Category: Uncategorized

When the early 2000s hit series “The West Wing” returned on Netflix in December 2025, it spurred conversation about how the idealistic political drama would play in Donald Trump’s second term.

The series features a Democratic presidential administration led by President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, and his loyal White House staff negotiating political challenges with character, competence and a fair bit of humor.

It sparked cultural commentary long after it ceased its original run in 2005.

In 2016, The Guardian’s Brian Moylan asserted that the “The West Wing” was appealing because it portrayed “a world where the political system works. It reminds us of a time, not too long ago, when people in political office took their jobs very seriously and wanted to actually govern this country rather than settle scores and appeal to their respective bases.”

In 2025, Vanity Fair’s Savannah Walsh mused that “The West Wing” might be dismissed by younger audiences as a “form of science fiction” or lauded by the demographic currently watching “Jed Bartlet fancams scored to Taylor Swift’s ‘Father Figure’” on TikTok.

Audiences have been comfort-streaming the “The West Wing” since Trump’s first term. Interest in the series spiked after Trump’s election in 2016, and it served as an escape from the contentious 2020 campaign.

When the cast reunited at the 2024 Emmy awards, the Daily Beast’s Catherine L. Hensley remarked that the series’ “sense of optimism about how American government actually functions … rang hollow, almost like watching a show from another planet.”

Nonetheless, Collider’s Rachel LaBonte hailed its Netflix return in late 2025 as a “balm for these confusing times.”

“The West Wing’s” transition from broadcast television behemoth to “bittersweet comfort watch” in today’s streaming era reveals a lot about how much our media and political landscapes have changed in the past 25 years.

As professors of media studies and political communication, we study the fracturing of our media and political environments.

The shifting appeal of “The West Wing” during the past quarter century raises a sobering question: Is political competence and an idealized respect for democratic norms losing popularity in 2026? Or does the new political reality demand engagement with the seamier side of politics?

‘The West Wing’s’ optimistic big tent

“The West Wing” premiered on NBC in the fall of 1999, blending political intrigue with workplace drama in a formula audiences found irresistible. The show surged in viewership in its second and third seasons, as it imagined responses from a Democratic administration to the values and ideology of the newly installed Republican President George W. Bush.

But the series was undergirded by an ethic of political cooperation, reinforcing the idea that, according to Walsh, “we’re all a lot more aligned than we realize.” In 2020, Sheen observed in an interview that writer “Aaron Sorkin never trashed the opposition,” choosing instead to depict “people with differences of opinion trying to serve.”

In 2019, The New York Times observed that the “The West Wing” presented “opposition Republicans, for the most part, as equally honorable,” and noted that the show earned fan mail from viewers across the political spectrum.

At its height of popularity, episodes of “The West Wing” garnered 25 million viewers. Such numbers are reserved today only for live, mass culture events like Sunday night football.

Of course, “The West Wing” aired in a radically different television environment from today.

Despite competition from cable, that era’s free, over-the-airwaves broadcasters like NBC accounted for roughly half of all television viewing in the 2001-02 season. Currently, they account for only about 20%.

Gone are the days of television’s ability to create the “big tents” of diverse audiences. Instead, since “The West Wing’s” original airing, television gathers smaller segments of viewers based on political ideology and ultraspecific demographic markers.

Darker, more polarized media environment

The fracturing of the television audience parallels the schisms in America’s political culture, with viewers and voters increasingly sheltering in partisan echo chambers. Taylor Sheridan has replaced Sorkin as this decade’s showrunner, pumping out conservatively aligned hits such as “Yellowstone” and “Landman.”

Liberals, conversely, now see “West Wing” alumni recast in dystopian critiques of contemporary conservatism. Bradley Whitford morphed from President Bartlet’s political strategist to a calculating racist in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” and a commander in “The Handmaid’s Tale’s” misogynist army.

Allison Janney, who played “The West Wing’s” earnest and scrupulous press secretary, is now a duplicitous and potentially treasonous U.S. president in “The Diplomat,” whose creator in fact got her start on “The West Wing.”

Even Sheen has been demoted from serving as America’s favorite fictional president to playing J. Edgar Hoover in the film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” whom Sheen described as “a wretched man” and “one of the worst villains imaginable.”

Television as equipment for living

Philosopher Kenneth Burke argued that stories function as “equipment for living.” Novels, films, songs, video games and television series are important because they not only reveal our cultural predilections, they shape them, providing us with strategies for navigating the world around us.

Films and series like “Get Out,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Diplomat” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” urge audiences to confront the racism and sexism ever-present in media and politics. That includes, as some scholars and viewers have noted, the often casual misogyny and second-string roles for some women and Black men in “The West Wing.”

