The Future Is Missing

There is something faintly Soviet about the American Republican Party. Its leaders are ancient, its slogans have acquired the solemnity of religious incantations, its internal disagreements are conducted through elaborate rituals of public denunciation, and its greatest ambition is to restore a vanished golden age that nobody can quite locate on a map. The portraits on the walls change occasionally, but the institution itself remains immovable. Somewhere in Washington, a committee of elderly men is presumably preparing a five-year plan for the restoration of 1957.

On Tuesday night, the voters delivered their verdict on the whole arrangement. The Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress, surrendered governorships in states they had treated as hereditary property, and watched their supposed new majority coalition disintegrate across the country. Texas elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1988. Kansas elected one for the first time since 1932. The Republican triumph of 2024, which was supposed to inaugurate a political realignment of historic proportions, survived approximately as long as most American New Year’s resolutions.

Naturally, everyone will have a theory about what went wrong. It was the war in Iran, the price of gasoline, the president’s temperament, the economy, the candidates, the polls, the media, the insufficiently enthusiastic participation of whichever demographic had most recently been declared the future of the Republican Party. These explanations have considerable merit. Wars are expensive, voters dislike being made poorer, and governments tend to become unpopular when they preside over both. But elections also reveal something about the political imagination of a country, and Tuesday’s results suggest that the American right has developed a serious deficiency in this department.

It has forgotten how to imagine the future.

This is a strange thing for a movement that once considered itself the natural political home of American optimism. Ronald Reagan spoke about a shining city on a hill, a country whose greatest achievements were still waiting to be accomplished. The old conservative imagination contained vast highways, prosperous suburbs, growing families, technological miracles, and the cheerful assumption that one’s children would inherit a better world. There were plenty of exclusions and illusions in that vision, but there was also a genuinely attractive proposition: America was a country going somewhere, and its citizens were invited along for the ride.

Somewhere between the Tea Party and the third presidential campaign of Donald Trump, the proposition changed. The right became a movement principally concerned with recovering things it had lost. Its favorite words became restore, reclaim, defend, and take back. Its favorite historical periods became whichever ones preceded the latest catastrophe. The nation had fallen, the culture had collapsed, the universities had been captured, the bureaucracy had become monstrous, the family had disintegrated, and the American people had been betrayed by practically everyone who had ever been employed in Washington. Much of this diagnosis contained important truths. The trouble is that a diagnosis, however accurate, is a rather poor substitute for a political destination.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have begun to rediscover a talent that the Republicans once possessed: making the future sound like somewhere a person might actually want to live.

Consider James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democrat who defeated Ken Paxton in Texas. Whatever one thinks of his politics, he belongs to a recognizable American tradition of young politicians who speak as though the country remains a place worth loving. He invokes faith, community, education, and the moral responsibilities of public life. His appeal extends beyond the familiar Democratic vocabulary of protecting vulnerable groups from imminent Republican depredations. He offers voters the possibility of building something together.

The distinction matters. A politician who promises to protect you from your enemies may earn your vote once, perhaps twice. A politician who can persuade you that your children might have a better life than you did has begun to establish something resembling a durable political allegiance.

And increasingly, it is the Democrats who seem interested in making that argument.