Category: 2024 elections

The ancients had much to say about hypocrisy and willful blindness in respect to problems.  The prophet Isaiah admonished King Hezekiah on his deathbed (2Kings 20:1, NIV), “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”  And then there is this famous line against pretense from Luke’s gospel (6:42, NIV):

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The Left – meaning today’s progressives and liberals – is nearly beyond redemption, philosophically and in many cases behaviorally.  Its neo-Marxist collectivism is a national suicide pact. But a sizeable element of the Right is similarly proving itself unworthy.  It is immersed in a performative style of politics, a politics as therapy – “Stick it to the libs, I feel better” – that lacks direction other than the desire to humiliate the other side in staged mini-dramas.  They may get an emotional rush from the rhetoric and theatrical antics but it is repulsive to large swaths of the nation’s electorate.  Principally for this reason, the last three election cycles have proven to be disappointments for those of a more conservative disposition.

Call it the Trump contagion.  It entered the GOP’s bloodstream in 2015 and is proving resistant to cure.  Trump still conjures a 43% plurality, 15 points better than second-place DeSantis, among Republican voters in the latest Fox News poll (see below).  43% are hungry for a four-peat of disappointment – to add to 2018, 2020, and 2022.  Einstein’s famous insanity formulation keeps coming to mind.  This large faction of Republicans remains oblivious to the fact that a candidate that survives them may not, and increasingly will not, survive the general electorate if the party’s base continues to choose candidates based on theatrics and their longings for an emotional release in their politics.  The hardheaded on the Right need to understand one inescapable fact: first, as a party, to accomplish anything, you’ve got to win . . . the general!  The stalwarts might celebrate victory in the intraparty feud in spring but after the dust settles in November, the donkey-party Left will still be making policy in the seats of power.

The contagion has overtaken the official GOP apparatus in some red/purple states.  The effect of the takeover is turning some purple states blue.  In places where it is deeply embedded, the infected exhibit the tendencies of those immersed in the blue bubbles, only this time, in a red one.  Secure in the cloister of others like them, they are awkward when forced to confront people who disagree and promptly jump to condemnation.  It’s true for both silos.  Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers”, Hillary’s “deplorables”, and ritual abuse of the word “establishment” and “elites” by Fox News’s primetime “populists”, and Trump’s litany of juvenile insults?

Professor Alberto Coll of DePaul University School of Law, and an astute critic of today’s defunct civic education, is concerned about the decline of the republican civic virtues of prudence, deliberation, and moderation (see below).  They are most fundamentally missing from K-12 and have been drummed out of higher ed, increasingly replaced by habitual Marxist oppressor-shaming.  It’s an ideology more at home as a bankrupt theology with its unexaminable assumptions and heaven-on-earth end state.  Not surprisingly, they behave much like jihadis with their statue-toppling, silencings on campuses, itinerant mobs, and the forcible injection of their ideology into all facets of the culture.

The Left’s inhumanity has elicited an analogous reaction on the Right.  Gone is any semblance of prudence.  Prudence dictates the recognition of complexities, consequences, and trade-offs.  Instead, everything seems so simple in a constant branding of everyone as either evil (them) or good (us).

The Left’s infantilism shows as an attempt to facetiously adduce cause from correlation: socio-economic stats are unequal among identity groups therefore bigotry is at fault, or so they assume.  If they can’t find sufficient numbers of bigots, they’ll make it airily “systemic”, which leads them right into the strawman fallacy.  It’s ludicrous.

The Right sometimes stumbles into the “systemic” quicksand.  They have a vocabulary of vague pejoratives to feed their obsessions such as the aforementioned “establishment” and “elites”.  Anyone who has been around too long in the public arena is automatically suspect by that logic, especially if previously identified as one by the movement’s carnival barkers (Hello, primetime Fox News.).  The terms encourage an instant distrust of credentials so academics, scholars, people in the professions, political figures, and leaders in business and civil society that disagree with them are summarily rejected.  It’s another form of bigotry, something familiar to Antifa and Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and The Squad in their usual hivemind.

Deliberation goes the way of prudence.  Adults don’t display it. It begins with listening which is clearly absent from the halls of Congress.  Have you seen the expansive number of empty seats on C-SPAN during speeches on the House and Senate floors?  People talk past each other in party-approved talking points.  The kids don’t see it modeled by adults in their media, or in their schools’ curriculums that refuse to establish a good grounding in language, the best of Western literature (Bible, Shakespeare), history, philosophy, and logic. They’ve been turned into vehicles for the voguish neo-Marxist orthodoxy.

I must admit that it’s hard on deliberation when one party – the Democrats – is committed to a revolution as complete as anything begun in 1917 Petrograd (see below about Antonio Gramsci).

As for moderation, what do you think after prudence and deliberation have been kicked to the wayside?  The socialism of AOC becomes mainstream Democrat, and the kookery of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Gaetz/Boebert/Trump clique seizes the reins of a Republican House caucus with the narrowest of majorities.  43% of the Republican base and the nearly entire elected Democratic Party, and maybe three-quarters of the Dem base, stand athwart each other separated with firehoses spewing rhetorical slime.

