That is something that a Facebook friend told me a little while ago and it makes as much sense in describing America’s current government as anything else.
This month, Senate Democrats are still trying to hash out the “Build Back Better” act for President Biden (and speaking of communication, that name is some awfully lame branding) with various people putting delays in the process. And as we speak, Biden held a virtual meeting for the first-ever “Summit For Democracy” saying “Here in the United States, we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort. American democracy is an ongoing struggle to live up to our highest ideals, to heal our divisions and to recommit ourselves to the founding idea of our nation.” But either for the sake of a global audience or just to be nice, he didn’t name names and point out what the real problem is with an American democracy that had been chugging along for over two centuries: The fact that one faction of the duopoly has rapidly regressed in intellect and now is not only against the Left’s vision for our nation, but is against the founding idea of our nation itself.
Go back to this November’s odd-year elections. Or as I describe it, further evidence that the Democratic Party couldn’t score in a bordello.
I mean, the previous off-year elections in Virginia, and the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election had me thinking that the Democrats might have learned the central lesson of 2016: that Americans can understand, full well in advance, just how criminal and irresponsible Donald Trump and his party of enablers are, and Democrats can STILL lose an election to them because simply being NotDonaldTrump is not the same as being good for anything. But then Virginia’s Democratic Governor was longtime Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe, so some people clearly didn’t learn. And a lot of conventional wisdom pundits thought that Republican Glenn Youngkin won by accusing Democrats of promoting “critical race theory” in schools even as Democrats insist that it’s only a collegiate-academic discussion.
What, you’re going to tell Republicans, you’re going to tell these people, who tell you with a straight face that “Let’s Go Brandon” is not code for “Fuck Joe Biden” and that there is no connection between Donald Trump and the neo-Confederate thugs who brought riot gear to the “peaceful protest” on January 6, you’re going to tell those people that antifa is not an organization and that critical race theory has no strict definition? Please. You can’t out-bullshit these people. Don’t even try.
Define your terms, liberals, or the enemy will define them for you.
The thing is, it wasn’t just Virginia, which was only starting to turn blue in recent elections. In New Jersey, which is almost as much a Democrat monoculture as New York state, incumbent Democratic Governor Phil Murphy was expected to coast against Republican Jack Ciatarelli, and ended up only winning by a slim margin, 24 hours after Election Day. One writer for New York magazine gave his analysis (and being on the New York Magazine staff, that makes him basically a Democratic Party insider right there): “Who could have predicted this? Well, anyone with a kid in public school during the pandemic paralysis of last year. I won’t pretend that my own experience is more meaningful than anyone else’s. But the singular of data is anecdote, so let me tell you what happened in my town.” Andrew Rice goes over some of the background: “There was a brief moment, in the summer of 2020, when it appeared as if Murphy might be edging toward a more proactive role. The scientific evidence was already pretty clear by this time: With masking and contact tracing, it would be possible to resume in-person learning. Other states were already doing so. But many teachers were understandably terrified. Over a few days in August, the state’s largest and most powerful teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, declared that it was unsafe to return to classrooms, and Murphy immediately reversed himself, saying local districts could continue with remote learning if they provided a “good reason.” Oftentimes, that reason turned out to be the objection of the unionized workforce. It was hard to escape the suspicion that Murphy was removing himself because he was unwilling to cross NJEA, his most important political ally. Among other things, the union had secretly funneled millions into a super-PAC formed to advocate for Murphy’s policy objectives.”
(I mean, for all the Facebook leftists telling me how important it is that we get people unionized, they haven’t seemed to learn why unions outside the government sector aren’t that popular any more.)
And then Rice goes over how this played out with actual parents (you know, those suburban moms who went big for Democrats the last few years): “Many parents — women especially — found themselves acting as involuntary substitute teachers and full-time caregivers, continually on call to dig out crayons, serve snacks, and solve technical problems with the Zoom. It was only natural that many of these frustrated parents started to pay closer attention to what was happening in the classroom — it was right there in their home. In the run-up to the election in Virginia, which was considered the one to watch, the media mainly focused — probably too much, in retrospect — on Fox News–driven controversies over critical race theory that erupted in conservative suburbs in Virginia. These were only one culturally specific manifestation of a universal ramification of remote learning. Parents were watching. They were Zooming into school board meetings. They were bombarding principals with emails. They were livid; they wanted to know who was in charge.
“But where was the manager?”
As for all that talk about how Washington Democrats’ inability to get a budget deal passed before the election hurt their chances, it is difficult to see how much that hurt in retrospect, but it’s hard to see how that helped. Some guy on Facebook posted “Sign I saw yesterday said ‘I wanted a large pizza with mushrooms and voted for who I thought would deliver. What I got was a medium cheese instead. But the the other party wanted to feed me arsenic and nails.” I commented, “You forgot the part of the joke where Joe Manchin scraped off the cheese and tomato sauce cause it wasn’t paid for.”
