America Is Going Backwards - and Falling Apart

After the end of the voting rights era, the country is facing rapidly encroaching minoritarianism, vastly unrepresentative political institutions, and an escalating crisis of legitimacy

By Thomas Zimmer, June 1, 2026

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A little over one month ago the Roberts majority on the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and functionally ended the civil rights era. Since the moment the decision came down, Republicans have been furiously attempting to undo whatever democratizing progress has been achieved since the 1960s, curtail minority political power, and extinguish multiracial pluralism wherever they are in charge. 

With so much at stake in the upcoming Congressional elections, it is understandable that much of the discussion has centered around the question of what this all means for the midterms. As they are frantically redrawing the maps across the South to gerrymander majority-minority districts out of existence, Republicans have suddenly gained six to eight additional seats (Si apre in una nuova finestra) that were guaranteed go to the Democratic Party. The GOP now goes into the elections with a more significant structural advantage than before the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, the margin Democrats need to get to a majority in the House has gone up to probably around four percentage points (Si apre in una nuova finestra). Because Trump and his party are so disastrously unpopular, Democrats remain favored (Si apre in una nuova finestra) to win at least the House. But this is now more likely to be a narrow election result. And that is dangerous. Much like after the 2020 election, Trump’s attempts to manipulate his way to victory will depend on whether or not he can get enough people in enough positions of influence to go along with his schemes. If the election is not really close, and the chances of getting away with nullifying the results are therefore low, people are less likely to accept the personal risk involved in helping Trump; if it’s tight, the calculus might change for people who believe in the “Big Lie” or simply don’t accept that Democratic governance could ever be legitimate.

All of this is important. And yet, the significance of what is now happening – of what is being done to whatever is left of American democracy – goes so far beyond the midterms, far beyond the partisan struggle in a narrow sense. The intention behind what Republicans are doing is not just to win in November. They are trying to transform the country’s political landscape and remake the face of the Republic.

Let’s make sure we fully understand the political, economic, and social consequences of this annihilation of minority representation; how it further undermines the trust in the country’s political system; how it deepens an ongoing crisis of legitimacy, as the political institutions become ever less responsive and representative; how it exacerbates a process that is tearing the country apart, as the gap between “Red America” and “Blue America” is rapidly widening.

If we want to have any chance of coming up with a response that is commensurate with this challenge, we must first grapple in earnest with the true impact of the end of the civil rights era – and with what the second white reactionary “Redemption” will do to America. 

Where things stand

Perhaps it’s useful, as a start, to outline what we already know and where uncertainty lies one month into this new post-civil rights reality in American history. The situation is dynamic, the extent to which Republicans will succeed at curtailing minority influence across the South is yet to be determined.

Some Republican-led states have already managed to significantly roll back minority political representation.

Florida pounced early, passing a new Congressional map two days before the Supreme Court announced its decision in Louisiana v Callais, obviously expecting the Roberts Majority to nullify the Voting Rights Act. Republicans targeted a district (Si apre in una nuova finestra) in south Florida that was almost 50 percent Black and over 75 percent people of color; they also made sure to split Hispanic voters in central Florida into several districts. Overall, the gerrymander Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law could net the GOP four additional seats (Si apre in una nuova finestra). Remarkably, Republicans are doing all this even though Florida voters passed a state ban on partisan gerrymandering in 2010. As always, they act as if the narrowly defined “will of the people” only the GOP gets to represent stands above the actually articulated preference of a majority of Americans.

In Louisiana, Republicans passed a gerrymander that eliminated one of the state’s two majority-minority districts, effectively going from a 4-2 to 5-1 map. To make that happen, they decided to pack all the Black people they could find in the New Orleans/Baton Rouge area in the south-east of the state into a bizarrely shaped new district (Si apre in una nuova finestra), so that the other five districts are overwhelmingly white.

Similarly, in Tennessee, Republicans have already enacted a new map (Si apre in una nuova finestra) that carves up the ninth district – the one around Memphis: 60 percent of the population is Black, about 9 percent Hispanic – distributing minorities across three districts in a way that leaves only white-dominated ones. One of the new districts stretches about 200 miles northeast all the way to the outskirts of Nashville: That’s how far they had to go to find enough white people to make sure Black voting power was sufficiently diluted.

