I’ve been professionally involved in every federal election since 1976. As almost anyone who has been involved at that level could tell you, the most important, and unbiased, post-election autopsies are not publicly available. Those that know don’t talk, and those that talk don’t know.

And why would we talk? Why would we spend millions of dollars to learn how to run better campaigns, only to publish those learnings for anyone to read, including our opponents? Nike doesn’t send out a press release about why their last ad campaign failed, and if they do, everyone knows that releasing it is for PR purposes. Same deal here. It’s not that everything publicly available is BS, it’s that without seeing everything, there’s no way to know.

So what are the public autopsies for? They’re about intraparty power struggles. They’re not about what Democrats should say in the next election cycle. They’re about who Democrats should listen to — and more to the point, who they should hire to consult. By the same token, they’re also about who should take the most blame for the previous losses (and thus who shouldn’t be listened to, or hired, again).

There’s a lot more detail, and plenty of caveats, on all of that in our conversation.

And speaking of Nike, Anat and I discussed how the big takeaway of the most candid autopsies we’ve read — like this one at The Bulwark by Rob Flaherty, Harris’s deputy campaign manager — is that the Harris campaign basically lacked a coherent brand. This is a point that Anat and I hammer often. Candidates and political parties need to tell a consistent and compelling story about themselves — ideally, a story that people can see themselves belonging to and being a part of. That’s what Trump has offered his supporters, and it’s the main reason (other than Roberts Court interference, or elected Democrats failing to do what was necessary to hold Trump accountable) that he’s stayed afloat despite so many scandals and criminal indictments.

We also discussed why Ken Paxton didn't just beat, but demolished, John Cornyn in Tuesday's runoff, despite Cornyn having narrowly led in the March primary. We’ll have more confirmation on this when the voter files are updated, but my best guess is that the March primary voters included proportionately more four-of-four regular voters, who are often more “mainstream” Republican, whereas this runoff drew much more MAGA energy.

Paxton’s win gives James Talarico a big opportunity. Anat counseled that he should respond to attacks like “Tala-freak-o” by confidently standing up for his own values, while at the same time calling out MAGA for picking our pockets and being “pedophile protectors.” Encouragingly, Talarico did almost exactly that — calling out Ken Paxton for letting an admitted child rapist back on the streets: “If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles.”

For more on the Democratic Party’s brand problem — and some actually-useful free advice on how to fix it — check out:

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Rick’s four-book series chronicling the rise of the American right, from Goldwater through Reagan (Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland), is the most comprehensive historical account of, to use his metaphor, how the right-wing storm gathered. It’s not the kind of teleological synthesis that tells you all of it was inevitable, but a day-by-day history — one that I recognize, because I lived through nearly all of it. It should be read to hold accountable all the pundits and commentators who have been making up a version of that history that suits their own purposes.

We covered a lot of ground — the right-wing movements of the 60s and 70s that most historians ignored at the time, the tragedy of how the left and center responded (or didn’t), and the through-lines to where we are today.

We dug deep on the battle between individualism and communitarianism — a framing war that the right won, and that Democrats helped them win. The right managed to convince half the country that freedom means getting the government off your back. But what about getting the boss off your back? What about the real freedom that comes from having the things you need to actually flourish — healthcare, education, information, some floor of material security?

We talked about how making collective demands of people in power is the best way to gain these types of freedoms — and how unions, for all of their historical flaws, have been the only institution that gives ordinary working people this kind of collective, truly democratic power.

So it’s no wonder that people in power, from both parties, have worked so hard to marginalize unions. When Gary Hart called unions “just another special interest group,” that was a key break in Democratic politics — one that still drags the party down today, as they try to narrowly poll and message-test their way to victory instead of building real power and consensus.

Rick just finished the manuscript for his next book, The Infernal Triangle. It covers the period from 2000-2010 and argues that Republican authoritarianism, Democratic fecklessness, and mainstream media complicity have created a doom loop for American democracy.

Subscribe to Rick’s Substack, Rickipedia, here.

