Reflections on the 2022 Midterms

The hoped-for "red wave" did not come. Here are some ideas about why, and what this could mean for the future.

I am far from the first person to weigh in on the elections results earlier this week. Suffice it to say that I will not dispute the general consensus that the 2022 midterms were a disappointment for the GOP.

The Republicans will probably take the House of Representatives. With 211 races called for the GOP and 21 still up in the air, the odds are in favor of them getting at least seven more and reaching a majority. The situation in the Senate is the reverse: Republicans went into the cycle with 50 seats and, unless they pull off a surprise win in either the blue-leaning Nevada race or next month’s Georgia runoff, they will come out with only 49, having lost a single seat to the Democrats.

A week ago, everybody was talking about a red wave. All of the traditional signs indicated it: a Democrat was in the White House, Biden’s approval rating was low, and inflation was very high.

My own predictions, though, seem to have been verified. (At the beginning of the year, I predicted that the Republicans would take the House, but that the Senate could go either way, though due to the small number of swingable states, neither party would gain more than two Senate seats.)

I think that this election will be remembered as another milestone in the growing polarization of American politics. The reason for this is that, prior to the Trump era, there were usually enough ideologically unaligned voters in play that elections could be won on the basis of things like economic indicators and habitual dissatisfaction with the incumbent party. But nowadays, voters are much more committed to their own party, leading to an inelastic election map where, regardless of the general mood of the country, only a few purple states will ever be contestable.

I expect the likely political consequences to be both bleak and dull. Bleak, because with control of the Senate, Democrats will have two more years in the clear when it comes to judicial appointments, and they will also hold a small but real advantage in legislative power. (And because so few seats are contestable these days, this advantage may last through several election cycles.)

And dull, because without the House, Democrats won’t be able to pass major legislation, so we are likely to just see several more years of piecemeal activism by the bureaucracy, the judiciary (except for SCOTUS), and the woke media, corporations, and education system as they continue moving the country further and further in their preferred direction.

So far, most of the commentary I have read about why the Republicans got this thrashing has centered on two hypotheses: abortion and Trump.

The argument that Democrats did well by running on abortion is simple: A lot of people who were otherwise uninterested in progressive politics were angered by the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and these people turned out en masse to protect a right which, prior to this year, wasn’t dependent on election outcomes.

This flew in the face of the more optimistic varieties of pro-life thought, which held that, deep down, most Americans were pro-life, but that Roe v. Wade had cruelly restrained them from acting on their convictions.

(You can tell that this outlook comes from the shallower end of the Right because of its proponents’ seeming unawareness that they have merely rediscovered the Nuremberg Defense. “Abortion is murder,” they say, “but unlike those awful Europeans, who voted their way to legal abortion, Americans can’t really be responsible for tolerating the slaughter in their country, because they were just following orders.”)

Meanwhile, the less winsome end of the Religious Right was quite cognizant, well before the Dobbs decision was handed down, that their position on abortion was a minority view and that the typical American, despite being squeamish about the idea of killing a baby, generally regarded it as the lesser evil when compared with “forced birth.” This kind of conservative saw Dobbs as “the end of the beginning,” the starting point on the long and hard road toward rebuilding a “culture of life.”

My own view, to put it bluntly, is even more pessimistic. As I see it, Dobbs marked the end of the end for Christian pro-life activism as a national political force. In its aftermath, Americans will do what Europeans did starting in the 1960s – decide via the democratic process that, under most circumstances, abortion should be tolerated, and decide it by a large enough majority that their opponents will give up and stop trying to reargue the matter.

I think that the main reason that abortion in the United States was such a contentious issue for such a long time was because Roe v. Wade left the losing side feeling cheated, and unable to drop the matter without feeling like it was surrendering to tyranny. But cheated or not, it was still the losing side.

I will make a confession here: I do not buy into Father Neuhaus’ famous dictum that politics is downstream from culture. I believe that, as often as not, it is the other way around.

As a general rule of history, a majority culture which fails to resist acts of political tyranny by a ruling minority will find, sooner or later, that it is no longer the majority culture.

Pagans were a majority in fourth century Rome, but they allowed the empire’s Christian minority to take control of its politics, and within a few generations the Christian religion had stamped out its competitors. A few centuries later, the earliest Caliphs found themselves ruling over a conquered population that was only about 10 percent Muslim, yet after a few generations of tax incentives that rewarded conversion to Islam, nearly all of their subjects had abandoned their Christian or Zoroastrian heritage and accepted the religion of Mohammed.

The Protestantism that was forced upon Tudor England was deeply unpopular with the masses, but after a few generations they had internalized it so deeply that when, in a remarkable stroke of luck, a Catholic inherited the throne in 1685, he was swept off of it a few years later in a huge popular uprising. In more recent times, the Russian Orthodox Church, after losing its country to Bolshevism, has never regained anywhere near its original influence, even with Bolshevism gone. And so forth.

In America, the fight over abortion was lost on 23 January, 1973, when the announcement of Roe v. Wade was not met, within a day, by twenty or thirty million people refusing to go to work, and pouring into the city centers to protest and make barricades instead. (What happened in France in 1830 is a good example of what this should have looked like.)

But when almost all of the Americans who were upset about Roe v. Wade still went to work like it was a normal day, and confined their opposition activities to a little bit of lawful and nondisruptive grumbling, the remainder of the American people looked at what was going on and concluded that, whatever value the life of a fetus might have, it couldn’t be nearly as much as that of an adult human being. And the rest is history.

