A Remarkable Moment in U.S. History

A diminished MAGA government remains acutely dangerous. But the path to consolidated authoritarian rule is shut. America must use this fleeting window for transformation.

By Thomas Zimmer, November 8, 2026

You are supporting Democracy Americana!

Thank you for being a paid member of Democracy Americana! It is your support that allows me to continue this independent work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity. If you ever have any questions, concerns, or problems with your membership, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly.

Before we get into it, can I ask a favor: When your Democracy Americana membership is up for renewal, please make sure the method of payment you selected is still valid.

The reason I am mentioning this is that I have been losing a crazy number of members because the payment simply couldn’t be collected. Usually, that means a credit card has expired, something like that. I am really proud that the rate of active cancellations at Democracy Americana is extremely low. But over the past two months, about ten percent (!) of all memberships had to be ended simply because the payments didn’t go through. When that happens, I reach out to people directly, and some of you have been kind enough to update their payment info and become members again. But many have not – because getting folks to actively re-subscribe is hard. People cancel subscriptions, that’s just the nature of the game. But to lose so many supporters who haven’t actually made the decision to cancel is… frustrating. And to be honest with you, this constitutes a significant problem for the long-term viability of this publication.

When your membership is up for renewal, the system will automatically remind you a few days ahead of time. When that happens, please make sure your method of payment is still valid. I know it’s a hassle, I understand it’s a little annoying. But by checking, you really are helping me out massively. Thank you so much!

Tuesday, November 3 was a good day for democracy in America. A historic day.

Democrats won strong majorities in both chambers (Opens in a new window) of Congress. When it’s all said and done, they will have won the House popular vote by around 14 percentage points (Opens in a new window). By that measure, this is the most devastating defeat for a governing party since 1974.

As the dust is beginning to settle, it is really worth reflecting on the larger implications of this remarkable result. I want to offer six observations and arguments about the historical significance of this election – and where America might go from here:

1) Not that more evidence should have been necessary, but the result of the midterms proves once and for all that there was no lasting rightward “realignment” in 2024, no “vibe shift” in American society and culture. In fact, we should all remember that an election is rarely an ideological referendum – and it certainly doesn’t manifest some durable “will of the people.”

2) The idea that this election was entirely about affordability is diagnostically misleading and politically harmful. Yes, cost of living and the economy played a big role. But so did corruption and the authoritarian assault on democratic self-government. This was about all of those things. And it was very much a plea for accountability from the majority of the electorate.

3) Multiracial democracy returned – or, in many ways: conquered for the first time – the American South where reactionary one-party regimes have been the historical norm. It is impossible to overstate how much of a political earthquake that is. It has the potential to drastically reshape the political landscape across the Republic.

4) One election is not enough to restore functioning democracy in the United States. But as much as the authoritarian threat has been acutely real: The MAGA government has now lost so much legitimacy that there is no more realistic pathway for them to get from here to consolidated authoritarian rule.

5) Unfortunately, until they can finally be removed from power, the MAGA government remains dangerous and will continue to cause tremendous harm. In fact, as delusion, authoritarian desires, ideological zealotry, ineptitude, and mounting desperation all combine, we must expect them to seek escalation whenever and wherever they still possess agency.

6) There now exists, potentially, a window for the kind of transformational change this country so desperately needs. But it won’t stay open for long. Such moments are rare in U.S. history, and they are always fleeting. We better remind Democratic elected officials that they now have an enormous responsibility not to waste this opportunity.

Let’s go through each of these points one by one and make sure we truly grasp the significance of what happened here. Because moments like these are rare in history.

There was never a rightward realignment

Much of America’s elite published opinion was so certain, within days and sometimes only hours of the 2024 presidential election, that the country was in the midst of a comprehensive rightward realignment. Trump’s victory, we were confidently told, was the result of lasting societal shifts (Opens in a new window) and signaled a profound reordering of American politics, an “American realignment” (Opens in a new window) – perhaps even the end of political liberalism (Opens in a new window) and the beginning of a permanent Trumpist era in U.S. history.