She just published a beautiful piece about Callais and her family history in Louisiana that you all should read: “The System My Grandfather Deserved: Our Political System Isn’t Broken. For Millions of Americans, It Was Never Built.” Stasha’s grandfather, Gustave Rhodes (not her great-grandfather — her grandfather) was a sharecropper on a sugarcane plantation in South Louisiana. Gustave organized his fellow workers and successfully sued to collect the wages they had been denied. But then, realizing that “Winning one battle inside a deeply unequal structure was not the same thing as transforming the structure itself,” he moved into voting rights organizing and worked alongside John Lewis.

The conversation covered, among other things:

• Why the South gets ignored until something explodes. Stasha talked about how Washington dramatically underestimates how widespread the feeling of institutional powerlessness actually is, and how it cuts across party lines. That convergence is both a warning sign and a political opening — if organizing can meet people where that feeling lives.

• The incremental reform trap — Stasha emphasized that things like same-day voter registration and stronger ethics rules absolutely matter. But incremental reforms become a trap when political leaders offer them not as steps toward bigger change, but as substitutes for it.

• “Ragency” — Anat brought in a word from organizer Ashley Fairbanks: rage + agency = ragency. Stasha pushed it further: anger is only power if you’re organizing it toward something.

• What we owe the next generation. The democracy we want to leave our children is one that’s inclusive enough to hear every voice, representative enough to reflect every community, and resilient enough to hold through whatever economic, political, or technological changes that come next. That’s substantively different from what we have now, which is a system built with deliberate exclusions that have never been fully reckoned with. The question this moment is asking us is whether we’re willing to name that gap honestly, and organize at the scale it actually requires, instead of continuing to negotiate against ourselves before the fight even begins.

More is coming soon from me on the Roberts Court, Callais, and where all of this fits into the larger picture.

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The organizing driving this is a direct response to what the Roberts Court did in Callais: state legislatures across the South are already moving to redraw maps designed to lock in a catastrophic imbalance of representation not just for Black Americans, but for all of us.

Here is Anat’s latest messaging guide on the destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

The bulk of our time in this week’s “Meeting the Moment” was me walking through a slideshow, previewing charts about Callais and the Roberts Court that will soon be published with a fuller narrative at Weekend Reading.

But for now, here are a few numbers that deserve emphasis:

• During the Jim Crow era, white Southern elites had almost twice the political weight they would have had if every vote counted equally. (I say “elites” because the facially neutral measures that kept Black people from voting also suppressed the votes of many poor and working-class white people.)

• Callais is about to take us back to that awful status quo — not for individual Black Southerners’ rights to cast a ballot, but for their collective rights to elect the representatives of their choosing. In the seven deep South states where majority-Black districts are now in jeopardy, about 50% of Black voters, compared to about 70% of white voters, cast their ballot for a candidate who actually won their district in 2024. After the maps get redrawn, that number is expected to be cut in half for Black voters, dropping to just 25%. White voters in those same states go from 70% to 71%.

Again, the charts from this presentation (and more) will be published here soon with the full context they deserve. I also posted two of them on Bluesky right after the decision dropped. What I wanted to convey in this informal Live presentation was the through line showing how the Roberts Court’s rulings aren’t just a series of unfortunate events, but components of a single project.

Before my Callais slideshow, Anat shared some remarkable dispatches from her recent travels globetrotting against authoritarianism. In Barcelona, she worked with the coalition around Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez navigating a challenge from the far right, and found the same playbook she recognizes here: scapegoating refugees and foreigners, exploiting economic anxiety, and flooding the media zone.

From there she went to Berlin for a multi-country conference on confronting authoritarianism. She was struck by seeing the Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks” — small brass plaques set into sidewalks across Germany and other countries, each commemorating a victim of the Nazi regime at the place they last lived or worked. The artist, Gunter Demnig, started the project in 1992 to create a decentralized memorial where you literally can’t walk down the street without stumbling across the history. They reminded Anat of the signs she saw in Washington, D.C., marking the spots where ICE has abducted people.

D.C. was Anat’s final stop on her way home, where she met with organizers, many from Texas, to hold public vigils in front of the White House and Tidal Basin memorials to demand the closure of the ICE concentration camps.

Some recent Substack Live conversations on related topics:

Legal education, Shaun explained, gives students a tragically necessary skill — the ability to translate real social problems into legal categories, much like a doctor has to translate pain into a diagnosis. But too often, the human, social, and moral consequences get lost in that translation. He uses torts as an example: law schools teach about individual negligence, while two of the biggest sources of harm in society — state violence and domestic violence — get cordoned off as something else.

