On July 5, 2025, Elon Musk dropped a bombshell on social media by announcing the establishment of the "American Party". This was not just another billionaire's political whim, but a carefully calculated radical experiment. Its direct trigger was his complete break with former President Trump over a massive spending bill that would lead to $3.3 trillion in new deficit. However, the true goal of this movement might not be winning a traditional election, but to perform a "Fork" on America's solidified democratic process using tech elites' logic and crypto world tools - replicating its foundation and then iterating and evolving in a new direction, reshaping the way power operates.
Rupture: A Catalyst Forged in Fiscal Fire
Musk and Trump's alliance was once the most eye-catching political landscape after the 2024 election. Musk not only invested heavily in support but also personally joined the cabinet, heading the newly established "Government Efficiency Department" (DOGE), vowing to cut trillion-dollar expenses for the federal government. However, this honeymoon period ended abruptly with the passage of the "One Big and Beautiful Bill Act" (OBBBA).
The bill was unprecedented in scale, with its core being permanently maintaining Trump's tax cuts while significantly increasing defense and border security expenses and cutting social welfare. According to calculations by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it would add nearly $3.3 trillion to the U.S. fiscal deficit over the next decade. This number became Musk's insurmountable red line. He denounced the bill as "pure madness and destruction", a express train to "debt slavery", and publicly promised that if the bill passed, "the American Party would be established the next day".
Musk's anger stemmed from a profound sense of betrayal. The core mission of the DOGE department he led was fiscal austerity and government downsizing, representing the tech libertarian ideology of "small government, high efficiency, and hard currency". The passage of OBBBA was, in his view, an open denial of this mission. This conflict was not a simple policy disagreement, but a head-on collision of two worldviews: one was Trump's political logic of consolidating populist base through massive fiscal spending; the other was Musk's technocratic approach believing in first principles, pursuing system efficiency and fiscal sustainability. When Trump openly threatened to make DOGE "go devour Musk", the former alliance completely shattered, and the birth of the "American Party" became inevitable.
Strategy: A Kingmaker's Asymmetric Game
When announcing the establishment of the "American Party", Musk did not propose a grand blueprint aimed at winning the national election. Instead, he unveiled an unusual and highly focused strategy: initially targeting only "2 to 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts" in the 2026 midterm elections. The core of this strategy was not to become the majority party, but to become a "Kingmaker" in a closely balanced Congress.
Musk revealed his strategic thinking through a subtle historical analogy: "We will use a variant of the tactics employed by Theban general Epaminondas in the Battle of Leuctra to break the unbeatable myth of Sparta: concentrating highly focused forces at the precise location on the battlefield." In the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, Epaminondas did not evenly distribute troops but concentrated his main force on the left wing, decisively defeating Sparta's elite with overwhelming local superiority.
Musk's strategy is a modern political application of this ancient wisdom. He understands that in the current context of political polarization and minimal seat differences between parties, a third-party group with even just a few seats but unified action can have decisive influence in critical bill voting. This is a politically capital-efficient investment, seeking maximum policy influence at minimal cost, forcing both parties to compromise on core issues like fiscal discipline and deregulation. It's a typical asymmetric operation aimed at disrupting and reshaping the entire political market with minimal investment.
Foundation: Mobilizing the Invisible "Crypto Constituency"
Any political movement needs a base, and Musk's "American Party" seems to have found a ready-made, well-funded group highly aligned in ideology: the cryptocurrency industry and its supporters. This circle, once peripheral to mainstream politics, is now rising as an undeniable political force.
The 2024 election cycle witnessed the industry's astonishing political donation capacity. Super PACs like Fairshake, funded by crypto giants such as Coinbase and Ripple, have invested over $119 million to influence elections, with their supported candidates having extremely high primary victory rates, demonstrating precise and powerful political operation capabilities. This powerful capital force provides a solid financial foundation for emerging forces like the "American Party".