This narrative is stubbornly persistent. Long after it had been proven wrong empirically, some of the country’s most prominent pundits continued to insist that, as Ross Douthat put it when he was still with the New York Times, the Trump election had been “an ideological referendum, and progressivism lost.” (Opens in a new window)

I really hope we can finally discard whatever still lingers of the realignment nonsense and all the silly “vibe shift” talk. In last week’s midterms, non-white turnout was up, especially in the South, and young men and Latinos (Opens in a new window) – precisely the groups whose relatively high support for Trump was cited as indisputable evidence for the “realignment” and the supposed emergence of a durable conservative majority – drastically shifted left.

It’s a reminder that what really happened in 2024 was not some lasting realignment. Trump won because (Opens in a new window) turnout among Democratic-leaning voters was down – and among the group of people who have no strong attachment to either party, an overwhelming anti-incumbent sentiment prevailed. This sentiment, especially among those who don’t follow politics closely, was fueled by a general frustration towards “the system.” Unsurprisingly, those same groups massively turned on Republicans (Opens in a new window) over the past two years, as the widespread desire to overcome a vaguely defined status quo was once again leading them away from the governing party.

There is a broader lesson here. Interpreting elections as ideological referenda will almost always lead us astray. Most of the time, they provide a snapshot instead of a manifestation of some lasting realignment or some durable “will of the people.”

What we need to grapple with is a somewhat paradoxical situation: Because the two major parties represent fundamentally incompatible visions for American society – a pluralistic democratic order here; a hierarchical ethno-state of white, Christian domination there – the stakes in every election are existential. But the exact outcome of the electoral contest is determined by dynamics that are separate and mostly detached from the grand ideological struggle. Right now, a major force in American politics is the widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo that is fueled by and/or crystallizes in perceptions of the economy, cost of living and, yes, gas prices. That is the most important reason why, until further notice, we should expect the party in power to be voted out, regardless of who or what the alternative is. 

Over the past twenty-two months, however, the Trumpists have governed as if they truly represented the immutable “will of the people.” Buying into their own propaganda, they haven’t even tried to enact a popular agenda. Instead, they attempted to impose an ideological MAGA vision. They focused on mass deportation and their fever dream of purging the nation by cruelty and violence; they engaged in an all-out culture war against the “woke” enemy within across politics and society; they got lost in military “adventures,” always looking for ways to quench their desire to project dominance at home and abroad.

MAGA has been trying to impose their deranged unreality on America and the world. On Tuesday, reality reasserted itself. The party of Donald Trump was punished: For the disastrous economic performance, the bizarre tariffs, the soaring gas prices.

But that is not all that happened in the midterms.

As a paid member of Democracy Americana, you are making this work possible. Thank you so much for your trust!

This was ALSO a vote for democracy and accountability

This was a proper wave election of historic proportions. And continued frustration with the status quo and the lasting anti-incumbent sentiment alone cannot explain such a result. Americans also saw the midterms as a chance to push back against the authoritarian assault on the democratic Republic, against the deranged corruption and oligarchic control, against the cruelty of this regime and the vile attacks on the basic rights and dignity of vulnerable minorities.

In national exit polls (take them with a grain of salt, of course) a lot of people ranked the economy and affordability as their priority; but “the state of democracy” was not far behind (Opens in a new window). Interestingly, the topic most voters described as either crucial or a major factor in their decision was “government corruption.” (Opens in a new window) What makes corruption so interesting as a concern is that it sits at the intersection of so many issues Americans care about. It is connected to the economy and affordability questions in many people’s minds, since they view the rampant corruption as one reason why “the system” doesn’t deliver. But it goes far beyond that: It captures the anti-elite sentiment, it crystallized the lawlessness of this government, the oligarchic takeover, the authoritarian impunity. Millions of Americans understood this election as a chance to make a stand against all of this.

