We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 13, 2026

Two weeks ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act provided that no state or local government could impose any conditions or procedures on voting that would result “in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

In the past, the Supreme Court has recognized that the right to vote alone does not necessarily fulfill the aims of the law. It’s possible—even easy—to dilute the votes of Black Americans to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate they support. Sometimes, then, in order to guarantee Black representation in government, states have had to create districts that are made up primarily of Black Americans. The court has condoned this practice, upholding the idea that in such a case, the state has a compelling reason to draw districts according to race. In the past, the court saw the creation of majority-minority districts as a way to comply with the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing that Black voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer.

But in 2024, a “non-Black” voter in Louisiana challenged a new majority-minority district drawn so that the state’s congressional delegation might include two Black legislators out of the six allocated to the state. Those districts were designed to remedy the fact that although one third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, the state has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction.

On April 29, by a vote of 6–3, with the right-wing justices in the majority, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s construction of a majority-minority district unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. It was, they said, an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. And, as the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the federal courts have no business addressing partisan gerrymandering.

Immediately, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to stop the state’s congressional primary election, which was already underway. His declaration has thrown the election into chaos as 45,000 ballots already cast won’t be counted, and the ballots already sent out will still include the race that Landry has now postponed.

Since then, other Republican-dominated states have rushed to pass mid-decade gerrymanders that will shut Democrats out of power.

Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, immediately called the Tennessee legislature into emergency special session to get rid of the state’s only Democratic member of Congress, the one representing Memphis. Sixty percent of the people who live in Memphis are Black. Once back in session, the Tennessee lawmakers repealed their own law that prohibited mid-decade redistricting. Then, on May 7, they cracked Memphis into three districts, diluting Black votes by swamping them with voters in white suburbs. The state had similarly cracked Nashville in 2022, flipping that seat, as well, from Democratic to Republican.

“Tennessee is a conservative state, and this map ensures that our congressional delegation reflects that,” Republican state senator John Stevens said. “This is about allowing Tennessee to maximize its partisan advantage.”

On May 8 the Virginia state supreme court voted along partisan lines to strike down a plan Virginia voters had approved to redraw the state’s congressional districts temporarily to favor Democrats as a way to counteract the Republicans’ partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states.

The court majority argued that the redistricting measure was invalid because, as Amna Nawaz and Ali Schmitz of PBS explained, the Virginia constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a constitutional amendment twice: once before a legislative election and once after. This should guarantee two different sets of eyes on any such amendment by letting the people elect new lawmakers between the votes. But when the General Assembly passed the measure the first time, early voting was already underway. Thus, the court said, it was not “before” a scheduled election.

On May 11, a week before elections are due to start there, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 district map that lower courts ruled unconstitutional because it diluted Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts, thus violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an unsigned one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts to reevaluate in light of the Callais decision.

On May 12, Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton removed all the House Democrats from standing committees, saying they had behaved in a way “aimed at disrupting the democratic and legislative processes” as they protested the mid-decade redistricting that broke up Tennessee’s only majority-Black, Democratic district. As Tennessee state representative Justin J. Pearson notes, this decree removed “every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on” and stripped “nearly 2 million Tennesseans from the representation they deserve” in the Tennessee state legislature.

On May 13—today—Georgia governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the Georgia General Assembly for June 17 to redraw Georgia’s congressional maps before the 2028 election. He said it was too late to change Georgia’s maps for 2026, but that the Callais decision requires Georgia to change its electoral maps.

Also today, Louisiana legislators advanced a congressional map eliminating one of the state’s two Black-majority districts. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster is expected to call for a special session to eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district and only Democratic seat, and Mississippi governor Tate Reeves said Mississippi lawmakers would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district before 2028.

Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket assesses that redistricting could net Republicans between 16 and 18 seats in Congress in 2026, while the Democrats will likely pick up six, at least so far: five in California and one in Utah where a court demanded a redrawing of districts. Many of these redistricting plans are being challenged in the courts, and it remains possible that not all of them will flip, but G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers assesses that the Democrats will have to win congressional elections by 3–4 points in order to win a majority.

We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South.

We have been here before.

The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by recognizing that right in the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and unscrupulous employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could only be paid for with tax levies. Black voters, they said, were ushering in socialism.

