Midterms 2022: The Real Rally to Restore Sanity
Most people aren't secretly terrible. And that's kind of nice to know.
I held off on writing about the midterm elections, mostly because everyone is writing about the midterm elections and I worry the internet might run out of space.
But rather insultingly, no one’s written about how I personally feel about the midterm elections. And not to be egotistical, but I think I’m the right guy for the job.
For last seven years, a tentpole premise of Trumpism has been that, deep down, we are all as horrible as Donald Trump. As a candidate, and then as a president, Trump never really argued that he was a good person. Instead, he argued he was “telling it like it is.” That assaulting women was “locker room talk.” In public, at work, with our families, Americans might care about things like decency and democracy. But this was all pretense. Peel back enough layers, he insisted, and most Americans were rotten to the core.
When he surprised everyone by getting elected president, it wasn’t just the country that changed. It was our collective assumptions about how much disgusting-ness Americans would tolerate.
On the internet, you’d often hear some version of “lol nothing matters,” usually written in a combination of resignation, fear, and ever-so-slight intrigue. The Trump era wasn’t really proof that nothing mattered. After all, a president presiding over an excellent economy in the midst of a national crisis failed to win re-election. But nothing mattered the way we thought it would matter. The Access Hollywood tape. Extorting Ukraine. Bungling covid. Decent, patriotic people weren’t supposed to tolerate this stuff. They should have been knockout blows. They weren’t.
Republican politicians embraced “nothing matters” in two important ways. First, they pushed the envelope of just how vilely they could behave. Matt Gaetz. Ted Cruz. Marjorie Taylor Green. Etc etc. Even boring, strait-laced Republicans like Glenn Youngkin felt liberated enough to joke about Paul Pelosi being beaten with a hammer by a right-wing conspiracy theorist. (He apologized later, but only after the election, which is kind of the point.)
Politicians are always trying to figure out what voters give them permission to do. The GOP decided that voters had given them permission to cut the brakes.
And for a while it seemed that they might be right. The political science way of describing “nothing matters” was the “shy Trump voter,” the voter who tells people and pollsters he would never vote for Donald Trump and then votes for him anyway.
The implication of the shy Trump voter theory went way beyond political theory, and some ways was even worse than the idea that Trumpism was destined to be overwhelmingly popular. It suggested that for a large chunk of the country - your friends, your family, your neighbors - being a decent person was just an act. Trump was right. We were wrong. People really were like him deep down.
And of course, if deep down, people are like Trump - a man obsessed with using the power of the state to punish his enemies, and who sees political violence as just another means to an end - what could happen here?
There’s good evidence that “shy voters” aren’t a thing. There’s also good evidence climate change is real, though, and that never stopped Republican elites from denying it.
For a long time, unlike with climate change, real-world evidence seemed to be on the denier’s side. The Trafalgar Group, a polling outfit that always seemed obviously snake-oily, claimed that it could do better than traditional polling by reaching the shy Trump voters. In 2016, they appeared to be right. They “called” Trump’s win. In 2018 they called DeSantis’s win. In 2020 they incorrectly predicted that Trump would be re-elected, but when everyone else thought a wave was coming, they were the only ones who thought it would be close, and they were right.
That’s part of what was so deeply unsettling about recent years. Not just all the stuff going on politically, or involving policy. But the continued sense that all the things we’d been brought up to believe - that enough Americans care about democracy, and doing the right thing, and role models, and love of country, and basic human decency, that our experiment in self-government will endure and be worth continuing - might not necessarily be true.
Which brings us to these midterms. Because 2022 was the ultimate test of nothing matters. I’m not going to go into all the details because they’ve been covered a million times. But the basic thrust of the Republican Party’s argument in this campaign was that voters would put up with any kind of behavior and any number of outrages.
Think about Dr. Oz’s campaign flack who went on the record to say that maybe if John Fetterman had eaten a vegetable he wouldn’t have a stroke. This wasn’t Donald Trump, a uniquely damaged yet charismatic person, going off script riling up a crowd. This was a replacement-level campaign staffer deciding that the best way to win over voters was to be (to use a political science term) an absolute dick.
