’s symbolic of how far to the left the city’s moral center has tilted. Mamdani’s appeal lies in blending radical economic proposals with a tone of inevitability. (Translation: free stuff).
As one New York Times columnist put it, “He speaks as though the future has already voted.”
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, hopes nostalgia can beat his own political baggage… and accusations of sexual misconduct.
The deeper question for political strategists is more than who wins when the polls close tonight — it’s how a city known as the world capital of money and finance is now poised to export socialist ideology to voting stations around the United States as the Democratic Party adopts his strategy against MAGA incumbents at a voting center near you.
The long march of Antonio Gramsci is all but complete and is maturing into electoral muscle.
The Court and the Crown
While New Yorkers cast ballots, the Supreme Court hears arguments that could redefine executive power itself.
At issue: whether President Trump overstepped constitutional bounds by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy tariffs unilaterally.
“This isn’t 1789,” one Trump adviser told Politico. “Trade, security, and national interest are all connected.”
But constitutionalists disagree.
Reason’s Damon Root warned, “If Roberts now allows Trump to wield the same unilateral power he denied Biden, his credibility as a neutral arbiter will be gone.”
The Court’s ruling could either limit or cement the president’s authority to shape global commerce without Congress — a decision that will echo through every market from soybean futures to semiconductor supply chains.
The Shutdown Enters The Record Books
In Washington, the stalemate over healthcare and spending continues. The U.S. government shutdown is now expected to last through Thanksgiving, until December 1, according to the betting site Polymarket.
If it does, it’ll notch a 61-day shutdown, far surpassing the current record of 35. Political forecasters believe otherwise. If Momdani wins in NYC, the thought goes, that’ll give the Democrats leeway to cave and vote yes on a continuing resolution.
As of this morning, air traffic control is now short over 3,000+ employees.
The administration announced Monday it will release enough funds for a half-month of food assistance to prevent 42 million Americans from losing benefits — a move forced by court order, The Washington Post reported.
From the outside, Congress and its spawn, the Affordable Care Act, appears to be the product of a dysfunctional morass of self-important, if useless, blowhards.
From a Cloward-Piven perspective, it is a stress test of the state.
The healthcare system is too expensive to sustain, yet too politically entrenched to reform. The government is simultaneously overburdened and underlegitimized — an economy and bureaucracy chasing their own tails.
In the end, Bernie Sanders may get his way when the whole system collapses and politicians get to rush in with the single-payer national health care system they’ve been holding neatly in their back pocket since Hillary Clinton chaired the Task Force on National Health Care Reform in 1993.
Long march.
The Passing of Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney died this morning at 84 from complications of pneumonia and heart disease.
The Associated Press called him “the most powerful vice president in history.” He leaves behind a complex and costly legacy.
The War on Terror, which he helped design, has cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
His influence extended beyond war planning — he was the architect of the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded surveillance powers in the name of security.
Cheney himself once said, “We must pass on our offices in better shape than we found them.”
Yet his version of “better shape” meant consolidating authority in the executive branch — an ethos that reshaped the balance of power in Washington.
Cheney is also more famous for uttering the most damaging phrase in modern political and monetary history.
“Reagan proved,” Cheney said, “deficits don’t matter.”
He meant voters won’t punish you at the polls if you run deficits. You just need an outsized mission, such as outspending the Soviet Union into oblivion or making the world safe for democracy by nation-building in the Middle East.
Cheney’s real legacy is that after those words, neither party made fiscal responsibility a component of their ongoing platforms. The result speaks for itself:
“Deficits don’t matter,” Cheney said. He meant politically. But the interest due on that attitude is coming home to roost in inflation and a declining bond rating for the U.S. Government. (Source: @rabblerouser on Reddit)
Another lasting feature of modern government that Cheney leaves behind?
As The Financial Times noted this morning, Cheney believed Congress’s “vacillation and indecision” weakened America’s ability to act.
That philosophy now lives on in the way presidents of both parties govern by decree. His shadow lingers in every emergency power claimed and every surveillance renewal quietly approved. Every executive order issued.
The Economy Behind the Stock Market Bubble
Even as politics dominate, the market continues its dance with gravity. We observed yesterday, October beat its reputation and ended with the Dow and S&P 500 logging their sixth straight monthly gains, the Nasdaq its seventh.
In the real economy, a different tune hums: 82% of Americans now live in regions experiencing recession-level slowdowns, according to the Fed’s Beige Book. The wealthy continue to spend, while the middle class falters. The top thrives on asset inflation; the rest live on credit.
Economist Betsey Stevenson warns, “The real risk to a K-shaped economy is social and political instability.”
On a day like this, her warning sounds less academic and more like a forecast consistent with the Grey Swan list for 2025, including growing political violence committed by clowns with little else to do but cause mayhem.
Cheney once said the President must be “ready for action — capable of decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”
Gramsci, writing decades earlier, said the old world dies slowly, and in its place, monsters are born. Between them lies today’s uneasy balance: an overstretched republic, an economy running on habit, and citizens toggling between activism and exhaustion.
The markets, like history, are patient. They wait out noise, absorb excess, and reprice truth at their own pace. Our job is to do the same — stay liquid, stay curious, and recognize that what looks like politics is often the prelude to revaluation.
~Addison
P.S.: This week on Grey Swan Live! we’ve got another doozy. I’ve lost count of the reader mail suggesting the market feels ripe for a crash, mostly asking how it will happen… and when.
This week, we’ll be joined by bestselling author Harry Dent to explore how AI, shifting demographics, and debt cycles converge into what he calls the Great Deflation of Illusions.
Harry and our colleague Adam O’Dell have also elaborated on their own answer to the question: how and when will AI crash. To get on the list to receive their forecast and the importance Harry attributes to November 19 (two weeks) enter your email address here.
If you have any questions for us about the market, send them our way now to: feedback@greyswanfraternity.
