The Ratchet Only Clicks One Way

There is a story the Never Trump ecosystem has been telling itself lately, and it goes something like this: the Republicans have overreached on voting rights, the gerrymandering is too naked, the public will revolt, and out of that revolt will come the political pressure to finally, finally pass meaningful anti-gerrymandering reform. The system corrects. Democracy is resilient. The cavalry is coming.

It's a nice story. It is also, if you stress-test the mechanism even slightly, completely full of shit.

Let's start with the Voting Rights Act, because that's the proximate cause of the current optimism. The Supreme Court's gutting of Section 2 is real, it is significant, and Justice Kagan's dissent doesn't pull its punches: Section 2 was the last remaining legal check on the partisan impulse to draw wildly contorted districts, and now it's gone. Minority voters in states still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting can now be cracked out of the electoral process with something approaching judicial blessing. The consequences are, as Kagan put it, "likely to be far-reaching and grave."

And yet the Never Trump crowd hears this and concludes: backlash. The people will rise. Reform will follow.

Here's the problem. That chain of events requires politicians who benefited from gerrymandered maps to vote those maps out of existence because voters are mad about them. That is not how politicians work. That has never been how politicians work. The incentive structure points in precisely the opposite direction, and it has done so consistently across decades of documented gerrymandering history. Voters say in polls that they hate gerrymandering and support independent commissions. They then vote for the people who drew the maps. The research bears this out: partisan gerrymandering is widespread, mostly cancels at the national level, and — here's the part that should make you want to throw something — primarily functions to suppress electoral competition rather than deliver massive seat advantages to either party. The point isn't to win huge. The point is to make the game harder to lose. Mission accomplished.

The 60-40 Fantasy

There's a related fantasy that runs alongside the backlash narrative, and I've been guilty of flirting with it myself: the idea that a large enough electoral defeat would finally extinguish MAGA as a political force. If Democrats just won enough, the fever would break.

The 60-40 threshold is wrong, but not because it's too ambitious. It's wrong because it misunderstands the mechanism entirely. Electoral defeats don't kill identity movements. They drive them underground, into grievance storage, where they ferment into something more durable. The 1964 Goldwater landslide didn't extinguish movement conservatism. It organized it. The people who lost that race built the infrastructure, the think tanks, the donor networks, and the judicial pipeline that produced the world we're currently living in. They just needed 16 years.

MAGA is, if anything, more resistant to this kind of defeat than traditional movement conservatism was, because its identity is explicitly built around victimhood and persecution. A massive electoral loss isn't a falsification of the worldview. It's confirmation. The machine metabolizes defeat and converts it to fuel.

The most likely medium-term resolution to MAGA isn't a Democratic landslide. It's a successor figure who speaks the grievance vocabulary fluently while governing in ways that don't structurally threaten whatever institutional guardrails are still standing by then. That's not a victory. That's a controlled burn. And the landscape afterward is still scorched.

The Ratchet

What makes this particular moment different from previous dark cycles, and what the Never Trump optimists are consistently underweighting, is the asymmetry of norm destruction[1].

Each violated norm becomes the new baseline. That sounds abstract, so let's make it concrete: a future Democratic majority cannot restore Section 2 of the VRA without passing legislation through a Senate map that is structurally biased against them. They cannot un-pack a Supreme Court with 51 votes without their own coalition treating it as norm-breaking and revolting accordingly[2]. They cannot un-gerrymander districts while the judiciary refuses to enforce fairness standards. Rucho in 2019 removed federal judicial remedy for partisan gerrymandering. The VRA ruling removes the racial discrimination remedy. What's left is state constitutional litigation, and those state courts are being packed on a separate but parallel track.

The ratchet clicks one way. Previous dark cycles, 1968, 1980, 2000, were recoverable through normal electoral mechanisms because the institutional framework survived them. The question that serious people are genuinely divided on right now is whether that's still true. Whether the damage is cyclical or structural. Whether the recovery, if it comes, actually translates into policy correction or just into the aesthetics of normalcy while the underlying architecture remains.

The Quicksand Has a Feedback Loop

Rick Wilson, who is sharp and often right, has been advocating for a scorched-earth Democratic response: blue states should maximize their gerrymandering to zero out Republican representation wherever possible. The visceral appeal of this is real. The practical problem is that it requires a Democratic Party with a killer instinct it does not possess, and a Democratic electorate willing to sanction total warfare it has historically refused.

But here's the dimension that doesn't get enough attention: even if Democrats found the killer instinct, the campaign finance structure would still be eating the working-class coalition from the inside. The corporate donor problem isn't primarily a messaging problem. It's a policy problem. When Democrats who took serious finance sector money declined to prosecute a single bank executive after 2008, working-class voters didn't make an irrational inference. They read the revealed preferences correctly. You cannot talk your way out of that with better messaging.

The credibility gap is a policy gap in a nice suit.

Citizens United deserves its villain status, but it accelerated something that was already structurally present. The Clinton-era DLC repositioning toward professional-class and finance-friendly politics was a choice, made before unlimited independent expenditures were constitutionally protected. The donor class captured the party before the Court made it fully legal to do so in perpetuity. And fixing it requires a constitutional amendment that needs two-thirds of both chambers and three-quarters of states, which requires winning majorities that the campaign finance structure is specifically designed to prevent. It's not quicksand. It's a hall of fucking mirrors.

The Demographics Aren't the Cavalry Either

The browning of America was always a lagging indicator, not a guarantee, and 2024 made that brutally clear. The coalition Democrats were counting on to grow is simultaneously becoming more contested. Hispanic working-class men. Non-college non-white voters. The "coalition of the ascendant" thesis assumed these voters would remain reliably Democratic as their share expanded. What we got instead was a multiracial working-class realignment that is genuinely in play, which is a much harder political problem than the demographic math originally suggested.

The path out requires not just demographic growth but retaining enough of a working-class coalition that has been actively migrating right for two cycles. That requires the kind of economic populism that the donor class specifically exists to prevent. See above. The mirrors keep multiplying.

What's Actually True

Here's what I can tell you with confidence. There is no clean exit. There is no single mechanism that resolves this. The Never Trump optimists want a story where outrage produces reform produces fairness, and that story requires a system that is increasingly designed to prevent exactly that sequence.

What exists instead is a decade-plus fight across multiple arenas simultaneously, with the outcome contingent on factors that are genuinely uncertain: whether economic damage from current policy becomes severe and attributable enough to fracture the Republican coalition, whether the MAGA small-dollar machine deflates without Trump's particular charisma sustaining it, whether enough institutional infrastructure survives to allow electoral corrections to translate into actual policy corrections.

The long dark stretch is real. Naming it clearly is not pessimism. It's the minimum requirement for thinking usefully about what comes next.

The cavalry isn't coming. We're going to have to build it ourselves, slowly, in the dark, while the other side holds most of the lanterns.

And that's going to take a while.

1 - to be fair, JVL at The Bulwark does talk about this one way ratcheting, it is just that his peers seem to dismiss it with a hand wave.

2 - in this case, the "unpacking" is the shifting the ideological split of the court to be closer to neutral from its far left lean today.