(As an aside: Some fifteen years ago, I remember talking to a former colleague who was working on international human rights politics in the 1970s and had just spent some time investigating the Pinochet regime’s torture campaign in Chile. He was – understandably! – shaken by what he described as the relentless creativity that went into inventing new ways of hurting and humiliating people. When I am looking at these bizarre new maps, I am reminded of that conversation. I guess coming up with ways to disenfranchise and exclude people from political representation is another example of such entirely misplaced creative energy unleashed by the desire to subjugate other human beings. What a marvelous and horrifying species we are…) 

Other Southern states have run into more difficulties in their attempt to pass a racial gerrymander in time for the November midterms. Republicans in Alabama sought to gerrymander one of the two majority-minority districts out of existence by re-instituting a map that a federal court had previously blocked because it was so obviously racially discriminatory. I guess they thought no one would dare to object after Callais. But last week, the same federal court did (Si apre in una nuova finestra), in fact, issue another injunction, declaring that “We reject in the strongest possible terms the State’s attempt to finish its intentional decision to dilute minority votes with a veneer of legislative regularity.” Alabama will, of course, take this to the Supreme Court. And even if they won’t have the new maps ready for the midterms, there is little doubt they will go back to the drawing board to come up with an even more extreme 7-0 map by 2028.

The same day a court stopped Republicans in Alabama, South Carolina also ran into difficulties. The state house had already passed a 7-0 map, targeting the sole majority-minority seat held by Democrat Jim Clyburn. However, the measure failed in the state senate (Si apre in una nuova finestra), where enough Republicans joined Democrats in blocking it. Not that they objected to the general goal of eliminating minority representation: They had reservations because early voting in the primaries had already started and feared a backlash from South Carolina voters if they rushed this through regardless. No doubt, therefore, that the state will have a 7-0 map ready in time for 2028.

The same is, finally, true for Mississippi and Georgia: In both states, Republican governors have stated their intentions to redraw the maps before upcoming elections in 2027 and 2028 – just not in time for this year’s midterms.

Overall, while there is some uncertainty regarding the exact timeline, the overall trajectory and the intention behind it are clear. Currently, Black members make up 14 percent of the House of Representatives (Si apre in una nuova finestra), which is about the same as the share of Black Americans in the overall population. But Republicans are determined to change that. About half of the 31 seats (Si apre in una nuova finestra) currently held by Democrats of color in the South could be eliminated; the Congressional Black caucus could lose about one third of its seats (Si apre in una nuova finestra). Even now, Congress overall is significantly whiter than the population, as 74 percent of elected officials in Congress are white, but only about 58 percent of the population. That representation gap is almost definitely going to get bigger.

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How the curtailing of Black and minority representation impacts life in America

One crucial reason why we need to widen our horizon beyond the effect on the midterm elections is the fact that the end of the voting rights order does not just impact the Congressional level. It is in state legislatures, county commissions, city councils, and school boards across large swaths of the country where the effects will be most immediately felt. And they won’t be adequately captured by counting seats either.

If you have read my previous piece (Si apre in una nuova finestra), you know that I tried to detail the many ways in which the 1965 Voting Rights Act was a game changer far beyond voter registration and turnout rates. And most of those tremendous achievements are now in danger of being rolled back by a raging reactionary countermobilization.

One crucial effect of the dramatic influx of previously disenfranchised voters after 1965 was the return of actual political competition to the South. The time of unquestioned one-party rule by segregationist Southern Democrats was coming to an end. Republicans today can’t keep people of color from casting their votes to the same extent (although they are certainly working hard to make it more difficult for them); but they can dramatically dilute their voting power and thereby blunt their influence. After 1965, increased political competition and Black representation also led to different policy outcomes. African Americans and other minorities finally became a constituency that politicians had to reckon with; their needs and preferences needed to be factored in – and they finally had a fair chance to elect representatives of their choice who would make sure that these disadvantaged communities could no longer be fully discarded, ignored, and actively punished. As a result, counties and communities with a large Black population received a much larger share of public goods and state funding (Si apre in una nuova finestra). Overall, Black economic power increased (Si apre in una nuova finestra) as this kind of fiscal redistribution combined with improved employment opportunities especially in the public sector, due to anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action. These achievements may not be lost instantly; but all of this is now in danger.

