Written by: Oliver, Mars Finance
On July 5, 2025, Elon Musk dropped a bombshell on social media, announcing the establishment of the 'American Party.' This is not just another billionaire's whim for political play, but a carefully calculated radical experiment. The direct trigger was his complete break with former President Trump over a massive spending bill that would lead to a $3.3 trillion increase in deficit. However, the real goal of this movement may not be to win traditional elections, but to use the logic of tech elites and the tools of the crypto world to 'fork' the entrenched democratic process in the U.S. — replicating its foundation and then iterating and evolving in a new direction to reshape the way power operates.
Break: A Catalyst Forged in the Fires of Finance
The alliance between Musk and Trump was once the most striking political landscape after the 2024 elections. Musk not only invested heavily but also personally joined the cabinet, heading the newly established 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE), vowing to cut trillions from federal spending. However, this honeymoon period abruptly ended with the introduction of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' (OBBBA).
The scale of this bill is unprecedented, with its core being the permanent implementation of Trump's tax cuts while significantly increasing defense and border security spending, and cutting social welfare. According to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will add nearly $3.3 trillion to the U.S. fiscal deficit over the next decade. This number became an insurmountable red line for Musk. He denounced the bill as 'utter madness and destruction,' a fast track to 'debt enslavement,' and publicly promised that if the bill passed, 'the American Party would be established the next day.'
Musk's anger stems from a profound sense of betrayal. The DOGE department he leads has the core mission of achieving fiscal austerity and government downsizing, representing the techno-liberal ideology of 'small government, high efficiency, hard currency.' The passage of the OBBBA, in his view, is a blatant denial of this mission. This conflict is not merely a simple policy disagreement but a direct clash of two worldviews: one side is Trump's, which seeks to consolidate populist support through massive fiscal spending; the other is Musk's, which adheres to first principles, pursuing systemic efficiency and fiscal sustainability. When Trump openly threatened to let DOGE 'go back to devour Musk,' the former alliance was completely shattered, making the birth of the 'American Party' inevitable.
Strategy: Asymmetric Game of the 'Kingmaker'
When announcing the establishment of the 'American Party,' Musk did not present a grand blueprint aimed at winning national elections. Instead, he revealed an extremely unusual yet highly focused strategy: the initial goal is only to secure '2 to 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts' in the 2026 midterm elections. The core of this strategy is not to become the majority party but to become the 'critical minority' in a closely divided Congress, thus playing the role of 'kingmaker.'
Musk reveals his strategic thinking with a clever historical analogy: 'We will adopt the variant tactics of General Epaminondas of Thebes, who shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility at the Battle of Leuctra, to crack the 'uniparty' system: concentrating highly focused forces at the precise location on the battlefield.' In the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, Epaminondas did not distribute his forces evenly; instead, he concentrated his main force on the left wing, achieving overwhelming local superiority to decisively defeat Sparta's elite.
Musk's strategy is a modern political application of this ancient wisdom. He understands that in the current polarized American political landscape, where the two parties have a very narrow margin in Congress, a third-party faction with even just a few seats, but unified in action, can have decisive influence in critical bill votes. This is a highly capital-efficient political investment, gaining maximum policy influence at minimal cost, forcing both parties to make concessions on core issues like fiscal discipline and deregulation. This is a typical asymmetric warfare strategy, aiming to disrupt and reshape the entire political market landscape with minimal input.
Foundation: Mobilizing the Invisible 'Cryptographic Electorate'
Any political movement needs a basic platform, and Musk's 'American Party' seems to have found a ready-made, well-funded, and ideologically aligned group: the cryptocurrency industry and its supporters. This circle, once drifting outside mainstream politics, is now rising as a political force that cannot be ignored.
The 2024 election cycle witnessed the industry's astonishing political donation power. Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) funded by crypto giants like Coinbase and Ripple, such as Fairshake, have invested over $119 million to influence elections, with candidates they support having a very high win rate in primaries, demonstrating their precise and powerful political operational capabilities. This powerful capital force provides a solid financial foundation for emerging forces like the 'American Party.'
