None of it worked, and Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025 with a stronger mandate. Now, if the polls prove correct and Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate, the question is whether they can finally achieve what they couldn’t pull off in those years. The answer is, likely, no: despite the unusually personal nature of his rule, Trump has, in fact, institutionalized his populist revolt.

An ambitious, energetic cadre of MAGA activists who’ve learned the ways of power stand between establishment Democrats and the dream of rolling back the revolution.

The desire for turning the clock back to 2014 is there, to be sure. Witness the recent remarks from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). Speaking earlier this month at the University of Chicago, the former CIA and Pentagon bureaucrat offered a revealing glimpse into the Democratic establishment’s plans for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. 

Asked how Democrats should use congressional power if they regain control after the midterms, Slotkin proposed pursuing a handful of high-profile investigations into Trump administration officials. The point, Slotkin explained, was not merely to hold officials accountable for alleged wrongdoing, but to send a stern message to the next generation of Trumpian staffers. She imagined a prospective staffer thinking to himself, as she put it, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.” She concluded: “I want that deterrence message sent.”

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Following Republican backlash, Slotkin backtracked on her statement, insisting she meant investigations into corruption and illegal conduct. But her national-security background makes her explanation unconvincing. Deterrence has a specific meaning in her world. It involves convincing an adversary that the costs of an action outweigh its benefits. To operationalize this approach requires making painful examples of a handful of targets to influence a broader group. 

Slotkin’s comments ultimately underscored a growing sense of panic within the Democratic establishment, among its career politicians, unelected Washington bureaucrats, and networks of NGOs and corporate interests pushed out of power by the Trump administration. They fear that the MAGA revolution has the potential to become an enduring force in American politics that could outlast Trump himself. And, perhaps most sobering of all, Slotkin’s comments appear to indirectly acknowledge that establishment Democrats have no legitimate political means of stopping it.

And they aren’t wrong.

Trump and the MAGA movement represented a powerful rejection of the overgrowth and abuses associated with the postwar liberal order. The order’s large governing elite had grown increasingly detached from the American people as it consolidated more power across the federal bureaucracy, universities, media, and other major American institutions, using authority for purposes beyond the desires of the ordinary citizen. Undoing this order would require Trump to challenge the very institutions through which the center-Left, especially, had exercised power for decades. The center-Left establishment, in turn, understood the threat from the start of his first presidency.

Early on, Trump’s personality made it easy to cast him as a villain. Over the course of a decade, establishment forces built a powerful movement among Democratic voters, particularly older and college-educated female voters, centered on opposition to Trump’s crass and bombastic style. From this emerged a broader narrative portraying Trump as an authoritarian whose presidency threatened American democracy itself, increasingly conflating the establishment’s loss of political power with an attack on the nation’s democratic norms and institutions. 

To be sure, Trump at times went out of his way to vindicate this picture of him, most notably in his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. Even so, the narrative failed to stop his movement. More importantly, the playbook is becoming increasingly unsuitable for a political struggle that must continue after he leaves office. 

With two years remaining in Trump’s presidency, establishment Democrats will need a new antagonist and a new pretext to continue clawing back institutional power. But the problem confronting them, as with much of the postwar Western liberal establishment, is twofold: they have lost their grasp on political reality, choosing instead to inhabit a powerful fiction of their own making; and consequently, they have become incapable of formulating a convincing strategy for returning to power through democratic means. The victories for Democrats expected in the upcoming midterms, after all, come not from the party’s establishment, but from insurgent forces in both its populist and radical Left. 

It is this dangerous combination of political desperation and an inability to accept her side’s dispossession by American voters that helps explain Slotkin’s apparent willingness to use the threat of investigations to intimidate and deter the next generation of conservatives from entering government.

Her desire to send a deterrence message may also reflect an understanding among Democrats that, unlike during his first administration, when Trump often found himself surrounded by officials who disagreed with his political goals, his second has brought into Washington a cohort of conservatives committed to translating MAGA’s ideological principles into government policy. Among them are Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both of whom sharply criticized Trump during his first presidential campaign in 2016 but have since become leading figures in his administration and potential successors to his political movement. Their ambitions extend beyond serving the president. They are seeking to change how the federal government operates, who exercises authority within it, and how much power its agencies should possess. The significance of this development is not merely that Trump has found more loyal officials this time around, but that they are gaining the experience, building the networks, and developing the institutional knowledge necessary to continue the political project after he leaves office.

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Ultimately, what we are witnessing is not the crisis of American democracy feared by establishment Democrats, but the fading of the postwar liberal governing order and the administrative state that expanded under it for the better part of a century. Their unwillingness to recognize the distinction is perhaps understandable given how pervasive their authority became. For decades, the political and professional class operating within Washington’s institutions came to regard its own position as an essential feature of American government, rather than a temporary claim to political authority. The possibility that this arrangement might be challenged, or even permanently altered, is consequently difficult for them to separate from the idea of a constitutional or democratic crisis.

What makes their loss of power particularly painful for members of the establishment is that MAGA isn’t simply seeking to replace their class with another of equal size. Its ideological ambitions include reducing the federal bureaucracy, transferring authority away from administrative agencies back to the states, and concentrating greater federal decision-making power in the executive branch. 

The threat to the old establishment is therefore not simply another four or eight years out of power, but the possibility that many of the institutional mechanisms through which it exercised that power will no longer exist for it to reclaim. The Biden years offered a reminder of just how consequential control of that machinery could be. Having spent four years out of power, Democrats returned to Washington and pursued sweeping policies, from expansive Covid-era mandates and inflationary spending, to opening the southern border, and waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine. 

That same pattern appears to be repeating itself, with establishment Democrats showing an even greater urgency to return to power and a willingness to consider increasingly extraordinary measures to regain it. From Slotkin’s proposed “deterrence” campaign to calls to pack the Supreme Court and admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state, the lengths some Democrats are prepared to go to reclaim that authority are becoming increasingly apparent.

There is a final irony in the Democratic establishment’s predicament. It has become so consumed with recovering its former authority that it risks overlooking the socialist insurgency growing within its own party. The longer the old establishment goes on fighting for political order that is slipping further from its grasp, the more room it creates for a young generation of Democrats to remake the party in their own hard-Left image.

President Trump built his 2024 re-election bid, in large part, on ending the border crisis and reversing mass migration. On the first front, external enforcement, he has unquestionably succeeded, as even Democrats grudgingly admit. Yet his broader efforts to reduce illegal and legal immigration have encountered resistance, often in unexpected places. Some of the fiercest opposition has emerged in areas of policy not obviously connected to immigration, while some of the most successful has come from within his own coalition.

This owes to the paradox of mass migration: as the share of foreign-born newcomers swells, voters become more determined to shrink it, while governments become less able to do so. Reversing mass migration, in other words, is hard. Really hard. Because migration entrenches itself and remakes recipient societies in indelible ways.

Public opinion in the late Biden years reflected the mounting frustration. In early 2024, Americans cited uncontrolled immigration as their no. 1 or no. 2 priority for three consecutive months — the first time they’d done so for multiple consecutive months in Gallup’s monthly trend assessment. Later that year, in June, Gallup found that 55% of Americans wanted immigration decreased, the highest share in more than two decades.

Trump took such polling as his new mandate. Immediately upon taking office, the president handed down sweeping executive orders to shut down the border, boost interior arrests of illegal and criminal immigrants, and (less concertedly) restrict legal immigration. 

Nearly two years later, the results show Trump partially delivered on that mandate. Illegal crossings at the southern border have dropped by more than 90%, while legal immigration has slowed considerably. Fewer visas are being issued, and immigration processing has slowed considerably, with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services completing 74% fewer naturalizations in July 2026 than at the same point a year earlier. 

