The results of the November 3, 2026 congressional elections are an earthquake, but not because of the scale of the defeat. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats, Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina, and took back both chambers. The earthquake lies in what the result reveals: America is on its way to becoming a one-party state.
The president, in a post on election night, blames Fox News. Vice President JD Vance, in a post on November 4, blames the war in Iran, which the United States and Israel launched on February 28, 2026, and the relationship with Israel. This is a pathetic excuse. The war and Israel are campaigns; the Republican Party’s problem is not a campaign but a structure. It does not know how to function as an effective organization. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is a disciplined army. It brought into its party apparatus first the academy, from the 1960s onward; then the corporate institutions, over the course of the 2010s; and finally the intelligence agencies, the letter of 51 former intelligence officials on October 19, 2020 was the moment it became visible.
Roosevelt’s big tent was built to absorb minorities and coalitions into America. Since Obama’s second term it has become, inside the Democratic Party, a component for building a new America, an America directed toward an equitable vision. The problem is twofold. What the people at the bottom of this structure want is representation or money, and they ask for it from those above them, which is foreign to the Protestant spirit. And those above them see politics as a Machiavellian game of power, a view that may suit the Hobbesian spirit, but certainly not the Lockean one.
The federalization of government, which has steadily intensified since 1913, the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve and the direct election of senators, and all the more since the New Deal of 1933, was always the Democrats’ most powerful weapon. It was a weapon that Eisenhower (the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, Little Rock in 1957), Nixon and Trump all ended up using. But while for them it was a tool for specific agendas, used and then set down, for the Democrats those federalized mechanisms perfected the party’s ability to guarantee long-lasting “results” and structural changes in distribution and allocation to its wide-tent coalition.
The Republican Party stands as a collection of intentions, agendas and defense, using short-term federal mechanisms that the Democrats perfected to work on their behalf in the long term, constantly acting in a reactive state toward the political superstructure. Yes, there may be backlash, Trump is the greatest example of the glitch in the mechanism. but the long-term trajectory is clear.
Republicans do not know how to function as an organization because they never took into account how American politics has moved into the field of voting based on distinct identities, which reflect agendas on a wider federalized scale. It goes against their Lockean-Jeffersonian logic.
The charm of one Trump can carry a party as long as promises are made and kept. When they are not, the charm retreats, and the party has no plan B. That is why it gave itself over entirely to Trump, just as the Democrats gave themselves to Obama, but the Democrats had an institutional architecture for the day after. The Republicans never did.
The Democratic Party thus created a neo-American reality which suits a civil way of life in which America is not seen as a property-based spiritual essence (or maybe, if so, as a negative one?) but merely as a distributive or identitarian reality. Hence Trump’s sad attempt to offer $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans held Congress, a $1.2 trillion bid for the same voters that $22 trillion of post-LBJ welfare spending had already shaped. Yet somehow, the roles were reversed. By the 2016 election, other than a few old New York Republicans, it seems that the Democrats became the elite party, while the right became the working class, until the left understood that the working class, and America as a whole, can still be reimagined, and mobilized into the political and cultural architecture they actually created and still own. All they need is someone a little more genuine and articulate than Harris, and a bit less extreme than Sanders.
There are very few examples in human history of states whose population comes mostly from the non-Western world and which successfully adopted a republican-liberal structure in which violence or one-party rule did not become an inherent part of elected political reality. There is no such thing as a liberal republic with a Marxist vernacular in culture, art and academia, without a European ethnic majority. This is the reality the Democratic Party is preparing for us, and this battle, a Hobbesian-Marxian army against Lockean-Jeffersonian intentions, will end in a federalized California state. Demographics tied to ideas and political cynicism are destinies.
