Margaret Thatcher once said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” It’s become a cliché, but sometimes clichés are nonetheless true. Then again, we can make them no longer true. Today, it’s increasingly apparent that winning arguments aren’t necessary. You can win the vote without an argument, program, plan, defense, etc. Brand your opponents, refashion the election system to your likes, then harvest the votes. Thus, it’s possible to have a majority government of mediocrities, strident revolutionaries, nincompoops, power-seeking narcissists, and a laughingstock to the world. Welcome to America 2022.
Throughout 2022, I expected, like everyone else, a red wave for the midterms. It didn’t happen. I wasn’t the only one gobsmacked. The whole conservative commentariat was left filling baskets with jaws lying on the floor, including their own. Oftentimes, shock is soon followed by scapegoating those who we already had a well-established emotional investment in disliking. It’s a way of never having to admit you’re wrong. A prime example would be the Fox News primetime lineup of entertainer-critics and their gaggle of contributors such as Mollie Hemingway. They aren’t the only ones.
For others on the right, they talk and write as if we’re still in the bygone era when going to the precinct polling place, being handed a ballot, and taking it to a privacy cubicle to mark it in the sanctity of your conscience was the default setting for elections. Today, the secret ballot is dead due to the machinations of the Democratic Party and the excuse of COVID. Pundits like National Review’s Jim Geraghty refuse to recognize how voter behavior and electioneering has been dramatically altered for the worse as a result. The character and personality of our elections has mutated beyond recognition. People adapt to new environments, sometimes grotesquely. Do we need a psychologist to remind us?
The nightly Fox News primetime lineup replaced talk radio as opinion setters on the right. They glommed onto the rising Trump phenomena and out came the jargon of the “establishment” and “RHINO“ as objects of derision, and a romantic attachment to the “outsider”. The terms are invoked like magical incantations, absent of much content. The words are ways of emoting.
Earlier this week, speaking of gobsmacked, Hemingway on Ingraham’s show jumped at the opportunity to blame the leaders of the party – the “establishment” – for the debacle. She’s right, to a point, but that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that most everyone on the right was caught off-guard. So, they condemn others for believing what they believed. Got that? Theirs is a criticism of others for reading the tea leaves as they did. It’s rank hypocrisy.
As the French philosopher and writer Rochefoucauld pithily put it, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The vice of never having to say your sorry makes a hypocrite of us all.
Then we have the refusal to accept the fact that elections have radically changed, altering for the worse electioneering and what is expected of the voter. Jim Geraghty fell into this trap. He dismisses “conspiracies” as an explanation of the outcome, as do I. But a “conspiracy” is one thing, a revival of Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine on a national scale is another. Bribery or a voter roll littered with the dead isn’t necessary. Just warp the system under the color of law so you don’t have to cheat. Some of the chicanery of an older time is legally permitted today. Many, many states have no-fault mail-in balloting and early voting. Ballots are shotgunned through the mail in some states from long out-of-date voter rolls. The secret ballot is dead, dead, dead, as ballots go into domiciles and get marked God-knows-how. Ballot harvesting invites highly partisan activists into the space between the voter’s conscience and its delivery into the box.
No, Hugh Hewitt, the harvesting isn’t the innocent act of collecting them. The older safeguards abounded not because everyone will violate moral norms without them. There’s a reason for the fingerprinting and background checks for school personnel. Without them, more miscreants will be quietly enabled to molest the kids. Ditto for partisan activists being kept as far away as possible from a person’s vote and its depository. The older voting safeguards were confidence-builders for the voter to be safe with his or her choice.
Geraghty cited the unevenness of the results throughout the ballot as proof of the absence of a “conspiracy”. For one, the election was not a conspiracy but exhibited the characteristics of political-machine style electioneering made possible by early voting, mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, etc. For instance, Laxalt loses the Nevada Senate race but the Republican captures the governorship. This line of thought ignores how a political machine might operate, particularly a national one, like stressing high-profile races, a laser-beam focus on keeping control of the House and Senate, and how closely a candidate adheres to the script. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid – with emphasis on the “must-haves” frees up space on the ballot for disparate choices.