But nowhere has Trump’s agenda been more aggressive, or more controversial, than in interior deportations. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates that interior deportations surged to roughly 120,000 in 2025, up about 150% from the 47,732 immigrants Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed from inside the homeland during Biden’s final full fiscal year.

These results have been obtained despite serious opposition from Democrats in Congress and Democratic-controlled states and cities, where many of the administration’s most intensive ICE operations have taken place. The administration’s aggressive interior enforcement tactics in particular have triggered intense media scrutiny and street-level backlash, contributing to public concerns over how arrests and deportations are being carried out. 

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A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around 60% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Yet disapproval of Trump’s enforcement tactics doesn’t appear to translate into broader opposition to his effort to curb immigration. The same annual Gallup survey that tracks Americans’ immigration preferences found earlier this year that a whopping two-thirds of Americans favor either maintaining today’s much lower levels of immigration or reducing it further. Americans may be uncomfortable with some of Trump’s hard-line tactics, but they appear to quietly favor the result.

By the standards of Western politics, Trump’s achievement — partially translating voters’ long-standing demand for lower immigration levels into actually lower inflows — is something close to a miracle. Across Europe, voters have for decades demanded less immigration, and elected governments promising to deliver it, only to watch as more and more newcomers flooded the system, squeezing workers’ bargaining power, straining social services, and contributing to social incohesion.

Spain’s case is instructive. In 2024, a national poll commissioned by the El País newspaper found that a clear majority of Spaniards believed the country already had too many immigrants. Yet mass migration persisted and in early 2026, the government launched an extraordinary regularization program initially estimated to convert roughly half a million illegal migrants into legal residents. By the time applications closed in June, nearly 1.2 million people had applied. 

Then there was Brexit and its aftermath — perhaps the clearest example of the betrayal of voters’ desire for lower immigration levels. In 2016, a majority of British voters took the extraordinary step of rejecting the political and economic order that had governed their country for decades. Regaining control over immigration was at the center of the Leave campaign. 

Yet even exiting the European Union, it turned out, wasn’t enough. The Tory governments ostensibly charged with overseeing the implementation of Brexit did the opposite. The annual number of people immigrating to Britain surged to 1.3 million in 2023, up from 589,000 in 2016. 

The truth is that since the current era of mass migration began more than a decade ago, no other major Western country has yet managed to reverse the trend and sustain substantially lower levels of immigration despite widespread public demand to do so. Trump’s partial success in sustaining substantially lower immigration for nearly two years remains, for now, an anomaly in the Western world. And even that effort is partial, tentative, and vulnerable, as we will see.

The reason is straightforward. Immigration at sufficient scale doesn’t merely add people to a country. Over time, institutions and industries adapt themselves to their presence. Businesses — especially in sectors like hospitality, food, construction, and personal services — become dependent on migrants’ cheap labor. In parallel with this, government agencies and nonprofit contractors build programs around migrants, which these days generally means poorer populations from the Global South. 

Those dependencies eventually create political pressure of their own, as employers, service providers, and local governments push national elected officials to protect the economic arrangements that have developed around migration. Immigration restriction therefore comes to mean more than stopping a flow of people. It means disrupting interests that have grown dependent on that flow.

Trump’s second term offers revealing examples of how this works. His immigration agenda has faced the resistance one expects from Democrats, including mass protests and federal lawsuits. Yet the greatest obstacles to his efforts to restrict immigration have not come from efforts to protect migrants themselves. Instead, they have come from federal elected officials in both parties seeking to protect the industries, labor markets, and government programs that have grown dependent on their presence.

Consider the 2025 government shutdown. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained plenty for Democrats to oppose on immigration, including tens of billions of dollars in new funding for ICE and the administration’s enforcement agenda. Yet when Democrats chose to force their most consequential confrontation with Trump, immigration enforcement wasn’t at the center of it. Health care was. Democrats blocked government funding for six weeks in what became the longest shutdown in American history, demanding that Republicans abandon the health-care provisions of the bill and preserve enhanced Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) subsidies that were scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

Here the paradox begins to reveal itself. The Biden-era immigration surge had become intertwined with the enormous expansion of government health subsidies. The CBO estimated that by 2024, the Biden surge had added roughly 600,000 migrant recipients of heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, private health insurance through ObamaCare. That was on top of another 300,000 foreign nationals receiving full Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits. 

The CBO projected that the insurance-premium tax credits for the surge population would add $66 billion to the federal deficit over the following decade, while Medicaid and CHIP spending would increase by another $40 billion. Much of that government spending ultimately became revenue for private health-care companies. ObamaCare subsidies pay premiums for plans sold by private insurers, while much of Medicaid coverage is administered by private firms. As migration increased the number of people eligible for subsidized coverage — aided by the Biden administration’s expansive use of parole and other humanitarian statuses that moved migrants into categories eligible for welfare benefits — it also expanded the market for the companies paid to insure them.

Here Trump’s immigration restriction efforts encountered an indirect kind of resistance. The fight wasn’t directly over migrants themselves, but over the flow of federal funding to private markets that had expanded alongside the growth of the migrant population. By the time Trump sought to unwind the enhanced subsidies, only four years after their creation, insurers had already adapted to the enormous market they created. Cutting them meant removing millions of subsidized customers and billions in revenue — a disruption significant enough that Democrats were willing to sustain the longest government shutdown in American history to prevent it.

In blue cities, meanwhile, mass migration — legal and illegal — functions like a permanent jobs bill for various groups, including public-school teachers amid otherwise declining enrollment; lawyers and other laptop workers in the NGO sector facing AI and automation; Left activists looking for a streetfighting cause to compete with the pleasures of Netflix and legal weed; and public functionaries struggling to justify their salaries amid out-migration from blue cities to suburbs and exurbs, and from blue states to red. 

Put another way, as UnHerd’s Michael Lind has argued, mass migration provides a subset of the urban professional classes with a reason to maintain and expand the government agencies and NGOs that keep them employed.

Which brings us to the Right. Republicans’ resistance to portions of Trump’s immigration crackdown reveals the same paradox from the other direction. Where Democrats faced pressure from industries that had come to serve migrants as federally subsidized consumers and program enrollees, Republicans faced it from industries that had come to depend on them as cheap labor.

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When workplace enforcement raids increased in 2025, Big Ag — one of America’s most forceful cheap-labor lobbies — warned Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that farmers and ranchers risked losing workers. Rollins took their concerns to Trump, who briefly directed immigration authorities to pull back enforcement at farms, hotels, and restaurants. 

More recently, even as it has removed temporary protected status for Haitians and others, Team Trump held off terminating protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, apparently following intense pressure from the construction industry. In both cases, Trump found himself caught between the populist voters who elected him to enforce immigration law and Republican-aligned industries that had spent years building their businesses around the wage arbitrage made possible by inviting what Marx called a “reserve army of labor.”

The Trump administration and some congressional Republicans, moreover, have moved to expand guest-worker presence in migrant-heavy industries, most notably agriculture. A subset of the GOP, in other words, is prepared to tolerate high migrant flows in some regions, so long as the newcomers are tied to specific employers, can’t organize or vote, and continue to do jobs “Americans won’t do” (which is just cheap-labor-lobby speak for: jobs Americans won’t do at poverty wages).

The upshot is mixed. Trump’s first two years have demonstrated that it is possible to end the age of mass migration. They also show the extraordinary political effort required to do it — and the multidirectional resistance. His most difficult battles have not always been with the liberal opposition, but with businesses, government programs, and other institutions that spent years adapting themselves to high immigration and now have an interest in its continuation.

