Well, if there was a Blue Wave in the midterm elections, it crashed right up against a red wave, as it turned out that the huge increase in midterm votes, including early voting, accrued to both major parties. So while at one point before Republicans got themselves all hot and bothered over Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats thought they might get the Senate back in addition to the House, they ended up losing seats there, even though at least two races in Arizona and Florida are still up for grabs, but late returns are also projecting that Democrats will pick up at least 38 seats. Still, despite things going largely their way, Democrats complain about the Senate results because the states where the contests occurred had roughly 12.5 million more Democratic than Republican votes.
I mean, not long ago, Democrats were complaining that they couldn’t win a majority due to the Electoral College, and they were complaining they couldn’t win House seats because of gerrymandering, and now they’ve gotten a better win percentage with House seats than with Senate seats (where neither gerrymandering nor the Electoral College come into play) and they complain that’s un-democratic too.
If you’re a Democrat, you look for excuses for why you can’t win elections. It’s what you do.
The thing is, I don’t really think the Democrats did anything wrong.
They were told not to make everything about Trump, and to focus on the kitchen-table issues. And that’s what they did. Most of the Democrats who won talked about how they emphasized health care and how Republicans had tried to undermine it. Andrew Gillum (Florida governor candidate) and Beto O’Rourke (Texas candidate for US Senate) made much of the media attention they were given and emphasized running positive, substance-based campaigns.
Trump is the one who made the election All About Trump. Partially because that’s what he does, and also because with that mostly empty gumball machine he calls a brain, he knows it works. But the end result just confirms the conventional wisdom about the results: He exacerbated the process by which Democrats regained the House and lost more seats in the Senate. And the reason for that dynamic is that you have local House races where the constituencies are more cosmopolitan (i.e. Not Trumpnik) whereas statewide Senate contests where rural counties are in play are more prone to the Trumpnik rhetoric of “We’re the Cowboys and They’re the Redskins” (choice of team metaphor is completely intentional).
There’s also the point that where one house has 435 seats and the other has only 100, maybe a third of which are in contest during any election, each individual Senate contest is more consequential and small numbers of losses are harder to recover from.
So the fact that results ended up as most experts predicted means that any pundit (either left-wing or right-wing) who wants to draw some moral lesson from all of this is confounded by the workings of a federal system that doesn’t correspond to the way most people think politics works. “We shoulda won the Senate cause we got more votes! We have a fascist moron as president when Hillary got more votes!” Well then, you need to look at how things work and do something about that. Indeed, the very fact that most midterm elections don’t have anything like this year’s level of turnout implies that a lot of voters weren’t aware of these factors.
In observation of results, I do think some things need to be done on various levels. First, the process of voting itself needs a severe overhaul. And unfortunately, I believe that the only way that can happen is to federalize the process in the same way that the Post Office and various other “local” institutions are actually federal. And the most obvious reason for this is that the various state bureaucracies that are in charge of delivering sample ballots, compiling ballots, making sure that electronic voting machines are plugged in, et cetera, are the same bureaucracies that are themselves under election, and in one case, one of the candidates who benefits from a dysfunctional voting system is not only running for higher office but is the official in charge of running the election system. Given that we’ve already had several constitutional amendments and legal precedents establishing that there IS a right to vote, and that the federal government can step in to protect it, we need to address the point that there is not an equal right to vote when one constituency has state of the art voting machines in an easily available polling place and the other one has old-time machines run out of Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.
But if your real complaint with the election is that it doesn’t do enough to reverse the dominance of Donald Trump, that requires a broader approach, dare I say a meta-political approach. This is a matter I’d been discussing with people on social media.
To address the subject of Trump’s success, I theorized: Why is Trump winning? Partially because he has the initiative. Why does he have the initiative? Because he sets the agenda. Why is he able to set the agenda? Because he doesn’t just accept the political given. For example, with the recent immigration/caravan/birthright citizenship controversy (which of course has evaporated now that he confirmed the Senate), do you think it matters to Trump that he can’t just wave a magic wand and say “I have repealed the 14th Amendment because I am the President and only I get double scoops of ice cream”? No. The point is to make it a subject of discussion. The point is to make the unthinkable thinkable. Because we have seen a pattern where Trump will spew some Dadaist nonsense and his various Republican enablers will feel obliged to translate it into real legislation. Because that is, after all, what a legislature does: It exists to translate political initiatives into working legislation.
This Thursday, conservative Ramesh Ponnuru was on one of the talking-head shows on MSDNC, and he pointed out that Trump and the Republicans have engaged in a fairly successful media strategy to demonize and delegitimize the Mueller investigation, because with the actual process of any House impeachment and Senate trial being a matter of political consensus and collective will, they have to put the matter in the court of public opinion in order to shrink even the concept of impeachment. Similar to how the “Dream Team” did with OJ Simpson, they put the prosecution on trial instead of the defendant. Well, maybe we should put the actual defendant on trial. That doesn’t mean you have any legislators initiate an impeachment, at first. You’ll notice that apart from the likes of Devin Nunes, there wasn’t an organized Republican push to kill the Mueller investigation even though there were some trial balloon opinions on the subject. The point was that the various whisper campaigns in friendly media were undermining the legitimacy of the investigation in the public’s eyes, at least with that substantial plurality that is loyal to Trump, such that people who would otherwise support a lawful investigation feel compelled to oppose it out of team loyalty.