As U.S. citizens protest authoritarianism in the streets from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, a comfort binge of a series in which the White House press secretary, as Vanity Fair said, “dorkily performs ‘The Jackal’ and doesn’t dream of restricting West Wing access – even on the administration’s worst press days” is appealing.

But indulging an appetite for what one critic has called “junk-food nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed” may leave audience members less equipped to build the healthy democracy for which the characters on “The West Wing” always strived. Or it may invigorate them.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Few ideas are as central to the nation’s identity as that of the American Dream.

With the 250th birthday of the United States coming up in July 2026, it’s worth stepping back to examine a concept essential to the nation’s self-image.

The term “American Dream” was actually coined in the 1930s by historian James Truslow Adams. Ever since the establishment of the Colonies, however, America has been viewed as a land where individual and collective hopes and aspirations can be realized.

From the idea of America as a shining “city on a hill” to the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the nation has been premised on high aspirations. The concept of the American Dream has epitomized these hopes, and it continues to be present throughout our cultural landscape.

As a social scientist, I set out to explore what Americans thought about the American Dream in today’s society. I interviewed scores of people, from an elderly man sleeping on the street to a billionaire entrepreneur.

I wanted to know exactly how they defined the American Dream – and whether it has become harder to achieve today than in the past.

Defining the dream

From pickup trucks and lawn tractor ads to the labeling of undocumented immigrant children as Dreamers, references to the American Dream in contemporary life are ubiquitous. Washington, D.C., is now home to a brand-new, US$500 million museum, the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, devoted to celebrating the idea and its history.

It turns out that for most people I interviewed, the American Dream consists of three basic ideas.

The first is what might be called an economic bargain: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should expect to have a financially secure life. This includes owning a home, being able to afford raising kids and retiring in comfort.

Second, the American Dream is centered on hope and optimism. It is about personal progress and the belief that the nation’s best days lie ahead. It’s the idea that each generation should do better than the previous one, and that upward economic mobility is essential for bringing this about.

The third and final idea people expressed was having the freedom to pursue their hopes to reach their full potential. For many, this is the epitome of the American Dream.

At its best, the U.S. is seen as allowing individuals the freedom to live the life they want. Liberty and rugged individualism have been hallmarks of America since its beginnings, so it should come as no surprise that they are also central to the American Dream.

Economically more elusive?

Given this, has the American Dream become more or less difficult to achieve over time? Unfortunately, for a growing number of Americans, it appears to be more difficult.

First, the goal of leading an economically secure life in exchange for hard work has become more elusive. Data from the Census Bureau indicates that median wages for full-time male workers have essentially flatlined since 1973. The economy has been producing more low-wage and part-time jobs. Many of these lack benefits, such as health insurance.

Less-skilled workers, such as truck drivers and postal clerks, have actually lost ground in terms of income. At the same time, housing, medical care, child care and higher education costs have dramatically increased over the past 40 years.

What about upward mobility and the hope for each generation to do better economically than the previous one? There is some evidence that one reason the middle class is shrinking is that more people have entered upper-income tiers.

Still, younger generations will actually earn, on average, less as adults than their parents did. This is the first time in U.S. history that this is the case. The formerly taken-for-granted idea of generational progress and moving forward appears to have stalled.

Upward economic mobility for lower-income workers has also slowed over the past 50 years, making it harder to climb the ladder of opportunity.

Dissatisfied, not dreaming

Finally, what about personal freedom? Survey data indicates that greater numbers of Americans feel they have less control over their lives and futures than in the past.

For more than 20 years, Gallup has asked the question, “In this country, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” The percentage of Americans reporting being satisfied has dropped notably over the past two decades. In 2007 it was 87%, but by 2024 it had fallen to 72%. For women, the number was even lower, declining from 85% in 2007 to 66% in 2024.

By comparison, the average for the wealthiest countries in the Gallup survey was 86%. Consequently, on all three counts it appears that the American Dream is becoming harder to achieve.

An aspirational hope

These trends are important for making sense of the polarization and general negativity found in America today. Too many Americans feel that they’ve been left behind and that the American Dream has become a distant reality.

For these Americans, the words of the late comedian and social commentator George Carlin ring true: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Yet the American Dream is a powerful metaphor and aspiration that continues to inspire many in this country. Among those I interviewed, there was a strong consensus that it represents the very best of what America has to offer.

There is no other country that has quite the equivalent of the American Dream. As the nation enters its next 250 years, working toward reestablishing the concept as a reality for millions of people who have fallen behind may be vital to maintaining the essence of the American promise.