Understanding this paradox matters as Western societies are at a breaking point after years of governments failing to respond to the growing demands of their people. A politics focused narrowly on reducing immigration numbers misses much of what sustains mass migration once it has taken hold. The more important target may be the sectors that have come to depend on migration. Industries, nonprofit agencies, and other institutions often play a quieter but more influential role in frustrating the changes voters demand. Reducing mass migration therefore requires more than changing immigration law. It also requires voters to elect governments willing to confront the domestic interests that have grown up around it, forcing them to adjust to lower levels of immigration.

There is a cost to waiting. If these interests grow powerful enough to completely prevent governments from translating public demands into policy, the consequences will extend beyond immigration itself to the very legitimacy of representative government.

In the years that followed, a few cultural flashpoints brought Islam’s place in America into public contestation. Even so, Bush’s distinction more or less held. But not anymore. Today, politicians and activists from his home state of Texas are promulgating school curricula that underscore the violent dimensions of Islam, mounting fierce opposition to new mosque proposals, and objecting to recent demographic changes in overtly racial and religious terms.

The Lone Star State, in short, is emerging as the central battleground in fierce new debates about Islam, identity, and American belonging. 

It’s easy to dismiss the ferment as just the latest expression of old-school Southern bigotry. And to be sure, the new Texas pushback against Islam is sometimes downright ugly. Yet those who merely wring their hands — including veterans of Texas GOP politics like outgoing Sen. John Cornyn and former Bush consigliere Karl Rove — underestimate the depth and durability of the anger, as well as its roots. By picking these fights, Texas Republicans seek to renegotiate and revise America’s modern immigration order, which dates back to the 1960s.

Consider the newly approved statewide social-studies curriculum, which requires teachers to explain early Islam in terms of “the Prophet Mohammed’s brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes,” and to emphasize the faith’s “normalization of slavery” and “the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” The curriculum must also “describe the teachings of jihad and how these teachings led to the expansion of Islam and the conquest of Christian lands, including Jerusalem, Syria, and Egypt.” As Texas’s Muslim population grows, Republican officials are responding not with accommodation, but by asserting more forcefully the state’s own civic identity and, not so subtly, their belief that Islam is incompatible with Western culture.

Islam isn’t the only target. There was also the recent Texas Longhorns controversy, in which Bo French, a GOP nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted on X a photograph of a large section of Indian-American students cheering at a University of Texas, Austin, football game with the following caption: “Social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.” 

While that post could be written off as one aspiring pol’s edgelording, the Islam curriculum represents a systematic push by the state GOP, with intense pushback from Muslim advocacy groups to show for it. The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Gov. Greg Abbott has designated a foreign terrorist organization under state law, has vowed to “overturn” it and to “protect teachers and students who refuse to teach it.”

The deeper issue is immigration — legal immigration, to be precise. Border security and illegal immigration have long been top priorities of the Texas Republican agenda, of course, but the current fight is something new and addresses a slow but significant transformation of American demographics now plainly visible in Texas. 

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In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national-origins quota system that had severely restricted immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The law didn’t transform the country’s demographics overnight, but it created the conditions for much larger waves of immigration in the decades that followed. In Texas, the Asian population nearly tripled between 2000 and 2020, swelling to 5.4%, up from 2.7%. In some of the booming North Texas suburbs where these communities have concentrated, the change is even more pronounced. In the Dallas suburb of Frisco, where much of the Asian population is Indian, the broader Census category of “Asian” jumped to more than a quarter, up from 2.3%, over the same period.

For a growing faction of Texas Republican activists, these communities have made legal immigration a cultural question in a way that illegal immigration never has been. That is in part because the demographic change is unfolding in many of the same middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs where conservative voters themselves live. Many of these immigrant communities are also relatively affluent, giving them the resources to invest in permanent institutions of their own, from commercial storefronts and restaurants to mosques and Hindu temples. The result is more immediate and visible contact with people whose religious practices, dress, customs, and social norms are unfamiliar — and seem threatening — to the native population. 

Legal immigration isn’t an entirely new concern in Texas. The state Republican Party had previously called for ending the H-1B program, which allows for the importation of workers whose right to remain in the United States is tied to a specific employer, rendering them particularly pliant and likely to undercut the wages and bargaining power of native workers. By 2024, Texas Republicans had adopted an unusually sweeping legal immigration agenda unlike that of any other state GOP. The platform called for immigration to be limited to levels that “facilitate assimilation,” the repeal of H-1B visas, an end to the diversity lottery and chain migration, and a moratorium on net migration. The breadth and ambition of these demands may make them easy to dismiss as so much rhetoric. But Texas conservatives have repeatedly shown that the state can be a launchpad for policies that reshape the national debate.

But the immigration debate also leads back to Islam. For some Texas Republican activists, it extends to specific religious beliefs and practices they see as difficult to reconcile with American law and culture. They argue that sufficiently large Muslim communities could develop a parallel social and legal order organized around Islamic religious law, or Sharia. The issue has therefore moved beyond the party’s older opposition to courts applying foreign law to whether Sharia could shape daily life within Muslim communities in Texas. In 2026, “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” became a formal grassroots legislative priority, calling for restrictions involving immigration, foreign funding, religious and educational institutions, and residential developments alleged to promote the application of Sharia law.

These ideas have not remained confined to the grassroots. Both state-level politicians and federal elected officials are pursuing government action to address these issues. In Austin, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies and public universities to freeze new H-1B visa petitions while his administration reviews the program. Attorney General (and US Senate hopeful) Ken Paxton has opened investigations into North Texas companies suspected of using sham businesses to sponsor foreign workers.

At the federal level, Texas Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus last year. It has since grown to more than 60 members, including more than a dozen members of the Texas congressional delegation. Their rhetoric has been unusually direct. Roy has argued that the immigration system must confront what he calls the threat posed by Sharia, while Self has described its spread as a threat to Western civilization. When a proposed mosque came before the McKinney City Council this summer, Self personally urged council members to reject it, warning that “there is no state cavalry coming to save you.” (The council ultimately approved the mosque unanimously because development complied with city ordinances.)

But even the most ambitious efforts to restrict future immigration can’t reverse the demographic change that has already taken place. Texas Republicans must contend with the state as it exists today, and with a younger generation that looks very different from the one that built the modern red state. Between the 2000 and 2020 US Censuses, non-Hispanic whites fell to 40% of the state’s population, down from 52%. Hispanics grew to 39%, up from 32%, while the Asian share nearly doubled (as already noted). The change is even more pronounced in the public schools. Of the roughly 5.5 million students enrolled today, only about a quarter are white, and more than half are Hispanic. Another 13% are black, and nearly 6% are Asian. Public-school enrollment isn’t a forecast of the future electorate, but it offers a striking picture of the generation now coming of age in Texas.

That demographic reality has raised the stakes of what Texas teaches in its public schools.

In September, the Texas State Board of Education completed its yearlong overhaul of K-12 social-studies standards. The curriculum’s new treatment of Islam has received the most media attention, having angered Muslim Americans and revived an old cultural debate over Islam and the West. But the more significant change may be what the standards say about how Texas intends to teach its own history and civic identity to an increasingly diverse generation. The standards place what the board calls a central emphasis on the foundations of Western civilization and the values that shaped the founding of Texas and the United States. Board chairman Aaron Kinsey said the goal was for students to understand the state’s republican form of government and America’s “exceptional place in the world.” The curriculum revision reflects a decades-long conservative project in Texas, in which grassroots activists scrutinized textbooks and pressed the State Board of Education to give greater emphasis to American patriotism, Christianity, and the country’s founding principles.

Underlying that effort is a larger disagreement over what civic education is supposed to accomplish. Conservatives involved in the curriculum fight argue that schools should transmit a common civic inheritance and give students the intellectual foundations for understanding why the American constitutional system developed as it did. But liberal and progressive critics argue that organizing history around Western civilization and American exceptionalism can marginalize the experiences and traditions of students whose ancestors came from elsewhere, as well as leave students unprepared to navigate a globalized world.