But even so, certain people wanted to rationalize that the Democrats’ hammering was a good thing in the long run, since after all the president’s party tends to lose off-year elections, and maybe if there’s a typical changeover that will help get things back to “normal.” Andrew Sullivan, whose remaining point in common with the Right is a loathing of PC wokeness, said after the Virginia election, “I know it’s an incredibly low bar, and if the Dems had won, we might have returned to Bannonland, but still. A peaceful, sane transfer of power? At this point, I’ll take it. A GOP victory with Trump off-stage? Every one counts. You have to repair norms bit by bit. Part of what the American voters had wanted from Biden was congenial, bipartisan normalcy. But the left mugged him. Youngkin had a chance to fill that abandoned moderate space in our politics — and grasped it. … Youngkin seemed like an old school Republican, spoke in reasoned language, did not resort to vile insults, proposed massive spending on education; promised to end a grocery tax; and took the 2008 moderate Obama position on race and history.”
The Left refuses to trust that this is just politics as usual, because they can’t trust that the Republican opposition is coming back to normal. Nor should they.
Please do not forget, conservative apologists, that the Republican Party started its Orwellian “election integrity” foist after, not during, Trump’s whiny campaign to “Stop the Steal” (that is, stop the Electoral College). Do not forget that they changed the laws to take power away from local Secretaries of State after, not before, January 6. You can see what the deal is. These people want to appease the Trumpniks, but they’re doing it a bit too late to make a difference. This time. Having seen that a motivated coalition of NotRepublicans can take out even the most popular Republicans (such as they are), they want to gin the system to make sure that can’t happen again, but they’re doing it in the hopes of getting a competent demagogue, someone who can push the buttons of the gullible, angry mob but who doesn’t eat paste (or well-done steaks with ketchup). I say it’s a hope because if they had a competent authoritarian, they wouldn’t have gone all in on Trump. I’m sure they’re hoping that by now some politically-correct governor like Ron DeSantis will run for the presidential nomination in 2024 and be a Trump with (relative) brains, but if anybody in the party had even the balls of a mouse to confront Mister Mean Tweets, again, they wouldn’t have Trump. And it’s not like they’re challenging him even now. They’re just hoping that without the presidency and the exposure that the Mainstream Media and Twitter unwisely gave him, that he’ll fade away. But even then, their best case scenario just means that America is run like DeSantis’ Florida or Greg Abbott’s Texas, and you can ask people in Texas how well that’s working out. You probably shouldn’t ask over the internet, because their power may go out this Christmas, and you probably shouldn’t ask by mail, because Louis DeJoy is still Postmaster General.
A few weeks ago I saw a Medium column from Umair Haque and it was yet another of his despairing attacks on America in general and how he predicted how the Virginia race was going to go because his parents moved there when he was a child, and he went over how horrible it was for him as a dark-skinned boy of British Commonwealth origins to grow up in Redneckistan.
He said “So there white Americans are. Let me say it again. They’ve got the society they want. They. Nobody else wants that kind of society — a place denuded of public goods and social protections, where guns have more rights than women do. By and large, minorities don’t want to live in that kind of ultra-competitive, individualistic society — they want something more like Canada or Europe.” Ah yes, the countries that are LESS multi-racial and more white than we are. So clearly we’re operating on different definitions of “white.”
But again, Haque does make great points even in spite of himself. He also said, “What on earth are white Americans so angry about? If you think about it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. They’ve got the society they want. The very one they keep on voting for. Sure, they don’t have healthcare and retirement and decent education and any kind of social systems or public goods. But that’s the society white America wants.”
That’s why I call this political movement “whiny fascism.” I mean, with Germany, they used to be this bad-ass Great Power that rivaled Russia and Britain and France, then they lost World War I, lost their colonies, got East Prussia split off from the rest of the country, got the Rhineland occupied, got inflation that jacked the price of goods into billions, and that was BEFORE the Great Depression. You can understand why they went for rage and hate. You can understand why Russia went for Stalin. Between the March Revolution and the consolidation of the Soviet Union, the country was in absolute chaos and civil war. Many more Russians died from the Russian Civil War than in World War I. You can understand why they wanted order. This country, people want to give the nuclear codes to Gary Busey’s idiot sidekick from The Apprentice cause they got sick of calling customer service and hearing “para espanol, oprime’ el numero dos.”