Since 57% of the Republican base retains some attachment to reality, the country’s hopes for a functioning republic reside with them.  A pushback may have begun with Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp.  He courageously stood against the Georgia state GOP that backed his opponent in the primary and went on to thump the Trump-backed shill in the primary and the odious Stacey Abrams in the general by 7.5 points.  The victory means that the guy has street cred.

He warned big donors in the Georgians First Leadership Committee at a recent luncheon, “. . . we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future.”  “Infrastructure” is a $10 word for a Trump-crazed state central committee.  The state party’s chairman, David Shafer, was so humiliated by the defeat of the committee/Trump-endorsed choices up and down the ballot in the party’s primary that he’s given up pursuing another term.  The state committee’s stance was stupid on steroids.  Shafer and his endorsements may be simpatico with Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene but not to a huge majority of registered Republicans, let alone the general electorate.  Successful politics is about addition, and not subtraction and performance-art politics. It means that the public wants good and safe schools, the potholes to be filled, crime to be defeated, and the sewers and garbage collection to function as billed.  “Owning the libs” won’t suffice.

The same is true for the Trump fanatics officially running the GOP in states like Arizona.  The writer Dan McLaughlin put it succinctly when he wrote, “It’s time to take the party back from the party.” Kemp is doing his part (see below).

The fallout from the 2022 elections is a siren-call warning to the GOP.  Of course, the country appears evenly divided when one of the parties weakens its standing with choices lathered in the general odium of Trump and sloganeering psychodramas.  The Democrats’ problem is the neo-Marxist Democratic Party and a hash that they’ve made of parts of the country under their control.  The Republicans have the Trump millstone around their neck. Given that dynamic, of course we have parity . . . of foolishness.

A few examples illustrate the reflexive Republican foot-shooting that makes it easier on the neo-Marxist Democrats thereby levelling the playing field in a country overwhelmingly not fond of the hammer and sickle.  In one heavily Republican Ohio congressional district, the Trump-endorsed/Q-Anon-dabbling J. R. Majewski lost in the general.  Moving over to a Michigan House race, Joe Gibbs beat incumbent Peter Meijir in a Republican primary campaign wallowing on Meijir’s vote to impeach Trump, only to lose in the general by double digits.  In Washington State, the Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler narrowly lost to Joe Kent in the primary with her vote to impeach Trump a key factor.  Kent, saddled with ties to white nationalists and other elements of the unhinged right, and fully immersed in the hyperbolic language of the Trump caucus, lost in the general.  No wonder that the expected red wave turned into scattered rain drops.

Republicans, if you don’t like rule by a commissariat, field better candidates with an eye to winning elections.  Try that.  Dah!  Send Trump packing, and for his cadre of groupies, grow up and follow Mick Jagger’s advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Young Americans Are Increasingly Ungrateful. Here’s What to Do about It”, Alberto Coll, National Review Online, 2/26/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/young-americans-are-increasingly-ungrateful-heres-what-to-do-about-it/

* “Fox News Poll: Trump, DeSantis top 2024 Republican preference”, Dana Blanton, Fox News, 2/26/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-desantis-top-2024-republican-preference/ar-AA17X7hn

* “Brian Kemp: Time for the Georgia GOP to Leave the Georgia GOP”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review Online, 2/23/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brian-kemp-time-for-the-georgia-gop-to-leave-the-georgia-gop/

* “Kemp moves to take command of GOP, leaving state party behind”, Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/23/23, at https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/kemp-moves-to-take-command-of-gop-leaving-state-party-behind/H6EYBMRZDFFCXBYNPPP3PY4WQA/

* An excellent summary of the influence of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci of the 1920’s and 30’s on today’s neo-Marxism in the Democratic Party and the commanding heights of the culture can be read here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

When does just being wrong cross over into insanity?  Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s.  The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results.  Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.

Today, we have good reason to know better.  Micro reality behaves differently than macro.  Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).

However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos.  Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme.  Yet, that is where we are going.  We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.

Passion and bias overwhelm good sense.  Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.

We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic.  Their entire belief system is based on it.  Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling.  Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?

Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives.  Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms.  Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections.  Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up.  The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud.  Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.

After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall.  More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure.  Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box.  Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved.  They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list.  And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity.  What could go wrong?  Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?

Not for Democrats.  They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field.  Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand.  My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.

The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below).  My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.

Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”.  All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.

Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it.  The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot.  Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail.  Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?

The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms.  Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess.  The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line.  So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person.  It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door.  Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.

The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns.  They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions.  Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud.  The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door.  Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles.  Authentication is gone, gone forever.

How can fraud be uncovered at this point?  People have to be extremely stupid to be caught.  Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity.  The secret ballot is dead, dead!

Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?

Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler.  They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.

The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition.  A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances.  This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness.  This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction.  Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.

You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up.  No such luck.  Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general.  The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.

Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base.  They are proving it weekly.  A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination.  Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one.  Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.

Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling.  A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points.  DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump?  Not so fast.  Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables.  Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden.  Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4).  DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability.  Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects.  At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states.  Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.

It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity.  The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.

He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe.  The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”.  Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors.  Don’t look here for a winning coalition.

 

With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.

Republicans are proving themselves to be no better.  Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner.  Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives.  Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections.  Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.

We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently.  Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities.  Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate.  A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality.  Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense.  Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left.  If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?

Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.

RogerG

Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/