We had a rich conversation about the role of politics in legal decision-making (especially in the Roberts Court); how labor law, which was already too difficult to enforce, has been even further weakened; why public interest lawyers shouldn’t be immune from honest criticism; and how progressives focused so much on winning legal battles over civil rights that it drew energy away from the movement organizing needed to push for deeper and more lasting change.

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Highlights included:

• There should be limited impact on the 2026 midterms, Amy said, given things like filing deadlines and the risks of dummymandering in what will likely be a huge Democratic wave year. (But stay tuned; hours after our conversation yesterday, Gov. Jeff Landry announced he plans to suspend the primaries in order to redraw the maps — even though the Louisiana filing deadline has passed, mail ballots have already been sent overseas, and early voting was about to start.)

  • Check out Cook Political Report’s coverage on redistricting, including its Redistricting Tracker that has been updated to account for the Roberts Court ruling.

• The real fight is 2028. We have every reason to expect Republican-controlled legislatures to aggressively redraw maps mid-cycle just like they’ve been doing, which Amy said will likely ramp up the pressure on blue states to respond in kind if they haven’t already. But blue states may have less room to maneuver, meaning that whatever happens ahead of 2028 will likely net to Republicans’ advantage.

• Kafka would be jealous of the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais: it allows racial gerrymandering (of Black voters, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) as long as it doesn’t interfere with a state legislature’s partisan goals.

• I presented data showing how dramatically Black representation in Congress increased, especially in the South, in 1992, the first election with majority-minority districts after Thornburg v. Gingles upheld Congress’s strengthening of the VRA to require them. Black voter participation skyrocketed almost immediately after the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, but casting a ballot isn’t the same thing as having your vote count; Black people in the South rarely got to elect the candidates of their choice who would represent their communities’ interests.

• The overall 2026 midterm landscape:

  • We discussed highlights from Cook Political Report’s latest polling of competitive House districts. The D+6 generic ballot suggests a roughly 8-point swing for Democrats from 2024 — which could easily be larger in many districts, especially if disillusioned non-MAGA Republicans stay home.

  • Plus, many Republican incumbents in gerrymandered districts have never run a real general election and lack the political infrastructure (consultants, TV ad experience, messaging discipline) to handle a competitive race.

  • The Senate: Amy said the four key pickup opportunities for Democrats, in order of most to least likely, are North Carolina, Maine, Ohio (more complicated because Sherrod Brown has a loyal cross-partisan voter base built over multiple elections), and Alaska (Mary Peltola has higher favorables and an outsider identity, making her competitive). Texas is a massive $500 million question mark. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn (running as an independent but coded as a Democrat) is a compelling candidate, but unlike 2024, Republicans won’t be caught off guard this time.

• The key to victory for Democrats running for Senate in red states? Timing. Not moderate policies, not messaging tweaks. I presented data showing that in the 21st century, almost the only Democrats who have won Senate seats in red states were either pre-existing incumbents (light blue) or rode a wave year (2006, 2008, 2012). And 2026 could be just such a wave year.

So why do we almost never hear about religion in political reporting? As Robby and I discussed, it’s a third rail for reasons that are understandable, but not defensible. Nobody wants to risk offending or essentializing people’s most deeply held beliefs — but those beliefs, and the institutions behind them, are too important to ignore.

Other highlights of our conversation included:

• Why Trump can’t take Catholic voters for granted. He’s never had a lock on Catholics the same way he has on Evangelicals — and that was before his war on Iran and his public attacks on Pope Leo XIV. (Also, Vance is the one who should be more “careful” about theology; the Pope has been so outspoken about the war in Iran because Catholic doctrine is very clear about the immorality of wars of choice.)

  • More at Robby’s Substack: “How Trump’s Fight with Pope Leo XIV May Hurt Republicans in the Midterms.”

• How Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI crusade is really about mainstreaming white Christian nationalism in the military.

• Why reporters who refuse to use the term “Christian nationalism” are out of step with well-grounded social science research.

• The enormous influence of Christian media on those within its bubble (which doesn’t include most political reporters).