I have found it helpful to read reporting from the local level to get a clearer sense of what this all means in practice, how this all affects the lives of people on the ground in immediate and concrete ways. Late last year, Bolts magazine (Si apre in una nuova finestra), which consistently provides excellent independent journalism, had a great story on Fayette County in rural Tennessee, which is about one quarter Black, according to the 2020 census. In December 2023, the county mayor and the 19 members of the all-white county board of commissioners shut down Bernard Community Center (Si apre in una nuova finestra), in the small town of Mason. The center had been used for family celebrations, senior breakfasts, communal movie nights, and more events of that kind; it significantly benefited the local Black population. Alas, their concerns and interests were evidently not all that important to local authorities. “If we had different representation on the county commission board, we would have had someone to stand up and fight for us,” a local Black resident told Bolts. So, why does a county that is 25 percent Black have all-white local political authorities? The answer, as almost always, is: By design. In 2021, the country drew a map that eliminated all majority-Black districts and aggressively diluted the Black vote. Local residents, with help from the NAACP, sued the county (Si apre in una nuova finestra), alleging that the map violated the Voting Rights Act. And before the Callais decision came down, it seemed like they had achieved a massive victory: Last summer, the county gave in and agreed to draw a new map that includes three majority-Black districts. This revised map would almost certainly provide significant Black representation on the county board. But now the Roberts Court has completely changed the situation. And the hard-fought victory of Black voters in Fayette County, Tennessee, is exactly the kind of political influence that Republicans are now going to extinguish across the South in the wake of Callais.

Republicans want to turn the clock back to a time when politicians could entirely ignore the interests and needs of communities they considered somehow lesser, not part of “real America.” Once they have sufficiently diluted minority voting power, I’m afraid these communities might find it harder to make their voices heard in the Democratic Party also. Even though they may not be on board with the goal of curtailing minority influence, Democrats – certainly in the South – might still be tempted or even forced to focus more of their energy on the white constituencies that still properly count under the warped rules Republicans are now re-creating. A similar dynamic certainly contributed to Republicans abandoning Black people in the South after the end of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century: Once they were fully disenfranchised and therefore couldn’t deliver votes or put pressure on politicians, it became a lot harder to justify advocating for them – or perhaps: a lot easier to legitimize ignoring them. We are, fortunately, not in the exact same situation today: Black people in the South will still be able to influence statewide elections; minority communities are also a much more important part of the Democratic coalition today. But still, the curtailing of minority political representation will have negative ripple effects far beyond the immediate loss of seats in parliamentary chambers.

Descriptive representation and crumbling trust

One concept that is helpful in deciphering and thinking through the deeper effects of the annihilation of minority representation across the South is “descriptive representation.” The basic idea is to describe and measure the extent to which the demographics of elected officials and thus the parliamentary chambers correspond to the demographic makeup of the electorate. The idea is that there is value in having political leaders who reflect the characteristics and demographics of the electorate they represent – especially those that have traditionally shaped the distribution of power like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation –, as the shared identity and life experience will enable them to do a better job of representing. In a proper democracy, the diversity of the population should be present and reflected in its political institutions and decision-making chambers.

Descriptive representation is not a panacea. In recent years, for instance, the percentage of Black Representatives and Senators in Congress has been roughly proportionate to the percentage of Black people in the overall population. And yet, racism has not been solved; while descriptive representation has increased over the same period, the wealth gap between Black and white in America has exploded since the 1980s.

That being said, we do know that a lack of descriptive representation has corrosive effects on a democratic system. For instance, descriptive representation significantly increases the legitimacy (Si apre in una nuova finestra) of political institutions among minority and traditionally marginalized groups. Simply put, the proportionate presence of Black people in parliamentary chambers increases the institutional legitimacy among African Americans. The same is also true for other demographics. Citizens generally associate descriptive representation with fairness.

There are, as always, some important caveats. The legitimacy-inducing impact of descriptive representation varies depending (Si apre in una nuova finestra) on the specific demographic group we are looking at, and also across specific topics. But the general tendency is clear: Descriptive representation strengthens the credibility and legitimacy of institutions. There is nothing specifically American about these findings either: The same effect can be found in survey data from Scandinavian countries (Si apre in una nuova finestra), for instance.

Conversely, the lack of descriptive representation – and we might add: the aggressive annihilation of representation – undermines trust, destroys the perception of fairness. America is already facing significant discontent across the political spectrum and a widespread resentment towards political elites. Trust in established institutions (Si apre in una nuova finestra) more generally has been declining massively. These trends are only going to be exacerbated now, as disadvantaged groups – who have good reason to be skeptical of America’s political system to begin with! – are faced with institutions that are deliberately excluding people who share their identities and can relate to their life experiences.