At the center of that disagreement is a still-deeper dispute over cultural relativism that pervades liberal and progressive thinking. The conservative critique is that a curriculum too reluctant to make distinctions between political, religious, and moral traditions eventually loses the ability to explain why the American system should command any particular loyalty. To this, the progressive response is that a common national story must teach the histories of other groups so that students can see their own communities represented in what they learn. They claim that traditional accounts of America have too often ignored or minimized the experiences of these minority populations.

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But post-1965 immigration presents a challenge to this familiar progressive response. Unlike black, Native-American, and Hispanic communities, many of the immigrant populations that grew rapidly after 1965 don’t have a long-standing place in the American tradition. The tension is therefore not just simply that there is less of their history to construct and emphasize in the American story. It is also that a world-history curriculum built around Western exceptionalism necessarily makes judgments about the non-Western civilizations from which many of these students descend.

Nowhere is that conflict clearer than in the teaching of Islam. The new world-history standards require students to study Muhammad, the Quran and Hadiths, and the Five Pillars of Islam. But they also give more explicit attention to Islam’s military expansion. The instructions to study the “teachings of jihad” and how they contributed to Islamic expansion and the “conquest of Christian lands” are new, and have been contested by Muslim groups. Students will also study Muslim participation in the medieval slave trade, conflicts between Christian and Muslim powers, and the role of radical Islam in the 9/11 attacks. 

Muslim organizations and some educators have objected to that framing. They argue that it disproportionately associates Islam with conquest, violence, and extremism. They also fear such teaching could contribute to Islamophobia and peer bullying. While these concerns are important, there is also no denying that the multicultural curricula that prevailed in recent decades also didn’t do justice to the truth: Islam has violent scriptures that, taken too literally, have inspired latter-day jihadists and societies that intensely repress women and religious and sexual minorities.

Texas Republicans may thus be taking on the most consequential culture-war fight they have ever attempted. Unlike earlier battles over abortion, guns, or gender, this one confronts demographic changes that Republicans see as a potential threat to their long-term political dominance in the state. Republicans are trying both to slow that transformation through efforts that restrict immigration and to ensure that an increasingly diverse generation of Texans can be taught a common understanding of the history and traditions of the state and country they share. Whether Texas can build that common civic education without taking actions that deepen the religious and cultural divisions it is trying to contain may be the real test of its current fight. A nation undergoing similar demographic transformation is watching. 

Then, in the early-morning hours of July 4, masked gunmen allegedly shot Bautista, just off that same park, as he was beginning his shift as an employee of the city’s Department of Public Works. He remained lying on the pavement for more than an hour before a passerby discovered him. By the time emergency services arrived, Bautista was dead.

As if his killing weren’t tragic enough for his family, in the days that followed another dimension of the story unfolded. Just weeks before the shooting, the Cambridge city council had voted to shut off ShotSpotter, the gunshot-detection system that had been used by the city for more than a decade to help the police locate shootings and to more quickly respond to victims in high-crime areas. One of those unutilized sensors was located only feet from where Xavier lay wounded.

Viewed in isolation, Cambridge’s removal of an anti-crime technology could be dismissed as the predictable politics of a college town with an oversupply of highly educated liberal voters. But Cambridge isn’t an isolated case. Across the country, Left-wing activists and progressive elected officials are increasingly targeting law-enforcement technologies they cast as tools of state surveillance, corporate power, and racial inequality. 

ShotSpotter is one such technology. Others include Flock Safety — a license-plate-recognition system that police departments use daily to apprehend suspects fleeing crime scenes, locate abducted children, and recover stolen vehicles. Together, these local campaigns show how opposition to new anti-crime technologies has become fertile ground for Left-wing activists seeking political wins. 

Yet affluent progressives are rarely the ones who pay the price for this kind of anti-policing push. 

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For Bautista’s family and many residents of The Port, the city’s decision was impossible to fathom. Days after his death, more than 200 angry residents packed a meeting with city officials, demanding answers. The central question that emerged in the discussion was: why had the city removed a technology that existed to help first responders reach gunshot victims more quickly?

The answer begins in January, when a 24-year-old Harvard graduate and self-identified democratic socialist named Ayah Al-Zubi — the youngest person ever elected to the city council — was sworn into office and immediately appointed chairwoman of the council’s public-safety committee. Al-Zubi had no background in law enforcement or public safety, nor had she ever lived in a low-income neighborhood, having spent most of her adolescence in a comfortable suburb of Cincinnati, where both of her parents worked as dentists.

Even so, Al-Zubi made ending Cambridge’s ShotSpotter program her first priority in office. It was a cause she’d championed for months alongside other local Left activists, who’d concluded —  rather suddenly, it seemed — that the tried-and-tested technology is an instrument of racialized surveillance.

In the public hearings that followed, activists repeatedly hammered this point: that ShotSpotter was inherently racist because its sensors were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. As one elderly white Cambridge resident told the committee, “ShotSpotter does not make Cambridge a safer community… It makes Cambridge a more oppressive place to live… particularly for its black and brown residents who are already targeted by racism.”

Others repeatedly cited an 82% false-positive rate, a figure drawn from a nearly decade-old Harvard Crimson analysis that the Cambridge Police Department disputes. And still others criticized the technology for failing to deter gun violence, despite the fact that its manufacturer, SoundThinking, has consistently described ShotSpotter as primarily a gunfire-detection-and-response tool, rather than a prevention system.

Yet these present-focused arguments ultimately took up only a small share of the advocacy. Far more common was reasoning focused not on what ShotSpotter actually does, but on what it might someday achieve. Activists warned that the sensors could eventually record private conversations and that ICE agents or a future Republican administration might gain access to the data.

Future speculation thus dominated the discussions. The arguments reflected what has become a defining characteristic of contemporary Left-wing politics: a paranoid style and a paranoid political imagination detached from reality, in which hypothetical future abuses of technology and state authority carry far greater significance than present challenges. Soon, the council voted to remove ShotSpotter, with five votes in favor of the proposal, two opposed, and two abstaining.

The successful effort of a small group of Left-wing activists to remove ShotSpotter in Cambridge reflects a broader transformation in the nature of progressive activism during President Trump’s second administration. Compared to the first Trump presidency, when opposition was organized centrally around resisting a single political figure, today’s activism is more fragmented and directed toward technological objects that have come to symbolize the larger political and economic systems the movement opposes. 

Whether the target is a gunshot-detection system, a license-plate reader, a Tesla car, or a hyperscale data center, the hardware increasingly becomes the site through which broader Left-wing anxieties about surveillance, policing, capitalism, and inequality are expressed. This new focus revises the mission of the historic Left, which welcomed technological advancement, even as it sought to reform or revolutionize the relations of production. Under the new dispensation, the product itself is the target — and advancement is presumed suspect unless proved otherwise.  

The pattern has become unmistakable. Since Trump’s return to office, dozens of predominantly progressive cities, the largest being Los Angeles, have ended or reconsidered their relationships with Flock Safety. In each of these cases, the campaigns shifted the debate away from the technology’s demonstrated uses and toward what it might someday become. Similar campaigns have targeted data centers, turning reasonable land-use disputes into a broader ideological struggle over Big Tech.

This shift coincides with two larger developments. The first is the growing disarray of the liberal institutions that once organized and directed Left-wing political energy. After nearly a decade of defining themselves in opposition to Trump, Democrats and the broader network of DC-based progressive organizations have struggled to produce a comparable national movement capable of channeling the Left’s diverse grievances into a unified political project. The Women’s March, the impeachment campaigns, and the George Floyd protests represented the high-water mark of that form of resistance, yet none produced a durable political movement beyond opposition to Trump himself.

