Alaska is 55% Republican. Its lone House seat is held by a Democrat.
Connecticut is 43% Republican and Delaware is 41% Republican. Hawaii is 37% Republican. Idaho is 30% Republican. Maine is 45% Republican. Massachusetts is 37% Republican. New Hampshire is 47% Republican. New Mexico is 46% Republican. Rhode Island is 42% Republican. Vermont is 32% Republican.
These states account for 30 House seats. Zero of those seats are Republican.
In fairness, there are just as many states with Democrat minorities that have no Democrat representatives, and most of them – for both parties – only have one seat. Still, gerrymandering is real, and as the parties become more and more belligerent toward one another, most states are gerrymandering more aggressively to create as many seats as possible for the party in power, in the run-up to the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
Neither party has all that much interest in democracy. Democrats want more power over the lives of everyday people and Republicans want the government to have less power over the lives of everyday people. Both parties are at this point more concerned with getting what they want than with how they get it, and neither really cares about the process as much as they care about winning.
Victor Davis Hanson recently posted to YouTube that the modern Democratic Party is modeled on the Jacobins from the French Revolution, and he’s correct, although when I made the same argument I focused more on the Directorate that ran revolutionary France. The most relevant section from my article follows (I encourage you to read the entire article):
Today, we are seeing large numbers of people, not only rejecting belief in God, but rejecting all that comes with belief in God, including the shared moral order that has always held Western nations together. If we do not regain that shared moral footing, we will either have mob morality (and the bloodshed that comes with it – England is bordering on this right now) or, more likely, state-defined morality.
State-defined moral systems always bend into tyranny, and tyranny knows no restraint.
Once restraint is severed, the intellectual class within our universities gradually ceases to be a steward of truth and becomes an architect of ideology. It is in fact the university system that is ‘teaching’ our children to reject our shared moral values.
Democrats, like the Jacobins, see themselves as intellectually and morally enlightened while they see others as backward, primitive, and corrupt. They claim that they want democracy, but they want a democracy only of the initiated. They do not care what anyone else thinks, and though they’ll give the appearance of the vote, if they are honest they don’t trust any system that can lead to Donald Trump.
Joe Biden went so far as to say, prior to the 2024 elections, “We’re going to do everything in our power that is consistent with the law and the Constitution to prevent another four years of Donald Trump.” Based on what the DOJ did, that included weaponizing law enforcement at both the federal and state levels.
Republicans are also against true democracy, preferring a constitutional republic where the government is limited, leaving individuals free to live their lives as they see fit provided they allow others to do the same. Based on their behavior leading up to this election, they are OK stacking the deck if it means that government stays limited.
On a moral plane, the parties reverse. Republicans want the country to remain grounded in the Judeo-Christian values it was founded on, whereas Democrats believe morality to be a product of culture. Being multicultural, they believe individuals should be free to create their own morality, giving us a morality of the lowest common denominator. That is functionally the same as having no morality at all.
Democrats have made the tolerance of immorality the only remaining moral virtue.
Republicans believe in individualism in all things but choosing morality. Democrats increasingly call individualism ‘racist,’ on the assumption that if we are left free, some of us might do better than others.
As Democrats behave more and more like the Directorate of the French Revolution, they are becoming more and more incompatible with Republicans, and their politics reflect this.
Republicans have, incidentally, moved as well. Democrats like to say that Republicans have become more extreme, but really the Republicans have moved to the left. Republicans just have not moved anywhere near as far as the Democrat base, which makes Republicans look more extreme by comparison. Positions that were routinely held by both parties, just ten or twenty years ago, are now considered radical by much of the left.
Trump is not just wrong to the Democrat. He is vile and disgusting, the lowest of the low, a worthless degenerate racist who hates humanity and steals from babies, someone who hates his own mother and bombs children, a pedophile and a rapist, a pig, a monster, a dog, a worthless con artist and thief, the spawn of Satan, a fascist lunatic and thug representing all that is evil and unholy in the world.
That’s not a real quote, but I’ll bet you heard Robert De Niro’s voice when you read it, and it is this kind of hatred that has both sides pulling out all the stops in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms.