Mark Robert Rank does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Many Americans report frustration with the two-party system, in which the Democratic and Republican candidates are seen as the only viable options for elective office.

But an alarming trend in many state legislative elections is lowering the bar even further, to something more like a one-party system. In dozens of states, an increasing number of state legislative seats are going completely uncontested by one of the two major parties.

State legislatures play a crucial role in American governance. As congressional gridlock has intensified over recent decades, state governments have increasingly picked up the slack on policymaking.

Yet in many states, competition over who serves in these legislatures has deteriorated significantly.

The result is a genuine crisis for political representation, policy innovation and candidate recruitment.

Scale of the problem

In many cases, one of the only two viable parties can’t field enough candidates for the state legislature to mount a credible challenge to the other, more dominant party.

While uncontested seats for Congress remain relatively rare – approximately 3% to 4% of U.S. House districts in recent cycles were uncontested – the phenomenon has become endemic in state legislatures. In recent election cycles, between 30% and 50% of lower-chamber state legislative seats nationwide went uncontested by one of the two major parties.

Even more astounding is the lack of competition in individual states, some of which see far less competition than others. Some states, like Michigan and Minnesota, regularly field candidates for both parties in nearly all their state legislative races.

Massachusetts is a different story: In their lower legislative chamber, more than half the races have gone uncontested by one of the two major parties in every election since at least 2010. In the 2024 elections, four out of every five seats went uncontested in races for the Massachusetts House. In Mississippi, out of the 174 seats in the state Legislature, only 25 of them – 14% – had actual contests with both parties participating.

In practice, this means that for many state legislative chambers each election cycle, the party that will control the majority in the next legislative session – a major prerequisite for governing and passing legislation – is literally a foregone conclusion. In these chambers, one party or the other has fielded candidates for less than half of the legislative seats.

In other words, it’s mathematically impossible for that party to win a majority, even if its candidates win every seat they compete in.

In the 2022 cycle, for example, simple majorities were guaranteed for either the Democrats or Republicans in 22 chambers across 16 states. In some of these cases, one party was guaranteed a veto-proof majority – meaning that party had enough lawmakers to override a governor’s veto if necessary – before a single vote had even been counted in the election.

What is and isn’t behind lack of competition

Several factors contribute to the prevalence of uncontested races, including the individual decision-making processes of potential candidates.

Running for office requires substantial investments of time and money, as well as major sacrifices of privacy and, in many cases, public and personal reputation. Even many individuals who are interested in serving decide that the cost isn’t worth it, especially when winning isn’t a guarantee.

The calculus is even more straightforward in heavily partisan districts, where the other party’s presidential candidate may have won by 40 or 50 percentage points in a previous election. Here, even well-qualified candidates face near-certain defeat. It’s easy to see why would-be candidates might reasonably decide to opt out.

Structural explanations for this lack of competition are more complex. For example, gerrymandering – the practice of drawing district boundaries to favor one party – is frequently cited as the main culprit.

But while gerrymandering does occur and merits concern, the evidence suggests it is not the principal driver of uncontested seats. Many states with independent redistricting commissions, such as Idaho, have experienced high rates of non-contestation despite having drawn competitive districts. Meanwhile, many states where legislatures control redistricting, such as Minnesota and Florida, maintain robust competition.

The phenomenon is also not correlated with whether a state is red, blue or somewhere in between, indicating that partisan control of redistricting alone cannot explain the trend.

Two complementary factors are more likely important. First, geographic partisan sorting – the concentration of politically like-minded people in communities – has accelerated over the past three decades. Democrats have consolidated in urban centers while losing ground in rural areas, particularly in the South and Midwest. This residential sorting creates naturally uncompetitive districts regardless of how boundaries are drawn.

Second, state and local party organizations have experienced significant decline in power and influence, particularly in states where one party holds an overwhelming advantage. These organizations historically served as recruitment and support networks for candidates challenging incumbent officeholders.

Without robust local party infrastructure, even qualified potential candidates in minority parties lack the resources and institutional backing necessary to mount viable campaigns.

Competition is fundamental to a functioning democracy

Regardless of underlying causes, the consequences of uncontested races extend beyond the immediate lack of choice on the ballot.

When one party faces no meaningful electoral threat, research shows that policy innovation and responsiveness suffers. Dominant parties lack incentives to develop proposals that address the concerns of all constituents, or to engage seriously with opposition ideas.

More fundamentally, the prevalence of uncontested races raises questions about democratic legitimacy. Elections serve not merely as mechanisms for selecting officeholders, but as opportunities for citizens to evaluate governance and hold officials accountable. When voters face no choice – when a candidate wins by default and not by persuasion – the basic requirements of democratic representation go unmet.

