So we had a mid-term election, and, like any good compromise, no one’s happy. The Republicans had, to some degree, bought into the mantra that It’s the economy, stupid!, and thus ignored their gaping flaws in their reaction to Trump’s January 6 Insurrection, which will loom over them as a black cloud of utter condemnation, the Dobbs decision, permitting the imposition of religious dogma on the American people via proposed Federal regulation, election denying, which is a strike against the very heart of how we handle transfer of political power, adherents to a set of economic tenets that are inferior, and a general incompetency. They thought Congress would be handed to them on a platter.
You’d think the Democrats could have run the table.
But they have too many flaws, and a few burdens, of their own. Chief among their current set of flaws is an autocratic thread that sets independent teeth on edge. I’ve mentioned this before, so I’ll keep it brief. It has become painfully apparent in their culture wars, chiefly in their style of managing the transgenderism issue, that rather than have a civilized discussion of the serious issues surrounding this small group of people, first they promulgated regulations that impacted a huge number of people, including the most vulnerable members of society, and then, when various folks try to have a discussion on the issue as required by the tenets of liberal democracy, the transgenderism advocates run around screaming BIGOT!
This is not in keeping with liberal democracy, or for that matter being an adult. But that first point, indicating an abrogation of their responsibilities under the social contract of being members of liberal democracies, is the most important.
Among their burdens is communications of difficult subjects. As a single example, the Republicans like to make that they’re the ones to trust on the economy, but all the studies I’ve seen show the stock market hates Republicans, the Federal budget hates Republicans, and the jobs report barely tolerates them. But this is not an easy message to communicate. When inflation kicked in, Democrats were in trouble, and then to compound it they didn’t have an effective counter-message. If asked, I would have advocated for a message of The Democrats are cleaning up after the incompetent Republicans, and just din that into everyone’s ears until they stuffed their ears with rags.
Would it have worked? I dunno. But they should have done more than they did.
Erick Erickson tries to tiptoe through the tulips with this post today:
This is the United States Balkanizing
Our united states seem more and more like a forced coalition of people who do not like each other.
Working-class neighborhoods of nonwhite voters shifted a bit to the right. White, rich neighborhoods that had long propped up the GOP shifted hard left.
In Republican states, the GOP did well. In Democrat states, the Democrats fared well. Republicans helped the Democrats in Maryland get the Governor’s Mansion. Democrats in Florida and Georgia voted for DeSantis and Kemp.
And, no doubt, Professor Turchin is muttering about the dilution of asabiya this morning, asabiya being the intellectual or spiritual bonds that hold diverse groups of people together. He might you that the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to this mess.
But Erickson (not Turchin) won’t tell you how much he and his ilk have contributed to this situation. From calling Democrats baby-killers, and thus not taking the entire subject seriously, to his really bad, context-free, nuance-free arguments, the angling of far-right conservatives for power, to grift, to generally act in a self-centered manner when that is not appropriate, has been a major factor in this situation.
But, as I mentioned earlier, the Democrats have their own horse in this race.
How bad is it? As I typed this, Senator Johnson (R) of Wisconsin, a conspiracy rumor nut, grifter, and probably certifiable crazy, has had his reelection race called in his favor. He may have won by a whisker, but he appears to have won – and he joins Senator Grassley (R) of Iowa in the victory dance, Grassley of 88 years of age, who makes a hobby of mendacity and potentially was involved in the January 6th Insurrection. He won far more easily than Johnson, so easily that I can only ask my neighbors to the south What the fuck are you thinking? And for those who think that two out of one hundred isn’t so bad, I urge you to examine Senators Feinstein (D-CA) and Collins (R-ME) for signs of dementia as well.
What does the future hold? We may see new political parties formed. I hope they discard the arrogance that each of our two major parties are displaying to their mutual costs, or they’ll never become large parties.
Erickson forgets one thing in his calculations: the senior generations responsible for this mess, especially on the Republican side, are inevitably dying out, and new generations are observing how badly this is going. I think Erickson believes this’ll be a long-term Balkanization, but I think that as younger generations start taking up positions of authority, this’ll turn into something else.
How it’s shaped by overpopulation and climate change remains to be seen.
