Dear Diary,

I Don't Feel Good, But I Feel Less Bad

Something strange is happening.

For the first time in a long time, I’m seeing signs that the system is fighting back.

That doesn’t mean things are okay. They’re not. The federal government is still being run by people with authoritarian instincts, institutional guardrails are weaker than they’ve been in generations, and the trajectory of the country remains genuinely dangerous. But when you live inside a prolonged political emergency, what you start looking for isn’t optimism — it’s evidence of resistance. Evidence that collapse is not inevitable. Evidence that democratic structures and democratic culture still retain the capacity to respond under pressure.

And lately, across multiple domains, that capacity has been visible.

Not perfectly. Not consistently. But unmistakably.

Democrats finally got real about structural power

The most significant shift — and the one that probably matters most in purely mechanical electoral terms — is what has happened around gerrymandering.

For years, Democrats behaved as though electoral fairness was a shared norm rather than a contested resource. Reform efforts were pursued in good faith, with the assumption that if one side unilaterally restrained itself, institutional legitimacy would eventually discipline the other. That assumption turned out to be wrong. It was rooted in a model of competition that no longer describes the environment we’re operating in.

What’s striking now is not just that Democrats recognized that reality, but how quickly and coherently they adapted to it.

Blue states are no longer engaging in unilateral disarmament while Republican legislatures aggressively optimize district maps. Instead, we’re seeing coordinated strategic responses — California, Virginia, and others — designed not to abandon democratic principles, but to prevent asymmetric structural disadvantage from becoming permanent. The shift required something that is politically rare: institutional humility. Reformers who spent years building anti-gerrymandering frameworks had to acknowledge that those frameworks were designed for a reciprocal system that no longer exists.

That kind of adaptation isn’t norm erosion. It’s survival under conditions of asymmetric competition.

And from a purely strategic standpoint, the execution has been disciplined and effective. One of the GOP’s most durable structural advantages may now be partially neutralized — or at minimum, actively contested in a way it hasn’t been before.

Given how often Democrats are (justifiably) criticized for strategic passivity, it’s worth recognizing when they respond decisively to changing political reality.

This was competent. Coordinated. And necessary.

House Democrats learned how narrative power actually works

The second development is institutional rather than structural — and it’s one I was deeply concerned about going into this Congress.

Historically, Democrats have treated congressional investigations as procedurally neutral fact-finding exercises. That posture makes sense in a system where the purpose of investigation is genuinely evidentiary. But when the underlying allegations are manufactured, procedural seriousness doesn’t preserve neutrality — it confers legitimacy. Treating a fabricated scandal as though it deserves institutional gravity is precisely how a fabricated scandal becomes politically real.

That dynamic defined Benghazi. The process itself validated the premise.

This time, Democratic minority committee members — particularly in Oversight and Judiciary — approached the situation very differently. They recognized that what they were confronting was not a policy disagreement or a legitimate investigative dispute, but an attempt to construct an alternative narrative reality through institutional theater.

And they refused to participate on those terms.

Rather than dignifying false premises with procedural solemnity, they exposed the mechanics of the fabrication itself. Hearings became venues for evidentiary dismantling, strategic ridicule, and narrative reframing. The goal was not to engage the claims at face value, but to demonstrate why they were unserious in the first place.

That distinction is enormously important.

Republicans attempted to build legitimacy for manufactured corruption narratives. Instead, those narratives were publicly disassembled in real time. The institutional stage that once amplified disinformation was used instead to undermine it.

This represents a significant strategic evolution in how Democrats operate inside formal governance structures. They are no longer assuming that institutional process is inherently neutral. They are treating legitimacy itself as contested terrain — which, in the current environment, is analytically correct.

Civil society is responding, not retreating

The third development is less formal but arguably more consequential over the long term: the public is not withdrawing from political life under pressure.

If anything, the pattern is the opposite.

We’re seeing first-time protesters, local mobilizations, and sustained community-level engagement in places that historically have not been centers of organized political activism. Participation in monitoring and accountability efforts has increased even after episodes of violence that might have been expected to produce deterrence. That’s a crucial indicator. Repression typically works by raising the perceived cost of engagement. When participation increases instead, it suggests that moral shock is overriding fear.

And much of this activation is not ideological in origin. It’s experiential. People witnessing state behavior they find intolerable and deciding, often for the first time, that they have to act.

That’s what democratic culture looks like when it is still alive — not professionalized activism alone, but ordinary citizens crossing the threshold from observation to participation.

Movements that continue to grow under escalating pressure are movements that are generating internal resilience.

Institutional friction still exists — even now

At the same time, the formal constitutional system — strained though it is — continues to generate limits.

Trump’s tariff behavior is a clear example. From a policy standpoint, tariffs are widely understood by economists to function primarily as domestic consumption taxes. From a political standpoint, however, they provide leverage — they allow the executive to distribute economic pressure selectively and to position himself as a gatekeeper for relief. That leverage appears to be the primary attraction.

When judicial constraints narrowed tariff authority, a conventional political actor might have used that limitation as an exit opportunity — a way to abandon a politically costly policy while deflecting responsibility. Instead, Trump doubled down, publicly reaffirming and expanding the commitment.

That response reveals the underlying incentive structure: the value lies not in policy outcomes, but in discretionary power.

But the critical point is that the constraint existed in the first place. Enumerated powers still matter. Judicial review still functions. Institutional resistance is inconsistent, incomplete, and often fragile — but it is not absent.

The system is degraded. It is not fully captured.

Looking forward: legitimacy is the real battleground

All of this matters most when thinking about what happens next — particularly in 2028.

Any future attempt to retain power after electoral defeat will occur in a more permissive institutional environment than existed in 2020. Personnel constraints are weaker. Norm enforcement is weaker. Internal resistance within executive agencies already purged.

That is the risk.

But institutional control is not the only variable that determines whether a power seizure succeeds. Legitimacy — the ability to plausibly claim that one represents the will of the people — remains a central structural constraint. Mass unpopularity increases the cost of compliance across every layer of the system: bureaucratic, elite, military, and public.

Historically, durable authoritarian consolidation has depended heavily on maintaining broad perceived support. Material provision, economic stabilization, or nationalist mobilization generate the social acceptance that reduces resistance when power expands.

Trump’s governing pattern works against that logic. He consistently prioritizes discretionary leverage over coalition expansion. He maintains policies that generate widespread economic dissatisfaction because they enhance personal control. He narrows, rather than broadens, his base of support.

If that trajectory continues, it creates a paradoxical constraint: the very behavior that maximizes his sense of power may simultaneously reduce his ability to successfully entrench it.

That doesn’t eliminate the danger.

But it changes the strategic landscape and it doesn’t take a genius to know that between the Epstein Files, the tariffs, and ICE, Trump is spiraling. In fact, he may have done this on Friday after the Supreme Court overturned his tariffs:

And if you’re thinking “No way! That has to be an impersonator,” consider this, dug up from CNN by my buddy at Call to Activism before I even had time to type “he’s done that before!”:

Trump becoming deeply unpopular has the capacity to save us all.

Rachel

February 22, 2026