As Trump approaches the end of his presidency, even that organizing center is beginning to dissolve, and the political energy it once contained is dispersing into smaller, localized battles fought in mayor’s offices and city-council meetings over the technologies increasingly shaping everyday life.

The second development is the speed at which computing has embedded itself into the economy. As semiconductors have shrunk and computing power has become cheaper, more industries have adopted technology capable of processing vast amounts of information and automating tasks that once required human judgment or that were simply impossible to perform at scale.

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Public safety and law enforcement have enjoyed the benefits of this computing revolution. Tools like ShotSpotter and Flock Safety are examples of the same more-powerful computing now commonplace across medicine, manufacturing, and finance, filling long-standing operational needs through automation and pattern recognition. The primary difference is that the Left sees these technologies, when used by law enforcement, as proxies for fears about the future of state authority and technological control.

To be sure, new technologies can produce unexpected consequences. Social media promised greater openness and connection but also gave rise to pervasive targeted advertising and worsening mental-health outcomes for adolescents. That history helps explain the public’s current unease with new technologies.

But broad skepticism alone doesn’t explain why anti-crime technology has emerged as a lightning rod for Left-wing ire. The reason lies in the unique character of the technological revolution. Unlike previous waves of technological change, today’s computing revolution has unfolded without a broadly shared national narrative explaining its purpose, benefits, or tradeoffs. That vacuum has given activists an opportunity to frame the debate, and to define these technologies primarily as instruments of surveillance and social control. 

As political commentators search for signs of how the Democratic Party will regain national power in 2028, much of their attention remains fixed on Democrats in Congress. But a quieter political movement is taking shape in local governments across the country. Led by informal networks of Left-leaning activists and citizens, it has become one of the most effective forces of our time, helping to block billions of dollars in government contracts with major technology companies and successfully turning symbolic political campaigns into real policy victories.

Perhaps more important, these campaigns reveal something deeper about the modern Left. Its belief system is now defined by a generalized suspicion of technology, institutions, and the exercise of power itself, mirroring the descent of parts of the Right into conspiracism and what used to be called the paranoid style. As these ideas become more influential within the Democratic Party, it is worth asking whether they provide the foundation for a national campaign capable of persuading ordinary Americans that Democrats are prepared to govern. At stake, after all, are the lives of people like Xavier Bautista, whose death might have been prevented had Cambridge retained the technology it chose to abandon in response to the Left’s anti-tech paranoia.

The evidence is becoming difficult to ignore. Last week, two Democratic Socialist of America members achieved electoral successes that underscore the movement’s growing ability to outcompete the party mainstream. In Maine, Graham Platner, who has described himself as a DSA member in online forums, clinched the nomination for the US Senate, besting the party’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills. On the other coast, Nithya Raman, the first DSA member elected to the Los Angeles City Council, advanced to a mayoral runoff against the establishment-backed incumbent, Karen Bass. 

Meanwhile, in New York City, fewer than five months after becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani is using his newfound political capital not to unify the Democratic Party, but to build a New York-based socialist faction in Congress. In a surprising escalation, he has endorsed the DSA-backed firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier in her bid to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and the progressive Brad Lander in his challenge to Rep. Dan Goldman. The Democratic establishment will now be compelled to spend millions to fend off these DSA primary challengers, no small feat for a party that needs significant funding to compete in the battleground races it must win to retake Congress.

The national Democratic leadership seems unwilling to publicly acknowledge the scale of the challenge emerging from the DSA and broader Left-wing movement. 

Unlike previous iterations of the American hard Left, today’s movement has learned to build a durable political infrastructure capable of producing candidates, mobilizing volunteers, and influencing Democratic politics. For more than a decade, this movement has quietly built a political ecosystem that operates independently from the traditional party. Organizations such as the DSA, Justice Democrats, and the older Working Families Party have spent years recruiting candidates, training activists, building donor networks, and developing local power. 

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The movement’s success isn’t measured only in the number of candidates it elects. It is also reflected in a growing capacity to shape Democratic politics. Across many cities, self-described progressives and DSA-endorsed candidates have assembled voting blocs on city councils and  successfully pressured moderate Democratic elected officials to slash police funding, ban ICE from city jurisdictions, and expand state and city funding for various social-welfare programs.

No organization has been more central to this effort than the Democratic Socialist of America. With more than 200 chapters nationwide, 100,000 members, thousands of highly motivated volunteers, and a growing roster of elected officials, the DSA has become the backbone of the modern socialist movement. Its greatest strength is the organization’s willingness to adapt its tactics to local conditions, now touting its presence, now deliberately obscuring its involvement when doing so is more electorally advantageous.

The rise of Graham Platner illustrates this point. It is now being revealed that his candidacy was largely manufactured by a handful of DSA members from the same networks that powered Mamdani’s election. Socialist operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan found Platner through a DSA-affiliated local activist group, but that affiliation never became part of his public profile. Instead, the duo built a carefully curated image of him as a humble veteran and oysterman. 

The operatives also managed to keep several major liabilities from coming to light before the primary, including his Nazi tattoo, allegations of manhandling his ex-girlfriends, and extramarital sexting. Now that Platner is the nominee, these DSA operatives have effectively saddled the Democratic Party with a nominee offering a socialist platform and enough personal baggage to sink its chances in Maine and damage the party’s broader brand heading into November.

If Platner’s campaign showcased the growing sophistication in defeating the party’s preferred picks in a primary, Raman’s challenge to Karen Bass reveals something more fundamental: the radical Left-wing movement will turn on Democratic incumbents — regardless of how much those incumbents have conceded to it. 

Bass wasn’t a moderate figure who resisted progressive demands from city lawmakers or the grassroots. She and Raman had worked closely together on their biggest shared priorities, including the city’s massive homelessness crisis. Bass also had the support of many of her progressive colleagues on the council, who chose to endorse her over Raman. But none of that mattered. The moment Bass became politically vulnerable, as she did after her mishandling of the Palisades wildfires, Raman filed to run against her. This is not a movement that can be appeased into loyalty, it is an insatiable insurgency that views propagating its own power as equally important, if not more so, than securing policy victories. 

Leading into the midterms, the Democratic Party faces the seemingly impossible task of forging a united campaign capable of winning enough moderate votes to flip at least one chamber of Congress, while simultaneously resisting a hostile takeover by a radical movement. Nowhere is the cost of that takeover more visible for Democrats than in Maine. DSA operatives built Platner from scratch and hid his liabilities long enough to push Janet Mills out of the race. Now that Platner is in the hands of the Democratic Party as its official Senate nominee, party officials have no choice but to defend him. Senate Democratic leaders have been forced to publicly rationalize his fitness to the moderate voters they can’t afford to lose. 

And it was the decision by the broader progressive ecosystem to challenge Karen Bass through Raman that helped transform what might otherwise have been a routine municipal election into a national headache for Democrats. It’s true that the DSA has thus far formally withheld its endorsement from Raman, in part over her tepid statements in support of Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Still, there’s hardly any doubt that she can be expected to push city politics closer to the group’s position.

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The entry of television personality Spencer Pratt further amplified scrutiny of blue governance in the city and state, drawing national attention to the party’s failure to deal with homelessness and public safety. Perhaps unexpectedly, the race has also brought attention to California’s unusually slow vote-counting process and permissive election rules, both of which have long raised Republican ire. In that respect, the Los Angeles race has provided Republicans with a highly visible example to cite as they continue pushing the SAVE Act and its proof-of-citizenship voter requirements.

