Since the Republicans won all three houses of the government, and have staffed the judiciary with their operatives, Democrats have engaged in a discussion of why they did so poorly. Its taken a while for things to become clear, but there is enough evidence to move forward with provisional conclusions.
As an aside, the NY Times revealed today, five weeks after the election, that the Biden administration oversaw the greatest immigration surge in American history. A little late in the day for a major tool of corporate America to come clean on this issue, dont you think?
Why did they wait until now to say so? Why did the Democrats not have a policy on both legal and illegal immigration beyond saying "Hey, we dont want to talk about it?" Or "the Republicans are freaking out about something that is not a real issue". But the reality turns out to be that immigration is objectively a very real, historical issue and yet I dont even know what Harris' position on immigration is. The Republican strategy of blocking the bipartisan bill on this topic was clearly a winning move and the Democrats are, as always, too weak to do anything and the American electorate is not interested in the "We tried" excuse.
The Republicans also ran on the economy. Here, again, the Democrats seem to have been in some weird reality of their own. They kept saying "The economy is fine, dont worry" but everyone I know who isnt in the top 20% think that prices have exploded in the last few years. Which makes the incumbent responsible for the economy no matter whose fault it is.
A third issue is the area of competence, or which party seems to listen and then get things done. It is extremely clear that the Republicans have acted with diligence and obstinacy to achieve their goals, from corrupting the judiciary, defunding the government to supporting any authoritarian dictatorship. The Democrats, not so much.
There are several other explanations that have been proposed for this election result. It is said that Biden abdicated too late in the cycle for voters to get to know Harris. It is said that by the very structure of the situation that Harris was essentially the incumbent and that the electorate was in an anti-incumbent mood. Both of these seem plausible to me although it is hard for me to gauge how important they were. Beyond that, however, the democrats were clearly the party of identity politics even when that meant active discrimination against white candidates. So why was there any surprise when white people voted against democrats? The democrats were the party of hard core transexual rights, even for minors without parental approval. That seems like a really weird policy to me if you want to get people who are parents to vote for you.
The democrats were the party of abortion rights. Now I keep reading that this is an important issue, and I think it is but clearly it did not win elections. In fact between two women's issues: abortion and a woman candidate for president, it does not seem as though women turned out overwhelmingly for democrats. Maybe I wont have to hear too much about the "women's vote" in the future? No I think I will be hearing about this for the rest of my life no matter what the data says.
The American people did not seem to object to a leader who is a pig, a rapist, a convicted felon and so forth. A traitor and a pig. All that stuff from Republicans about "character" has been BS all along. This is not a surprise to me, and I hope it is not a surprise to you either. Nixon seems like a fine, outstanding scholar compared to Trump.
So maybe the Republican positions are egregious and offensive. Maybe they are pandering to the worst segments of the American people. Maybe so, but they seem to win elections and while there are lots of flaws in the American Republic, and voter suppression, and weirdnesses in the way red states organize and vote in order to keep the people from being able to affect their government, nevertheless they seem to have won, in the aggregate, this last election.
Like all good proto-fascist societies, America seems to be in that phase where only power matters. That is what the Republicans have proven time and time again since November 2000 and the Democrats never seem to learn. The democrats will not listen to Bernie Sanders, or to AOC, nor will they fight Trump and all his works. The Democrats had a chance to make judicial term limits a reality but they could not be bothered. They do not have the courage of their convictions.
So why bother to elect a democrat? Whats the point? They want to rule in some sort of fantasy past where America was semi-bi-partisan, a world very different from today. So electing a democrat seems to me to have no raison d'etre.
Image courtesy of Midjourney
