As of this writing,* it appears that there will not only be no “red wave” from the midterms, but it may turn out that Biden’s Dems may have the best outcomes of any election in the last 20 years. It’s possible that the GOP will eke out a majority in the House, though it appears that the “quality candidates” blew the Senate. Who thought Herschel Walker was a viable candidate for senator, other than a pathetic fraud whose sole concern was fealty to him personally?
As Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Maybe the common people aren’t as stupid as some would have us believe. There are, of course, many elected who are fools and knaves, if not both, but there are always outliers and they don’t change the bigger picture.
Not being a Republican or a conservative, and as I’ve made sufficiently clear here many times over, the Trumpian tilt of the GOP has made it impossible to support the election deniers, racists, and general nutjobs that have either seized control of the party or acquiesced to the party’s seizure to keep their jobs. To the extent this election reflects the “common people’s” rejection of their allegiance to the worst extremes and Trump, that this is a crushing defeat should be a lesson that no matter how awful the Democrats, Americans don’t want you more.
But what does an old school liberal’s views of the failure of a party with which he would never support matter? No doubt the spin machine will crank up to manufacture lies to cover up this massive failure. Were elections stolen by invisible space aliens again? Who knows why Pennsylvanians preferred a guy with a stroke to a Jersey carpetbagging Trump sycophant? But they did, and they’re no wild-eyed wokesters.
Then again, the fact that there was even a doubt for Democrats running against some of the more incompetent, ignorant and insane candidates ever amassed should suck the wind out of their self-serving lies as well. This was an election to see which party could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This was an election that could have been swept by the party that could offer sanity, normality. Neither party could pull that off. Both parties were controlled by their worst, most extreme, most unacceptable wings. That’s what made it a horse race.
Will the Republicans be chastisted by their massive failure to win? Will they grasp that endorsement by Trump is their death, even by those who would otherwise vote Republican? Don’t forget, this mutt cost the GOP the Senate for the last two years because of his twisted ego, because he’s always been only about him and never about anything else, particularly you.
My far greater concern, however, is that the opportunity to swing the Democrats back to liberalism and put an end to this cultural revolution waged by the woke against the vast majority of Americans who find them nearly as repugnant as Trump, has been lost. That their campaign theme remains “we’re less evil then Republicans” may have saved them from a red wave, but less evil is still evil. But did the potential for such a revelation die with their holding off the red wave?
If Democrats lose big on Tuesday, as it appears they might, it will be time to ask some serious questions, including: How is it possible that they lost to a political party as weird and conspiratorial as today’s version of the GOP?
This was published before the election. Even then, the reactions were the usual denial, rejection and infantile snark that reflects the deepest thoughts of the hard left.
According to Third Way’s findings, “Despite a roster of GOP candidates who are extreme by any standard, voters see Democrats as just as extreme…”
Progressive readers may have difficulty understanding this, but for much of the country (and I’m not just talking about Trump fans), far-left ideas and activists are more troubling than the crazy candidates and conspiracies on the right.
Hot-button topics like critical race theory, transgender issues in schools, “social justice” riots, and “defund the police,” are simply more bothersome to a lot of the electorate than Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
There was no winning the midterms for most of us, a reality that many realized but few admitted. If the predicted red wave happened, it might have been understood as a repudiation of the culture war progressives were desperately seeking to ram down people’s throats. Then again, it meant that morons and dangerous nutjobs would hold office, which wasn’t a good thing. And if the red wave failed, would the Trumpkins finally grasp that their idol was made of tin? At the same, time, would the wokies believe this meant America wanted to be reimagined as a world of safe spaces, microaggressions and land acknowledgements plus personal pronouns?
Either party could have owned this country with candidates of moderate intelligence, a modicum of integrity and a rejection of their tribes extreme fringes. Neither party could pull it off. The best we can hope for is another two years of congressional paralysis so that Biden doesn’t squander a few more trillion and make plural pronouns the law of the land by Executive Order.
No lesson will be learned. No one will be saved. And the prospect of the next election, a presidential election, with no candidate as yet that a nation will want to vote for, looms large. The Dems sought to make this election existential for democracy, and the Reps did their best to help the Dems make the case, but what kind of democracy do we have when election after election, our votes are cast against the candidate we find most despicable rather than for a candidate we want in office?
To the extent Mencken was right, we common people know what we don’t want, but what of those of us who have no option to vote for someone we do want? We get an election like this, and neither side will learn anything from it.