• How the Roberts Court has weaponized (individual) religious liberty to curtail other freedoms.

Make sure to pre-order Robby’s new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, here.

In addition to the book and his research at PRRI, be sure to follow his popular weekly Substack newsletter, Redeeming Democracy.

Redeeming Democracy by Robert P. Jones

Research and reflections on religion, racial justice, & the moral work of protecting democracy. Hosted by NYT bestselling author Robert P. Jones, president/founder of PRRI.

In this week’s “Meeting the Moment,” Anat and I addressed two different topics where we've been hearing a lot of discomfort from folks along these lines. I also gave a forgotten-history lesson about what the Nuremberg trials should tell us about our current era.

Was it a good idea for Virginia voters to choose to redraw their maps?

To defend themselves (and all of us) from a fascist movement trying to seize an illegitimate House majority by doing the same thing? Of course it was a good idea! But Republicans would love you to think otherwise, judging by all the ads that misleadingly suggested Obama was against the redistricting measure.

Won't that just give MAGA an excuse to declare the midterm results illegitimate?

They don't need an excuse! We know they're going to try to do that, because that's what they always try to do when they lose. Emphasis on “try.” We can make sure they don't succeed by doing two things: preparing people to reject the BS we already know MAGA will pull, and win by so much that they can't even try to contest the results. (That's one lesson we should take from Hungary in 2026, as Kim Scheppele explained on Weekend Reading Live.)

Should we really say that Trump and ICE are holding people in “concentration camps”?

Yes — because it’s both true and strategic.

It’s true because that's what they are, as Andrea Pitzer explained in our recent conversation: a place where people are held without due process after being rounded up based solely on what they look like and where they come from.

It’s strategic because it signals that this is an extreme circumstance that demands an urgent response. Think of it this way: can you imagine a bunch of Texas moms deciding to caravan down to Dilley and protest because in America, we don't have…detention centers? You can make that term more toxic if you're trying to free a specific sympathetic population, like children, but most of the victims here are single men who also deserve freedom.

Pop quiz: What crime were the Nazis tried for at Nuremberg?

Did you guess something like genocide? That was part of it. But the first charge, and the primary motivation for trying the Nazis, wasn't specifically about the Holocaust; it was “crimes against peace.” After two devastating world wars, the international community wanted “never again” to mean: never again should any country start an aggressive war, because the consequences to the entire planet could be too devastating.

Only in the 1960s did that narrative shift, largely because the U.S. and the Soviet Union decided that they didn't want the same prohibition applied to them.

When we define “never again” as being strictly about the Holocaust, it becomes too easy to let ourselves off the hook. Nothing is as bad as that, so we can't compare ourselves to it. Things couldn't get that bad. We haven't gone that far. Which means almost any atrocity short of murdering 6 million people isn't “far enough” to sound the alarm about and move heaven and earth to stop.

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Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the billionaire-funded right-wing capture of the Supreme Court, and one of the best people I could think of to talk about these revelations with.

We discussed why people should be enraged about not just the Roberts Court, but also its billionaire backers — and the media that erases the influence of those backers while giving institutional cover to an illegitimate, captured body.

We covered, among other things:

• Why Roberts has always been the one undermining the legitimacy of his Court, not the people calling him out for it.

• How the leaked memos reveal his improper, politicized pre-judgement of the case about Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

• The extraordinary influence of dark money, especially from the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Charles Koch) on capturing the Supreme Court, and why we so rarely hear about it in mainstream court coverage.

• Why the “liberal” justices are often the real conservatives on the Court (e.g. trying to defend precedents that were themselves compromises handed down by Republican justices);

• How the capture goes beyond SCOTUS; for instance, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who selected Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, also worked to place sympathetic attorneys general like West Virginia’s who could bring strategic cases like one against the Clean Power Plan.

• Why the “rule of law” tends to mean “rule by lawyers,” even and especially among liberal institutionalists, and how to focus instead on the rule of justice.

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We covered:

• How taxes can be a mobilizing lever. Messaging tip: Instead of calling for billionaires to “pay their fair share,” say they should “pay what they owe.” Where “fair” is in the eye of the beholder, owing suggests they’re already behind in their payments, which is true!