Normally, states redistrict after each census, but when Texas tried to redistrict after the 2010 census, it was blocked by the Obama White House, and its post-2010 redistricting efforts have been tied up in litigation and federal oversight until recently when Texas got the green light to proceed.
Texas did not redistrict between censuses solely to skew the 2026 midterms. It did so because it finally won in court, and redistricting was overdue. It was a special circumstance that Gavin Newsom misrepresented for political advantage.
Gavin Newsom accused Texas of redistricting for partisan purposes and responded by also redistricting California between censuses, adding more Democrat seats to offset the changes in Texas. Then the floodgates opened and a number of additional states redistricted, gerrymandering more radically across the board.
Virginia tried to do so as well, but the Virginia Constitution has rules for how to do so and those rules were violated, causing the Virginia Supreme Court to strike the changes down. Virginia is now looking at ways to force justices to retire so it can build a new court.
Both sides gerrymander, but historically Democrats have been better at it than Republicans. This is not because Republicans are less willing to do so, but because of provisions in the Voting Rights Act that Democrats sued Republican states with, making them gerrymander in ways that created minority-majority districts, on the assumption that these districts would vote Democrat. As such, Democrats have been able to gerrymander not only the states they control, but through the courts they have been able to gerrymander some of the states they do not control, forcing those states to create as many minority-majority districts as possible.
The Supreme Court recently ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that while it is illegal to redistrict in ways that discriminate against minorities, states cannot discriminate for minorities either. Now many Democrats are losing their minds as Republican states who were forced by lower courts to gerrymander in ways that created extra Democrat districts are removing them.
And removing court-ordered gerrymandering is not racist, no matter how many claim otherwise.
As bad as gerrymandering is, it is but a symptom of something much worse, which is the hatred both parties are increasingly feeling toward one another. They are viewed as evil, illegitimate, and beyond redemption.
Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed millions of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” Robert De Niro has repeatedly referred to Trump as a “monster,” a “dog,” a “pig,” and said publicly, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Kathy Griffin posed with a fake severed head of Donald Trump covered in blood.
Members of Congress, media figures, and celebrities routinely compare Trump to Hitler or Mussolini, while MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson once referred to Trump supporters as “a threat to the country.” After January 6, 2021, commentators and academics openly discussed the need to “deprogram” Trump supporters, language normally associated with cults or enemy populations rather than fellow citizens. Others argued that Trump should be removed from ballots, imprisoned, financially destroyed, or permanently barred from office.
Republicans and conservatives have also increasingly adopted the language of political hatred. Democrats are no longer merely described as misguided or wrong, but as enemies of the state.
Donald Trump referred to Democrats as “sick people,” “radical left lunatics,” and “the enemy from within.” Marjorie Taylor Greene once said Democrats are “the party of pedophiles,” while Kari Lake accused Democrats of “trying to destroy this country.”
Conservative media figures routinely describe Democrats as communists, traitors, groomers, or enemies of Western Civilization. Tucker Carlson warned that Democrats “hate America,” while others on the right have described the modern Democratic Party as “evil” or “demonic.”
After the riots of 2020, many conservatives stopped viewing Democrats as permissive on crime and began describing them as actively aligned with chaos and destruction. Online rhetoric has escalated even further, with some voices openly discussing “national divorce,” secession, or the idea that the opposing side is irredeemably corrupt and fundamentally incompatible with American life.
The point isn’t whether one or both sides are right in how they view the other side, but that the escalation of rhetoric pushes the sides even further apart. Both sides now frame political defeat not as a policy loss, but as an existential threat. Nor is this division transitory. The parties want to take the country in mutually-exclusive directions, making the division permanent, unless one or both parties change.
When Democrats discuss policy, it comes from the more radical elements of the party, such as Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other Democratic Socialists. The Supreme Court, which is currently interpreting the Constitution based on an originalist interpretation (based on what it actually says using definitions from the time it was written) is increasingly called corrupt, racist, and illegitimate. According to a 2023 Marquette Law School Poll, 66% of Democrats want to expand the size of the court to stack it, and I don’t believe doing so has become less popular among Democrats now that Trump has been elected again.