That said, I will make it clear that I am still very glad that Justice Alito’s side prevailed in Dobbs. Even though Dobbs was bad for Republicans in electoral terms, I would rather see the Republicans be the minority party in Congress while being free to enact a conservative agenda in their own states, than see them win lots of elections while being restrained by the courts from doing anything useful with those wins. In other words, I prefer a small amount of real power to a large amount of fake power.

(Also, from a purely legal standpoint, overturning Roe v. Wade was plainly the right thing to do. If the majority of Americans want legal abortion, let them pursue that goal honestly, through electoral politics. The less living constitutionalism we have – the less 2+2=5 style jurisprudence – the better off we are.)

I obviously don’t trust the masses to always do the right thing. Voters, like all human beings with power, abuse that power from time to time. But progressive elites abuse their power a lot more. And at the end of the day, I have more respect for my pro-choice neighbors than I do for smug swamp creatures like Laurence Tribe who use the word “democracy” to mean a system of government in which a small group of unaccountable elites gets to decide which issues the common people are and aren’t worthy to weigh in on.

And a good example of democracy being the least bad form of government is the fact that, while the typical American leans left on abortion, he or she is still against what the progressive activist class is doing on the critical race theory and transgender child fronts. Hence the general success of people who ran against those things in gubernatorial and state legislature and school board elections.

After abortion, the second commonly-cited factor in the Republicans’ loss is the lingering influence of Donald Trump. Even though he has been out of office for nearly two years, everyone knows that American politics still revolves around Trump, and this is true whether you are a hardcore Trump fan who looks forward to helping your idol win the White House “a third time,” or a hardcore Trump foe who sees every Trump-endorsed officeholder, state or federal, as an accessory before the fact in the next coup.

It is not hard to see why this is bad for Republicans. To begin with, if Democrats feel just as threatened by Trump now as they did when he was in office, then they will be free of the usual disadvantage of incumbent party complacency. Also, Trump is continuing to harm the Republican Party by endorsing weak candidates, especially in critical Senate elections, where a poorly chosen candidate often means six whole years of a Democrat representing an otherwise-red state.

Trump’s candidates often had no political experience at all, unless you count sitting on some celebrity advisory board in the Trump Administration. And the evidence should be pretty clear by now that Trump is failing in his attempts to create clones of himself out of random outsiders with good name recognition but no political record. A Heisman Trophy winner here, a television cardiologist there… does not a winning coalition make.

Doctor Oz, I think, is a decent and intelligent man who just didn’t learn the ropes fast enough when it came to politicking. Hershel Walker, on the other hand, is an oafish rake, and even if he wins his runoff, which looks unlikely, he will be a very weak senator when compared to the likes of Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnel, Rand Paul, and J.D. Vance.

A year ago, it seemed undeniable to me that Donald Trump would get the 2024 nomination if he wanted it. Now, I’m not so sure. Granted, the old Republican Party of Bush and McCain and Romney is dead and will remain dead, and there is little chance that a Marco Rubio or a Chris Christie or a Jeb (!) could even get out of the starting gate in 2024. But I do think Trump is threatened by the fact that the “national conservatives” – the people who generally agree with Trump’s attitudes on the issues while rejecting his egotism and indiscipline – seem to have found a champion in Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

(Or “Ron DeSanctimonius,” as Trump repeatedly calls him in a longwinded statement which he put out a few days ago).

I will admit, in perfect honesty, that I do not know what to think about DeSantis. His hostility toward the Covid lockdowns was a smart and brave move, which showed that he understands the needs of the common people and isn’t afraid to take their side against the privileged bicoastal ruling class. And DeSantis is certainly a skilled politician, whose success in turning a purple state into a solidly red state should not be overlooked.

Yet many of his most celebrated accomplishments seem, on inspection, to be half-measures. His famous bill about queer propaganda in schools (the “age appropriate sex education” bill or the “don’t say gay” bill, depending on who you ask) is as good an example as any. In short, this law forbids children from being instructed about gender identity and sexual orientation before the fourth grade, while implicitly leaving the door open to the queering of children aged nine and upward.

To me, hearing about this bill is a bit like hearing that a certain polity, notorious for its draconian criminal code, has finally listened to reason and abolished capital punishment for parking tickets.

In either case, it is good, strictly speaking, that a line was drawn. But I really question the sincerity of someone who is content with such a small win. If I had a fourth grader, I would not send him or her to Florida public schools.

But I digress. Like I said at the beginning of this post, my impression of the political landscape right now is that it is both bleak and dull. Our elected officials squabble over small things – shall we teach eight-year-olds that they might have been born as the wrong sex, or shall we withhold this crucial knowledge until they are nine? Shall Floridians who want abortions after 15 weeks be compelled to go to a blue state to get them, or shall this only become necessary at 20 weeks? Shall we, or shall we not, sell oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to buy a few more months of denialism before we all have to admit that cheap gas is not, and indeed cannot be, a permanent thing?

If you think that America’s future will be decided by political contests of this sort, then I have a bottle of snake oil to sell you.

But I need not rehash my arguments for detachment and individual/family preparedness as the only realistic strategies for dealing with the future. I have made those arguments already.

To put it briefly, my view is that, at this point, winning against the system consists mainly of being choosy about where you send your children to school, raising them with traditional ideas about family and procreation, living frugally, growing some of your own food if you can, learning practical skills that might prove useful as our country’s technoscape slowly unravels, and joining a fraternal order such as the Freemasons so that you will have sworn brothers to help you out in times of trouble.

Those things are more important than elections. But elections still matter. I voted on Tuesday, and I will vote again when my state holds a runoff election next month. Even when the choices on the ballot are bad (and in my state, they were) adding your own vote to the count is still a way of signalling to society at large that you aren’t indifferent to its fate. And signals like that matter.