Democracy, Good And Hard

As of this writing,* it appears that there will not only be no “red wave” from the midterms, but it may turn out the 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 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 in 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 were 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.