Beyond substantial capital, a crypto-friendly political ecosystem has quietly formed in multiple U.S. states. From Arizona to Ohio to Texas, several key states have passed or are reviewing bills allowing digital assets like Bitcoin to be incorporated into government reserves or public pension funds. This political map reveals a clear trend: in states crucial to congressional control, a voter base friendly to cryptocurrency already exists.
Looking deeper, Musk's repeated use of the term "uniparty" resonates strongly with the core beliefs of the crypto community. Bitcoin's birth itself was a rebellion against traditional finance (TradFi) and the government central bank "centralized monolith". When Musk uses similar language to describe Washington's establishment, he cleverly connects dissatisfaction with the political status quo to the crypto world's inherent critique of centralized power. This makes the "American Party" more than just a political party - it becomes an extension of the decentralization revolution in the political realm, transforming potential supporters from ordinary voters to ideological comrades.
Methods: From Dogecoin Legion to PolitiFi
If capital and voter base are the fuel of the "American Party", its mobilization and operational methods might completely subvert traditional campaign models. Musk's interaction with the Dogecoin community has long previewed a new political mobilization manual based on internet culture and decentralized networks. Through Meme and personal appeal, he transformed a loose online network into an extremely action-oriented force.
Now, this model has evolved into "PolitiFi" - meme coins created around political figures or events. Imagine the "American Party" issuing official tokens where supporters' personal wealth is directly linked to the party's prestige and success. This mechanism creates a powerful positive feedback loop: to increase the value of their held tokens, supporters will spontaneously become the most passionate evangelists and proselytizers. They will create Memes, promote the party's ideas on social media, develop new members, because every successful promotion could directly translate into personal wealth growth. This essentially "gamifies" political participation, transforming passive supporters into active, economically motivated stakeholders, with mobilization efficiency and stickiness that traditional parties cannot match.
Endgame: Political Party as a Protocol and Political DAO
The ultimate form of this experiment might be establishing the world's first large-scale political decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A DAO is a blockchain-based organization with rules written in code, governed collectively by members without a centralized leadership. Applying this concept to a political party means that core functions like party platform development, candidate nomination, and fund management can be conducted in an open, transparent, and tamper-proof blockchain environment. This is the most thorough technical implementation of Musk's promise to "return power to the people".
A political DAO can integrate multiple innovative governance mechanisms advocated by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and others:
- Liquid Democracy: Members can directly vote on issues they care about, while delegating voting rights in unfamiliar domains to experts they trust.
- Quadratic Voting: This mechanism encourages people to vote on issues they care most about, producing more nuanced decision-making results that better reflect collective true preferences.
- Reputation-Based Governance: Voting rights are not derived from wealth, but from contributions to the community, rewarding merit over capital.
By combining these models, a DAO party can construct a highly flexible, transparent, and censorship-resistant governance framework, fundamentally solving the problem of modern party decision-making being monopolized by a few elites and financial backers.
Conclusion: A New Branch of Democracy
Elon Musk's "American Party" is far from a simple political disruptor. It is a singularity where powerful forces converge: a profound ideological conflict, a lean "kingmaker" strategy, a fully mobilized cryptocurrency voter base, and a disruptive campaign mobilization manual.
What this ultimately points to is a more grand and radical vision: "protocolizing" the party itself, constructing a decentralized autonomous organization driven by code and consensus. This is not just a challenge to traditional party models, but a stress test for the entire representative democratic system.
This "forking democracy" experiment will channel Silicon Valley's disruptive spirit, the decentralization ideals of the crypto world, and the massive capital they can mobilize into the political realm in an unprecedented way. However, this prospect also brings complex and profound challenges. On one hand, it might bring unprecedented democratic innovation; on the other, it raises concerns about a new form of "technological elite politics". When voting rights can be purchased and market sentiment can directly influence political direction, the stability and fairness of democracy will face new tests.
Regardless of success, this movement has placed a sharp question before the world: When politics itself can be coded, tokenized, and "forked", where will the democracy we know go? This conflict that began in the corridors of Washington may ultimately write a new chapter for 21st-century governance models on the distributed ledger of blockchain.
