The results of the midterm elections are clear; their meaning is not. The blue tsunami apparently has not budged either of the dominant intellectual factions on the Right. The so-called “doomers” see fresh support for their conviction that the republic is sliding more or less inexorably into ruin. The more conventional Old Guard, who find such talk alarming, continue to insist that “you win some, you lose some,” and that Republicans will live to fight another day.

What makes the current political scene so perplexing is that both sides can point to certain undeniable facts to support their position. The United States is, for now, neither all one thing nor all the other. James Madison’s Constitution, though beaten and bruised, is still functioning, according to the conventionalists. American politics remains fundamentally “normal.” In reply, the pessimistic wing accuses the “normie-cons” of naivete and complacency. The original Constitution, they argue, has by now been almost entirely pushed aside by a new, second Constitution, based on a new understanding of justice and human nature, and fanatically devoted to implementing the ideological Left’s agenda.

It is hard to deny that virtually all aspects of our public life have become distorted and dysfunctional in a way the founders would hardly recognize. Yet the Old Guard does seem to be correct to insist that elections—the most important safeguard of popular consent—are still respected by both sides, however tenuously.

Despite a few vocal outliers and occasionally heated rhetoric, both parties have grudgingly accepted the results of the last several voting cycles, if not in equal measure. (It is worth noting that during Joe Biden’s entire four-year term, no one from the allegedly extreme party of gun violence tried to assassinate him.) Presumably, this will still hold in two years, even if—as seems quite possible now—the Democrats not only maintain significant majorities in both chambers of Congress, but take control of the White House as well. That, oddly enough, could represent a notable return to something very traditional and normal in American politics: the “realigning election.”

Until a few decades ago, the regularity of realigning elections had been such a reliable feature of American history that political scientists had come to treat the phenomenon as almost an iron law. Beginning in 1800, the American people seemed to prefer that one party hold authoritative control of the federal government for a full generation or so, at which point they decisively switched their allegiance to the other party. Thus, Republicans and Democrats essentially traded control over the national government every few decades: in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and then, perhaps, in 1968 or ’72—but this is where things took a turn.

In an essay titled “Political Parties, the Constitution and the Future of American Politics,” Charles Kesler notes that realigning elections consistently allowed the American people to choose between two “well-developed interpretations” of the Constitution: “a more democratic or a more republican view.” “The former view emphasized popular sovereignty, the latter popular responsibility.”

Parties competed to prove their fidelity to the Constitution, each grudgingly conceding the legitimacy of the other(s), but insisting on its own superior credentials—and thus its right to define what was common ground, and what forbidden ground, in the public life.

In practice, these boundaries were set by the majority party, but the fight was always over who would get to set them—whose view of the Constitution would prevail. When the competing views became sufficiently discordant, the American people faced a critical election whose consequences might include the overturn of the existing majority party, and the establishment of a new one. Such realigning elections are rare but revealing: they set the grounds of electoral competition for the next generation or two, and renew the nation’s dedication to the moral and political goals of republicanism proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and incorporated in the Constitution. Thus America’s party system reflected the continuing vitality of the Constitution, and presupposed a healthy respect and even reverence for it.

Kesler notes that this regular process seems to have stalled in the 1980s. The Reagan Revolution ought to have solidified Nixon’s 1972 landslide re-election and inaugurated a generation of Republican dominance. But by this point, the federal government itself had become a significant—perhaps the most significant—faction in American politics. The will of the voters now had to contend with the will of the bureaucracy. As a result, Kesler notes, the United States has “tilted away from elective representation and party politics and towards new, non-elective and non-deliberative modes of representation.” Consent steadily yielded to the benevolent administration of scientific experts.

Picking up on this theme, the late Angelo Codevilla, another great Claremont scholar, noted in 2020 that the institutional changes wrought by the second Constitution have been driven by a potent intellectual critique that guided “the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s.”

The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.

Not surprisingly, this ostensibly moral agenda coincided very nicely with the political and economic interests of the ruling class, which appointed itself the guardian of the progressive second Constitution. To what degree the ruling class actually believes in or cares about the various oppressed classes it purports to champion is an open question. As Codevilla perceptively emphasizes, its disdain for traditional, working-class voters is evident; the desire to actually improve life for the American citizenry is less clear. If this were nothing more than hypocrisy, it would hardly matter.

But the political problem, not just for the Left but for America, is that the ideological cart to which the ruling class hitched its pursuit of power—the postmodern crusades for sexual liberation, racial grievances, and the autonomy of the uninhibited self—turns out to be rather difficult to manage. The radical vanguard that supplies the Democrats with energy, zeal, and fashionable cachet, what Codevilla calls the “intersectional” component of the Left, believes (not without good reason) that it is in charge. This makes for an uneasy coalition. “For most ruling class notables,” Codevilla observes, “enjoying and parceling out victory’s prerogatives is the revolution’s point.”

They would prefer to suppress the deplorables while minimizing disruption of the economy and avoiding violence. For these chiefs, rubbing the deplorables’ faces in excrement is mostly an instrument of conflict. But for the intersectionals, it is the revolution’s very objective, its driving logic. For them, vengeance is electoral victory’s foremost prerogative. Determined as the chiefs may be that the intersectional tail must not wag the revolutionary dog, the fact is that each and every part of the intersectional coalition sees itself as the dog.

The crucial question in 2028 and beyond will be: Who is really the top dog in the ruling class?

A few days ago, National Review’s Dan McLaughlin—hardly a MAGA extremist—tweeted, “I understand entirely the instinct to teach the House GOP a lesson. But if you punish the Senate GOP, it will be 6 years before they can do anything about it. And we can lose the Republic before then.” If this week’s midterm elections does indeed foretell a critical realignment to the left in 2028, it will mean not six but at least 30 years of unchallenged dominance by the Democrats—with very little assurance that the neoliberal oligarchs will be able to moderate the intersectional fanatics. That might be enough to make even the most complacent “normie-con” blanch.