The midterm results are clear enough. What they mean is another matter. The apparent blue wave has done little to change the views of two influential camps on the right. Pessimists take it as further evidence that the republic is drifting toward collapse. More traditional conservatives reject that kind of alarm, arguing that elections bring losses as well as wins, and that Republicans will have another chance.
Both sides can point to real evidence. For now, the United States is not entirely one thing or the other. The Constitution is battered, but it still functions, conventional conservatives say, and American politics remains recognizably normal.
The pessimists answer that this confidence is naïve. In their view, the original Constitution has largely been displaced by a second one, founded on a different idea of justice and human nature and committed to advancing the left’s political program.
It is difficult to deny that public life has become distorted in ways the founders would barely recognize. Still, the old guard has a point when it says elections—the central means of expressing the public’s consent—continue to be respected by both parties, even if that respect can seem fragile.
With a few outspoken exceptions and plenty of heated language, both parties have accepted the outcomes of recent elections, though not always to the same degree. During Joe Biden’s four years in office, for instance, no one from the party often portrayed as uniquely prone to political violence tried to assassinate him.
That acceptance may continue through the next election cycle, even if Democrats hold substantial majorities in Congress and win the presidency. Oddly, such an outcome could bring back a familiar feature of American politics: the realigning election.
For much of American history, political scientists viewed these elections as almost inevitable. Beginning in 1800, voters seemed to give one party control of the federal government for a generation or so, then decisively shift their support to the other party.
The parties traded national power in 1828, 1860, 1896 and 1932. Another shift may have come in 1968 or 1972, but after that, the pattern changed.
Charles Kesler has argued that realigning elections gave Americans a choice between two developed understandings of the Constitution: one that stressed popular sovereignty, and another that emphasized the responsibilities of citizens and representatives.
In this older pattern, parties competed to show that they were the truer defenders of the Constitution. Each accepted, at least grudgingly, that its rivals had a legitimate place in politics, while claiming the stronger case for setting the boundaries of public debate.
The majority party usually established those boundaries, but the deeper contest was over which interpretation of the Constitution would guide the country. When the differences grew sharp enough, voters faced a consequential election that could unseat the existing majority and create a new one.
Such elections are uncommon, but they can shape political competition for a generation or longer. They also renew the country’s commitment to the political principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and embedded in the Constitution. In that sense, the old party system depended on the Constitution remaining a living force in American life.
Kesler suggests that this cycle stalled in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s political success might have been expected to extend the Republican dominance associated with Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide. By then, however, the federal bureaucracy had become a powerful force in its own right—perhaps the most powerful faction in the country.
Voters’ preferences increasingly had to compete with the judgment of government institutions. Kesler argues that political representation shifted away from elected officials and party debate, toward forms of representation that were neither elected nor deliberative. Public consent gave way, bit by bit, to administration by experts claiming to act in the public interest.
The late scholar Angelo Codevilla made a related argument in 2020. He wrote that institutional changes associated with the second Constitution were driven by a powerful intellectual critique, one that had shaped progressive efforts to improve society since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s.
In Codevilla’s account, the ruling class faulted Americans for failing to provide enough education, support for disadvantaged people, environmental protection and public health. It also condemned the country for its treatment of women and, above all, for racism. These campaigns, he argued, relied on claims advanced by highly credentialed experts, often treated by government and the media as authoritative scientists, while those who disagreed were cast as enemies of the public.
This moral agenda also happened to serve the political and economic interests of the ruling class, which appointed itself the defender of the progressive order.
Whether that class genuinely cares about the groups it says it represents is hard to know. Codevilla pointed to its evident contempt for traditional working-class voters, while its desire to improve life for ordinary Americans seemed less evident. If the issue were simply hypocrisy, that might not matter much.
The larger problem is that the ruling class tied its pursuit of power to a political project that is difficult to control: movements centered on sexual liberation, racial grievances and individual autonomy.
The radical activists who give the Democratic coalition energy and cultural influence—what Codevilla called its intersectional wing—believe, with some reason, that they are in charge. That leaves the coalition on uneasy footing. For many establishment figures, Codevilla observed, the point of revolution is to enjoy and distribute the benefits of victory.
Those leaders may want to marginalize their opponents while avoiding economic disruption and violence. They can use humiliation as a tactic, but the intersectional activists may regard it as the goal itself. The establishment may insist that the most radical parts of its coalition should not control the whole movement, but each faction can see itself as the movement’s true center.
The central question in 2028 and after, then, may be simple: who really leads the ruling class?
Before the midterms, conservative commentator Dan McLaughlin wrote that he understood the urge to punish House Republicans, but warned that doing the same to Senate Republicans could leave the party powerless for years. The republic, he cautioned, might not have that much time.
If the latest results point toward a major leftward realignment in 2028, Democrats could enjoy not just six years but perhaps three decades of dominance. It is far from certain that establishment Democrats could restrain the movement’s more radical forces for that long. Even the most relaxed traditional conservative might find that prospect unsettling.