As usual, Democratic leaders have opted for damage control rather than direct confrontation in response to each of these power grabs. This posture of strategic ambiguity reflects a naive confidence that maintaining a peaceful coalition will eventually absorb DSA and progressive officials into the party apparatus and keep them under establishment authority. But that logic is flawed. It doesn’t account for the strength this movement has built at the local level, or its willingness to use local political power to resist submission to national leadership.

The tipping point may already be here. If Mamdani succeeds in helping even one DSA challenger unseat a sitting member of Congress, or if the candidate cultivated by DSA operatives captures the Maine Senate seat, it will demonstrate that the Democratic establishment can no longer protect its own incumbents. Once that assumption disappears, every safe Democratic seat becomes a potential target. Members of Congress will live in fear of the DSA or other Leftist organizations launching  primary challenges against them. The threat itself would become the most powerful leverage the movement has to push the national party to the hard Left. The party’s performance in the midterms, as well as its viability in the 2028 presidential election, will depend upon whether it can confront this threat. 

So why does it seem that Democrats are fumbling a winnable midterm cycle?

Two recent developments within the past few weeks reveal the party’s fundamental problems leading into the fall. The first demonstrates the real limits of Democrats’ ability to fight back against Trump. And the second shows that the party’s refusal to admit its mistakes prevents it from unifying around a coherent strategy to win.

Consider how badly Democrats lost the redistricting war with President Trump over federal congressional seats. Last year, Trump coordinated a sweeping national redistricting effort designed to lock in Republican control of the House. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger decided to “fight fire with fire” by gerrymandering their own states to counterbalance Republican gains in places like Texas. But this response made things worse.

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In Virginia, the state supreme court struck down the new Democratic map, ruling it violated the 2020 voter-approved redistricting reforms. Worse, Newsom’s California plan — which could create five new Democratic-favorable seats — gave Republicans exactly the rationale they needed to escalate their own gerrymandering efforts in states where the GOP initially showed reluctance to do so. North Carolina Republicans explicitly cited Newsom’s redistricting as justification for their own maps, saying the Golden State was “blocking the efforts of blue state Democrats to take control of Congress.”

The math is daunting. As of now, Republicans stand to gain roughly 13 House seats from their gerrymandering efforts nationwide. Democrats, thanks to Newsom, may gain five. That is a net gain of seven seats for Trump. In sum, Democrats’ attempt to fight back didn’t stop Trump’s redistricting efforts. Rather, they normalized a sleazy policy and gave hesitant Republican-led states the push to escalate the effort.

If Trump’s redistricting efforts hold, Democrats could fail to retake the House this fall. Without at least one chamber to create institutional leverage, Democrats would be unable to access critical tools to reach voters before the 2028 presidential election, such as investigative power, subpoena authority, and a platform for high-profile hearings. Instead, they would be forced to continue their symbolic protest and opposition for the remainder of his term. 

But the real fumble of Democrats leading into 2026 and 2028 comes not from losing the redistricting fight or any of the other defeats to Trump, but from the party’s ongoing refusal to honestly examine why it lost the 2024 election. 

This institutional failure has come into focus with the Democratic National Committee’s recent release of its much anticipated 2024 election post-mortem, a report that was supposed to answer hard questions about why the party lost, but instead highlights the insularity and self-protective tendencies of the small professional class of Democratic operatives who influence the party.

The timeline of the report’s suppression and eventual release illustrates this problem. In February 2025, Ken Martin, the then chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, won the election to become the next DNC chairman. He defeated Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, who had the backing of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and other top Democratic leaders.

Martin’s strategy to win the most votes from the 448 DNC members, the majority of whom are state party representatives, was straightforward. He promised a “50-state party strategy,” pledging to invest more money in state parties across the country, including the least competitive ones. This stood in contrast to Wikler, who wanted to concentrate resources on media and battleground state elections. Not surprisingly, the candidate promising money to more of the voting constituency beat the candidate advocating for strategic spending focus.

But Martin had to do more than promise money to win. He also had to appease the numerous Democrats angry about the 2024 election defeat. Many of these critics weren’t voting DNC members, but their voices and donations mattered. For them, he promised an independent autopsy conducted by an outside auditor that would rigorously examine why the party lost and tell the truth.

But something changed once he got into office. 

Instead of an independent process, Martin put one of his close friends, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, in charge of the report. Then, in December 2025, Martin announced that the DNC would not release the final report after all. He justified the decision by saying it would distract from the party’s 2025 wins and take focus away from the midterms.

It was only when CNN was preparing to expose details of the report’s drafts in late May that Martin abruptly changed his position, releasing the complete report on May 21, 2026.

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Much of the fallout has focused on the draft report’s shocking lack of quality, which included factually incorrect claims and missing sources. But the real problem is what the report deliberately avoids. Most strikingly, the report never addresses the simplest, most obvious explanation for why Harris lost: the Biden administration’s record was unpopular, and Harris was not a credible alternative. On immigration, inflation, and governance more broadly, voters rejected the first Biden term. By the time Harris launched her campaign, President Biden’s approval rating had collapsed to 36%, and Harris was unable to credibly distance herself from his record. The autopsy avoids both of these truths.

Instead, the report downplays Harris’s responsibility for the loss, arguing that she was not properly armed for victory. Its key finding: “the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch.” This is absurd. It was never the plan for Harris to run in Biden’s place during his first term, nor was it the plan when he announced his withdrawal from the race abruptly in July 2024. The White House had no obligation to spend four years grooming Harris as a successor, because Biden was supposed to be running for reelection. Any lack of preparedness of the Vice President should be blamed on herself and the dozens of Democratic operatives who opportunistically asserted her name as the natural successor to Biden in the hours following his announcement, thus shutting down the efforts of former President Obama to create a process for new candidates to be selected by the party (and of course, to avoid having Harris be the nominee). A former prosecutor, attorney general, and senator ought to be able to demonstrate her capability to be an effective leader without the handholding of an entire team. If Harris needed more prep time to be a good presidential candidate, it means she was unfit for the position. 

And the reality is that many Democratic operatives knew this simple truth about Harris and either endorsed her bid or hid their hesitation and got behind her. But what can be said about the judgment and character of the Democratic operatives who did this, knowing full well of her ineptness and dysfunctional managerial style, one that resulted in a 91.5% staff turnover rate while she was vice president? They all knew about it but looked the other way. This includes Ken Martin, who was a vice chair of the Harris-Walz campaign before running for DNC chairman.

For many Democrats, the autopsy’s silence confirms their suspicion that a small network of operatives is suppressing a report that would examine their own conduct. Many of these same operatives ignored or hid President Biden’s cognitive decline while prioritizing their own positions over the risk to the country and party. They then helmed a campaign so financially chaotic that it blew through $1.6 billion in roughly 100 days and left the party $20 million in debt. And now they are using the DNC chair to ensure that the most obvious truth about the 2024 election is not stated by the party itself. Namely, that it was the Democratic professional operative class that were the primary drivers for creating a disastrous first term for Biden, and choosing an unfit replacement candidate to succeed him.

Ken Martin was installed as DNC chair to keep this problem from being named. Instead, he and many Democrats want to pretend the party’s current leadership ecosystem is capable of mounting a serious effort in 2026 and 2028, without acknowledging the role many of these operatives played in hiding Biden’s decline, downplaying Harris’s unfitness, and suppressing honest examination of the party’s candidate selection. 

A party that cannot be honest about its own mistakes is destined to repeat them. And in both the gerrymandering fight and the handling of the election autopsy, the party chose to do the expedient thing rather than the right thing — both decisions that have been disastrous. Democrats know these truths about themselves. Until they admit them, they will keep losing winnable elections. 

