Democrats Need to Realize What Time It Is: On Conjuncture, Revolution, and the Next American Republic

The continued fallout from the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act has placed American democracy on a knife’s edge. Southern states immediately rushed to redraw their maps, erasing their minority-majority districts even as voting is underway in multiple jurisdictions. The Supreme Court took another step to empower this Neo-Jim Crow assault on the electorate by determining that Alabama can move ahead with redrawing its districts before the midterm elections. Alabama’s primaries are next week. 

On BlueSky, legal analyst Ari Berman called the decision “outrageous.” At Mother Jones, Berman and Pema Levy explained,

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

At The UnPopulist, Andy Craig laid out harrowing possibility opened up by these rulings, one that could see Republicans attempt another seizure of power like in 2021:

The basic shape of the gambit is straightforward. If Republicans cannot stop a Democratic majority from emerging on election night in November, they might still try to prevent it from taking power in January, by blocking enough Democratic members-elect from being seated to leave Republicans in the majority.

This danger has been given a boost by the 6-3 party-line Callais decision. Several Republicans, in both Congress and the administration, are now claiming that deliberately drawn majority-minority districts are constitutionally banned. Several states will conduct elections this November using such districts which were, until now, often required under the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights law gutted by the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 3, 2027, when the new House convenes, Republicans could object to the seating of Democratic members, alleging their elections were unconstitutional. The goal would be for a rump House to then have a Republican majority, elect a Republican speaker, and decline to seat the challenged members. On this theory, the seats of rejected members would be vacant, allowing a Republican-controlled House to proceed to business even with fewer than all 435 representatives. The Constitution defines a quorum as a simple majority of the House’s members, and past practice has been to not count vacancies toward that number. In other words, an outright purge of the House.

What Berman, Bouie, Hayes, Craig, and others all apprehend is the immense peril of this moment and the poisonous intentions of the Republicans and their allies on the Supreme Court. 

Meanwhile, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the state’s 10-1 Democratic gerrymander on technical grounds. This is despite the gerrymander having been approved by a statewide referendum in which 3.1 million participated and 1.6 million voted in favor of the proposed map. 

Democratic voters and liberal commentators exploded with rage at the court overturning a popularly approved gerrymander at a time when Republicans are systematically dismantling American liberal democracy. Not only this, but in recent years Republicans have implemented their own gerrymanders in defiance of court orders, as they did in Ohio. In that state, elected republicans continued to work to gerrymander the state despite multiple rulings from the Ohio Supreme Court that their maps were unconstitutional. 

Lawmakers in Virginia, however, have shown a more tepid response. Speaking to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, Virginia State Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell pushed back on what he called “extreme” proposals like lowering the court’s retirement age and reassured Sargent that Democrats should still be able to win two out of the four seats the new map would have gained them. In defending his unwillingness to play hardball, Surovell told Sargent, “We went through this referendum to try and protect American democracy.”

It’s an attitude that is astonishingly at odds with the reality we are all living in. Jamelle Bouie, among others, has argued that we are experiencing a widespread Republican attempt to undo the Reconstruction Amendments that, along with the later civil rights reforms, form the constitutional foundation for our multiracial democracy. As Chris Hayes put it on his show, All In, 

They want a new Jim Crow. They’re very explicit about it. They’re hard at work trying to make it happen, and now they have a blessing from the Supreme Court.

In the face of this, Bouie has argued that Democrats in Virginia can and in fact must defy the Virginia court ruling. The Virginia gerrymander was democratically approved, and it is now an essential bulwark as the Republicans prepare to paint the South a deep, Neo-Confederate red. 

On his YouTube channel, Bouie argued

This is an absurd ruling. It’s a ruling that you can obviously challenge on its own grounds and you can obviously, I think, fairly portray as pure partisanship. Because the other thing is that I don't think there's anyone in the world—or anyone who pays attention to this stuff—who thinks that if the shoe were on the other foot, if Republicans were engaged in trying to redistrict using the referendum process, that the court would have ruled the same way. I don't think anyone thinks that.