Several scholars have pointed out that impeachment is really more of a political process than a legal process. There has to be a real consensus behind it, and that consensus is what neds to be built up before the work is done. Currently any Democrats and non-Republicans who push impeachment have the burden against the Republican Senate consensus that will surely block them. The goal, before any actual impeachment is drawn up, is to put the burden on those senators and make their defense of Trump politically unfeasible. The fact that it can’t happen now is irrelevant. Do you think that Republicans cared that all the repeals of Obamacare they passed were going to be vetoed by Obama? No. The point was to keep the issue out there until they got the president they wanted. Of course the problem in that case was that once the Republicans got the president they wanted they couldn’t even pass an Obamacare replacement that they could agree on, but that’s because they’re incompetent morons. Whereas Democrats are often politically incompetent, but they’re not morons.
But part of what I mean when I say that Democrats are politically incompetent is precisely that they don’t understand this principle. They only operate in terms of the existing political landscape where Republicans seek to change the terrain. Democrats wait for a consensus for action instead of forming the consensus and then taking action. If you’re going to say, “well, there’s no point in talking impeachment because we’ll never get enough votes in the Senate” then it will never get done. That doesn’t mean you barrel through without a consensus. You get the consensus and THEN get it done.
In that regard, there’s another idea that I’d like the press to try. I know they won’t, for the same reason that TV networks won’t stop playing Christmas ads WHEN IT’S STILL MORE THAN A WEEK FROM THANKSGIVING. But the idea is: Boycott Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean that they don’t cover the various scandals that he and his crew have created for themselves. On the contrary. Focus on those scandals but refuse to talk to him.
None of these press scrums where the reporters and Sister Mary Elephant Sarah Sanders play “you pretend to tell us the truth and we pretend to believe you.” Nobody interviewing Trump on the lawn on the way to the helicopter. Nobody at Trump’s rallies roped off for him to point at, so the redcap audience can jeer at them like a staff of Court Jews.
Seriously, from their perspective, most administrations (not just Trump’s) are in an adversarial relationship with press corps “gatekeepers”, and Trump took to Twitter early, so he’s already got a means of communicating directly without their medium.
Supposedly, in the wake of Trump yanking Jim Acosta’s press credentials, this has already been debated by some but networks are afraid of making themselves the issue. “Don’t give him ammunition?” Like he isn’t going to make an issue of it anyway. That’s why he baits the press in the first place. If, as some concern trolls insist, “(Jim Acosta) and Trump almost need each other to sustain a mutual narcissism”, then the more responsible party needs to break the cycle.
Go ahead. Go ahead and let the little baby whine and stamp his feet. Go ahead and let him piss in the corner and cry. It’s not an election year any more, what’s he gonna do?
I’m pretty sure Fox News wouldn’t go along with it, but then the purpose of Fox News is to appeal to those whose minds are already made up.
(Side joke: What’s the difference between Fox News Channel and Pornhub? Pornhub has fewer blowjobs.)
This is part of the larger goal in reversing what Trump has done. What Trump has done is to legitimize his approach to the world. And the press was enabling him all the way. At first because he was a reality TV star. Then because he was the Republican nominee. Now because he’s the president. In any case, if we were dealing with somebody who didn’t have Trump’s reputation and fame, if he announced a presidential campaign by stating that Mexicans were rapists and drug smugglers, the press would have treated him like a mutant retard unworthy of their attention. You know, what they do to Libertarians. What we need to do is treat him like that. Not withstanding the fact that he actually is the most important man in the world now, the point is to make it clear that he does not hold his position legitimately. In my opinion, Trump won the election fairly (by the terms of the Electoral College) but since then has done everything he could to invalidate his status, and the only reason he hasn’t been impeached is because no other president (including Nixon) has abused the privilege this much.
And when you’re dealing with someone who’s that much of a solipsist, removing media attention takes away his validation. In a certain respect, it may make Trump doubt his own existence. Trump doesn’t mind being in an adversarial relationship with the media, it’s what he lives for. But to have no relationship with them at all? How long could he go cold turkey?
Shift the terrain. Gaslight the gaslighter. Take his mic. That’s how you start fighting back.
Overall, it occurs to me that Trump and the alternative-to-being-right are doing a much better job of asymmetrical social warfare than the media leftists who are supposed to be good at it. In fact, I find a lot of parallels to what’s happening in a certain bit of radical text. I’ll get to this in my next post.