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Even if Democrats win the midterm elections, the deeper transformation of American governance may already be underway.
The real struggle facing the country may no longer be between Democrats and Republicans, but between democracy itself and a growing concentration of power.
Democrats may be celebrating the coming midterm elections, but those celebrations may be premature. Polls showing declining support for President Trump and his policies may suggest a banner year for the Democrats-- but the political landscape of the United States has changed in ways that go far beyond a single election cycle.
The real danger facing the country may no longer be simply a contest between Democrats and Republicans. Increasingly, the struggle appears to be between democracy itself and a growing system of concentrated political and economic power.
The early elections have gone heavily Democratic, and the House of Representatives may well fall under Democratic control, opening the possibility of investigations and even impeachment. There finally seems to be a path to "getting" Donald Trump and perhaps proving that Hillary Clinton was right all along-- a line of thinking that continued through the Biden years.
But this sense of optimism may be dangerously misleading.
The Democratic Party today often looks much like the one voters rejected in 2016-- still deeply tied to corporate money and the influence of oligarchic power, and still struggling to reconnect with the ordinary working Americans who once formed its base. When the party jettisoned Bernie Sanders in 2016, many of those voters felt abandoned and became vulnerable to the political showmanship of Donald Trump, the newest P. T. Barnum of American politics.
Rather than confronting that lesson directly, the Democrats largely continued along the same path during the Biden years, following the familiar Obama-Clinton pattern and assuming that "anything but Trump" would be sufficient.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his allies have been pursuing a far more ambitious strategy.
With the help of the architects behind Project 2025-- an organized effort to reshape the federal government under far stronger executive control-- they have been quietly developing a new approach to governing power.
This effort goes far beyond winning a single election. It seeks to restructure the machinery of government itself, disconnecting it from many of the rules, norms, and guardrails that once supported the constitutional system and the rule of law.
Democrats may still believe that simply appearing at the polls as the alternative to Trump will be enough to regain control-- that voters will automatically return to them at the polls while the party continues to avoid the deeper issues surrounding its relationship with corporate power, the quiet influence of oligarchs, and a form of free-market capitalism that increasingly drains the vitality from our national life.
Instead, the party often appears to believe that it can simply put a new coat of paint on the same economic system, sometimes referred to as "putting lipstick on the pig", and present it as a fresh solution, even as many citizens experience growing economic insecurity and political disillusionment.
Meanwhile, the Project 2025 architects have been steadily reshaping the structure of governance itself.
Over the past several decades, a series of precedents has weakened many of the guardrails that once protected the constitutional order. As those guardrails erode, an increasingly autocratic structure begins to take shape within the shell of existing institutions.
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