Post-election polling results in a prior AEI piece (see the proceeding post) might be symptomatic of a deeper trend: the electorate was awash in the poorly informed and addle-brained. People that wouldn’t break away from their basement game console in normal times came out of their bunker to mail their ballot. Why? For once, our politics became as interesting as World of Warcraft. Provocateurs and rhetorical bomb-throwing (and sometimes literal) made our politics able to compete with whatever you can get while streaming. It’s a thought worth exploring.
Battle lines were stark this time around. Take a look at the orange man. Something that you can’t say about Trump is that he speaks in soothing subtleties. The guy’s entertaining ad hominems turned his rallies into a kind of Woodstock. They added, with his Twitter fulminations, to his following but also detracted from it. Others harboring distaste for his antics are going to explode in hostility to him. The guy is both repellant and magnetic at the same time.
Over on the neo- and paleo-socialist side, we have the black-clad anarchists of BLM and Antifa, the immature mental hiccups of recent urchins from our college campuses who matriculated to Congress (the Squad), and Democratic Party power brokers who can take the hiccups and turn them into policy and party platforms: defund the police, identity favoritism, gun confiscation, government invasions of the pulpit, erasures of history, etc. The bomb-throwing went to the streets and into the party’s base and mouths of its camera-hugging politicos, all of this occurring in the Super Bowl of our politics, a presidential election year. This side of the ledger is also simultaneously repellant and magnetic.
Add the accelerant of chaotic election procedures in mail-in voting with mostly lefty “dark” money to inflate the ballot count and we have hyper-inflationary votes with the value of dirt. The election has little credibility at the moment our politics became incendiary.
The results were courtesy of the politically-motivated ignoramuses who were drawn out by the flammable political melodrama. Otherwise, they’d slink back into their lounge chair.
Interestingly, a high voter turnout may not be a sign of a healthy democracy. In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, Dalibor Rohac makes plain that goons come to the fore more times than not. So, this time around, we got the mentally incontinent Joe and the slap-happy but rattled Kamala — and a Congress that could possibly check the worst instincts of these clowns.
If this is a recurring feature of our politics, our fortunes may resemble the termites leaving little mounds of shavings as they go to work on your home’s skeleton. Soon, a threshold is reached when the thing comes crashing down. Hopefully, you won’t be in it when it does.
RogerG