The United States Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais did not surprise anyone who has been paying attention. The 6-3 ruling on April 29 effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to dismantle majority-minority districts and clearing the way for a wave of mid-decade redistricting already underway in Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, and beyond. The dissents from Justices Kagan and Jackson named what the majority did, the “now-completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act. The political class is scrambling to respond.
The instinct of the response so far has been right, but incomplete. New maps. New litigation. State-level Voting Rights Acts. Congressional pressure. All necessary. None sufficient.
What is missing is a recognition of what it actually took, the first time, to pass federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not the work of legal advocates alone. It was the legislative ratification of a civic capacity that had been built, painstakingly, over more than 50 years, through Black churches, historically Black college and university (HBCU) networks, the Highlander Folk School, the Citizenship Education Program of the SCLC, the Mississippi Freedom Schools, and, before all of those, the Jeanes Teachers and the Rosenwald schools network that sustained Black community life across the segregated South from the early twentieth century forward. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed because the institutional pathways were built and put in place. The marches mobilized the people the organizing had been forming for decades.
That is the capacity the country needs to rebuild now. Not because the threat is the same, but because the response has to come from the same place: the institutions of everyday life in democracy where people either get formed into citizens with standing, or they don’t.
The contested frontier of citizenship today is not the racism that animated Jim Crow. It is erosion of the standing through which ordinary people are able to act on and act in public life in ways that make a difference. In this narrow sense, the Court’s majority sees something the dissent does not. The legal architecture of 1965 was built for a frontier that has shifted. What the Supreme Court’s conservative majority misses is everything that follows from that fact.
Today the people’s capacity to work together to build a common life depends less on the decree of governments than on the daily practice of institutions—the schools, workplaces, agencies, hospitals, universities, congregations, and more through which ordinary people meet public life and either acquire standing or lose it. What has settled into the daily practice of institutions over the last four decades is a management operating style that translates democratic problems into administratively legible substitutes. Institutions treat people largely as stakeholders, clients, users, or risk factors—categories to be managed—rather than as co-creators of a public life institutions help build. The practice presents itself as neutral, pragmatic, and responsible, precisely the traits that allow it to evade democratic scrutiny. And it is self-undermining even on its own terms. Its routine operations drain the civic standing that institutions depend on, and its characteristic response to problems often only makes matters worse—more procedure, more audit, more managed participation. The right calls this the administrative state. The left calls it neoliberalism. They are naming, badly, the same approach.
These institutions are not government in the legal sense. But they govern. They make rules that shape people’s lives and the future, distribute consequences that determine who can act, and form citizens. Democracy is not the property of the state. It is the property of every institution that organizes power in and over people’s lives.
The response, then, has to be a constructive project: rebuilding the civic architecture through which ordinary people acquire standing and act with binding public civic consequence. Not voice. Not engagement. Not dialogue alone. But standing, the recognized capacity to make claims on a future that institutions help people build. Authorship, the practice of co-writing the response of institutions to the world. Pathways, the durable structures that carry decisions forward instead of dissipating them into process.
The civil rights movement built power not by capturing the state but by building institutions (Black churches, HBCUs, the Highlander Folk School, the Citizenship Education Program) that formed citizens capable of acting on and with the state when the moment came. The Voting Rights Act ratified that capacity. It did not create it.
That capacity is what needs rebuilding now.
At the Farmer House Politics Lab we call this work Civic 2035, a framework for building the next chapter of the American civil rights movement by 2035, the 70th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Civic 2035 is not a program or a policy fix. It is a framework for rebuilding the structures that allow people to act as co-authors of a common life. Democracy depends on people (teachers, pastors, supervisors, civil servants, and more) who carry public purpose into their everyday work and who treat their jobs as a form of citizenship rather than as service-delivery. The practice reflects an American citizen tradition that treats democracy as something built every day inside the institutions where ordinary people spend their lives. But where such “civic professionals” open doors, civic architecture keeps those doors open across generations. It shifts democracy from relying on exceptional individuals to relying on durable design.
This is the work the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance has been carrying for the last six years across Texas HBCU campuses, with the Politics Lab as its institutional home. A first-year student can arrive on campus, discover her own voice in public debate, and by the end of the semester stand alongside peers and faculty presenting proposals at the Texas State Capitol. The Texas HBCU Legislative Caucus, a bipartisan body inside the Texas Legislature, the first of its kind in any state, emerged from that work. Not from litigation. Not from pressure. From sustained relational organizing, partnership, and a refusal to treat the institutions of American public life as someone else’s to run.
What is true in Texas can be true anywhere. The civil rights movement did not end. It waits for its next chapter. Civic 2035 is our chance to write it, and to build the institutions that will hold it.
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