2018 Mid-Terms: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
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Well, the mid-term elections are in the rear-view mirror and fading fast in the public consciousness as the never ending and frantic news cycle moves on to other topics like Jeff Sessions’ firing and the horrific shooting in Thousand Oaks. Before the election results are permanently lost down the memory hole though, I thought it would be wise to revisit them and see where we are and where we are headed.
GOOD? BAD? UGLY?
I predicted there would be no “blue wave” and depending on with whom you talk I might have been right. That said, the Democrats in the House outperformed my prediction, I thought they would either lose or win the House by a nose, and they exceeded that.
Some in the media are calling this a “blue ripple” as opposed to a blue wave, that may be more accurate but it also strikes me that it might be a desperate attempt to find the bright side. This election was billed as a referendum on Trump, and the cold hard reality is that Trump was not repudiated. Yes, Trump lost the House, but historically speaking, he substantially outperformed his predecessors. For example, Obama lost 66 House seats in 2010 and Clinton lost 54 seats in 1994 in their first mid-terms compared to Trump losing 30 (or so, the final tally isn’t in yet) this year…and they both went on to win reelection. Add to that the fact that Trump expanded his majority in the Senate and it appears that while Trump is certainly more vulnerable with a Democratic House, Trumpism is, to quote The Simple Minds, “Alive and Kicking” here in the good old U.S. of A., which means that while my House prediction may have been too pessimistic, my prediction of very bad things to come in our future is going to be right on the nose.
BAD
The Democrats, with their chests puffed out after winning the House, have seemingly decided to take a gigantic shit all over themselves and keep Nancy Pelosi on as Speaker of the House. What a brilliant strategic move, making an elderly, rich, corporate whore, machine politician as the face of your party when populism pulsates throughout not just the critical rust belt states you so desperately need to flip in order to win back the White House, but the majority of the country as well. Power is there for the taking if only the Democrats would abandon Wall Street in favor of Main Street and tack far to the left economically. But we all know they won’t do that because, just like the Republicans, they are pigs at the trough, and regular folks are left with nothing but the foul stench of their excrement after the establishment hogs have gorged themselves.
GOOD AND BAD
I had a reader email me earlier in the year regarding Beto O’Rourke, this reader is a very smart and engaging guy and always has terrific insights to share. In one email he told me he was excited for Beto in Texas, and thought he could be a game changer. I replied to the reader and told him that I liked Beto a lot as well, but that Texas politics is like the movie Chinatown, and while Democrats keep insisting that it is going to flip blue, at the end of the day Democrats will only be left agog in the middle of the street as their partner tries to console them by saying, “forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
I do admit though, that on election night as I saw the numbers come in I totally got sucked into the Beto magic and started thinking he might pull it off and be the next JFK and become president in 2020 and save the universe. But then the Beto love (played by Faye Dunaway) got shot and killed and the creepy Ted Cruz drove off with the election with incestuous lust in his eyes for his daughter/granddaughter and I was left muttering to myself, “forget it Mick, it’s Chinatown.”
GOOD
With all that said, Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Gillum in Florida are both cases that prove that genuinely economically progressive politicians will outperform the usual centrist drivel put forward by the Democrats. I keep hearing how O’Rourke was fool’s gold, same with Gillum, and that the lesson to be learned from their loss is that the Dems need to move to the center. This is beyond moronic. Both Beto and Gillum were supposed to lose because both Texas and Florida are Republican states, but they did extremely well and exceeded expectations because, one - they are top-notch political talents and two - they were selling a genuine progressive economic agenda that has proven to be extremely popular among the masses regardless of party. Hell…in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, voters passed initiatives to expand Medicaid and in Arkansas and Missouri they voted to increase the minimum wage.
I believe that the lesson to be learned from Beto and Gillum is the same lesson to be learned from Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise showing in the last British election, which was met with the equally inane analysis of “but he didn’t win!”. In our myopic culture, one must look to the big picture and the long game in order to have a strategic advantage, for Corbyn, his “loss” was a “win” because he gained momentum and was positioned to win at the next election and would not be held accountable for the shit show that is the current Brexit negotiations. For Beto and Gillum, they “lost” but won because they can now spend their time positioning themselves and gearing up for future races which might be more advantageous than this latest one. Beto and Gillum are serious talents, they just have to find a way to maintain the magic and not sell out before the next election.
GOOD
On the bright-side, one of my least favorite politicians of all-time, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, was defeated. Walker is a Koch brothers sycophant and an anti-Union hound, and I hope his next job is testing the strength of two by fours with his face.
BAD
Steve King of Iowa and Peter King of N.Y. are two more of my least favorite politicians. Being a native New Yorker, I find Peter to be the more deplorable of the two kings but it is close. Sadly, they both won re-election, and seem to be the type of politicians who will probably become Weekend at Bernie’s Congressman who continue in their jobs long after their death.
BAD
Speaking of awful people winning elections…in my home state of California, the repugnant Gavin Newsom won the Governorship and the repulsive and decrepit Dianne Feinstein won her fifth Senate race. Both Newsom and Feinstein are the poster children of Democratic fecklessness and corporate sluttery.
Newsom is one of the more phony and manufactured politicians you will ever come across, he makes Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney look like Robin Williams and Jonathon Winters. Newsom no doubt has his sights set on the White House, but the reality is that he doesn’t stand a chance. Trump would chew up and spit out a canned clown like Newsom and his corporate friendly economics with ease.