And in the wake of a Chinese virus that Trump did not cause (but did everything in his power to help Xi Jinping cover up) we entered 2021 with a new president in position to use what we’d learned about the pandemic, including the beginnings of a vaccination program. And that was working pretty well. Not like we don’t already require vaccines in schools for all kinds of diseases without panicking about them. But no, suddenly vaccines are the worst thing since Hitler. As opposed to say, getting a bunch of paramilitary thugs to carry flags and seize a seat of government in an attempt to overthrow the republic.
Many of our issues with supply chains and economic disruptions are at least partially due to the lingering coronavirus and its continuing mutation, and since a lot of that started outside the States, there’s a limited amount that individuals or this government can do about that. Even so, there are things individuals and the government can control. The fact is, going along with the vaccine regimen would help get things back to normal, and normal is the last thing Trumpniks want. Even when Trump himself asked people to get vaccinated in one speech, half the crowd booed him, because at this point that would mean giving Biden, and Fauci, and the Deep State a win, and we can’t have THAT. We already knew, when Trump was president, that governors like DeSantis and people in states like South Dakota weren’t going to enforce or even allow masking and social distancing, no matter how many of their fellow travelers died, and now that there’s a vaccine option, that’s just one more pretext for the cult to engage in performative defiance, just one more icky vegetable that they don’t wanna eat.
Republicans are in fact quite explicit about this, one of them saying that the Party needs “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” to get the House back in 2022.
Part of communication is pointing out that the current malaise isn’t (just) because Democrats can’t get anything done, it’s because moderates like Joe Biden are largely in consensus with “progressives” but the entire Republican Party and at least two conservative Senate Democrats are deliberately standing in the way, and if the president has any influence with the public, and (allegedly) the gist of the Democrats’ agenda polls better than actual Democratic politicians do, then Biden and his people need to point out that not only does change not happen by itself, it is happening in the face of sabotage and opposition.
I mean, I’m not even sure why I’m rooting for tax-and-spend Democrats to win, but then I remember that the Libertarian Party, which has never been ready for prime time, is actually getting worse and following the Republicans’ Know-Nothing lead on COVID, and any vote for Republicans is a vote for the Party of Trump. And the last four years ought to demonstrate why that’s a terrible idea.
As I may have said once, a good idea beats a bad idea, but a bad idea beats no idea. In theory, Democrats have an idea: it’s expressed in the massive legislative package set up for the Biden Administration this year. But they didn’t get around to passing even half of it until it was too late for the off-year elections, and that because Democrats assume, as with the Affordable Care Act, that you have to pass the bill to actually see what’s in it, where in fact if they promoted the bill in such a way that voters could see what was in it, they might put more pressure on Congress to get it passed.
Meanwhile Republicans don’t really have any constructive ideas, but they do have rage and hate and discontentment, some of which they have ginned up from phantom buzzword slogans but some of which is due to real issues like inflation that the government either cannot or will not do anything about. And at this rate if you get more Republicans in charge (whether Trump is the specific leader or not) it’s only going to justify Trump’s position that massive death tolls from Trump Virus aren’t government responsibility. But when you have a Democratic Party which assumes that every personal or political concern IS government responsibility, and then doesn’t do anything about them, why not elect Republicans? Because at that point, substance is clearly meaningless and all that matters is one’s preference on culture war aesthetics, and that’s where Republicans always have Democrats beat.
I mean, the Democrats ought to see, or at least deduce, what’s going on. They ought to realize that Republicans aren’t just going to passively wait for liberals to sabotage their own agenda (though that’s usually a safe bet). They’re going to actively work to make things more difficult for Democrats, and they have been, just as they did with Obama. Democrats ought to see that whether “conservative” behavior is an ant-like organized policy or just the spiteful stubbornness of a group of individuals, it is having a collective effect and that is impacting their chances of political success. They ought to be able to pick up on this, react to it and create a counter-strategy. And yet November 2 showed that they’re totally surprised.
I was trying to figure out what this behavior reminded me of, but this October GEICO brought back that commercial they do every Halloween season spoofing slasher horror movies. The one where the small group of people is running through a darkened town in a panic, going, “Let’s go to the barn!” “No, let’s hide at the post office!” And one of the gals wails, “Why don’t we just get in the running car??” And one of the guys with her says “Are you crazy? Let’s go hide behind the chainsaws!” So of course, that’s what they do. And if that isn’t the Democratic Party, I don’t know what is.
Because if the Republicans and Libertarians are just variant intensities and flavors of chowderhead, the Democrats present as people who ACT like they got some sense but refuse to draw obvious conclusions from available data. So, given that the Libertarians actually won a large number of local offices in the off-year election, and the local offices are starting to be where the action is, you may want to reconsider them. I mean, yes, at the end of the day Libertarians may just be Republicans who like pot and support trans rights, but that’s more than you’re going to get from the actual Republican Party. And I’m starting to think it’s more than we’ll get out of the Democrats.