Obstacles to renewed competition

Reversing this trend requires overcoming significant practical obstacles.

Recruiting qualified candidates to run for office is famously difficult; recruiting them for seemingly unwinnable seats is nearly impossible. And convincing national party organizations, interest groups and donors to invest resources in what they see as “hopeless” races is equally challenging.

But the consequences are too significant to ignore, and go beyond democracy or policy considerations.

State legislatures serve as the primary training ground for candidates who later seek higher office. When parties and their candidate talent decline to compete in entire states, they forfeit not only immediate electoral contests, but also the opportunity to cultivate future leaders at the federal level.

Competition cannot be superficially manufactured, and both the causes of and solutions to its recent decline are complex. Both, however, must be reckoned with. Without real competition, elections risk going from true exercises in popular sovereignty to a mere administrative formality.

Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In separate encounters, federal immigration agents in Minneapolis killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026.

Shortly after Pretti’s killing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said he committed an “act of domestic terrorism.” Noem made the same accusation against Good.

But the label “domestic terrorism” is not a generic synonym for the kind of politically charged violence Noem alleged both had committed. U.S. law describes the term as a specific idea: acts dangerous to human life that appear intended to intimidate civilians, pressure government policy or affect government conduct through extreme means. Intent is the hinge.

From my experience managing counterterrorism analysts at the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center, I know the terrorism label – domestic or international – is a judgment applied only after intent and context are assessed. It’s not to be used before an investigation has even begun. Terrorism determinations require analytic discipline, not speed.

Evidence before conclusions

In the first news cycle, investigators may know the crude details of what happened: who fired, who died and roughly what happened. They usually do not know motive with enough confidence to declare that coercive intent – the element that separates terrorism from other serious crimes – is present.

The Congressional Research Service, which provides policy analysis to Congress, makes a related point: While the term “domestic terrorism” is defined in statute, it is not itself a standalone federal offense. That’s part of the reason why public use of the term can outpace legal and investigative reality.

This dynamic – the temptation to close on a narrative before the evidence warrants it – seen most recently in the Homeland Security secretary’s assertions, echoes long-standing insights in intelligence scholarship and formal analytic standards.

Intelligence studies make a simple observation: Analysts and institutions face inherent uncertainty because information is often incomplete, ambiguous and subject to deception.

In response, the U.S. intelligence community codified analytic standards in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The standards emphasize objectivity, independence from political influence, and rigorous articulation of uncertainty. The goal was not to eliminate uncertainty but to bound it with disciplined methods and transparent assumptions.

When narrative outruns evidence

The terrorism label becomes risky when leaders publicly call an incident “domestic terrorism” before they can explain what evidence supports that conclusion. By doing that, they invite two predictable problems.

The first problem is institutional. Once a senior official declares something with categorical certainty, the system can feel pressure – sometimes subtle, sometimes overt – to validate the headline.

In high-profile incidents, the opposite response, institutional caution, is easily seen as evasion – pressure that can drive premature public declarations. Instead of starting with questions – “What do we know?” “What evidence would change our minds?” – investigators, analysts and communicators can find themselves defending a superior’s storyline.

The second problem is public trust. Research has found that the “terrorist” label itself shapes how audiences perceive threat and evaluate responses, apart from the underlying facts. Once the public begins to see the term as a political messaging tool, it may discount future uses of the term – including in cases where the coercive intent truly exists.

Once officials and commentators commit publicly to a version ahead of any assessment of intent and context, confirmation bias – interpreting evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs – and anchoring – heavy reliance on preexisting information – can shape both internal decision-making and public reaction.

The long-term cost of misuse

This is not just a semantic fight among experts. Most people carry a mental file for “terrorism” shaped by mass violence and explicit ideological targeting.

When Americans hear the word “terrorism,” they likely think of 9/11, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing or high-profile attacks abroad, such as the 2005 London bombings and December 2025 antisemitic attack in Sydney, where intent was clear.

By contrast, the more common U.S. experience of violence – shootings, assaults and chaotic confrontations with law enforcement – is typically treated by investigators, and understood by the public, as homicide or targeted violence until motive is established. That public habit reflects a commonsense sequence: First determine what happened, then decide why, then decide how to categorize it.

U.S. federal agencies have published standard definitions and tracking terminology for domestic terrorism, but senior officials’ public statements can outrun investigative reality.

The Minneapolis cases illustrate how fast the damage can occur: Early reporting and documentary material quickly diverged from official accounts. This fed accusations that the narrative was shaped and conclusions made before investigators had gathered the basic facts.

Even though Trump administration officials later distanced themselves from initial claims of domestic terrorism, corrections rarely travel as far as the original assertion. The label sticks, and the public is left to argue over politics rather than evidence.

None of this minimizes the seriousness of violence against officials or the possibility that an incident may ultimately meet a terrorism definition.

The point is discipline. If authorities have evidence of coercive intent – the element that makes “terrorism” distinct – then they would do well to say so and show what can responsibly be shown. If they do not, they could describe the event in ordinary investigative language and let the facts mature.

A “domestic terrorism” label that comes before the facts does not just risk being wrong in one case. It teaches the public, case by case, to treat the term as propaganda rather than diagnosis. When that happens, the category becomes less useful precisely when the country needs clarity most.

Brian O’Neill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

On Dec. 26, 1926, 16,000 hockey fans packed Madison Square Garden to witness the birth of a rivalry between the New York Americans and the brand-new New York Rangers. The game would later be remembered for establishing a foundation of popularity for the sport in New York City.

The only American playing for the Rangers that night also happened to be the largest player in the history of the NHL up to that point, defenseman Clarence “Taffy” Abel.

Standing over 6 feet tall and weighing 225 pounds, Abel was a brutal behemoth on the ice. Yet off the ice, he was a quiet, personable man who charmed sportswriters.

Despite being a foundational figure in American hockey – an Olympic silver medalist and a two-time Stanley Cup champion – Abel has been largely erased from the national memory. His story is not just one of athletic prowess, but of a secret identity maintained for survival and a career ended by a league that turned against him. As a scholar of Olympic media history, I recognize Abel’s story as an important but overlooked example of how race and labor issues can influence public memory.

Passing as white: Abel’s secret identity

Taffy Abel, who earned his lifelong nickname from his childhood love of candy, was half-Ojibwe, born in 1900 in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. One of Abel’s few surviving relatives, George Jones, a nephew by marriage, recalled that his mother, Charlotte, an Ojibwe woman, encouraged Taffy and his sister to “pass” as white to protect them from the era’s rampant racism and the threat of being sent to an Indian boarding school. Though his heritage remained an open secret in his hometown, Abel maintained his whiteness throughout his hockey career.

His mother died in 1939, and it was only after her death – and years after his retirement – that Abel began to speak openly and proudly of his Indigenous roots. This forced silence is a primary reason his legacy remained obscured; for decades, he was categorized simply as a white American athlete, masking his status as a racial trailblazer.

Pioneer on the ice

Abel’s hockey journey was historic. At the 1924 Chamonix Games – the first official Winter Olympics – he was chosen to carry the U.S. flag during the opening ceremony. He led the American team to a silver medal before being recruited by Conn Smythe for the inaugural New York Rangers roster.

Because of his size, and perhaps also because of his biracial identity, which was likely known to many players in the NHL, Abel was forced to fight often in his rookie year. He led the Rangers with 78 penalty minutes, and soon became famous around the league for his jarring and ferocious checking.

In Abel’s second season playing for the Rangers, the team won the Stanley Cup. He became the first American player to win a medal at the Olympic Games and the Stanley Cup, cementing his legacy as one of the finest hockey players in the world. In 1929, he was traded to the Chicago Black Hawks, where he anchored the defense on a team that won the Stanley Cup in 1934.

Hits the wall

The end of Abel’s career was not dictated by age or injury, but by a stand for labor dignity. After the 1934 championship, he held out for a salary that reflected his value as a star attraction. Black Hawks management responded by insulting him in the press, portraying Abel as an ungrateful prima donna.

Around the league, executives mocked Abel’s weight, telling newspapers that Abel walked out because he wouldn’t respect a team-mandated diet. Abel believed a team would sign him for 1935, but it soon became clear he had become effectively banned from the league due to his advocacy for equitable pay.

He had been a star attraction for the Black Hawks, and despite leading the team to the Stanley Cup in his final game, Abel never played another game in the NHL. At age 34, he returned to Sault Ste. Marie, operated a café and coached youth hockey, quietly fading from the national spotlight.

Complicated reckoning

Only recently has the NHL acknowledged Abel’s Native American heritage. However, his story presents a challenge to the league’s historical narrative. To celebrate Abel as a pioneering person of color requires the NHL to confront its own role in the systemic racism that forced him to hide his identity. Only recently has the league’s longtime, historical ban on nonwhite players – dating from its founding in 1917 – been an open and popular subject of public discussion.

Furthermore, the history is messy. Because Abel passed as white during his playing days, some modern observers find it difficult to reconcile his achievements with those of later pioneers who broke the color barrier more overtly.

Ultimately, Clarence “Taffy” Abel was a resilient path breaker who navigated artificial borders – between the U.S. and Canada, and between white and Indigenous identities. He was a charter member of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1973, and his memory inspired future Indigenous stars like T.J. Oshie.

Yet his name remains largely unknown because, I believe, his life forces a reckoning with a society that dehumanized him. Even Abel’s U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame biography minimizes his heritage, noting “Thought by some to be the first Native American to play in the NHL.”

Abel fought for fair pay, against racism and through physical pain. He died in 1964, but the issues he grappled with – labor exploitation and racial identity – remain at the forefront of the American story today.

Michael J. Socolow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Forcibly entering homes without a judicial warrant. Arresting journalists who reported on protests. Defying dozens of federal orders. Killing U.S. citizens for noncompliance. Asking constitutionally protected observers this chilling question: “Have you not learned?”

This is daily life in Minnesota. Operation Metro Surge, ostensibly an immigration enforcement initiative, has become something more consequential: a constitutional stress test. Can constitutional protections withstand the actions of a federal government seemingly intent on aggressively violating the rule of law?

In Minneapolis, a city still reckoning with its own grim history of policing, the federal operation raises fundamental questions about law enforcement and the limits of executive power.

Legal scholars and civil rights advocates are especially worried about ongoing violations of the First, Second, Fourth and 10th amendments, as are other observers, including historians like us.

Catalog of violations

First Amendment concerns stem from reports that agents from ICE – described by some scholars as a paramilitary force – and the Border Patrol have deployed excessive force as well as advanced surveillance methods on suspects, observers and journalists. When enforcement activity impedes the rights to assemble, document and criticize government action, that chills those rights, and the consequences extend beyond any single demonstration. These rights are not peripheral to democracy. They are central to it.

Second Amendment issues erupted following the fatal shooting of a legally armed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Highly placed administration officials claimed Americans could not bring firearms to protests, despite a long-standing interpretation that in most states, including Minnesota, a person who was legally permitted to carry a firearm could bring it to such events. The assertion was in fact contrary to the Trump administration’s support for gun rights.

Thanks to the videos flooding social media, Fourth Amendment concerns are the most familiar. Allegations include entering homes without warrants, stopping, intimidating and seizing legal observers, and detaining suspects by virtue of their appearance or accent. Those are clear violations of the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, which were adopted to prevent the exercise of arbitrary government power.

Finally, the 10th Amendment lies at the heart of Minnesota’s legal cases against the federal government.

One lawsuit contests the federal government’s refusal to allow the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Another challenges efforts to pressure local governments into assisting federal immigration enforcement. These disputes implicate federalism itself – the constitutional division of authority between states and the federal government that is the foundation of the American system.

The massive and rapid accumulation of these alleged constitutional violations – now working their way through the courts – in a single geographic locale is striking. So are the mass resignations from the state’s U.S. attorney’s office, which is responsible for representing the federal government in these cases.

And so is the deeper historical context.

A retreat from federal constitutional oversight

Starting in 1994, federal intervention became a powerful corrective whenever local police violated constitutional rights.

From Newark to New Orleans, federal oversight was not always welcomed, but it was frequently necessary to enforce equal protection and due process.

Federal oversight has been essential in enforcing civil rights when municipalities would not. Active monitoring of policing in those cities kept officers and administrators accountable and encouraged officers to follow constitutional standards. At its core, what experts call “constitutional policing” requires that government’s use of authority to ensure order be justified, limited and subject to oversight.

In that vein, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman, the 2023 U.S. Department of Justice report on policing in Minneapolis identified questionable patterns and practices. Those problems included the “unreasonable” use of deadly force, racial profiling and retaliation against journalists. The Department of Justice’s proposed consent decree – grounded in constitutional policing – offered a way forward.

But in May 2025, the Department of Justice, under the leadership of President Donald Trump’s appointee Pam Bondi, withdrew the recommended agreement.

Seven months later, Operation Metro Surge deployed thousands of federal agents to Minnesota with a markedly different enforcement philosophy.

Indeed, the recent expansion of federal enforcement authority in Minnesota followed a retreat from federal constitutional oversight.

Taking the handcuffs off

A presidential executive order, signed by Trump in late April 2025 and titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” pledged to remove what were described as “handcuffs” on police.

Soon thereafter, the administration deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles amid immigration protests.

Though a federal judge later rejected the legal rationale for that deployment, in August 2025, the president sent National Guard forces to Washington, D.C., purportedly to reduce crime. In September 2025, Trump described American cities as potential “training grounds” for the military to confront what he called the “enemy from within.”

Each episode reflects an increasingly expansive view of executive branch authority.

Whether Operation Metro Surge ultimately withstands judicial scrutiny remains to be seen. Numerous lawsuits continue to wind their way through the courts.

But the broader question is already clear: When, in the name of security, the executive branch directly challenges so many Bill of Rights protections at once, how much strain can the American legal system absorb? Will basic constitutional rights survive this moment?

What is unfolding in Minnesota is not simply a local enforcement story. It is a test of whether the Constitution as we know it will survive.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

President Donald Trump and Congress agreed to separate funding for the Department of Homeland Security from a larger spending bill that enables the federal government to continue operations. They now face a self-imposed deadline of Feb. 13, 2026, to negotiate potential changes to immigration enforcement.

The fact that funding for the department – and in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE – has become politically contentious represents a new turn on Capitol Hill.

Funding for ICE has increased substantially over the past year, with the number of its agents more than doubling.

On July 4, 2025, Trump signed a massive tax-and-spending package that increased annual funding for ICE from US$8 billion in 2024 to $28 billion in 2025.

During the first year of Trump’s second term, Republican majorities in the House and Senate have taken a hands-off approach to oversight of what is now the nation’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.

I am a professor of government who studies Congress and its oversight role. Since ICE’s funding increase, the Senate has held just one public hearing on ICE, according to my own unpublished data. Although the House has held a few routine oversight hearings of DHS, none have focused on ICE or Customs and Border Protection.

Traditional role for Congress

Congress holds longtime, well-established constitutional authority to oversee and investigate the executive branch and other political institutions. Having authorized funding for federal programs, it typically – if inconsistently – conducts substantial oversight to ensure its policies are being carried out successfully and as lawmakers originally intended.

Following the January 2026 killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, members of Congress from both parties have called for investigations.

However, “investigations” is a broad term that encompasses several options. The Justice Department announced on Jan. 30, 2026, that it is pursuing a civil rights investigation into Pretti’s death. That same day, DHS announced that the FBI is leading the federal probe into his death, with assistance from ICE.

But Congress could also establish an independent, bipartisan commission to examine the killings and make recommendations for laws and regulations to prevent future deaths and ensure quick accountability. Some notable examples of congressional commissions include one that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a 2010 commission that recommended $4 trillion worth of budget changes to address the national debt.

Or Congress could take the lead itself.

Rand Paul, the Republican chair of the primary oversight panel in the Senate, and New York Republican Rep. Andrew Garbarino, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, have asked top immigration officials to testify this month. But other congressional Republicans have remained vague about what shape the investigations should take and which branch of government should lead them.

Who’s in charge of oversight?

The debate over which branch of government should investigate government failures is a long-standing one.

Early in the republic’s history, under President George Washington, a federal militia suffered a massive defeat at the hands of Native American tribes at the Battle of Wabash in 1791. Congress was unsure of its constitutional authority to investigate the disastrous encounter: Did the separation-of-powers system prevent Congress from investigating another, independent branch of government? Or did the Constitution’s system of checks and balances imply that the Washington administration could not credibly investigate itself?

Ultimately, the House opted to establish its own investigative committee, and Washington, setting an important precedent, agreed to turn over requested information.

There are several benefits to Congress leading its own inquiries, whether in lieu of, or in addition to, federal agency investigations. For one, even highly combative committee hearings are valuable arenas for information gathering and processing, helping members of Congress thoroughly understand an issue and thus make informed and effective policy changes.

An in-depth committee investigation of the Minneapolis killings could make it more likely that new restrictions and oversight mechanisms are written into law.

Investigations can be bipartisan

Additionally, Congress’ subpoena power is a legally binding tool that enables committees to draw necessary information from the agencies they are investigating. This information, presented at hearings and in committee reports, becomes part of the historical record and serves as an important resource for future investigations both within and outside Congress, including scholarship.

For instance, the final reports of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack in 2022 and the House Committee on Benghazi in 2016 provide exhaustively detailed timelines of the respective attacks that do not exist anywhere else.

Republican-led investigations into the Minneapolis killings, and continued oversight of ICE and CBP, would also lend credibility to both the party and the independence of the legislative branch.

Political scientists have found that committees are less likely to investigate the executive branch when the president is from their own party. However, significant bipartisan probes do occur even in a highly polarized era. In 2005, for instance, Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis launched an inquiry into the George W. Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, despite facing pushback from the White House.

More recently, in 2018, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigated Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s handling of the Flint water crisis in Michigan, earning praise from Democrats on the panel.

Risks of grandstanding

However, while Congress has investigative powers, it does not have any enforcement authority. Congress can recommend criminal charges after an investigation, but only the Justice Department can bring indictments.

There are also significant political risks to committee-led inquiries, particularly public hearings. Political scientists have found that investigations of the executive branch diminish the president’s approval rating.

Additionally, members of Congress often engage in performative outrage and grandstanding during public hearings, which tends to help individual members’ electoral prospects but does little to enhance collective public faith in Congress’ legitimacy or its ability to conduct independent and fact-based inquiries.

Given the continuing partisan divide over ICE and the agency’s increased presence in Minneapolis and other cities, it’s possible that congressional hearings could devolve into rancor and name-calling. However, public opinion polling has found that ICE has become a liability for Trump and the Republican Party.

With the 2026 midterm elections coming up, Republicans in Congress may not be able to afford to stay silent.

Claire Leavitt has received funding from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Informing people about political deepfakes through text-based information and interactive games both improve people’s ability to spot AI-generated video and audio that falsely depict politicians, according to a study my colleagues and I conducted.

Although researchers have focused primarily on advancing technologies for detecting deepfakes, there is also a need for approaches that address the potential audiences for political deepfakes. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly difficult to identify, verify and combat as artificial intelligence technology improves.

Is it possible to inoculate the public to detect deepfakes, thereby increasing their awareness before exposure? My recent research with fellow media studies researchers Sang Jung Kim and Alex Scott at the Visual Media Lab at the University of Iowa has found that inoculation messages can help people recognize deepfakes and even make people more willing to debunk them.

Inoculation theory proposes that psychological inoculation – analogous to getting a medical vaccination – can immunize people against persuasive attacks. The idea is that by explaining to people how deepfakes work, they become primed to recognize them when they encounter them.

In our experiment, we exposed one-third of participants to passive inoculation: traditional text-based warning messages about the threat and the characteristics of deepfakes. We exposed another third to active inoculation: an interactive game that challenged participants to identify deepfakes. The remaining third were given no inoculation.

Participants were then randomly shown either a deepfake video featuring Joe Biden making pro-abortion rights statements or a deepfake video featuring Donald Trump making anti-abortion rights statements. We found that both types of inoculation were effective in reducing the credibility participants gave to the deepfakes, while also increasing people’s awareness and intention to learn more about them.

Why it matters

Deepfakes are a serious threat to democracy because they use AI to create very realistic fake audio and video. These deepfakes can make politicians appear to say things they never actually said, which can damage public trust and cause people to believe false information. For example, some voters in New Hampshire received a phone call that sounded like Joe Biden, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary election.

Because AI technology is becoming more common, it is especially important to find ways to reduce the harmful effects of deepfakes. Recent research shows that labeling deepfakes with fact-checking statements is often not very effective, especially in political contexts. People tend to accept or reject fact-checks based on their existing political beliefs. In addition, false information often spreads faster than accurate information, making fact-checking too slow to fully stop the impact of false information.

As a result, researchers are increasingly calling for new ways to prepare people to resist misinformation in advance. Our research contributes to developing more effective strategies to help people resist AI-generated misinformation.

What other research is being done

Most research on inoculation against misinformation relies on passive media literacy approaches that mainly provide text-based messages. However, more recent studies show that active inoculation can be more effective. For example, online games that involve active participation have been shown to help people resist violent extremist messages.

In addition, most previous research has focused on protecting people from text-based misinformation. Our study instead examines inoculation against multimodal misinformation, such as deepfakes that combine video, audio and images. Although we expected active inoculation to work better for this type of misinformation, our findings show that both passive and active inoculation can help people cope with the threat of deepfakes.

What’s next

Our research shows that inoculation messages can help people recognize and resist deepfakes, but it is still unclear whether these effects last over time. In future studies, we plan to examine the long-term effect of inoculation messages.

We also aim to explore whether inoculation works in other areas beyond politics, including health. For example, how would people respond if a deepfake showed a fake doctor spreading health misinformation? Would earlier inoculation messages help people question and resist such content?

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Bingbing Zhang receives funding from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections. It appears poised to abolish another pillar of the law.

In a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, the court appears ready to rule against Louisiana and its Black voters. In doing so, the court may well abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that prohibits any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for political clout for minority groups.

The dismantling of Section 2 would open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

There would be considerable historical irony if the court decides to use the 14th Amendment to provide the legal cover for reversing a generation of Black political progress in the South. Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

I am a historian who studies race and memory during the Civil War era. As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work may soon be undone by the current Supreme Court. The court, which heard oral arguments in the Louisiana case in October 2025, will release its decision by the end of June 2026.

Robert D. Bland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation