And by that I’m not thinking of some picayune meaning like Control of the Senate for the next Congress.
No. I’m talking about an election which will have nation-wide, decades-long ripples, not only in the political world, but necessarily across the economics of the world as well.
Such elections don’t come along often. I think we may encounter such an election in this cycle, though, in the race for the Texas Senate seat.
Let me tell you why. Don’t shudder, this’ll be brief.
In the contest of Talarico (D) vs Paxton (R), we have candidates who are emblematic of the perceptions that voters have, or will have, of the parties.
Talarico may be exciting to Democratic activists for his identity as a Presbyterian seminarian, but Republican critics – attack dogs, if you like – will be emphasizing such reports as this:
Brent Scher
At James Talarico’s church, where he said in a sermon that the “trans community” needs “abortion care,” they’re pushing trans books on kids
Among the books in the church library is “This Book Is Gay,” which lays out the “ins and outs of gay sex” for kids
We may have, as a country, half of a grasp on the abortion issue that comes from decades of public debate on the matter, but I remain convinced that the American grasp on the transgender issue is, at best, insignificant. I wrote this post in November of 2021, suggesting the transgender advocate community – and I speak with precision, so if my reader is shouting BIGOT at their screen, then go back to the beginning of this paragraph and read thoughtfully, or at least at half-speed – has egregiously failed everyone who may be transgender by not following the procedures of public debate on the issue. American comprehension does not appear to have improved substantially since.
This permits folks like right-wing pundit Erick Erickson to write pieces containing passages like this:
Talarico is a bridge too far for actual Christians. He announced that “God is non-binary,” doubled down on the remark and defended it to Jake Tapper on CNN, and now claims he did not mean it since it has become an issue. He has claimed there are “six sexes,” not just two, and discussed how he loves trans kids. He also wants an open border. Talarico even attends a church with books in the church library to teach kids about gay sex. “Among the books in the church library is ‘This Book Is Gay,’ which lays out the ‘ins and outs of gay sex’ for kids”
For a Democratic activist the content cited by Erickson may seem unobjectionable, but for an independent voter who doesn’t often encounter transgenderism issues, the description of Talarico may seem odd, even alarming.
And, as noted in my post here, the great blunder of the transgender advocates has been to exclude the American public from any debate. This has led to a Democratic Party that is half-conscious of its blunder, where activists play CYA (Cover Your Ass) games such as calling the voters bigots for expressing concerns over an issue that has not had its time in the Sun, and engage not in serious discussion and debate, but in a hollow performative morality when this issue, and others, come up, leading to a Party that is more concerned about being Politically Correct than about the worries of an electorate that feels its future is in doubt. What is performative morality? When someone expresses a concern about an issue and our performer doesn’t come back with an intellectual answer, but instead says they can’t possibly work or even be in the presence of said … apostate. It’s a variant of bullying in which our offended person assumes a metaphorical high ground that they have not earned, and may never.
Talarico will wear such positions proudly, mixing religion in with them; Texas voters may select him in the election, but it may be with some reluctance. Unfortunately, Reluctantly Talarico is not a box on the ballot.
But odd positions like these, whether proudly hugged by Talarico or thrust upon him by ruthless Republican critics, will adhere to the electorate’s shared consciousness.
Sounds bad? Republican candidate Ken Paxton’s worse.
Look, I said I’d be brief. There are numerous lists of scandals in which Paxton has been involved, here’s Steve Benen’s list. I’ve written a little bit about him myself, but I shan’t link to them. I used to consider him a weird outlier that served to illustrate the moral decay of the Texas GOP. In some ways, I still do.
But more telling is, once more, right wing pundit and radio host Erick Erickson, whose observation of Paxton and Texas voters has been made with Erickson holding a bucket while he types – or so I hope:
Texas voters, who grew up with J. R. Ewing on television, will probably elect Paxton. They already re-elected him statewide as Texas Attorney General. When contrasted with an actual heretic “seminarian,” many Christians will hold their nose and vote for the crook. In Louisiana, in 1991, Governor Edwin Edwards faced off against KKK Leader David Duke. The entire Republican leadership of the nation, including President George H. W. Bush, condemned Duke. Edwards’s campaign circulated a bumper sticker that read, “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.” Ken Paxton could run with the same bumper sticker.