America has a black-youth gun-violence problem. It’s long been with us, but the latest iteration is different, and it is getting worse in ways that the country’s establishment liberals and urban leaders seem either unwilling or unable to confront.

You won’t find much about this crime surge in the national mainstream news. Since the wave picked up speed during the pandemic, establishment liberals have remained largely uncomfortable talking about it. The press coverage of teen takeovers illustrates this tendency. Local police departments have been documenting and responding to these gatherings since at least 2023, yet it took The New York Times and CNN nearly three years to cover the phenomenon in meaningful depth. They finally did so only last week, as takeovers and shootings continue to grow across major cities this spring. Even then, CNN’s piece ran nearly 1,000 words on the violence without mentioning race once. And in typical fashion, the Times mentioned race only to suggest that concern about the gatherings was itself a form of racial bias.

To get a real picture of what is happening, you have to piece it together yourself, poring over local news coverage, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records, and state-level data. What emerges is a crisis defined by two characteristics: a younger perpetrator profile and crimes more brazen and senseless in nature. 

The shooters are younger than before, many of them school-age black male youth between 12 and 19 who obtain firearms illegally through social media, which have made acquiring a gun easier than ever. The disputes that trigger the violence increasingly begin as interpersonal conflicts with other black male teens, escalating through online exchanges before erupting in person. In March, for example, a 15-year-old approached 16-year-old Jaylen Bailey at a mall in Champaign, Ill., over an existing dispute, before he shot Bailey in the parking lot, near his mother and siblings. 

Others erupt more wantonly, with many occurring during the alcohol-and-marijuana-fueled teen takeovers, whose young male participants often arrive armed. What begins as a fun gathering can turn violent quickly. An accidental bump or shouted insult can be enough to escalate into drawn firearms and open fire. In the majority of such events broken up by police across the country in recent months, officers have recovered multiple firearms among those arrested.

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This gun violence is also no longer contained to low-income residential neighborhoods. Increasingly, it’s spilling into the few remaining malls, commercial districts, and public parks that Americans of all walks of life share. And in doing so, it is injuring and killing a growing number of bystanders who had no part in the dispute. 

On April 23, at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, the largest shopping center in the Bayou State, 17-year-old Markel Lee drew a semiautomatic weapon during a dispute with another young black teen in a crowded food court and opened fire, killing Martha Odom, a high-school honors student from Ascension Episcopal School, and seriously injuring five other bystanders. In a state that ranks third in the nation in overall gun homicides and first in child gun deaths, the Mall of Louisiana shooting drew a swift and unusually sharp response from lawmakers. Gov. Jeff Landry held a news conference the following day alongside more than a dozen visibly frustrated state law-enforcement officials, using the word “spillover” to describe how the violence had reached one of the state’s most popular commercial destinations, and took the opportunity to criticize the Democratic-run city of Baton Rouge for its failure to stem it.

 The numbers behind this crisis are stark. According to CDC mortality data, firearm homicide deaths among black youth 19 and under spiked to 1,553 in 2024, up from 1,125 six years earlier. The 1,553 deaths represented 65% of all youth firearm homicide deaths nationally, despite black youth comprising roughly 14% of the youth population. 

In Florida, homicide arrest intakes of black youth 18 and under rose 52% between fiscal years 2018-19 and 2024-25. Felony firearm arrests in the Sunshine State among black youth rose 31% over the same period, from 656 to 859. This surge is almost entirely isolated to black youth. Over that same period, felony firearm arrests among white youth in Florida fell 27% and homicide arrest intakes were flat. 

In Texas, homicide referrals to the state’s juvenile justice system doubled by fiscal 2024 compared to 2018, and firearm offenses rose 58%. By 2024, nearly 1 in 12 youth admitted to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department had committed murder, up from 1 in 100 in 2018. In Washington, DC, the share of homicides and nonfatal shootings committed by perpetrators aged 15 to 20 rose to more than 21% of all such cases by mid-2024, up from roughly 11% in 2021.

The data tell a more nuanced story than a general surge in black youth crime. Data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice shows misdemeanor offenses among black youth have declined since 2018, and felony property crimes have returned to pre-pandemic levels, a pattern that has been observed by other local law enforcement agencies across the country. It’s not that more black youth are getting into trouble with the law — but the nature of that trouble has changed. The lethal presence of firearms in adolescent interpersonal disputes that once ended in a fistfight and a juvenile-court hearing is turning mistakes into felony assault and even murder charges that prosecutors are compelled to bring in adult court. Taken together, the data point to a troubling reality: the first post-Obama, post-Black Lives Matter generation of black teens are more likely to die by firearm homicide than at any point in at least a quarter century or serve lengthy sentences in adult prison than any earlier generation.

All the more troubling: the surge wasn’t inevitable. It is, in large part, the consequence of progressive groups and establishment liberals abandoning effective crime-reduction strategies in favor of activist narratives. To understand how this unfolded, we have to go back to 2013.

On July 11 of that year, the CDC released a public-health report with a remarkable finding: the nation’s youth homicide rate had fallen to a 30-year low. After holding relatively steady through the early aughts at around 9.3 per 100,000, the rate had fallen to 7.5 per 100,000, the lowest recorded since 1981, and remained on a downward trajectory. 

The report should have been a moment of national celebration. Buried within it was data indicating real progress was being made to stem the staggeringly high murder rates for black youth. That figure had plunged to 25.9 per 100,000 in 2013, down from 32.8 per 100,000 in 2006 — a 21% decline.

But there would be no celebratory announcement from the Obama administration, nor would the findings receive significant national attention. That’s because a debate about race and policing that had been building for years in the country’s most liberal universities and law schools, catalyzed by works like Michelle Alexander’s influential 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, was about to spill into the broader culture.

On July 13, two days after the CDC study was published, a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a legal outcome that would ignite a national debate and dominate American political life for the next decade. Hours after the verdict, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was created, and it would serve as the rhetorical basis of a new social movement asserting that law enforcement and other public institutions systematically mistreated black Americans, particularly black male youth; fixing this, in the BLM telling, required fundamentally dismantling or restructuring policing itself.

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In the ensuing years, the movement proved remarkably successful at influencing mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and academic and corporate institutions. That institutional legitimacy would eventually be converted into a powerful political force, as philanthropy organizations, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, poured well more than $1 billion into a growing network of racial-justice nonprofits, advocacy groups, and the campaigns of office-seekers who adopted the movement’s worldview. 

The policy reforms that followed were sweeping, including reducing patrols in high-crime communities, ending cash bail for most misdemeanor offenses, reducing or outright eliminating punishment for property crimes, and cutting local police budgets in favor of alternative programs like social workers and “violence disruptors.” Democratic-run cities across the country began uncritically implementing these changes, driven by a new class of well-funded, ideologically driven nonprofits that had rapidly proliferated across major American cities.

The movement reached its peak in the summer of 2020, when the death of George Floyd following his arrest by Minneapolis police ignited protests and riots across major American cities. In the months that followed, multiple Democratic-run cities, energized by the political moment and the broader anti-Trump coalition, moved to slash police budgets and roll back law-enforcement practices that had brought about the successes of the previous decade. But instead of delivering racial justice, the concrete result was the single largest surge in youth violence in a generation. A CDC analysis found the youth homicide rate for Americans aged 10 to 24 jumped 37% between 2019 and 2020, to nearly 11 in 100,000, up from 7.8. For black youth, the picture was even more grim. Their homicide rate jumped 39% in that same single year, to nearly 46 per 100,000, up from 33, and continued climbing to a peak of 47.3 in 2021, nearly double the rate recorded at the low point of 25.6 in 2014.