More moderate Democrats have moved away from policy prescriptions, preferring to denigrate their opponents, calling them evil, stupid, and unfit for office. It is not that the moderates have no policy ideas. It’s that all of the political energy is with the radicals, and the moderates are getting out of the way.
And of course the power is with the radicals. The left draws from the same revolutionary tradition as the French Revolution, inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine. Paine aligned with the revolutionary factions within France, supporting the Revolution even after it became violent. Ironically, Paine was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror once the revolution ran out of enemies and began consuming its own.
Paine helped open the philosophical door that later revolutionary thinkers, including Karl Marx, walked through.
The French Revolution transformed Paine’s philosophical radicalism into political radicalism. Marx later transformed it again into economic and class radicalism. In the twentieth century, these same impulses evolved into ideological movements centered on perpetual social reconstruction, where every institution, norm, hierarchy, and cultural tradition became subject to political scrutiny, moral judgment, and rejection.
The modern left expanded this further. Today it extends into language, gender, race, history, family structure, religion, education, and even objective truth. Nothing is viewed as fixed, inherited, or outside the reach of political revision.
If every generation possesses not only the right, but the moral obligation to dismantle all inherited systems, then society becomes permanently revolutionary. Nothing can settle.
I’ve often said that each generation is a bridge, taking what it is given from the previous generation, discarding what no longer works while keeping the rest, adding to it as necessary, and then handing all of it over to the next generation. Today’s left wants to take everything that came before and throw it away. The arrogance of this belief that nobody who ever lived before had anything useful to share with the world seems lost on them.
What we are seeing with gerrymandering is a nation splitting apart. It is in fact not hard to imagine the United States splitting in three, with the West Coast, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado becoming a political unit, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan joining with Pennsylvania and the Northeast as another political unit (connected through Canada), and the central and southern United States becoming a third. If there were a civil war, it would be the West Coast and Northeast against the middle.
What happens if after the midterms, half the states declare that thanks to gerrymandering, they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the new Congress? What happens if California declares that the Federal Government under Trump, with the new Congress, has no authority over California?
Other states would follow suit.
Imagine if Democrats take both houses of Congress and then someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the 2028 popular vote, while losing the Electoral College. What happens if the Democratic Congress listens to Pete Buttigieg and certifies the winner of the popular vote as President?
Texas and Florida might declare the new President illegitimate and declare that the Federal Government under that President has no authority over their states.
Once again, other states would follow suit.
People don’t just hate each other. Increasingly, they want to hurt one another. And that’s true on both sides. I mentioned Democrats and violence earlier, but January 6, 2021, had at least some level of violence too, and not all of it was caused by FBI informants. Most on the right may not say of the left, “They are communists, the enemy!” but if we are honest, we know people who think that way.
I’d love to see our political parties find some semblance of common ground, but each has its own news sources and its own sources of truth. Neither side gives much intellectual credibility to the other, and to the degree that the left rejects ‘truth’ as subjective, they don’t really care if they are technically correct. They believe they are morally correct, and they believe that to be enough.
We can see where this leads by looking at Europe and Canada, which are ten or twenty years ahead of us and are already experiencing the kinds of civilizational strain that can lead to civilizational collapse.
We differ from Europe and Canada only in that we are still allowed to disagree. Europe and Canada are increasingly banning dissent as ‘hate speech,’ and censoring content. Europe is going so far as to sue X (formerly Twitter) in European courts to try and get it to censor content as well. If X loses that suit, other social media houses will be forced to self-censor as well, lest they be sued.
If the European Union is allowed to censor American companies based on their materials being available in Europe, the First Amendment will be effectively dead, and the political left will win, giving them free rein to create a new version of the French Revolution, but on a global scale, which is of course what they are looking for.
My message to the left is simple: the French Revolution did not lead to the radically liberated civilization Thomas Paine imagined.
It led to Napoleon.
And then it led to war.