• May Day Strong on May 1, when millions will walk out of school and work and opt out of shopping. It’s a day to flex our collective economic power and make it too costly for corporations to support the Trump regime and MAGA. It’s also a day to build organizing muscle and get more people mobilized to shut down cities in case Trump “goes nuclear” (either figuratively or literally).

• Some suggested May Day slogans from Anat: No funding for fascism, no money for murder, no payouts for pedophiles.

• Who the targets of a general strike should be. In the U.S., we tend to not realize that the target of a general strike is supposed to be the capitalist class, not the government. Most people’s ire is understandably directed at Trump, but he wouldn’t be in office or have the power he does if not for the billionaires, oligarchs, and corporations propping him up. We are letting too many corporations claim to be on the side of justice while giving Trump and MAGA some of the estimated $3 billion they’ll be raising the midterms.

• Why banks are an effective protest target: they’re both sensitive to consumer pressure and have a lot of structural power to stop or prevent the regime’s abuses. Most protest targets are only one or the other. (e.g., Palantir is powerful but very loyal to the regime; Target is moveable but not ultimately very powerful.)

Upcoming Days of Action:

• April 16: 10,000 Moms Go Live: Digital day of action for moms to read children’s letters from the Dilley concentration camp in Texas (toolkit here).

• April 18: Caravan of moms to Dilley concentration camp to demand the release of children held there.

• April 25: Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention, from Detention Watch Network

• May 1 (May Day): May Day Strong, No work, no school, no shopping. Sign the pledge and find or host an action at maydaystrong.org.

• Labor Day: The next major structure test after May Day. Stay tuned.

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After Orbán won power in 2010, he quickly worked to consolidate it permanently (he thought) in the previously-robust democracy. In addition to rewriting the constitution to give himself advantage, he used tactics that should sound very familiar to us: weaponizing the state budget to defund media, NGOs, and universities that could oppose him; suspending civil service protections and mass-firing government employees; packing the courts with loyalists; and using extreme gerrymandering. (For Trump, the latter two things were already done before he took office.)

There’s a reason Orbán’s playbook sounds so familiar — Project 2025 was co-developed with Orbán’s Danube Institute think tank, which also trained figures like Christopher Rufo.

Kim explained how Orbán’s opponent, Peter Magyar, was able to use Orbán’s system against him to win a massive victory. It’s a fascinating story, complete with a zebra serving as a powerful symbol against corruption and oligarchy. There are key lessons for the U.S. about how to defeat an entrenched autocracy.

But even though Magyar has the supermajority he needs to amend the constitution, he still faces challenges that might require him to use some of Orbán’s own playbook to fully dismantle the old system. And while global far-right networks share tactics across borders, pro-democracy forces are still too often siloed within their own nations.

We covered a lot more in our conversation — the role of oligarchy, social media, and moral panic in both the U.S. and Hungary; how both the Roberts Court and Hungarian courts will occasionally rule against the executive on lower-stakes issues to maintain the illusion of independence; and more. You should also check out Kim’s article detailing how Orbán managed to steal so many elections.

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Before Auschwitz was a death camp, it was a concentration camp in the sense we usually see around the world: a place where civilians (as opposed to prisoners of war) are detained en masse, without due process, as a targeted group based on their identity or politics. And concentration camps like Auschwitz are only built after years of groundwork in the form of propaganda demonizing the out-group and justifying their removal from society. (Sound familiar?) If we can only call extermination centers “concentration camps,” what do we call places like the first Auschwitz — which was already a horror and paved the way for what came after — and how do we educate people about the historical path we’re on and where it can lead?

Educating the public is especially vital, Andrea said, because the longer we wait, the harder it gets to dismantle the systems that get built, the worse the abuses can get, and the more people are targeted beyond the original disfavored group. There are many ways these systems can end — but they never end on their own.

That’s why we have to take the kind of action today that we fantasize about taking if we had lived in Nazi Germany. In short: What do you want to be able to tell your children and grandchildren you did to stop this? Andrea’s weekly newsletter always includes ideas for actions to take. A few she mentioned include getting involved locally to block the construction of new camps, supporting legal representation for immigrants, and pressuring corporations that profit from the camps. And mark your calendars for April 25, the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention.

