Counterarguments to my theme seem to be losing their force, gradually but steadily.
My theme is all too well established, here. I have written repeatedly about an irreparably poisoned political system, about an ungovernable America, about the seeming pointlessness of the political rituals, about the deeper hollowness of the culture, and about the nightmarish reality that the processes don’t work or make sense yet people keep going through the motions and about how the repetition is maddening.
I would like a practical way out of this doom-loop to demonstrate that I’m wrong. But that really isn’t happening. To the contrary.
What seems missing from all the popular reactions to the narrow but high “red wave” at work in yesterday’s Virginia and New Jersey elections is the possibility that it has next to nothing to do with events, policies, or issues.
I have written some version of this before, too, but it’s worth being more direct: America has now gone about 20 years in which the large minority of not-totally-committed voters votes to destroy the sitting president’s party at midterm elections, and it really strains credibility to insist that this pattern simply happens to be the result of a politics which is still meaningfully about events, policies, issues.
Again and again since the mid-00s, voters have on-net voted to annihilate the president’s party in non-presidential elections. Is it really the likeliest explanation that the recurrence is just a coincidence, and that each of those elections was about its own story, issues, etc.?
I don’t think that it is.
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