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The girl smiled and pointed at the “I Voted!” sticker on her forehead. Her father took a selfie with her outside the voting center. Hours later, New Yorkers danced and honked car horns to celebrate the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. The street parties reminded me of when Barack Obama won the presidency after eight years of Geoge W. Bush, or Joe Biden against Donald Trump. You could feel the people sigh in relief.

Now, six months later, it’s hard to imagine such elation after an election — not after the right wing’s latest act of legal warfare on democracy with the Supreme Court’s further gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Not wasting time, Republicans in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina redrew maps to end Black-majority districts immediately after the decision. Next, the Virginia Supreme Court cold-stopped Democrats from redistricting four more seats to fight Republican gerrymandering. Even before the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump administration had the FBI raid a voting center while pushing the SAVE America Act. The legislation, currently stalled in the Senate, would erect high walls to voting — such as demanding a passport or birth certificate, rather than just a driver’s license. It could cut off more than 21 million Americans from voting, including the poor, married people with changed names, the elderly, and people of color.

After the Supreme Court ruling, grief swept our community. On the phone, my friend, a Black activist, cried. I heard the fear of a 21st-century Jim Crow regime. Could we see legal resegregation? These fears obscured the real future that the right wing is trying to build: the end of democracy. The far right wants techno-feudalism, or what some of its members have dubbed a “Dark Enlightenment.” Right-wingers believe that now, as multiple crises pile up, is the time to strike. They think the billionaire class will fund this future even knowing Americans don’t want it. And we, the people being pushed out of democracy, need to know what it is being planned in order to stop it.

Not Politics as Usual

“We Shall Over Overcome (Again): Fight Against White Supremacy” the protester’s sign said. In Tennessee, activists raged at Republicans taking apart Black voting districts. They linked arms on the steps of the state house and chanted. Some were forcefully removed by state troopers.

The Republican Party is actively tearing down democracy. It starts at the top, with Trump sending federal agents to scare state election officials and seize records. He, after all is, the one who stacked the Supreme Court, which granted him wide immunity before eviscerating the Voting Rights Act. Across the country, state Republicans are carving up Black-majority districts like a Thanksgiving turkey. On the surface, there is a one clear reason: They are losing.

Black Disenfranchisement Has Not Been This Intense Since Jim Crow

The Republican Party is in free fall. Trump’s polls numbers are so low you can play the limbo with them. The man is at 36 percent approval and dropping. Two out of three Americans blame him for painful gas prices. Six out of 10 are sour on the Iran war, even before a........

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