Month: November 2024

And Now, The Autopsy

The phrase “autopsy” in regard to post-election analysis came about after the Republican Party commissioned a study shortly after Mitt Romney lost to President Obama in 2012, despite Obama not performing as well as he had in 2008. It was not actually called an autopsy, but that’s the phrase that developed in the political media. So ever since then an analysis of the losing party’s campaign in an election has been referred to as such, except of course, for the 2020 election, which according to the Church of Trump canon dogma that will soon be enshrined in official documents, Donald Trump DID NOT LOSE despite the fact that he’s officially elected the 47th president and not still the 45th. So here’s my personal analysis for what went wrong with the (Biden) Harris campaign and what Democrats could do better in the next presidential campaign, assuming they’re allowed to have one. I can only hope this is not the literal autopsy of the Democratic Party, but let’s see what happens in Trump’s first hundred days.

On Facebook, I’d posted a Reason Magazine article pointing out that after 2016, Democrats did, sorta, have an “autopsy” on the results of the election, saying “In fact, Democrats tasked then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) with compiling an autopsy of the 2016 election, only to then effectively bury it: Maloney presented the report to lawmakers “during a members-only gathering at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters” in 2017, Politico reported, but “members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of DCCC staff.” Which is about par for the course with these people. And one friend, thinking that the premise of learning from the Republican victory was to be more like them, asked me, “If the result of the autopsy is, the only way to beat them is to be more like them than they are, what’s the point?” And I responded: “Winning. Without which being less like they are is irrelevant. Moral victories don’t count.”

The fact that the nominally democratic party is so elitist and controlling tells you a big part of the problem right there.

Of course learning from how the other side wins doesn’t mean you’re going to be as evil as they are. The Democratic Party is not run by a womanizing pathological liar and real-estate cheat. Bill Clinton retired. And it’s not like they didn’t learn from you. This election Republicans learned how to use early voting and mail-in balloting as opposed to acting like mail ballots were possessed by evil spirits.

I should have guessed that Nevada was a microcosm for the country. When early voting started I kept noting Jon Ralston’s blog on The Nevada Independent site, and he immediately noted that the rural counties north of Clark County/Las Vegas had a huge turnout for early voting and they were nearly all registered Republicans. Whereas Clark County normally has a Democratic “firewall” but it was very small compared to previous elections. Things picked up a little as it got closer to Election Day (and it looks like Senator Jacky Rosen and all Democratic House members got re-elected) but Nevada went for Trump because the early data was actually the trend.

Trump won with slightly less vote than he got in 2020, and he still won the popular vote because about 14 million people (at this week’s count) who voted Democrat in 2020 stayed home. Trump did not raise the “ceiling” on his support. Kamala Harris fell through it. And as Tom Powell Jr. on TikTok said, “when you don’t vote, this is the shit that happens.”

That should be the first lesson right there. Just as Trump picked up a lot of voters who you wouldn’t think would be the usual suspects for the Trump fan club, so too a lot of the people who didn’t vote this time and are not fans of Trump did vote for Biden the last time. The lesson is, you’re not representing those people. In the next four years, or however much time you still have left, you ought to go and search for those people in the neighborhoods you lost. Have your staffers “of color” talk to their own families, and their relatives, and friends and ask what issues they’re concerned about that they expect government to be able to fix. I don’t assume that gender-neutral addressing will be high on the list.

Secondly, as James Carville – a political strategist who won for you – is famous for saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Because clearly, even the horror stories about Project 2025 and the deaths of pregnant women in miscarriage because no one wanted to be accused of facilitating an abortion weren’t enough to deal with ridiculous inflation. Which HAS gotten under control now, but “under control” doesn’t mean prices have actually gone down. Knowing that you would be blamed, you should not have instituted inflationary policies in the first place. Or at least, not if you were going to let the guy who tried to seize control of the Capitol by force run free braying his stab-in-the-back mythology and using his fan club to bully the very Republicans he tried to kill to march in line behind him again. That’s another thing, you should have prosecuted Trump THE very day he quit being president and not fuck around for two years while he did all this. (Another Facebook friend pointed this out to me, and I agreed, and said, ‘that’s a great example of why we’re not like them, isn’t it?’)

