Goldstone is the author of the forthcoming "Not White Enough: The Long Shameful Road to Japanese American Internment."
In the wake of Herschel Walker’s stunning loss to Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s Senate runoff, Democratic Party professionals reacted very differently than their Republican counterparts, and those disparities in many ways epitomize the current state of electoral politics in America.
Democratic strategists, although exultant, recognized full well that Warnock’s victory was due in good part, perhaps primarily, to the quality of his opponent. While many on the left were proclaiming Georgia a purple state, the pros knew better. Georgia is still red as evidenced by Republicans’ clean sweep of the other statewide offices, with none of those races being close. Still, that Democrats had any chance at all was the result of a ferocious, years-long campaign to register and educate voters, many but not all Black, spearheaded by Stacey Abrams (who was not a beneficiary of her own efforts). In addition, Democrats made certain that their message was not so extreme as to alienate moderate conservatives in the cities and the suburbs. They even made modest inroads in rural areas, with Warnock specifically mentioning his work for farmers in his victory speech.
As James Carville said the night of the runoff, winning is about forming coalitions. Given the diffuse nature of the Democratic Party, that is their challenge. Democrats are the amoeba, an organism that has an outer boundary but no fixed shape. The party’s members range from the way-left Bernie Sanders and AOC to the almost-right Joe Manchin and now-independent Kyrsten Sinema, who remains closer to Democrats than Republicans. Getting them to agree on most policy initiatives is bruising, filled with invective, recriminations and accusations of disloyalty to basic party principles. To create effective coalitions, then, Democratic leaders must appreciate the need for the party to have some form, some outer boundary, within which compromise can be successfully fashioned. But that boundary cannot be so fixed, so rigid, that it forces one side or the other to defect, as Sinema’s decision to abandon the party label so aptly demonstrates.
Republicans have a different and likely more intractable problem. Their professionals knew exactly why they lost — an abysmal candidate forced on the party by the now-toxic Donald Trump. We must move on, many said. But that will not be easy. Walker was the candidate not because he was chosen in a back room by Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, but because he won the primary ... by a lot. Other disastrous Republican nominees, such as Dr. Oz, Blake Masters, Tudor Dixon, Kari Lake and dozens more, were chosen the same way. Had their opponents prevailed in the spring and summer, November would have looked far different.
But Republicans have been sliced in half. Like the earthworm, the half with the head will regenerate a tail and survive, but the half without the head will die. The question for their party is which side has the head. (A flatworm will fully regenerate if cut in half, which, if the metaphor holds, might result in a third party. That outcome would hardly be a boon to Republicans in either camp.)
If the head is on the Donald Trump side, party pros know that Republican primary voters will continue to choose candidates who flame out in general elections because the electorate in all but deep red constituencies have made it clear that Trump’s bombast is no longer enchanting. If, on the other hand, what in the current environment are considered mainstream Republicans — formerly the extreme right — try to take control of the nominating process, the Trump half will either rebel or stay home.
As we begin the 2024 election cycle, these distinctions may prove crucial. For all the vitriol directed by progressive Democrats at Sinema and Manchin, the party desperately needs them both to be re-elected if it is to have any chance of maintaining control of the Senate. Because Democrats did not cut themselves in half, Joe Manchin can return to West Virginia and tell voters not only that he is his own man but that he can wield far more power as an independent Democrat than can any Republican. Kyrsten Sinema can similarly flaunt her bona fides as an “independent” thinker who puts the needs of Arizona before blind party loyalty. (She may face a challenge from the left but only a centrist can win in Arizona.) Other Democrats under threat, such as Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, can make similar arguments, thus giving them a decent chance of re-election in Republican states.
The amoeba advantage goes far beyond the Senate. Republicans won 18 House seats in districts carried by Joe Biden compared to only five by Democrats who were victorious in Trump districts. If party leaders take the need to build coalitions seriously, they can easily reverse a sufficient number of those losses to win back the House in 2024.
While the Democrats’ task is arduous and painstaking to be sure, Republican leaders are faced with a far more daunting backdrop. The only way they can overcome what seems a fatal split in their party is to try to stitch the earthworm back together, to somehow find a way to nominate candidates who can win general elections without inciting the fury of Trump worshippers who would gleefully burn down the “RINO” house if Trump told them to.
Presently, the party hopes that it can pivot to Trumpism without Trump, in the person of, say, a Ron DeSantis. But while Florida’s governor might currently be receiving both breathless accolades and strong poll numbers, time will only tell if he is a genuine heir to the golden throne or merely a Trump du jour.
In 2016, Wisconsin's Scott Walker was also flying high as a young, hard-nosed conservative governor who had been resoundingly successful in a swing state. Walker was widely touted as the future of the party — until he was forced to perform on a national stage. He did not fare badly, certainly no worse than some of the dozen-plus other candidates, but nor did he send sparks through the Republican electorate. His presidential campaign ended up lasting two months. DeSantis might prove more effective and have more staying power, but those who are praying for a neo-Trump candidate need be aware that the actual Trump will likely be there to insult, belittle, and mock any would-be successor.
With what promises to be a brutal election season ready to begin, there are lessons to be absorbed by both parties. For Democrats, it is to embrace their amoeba-esque flexibility, to recognize they cannot win without it; for Republicans, it is to make sure the worm’s head is on their non-Trump half and then to put all their resources into regenerating the half they allowed Trump to cut off.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.