And you know what, forget all the studies and fancy academic concepts for a second. The basic point is this: As long as our political leaders don’t look anything like the people they are supposed to represent, we cannot pretend to be living in a fair, truly democratic society. As long as one particular demographic – white men – is vastly overrepresented in the halls of power (and not just in politics, but across all spheres of life), we cannot pretend to be living in a fair, truly democratic society. As long as a raging countermobilization against the extension of democratic participation beyond one particular demographic is powerful enough to take over a major party and promptly extinguish minority representation in significant parts of the country, we cannot pretend to be living in a fair, truly democratic society. 

For anyone who believes in the promise of egalitarian pluralism, the goal should be to create a society where the status of the individual is not massively determined by race, gender, religion, or wealth. America is now aggressively moving in the opposite direction.

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A spiraling crisis of legitimacy

Many Americans realize that what is happening around them is incompatible with the democratic promise. This is where the aggravated assault on minority political representation in the wake of the Callais decision intersects with and exacerbates the ongoing crisis of legitimacy America’s political institutions – and American democracy as a whole! – have been suffering for quite some time. It will make America’s political institutions even less responsive, insulate the country’s political leadership even further from the people they are ostensibly representing. 

Many of the un- / anti-democratic elements of the American political system are brutally obvious – yet I believe it is worth emphasizing some of the lowlights.

Twice in the twenty-first century, a president came into office despite having lost the popular vote.

Less well-understood than the distorting effects of the Electoral College, perhaps, is the role of the Senate. It is evidently not a representative body – or, rather: it represents states, not people, resulting in a small-state bias (Si apre in una nuova finestra) that consistently favors the Republican coalition of white conservatives. Throughout the twenty-first century, Democratic senators have represented a larger share of the electorate. But Republicans have won or held a majority of seats in the Senate in 7 out of 13 election cycles. In fact, the last time GOP senators represented more people (Si apre in una nuova finestra) than their Democratic counterparts was after the 1996 election. Similarly, if we create a popular vote for the Senate and look at the number of votes cast for all 100 seats by combining three two-year cycles, Democratic senate candidates have received more votes for almost thirty years (the last time they didn’t was in the three-cycle stretch from 1994-1998).

Remarkably, five of the six Supreme Court Justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act were nominated by a president who first came into office having lost the popular vote. Three of the six justices that make up the Roberts majority were chosen by Trump in hist first term, after he had received almost three million fewer votes than his opponent.

As a result, a president initially lifted into office by a minority, backed by a Senate elected by and representing a minority, created a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court that has just nullified the most important law ever passed in U.S. history – a law that was backed by a clear majority (Si apre in una nuova finestra) of Americans. 

Amidst the many deliberately undemocratic elements in the architecture that was created for the American Republic, the Founders intended the House of Representatives to be the responsive branch. And comparatively speaking, it still is. In 2024, for instance, the House closely tracked the result of the presidential election: Republicans won a narrow majority of seats – Trump won the popular vote by a similarly narrow margin.

But the House has been on a trajectory to becoming less responsive and less representative for a long time. As Elliott Morris has outlined (Si apre in una nuova finestra) recently in a comprehensive piece that I strongly recommend you all read, the number of competitive seats in the House has been going down for decades. There were around 100 competitive district in the 1970s – meaning they only had a relatively mild partisan lean, allowing either party a realistic shot at winning. Even before the latest escalation of mid-cycle gerrymandering, that number was down to a little over 40 seats. Unsurprisingly, a big drop came after 2010, when Republicans first escalated gerrymandering in reaction to Obama’s victory. Now, as majority-minority districts are being extinguished, we’ll be left with something like 33 competitive districts, of which only about 15 qualify as a proper toss-up. 15 out of 435. 

If we put it all together, the picture that emerges is not pretty: Encroaching minoritarianism; a lack of meaningful political competition in most parts of the country; and political institutions that are increasingly unresponsive and unrepresentative. This is not good. Not good at all.

Red America vs Blue America

Trying to justify their outrageous attempts to gerrymander Black political representation out of existence, Republicans in the South have spent the past month arguing that it is not only their right, but actually their duty to vanquish Democratic elected officials – because only (white) Republicans can represent “our state.”

