America's Next Phase Has Arrived

Jeff Landry spent millions trying to rewrite Louisiana’s constitution. The voters said no. Five amendments, all of them going down on May 16th, and not even close. Republican policy, when you strip the party label off it and just ask people to vote on the actual idea, loses. Democrats showed up, even when they spent next to nothing in ads. Independents came out swinging. The grassroots beat the machine, and the machine had all the money.

Landry’s response was to leave. The votes were in, the rebuke was complete, and the day after Louisiana spoke he literally packed up and fled the state for a Trump vanity trip to Greenland, a move that is likely illegal since Louisiana law bars the governor from holding any other office or position. Instead of facing the voters who just rejected everything he pushed, Landry was overseas getting jeered by Greenland residents, picking fights with journalists, and trying to lure local kids to his residence with cookies. The man could not get out of Louisiana fast enough. It would be funny if it were not so telling. This is what running from accountability while embarassing our state looks like.

Back home, the picture keeps getting worse. Republican officials in Louisiana hold every card. The governorship, the legislature, the courts, every lever of state power. They own this. There is no one else to blame and nowhere else to point. Landry’s approval is sinking. Trump’s numbers are falling. Bipartisan coalitions are forming around carbon capture opposition, around voting rights, around the simple idea that Louisiana’s government is not working for Louisiana’s people. These are not activists. These are your neighbors. And they are moving with almost no money, which is exactly what terrifies the people who have all of it.

What Landry and the GOP is selling does not look dangerous on the surface. “100 billion in investment.” Data centers. Carbon capture. Tax cuts. It sounds like prosperity. What nobody explains is who actually pays for the “investment” and who collects the profit. The people pay, through subsidies, through tax breaks carved out for corporations, through utilities climbing while wages sit still. The out-of-state shareholders collect. The politicians collect their cut in the form of continued power. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. It has always been the system.

And they know it is slipping. You do not move to restrict independent voters when you are winning the argument. You do not gerrymander harder when the people are with you. You do not ram unpopular policy through at midnight when you feel secure in your position. And they are still scrambling to lock in structural advantages before the public catches up to them completely. That tells you everything about what they see coming.

Here is what they do not want you to see.

The civil rights movement was never only about Black people. It was about Black people most urgently, most visibly, and at the greatest cost, because Black people have carried the heaviest burden of what this country built. But the fight itself has always been larger than that, and understanding that is the key to understanding this moment.

Start in 1776. The country had to invent what a citizen even was. Who counts. Who has rights. Who gets a say in their own governance. The answer they started with was narrow and ugly, but the idea they put on paper was genuinely radical. Government gets its power from the people. Not from kings. Not from inherited wealth. Not from the ownership of other human beings. From the people. That sentence started an argument that is still going.

Everything since then has been the slow, painful, contested expansion of who “the people” actually includes. Women fought their way in. Black Americans fought their way in and are still fighting. Working people of every background have been in this fight, sometimes without knowing it, because the forces working against them have always been the same forces. Concentrated money. Concentrated power. And the move those forces make every single time they feel the ground shifting is division. Turn one group of working people against another. Make white workers fear Black progress. Make rural communities fear cities. Keep everyone looking sideways so nobody looks up.

Slavery was not only a moral catastrophe. It was an economic system, and it required the invention of racial hierarchy to keep itself justified. When it ended, the people who had built fortunes on it needed a new strategy. They built one. Jim Crow. Segregation. The systematic underdevelopment of Black communities, and then the use of that engineered poverty as supposed proof that Black people were less deserving. It was a lie constructed on a wound they made sure never healed.

The modern version of that same trick is the idea that corporations are people. Think about what that means. The same legal tradition that once ruled Black Americans were not full citizens later decided that a business entity, a holding company, an LLC, a shell, deserves the rights of a citizen. That did not happen by accident. Concentrated money needed a legal shield, and it got one. Same game, new name.

Here is what they have always known and never wanted the rest of us to figure out. When you lift the floor for the people who have been kept the lowest, the floor rises for everyone. Better schools in Black communities mean better schools, period. Higher wages for the most exploited workers pull wages upward across the board. Less poverty means less crime, less pressure on public systems, more money moving through local economies. It is not a new idea. Louisiana has seen it before, in the rare moments when its leaders actually chose the people over the powerful. Those moments did not last long. The machine always found a way to reassert itself. But the proof of concept exists in our own history.

The civil rights movement was always the American story. It is the story of regular people taking back control from concentrated power, one painful inch at a time. What we are watching right now, in Louisiana and across the country, is the next chapter of that same story starting to write itself.

And if you are white in Louisiana, this is your fight too. The insurance premiums you cannot afford. The school your kid goes to that does not have what it needs. The hospital that closed in your parish. The wages that have not moved while everything else has gone up. The utility bill that keeps climbing while the company files record profits. None of that is an accident, and none of it is your Black neighbor’s fault. It is the result of a political arrangement that has spent generations making sure working people in Louisiana, Black and white, never build enough collective power to demand something different.

People sometimes ask why race keeps coming up. Because it is real. Pretending it is not does not make it go away. It just lets the people who benefit from it keep benefiting, quietly, while the rest of us argue about everything except the thing that matters. Seeing it clearly is not divisive. It is the beginning of actually fixing what is broken. And what is broken is breaking all of us.

The next phase was always coming, and Louisiana has always been where America works out its hardest fights. The worst of what this country built took root here. The most important battles for human dignity have been fought on this soil. That is not a coincidence. It is a calling. The question is whether enough of us are ready to finish what 250 years of history has been pointing toward.

677. This week, we talk to Dustin Granger about Louisiana politics. As a seasoned financial advisor with over two decades of experience, Dustin Granger has built his career helping Louisiana families navigate the turbulent waters of the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recurring hurricanes that shape life on the Gulf Coast. A lifelong resident and LSU alumnus, Granger now serves as the Treasurer of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Granger is a leading voice for economic reform and climate resilience. He advocates for a “New Louisiana” that breaks away from traditional corporate-heavy investments to embrace renewable energy, fair taxation, and sustainable infrastructure. In this interview, we discuss his recommendations for the current voting season, his strategies for stabilizing property insurance, his commitment to strengthening the state’s middle class, and his ongoing work to revitalize the Democratic infrastructure across the Bayou State.

Click to listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or here

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Who’s running for Congress in 2026? (the below is now in flux because of the racist power grab map changes) Check out Jamie Davis and Gary Crockett running for U.S. Senate, Conrad Cable and Matt Gromlich against Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-4), Lauren Jewett against Steve Scalise (LA-1), John Day, Tia Lebrun, and Caleb Walker against Clay Higgins (LA-3) and Rubia Garcia, Jessee Fleenor, Dan McKay & Larry Foy against Julia Letlow’s successor (LA-5). Re-elect Democrats Cleo Fields (LA-6) and Troy Carter (LA-2).

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