Such an interpretation is also supported by the patterns of voter mobilization and movement, by the political geography of this result. Why was the blue wave strongest in the South? Because Hispanics – especially in south Texas – moved left dramatically (Opens in a new window) compared to 2024 after two years of being demonized and subjected to a vile mass deportation campaign. And because non-white turnout was up massively (Opens in a new window), especially – and this is absolutely stunning – among people of color in areas that were covered under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act until 2013. Section 5, if you’ll recall, required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to acquire pre-clearance from the federal government for any change in voting laws. It was a complete gamechanger. Pre-clearance under Section 5 blocked around 1,200 laws and regulations – most of them on the local level – before the Roberts Court gutted it in its decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 because the reactionaries on the Court declared racism over. They followed this up earlier this year by gutting what was left of the VRA in the disastrous Callais decision in late April. There is no question that one thing that motivated people of color in the South to take to the polls was this outrageous assault on multiracial democracy.

And that is how you get a historic result like the one we got on Tuesday: This was about the economy and the cost of living. But it was also about democracy, about accountability, the rule of law, equality, and authoritarianism. And that is why, beyond just the similarly massive popular vote margin, the 1974 midterms are such an interesting comparison. That was the post-Watergate election, the first chance for the American people to react after they had found out about the authoritarian criminality of the Nixon administration. Nixon had resigned shortly before the midterms to evade impeachment. But his Republican Party had to face the voters in November. Then as now, a strong majority decided it was time to finally rein in a breathtakingly lawless government.

Democracy in the American South, finally

The historical significance of this election also lies in where Democrats won. Kansas will send a Democratic senator to Washington for the first time since 1932. Democrats won Senate seats in Texas and South Carolina. Mississippi (!) is still counting, but it seems pretty certain that the Democratic candidate Scott Colom will prevail (Opens in a new window). 

The Democratic victories across the South, in particular, seemed utterly unrealistic even just a few months ago. A pipe dream turned reality. And not just on the Congressional level. On Tuesday, Democrats won governorships and state houses in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, for instance – hundreds of seats, hundreds of races, hundreds of positions turned blue.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of what happened here. In many areas of the Deep South, the party advocating for pluralistic democracy had almost NEVER really been competitive before. Mississippi might be the most stunning case: During the Jim Crow era, the state’s one-party apartheid regime was the most brutal in the country. On Tuesday, Mississippians elected a Black Senator who, on his way to victory, flipped Forrest County (Opens in a new window), which was created in the early twentieth century and named in honor of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general during the Civil War who later became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In his final campaign spot (Opens in a new window), Colom stood outside the home of Medgar Evers in Jackson Mississippi, telling the story of how Evers, a Black civil rights activist, was assassinated by white terrorists right in front of his house in June 1963.

The partisan valence of the struggle against multiracial democracy flipped over the course of the twentieth century. As the GOP became the political home of the American Right and the parliamentary arm of the white reactionary countermobilization, the South turned Republican. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act, increased political competition and Black representation led to fairer, more equitable policy outcomes. Republicans in the South have been committed to rolling those back. Over the decades, they have fortified their power on the state level. In the twenty-first century, discriminatory election laws and aggressive partisan gerrymandering enabled them to establish de facto one-party regimes (Opens in a new window) at the state level. There are large swaths of the South where there hadn’t been proper, fair competition between the parties (Opens in a new window) in a long time.

This has not been exclusively a Southern problem. Since the 1970s, the number of truly competitive House districts has gone down considerably across the country. Political institutions on the state and local levels are, in many parts of the nation, becoming ever less responsive and ever more unrepresentative.