We also discussed historical examples other than Nazi Germany: the detention of Japanese people in the U.S., the Rohingya in Myanmar, Spanish Civil War refugees in France, and asylum seekers in Australia. (Anat worked on a successful effort to help close the offshore prisons in Australia, which she detailed on her podcast here).

And we unpacked the real tension between winning freedom for the most sympathetic individuals (children, the sick) through targeted PR campaigns, versus the risk of providing the government an “escape valve” that makes closing the camps less urgent.

Remember: when you "only" call out the worst abuses of a system, you make those worst abuses, rather than the system itself, the problem. This implicitly conveys to those who are only just paying attention that the system itself does not need to be challenged.

And, remember what the rest of the famous Frederick Douglass quote tells us:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted.… The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

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We covered:

• Why the voters who decide elections tend to be the ones who don’t love either party — and why those voters keep favoring Democrats in the Trump era.

• Answers to the question in Elliott’s post, “Trump is 20+ points underwater. So why aren’t Democrats up 20 for the midterms?” One reason is that voters who “somewhat disapprove” of Trump are not reliably pro-Democrat; they include many Trump voters and non-voters who are feeling left behind economically.

• Many reasons that 2026 looks good for Democrats. For instance, midterms tend to energize supporters of the party that lost the last election, and people who stayed home in 2024 favor Democrats. But what’s happening now is also more than just a “thermostatic” effect; it’s a reaction to real and terrible things that the Trump regime is doing.

• Elliott’s preliminary voter file analysis from the Arizona CD-7 special election and New Jersey governor’s race, which found that partisan turnout differential (more Democrats than Republicans showing up to vote) accounted for the majority of Democrats’ gains.

• The frustrating lack of nuance and one-dimensionality from those who counsel Democrats to “moderate” on policy. (Everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer salesman.)

Other links:

“The six big events that have dragged down Donald Trump’s approval rating” (Strength in Numbers)

“Red Wave, Blue Undertow” (Weekend Reading)

“The Democratic Party is about to make the most predictable mistake in American politics” (Lee Drutman)

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Anat and I covered:

• Birthright citizenship and the Roberts Court. It’s absurd that the Roberts Court even took this case, and debating it in terms of law and precedent gives it an unearned legitimacy. What’s happening here is the same thing that the Trump regime has been doing since day one — trying to shred the Constitution and redefine who gets to count as an American.

  • Messaging guidance on birthright citizenship.

• Trump’s executive order attacking voting rights. Again, zero merits and zero surprises. Once again, Trump has proven he knows he’s losing, which is why he wants to keep people from voting in order to control the outcome of elections and seize more power. Good news: calling this out makes people more motivated to vote and take action, not less, because it makes them feel defiant instead of hopeless.

  • ”Hands Off Our Vote” messaging guide.

• Iran. We talked about what our responsibility as Americans is when our leaders are committing and celebrating war crimes. And when we spend our time tallying what the billions spent on war could buy instead (health care, etc.), we lose sight of the fundamental immorality of what’s happening.

  • Iran messaging guide.

• Slovenia. An under-the-radar election story with some interesting and troubling parallels to our own situation, including an elaborate disinformation plot.

Chag Pesach Sameach!

Also, two book recommendations for anyone interested in how Germans responded to rising fascism: In the Garden of Beasts and The Order of the Day.

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Even now, as Trump’s approval generally and on “immigration” specifically is in the toilet, there’s a desire to believe that he has tapped into some genuine Völkisch sentiment of the public. But Americans’ views on immigration aren’t hard to understand — and they haven’t changed much if at all since before the election. Most Americans think there should be a path to citizenship for people who have lived here for years. They also think laws matter and should be enforced. They also don’t want to see their neighbors violently rounded up and sent to prison camps — and were not sufficiently warned about Trump’s plans to do just that. (For more on this from me, see “Poll-Washing Our Way to Fascism” and “The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority.”)

We talked about why The New York Times is both indispensable (this 2023 piece outlined nearly all of the grisly details about Trump’s deportation scheme) and indefensible (by refusing to let that reporting inform their politics coverage, as I wrote in "Does Joe Kahn Trust the New York Times?").

We talked about, as Greg argued recently, “How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration” — by loudly drawing attention to Trump’s crimes against humanity instead of staying silent like so many counsel.