The inflation issue brings up another relevant bit of advice: Act as if (even if it is statistically impossible) that all voters are dumber than a bag of rocks, only more opinionated. After all, the Republicans do, and look where they are. That does not mean being patronizing. That’s part of what got you where you are. It means, don’t just assume everyone knows the obvious, cause what’s obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to everyone else. Remember, a person can be smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

Part of this means finding out how people actually communicate these days. Milblogger Jake Broe pointed out that for-profit corporate media is dead. And apparently Republicans figured this out four years ago. It was good that Harris appeared on Fox News, 60 Minutes and “Call Her Daddy” but they should have gone more in the latter direction with those liberal-leaning podcasts that exist. Broe says one reason they didn’t is because if you go on some podcast for three hours, you run the risk of actual conversation, and that risks saying something stupid. But he says the American people are ready for this. Maybe so. Donald Trump says stupid shit all the time.

The recurring point in all this is: Meet people where they are. Learning from the enemy does not mean becoming more evil and stupid than they are, because that really would defeat the purpose of winning. It means, learning what they’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Specifically, finding out what voters want and presenting your agenda as being in line with their interests. Assuming, of course, that you know what your agenda is.

And this is all assuming that you’ll even get another fair shot at the White House. From what all the Trumpniks are saying, by 2028, I don’t think you will.

But hey, Democrats, there’s still all kinds of weirdo loner Republicans out there who want to assassinate Donald Trump, and nobody’s taking their guns away. So you’ve got that to look forward to.

More Thoughts On The Election

They shed their sense of responsibility

Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob

That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything,

Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only,

Bread and circuses.

Juvenal, Satires

I had said at least once that the “original sin” of the US Constitution is not slavery, horrible as it was, because slavery could have been, and mostly was, eliminated by the constitutional process. But the Founders, deliberately rejecting the British parliamentary system, also rejected its party politics and assumed them to be an aberration rather than the political default. So instead of having a Constitution that either accounted for partisanship or sought to eliminate it, they simply assumed that all races would be conducted on a non-partisan basis, which in the first few elections after President Washington proved not to be the case. Over the years, the two parties, whichever they happened to be, adapted the system to serve them rather than the other way around, which is how, among other things, the authoritarian party enacted Jim Crow laws and other institutions to preserve the spirit if not the letter of slavery. The party system is also how, for instance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was able to effectively veto President Barack Obama’s last nominee for the Supreme Court by preventing the nomination from even getting to the floor, where it might have passed. Nowhere in Article I of the Constitution does it give the Senate Majority Leader that power, perhaps because Article I says nothing establishing an office of Senate Majority Leader.

In fact, the problem is even deeper than that. The problem isn’t just that the Founders failed to check a partisan tendency that led to the preservation of our aristocratic groups, in many respects they sought to do this very thing. Followers of Antiquity, they rejected existing models ranging from the Iroquois Confederacy to the Confederation Helvetica, instead modeling the new Constitution on the Roman Republic, even knowing how it ended up. Like Rome, the structure is based on a Senate composed of an aristocratic, land-holding class, with some accomodation for the greater populace. And Rome was supposed to have most of its government done via the Senate, with its executive (consul) being limited to a few functions for specific purposes, but as the senatorial families squabbled with each other, they ended up turning more and more power to the executive just to get anything done, which is how the consul became a Dictator, then a Caesar, then an Imperator, and finally an absolute monarch.

This might seem familiar.

So it really doesn’t surprise me that America could turn into another Roman Empire, since that model is partly baked in. But I am still a patriotic American, and frankly, I find it a Goddamn insult that our first dynastic monarch could be an inbred slug that would make the Senators who approved Elagabalus retch.

There is this one politics show in the UK called “The Rest is Politics” that had a segment discussing “The Positives of a Trump Presidency”. The YouTube clip lasted 1 minute 15 seconds.

There will be some time to go over exactly what Democrats did wrong, and where they can go from here. If, as in the last elections both for and against Trump, people were dissatisfied with the party in power, Democrats ought to have a chance to come back. The problem is they may not get the chance. The model of “post liberal” or “illiberal” government is not to start martial law on Day One, it’s to keep all the trappings of a multiparty republic but to marginalize all opposition so that they can never get any real power. That’s what they did in Hungary and Venezuela (not to mention Russia) and it’s what they’re going to do here. We know this because in some states they already have.