But these anti-democratic tendencies have been far more pronounced in the South, where the Republican ruling party has been fully devoted to encroaching minoritarianism. Republicans in the South are convinced that it is not only their right, but actually their duty to vanquish Democratic elected officials – because only (white) Republicans can represent “our state.” They are committed to a state essentialism that proclaims a kind of white conservative essence that supposedly defines these states and is beyond democratic contestation. In this interpretation, this “red” essence then necessitates monopolizing all power, on all levels of government, in the hands of the Republican Party; anything else is considered an affront to the state’s very nature, its immutable gestalt.

The efforts to put this sort of anti-democratic essentialism into practice by creating de-facto one-party states have been supercharged by the Supreme Court’s Callais decision. In late April, the Roberts majority on the Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since the moment the decision came down, Republicans have been furiously attempting (Opens in a new window) to curtail minority political power and extinguish multiracial pluralism wherever they are in charge. They frantically redrew the maps across the South to gerrymander majority-minority districts out of existence and annihilate minority representation wherever they could.

Even before the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Republicans in the South had managed to largely insulate their power against democratic control from the local population. With the VRA gone, it might have seemed near-impossible to halt the anti-democratic reshaping of the Republic.

But then the midterms happened. And democracy returned – or, in many places: arrived for the first time – to the South. This was an earthquake. It will profoundly affect the balance of power across the United States. And it will put a lot of pressure on the Republican Party to actually start fighting for majorities instead of focusing almost exclusively on erecting minoritarian white Christian conservative rule.

The path towards consolidated authoritarian rule is shut

As soon as the results came in, the Wall Street Journal (Opens in a new window) declared that since Democrats won the elections, all the talk about the authoritarian threat had been overblown to begin with, all just liberal hysteria and Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It’s not even worth getting riled up about such nonsense.

For many months, the Trumpists have tried, in ways blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, to take control of the election, to manipulate their way to victory by imposing new rules that would have disenfranchised millions and thrown the entire process into chaos. Those efforts were thwarted (Opens in a new window) because people and institutions pushed back. But that doesn’t mean this outrageous assault on the constitutional order didn’t happen or wasn’t a big deal.

We must always distinguish between the Trumpists’ intentions and their ability to impose them on the country. That cuts both ways: Just because they haven’t been able to institute authoritarian control across American life doesn’t mean they never wanted to. Just because they have fascistic desires doesn’t mean the Republic is doomed and a Trump dictatorship the only possible outcome.

Let’s not waste time and energy with people who can’t – or are so disingenuous that they won’t – conceive of the political conflict beyond a simplistic binary of perfect democracy vs full-on dictatorship with totalitarian control over society.

Yes, America just had competitive elections. And even though the government lost, the threat of encroaching authoritarianism was very much real. That is precisely the nature of this precarious in-between state where America exists, somewhere along the spectrum between a functioning, stable liberal democracy and a fully consolidated autocracy.

That is why the midterm elections mattered so much. We knew the results would either push the country further towards the authoritarian end of the spectrum – or would make it a lot more difficult for the movement that currently controls the government to consolidate power.

One midterm election is not enough to restore functioning liberal democracy in the United States. But I feel confident that after this historic result, there is no more realistic pathway for the Trumpists to get from here to consolidated authoritarian rule, understood as stable, durable control, comprehensively entrenched across all major spheres of American politics and society.

This has been the key question since the spring of 2025: Would the MAGA government be able to consolidate authoritarian power? During the first few months of the second Trump presidency, they made dramatic advances towards that end. The MAGA onslaught, it seemed, was overwhelming a system that was disastrously slow to respond. But from the summer of 2025 onwards, societal resistance hardened significantly. The country has not been irresistibly marching towards a Trump dictatorship. Several times over the past twenty-two months the Trumpists seemed poised to vanquish the democratic opposition and break through whatever obstacles the constitutional order was still placing in their path – but then were unwilling and/or unable to force that next step. Minneapolis provided the most striking example (Opens in a new window). In January, the government sent thousands of heavily armed ICE and Border Patrol agents, hoping it would serve as a warning to the rest of the nation. But the failed paramilitary occupation of the city turned into something else: A reminder of democratic freedom and solidarity.