Hemingway dismisses candidate quality, as do I, and Geraghty thought it mattered. I think that if it was of consequence, both parties had a problem. Blake Masters was a novice and John Fetterman was unable to hold a train of thought or put a sentence or line of logic together. Katie Hobbs was a glaring millennial-uptalking/valley girl/airhead. The list is long and filled with charlatans and wastrels. Many Democrats refused to debate or only agreed to one after enough votes were locked up in early voting. Joe Biden in 2020 showed how political-machine campaigning is tailor-made for a basement strategy. This election season had few debates and very little face-to-face campaigning by the Democrats. The strategy was to hunker down, avoid any risk, and tar the other side with over-powering evil.
Was Chicago’s Richard Daley or Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett ever known for their debate prowess? Their expertise was in running the machine of an army of operatives steeped in favor-peddling. Today, single potentates aren’t necessary, just have an overwhelming fundraising advantage to build a machine that facilitates a safe space/basement presence on a nonexistent campaign trail.
Nobody was put through a wringer to make the average voter ferret out their preferences, because the wringer was absent, or reduced to irrelevance. In many places, especially in blue states, for many voters, the campaign season began and ended within a week or two after receiving their ballot in the mail. The machine went to work locking up these votes ASAP at favorable moments in a news cycle that they helped engineer with an always compliant media. Make broad, spurious charges – “a threat to democracy” or “MAGA Republicans” or “they want women to die” [abortion, Dobbs] – and contort anything to reinforce their self-created stereotype of their opponents (the Paul Pelosi incident). But, by all means, flood the bank with early votes before the public’s attention is drawn to the real issues, the ones that are hammering their daily lives.
In this election, given its structure, issues really didn’t matter – inflation, the border, the Kabul disaster, XY “girls” invading girls’ bathrooms and sports, crime, kids barred from their schools, urban barbarity, greenie authoritarianism, etc. – in order to keep the eyes trained on the meanie Republicans. That’s the reason for hunkering down and let Biden occasionally emerge from his bunker to plaster the meanies.
This style of campaigning leads to some real eye-opening results. The “they want to women to die” led to an endorsement of what can only be described as infanticide in more than a few states. Some state constitutions became festooned with carte blanche abortion. Persistent polls for decades have shown a popular rejection of late-term abortion. Did people really know that they were embracing it, and, in some cases, forcing other people to pay for them or others to perform them under criminal sanction, without parental consent? Did people really know that the “health of the mother” language is subterfuge for late-term abortion? In my own state, Montana, the voters couldn’t bring themselves to protect a baby who survived one. If there is a Judgment Day or some moment of cosmic justice, many souls are imperiled by what they were led to spuriously believe. In some not-to-distant future, will “my body, my choice” join the ranks alongside “racial purity”?
These results, grotesque as they are, are only possible if the vetting of traditional campaigning is replaced by our newly minted political-machine style. We’ll only get more of what we didn’t intend in a government filled with acolytes of the mindless talking point. Highly partisan activists and political groupies seldom make for statesmen/women.
Geraghty, Hemingway, Ingraham, and me too, would probably agree on the need for Republicans to follow suit. It’s a time of reciprocal escalation to avoid unilateral disarmament. However, Republicans should only get good at this malignant political-machine style in order to destroy it. End universal mail-in voting, make election day one day, re-enshrine the secret ballot, and secure the vote. It’s not hard, just use this bastardized system to gain power to end it.
Until we come to grips with a malignant election system that brings out the worst in all of us, anything that we do in the long run will be pointless. A government of shallow narcissists and brain-dead activists will only hasten the decline of a once mighty nation. Competing national political machines encouraging ill-considered voter behavior will guarantee it. Without correction, paste R.I.P on the once-great citizen republic called the United States of America.
RogerG
Read or watch here for more:
* Jim Geraghty’s explanation of the midterm results: “The Magnitude of the GOP Midterm Debacle”, National Review, Nov. 14, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-magnitude-of-the-gop-midterm-debacle/
* Mollie Hemingway’s analysis of the midterm results on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show at https://youtu.be/cCyPdLtx844