In addition to substantial capital, a pro-crypto political ecosystem has quietly taken shape in several states across the United States. From Arizona to Ohio to Texas, multiple key states have passed or are considering legislation allowing the inclusion of digital assets like Bitcoin into government reserves or public pension funds. This political map reveals a clear trend: in the critical battleground states that determine congressional control, there exists a voter base friendly to cryptocurrencies.
On a deeper level, Musk's repeated use of the term 'uniparty' resonates strongly with the core beliefs of the crypto community. The birth of Bitcoin itself was a rebellion against the 'centralized unity' of traditional finance (TradFi) and government central banks. When Musk uses the same language to describe the establishment in Washington, he cleverly connects dissatisfaction with the political status quo to the crypto world's inherent critique of centralized power. This makes the 'American Party' not merely a political party but an extension of a decentralized revolution into the political realm, transforming potential supporters from ordinary voters into staunch ideological allies.
Means: From Dogecoin Legion to Political Finance (PolitiFi)
If capital and voter base are the fuel for the 'American Party,' then its mobilization and operational methods could completely disrupt traditional campaign models. Musk's interaction with the Dogecoin community has already rehearsed a whole new political mobilization manual based on internet culture and decentralized networks. Through memes and personal charisma, he has transformed a loose online network into a highly effective force.
Today, this model has evolved into 'Political Finance' (PolitiFi) — meme coins created around political figures or events. Imagine an 'American Party' issuing an official token, where supporters' personal wealth is directly tied to the party's reputation and success. This mechanism creates a powerful positive feedback loop: to increase the value of their tokens, supporters will spontaneously become the most enthusiastic missionaries and advocates. They will create memes, promote the party's ideals on social media, and recruit new members, as each successful promotion could directly translate into their wealth growth. This effectively gamifies political participation, transforming passive supporters into active, economically motivated stakeholders, with mobilization efficiency and stickiness unmatched by traditional parties.
Conclusion: Protocol as Party and Political DAO
The ultimate form of this experiment may be to establish the world's first large-scale political decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). A DAO is a blockchain-based organization, where rules are written in code and governed collectively by its members, with no centralized leadership. Applying this concept to political parties means that core functions such as party platform formulation, candidate nomination, and fund management can all be conducted in a publicly transparent, tamper-proof blockchain environment. This is the most thorough technical realization of Musk's commitment to 'return power to the people.'
A political DAO can integrate various 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 on unfamiliar areas to trusted experts.
Quadratic Voting: This mechanism encourages people to vote on the issues they care about most, resulting in decisions that are more nuanced and better reflecting collective true preferences than simple majority voting.
Reputation-Based Governance: Voting rights do not stem from wealth but from contributions to the community, rewarding merit rather than capital.
By using a mix of these models, a DAO party can construct a highly flexible, transparent, and censorship-resistant governance framework, fundamentally addressing the dilemma of modern party decision-making power being monopolized by a small number of elites and big donors.
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 struggle, a lean 'kingmaker' strategy, a fully mobilized cryptocurrency voter base, and a set of disruptive campaign mobilization manuals.
And all of this ultimately points to a grander and more radical vision: to 'protocolize' the party itself, constructing a decentralized autonomous organization driven by code and consensus. This is not only a challenge to the traditional party model but also a stress test for the entire representative democracy system.
This experiment of 'forking democracy' integrates the disruptive spirit of Silicon Valley, the decentralized ideals of the crypto world, and the vast capital that both can mobilize into the political arena in unprecedented ways. However, this prospect also brings complex and profound challenges. On one hand, it may lead to unprecedented democratic innovation; on the other hand, it raises concerns about a new form of 'technocratic elite politics.' When voting rights can be bought, 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 encoded, tokenized, and 'forked,' where will the democracy we know go? This struggle, which began in the corridors of power in Washington, may ultimately write a new chapter for 21st-century governance models on the distributed ledger of blockchain.