The Trumpists simply don’t understand that even authoritarian governments depend on political legitimacy. In a modern mass society, they have to find ways to get millions of people to comply. They rarely possess the type of apparatus that could achieve this goal purely by direct force and coercion – and the MAGA government certainly does not have the manpower for that kind of oppression. Authoritarian rulers must therefore care about their public standing and make sure enough people actively support their agenda. Or they must create conditions that compel people to acquiesce because they believe themselves to be confronted with a government that will remain in power for the foreseeable future.

After the historic defeat in the midterm elections, the MAGA government no longer has the political legitimacy to ensure complicity and compliance across American society. There is, I will repeat my assessment, no more realistic pathway for a severely diminished Trumpist government to impose and consolidate authoritarian rule in a country the size of continental Europe. MAGA has failed to achieve its core objective.

The fury of diminished authoritarians

MAGA has failed to consolidate authoritarianism. But that does not mean they are not dangerous anymore. Unfortunately, the Trumpists remain capable of causing tremendous damage and unspeakable harm.

MAGA is ideologically and psycho-politically incapable of moderating. It is a hysterical movement that exists in a constant state of imagined emergency. There is no room for compromise or restraint. Every crisis, every defeat only heightens their sense of being under siege, legitimizing and amplifying calls to hit harder, more aggressively.

We have already seen extremely concerning signs pointing in that direction. On Friday, Trump announced (Opens in a new window) that he was promoting Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff. Miller is a proper ideological extremist, the key voice of violent white nationalism inside this government. For the past twenty-two months, he has consistently been demanding and pushing for further escalation.

This is where the gravest danger lies: Fueled by a sense of having burned all bridges behind them, extremists like Miller will seek to escalate wherever this government still possesses agency.

A clever strategy towards consolidating power this is decidedly not. A fanatic like Miller will only exacerbate the worst, most self-destructive tendencies and most unpopular actions of this regime. But giving more power and influence to a man like that is profoundly dangerous. When people like Miller are being elevated in a situation where delusion, authoritarian desires, ideological zealotry, ineptitude, and mounting desperation all combine, things are bound to escalate further. And that means the Trumpists will cause enormous harm.

For the next two years, Democrats in Congress and all (small-d) democratic forces in the country will need to fight hard to curtail the deranged fury of these authoritarians, to fight back against the destructive frenzy.

A fleeting window for transformational change?

Throughout American history, the great advancements towards egalitarian democracy usually came in moments of breakthrough. Revolutionary change often followed severe crises that had upended entrenched political power and thereby created a pathway towards transformational change.

Democratizing change happened because people recognized these opportunities and seized the moment. This is what stands out about the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, when the nation was fundamentally reconceptualized and the Reconstruction Amendments changed the nature of the constitution – the document itself, but also the political and social regime it prescribed – so profoundly that the historian Eric Foner has called it a “Second Founding.” (Opens in a new window) It happened again during the Second Reconstruction that culminated in the revolutionary civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

In those situations, the people in charge did not merely attempt to restore a status quo ante, or to reform a system that wasn’t worth preserving; they aspired to transform the nation. Not as a project of idealistic utopianism, but as an exercise of practical realism. Because they saw a leap forward as the only viable option. 

We might be entering another one of these rare moments when transformational aspiration actually has a chance to become reality. Even more so if Democrats manage to win against Donald Trump one more time in 2028. But we know this constellation will not last. As soon as they govern from the White House, the widespread frustration towards “the system” will be directed against Democrats.

America desperately needs deep structural reform. Transformation, not just restoration. Not just politically, but culturally and socio-economically as well. Let us remind the political leaders of the Democratic Party of the enormous responsibility they now shoulder.

Thank you for reading – and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!