Specifically, in Florida this election, there were state questions on the ballot, one being Question 3 (legalizing marijuana) and Question 4 (legalizing the right to your own uterus) and each got over 56 percent support, but in DeSantis Florida, you need 60 percent for an amendment to pass. A clear majority isn’t enough.

That’s the model. DeSantis Land is actually the best we can expect. And if as seems likely, the House remains Republican, there won’t be anybody stopping these guys from doing what they want to do. Certainly not the Supreme Court.

The problem with saying “Orange Man Bad” is not that it isn’t true, it’s that no one wanted to hear it. Yeah, maybe nobody cared that liberals were all offended that Trump used R-rated language and fellated a mic on stage. That’s part of the appeal. Because punk rock may not sell records anymore, but it’s great for politics. Saying that Trump is a fascist is true, but it’s also irrelevant. Because nobody cares if the government is fascist as long as the economy works. And you know, fair enough. The problem isn’t that you could make a case for a hypothetical Republican or for Trump in his first term (and I could), it’s that Trump in the here and now does not justify that argument.

To some extent if you were to judge the Trump economy only before COVID, you could say that it was a better economy than the Biden/Harris inflationary economy, and that would make a Trump presidency better. But there’s two problems: One, the wonderful Trump economy was actually wrecked by Trump himself, because of his fiasco response to COVID, and two, his main economic policy for the second term is a broad-based tariff program that would effectively shift the tax burden from the wealthiest to the middle class by forcing them to pay higher prices for goods, which pretty much everybody but Trump knows would be disastrous for the economy.

You could have had your hypothetical perfect Barack-Obama-meets-Jack-Kennedy Democrat running against Trump and it wouldn’t have mattered against a media and public that idolized Trump precisely because of his flaws. They support him because he’s vulgar. They support him because he’s ignorant. They voted for him because he hates everybody else.

We decided to have this guy, with his cotton-candy hair, circus peanut skin and retarded toad grin, saying that THIS is what WE want, because THAT is what we think we ARE.

After all, this IS a democracy. NOT a republic.

A comedian I follow on Facebook posted: “I’m sorry to say it, but the best way to increase the median IQ of this country is to have another pandemic.” And I think he’s right.

See, despite all the changes to my own politics, I still define myself as more right-wing than left-wing. For one thing, we have a party based on altruism and political correctness, and look where that got us. But I actually describe myself as a Social Darwinist. Which is exactly why I am against fascism. You would think otherwise, since we think of the two as synonymous. But in biology, Darwin meant “survival of the fittest” to mean “survival of the species best adapted to its environment.” The phrase is a misnomer because it’s meant to endorse “survival of the most fascist.” But fascism, social controls, using force to defy reality, are the exact opposite of adapting to the environment. And the results on the Right were a stagnating economy and living conditions even before going to war. And left-wing collectivism in the communist countries just meant the decline took place over decades instead of years. Darwinism, applied to society, ought to mean the culture (not the ethnic group) best capable of surviving and adapting to the world. But that requires systems that are accountable and capable of responding to information, as opposed to denying information to preserve an ideological agenda.

I had mentioned previously that we have a media environment that created a society where people not only don’t know the difference between reality and media, but don’t want to know. I had also said in 2020 that some people actually want a mass collapse and die-off to clear out the rot. It’s the only explanation for why so many voters actively opposed the one party that still believes in preserving the system. The system isn’t working for them. So rather than fix it, let’s just blow it up.

And when you don’t have a public infrastructure, you don’t have a health system, you don’t have disaster relief, and government serves no purpose except forcing you to pay taxes to support the already rich, you find out whether or not you can survive on just your resources.

Survival of the fittest.

I’m cold about this, but apparently some people need to learn things the hard way. We have developed an environment where people think that we have always had rule of law and social supports and therefore that’s not going to change. But that stuff takes maintenance, and it takes effort. It can be destroyed by our decision making. And you can’t demand radical change and not get radical consequences.

And if you decide you don’t want “the system”, there are consequences, and you’re about to suffer them. And so will everyone around you who knew better. And unlike the Germans in 1945, you won’t get to cry and say you weren’t warned. Because they didn’t have an example from history. This country can’t even learn from four years ago. And the Trump from four years ago is the best we can expect. And because of Trump at his best, over 300K people died from an easily preventable virus. You think the next four years will be better? Well, for some reason, I’m not very optimistic.

The United States of America: 1776-2024

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Well.

As I keep saying: God is real and he hates us all.

Either that or as I also said last time, either somebody ginned the election returns like Maduro did in Venezuela or the average American voter is too stupid to find their face in a mirror.

Judging from the US Senate results, I’d say the latter.

And I could say that a country that was too sexist to elect Hillary Clinton is too sexist and racist to elect a woman “of color”, but then why did so many women and Hispanics vote Trump? Even AFTER the Puerto Rico shit? You can bitch all you want about the Electoral College, but again, Republicans won the Senate, fairly clearly. The Electoral College has nothing to do with that. Hell, at the end of all this Trump might have the popular vote.

I think what it comes down to is, once again, the media making this a horse race between an entertainer and a bureaucrat, where the entertainer has a natural advantage. Not only that, the impression was given that the Democrats had a get-out-the-vote operation and the Republicans didn’t.

It’s one thing for Trump to win, since everybody was saying this was a coin flip, but in the next few months before the Ministry of Truth is established, we need to analyze exactly how he won THIS big.

I saw a Vlad Vexler commentary on YouTube in the aftermath of this election, and he was pondering what exactly we need to consider as to how we (the center-liberal people) could have let things come to this. And my response was, what is there to understand? After all we have learned about Trump, after we have seen him visibly deteriorate, after we have seen what is waiting in the wings if he dies in office, we (well, not me) elected him again? Why?? Was it all just “Fuck the Democrats”? I mean, I can kind of understand that. But it’s not enough. Just as the evil and incompetence of the Republicans is independent of the fact that Democrats are inadequate even by leftist standards, the fact that Democrats are inadequate is independent of the fact that Republicans are not only evil but objectively unfit to govern, because as in socialist countries, the evil of their ideology is going to dictate policy that is totally in conflict with reality. And whatever my misgivings with the Democrats, that was the reason I voted for them.

I cannot even say that I am sorry. What is there to be sorry for? I did what I could.

I am mad. Because anybody who claims to care about the world we’re in and voted for the Trump Party anyway made the world worse. We let the Middle East down. We let Ukraine down. We let Taiwan down.

This is a world of consequences. You cannot, say, tell everybody that abortion rights matter, and vote for abortion rights initiatives and then elect a government that is going to make the Dobbs decision nationwide. Contrary to what Trumpniks believe, reality exists and causality exists. And the reality and consequences of their actions WILL come back on them just as they did in 2020. The problem is they will also come back on the rest of us. It will mean that more people, in this country and throughout the world, will die who didn’t have to die. We know those are the stakes because that is what happened.

Seriously, fuck this place. The Republican Party quit being a republican party. The Libertarian Party quit being a libertarian party. And America just quit being America.

The only thing I can say as encouragement for the next four years – or however long this lasts – is that America is, or is supposed to be, a country of individuals. It doesn’t matter if the collective has decided to be stupid and illogical. If you are still an individual – if YOU are still America – then America still exists.

My Predictions For 2024

Up til this weekend, every election poll has had the race still tied between Vice President Kamala Harris and once-and-future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. But apparently because Trump has so much built in support, from his Party, the “liberal” media and his cult of apes in pants, he figured he could afford a few unforced errors.
Like, when he went back to New York, a state he will never win, and held a Sunday rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City, for some reason, and the first speaker was a “famous” podcast comedian that I’ve never heard of until now telling jokes about the fecundity of Puerto Ricans and saying their homeland was a floating island of garbage. And at least he could make the excuse that he was using roast humor. The other guest speakers, who used various slurs for Harris and called her campaign staff “pimp handlers” weren’t even as funny. But apparently it’s the garbage comment that everybody fixated on. So in his when-you’re-in-a-hole-dig-to-China way, Trump decided to embrace the image by wearing a garbageman’s orange reflective vest to a campaign event. Cause apparently he didn’t look orange enough. You know he’s a professional garbageman cause he still had his tie on. He also decided to make the metaphor even more perfect by bringing out a white garbage truck with the Trump/Vance logo on it. And then he flubbed it by trying and failing to get in the cabin, displaying further evidence of his deteriorating motor skills.

