by Gordon C. Morse

It’s mid-summer and hot. Let’s imagine the fall, cooler air and assume James Carville is right.

“The Democratic Party,” he wrote in The New York Times, “is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war.”

Carville would hold off the fight temporarily. Need more Democrats in Congress, he says. Focus on the 2026 congressional elections and seize upon President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which Carville calls “a big, steaming doggy nugget of epic proportions.”

After that, game on.

Virginia could easily end up being a battlefield in the coming clash and how civilized will it be? You wonder.

Before that, a quick trivia question: Who ran Lt. Gov. Richard Davis’ 1982 campaign for the U.S. Senate?

James Carville. He got famous later and now claims soothsayer status.

But let’s go with it and, for the purposes of conjecture, declare Republican Winsome Sears an also-ran in her bid for governor in November. Many people have reached that conclusion and it naturally invites complacency. But I’m just postulating here.

Because assuming that Spanberger has the fall election in the bag, you may also easily conclude that the present meager Democratic majority in the Virginia House of Delegates will become less meager.

These new House Democrats will appear at the State Capitol in January and who will greet them at the door? It will be the Democratic lawmakers who, in the main, emerged in 2020 from two long decades in the cold, unpleasant existence of a legislative minority and then threw caution to the wind.

Those Democrats – stymied over the last three and a half years only by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s active veto pen — drew inspiration from “systemic racism.” They were abetted in that belief by George Floyd’s murder, bargained with a weakened Gov. Ralph Northam (you may remain governor, Ralph, but you must sign everything we send you) and locked Virginia’s Covid pandemic response within a racial equity package framework.

All this and more made 2020 the year of peak progressivism in Virginia and Democratic Party lawmakers ache for its return.

It took a while for Virginia (largely because the working press has near zero institutional memory) to realize that this Democratic Party – as manifested by its state lawmakers – bore little resemblance to the Virginia Democratic Party that had previously ruled the General Assembly.

These were different people. Different in public experience (they had little), different in ideas (national ideological struggles danced in their heads) and thoroughly indifferent to all and everything that had preceded them.

To their boundless aspirations, the Democrats added stunning egocentricity. They were enthralled with themselves. Restraint was irrelevant. They were on a mission.

Ergo, they abandoned moderation, embraced aggression and started performing. An attempt was made to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even though the ERA had died long before.

An elaborate show was staged to repeal racially discriminatory laws from the Jim Crow era, even though the power, meaning and enforcement of those laws had ended decades earlier.

It was odd to watch. Not all of the Democrats were in on the joke. Some of them rose on the House floor seemingly convinced that they had become warriors in the fight against Virginia apartheid.

These people lacked any direct memory of the Civil Rights era. They had not been born when it happened. They had simply had imagination and mostly about themselves.

Other reforms were more pertinent. There was legislation to prevent gun violence and expand voting rights, to decriminalize marijuana possession and to dramatically rein in local police departments.

The Democrats got expansive on the environment and enacted the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which largely amounted to a demonstration project that they insist, to this day, is meaningful.

I am not saying that the dreamy House Democrats were far left, because that would have them holding hands and singing the “Internationale” — “Debout, les damnés de la terre!”

No, they are just very, very, very left and in ways that only occasionally intersect with reality.

Or, to put it another way, they are a darn sight further left than anything that would have tolerated by the House Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gov. Younglin’s 2021 election, to much clamorous response, quashed the Democrats yearning sprint to excess.

But soon Youngkin will hand over the keys to the Governor’s Mansion to Spanberger and then we will discover how much moderation the supposedly moderate new governor will bring to bear.

Even before then the governor-to-be may be tested on the subject of higher education and challenged to say, “No.”

That will be difficult. Democratic Governors Chuck Robb and Jerry Baliles never did. They both enjoyed large Democratic Party majorities during the 1980s and it always made more sense to work through differences, rather than invite a confrontation.

But here’s the difference: Back then there was a rough consensus favoring moderation. There were some stiff disputes, but they hardly hinged on ideology. Pragmatism generally ruled.

That’s not the case now. The House Democrats now in office feed on ideology and have found purpose, not in Virginia’s assorted challenges, but in the conviction that an insatiable market exists for baloney.

Case-in-point: Democratic Party lawmakers held a press conference on Thursday regarding how Virginia higher education gets governed. It’s safe to say that they don’t like Trump and trucked out 94-year-old former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder to front their indignation.

It was incoherent. None of it made a bit of sense.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in “Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College” emphatically barred the use of race as an explicit factor in college and university admissions decisions, effectively eliminating race-based affirmative action in higher education.

True, it did not directly prohibit colleges and universities from establishing or operating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. But the Justice Department has anchored its efforts in Virginia on the proposition that such race-based programs affront the U.S. Constitution and much in the same way that race-based admissions decisions do.

No one appears to think that’s off the mark. You know the logic: If it quacks, well …

Do the Democrats wish to restore DEI programs to Virginia colleges and universities? Wilder implied as much, though he never explained how that would change the basic equation.

Other Democrats threaten to reconfigure the governing boards, impose the General Assembly’s will and how far will that get? There’s an unholy and unnerving resemblance of this stance to the segregationist’s state’s rights maneuvers more than a half century ago. That ended with Virginia nearly losing control of its schools to the federal authorities.

The Justice Department retains the power to enforce compliance with federal civil rights laws. If Virginia lawmakers were to blatantly or persistently defy these laws or court orders, the federal judiciary could impose stronger measures—such as court-mandated oversight, the appointment of special masters, or even directives that diminish state authority over institutional governance.

The historical precedent from the Civil Rights era demonstrates that, in cases of extreme and sustained resistance, the federal government can and will act decisively to enforce constitutional rights, including imposing significant constraints on state control.

Thus, while the level of intervention faced by Virginia today is not at the scale seen during “Massive Resistance,” the legal mechanisms for much deeper federal involvement remain in place should circumstances escalate.

Will those circumstances make life interesting for Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger?

Will that help lay the basis within the Democratic Party for Carville’s civil war?

Will it end up being a rip-roaring mess?

Oh, my, yes.

Civilized? Nah.

Gordon C. Morse has been writing commentary and speeches in Virginia since 1983. This column his republished with permission from his Substack account Heart’s Desire.