Over the course of a decade, the movement carved a swath of destruction across American cities, defunding and demoralizing local police departments, stripping prosecutors and the criminal justice system of their most effective deterrence tools, and convincing a generation of young black Americans that the institutions around them were illegitimate instruments of oppression. It is the ultimate indictment of Black Lives Matter that the movement wiped out the very progress in reducing homicides that had been underway when it first launched.

The current black-youth gun-violence surge is a problem worth solving. Failing to address it means condemning still more members of this generation and future ones to death or lengthy incarceration, two outcomes that should be unacceptable, especially since American policymakers have shown before that it is possible to break crime waves, most recently in the mid-2010s. 

Any meaningful solution requires major reform, including the return of many of the hard-on-crime approaches used to stem previous crime waves, as well as more funding of the criminal- and juvenile-justice system, particularly at the local level. Republican-led states are better positioned to pressure Democratic-run cities into making the policy corrections they have grown increasingly reluctant to make on their own. But in Democratic strongholds like California, Illinois, and New York, meaningful change is unlikely so long as establishment liberals retain their outsized influence over state and local policy, while refusing to acknowledge that a decade of uncritically embracing radical progressive ideas dismantled what was working and set the conditions for this surge. Until they reckon with that, the crisis will only worsen.

The coming summer will make that reckoning harder to avoid. More shootings and more teen takeovers will likely mean more confrontations between GOP-led states and Democratic-run cities, which will keep the issue in the public eye. The Trump administration, which has shown little hesitation in pursuing federal intervention on crime, will likely raise the pressure further. Establishment liberal institutions will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the crisis — or their role in creating it.

In the context of the case itself, the fact that black voters comprise roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, the court held, doesn’t automatically require the state to redraw its congressional map to give that group proportional representation in a third of its six congressional seats. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito reasoned that Section 2 remedies require a clear showing of racial animus — “a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

Mainstream liberal headlines greeted the ruling as another cruel blow to democracy, another attack on racial minorities, another dark day in civil-rights history. NAACP President Derrick Johnson declared it “a major setback for our nation that threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for.” Former President Barack Obama warned that the decision frees “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities — so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias.’” Liberal Justice Elena Kagan stood to read her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare gesture used to underscore her strong disagreement with her colleagues.

These liberal stalwarts aren’t entirely wrong that something significant has ended. But what has ended isn’t the protection of minority voting rights. What has ended is a decades-long political strategy that used the moral language of civil rights to accomplish something the civil-rights movement never actually intended: the expansion of deliberate racial sorting of American voters into engineered electoral districts designed to favor the Democratic Party.

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By josh hammer

The concept of “using race to fix race” is a pillar of the legal architecture that arose from the 1960s civil-rights era: affirmative action in college admissions and employment being its most explicit and controversial examples. But “using race to fix race” was never understood to be a feature of the Voting Rights Act. Congress designed the VRA to stop state governments from excluding minorities from the ballot box — not to mandate racially engineered outcomes.

But decades after the civil-rights movement, something shifted in how Democratic-aligned rights groups understood the VRA. The law stopped being primarily a shield against racial discrimination and became a sword to expand minority political power by compelling states to draw new districts. Strangely shaped maps that snaked across counties and clustered racial minorities into artificial majorities were no longer per se bad. They could be a useful tool, so long they benefited Democrats. (To justify their gerrymandering, liberal civil-rights litigation recasts residential racial integration — one of the genuine achievements of the post-civil-rights era — as intentional “vote dilution,” requiring the judicial remedy of clustering racial groups into artificially drawn maps.)

That strategy accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Section 5 provision of the VRA that had required states with a history of discrimination to get federal preapproval before changing their election rules. Stripped of that powerful administrative lever, liberal groups turned to Section 2, the VRA’s general anti-discrimination provision, to litigate similar outcomes through the courts.

Over the following decade, a web of organizations — the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, LatinoJustice, and a constellation of Democratic-aligned law firms led by the Elias Law Group — went into action. They turned to a 1986 Supreme Court precedent to advance the theory that Section 2 requires the creation of majority-minority districts wherever the demographic math could be made to support one. 

With this logic, these groups won federal court orders in dozens of redistricting cases compelling governments to redraw maps at every level, from school boards in Alabama to statehouses in North Dakota and Mississippi. The targets expanded with each cycle: first majority-black districts, then majority-Latino, then Native American, and, most ambitiously, “coalition districts” combining black, Latino, and Asian voters into a single legally protected class.

The deeper problem with this strategy is one mainstream coverage consistently refuses to examine. Racial clustering isn’t an expression of civil rights. Deliberately drawing maps that concentrate people by race is a form of segregation, regardless of the political justification. It was wrong when white Southern legislators used it to dilute Black voting power in the 1960s. It is wrong when liberal lawyers use it to manufacture safe Democratic seats today. 

The principle doesn’t change based on who draws the map.

What the Democratic civil-rights industrial complex built was, at its core, a system that treated black, Latino, and Asian voters not as individual citizens with rights to be protected, but as demographic raw material to be sorted and clustered to the party’s benefit. In 2024, not a single Republican won a majority-minority district anywhere in the country. Instead, these were guaranteed seats for Democrats with no competition, no accountability, and no reason for an elected Democratic representative to do anything other than perform the expected cultural politics of their carefully created constituency. 

The question worth asking, which the Democratic Party has thus far avoided: what did those guaranteed seats deliver for the racial minority communities they were designed to represent? The most Democratic-run cities in America, anchored by these safe majority-minority districts, are also among the most expensive, most unequal, and most poorly managed. Guaranteed seats for Democrats didn’t produce good government. Instead, they set a permanent stage for racial grievance politics that reliably generated fundraising and turnout while delivering remarkably little in the way of material improvement for these captive constituents. 

The new Callais ruling curtails the ambitions of the liberal coastal elites who control the Democratic Party and its various legal and advocacy apparatuses from expanding this captive electoral model through Section 2 of the VRA. There will be short-term costs, to be sure. Republican state legislatures will redraw maps. Some black and Latino Democratic incumbents will face genuinely competitive races for the first time. 

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But discomfort for a political party and injustice for a minority racial group aren’t the same thing. Minority voters dispersed into competitive districts produce something the majority-minority district system never could: real pressure on candidates of both parties to earn those votes. In the long-term, the GOP will have to compete for black voters in Georgia, Latino voters in Texas, and working-class minority voters across the South. This is a better arrangement than one that would simply corral those voters into packed Democratic districts. It also allows Republicans the time and opportunity to build persuadable platforms to absorb the coming demographic wave of post-1960s naturalized Americans voters and their offspring, who will play an increasingly important role in future elections.

As for the Democrats, the high court has effectively curtailed the efforts of party operatives to use the VRA to lock in more racial minorities in state redistricting following every US Census. This is a decidedly good thing, because majority-minority districts for decades have left black and Latino voters captured by one party with nowhere else to go. The result was a party that allowed itself to believe that symbolic representation could replace actual representation; and that racial-justice rhetoric could be substituted for material economic results. 

For many observers, it has been obvious for some time that the long-term Democratic strategy was to use Section 2 to create more majority-minority maps, eventually allowing the “coalition district” concept to be held constitutional to cluster two or more racial minority groups to create new districts as the demographics of the United States reflect not just greater number of Hispanic and black voters, but increasing numbers of Asian immigrants.

Long term, Callais is about something larger than redistricting. For more than 60 years, since the passage of the major civil-rights legislation, race became the organizing logic of Democratic electoral strategy because racial sorting was electorally useful. It filled campaign coffers, it guaranteed political seats, and it gave consultants and lawyers and civil-rights organizations a lucrative and powerful position near the center of the party’s operation. The latest court ruling sets the upper limits of the legal architecture the party sought to expand to capture an increasingly diverse electorate. Now if the Democrats want new voters, they will have to earn them.