As Greg noted, behind many of the squabbles we hear about wokeness, there is a shadow debate about how politics work — how voters process information and how to persuade them in the Trump era. And too often, the people who claim to be neutral data scientists are being intellectually lazy and affirming their own priors about that question.

Chris’s award-winning books have rewritten public understanding about reactionary movements (Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, co-authored with Matt A. Barreto) and the role of Black veterans in the civil rights movement (Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South).

We had a rich discussion about his areas of expertise, including:

• How status threat — white Christian men’s belief that they are losing social, cultural, or political status — has driven reactionary movements from the KKK to the Tea Party to MAGA, and how it is shaped by geography and social environment. (For instance, Blue states like California and Massachusetts have undergone dramatic demographic change without the political backlash seen in red states.)

• Why Black military service in World War II and Korea was an underappreciated driver of the civil rights movement, with veterans’ courage and conviction that they deserved full citizenship spreading in their communities.

• Key findings from longitudinal research conducted by Chris’s firm on the Black community during the 2024 election cycle — including the fact that 70% of low-propensity Black voters were never reached by the Harris campaign.

• Why obsessing over “the white working class” leads Democrats astray and alienates Black voters.

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Calling Trump and MAGA “fascist” out loud was once a surefire way to be mocked and dismissed from left, right, or center. But as we discussed here, fascism isn’t an insult — it’s an analytical framework that both explains why Trump and MAGA are doing what they do, and lets us anticipate what they will do. Anyone who understood this from the beginning hasn’t been surprised by much of what Trump has done, including his imperialist warmongering and brutal mass deportations.

Jason had sharp insights to share on topics including:

• Language as a political weapon that the right wing has always understood how to wield;

• Why erasing Black history is a deliberate strategy to prevent people from recognizing historical patterns being repeated today (see his recent Guardian piece on this subject);

• How his own family history (two Jewish parents who escaped the Holocaust as children) informs his scholarship and his willingness to speak out;

• The need to explicitly name, not shy away from, the white supremacy and patriarchy that are now official government policy.

For those of you in Brooklyn, on Thursday you can see Jason in conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of The 1619 Project.

Jason Stanley is the author of seven books, including How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. He is the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

More Reading:

Sleepwalking Our Way to Fascism (Weekend Reading)

Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport (Weekend Reading)

Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)

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You don’t steal an election overnight, and the South is the canary in the coal mine for what could be coming for all of us if Republicans pass the Voter Elimination Act (aka SAVE Act). But we’re not fatalistic: There are courageous people fighting this in the South, and wins are happening.

It was such a good conversation that we went a little over time. We also covered:

• The real goal of gutting Black political power behind attacks on voting rights, and why we should all be “allies” of Black voters.

• The latest anti-voter news in Georgia this week, from the legal fight over the Fulton County raid to a new voter purge tool promoted by the My Pillow guy.

• What’s really at stake in the Callais case that could gut the Voting Rights Act: whether people are given the opportunity to vote for someone who actually represents their interests. (Read this report from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter that finds a bad ruling could help secure an additional 19 safe Republican U.S. House seats compared to 2024.)

• The Trump administration’s attacks on Black history and progress (read Onyx Impact’s Blackout report on over 15,000 instances).

• What we can do: many things, including supporting election workers, becoming one yourself (sign up at Power the Polls), and donating to Fair Fight Action.

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• When Trump said “Democrats are destroying our country” in his State of the Union address, that was a tipoff that he is really the President of the Neo-Confederacy.

• Messaging moment: Call it the “Voter Elimination Act,” not the “SAVE Act,” when referring to the GOP’s bill that would keep millions of Americans from voting. Also, don’t name specific policies like voter ID; say that they want to “keep people from voting to control the outcome of elections.” (“Control” is even stronger than “rig”!)

• Note to everyone: When Trump calls for Republicans to “take over” elections, the headline isn’t that he wants to “nationalize” or “federalize” them.

• How too many Democrats are acting like a loyal opposition party to the fascist regime.

• What a French philosopher and wrestling have to do with how Trump came to power.

• What we hope for when we hope that Democrats will win (or Republicans will lose) the midterms.

• Discussing two massive resurgent labor movements happening right now in Argentina and India.

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