This past Tuesday came as a shock to a lot of people on the Right. It shouldn’t have, but frankly Don’s win a year ago should not have happened at all, so the shock on the Left must have felt similar. We are now not even a year into his second term and the reality of what he is has finally begun to register with those who thought voting for anything but the democrat was a good thing.
There is, however, one main lesson to be learned from both events.
Turnout matters above all else.
For an off-season election, we saw record turnout across the country, with massive wins for the candidates running in opposition to MAGA. This is not a shock. Regardless of one’s political desires, this country is largely a center left polity. Not in terms of specific programs or ideologies, but in terms of sentiment. We are not, by and large, bullies. We tend to react negatively to churlishness, mean-spiritedness, greed, and cruelty. Whether the Right sees themselves as any of those things, the fact is the majority of people do, because the GOP has become, over the decades since Reagan, the Party of No. This past year this aspect has not only been present but touted by the smiling enablers of what is turning out to be the most curmudgeonly, Bah Humbug administration in our history. The shutdown currently is nothing but a consequence of the Republican-controlled federal apparatus consistently messaging that people below a certain income—or of a certain complexion, a certain religious bent, a certain gender (fluid or not)—do not deserve anything simply by dint of being humans. Whether they like it or not, they are responsible by virtue of passing a bill (Big, certainly, but thoroughly ugly) that pointedly cuts and curtails those very things we need to have decent lives. In order to pay for tax cuts to people and entities who do need them, public programs supporting healthcare, housing, and nutrition were on the chopping block. Somehow the GOP continues to believe that by eliminating government programs that address these things will somehow magically be compensated for by private moneys that have consistently failed to appear no matter how many times they repeat this nonsense. Charity has never been able to make up for the in-built social inequities that maintain a powerless class. This is the richest nation in history—feed people.
Instead, they play politics. And it has been made as clear as can be that this is exacly what Don is doing. He does not understand why people are in need. Personally, I’ve known people like this all my life. “They should get a job! Why is it my responsibility to take care of them?” The thing is, while there are always people who suffer this kind of civic myopia, we usually don’t elect them to office.
Added to that is this stalemate over the Epstein files. I would find this amusing if it weren’t so toxic. When Don initially declared they would be made public, obviously he and the Party expected to find scores of Democrats in them. One can only imagine the phone call between Bondi and Don when it was discovered that, no, it would seem most of those implicated are either in the Party or are major donors. Suddenly, releasing those files has become The Thing That Must Never Happen. Distractions have proliferated, up to and including unsanctioned attacks on fishing boats. The rhetoric is becoming a near scream. The Speaker will not reconvene the House, not because he fears losing any ground on the reconciliation package, but because he would have to seat a newly-elected representative who will then be the last necessary vote to force a release of the Epsteins files. He can claim that is not the reason all he wants, but Mike Johnson’s credibility is about gone.
Why, one might ask, are so many of them vulnerable to the Epstein files? Well, hardly a week or two goes by that we see another “conservative” official charged with a sex crime. It has become monotonous. A new pedophilia charge is made and, oh yes, it’s a Republican. Again.
Before the claim is made that this is liberal bias in the media, let me remind you that Rightwing media is a monster in this country, and it is a safe bet that if a Democrat were guilty of any of this, they would put up billboards.
It’s not so much that Democrats are necessarily, by virtue of being Democrats, less prone to this sort of perversion. It’s that people with those character traits can’t be found among people inclined to vote democratic, but also that they don’t run for office or are weeded out before they get to that point. Because such character traits are not isolated. They come bundled with other characteristics that bar them from consideration. Whereas the opposite is true for the GOP—they reward such characteristics, because they identify them with the kind of red meat machismo they see as indicative of good conservative values. They actually select for the higher likelihood that their candidates will turn out to be sexual predators, because this is linked to predator traits in other areas. I suppose one could say that the self-styled virile toughguy attributes tend often to come paired with a taste for sexual dominance (and who is easier to dominate than children?).
That and Epstein’s little party machine was a major private power-brokering space. Even if some of these candidates never partook of the perks on offer, their presence was for a time an expected part of getting on within the movement.