Dianne Feinstein, or DiFi as I like to call her, is a prostitute for the military and intelligence industrial complex. She loves the intelligence community and shamelessly kisses and licks their ass on her own volition and upon their request. Why liberal Californians love DiFi is a complete mystery since she is actually a closeted Republican, which makes sense since she is old enough to be Calvin Coolidge’s big sister.
THE WAY FORWARD
As for the next two years…as I stated in my prediction post, things are about to get really interesting. The Democrats seem to want to try and impeach Trump, which strikes me as a bad move strategically.
I am all for hearings and holding his feet to the fire, but I think it should be done in moderation and with surgical precision. Like Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York the Democrats must stick the knife in where it will be fatal. Random investigations of petty offenses may actually be fruitful in the short term, but long term would only strengthen Trump across the country. Remember, a lot of people hate Trump, but a lot of people also hate grandstanding Democrats (see Cory Booker and his “I am Spartacus” buffoonery) and the media (see Jim Accosta). So the wise move is to do fewer hearings but to have them cut deeper and in fatal areas. My advice for the Democrats…and I have been saying this from the get go…DROP THE RUSSIA BULLSHIT. The Russia investigation is going nowhere…even if Russia is guilty of what everyone says they are (which I still do not believe since I have yet to see one iota of proof), no one but liberal partisans gives a flying fuck.
Want to get under Trump’s skin, forget Russia, forget Stormy, forget emoluments…go after his business. Trump will go nuts, he will flail and freak out because going after his business means going after his family. And going after his family may turn some people off, but unlike the Russia story, Trump’s business is ultimately a political winner for Democrats. Trump can be shown to be just another silver-spooned, Daddy’s little rich girl, corrupt business man who is cheating the little guy and breaking the law. Exposing Trump’s business does two things, it will show him to be criminal and most importantly it will show him to be a failure and that will resonate with regular people who do not care one bit about the Russia nonsense.
The other thing Democrats should do, is use their newfound leverage to actually make deals with Trump. Trump will want the wins, and Dems may not like letting him have them, but big picture, getting Trump, a Republican president, to sign off on Medicare for all, would be a huge win for Democrats and would shatter any Republican coalition. It would also show that Democrats are more than just Anti-Trump, and that they actually have a governing philosophy and want to get things done and that will play in the heartland.
The Democrats would also be wise to move closer to Trump on immigration and make a deal with him on it. Immigration is an issue that the Democrats are going to lose on, and so they must find a reasonably moderate solution to it before 2020. Trust me, open borders and shutting down ICE are not going to work as a position on immigration. The Democrats (as I have been saying for years), should make the immigration debate about economics, which would again, split the Republicans. The Chamber of Commerce Republicans want illegal immigration because it gives them cheap, non-union labor but “Springsteen voters” (working class who voted for Obama twice but switched to Trump) don’t want illegal immigration because it lowers their wages and dilutes the culture. Dems would be wise to placate the Springsteen voters because they are the ones who can give them Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio…and thus the White House.
As I said in my prediction post, we are in a phase of destruction right now, which is a part of a natural historical cycle. Some readers have asked me what they should do with that information, many wondering if it won’t lead to apathy or depression. My response is simple, use that information to your strategic advantage. The system we have is collapsing, and understand that means you can stop trying to prop the old system up, but instead position yourself to prosper when the systemic collapse becomes glaring.
Trump understood, either consciously or more likely unconsciously, that the system was failing. He ran as someone outside the system who would replace the system. Clinton ran as part of the failing system who would fix that system. The collective unconscious knows the system is dying, and anyone trying to fix it by breathing life back into it will seem absurdly crazy to the collective. It is like performing CPR on a corpse, it is a fruitless and exhausting endeavor and will only end in fatigue and failure.
With this in mind, Jeremy Corbyn’s loss in the UK, or Beto’s loss in Texas or Gillum’s in Florida, seem less devastating, in fact, they seem downright invigorating. Centrist, globalist, neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative foreign policy are of the dying system, and Clinton’s loss in 2016 and the Democrats under-performing in 2018 are a death rattle for that ideology.
What liberals and leftists need to do is to keep their heads down and their nose to the grindstone. They need to be ready for when the system collapses entirely and that void sits at the center of our culture and state. Reaganism, Republicanism, Centrist Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism have all failed and will be rejected as akin to CPR on a corpse when the system dies. Liberals and leftists need a coherent and cogent substitute in order to step up when the time is right and make the case for what the New America will look like.
Bernie Sanders already planted the seed with his electric run in 2016. He has been followed in 2018 by numerous top-notch candidates as well as the Democratic Socialists of America who have a genuine alternative to the dying system, which gives them an edge going forward. No doubt we will see even more Democratic Socialists and Bernie backed candidates in 2020 and beyond.
Corbyn has done the same in the UK, and is poised to lead New Britain after Brexit…just as American liberals and leftists must themselves prepare to lead the New America after its inevitable collapse. Any liberals and leftists clinging to dreams that a Clinton-esque neo-liberal shift to the center will be the ticket to success in 2020 better disabuse themselves of that delusion because that will guarantee another four years of Trump and God knows what that will bring.
©2018