It’s worth noting that the latest scandal is Paxton accepting the endorsement of known criminal Donald J. Trump in the primary runoff. It ties him to a politician which most of the electorate considers incompetent, who has been convicted of criminal acts, and who has endangered the nation with his foolish war, his tariffs, and his lack of comprehension of foreign affairs. I don’t recite these to take a malicious shot at Trump; the endorsement acceptance ties Paxton to this list of Trumpian defects, and, by association, the new character of the Republican Party: boastful, mendacious, grasping, manipulative … incompetent.
And Paxton becomes emblematic of all these repellent qualities. Go click on Benen’s list if you doubt it. He already has most of those qualities; the endorsement just publicizes it.
I was reading Professor Richardson’s May 27, 2026 column yesterday when I ran across this:
… elite enslavers who dominated the Democratic Party demanded party members line up behind their determination to spread human enslavement to the West. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state protected the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border from enslavement, Democrats in 1854 forced through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting slavery there.
Their purity test was a harbinger of a dramatic political realignment.
The Democrats were the Party of the Southern Revolt, one might say; today’s Democrats would repudiate the Democrats of the 1850s. Richardson continues:
Frustrated that the existing parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were not taking a strong enough stand against the demands of elite enslavers, those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the spread of slavery abandoned their old political allegiances and came together. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.”
And where are the Whigs now?
I’m saying here that the emblematic Texas Senate candidates are conveying to the electorate the nature of the Republican and Democratic parties, and that the independent segment of the electorate is, or will be, dismayed at the natures of the Parties. Here’s a bit more of the good Professor:
As voters swung away from the Democrats in the 1850s, those Democrats left in office represented the most extreme districts and were themselves the most extreme members of the party. They tried to rally their base by appealing to racism, warning that Black Americans would murder white people unless they remained enslaved and insisting that anyone opposing the spread of slavery was endangering the country and that the U.S. had always been a nation of and for white men.
Our lesson for today? The Parties, driven towards their respective extremes by the power-hungry and the arrogant activists, are running a very strong risk of becoming irrelevant and, thus, disintegrating, to be replaced by Parties which, respectively, advance the better aspects of their ideologies, while discarding the power-hungry and the foolishness.
For the reader who thinks I’m taking a few disparate facts and weaving a largely fictional narrative out of them, here’s another fact, this one from Gallup:
Both Parties are driving away voters at ruinous rates. They’re becoming invalid. Whenever I see news of Party introspection, it’s clear that the Parties don’t want to introspect, if I may coin an expression. Introspection will inevitably endanger the selfish interests of powerful elements of both Parties, whether it’s that of transgender advocates or of prosperity theology pastors, and thus it’s shut down as soon as it’s clear it’s a danger to those interests.
But the failure to identify the wounds inflicted by arrogance leads to infection and pus, and if that’s not treated, then the organism organization dies. For those of us who find Professor Turchin convincing, the Soviet Union forced the Parties to cauterize the arrogance of members, to restrain their arrogance where it couldn’t be removed, because the focus of American social life was the alleged existential threat of the Soviet Union; in its shadow, the Birchers and Communists and religious nutters. and all the rest were evaluated, if informally, and rejected or repressed. When the Soviet Union, and its explicit threat, collapsed, the failure of that existential threat removed the fuel, the reason, for requiring the Parties to exercise discipline and execute their gatekeeping responsibilities, and the Parties then ran wild.
I make no specific predictions, but I do say that the Texas Senate race of 2026 may begin the process to see off one, or even both, major political Parties, and the beginning of the process of the formation of possibly many new Parties to replace them. I predict the survivors of this process will, from the experience, lack some of the arrogance, and consequent positions, that has so wounded today’s Parties.
And, as painful as it is for both Party members and the electorate, it will be good for the nation.