Former Confederates declared it their duty to “redeem” the South from “Black rule,” by which they meant the Republicans and third parties in which white men and Black men worked together for policies that benefited workingmen, policies like education and workers’ protections. White Democrats argued that because such parties, even if overwhelmingly white, could win only with Black votes, they represented “Black rule.”

By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until the mid-1960s as white southern Democrats worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in the South to cement their own control over the region. In 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and Its Results insisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had perverted the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars.

Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted.

Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2,000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to “reform” the city government. They issued a “White Declaration of Independence” and said they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by” Black men.

As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed “there was no intimidation used,” but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. In the years to come, white Americans would continue to maintain control of politics through violence. They considered it a public duty to purge society of Black Americans, taking photographs of themselves at lynchings.

The region white Democrats ruled at the beginning of the twentieth century enforced white supremacy with extralegal violence. That racial domination helped white Americans swallow the South’s dramatic inequality. A few wealthy men dominated the region, while most people were poor: southerners had about half the average per capita income of the rest of the nation.

It was this world Congress addressed when, after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, it passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, finally taking seriously the amendment’s charge to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted that democracies depend on members of each party recognizing the legitimacy of their partisan rivals. Even if they disagree with each other, each recognizes the others’ members as loyal to the nation and accepts their legitimacy as lawmakers if voters elect them. Democracy also depends on parties refusing to use the tools of government to destroy the ability of their partisan opponents to win elections.

A day after a Pennsylvania man was arrested for making a “hit list” of twenty Democratic legislators he called “communist infiltrators” and threatened to shoot, as President Trump calls Democrats “traitors” and as southern states destroy the ability of Black Democrats to elect representatives, the echoes of the past are deafening.

Although the parties have switched sides, the story is the same. Now, as then, a minority is disfranchising voters because it knows its ideas are unpopular and it cannot win on the merits of its policies. What it can do, though, is to deliver white supremacy to its followers in hopes that it will be enough to make them ignore the economic system that is leading them to ruin.

As Joyce White Vance noted tonight in Civil Discourse, Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II reacted to the news of Georgia’s special session for redistricting by saying: “If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.

“June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.

“Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

The Day Fairport Convention’s Bus Crashed, Killing Martin Lamble

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May 12, 1969 bus crash killed Fairport Convention drummer Martin Lamble and severely injured other members of the group.

As the summer of 1969 approached, the future looked bright for Fairport Convention, as their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays, expanded the band’s audience with a more rock-inflected version of their folk sound. But an awful tragedy nearly destroyed the band just as all their hard work was starting to pay off.

In the early morning hours of May 12, as the group traveled back from a celebratory gig in Birmingham shortly after wrapping up work on their next album, their van veered off the road — and in the aftermath of the crash, Fairport Convention would never be the same. The wreck killed drummer Martin Lamble, who was just 19 at the time, as well as fashion designer and magazine columnist Jeannie Franklyn, who’d been dating guitarist Richard Thompson. Thompson suffered a broken shoulder and bassist Ashley Hutchings was sent to the hospital with assorted serious injuries, while guitarist Simon Nicol, who’d been sleeping on the floor of the vehicle when it went off the road, escaped with a concussion.

“Our road manager and sound guy, Harvey Bramham, did most of the driving although I’d do a bit to relieve him. On this particular gig, he’d been feeling peaky all day, quite unwell,” explained Nicol in a post on the Fairport Convention website. “I had a bad migraine so I wasn’t in a seat; I was stretched out on the floor with a blanket over my head trying to sleep off this terrible headache. When I woke up, the van was doing things which didn’t involve the wheels being in contact with the ground: when it stopped moving, I was the only one left. All the gear had gone out of the back and all the people had gone out through the windows and doors.”

With the release of their next album mere weeks away, the members of the group had to decide whether they could even carry on as a unit. “That was a big watershed, I think. In the aftermath, we thought a lot about what to do, whether to call it a day. It had been fun while it lasted but it took a definite effort of will to continue,” recalled Nicol. “It had given us a lot but now it had taken away a lot: was it worth it if it was going to cost people their lives?”