And in this one speech Friday in Arizona, he got so frustrated at a bad microphone that he started doing the hawk-tuah like he was simulating oral sex on it. So Trump must think he’s going to win. He’s already rehearsing for his next meeting with Putin.

But otherwise, with everything we now know at this point, if Trump wins it is either because they ginned the results the way Maduro ginned the results in Venezuela, or because the American public as a whole is too damn stupid to find their faces in a mirror.

There’s a reason that the media is only focusing on a few swing states: Cause all but seven states are pretty much spoken for. If you look at, say, 270towin.com, it’s got Harris listed at 226 electoral votes cause those are the states that are pretty much sure to vote Democratic. Like, you know most of the Northeast and the West Coast are going to go blue. Trump is listed at having 219 votes. Because Alaska and most of “flyover country” are guaranteed to go Trump. Democratic Senate candidates in Texas and Florida are making a serious challenge, but ultimately, both states are going to go Trump. After all, if one of them did go Democratic, that would be the end of the election. If both went Democratic, that would be the end of the Republican Party.

Allan Lichtman’s final analysis for the Electoral College map shows Harris winning with the following spread on the remaining swing states: Trump gets Arizona and Nevada. That’s 17 Electors. Pennsylvania is still up in the air, which it probably would be given the amount of time it takes to get the votes. But Harris gets Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. Now, if Harris got Wisconsin and Michigan that’s 25 Electors. If she got Pennsylvania that’s 19 more and that would be 270 by itself. Of course that still won’t be enough because the Trumpniks will try to contest the results everywhere and if she has only that many, flipping one state would be enough to deny the election. Which is why North Carolina and Georgia going blue is important. I personally think Pennsylvania is more likely to go Democrat than North Carolina, but North Carolina is almost even money at this point. Georgia is always the wild card. It’s been red for some time and has a Republican government that has done a lot to restrict voting, even if it isn’t quite as Trumpnik as the governments in other red states. Yet voter turnout (and the repellent nature of local Senate candidates) has caused federal elections in Georgia to go to the Democrat the last few times.

And speaking as a Nevada native, frankly if I were a Harris campaign staffer looking at the Electoral College map, I’d say North Carolina for Nevada is a great trade.

And then there was the news that everyone on the Internet was going on about, where a major poll Saturday by Anne Selzer showed Harris leading by 3 in conservative Iowa. At the same time, more sober prognosticators don’t think Harris is actually going to win Iowa, but the telling thing is that a reputable pollster is showing her gaining and potentially winning a state Republicans can usually take for granted.

Maybe, contrary to what the media is telling us, Americans don’t want a country where Elon Musk is running economic policy, Robert Kennedy Jr. is running the health system and a rapist is deciding whether we have a national abortion ban.

My bet would be similar but not quite the same as Lichtman’s: Arizona and Nevada go Trump, although there’s a possibility that the popularity of the Democratic Senate choices in those states might carry Harris. Pennsylvania goes Harris, though that may take days to determine after Tuesday. North Carolina goes Trump, though that may take days. Georgia goes Harris. Again, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would be just enough for Harris to clinch and if she gets either NC or GA, that would cement the victory, and if she gets both, or gets one of those plus either or both of AZ or NV, that would really cinch it. Remember, we all knew in 2020 that Trump wasn’t going to admit if he lost, and Biden won mainly because he won enough states by wide enough margins that Trump couldn’t steal anything by recount or state government interference, and as it turned out, none of the states he contested after Election Day went back to his column. That looks like what we’re going to see here.

All that being the case, I’m more interested in seeing how everything plays out, how quickly it plays out, and, just as important in the long term, who wins the Senate. Part of the reason I’m more optimistic about Harris is that Democrats in Senate races – especially Colin Allred in Texas – are polling a lot better in their races than Harris polls against Trump. And while there is always cross-voting it’s a little hard to believe that people who are voting for Democrats in downballot races are that disinclined to vote for Harris. (Just as, Democratic optimists not withstanding, it’s a bit hard to believe that all those rural Republicans in Nevada are flooding the early voting lists so that they can vote in Harris.) I’m also interested in seeing how the state election Questions, especially Nevada Question 3, turn out.

But still, we can never assume that Trump is done for or that he’s not going to win this election. Always remember: God is real, and he hates us all.