The Midterms, the Boomerang, and Autopoietic Systems: Why the Work Continues

Why even an election result that feels like progress is a reason to keep building

Election seasons invite us to tell a story about where the country is headed. We look at the results and try to decide what they mean: a mandate, a rebuke, a turning point, a return to something familiar. The 2026 U.S. midterms have prompted widespread celebration and relief (and disappointment and concern for some). But an election result does not speak in one voice, and it cannot tell us by itself what kind of society we are building.

I am interested in what the results may reveal about a growing desire for fairness, dignity, and social justice. I am also cautious about treating that desire as settled or permanent. A moment that feels like progress can make us believe the work is finished. It isn’t. It never is.

To be clear, I am talking about election results, but I am not making a case for partisan politics on this platform. I am talking about systems. Elections gift us a visible moment to consider how power works, how it responds to pressure, and how it can reproduce itself—even when people are pushing for change.

Over the last decade, we have seen what can feel like a political boomerang: gains followed by resistance, new protections followed by efforts to weaken them, public calls for equality followed by renewed challenges to who belongs and who gets to decide. This pattern is not new. It is one reason I keep returning to the idea of autopoietic systems.

Autopoiesis means self-making or self-producing. Social systems can reproduce their patterns through routines, rules, relationships, and assumptions. In plain language: a system will keep making more of what it already knows how to make. Change the people at the top, and the meeting agenda may stay the same. The referral form gets a new logo, but still sends the same students down the same path. The system has a copy machine.

Systems of power and privilege aren't legislated away nor do they disappear when a different group wins an election. They adapt. They find new ways to preserve advantageous arrangements. That can happen in government, but it can also happen in workplaces, schools, and communities—in the ways decisions get made, whose voices are invited, whose judgment is trusted, whose mistakes are forgiven, and who is expected to adjust.

History offers a stark example. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery, established citizenship, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Yet after Reconstruction, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and other barriers worked to restore racial hierarchy and deny Black Americans political power. The promises written into law mattered. But they did not, by themselves, undo the systems built to resist those promises. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed discriminatory voting practices; in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of its federal oversight formula. The struggle over voting rights continued.

That history is not an argument that laws or elections are pointless. They matter. Elections can open doors, shift priorities, and create room for people to act. But a perceived political victory is an opening, not a guarantee. A system can absorb new language, new leadership, and even new laws while finding ways to preserve familiar arrangements. Sometimes the system is less a villain in a cape than a printer that keeps producing the same document and blames you for the paper jam.

That is why momentum matters—and why we have to use it. A result that feels favorable can make us want to exhale. We can celebrate the opening and still ask what we are building through it. Are more people learning how decisions are made? Are institutions changing their daily practices? Are the people most affected by those decisions the ones shaping what comes next?

This work belongs to all of us. We build capacity when we understand the systems around us, share what we learn, and help more people take part in shaping decisions. We build it when we look at routines in our own workplaces and communities and ask who they serve. We build it when we keep listening after the announcement, the election, or the celebration—when the less visible work begins.

The midterms may offer a reason for hope and a signal that many people want the country to move toward fairness and dignity. That momentum is worth taking seriously. The question is how we turn it into something durable: not only a change in who holds power, but a change in the conditions that determine how power is used.

So celebrate moments of progress. Then check what the system is printing, hold power accountable, and keep building while the door is open.

What capacity can you help build in your workplace, your community, or the institutions you care about?

In hopeful solidarity,

Dr. Violet Jiménez Sims

Editorial note: The historical examples above are supported by the National Archives’ histories of the 15th Amendment and Voting Rights Act, and the National Park Service’s account of Reconstruction and repression. The midterm results and reported voter concerns are summarized by the Associated Press.