This gets to the second reason why you shouldn't just acquiesce in the face of this, and that is a referendum isn't just any other vote, right? A referendum on a constitutional amendment is just not any other vote. It is a vote of the people in their capacity as sovereign, and sovereign simply means like ultimate authority. The Constitution, both the federal Constitution and state constitutions, get their authority from the fact that they're creations of the sovereign people, ratified by the sovereign people. And the courts, which are meant to enforce these constitutions, also get their power from the fact that they are creations of the sovereign people.

Bouie is correct, but I want to add some additional urgency to his point. What we need to grasp about this moment, and what Democrats in particular need to understand, is that a revolution is already underway in this country. This is a moment of drastic, monumental change, initiated by a Republican Party poisoned by illiberalism and anti-democratic resentments and a figure in Donald Trump who wants to arrogate monarchical, despotic powers to himself. 

In her book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, Manisha Sinha frames the period from the outbreak of the Civil War to 1920 as a new formulation of the republic, ruptured from the first and its slaveholding traditions. It continued, shepherded fretfully from the immolation of Reconstruction to the passage of the 19th Amendment and the rise of a new American imperial disposition, marked by domestic racial oppression and increasing power abroad. As Sinha writes,

By the end of the nineteenth century, a formal US empire would subject people from the Caribbean to the Philippines to colonial rule. The demise of the Second American Republic inaugurated an era of hierarchy and inequality—racial, ethnic, gendered, and economic—rather than one of equal citizenship promised by the war for emancipation and Reconstruction.

This idea of rupture and conjuncture, of breakdown in traditions that give way to revolutionary moments and new political expression, is of course not unique to the study of American history. 

In Machiavelli and Us, the famed theorist Louis Althusser’s lectures on Machiavelli were collected and published together for the first time. In them, Althusser argues for an understanding of the Italian father of political science as a theorist with a supple understanding of the timeliness of historical action. Althusser’s reading resonates with Machiavelli’s understanding that true leaders must possess what he called virtú. 

Machiavelli’s use of virtú is not about moral greatness. It has more to do with seizing the moment. It’s not quite so crass as opportunism, more a sense of readiness that the most important historical figures seem to possess. Althusser describes Machiavelli as a genius of aleatory materialism, that is to say, the immediate and the contingent. I may not be a Marxist or a historical materialist, but this framing of Machiavelli’s aleatory thought—his apprehension of what Althusser calls “the conjuncture” or “the encounter,” what we could more simply call the moment—is a reminder that revolutionary moments demand that we act boldly and decisively. They are moments of great danger but also great opportunity. 

Indeed, the system that replaced Sinha’s Second American Republic was arguably swept away in another revolutionary period beginning in the 1950s and continuing on into the 1970s, as the civil rights movement reached its zenith and all three branches of the federal government finally began to act. The republic under assault today is really the one that emerged in the 1970s, a half-century-old experiment in genuine multi-ethnic, pluralistic democracy. 

And so our moment is a revolutionary one, too. No amount of Democratic quiescence can change this. The action is upon us. This all a bit of an airy way of saying soothing simple: Democrats need to wake up and realize what time it is. And I’ll be clear, I’m not a radical. The moment is. 

The Republicans and their Supreme Court are waging revolution by demolishing the institutions and rules of American liberty. Democrats who stand on procedure and pontificate about exercising caution and restraint are catastrophically out of step with events. Virginia must implement the map anyway. Democrats must be prepared to play hardball throughout the midterms and in 2028. And when the time comes, they’ll have to embrace an expansion of the Supreme Court, perhaps along the lines outlined here by Jonathan V. Last. This isn’t a call to violence. It’s a call to play hardball, fill the streets, and embrace ambitious and aggressive reform. 

Anything less is to miss the moment. It’s to stand flat-footed as history happens to us. And anyone so inclined should either come to their senses or get out of the way. This American republic, however you want to enrage it, has fallen. A revolutionary moment is here, and the future belongs to those who are willing to seize it and set the course of the nation. 

This moment requires that we act on the stage of history with celerity, forcefulness, and courage. Anyone who fails to do so will be rightly condemned instead. But those who do act could help usher in the next great American republic, one that might finally realize the seeds planted in our founding documents. 

Featured image is The Death of Virginia, by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière