How Did We Get Here?

In Congress alone, Republicans lost 40 seats in the House of Representatives (numbers at this writing are 254 Democrat to 164 Republican) and eight seats in the U.S. Senate (55 Democrat to 44 Republican), with Alaska still counting votes.

Democrats flipped the governors' offices in Nevada, Ohio, Iowa, Georgia and Texas, and they now hold a majority of governors' offices — 29 — with two more states — Kansas and Alaska — still counting but likely to go to the Democrats. Democrats also flipped more than 500 individual state legislative seats across the country, including turning the control of 12 legislative chambers from red to blue. In Arizona, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democrats now hold the "trifecta": the governor's office and control of both houses of the state legislature.

But it isn't merely the change in political power that feels so monumental; it's the vast — and increasing — differences between the parties and what they stand for that portends ill for the country.

How did we get here? It is a confluence of trends.

First, Republican leadership is flaccid. For the past two years, despite having Donald Trump in the White House and control of both houses of Congress, Republicans did precious little. The worst betrayal was the failure to pass a law protecting election integrity, which the vast majority of Americans want. Multiple iterations of the SAVE Act passed the House of Representatives but died in the Senate, because Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) insisted he couldn't drum up the votes. And yet, after the historic drubbing Republicans suffered last week, Thune had the audacity to declare that he wanted to be minority leader. What's worse is that the Senate Republicans just gave it to him.

Pathetic.

But our problems start in the classroom, not the at the polls. Our K-12 educational system is an unmitigated disaster. Huge numbers of American youth cannot even read at grade level. Teachers' unions vote Democrat and wield enormous political clout despite failing schools. And every day brings more headlines about political, cultural and sexual indoctrination that takes place in grade schools and high schools. Higher education is just as bad, if not worse. Tenured faculty can promote insidious and societally corrosive ideologies like communism without accountability. And where do you think the K-12 teachers come from?

A miseducated population is easily manipulated. Feelings are more important than facts. When people have been indoctrinated rather than educated, they do not value rational argument and cannot process evidence, even when it is presented to them. It's as if their brains shut down. How their views make them feel about themselves means more to them than the consequences of the policies they support. They are impervious to even the most compelling persuasion or proof.

Sexual libertinism seems to be the most important "freedom." The Left has no problem restricting speech, religion or gun ownership but worships anything having to do with sexual behavior. This has reached the point of absurdity, as manifested by the twisted defense of changing children's "gender" via chemical castration and surgical mutilation. And — need it be said? — where promiscuity goes, abortion must follow. Every Democrat governor in this country now promotes or defends abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy.

Left-wing political views have replaced individual morality as a measure of personal virtue. It matters far less what decisions you have made in your personal life, and far more that you can stick a sign in your yard or make a TikTok video proclaiming your support for the latest lefty cause celebre or Oppressed People of the Week.

A warped definition of "compassion" has also replaced common sense. Criminals are released without bail, millions of migrants can pour into the country, fraud is committed with impunity, homeless people are allowed to live and use drugs and die in the streets — and all because someone has declared these policies to be "compassionate."

Too many Christians don't vote. According to a study conducted by Arizona Christian University in 2024, approximately 32 million Christians did not vote in that election. (It remains to be seen how many sat out in 2026.) Contrast that with Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations published a "Strategic Election Plan" this year to get a majority of the country's Muslims to the polls. On the "Muslims Vote" website, it says, "With an estimated 8 million American Muslims nationwide and over 2.5 million registered voters concentrated in twelve states that will decide control of the U.S. House and Senate, our mobilization is not symbolic — it is decisive." Decisive, indeed. CAIR also reports that 255 Muslims now hold elected office in the U.S., including six in the U.S. House of Representatives and one in the U.S. Senate — Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim elected to that body in the nation's history.

But the root of all our problems is that we have abandoned God. The United States was founded by Christians and upon principles grounded in Judeo-Christianity. The liberties enshrined in our Constitution depend upon a population whose baser impulses are restrained by individual morality. Many of the Founding Fathers — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams — expressly acknowledged the pivotal role of Christianity.

As we are now seeing, the crumbling of the Judeo-Christian foundation of this country has impact even beyond political idiocy, pervasive immorality or widespread crime. For decades, secularists have argued that we could preserve the quality of the country — our liberty, our prosperity and our peace — with rationality rather than religion.

It is evident just how untrue that is. Rationality requires a belief in objective truth. While it is possible to believe in truth without believing in God, it is impossible to appeal to rationality with an indoctrinated population that succumbs to beliefs like "all truth is relative," "math is racist," or that science is a "tool of white supremacy."

It isn't hard to look back and see how we got here. The difficult question is, how do we get out?

Comment by clicking Laura Hollis is an attorney and academic. She resides in Indiana with her husband and their two children.