And the polling backed it up. At the end, led by Trafalgar and a series of Republican-leaning copycats, the polls snapped back in line with the “fundamentals,” suggested that all that beyond-the-pale behavior wasn’t actually beyond the pale at all. Voters might not like it. But they wouldn’t care about it. It wouldn’t matter.
To me, the real lesson of 2022 is that everything matters. Inflation mattered. Joe Biden’s low approval ratings mattered. Crime (and the perception of crime) mattered. But they weren’t the only things that mattered. And in the states where the Republican Party most fully embraced Trumpism - the states where they were the most undemocratic and indecent - they lost.
We’re not out of the woods yet. GOP elites have rejected Trump in favor of Ron DeSantis, which is like deciding Seven-Up in favor of Sprite.
But one of the hard things about democracy - one of the things its detractors in places like Hungary, Russia, or China enjoy pointing out - is that it relies on the will of the people, and people often aren’t very good to each other. We can be selfish and cruel and petty and shortsighted. Why would anything good come of turning governance over to a species like that?
American democracy has obviously reflected, and sometimes amplified, the flaws of the people who compose it. But the magic of our experiment is that more often than not it’s been better than we are - and certainly better than people who aspire to become autocrats are. We want to be better. And in the long run, if given the choice, we tend to pick leaders who appeal to the best in us instead of the worst.
That’s what Tuesday reasserted. And that’s why I’m feeling so relieved.
P.S. Thanks to everyone who came over here from Twitter and signed up. I hope you like the newsletter.
P.P.S. I’ll probably change the name of this thing so I can write about whatever I feel like writing about that is in the realm of politics/democracy/words but not so op-ed-ish that it should be an op-ed. I’m open to suggestions.
Ta
David I want to believe your fourth-to-last paragraph (fourth-to-last, if you count both P.S.'s and the one-liner one): the paragraph that starts with "American democracy...." and then extols it. I want to believe it and I am open to it; I'm not a 100% cynical person. Someone once said that the people who seem most cynical on the outside are often the ones who are most idealistic on the inside -- they're just feeling crushed about the bad stuff. (I think it might have been me who said it. Or, I.)
But listen, your assertions in the paragraph are partly backed up by the poetic eloquence with which you assert them. Things that are asserted poetically and eloquently just have a certain ring of truth to them, even if they're only wishful thinking. But you've also backed up the democracy-extolling assertions with the fact that the Republican Party seems only to have won the House (not true), and that only by a small margin; and did not seem to have won the Senate (below I'll argue that the Republican Party has controlled and still does control the Senate). And there is some relief that a handful of MAGA operatives did not succeed at slithering into some of the more dangerously positioned state-level posts of secretary of state. Hey man that's great.
But I'm not so sure -- are you really sure? -- that now is the time to be extolling American democracy rather than pronouncing it dead. I will not repeat the usual, tired list of complaints about our body politic, but posit that the theoretical underpinnings of any legitimate democracy have become, literally, defunct. Obsolete. They no longer apply. Let me explain why I think our democracy has not just recently died, but rather that its corpse already stiffened and went cold decades ago.
It is not just that the party of nearly-neofascist lunatics, in 2022, mostly controls a Supreme Court that anyway lost all credibility two decades ago when it overturned our country's 2000 presidential election. The unelected Court Justices blithely inserted into the White House, in a bloodless coup, the loser of the 2000 American election.
It is not just that a fully-neofascist neofascist did win the presidency in 2016, and came incredibly close to winning it again in 2020, and will certainly at least come close to doing so in 2024. It is not just that the nearly-neofascists have won control of the House now and also, contrary to our news headlines, have maintained their hold on the Senate. (Excuse me, people. The Republicans still control the Senate, as much as ever, as long as you recognize Sinema and Manchin as the undercover Republican moles that they are, seated for no particular reason (except as disguise) on the Democratic Party's side of the aisle).
And it is not just that supposedly vibrant democracies in recent years elected far-rightwing heads of state in Italy and Brazil, and not just that the largest democracy in the world -- India -- has had a far-right ruling party for nearly a decade. Granted, some far-right leaders are not hellbent on tearing down their countries' entire democracies; some of them only want to tear down key parts.
But here is what is more signficant than any of this, in my opinion. Regardless of which side barely won these midterms or has barely won or lost in nearly any of the recent, 21st-century American elections, the contests themselves are not actual elections.
If they were real, actual elections, victory or defeat would not be wholly determined, as it has been now for a long while, by a battle for power waged not among voters, but rather, between two media corporations: the New York Times, from which most news networks get most of their information, versus Fox Propaganda Inc.
Actual elections aren't lost or won based on the collective whims of, on one hand, masses of voters who are totally siloed within the fact-universe created by media on one side, and, on the other hand, other masses siloed in a different fact-universe created by media on the other side.
The idea that so-called "false news" and so-called "targeted voter suppression strategies" are relatively new phenomena is naive. Misguiding news narratives and concepts, biased framing of issues, absurd kowtowing by journalists to distorted and misleading "conventional wisdom" echo chambers ... these tools have been amplified and turbo-driven by mass media for decades, with those media themselves (including my former editors, colleagues and to some extent myself) influenced, blinded, biased, swayed, distracted and misled by paid political operatives, either of the parties, of the billionaires, or of the politicians seeking re-election via media manipulation. (Disclosure: I formerly reported for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press and others.)
Rival gangs of billionaires and the owners of rival industries have been lining up behind Republicans on one side, and behind Democrats on the other, for decades, and they have been systematically biasing the news-facts-narratives in separate mediaverses for just as long.
Ridiculous falsehoods are believed by blinkered, deluded voters of every stripe. (For example, such illogical and debunked but nevertheless alive-and-well falsehoods, as these: that deficit spending to help low-income and unemployed workers is a burden that we are handing down to our grandchildren; that U.S. foreign and military policy is determined exclusively by our security concerns and our values, not mostly determined by transnational corporations; or that, compared with the middle class in other countries, the American middle class enjoys a standard of living and quality of life that is either best in the world are among the best ..... these are the ridiculous falsehoods that I mean.).
The only reason these midterm "election" results feel like good news about democracy is that too many people think our democracy is still alive, and, even if some partial truth is conceded to their perspective, too many people are "worried that what amounts to a coup might be attempted in 2024." That's a false worry. It is a misleading concern.
There is no "might' and there is no future tense regarding the start of the current coup attempt. It is already occurring now in plain sight, it is already in progress, and regardless of whether the midterm elections look like they might have dealt the coup a small and temporary setback ..... regardless.... the coup leaders' success or failure will not -- not -- be determined by actual democratic elections. Not this year, not in 2024, not anytime soon.
The Framers, the Founding Fathers, the philosophers of modern democracy from Rousseau to Locke and beyond, constructed some theories that, for some time, made some sense, at least in theory. And for a century or so those theories of democracy could be rolled out and at least messily approximated, in practice.
But all of these democratic theories and nearly-democratic practices were long ago obliterated by the advent of nationwide mass media, harnessed to serve the objectives of competing billionaires and business groups, and the think tanks they fund, and the members of congress they own.
Restoring, reviving, resurrecting anything in America deserving of the name "democracy" will not be achieved at all, by staving off Trump and the Trumpist hordes, if it turns out that is even possible to do. There still will be no democracy here, unless democratic theory is overhauled, new measures are taken and profound structural changes are made. To think that a democracy is functioning at all, while a democracy-destroying, wealth-fueled, media-amplified propaganda juggernaut is roaming the Earth, is like thinking a Birthday Party is still going on in a house where lions entered long ago and are roaming through the rooms killing and eating any leftover partiers.