Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
The term “ realignment ” gets used and abused a lot, because people have agreed to use it without agreeing on a definition. Traditionally, realignments are said to have occurred when majority and minority parties switch places. Starting in 1932, FDR pulled blacks and working class and immigrant whites into the Democratic Party, making it the majority party for generations. It’s a sign of how massive that coalition was that it’s been shrinking since the 1960s without Republicans ever becoming the clear majority party, though the story gets complicated with the rise in voters calling themselves independents.
For the last 20 years, the parties have essentially been tied, and it seems unlikely that will change anytime soon. But there’s still a whole lot of realigning going on. Donald Trump has accelerated the trend of the white working class fleeing the Democrats. Meanwhile, college-educated and suburban voters have moved significantly toward the Democrats.
In other words, while the parties are stuck in a logjam, the coalitions making up the parties are changing dramatically.
And that’s where the inconsistency and hypocrisy come in. Parties reflect the interests of their electoral coalitions. You can see signs of the adjustments all over the place. Republicans such as JD Vance sound a lot like anti-war Democrats from 20 years ago, railing against warmongers, chickenhawks and “neocons.” Democrats haven’t changed as dramatically, but they are far more comfortable talking about American global leadership and the importance of our alliances than they used to be.
Parties also reflect their candidates, which is why the party of philandering Bill Clinton now talks a lot about good character while Republicans fawn over Trump’s alpha dog “ manliness.”
Democrats have been far more consistent on abortion, because in a post- Roe environment it’s a winning issue. But Trump has moved the GOP toward a de facto pro-choice position, denouncing “heartbeat bills” while also insisting that states should be free to do what they please on abortion.
Neither party is coherent — or good, in my opinion — on trade and industrial policy, but Trump has definitely made the GOP more protectionist and dirigiste than at any point in my lifetime. Given the movement of rank-and-file members of private sector labor unions toward the GOP it’s not hard to imagine a new partisan divide between public and private sector unions.
The most interesting change might be on the issue of democracy itself. I don’t mean the arguments about Trump’s pernicious election fraud lies (the sorts of lies once associated with left-wing Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), but the broader debates about the Electoral College and so-called “voter suppression.”
For decades, both parties shared the flawed assumption that higher voter turnout mostly benefited Democrats in national elections. (Democrats had the opposite view in big city elections.) Voter ID laws and tighter restrictions on early and absentee voting were seen as a way to make sure that high-propensity voters — i.e., disproportionately Republican college-educated suburbanites who could be relied upon to vote — were overrepresented, and low-propensity voters — Black, Latino and rural non-college educated whites — were underrepresented. The overheated rhetoric about “voter suppression” or “election integrity” was unjustified. But the dynamic was real, because the electoral calculation was real.
After 2016, many Democrats doubled down on the claim that the Electoral College was racist or undemocratic, which was itself remarkably hypocritical given their previous boasts that the Democrats had a near- lock on the Electoral College: That’s where the phrase “ the blue wall ” originated. Bragging about your advantage in the Electoral College only to call it racist and undemocratic when it works against you is not a great look.
In 2024, the Harris campaign relied on high-propensity voters while the Trump campaign leaned heavily on low-propensity men. Assuming these trends are real and that they become the new normal, it will be interesting to see whether the parties switch their rhetoric about democracy.
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A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.