*I say this because some dolt later today will bring up things that have yet to happen to “correct” something here.
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I am happy that, except for Arizona, the craziest of the election deniers have been rejected. And Arizona is too close to tell.
And I don’t know if it’s my own bitterness, but it would have been nice to see my Democrats get an appropriate punch in the nose but they will most likely see this as confirmation they were right and double down on the insanity.
The best takeaway I can muster is that the Desantis landslide will force Trump out of the race, either by not entering or by getting trounced in the primary, and either way, that may be the best solution to likely GQP violence in 2024/25.
And maybe I can be hopeful that either a Desantis run will force a Come to Jesus in the DNC or that a Desantis presidency will.
The downside to a DeSantis rout is that DeSantis would be president, although it might be the only way to break the party from Trump.
The critical thinking, self-directed individual (moderates from both sides) is no longer needed in our six-second attention span, Coke/Pepsi-Brawndo-democracy.
“They’re hunting us down here with Liberty’s light
A handshaking double talking procession of the mighty
Pursued by a T.V. crew and coming after them
A limousine of singing stars and their brotherhood anthem
The former dictator was impeccably behaved
They’re mopping up all the stubborn ones who just refuse to be saved”
No General Bullmoose?
“Maybe the common people aren’t as stupid as some would have us believe.”
Eh, let’s not get carried away here. The races blue won were not an absolute blowout, red picked up two seats in the house as of 8AM this morning, and the Jewish space laser lady is still in office. All this tells me there are still far too many people who believe ‘owning the libs’ is an effective and preferable leadership strategy and the loss of reproductive freedom was not the animating cause many predicted and leftists hoped it would be.
I’m cautiously optimistic this morning, but I’m not popping the cork on my bottle of sparkling apple cider.
The voters don’t need a red wave, just either house, enough to make sure the worst excesses of the blue gang will be checked. Also, the insane red candidates in some jurisdictions were helped to the party nomination by blue saboteurs crossing party lines to choose the worst possible nominees. In some jurisdictions, this may have proven in retrospect to be a lesser work of genius than originally thought. Time will tell, as the dust settles, how things work out for the wokieness crusade.
One of the best pre-election predictions I read was on these here pages, “After the election, a million people will say they told you so, having made baseless guesses for their own purpose, some of which will prove correct as others prove absurd. ”
So let the games begin.
The simple fact is that most election conclusions are overdetermined.
(Not that I took the idea to heart: I bet 50 push-ups on my own baseless and biased guesses, and now I have to have to (try to) pay off the debt under the watchful eye of a snickering son.)
We need to have a voting system where the votes are counted quickly. I do not know who my governor or mayor is and I may not know for another week. Oregon is a 100% vote by state and ballots mailed by election day will be counted if they are received by next Tuesday. I understand for overseas military but ordinary people need to get their ballots in on time.
Having been influenced by a New Year’s Day commitment to do a deep dive into the Old Testament this year, and having followed through, I am going to postulate that almost no one will learn anything from this fiasco. (Maybe we all get smarter after Daniel, but I’m not holding out much hope.)
Overall, I’m more optimistic. The election results, and possibly a long-hoped-for indictment or two, should move the MAGA movement to the sidelines, and with other divsions in the GOP, should keep things in check. But the Democrats do have a serious leadership problem. Good answers to the question “who will run if Biden doesn’t?” are hard to find. Certainly none of the contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2020 is attractive.
As an outsider (from the other side of the world) I have often puzzled how few recognise that Trump’s attraction was simply that he was up for the fight. The same with Kari Lake in Arizona.
Trump made many crazy pronouncements but mixed in with them were things that most ordinary members of the community agree with – that people should be judged on their individual merits, that a man who puts on a dress is not a woman, that reliance on energy from despots (Russian gas to Germany) is suicidal.
Until more measured, dare I say mature, politicians can bring themselves to say these things with conviction, the Republican party will continue along its current unattractive path.
Similarly the Democrats.
AOC is up for the fight (and accordingly electable) but until someone more in tune with society like Joe Manchin is leading the Democrats they will continue to be more concerned with lavatories than energy-supply, with pronouns than defence. I doubt that John Kennedy (or even Bill Clinton) would recognise the current party as his successor.
Gore Vidal once said that America has only one political party but with two right wings.
He may have been correct when he said it but the current state of affairs is that the USA now has two revolutionary parties, each ready to seize power to save the country without a thought to the destruction they are causing – both at home and, indirectly, worldwide.
It is thoroughly depressing.