As I prepared for what promised and turned out to be foreboding election returns, I mixed up a couple of Rex Regum (King of Kings) cocktails for myself and a friend. And I recalled election night 2016 almost exactly a decade ago, for it was the last time I had this drink.
In the lead-up to the election of 2016, the traditional Christian outlook and way of life in America was, to use a boxing metaphor, “on the ropes.” The American Left had aggressively pushed cultural liberalism. From mandating the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for contraceptives, to kicking Catholic Charities out of adoption programs in states like Massachusetts and Illinois, to threatening the livelihood of Christian bakers and other proprietors if they did not genuflect and profess their faith in the creeds of cultural liberalism, it was no exaggeration to think that religious freedom in America was in the balance, since the winner would have a chance to shape the Supreme Court for a generation. Trump’s win was a shock to most observers (even to those of us who predicted he would win). It wasn’t clear that he would actually govern conservatively or nominate originalist judges to the courts who would restrain cultural liberalism. But there was at least a chance he would be, as the great Charles Krauthammer put it then, a junkyard bulldog who would protect traditional Christians from the predations of cultural liberalism.
As I sipped my Rex Regum, I couldn’t help but riff on Jacopo’s line to Edmund Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, when Dantes’s beloved Mercedes narrowly dodges a fatal bullet: “Once again, God sees America out of the corner of his eye. She will live.”
Ten years later, the landscape is very different. Cultural liberalism only metastasized during Trump I and bided its time until the Biden years, which saw virulent expression in the excesses of wokeness and identity politics. Still, Trump’s three Supreme Court picks, which will likely turn out to be his most important legacy, managed to overturn Roe, proved largely successful in keeping cultural liberalism in check at the legal level and expanded the capacity for those of traditional religious outlook to pursue happiness. And, since Trump’s comeback victory in 2024, the DOJ has arrested wokeism in many ways that have been broadly popular among Americans.
Rightly or wrongly, in such a landscape, the threat from the cultural Left is perceived to be diminished, weakened. More urgent to voters was the economy and cost of living—and Americans’ belief that Trump would deliver the material prosperity he promised in 2024. The exit polls reveal that the economy and cost of living drove the blue tsunami, more than any other single issue (including corruption, the Iran War, health care, immigration enforcement, etc.). According to exit polls, 66 percent of voters believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions and 63 percent blame Trump for higher prices, and a solid plurality (43 percent) said the Democratic Party would better handle the economy. It also looks like many voters believed Trump’s Iran War and tariffs have contributed to higher prices and economic woes. Exit polls found 74 percent of voters considered the Iran war to be a crucial or major factor in their vote; and 66 percent of voters believed the tariffs hurt the economy—Democrats won strong majorities of both of these groups.
It was a “shellacking,” the most recent parallel of which was the red wave of 2014. Now, both parties are at a crossroads.
The blue tsunami of 2026 is a historic reckoning. Democrats gained at least seven seats in the Senate (including “red” seats Trump won handily in Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and South Carolina), at least twenty-one seats in the House, and flipped governorships in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and Nevada. It was a “shellacking,” the most recent parallel of which was the red wave of 2014. Now, both parties are at a crossroads.
The Republican Party in some states (like Texas) has been in power so long that it has too often lost its immunity to internal rot. A candidate like Ken Paxton—a flagrant adulterer and uninspiring goober who was credibly accused of corruption—was an electoral turd that hundreds of millions of dollars could not polish. In South Carolina, Darlene Graham basically admitted she was unqualified to succeed her brother. Both were endorsed by Trump. Even if alternative choices in these races would not have survived the blue tsunami, clearly the GOP has a candidate quality problem that goes to the top. An electorate that pretty handily returned Trump to power in 2024 has clearly rebuked him in 2026. This comes two years after they gave Republicans united government, whose biggest legislative accomplishment, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, was referred to as a crap sandwich even by its defenders. So, what kind of party will the GOP be in the post-Trump era? Can it recover a coherent conservatism which prizes constitutionalism, limited government, personal and public virtue, ordered liberty, and the hardscrabble but unsexy work of member wrangling, negotiation, compromise, and competently legislating? Or will it succumb to opportunistic disrespect for rule of law, licentiousness, superficial kayfabe, grift, and incompetence?
The Democratic Party is also at a crossroads. How will it exert its newfound power? For it elected candidates who are at least as ostensibly different as Abdul El Sayed, James Talarico, and Josh Turek. El Sayed is a democratic socialist-adjacent candidate who in the final days of the campaign expressed his communistic view that children belong to the collective and parents don’t have the right to shield their children from the detritus of cultural liberalism in public schools because they don’t even have such a duty. El Sayed went so far as to say that the parental duty to protect their children’s innocence was an “outdated” idea. Talarico is a pro-abortion radical who has argued that God is pro-choice, since he gave the Blessed Virgin Mary a choice whether to bear the Son of God and suggested that being created in God’s image means that human beings are essentially genderless. Meanwhile, Josh Turek, the Paralympian—who explicitly eschewed being a “liberal” and campaigned as a moderate “Prairie Populist”—largely avoided speaking about or voting on the controversial culture and war issues. Will the Democratic Party learn from the backlash to Woke 1.0; rediscover the honorable strains of progressive and centrist liberalism of statesmen like FDR, Kennedy, Moynihan, and Clinton; and focus on the thoughtful reforms advanced by liberal public intellectuals like Matt Yglesis and Ezra Klein? Will they focus on popular economic policies and restrain the drive of its most radical members towards aggressive cultural liberalism? Or will the Party embrace Woke 2.0, a more radical version of the original?
While we cannot know the answers to these questions, we can take solace in knowing who is really in charge and recalling what this means for the Christian. In Quas Primas, wherein the Church established the Feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI taught that Christ’s kingship is over all things, including our politics. In his person is embodied supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power. It is a spiritual kingdom, which demands of its subjects “a spirit of detachment from riches and earthly things, and a spirit of gentleness,” who, at the same time, “must hunger and thirst after justice, and more than this, they must deny themselves and carry the cross.” So Christians must work for justice—must seek to align human law and policy with the eternal law—and be willing to sacrifice for justice and the common good of their polity. This vocation is quickened by and ordered to Christ’s kingship. For if a person in whose heart Jesus reigns is an instrument of peace, will not a society of men and women in whose hearts Christ reigns have the tranquility of peace? And yet Christians can only ever have one foot in this world, for their ultimate hope lies in the desire of another.
As we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King this November, let us never forget: The fortunes of earthly politics wax and wane, but the virtue of hope in Christ the King remains.