At the end of the day, it will finally be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the goal of all this was to secure a privileged position in which to act without constraint, either in business dealings or bedroom games. The GOP has become the party of closed door privilege.
And it has all been self-selected. Any savvy political operative who mouthed the appropriate platitudes to mollify the hard-core conservative base did quite well in this arena. And since that base had already determined that their opposition was an agency of the antichrist, appearance clearly mattered more than substance. Conjoining the religious right with a major party was always going to risk creating a Caligula’s Court, because for decades we also experienced one saw-dust preacher after another revealed to be a hypocrite of the first water, one sexual pecadillo after another—and almost universally forgiven by the rank and file. That the same thing seems to be the case now in the politics of the Right ought to surprise no one. Such a mindset actually prefers a deeply-flawed corrupt character. They couldn’t stand seeing a decent man in the White House because it showed them they had no valid cause to insist on their model of sin-and-forgiveness powerbrokering.
But in a practical sense, this has all been a disaster. That’s all right, though, in their view. Combined with the “libertarian” wing of the Party that insists that federal government, no matter what, must be brought low, these two goals reinforce and the intransigence increases. Too bad so many people get hurt through attempts to enact this state of affairs.
It has become laughable and I would laugh if this were not so sad and frightening. The veneer has been ripped off and now people have a choice to make. Reject this heinous mix of authoritarianism and callous bigotry or admit that, really, this is what you want: to be a nationalist above all, which means being a bigot and willfullly ignorant.
What we must take away from it, we who oppose all this, is as I said above: turnout matters. Apathy is the enemy. Anything that aims to suppress the vote—anything—must be ground to dust. No one should win an election by barring people from the polls. That’s not winning, that’s cheating, and the GOP has pretty much admitted that the only way they win is by preventing certain people from voting. If we do this next November, have this level of turnout, and more, we have a shot at restoring the legitimacy of our institutions. Because right now, as it stands, we are a rogue state.
The Distal Muse
November, November
This past Tuesday came as a shock to a lot of people on the Right. It shouldn’t have, but frankly Don’s win a year ago should not have happened at all, so the shock on the Left must have felt similar. We are now not even a year into his second term and the reality of what he is has finally begun to register with those who thought voting for anything but the democrat was a good thing.
There is, however, one main lesson to be learned from both events.
Turnout matters above all else.
For an off-season election, we saw record turnout across the country, with massive wins for the candidates running in opposition to MAGA. This is not a shock. Regardless of one’s political desires, this country is largely a center left polity. Not in terms of specific programs or ideologies, but in terms of sentiment. We are not, by and large, bullies. We tend to react negatively to churlishness, mean-spiritedness, greed, and cruelty. Whether the Right sees themselves as any of those things, the fact is the majority of people do, because the GOP has become, over the decades since Reagan, the Party of No. This past year this aspect has not only been present but touted by the smiling enablers of what is turning out to be the most curmudgeonly, Bah Humbug administration in our history. The shutdown currently is nothing but a consequence of the Republican-controlled federal apparatus consistently messaging that people below a certain income—or of a certain complexion, a certain religious bent, a certain gender (fluid or not)—do not deserve anything simply by dint of being humans. Whether they like it or not, they are responsible by virtue of passing a bill (Big, certainly, but thoroughly ugly) that pointedly cuts and curtails those very things we need to have decent lives. In order to pay for tax cuts to people and entities who do need them, public programs supporting healthcare, housing, and nutrition were on the chopping block. Somehow the GOP continues to believe that by eliminating government programs that address these things will somehow magically be compensated for by private moneys that have consistently failed to appear no matter how many times they repeat this nonsense. Charity has never been able to make up for the in-built social inequities that maintain a powerless class. This is the richest nation in history—feed people.
Instead, they play politics. And it has been made as clear as can be that this is exacly what Don is doing. He does not understand why people are in need. Personally, I’ve known people like this all my life. “They should get a job! Why is it my responsibility to take care of them?” The thing is, while there are always people who suffer this kind of civic myopia, we usually don’t elect them to office.
Added to that is this stalemate over the Epstein files. I would find this amusing if it weren’t so toxic. When Don initially declared they would be made public, obviously he and the Party expected to find scores of Democrats in them. One can only imagine the phone call between Bondi and Don when it was discovered that, no, it would seem most of those implicated are either in the Party or are major donors. Suddenly, releasing those files has become The Thing That Must Never Happen. Distractions have proliferated, up to and including unsanctioned attacks on fishing boats. The rhetoric is becoming a near scream. The Speaker will not reconvene the House, not because he fears losing any ground on the reconciliation package, but because he would have to seat a newly-elected representative who will then be the last necessary vote to force a release of the Epsteins files. He can claim that is not the reason all he wants, but Mike Johnson’s credibility is about gone.
Why, one might ask, are so many of them vulnerable to the Epstein files? Well, hardly a week or two goes by that we see another “conservative” official charged with a sex crime. It has become monotonous. A new pedophilia charge is made and, oh yes, it’s a Republican. Again.
Before the claim is made that this is liberal bias in the media, let me remind you that Rightwing media is a monster in this country, and it is a safe bet that if a Democrat were guilty of any of this, they would put up billboards.
It’s not so much that Democrats are necessarily, by virtue of being Democrats, less prone to this sort of perversion. It’s that people with those character traits can’t be found among people inclined to vote democratic, but also that they don’t run for office or are weeded out before they get to that point. Because such character traits are not isolated. They come bundled with other characteristics that bar them from consideration. Whereas the opposite is true for the GOP—they reward such characteristics, because they identify them with the kind of red meat machismo they see as indicative of good conservative values. They actually select for the higher likelihood that their candidates will turn out to be sexual predators, because this is linked to predator traits in other areas. I suppose one could say that the self-styled virile toughguy attributes tend often to come paired with a taste for sexual dominance (and who is easier to dominate than children?).
That and Epstein’s little party machine was a major private power-brokering space. Even if some of these candidates never partook of the perks on offer, their presence was for a time an expected part of getting on within the movement.
At the end of the day, it will finally be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the goal of all this was to secure a privileged position in which to act without constraint, either in business dealings or bedroom games. The GOP has become the party of closed door privilege.
And it has all been self-selected. Any savvy political operative who mouthed the appropriate platitudes to mollify the hard-core conservative base did quite well in this arena. And since that base had already determined that their opposition was an agency of the antichrist, appearance clearly mattered more than substance. Conjoining the religious right with a major party was always going to risk creating a Caligula’s Court, because for decades we also experienced one saw-dust preacher after another revealed to be a hypocrite of the first water, one sexual pecadillo after another—and almost universally forgiven by the rank and file. That the same thing seems to be the case now in the politics of the Right ought to surprise no one. Such a mindset actually prefers a deeply-flawed corrupt character. They couldn’t stand seeing a decent man in the White House because it showed them they had no valid cause to insist on their model of sin-and-forgiveness powerbrokering.
But in a practical sense, this has all been a disaster. That’s all right, though, in their view. Combined with the “libertarian” wing of the Party that insists that federal government, no matter what, must be brought low, these two goals reinforce and the intransigence increases. Too bad so many people get hurt through attempts to enact this state of affairs.
It has become laughable and I would laugh if this were not so sad and frightening. The veneer has been ripped off and now people have a choice to make. Reject this heinous mix of authoritarianism and callous bigotry or admit that, really, this is what you want: to be a nationalist above all, which means being a bigot and willfullly ignorant.
What we must take away from it, we who oppose all this, is as I said above: turnout matters. Apathy is the enemy. Anything that aims to suppress the vote—anything—must be ground to dust. No one should win an election by barring people from the polls. That’s not winning, that’s cheating, and the GOP has pretty much admitted that the only way they win is by preventing certain people from voting. If we do this next November, have this level of turnout, and more, we have a shot at restoring the legitimacy of our institutions. Because right now, as it stands, we are a rogue state.
Share this:
Like this:
Related