Welcome to the May 2026 edition of The American Enterprise. This month, we are featuring essays by Philip Wallach on the American voting system and gerrymandering, Liam Karr on the need for more US economic investment in Africa, and Clay Calvert on the landmark court ruling on social media addiction.

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May 2026

Welcome to the May 2026 edition of The American Enterprise. This month, we are featuring essays by Philip Wallach ([link removed] ) on gerrymandering and the future of America's voting system, Liam Karr ([link removed] ) on the benefits of more US economic investment in Africa, and Clay Calvert ([link removed] ) on the landmark court ruling on social media addiction.

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Does Democracy Demand 435–0? ([link removed] )





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By Philip Wallach

What is at the core of democracy? Does it require constitutional government, protection of individual rights, or robust party organizations? Or is it as simple as “The party that gets the most votes gets the power”?

America’s constitutional democracy is built to prevent us from giving ourselves over to that harmful simplification, which our Founding Fathers abhorred. They built a system that makes it nearly impossible for any faction—even a majority faction—to wield absolute power, thereby ensuring our democratic government will consider all sorts of people’s concerns, however the political winds are blowing. Yet two recent developments show how strong the urge is to reduce our democracy to political arithmetic.

The first is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which attempts to solve the vexing problem of a presidential candidate who wins fewer votes than their rival but is nevertheless declared the winner because of the peculiar Electoral College. Over the past two decades, 18 states ([link removed] ) have signed on—including Virginia, which became ([link removed] ) the most recent signatory in April 2026. Among themselves, signatory states control 222 of the 538 total electors. If they manage to recruit states controlling another 48 electors, then they will collectively pledge their 270 (or more) electors to the popular vote winner. Voilà, no more divergences between the top popular-vote-getter and Electoral College winner. Doesn’t democracy demand it?

The other trend, which has dominated recent headlines, is our mid-decade gerrymandering extravaganza. So far, eight states have reconfigured their congressional districts to maximize the majority party’s congressional seats. Mid-decade redistricting, unrelated to any reallocation of seats after the decennial census, is not a brand-new phenomenon, but the passion for it discovered in 2025 and 2026 burns hotter than at any other time in living memory. A full, blow-by-blow account of this struggle would make for a lively epic poem, but we should attend to the underlying cause rather than merely fixating on the proximate ones.









In short, Americans’ partisanship has eclipsed their sense of the importance of local representation. There are still a few holdouts who insist ([link removed] ) on their commitment to quaint ideas like the integrity of political communities, and they won a battle when they defeated a redistricting effort in Indiana. But most politically active citizens have a hard time understanding why they would pass up the chance to wring out more advantages from districting, if the rules allow it. According to two recent Supreme Court rulings, they do. In 2019, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority signaled ([link removed] ) its unwillingness to stand in the way of most political gerrymanders, and in 2026, the Court signaled this specifically for majority-minority districts ([link removed] ) long treated as mandatory under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As a result of this shift in ideas of representation toward a winner-takes-all mindset, both Republicans and Democrats have felt the need to purify their states’ congressional delegations. Take Tennessee, which pushed through a change from an 8–1 GOP-majority map to a 9–0 one, splitting Memphis into three districts and Nashville into four. Senator Marsha Blackburn insisted ([link removed] ) that, since she’s “never heard a liberal bemoan the lack of conservative representation in Massachusetts” or other solid-blue states, the Volunteer State should not hesitate to fulfill its own destiny. “If we are to make Tennessee America’s true conservative leader, this is where it begins,” the possible future governor intoned.

Democrats have sung from the same hymnal in recent months; upon being asked to chair a new state redistricting commission, Senator Angela Alsobrooks averred ([link removed] ) that “Maryland deserves a fair map that represents the will of the people.” She meant, naturally, that the Old Line State should be a single-line state, with an 8–0 Democrat majority instead of the current 7–1.

Facing the possibility of losing her US House district in Alabama to a new partisan gerrymander, Democratic Representative Terri Sewell drew out ([link removed] ) this logic to its inevitable end point: "I take 52 seats from California, and 17 seats from Illinois, because at the end of the day, they’re rigging this election to try to win. And we just can’t sit back here and do nothing. We’re going to play their game, and we’re going to beat them at it." Worry not—modern mapmakers produce such marvels ([link removed] ) without delay.

There is something sickeningly plausible about this eventuality, as it is difficult to say why our current tit-for-tat redistricting war should peter out. At the end of this race to the bottom, we will have refashioned the US House in the image of the Electoral College, with members effectively awarded winner-takes-all by each state. Given how sophisticated partisan mapmakers can be today, if states are determined to make themselves solid red or solid blue, it seems almost ridiculous to bother with the exercise of districting at all. The voting process would be so watered down in this paradigm that it would leave voters with only one choice: Do you want your state represented by Republicans or Democrats? Whichever gets the most votes gets all the seats.

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A Foot in the Door but Needing More: Trump’s Transactional Approach in Africa ([link removed] )

Liam Karr



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A Landmark Tech Ruling and What Lies Ahead ([link removed] )

Clay Calvert

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