“We were totally fractured, in more ways than one,” Hutchings told the Guardian. “It seemed like I was in hospital for months. When I woke up at the side of the M1, I thought I’d lost my sight. As it was, it was just that both eyes were terribly cut and bruised, and eventually, that improved. But I had a broken nose, broken cheekbone, a lot of head injuries, a broken pelvis, a bad ankle injury. All of those things took a long time to heal. People were asking us about the future, but we couldn’t conceive of planning one.”

“We were very traumatized,” added Thompson. “And there was this feeling: ‘Should we carry on? Has the stuffing been knocked out of us?’ But eventually, we made a conscious effort. We got together and said, ‘Yes, we are carrying on.'” As Nicol put it, “We all felt psychologically traumatized as well as being damaged physically. But by the time Ashley’s face was back together and Richard’s bones were healing, we’d decided to rebuild the band and carry on.”

While Fairport Convention handled the last few bits of work to prepare their third LP, Unhalfbricking, for its July 1969 release, DJ John Peel hosted a benefit concert featuring Family, Pretty Things, and Soft Machine on May 25 to raise money for Lamble and Franklyn’s families. While they soldiered on, the pall of the accident continued to loom; as Hutchings later told the Guardian, he can’t even look at the cover of Unhalfbricking without thinking about the tragedy. “My memory of it is bound up with the terrible car crash. On the back cover we’re all eating around a table. The shirt and the leather waistcoat I’m wearing are what I had on when the crash happened. I can clearly remember them being bloodstained,” he explained. “You don’t forget things like that.”

In fact, although the group soon found a new drummer in Dave Mattacks and rebounded to create one of their most successful albums with Liege & Lief later that year, Hutchings was on his way out of the band. “I believe the crash hung over the band in unseen ways,” mused Nicol. “I think it was one of the unspoken reasons for the next big change, when Ashley decided to leave the band later that year after we had recorded Liege & Lief and relaunched the band to some fanfare and acclaim. Whatever the upfront reasons about musical differences and wanting to concentrate on traditional material, I think the accident was the underlying reason why Ashley felt he couldn’t continue with us.”

Fairport Convention’s lineup would continue to change quite a bit over the years, but aside from a hiatus between 1979-’85, they’ve continued to tour and record steadily — and although Nicol is the only original member left, he wouldn’t mind seeing the Fairport name continue after he’s gone. “I’d like Fairport to become the first band to be like a male voice choir, carrying on through changes of personnel but retaining its identity,” he wrote on the band’s site.

“After all, no one bats an eyelid about a brass band playing on long after all the original members are gone. Why shouldn’t there be a Fairport Convention in fifty or a hundred years?”

Source: The Day Fairport Convention’s Bus Crashed, Killing Martin Lamble

Meet the Future of the Democratic Party

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By Robert Reich

Last Thursday, populist Democratic candidate Graham Platner shook up the Democratic establishment when his primary competitor, Maine Governor Janet Mills, suspended her Senate campaign amid polls showing her badly trailing Platner, an oyster farmer who had come out of nowhere to win a national following.

Platner is the latest example of the rise of anti-establishment outsiders in the Democratic Party — a trend that also includes self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who last year defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor.

Yet the Democratic establishment — corporate Democrats, wealthy Democratic donors, entrenched Washington “centrists,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer — still don’t get it.

Hell, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it a decade ago when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee (and, not incidentally, Jeb Bush was considered a shoe-in for the Republican nomination).

I remember interviewing voters about their political preferences in the late spring of 2015, in the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, for a book I was then writing. When I asked them whom they wanted for president, they kept telling me Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Often the same individuals offered both names. They explained they wanted an “outsider,” someone who would “shake up” the system, ideally a person who wasn’t even a Democrat or a Republican.

The people I met were furious with their employers, with the federal government, and with Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and enraged at those at the top. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis or the Great Recession that followed it.

They kept reiterating that the system was “rigged” in favor of the powerful and against themselves. They didn’t oppose government per se; most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and roads and bridges. But they hated “crony capitalism” — large corporations using their political clout to gain special favors and changes in laws that often hurt average people.

The following year, Sanders — then a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries — came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses. Had the DNC not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging its financing in favor of Clinton, Sanders would probably have been the Democratic nominee in 2016.

Trump, then a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elected office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America. Granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and he had some help from Vladimir Putin, but he won.

Something very big was happening in America: a full-scale rebellion against the political establishment.

That rebellion continues to this day. Yet much of Washington’s Democratic elite is still in denial. They prefer to attribute the rise of Trump and, more broadly, Trumpism — its political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and cultural populism — solely to racism. Well, racism is certainly a part of it. But hardly all.

In 2024, Democrats didn’t even get to choose their nominee from the primary process, since Biden dropped out after a dreadful debate performance and was replaced by Kamala Harris — leaving some Democrats feeling like higher powers were picking their nominee.

The anti-establishment groundswell has by now spread to independent voters — who are now a whopping 45 percent of the electorate and have moved sharply against Trump. It’s one of the most dramatic shifts in recent political history.

Trump’s approval rating among independents now stands at 25 percent, while 68 percent of independents disapprove of him. In 2024, independents were evenly divided, with 48 percent voting for Harris and 48 percent for Trump. In 2020, independents favored Biden by 9 percentage points.

The Democratic establishment still doesn’t see the groundswell — or is actively fighting it.

In Iowa, whose primary is June 2, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is quietly backing state Rep. Josh Turek against state Sen. Zach Wahls. That’s probably a mistake. Turek is a good candidate, but Wahls is a young, dynamic progressive — similar to Platner in his ability to inspire and rally. (In Iowa, independents who want to vote in the Democratic primary need only declare themselves Democrats by June 2.)

In California, whose primary is also June 2, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just rejected Randy Villegas as its preferred nominee for the 22nd Congressional District and instead endorsed doctor and assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains. Villegas, known as a strong progressive, has been endorsed by the congressional progressive caucus and the congressional Hispanic caucus’s campaign arm. “This is about party leadership and D.C. elites putting their thumb on the scale for who they know will bend the knee to party leadership and corporate interests,” Villegas says.

In Arizona, whose primary is July 21, the DCCC has endorsed Marlene Galán-Woods in a Democratic primary to replace Representative David Schweikert, the Republican who is leaving Congress to run for governor. The DCCC rejected Amish Shah, a doctor and former state legislator who won the primary in 2024 and came within a few points of defeating Schweikert. (That year, Ms. Galán-Woods finished third in the primary.) Shah has been leading Galán-Woods by a 3-to-1 margin in the only public poll of the race. Shah says Democrats should stop backing the party apparatus if they want to win the House majority.

In Michigan, whose primary is August 4, the DSCC is backing Rep. Haley Stevens, who’s in a tight race against rival Abdul El-Sayed. Also probably a mistake. El-Sayed is another young progressive who’s showing a remarkable ability to galvanize Democrats and independents. (Michigan has open primaries in which any voter can participate.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

If Democrats fail to connect with the frustrations of average hardworking Americans and decide instead to side with big corporations and Wall Street, they’ll have given up the most crucial opportunity in a generation both to take back control of Congress and to lead the way on a new progressive agenda.

What does this anti-establishment surge — including the remarkable growth of independents and their sharp rejection of Trump — mean for the presidential race in 2028?

For one thing, it suggests that the current presumed Democratic frontrunners — Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom — are frontrunners only because of their name recognition. As voters find out more about the alternatives, it’s unlikely that either of them will make the cut.

For another, it suggests that anti-establishment candidates are the ones to watch.

Obama chief of staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told a packed crowd at the Milken Institute Global Conference this week that the biggest challenge both parties have faced over the last quarter-century has been the battle between establishment forces and anti-establishment forces.

Emanuel was correct. But he then went on to suggest, absurdly, that he’s anti-establishment. Emanuel’s cozy ties to corporate America, his closeness to Citadel founder Ken Griffin (who praised Emanuel from Milken’s main stage), and even Emanuel’s presence at the Milken conference, belie his claim.

But the mere fact that Emanuel thinks it important to claim anti-establishment creds underscores that the biggest force in American politics today — and in the Democratic Party — is anti-establishment rage at political insiders.

Despite the Democratic establishment, a younger and more charismatic generation of populist and progressive Democrats is on the way to winning primaries and general election races across America. If Graham Platner beats Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, which seems likely, he’s the kind of candidate who (in my humble opinion) will be the future of the Democratic Party.

Source: Meet the Future of the Democratic Party – Robert Reich