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.

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.

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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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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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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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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There are many more insights worth digging into in the report and in our conversation. PRRI’s work helps show why the typical demographic analyses of politics (college/non-college, etc.) fall woefully short of explaining what’s really going on.

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And it’s not just the Supreme Court; the Eighth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Minnesota, has also been captured and has repeatedly intervened to block lower-court efforts to restrain ICE abuses and protect basic constitutional rights.

As we discussed, the phrase “not above the law” has no meaning anymore when the Roberts Court keeps changing what the law means. Lisa will be joining me more regularly from now on to keep track of the latest.

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• Taylor Rehmet’s massive upset win in Texas, where the district swung about 30 points towards Democrats — and where Rehmet, a union machinist with deep community roots, defied typical narratives about Democrats needing “moderate” candidates to win in red places;

• Elliott’s prescient polling and analysis starting last year that showed the unpopularity of Trump’s brutal deportation (as opposed to “immigration”) policies, and the problems with most mainstream polling on the topic;

• Why the “median voter” theory (the idea that elections are won by moving toward a mythical ideological center) is garbage;

• How a certain crowd of “Capital-S Strategists” keeps using “data” to confirm what big funders already want Democrats to do;

• And much more.

Links:

The ICE Shootings Are a Tipping Point (Strength in Numbers)

Blue wave watch: Democrat flips Trump +17 Texas Senate seat in 32-point swing (Strength in Numbers)

Poll-Washing Our Way to Fascism (Weekend Reading)

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I talked about how important it is to understand that our elections are decided not by hard partisans, but by a group of people who are increasingly dissatisfied with the way the political system and economy has been delivering for them in their lives. In 9 of the last 10 midterm or presidential elections, the party that wins the last election loses the next one (at least one chamber of Congress or the White House). Young voters and Latino voters swung the most in 2024, and swung the most in the other direction this time, because neither was actually endorsing MAGA or Trump’s policies. And importantly, a different set of young and Latino voters decide to show up vs. stay home each time.

When asked about what 2028 might look like, I cautioned against viewing it in “normal politics” terms; we don’t know what kinds of authoritarian voter purges or opposition crackdowns are coming, for instance. But the most successful leaders of the Democratic Party are probably going to be people we don’t know about now. The way to change the Democratic Party is to have more Democrats who are different and aggressive in fighting for what people want. There’s not an example in American history of big change coming from existing party leadership; change happens when massive victories change who the party is. That was true when FDR came to power and when MAGA took over the Republicans.

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• There was no grand “realignment” where key demographic groups, like young Black and Latino men, “moved right.” We should think of people who decide American elections not as demographic categories, and not as “progressive” or “moderate,” but as a group of people who are pissed off at the party in power or dissatisfied with how politics is working for their lives.

• Discourse has been captured by a group of analysts and strategists who have lost sight of how you actually win elections and make big gains—as if the only thing that matters in football is extra points and field goals, not touchdowns. (It’s silly to argue about which style field goal kicker you should draft when your team is down by 10 in the fourth quarter.)

• Democrats should be much more ambitious about how many races are put in play when it could be a wave year. In 2006, Rahm Emanuel arguably cost Democrats seats by discouraging investment in a number of winnable races—including one candidate in Minnesota by the name of Tim Walz.

• “Turnout” and “persuasion” have become ideologically coded as “progressive” and “moderate,” respectively—but that’s not how people decide who to vote for, or whether to vote at all. It makes perfect sense that for the same reasons, some in the “pissed off” block who stayed home last year would realize they needed to show up this year, and some who gave Trump a chance last year would switch to vote for the Democrat, or stay home, this year.

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Most Americans believe the administration has gone too far on things like ICE detentions, closing government agencies, and cutting funding to research and universities. Strong majorities share basic values about pluralism and inclusion, including the idea that we should give unauthorized immigrants living here a path to citizenship, not round them up and deport them. And when given a choice between calling Trump a “dangerous dictator” or a “strong leader,” even larger majorities choose “dictator” now (including a nine-point jump among independents, two-thirds of whom now choose this option) than the first time the survey asked this question at Trump’s 100-day mark.

The survey helps show that our polarization is asymmetric—it’s not two parties drifting apart equally, but Trump and the Republican Party moving away from most Americans. It also shows what we miss when the media ignores the ethno-religious nature of our political divides. The Republican Party is nearly 70% white and Christian (compared to 41% of the US). Trump’s biggest supporters are white Evangelical Protestants—who make up only 13% of the population but whose power is magnified by numerous structural and organizing advantages. (For more on that, read my 2023 post on “How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right.”) And among Latinos, being Protestant is the most powerful predictor of Trump support—but while about six in ten of them voted for Trump in 2024, 53% now choose the “dangerous dictator” option.

For more from Robert P. Jones, read his books (The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, a New York Times bestseller; White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award; and The End of White Christian America, which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.) He also writes weekly at www.whitetoolong.net, a newsletter focused on religion, racial justice, and democracy.

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We discussed how these founding divisions between elite control and popular power echo through today’s democratic crises—especially when it comes to the capture of the Supreme Court and the Republican Party by right-wing plutocrats and white Christian nationalists. We talked about the difference between popular constitutionalism and judicial supremacy; the incoherence and ahistorical nature of “originalism”; why plutocrats and Republicans who neither liked Trump nor necessarily opposed democracy are now consolidating behind his authoritarian rule; and much more.

Some links to more of Michael Klarman’s commentary and scholarship:

• A debate with Jonathan Turley at Colgate University on whether we are in a constitutional crisis

• “Last Lecture” on Threat to Democracy and Rule of Law posed by Trump Administration (April 2025)

• Harvard Law Review (2020): The Degradation of American Democracy — And the Court

• Books:

  • The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

  • From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality

  • From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage

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