That’s how Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, for instance, celebrated (Si apre in una nuova finestra) the chance to dilute and obliterate Black voting power because “Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best,” and this “win for Alabamians,” as she put it, “enables our values to be best represented in Congress.” 

“Right now, we have one congressman that’s Democrat,” GOP Representative Sheri Biggs from South Carolina (Si apre in una nuova finestra) said last week. She was referring to Jim Clyburn, the state’s sole Black delegate, who won his seat with almost 60 percent of the vote. It doesn’t matter to Biggs, who simply refuses to accept that Clyburn is a legitimate representative: “I think a 7 and 0 map,” she continued, “would definitely reflect our values.”

This sort of ideological “real Americanism” is not surprising – in fact, it has become dogma on the Right to regard Democratic governance as fundamentally illegitimate. But the kind of state essentialism that is on display here is nevertheless striking and dangerous. It proclaims a kind of white conservative essence that supposedly defines these states and is beyond democratic contestation. In this interpretation, this “red” essence then necessitates monopolizing all power, on all levels of government, in the hands of the Republican Party; anything else is considered an affront to the state’s very nature, its immutable gestalt. 

The efforts to put this sort of anti-democratic essentialism into practice by creating de-facto one-party states have been supercharged by the Supreme Court’s Callais decision. Not only does it functionally remove all hurdles against racial discrimination in voting, which allows Republicans to properly subjugate the minority populations across the South. Samuel Alito, in his decision, even explicitly blessed such efforts by declaring partisan gerrymandering a legitimate state interest. This is the reality of American politics now: Whoever holds a trifecta on the state level can quickly enshrine one-party rule on all levels by aggressively redrawing all the maps. Republicans are certainly all in on that proposition. And even if Democrats do not buy into the underlying state essentialism: Until there is a chance to pass a new, robust Voting Rights Act and ban partisan gerrymandering everywhere, they must retaliate. Unilateral disarmament must not be an option in the face of this Republican Party. It would simply allow them to end democracy for good. 

The scenario we are looking at is red states turning much redder and blue states having to turn bluer in response. In recent years, the country has been falling apart into a multiracial, pluralistic “blue” part that accepts the changing social, cultural, and demographic realities vs. a “red” part that is led by patriarchal white nationalists entirely devoted to rolling back those changes. This constitutes a significant departure from a general trend that had characterized the country from about the 1930s onwards, when the political, social, legal, and cultural reality across the nation had become more similar. It was a process of nationalization, for which the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, imposed by the federal government across the country and against state resistance, acted as a key catalyst. There were always strong forces working in the opposite direction, of course: The liberalization of urban areas everywhere was countered by a “southernification” of rural America in the north. That created a political geography defined by an urban-rural divide that transcends state borders and was never quite captured by the “red states” / “blue states” binary.

But if America keeps going down the path it is on right now, “red states” and “blue states” will become much more of a reality than they already are, at least in terms of how political power is distributed. As a result, large constituencies will go entirely unrepresented – not just in Congress, but on all levels, from local politics up. Black Americans in the South, of course; but also conservative rural communities in New York or California. They won’t just be represented by fewer elected officials – they’ll have no meaningful political representation at all.

America is facing a crisis of legitimacy that threatens the very existence of the country. At what point does it spiral out of control?

This is not the end

None of this is guaranteed to happen. Let me end there. America is not doomed. The anti-democratic reshaping of the Republic; the escalation of this crisis of legitimacy to the point where it can no longer be resolved within the confines of a single nation-state: None of this is pre-ordained.

The solutions, it seems to me, are both relatively clear and also incredibly hard to realize. America needs a new Voting Rights Act that guarantees robust protection against discrimination in voting. Partisan gerrymandering must be outlawed. Better yet: A structural reform that implements some form of proportional representation (which would make partisan gerrymandering useless or at least vastly less potent). But, of course, none of that would make it past the Roberts Court – and so this rogue rightwing majority on the Court, which has acted as the spearhead of the reactionary countermobilization, must first be reined in.

America needs transformational change. And transformational change needs preparation. That is, ultimately, the reason why it is important to spell out how dire the situation is. Only if we understand the threat can we come up with a response that is commensurate with the challenge. And ideally, we should seek to come up with such a transformative response before a violent breakup forces us to remake the country while the Republic lies in ruins beneath our feet.

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