Update on the partisan political situation and some observations about what it means. I have some other comments, too, actually a few tweets to share, one with Ronald Reagan, the other Milton Friedman. First, the present situation.
As of December 2024: Republicans control 28 state legislatures, accounting for 59 percent of all states. Republicans hold 27 governorships across the United States, accounting for 54 percent of US state executive branches. The US Supreme Court is 6-3 conservative majority. Federal appellate courts are approximately 55 percent Republican-appointed. Over 60 percent of state supreme court justices are affiliated with or appointed by Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans have secured at least 218 seats, the minimum required for a majority. In the Senate, Republicans have gained a majority with 53 seats. Republicans have captured the White House, with a majority of states, including all seven battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Crucially, there were no counties in the United States that shifted blue in 2024. Eighty percent of counties shifted red. All the states did.
The quibbling over the size of Trump’s popular vote victory (the most votes of any Republican President) distracts from the more significant fact that Republicans are the majority party across America. This represents a significant change in partisanship during my life. When I was born in 1962 (the year Ronald Reagan switched parties) and many years after, aside from the Executive, Republicans were in the wilderness. Today, Democrats are in the wilderness, and by all indications will stay that way.
One might be tempted to ask Democrats to look at what they stood for when they were in the majority and then at what they stand for today. But this assumes that the party was substantially different when it was in the majority. Moreover, it assumes that the American populace has remained substantially the same over the last several decades. To be sure, some Democrats who have left the party have said the party left them (I think Reagan coined the cliche). But both assumptions are partly or entirely wrong. Democrats have been progressive and corporate statist for more than a century, and racialist from the start. The people, hammered by globalization—mass immigration, the transnationalization of production—have come to the realization that progressivism and corporate statism are the cause of their woes.
The people have finally come to the conclusion that don’t like neoliberalism and neoconservatism. They don’t want indoctrination camps masquerading as educational institutions. They’re tired of cultural managers telling them how to think and feel about things. They want an end of the forever wars. They want the freedom to hold and express opinions, including the right to criticize the things they don’t like or want. They don’t want big intrusive government. They want to return to the American Republic their ancestors established.
True, the Democratic Party shifted loyalties from private sector blue collar unions to the unions of the credential class. Union density peaked at the end of World War II. It began its decline with the Cold War. There were no public employee unions. That changed in the 1970s. By 2016, private sectors unions comprised only around seven percent of the population—the lowest level since the nineteenth century. At the same time, public employee union density is more than one-third. True, the Democratic Party walked away from the rule of law (after finding it in the 1990s). Democrats shifted on many other things, as well, most notably free speech and the right of the people to their own conscience. But the party’s core attributes—technocratic control of the population, identitarian politics—has not changed since Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
The cumulative effect of decades of Democratic Party control of the government on the American people changed them.
Newt Gingrich described the shift as a revolution back in 1994. With hindsight, he wasn’t wrong. He saw it coming. Ross Perot had a lot to do with that. We think of revolutions as sudden. But if you pay attention, the rate at which awakenings occur is variable across history. The slow moving (attempted) coup of MAGA during Trump’s first term told us that the revolution had substantially already occurred. The power elite saw it, too. But their counterrevolution failed. The revolution is restored.
freedom and reason 