On Victory and Defeat
2022 Midterm Election Hell
Well then, where to begin? These results are simultaneously so bitter as to bring tears, and yet just sweet enough to make that rear tooth ache through the pucker. There is no doubt a plethora of black-pills to arrange in our weekly pill planner – and I do recommend doing so, as to attempt to swallow them all at once might be dangerous.
Firstly, to address the elephant, I did, in fact, win election to the NH House of Representatives. I owe you all a debt of gratitude for your support and efforts, and I do hope to live up to reasonable expectations for me, and my project going forward. I will be quite busy, I think, in the coming months with this task.
Now, to examine the ugly, let us look to the broad, national trends that we can pull out of this midterm. Clearly, the culture war has galvanized the vote to an intense degree, with record turnouts all over, young, unmarried women were galvanized severely by their pro-abortion stance (D+29), and married families galvanized likewise around education, parental rights, and child sexualization issues, as demonstrated by sweeping conservative takeovers of school boards.
On the whole, the GOP side pulled out a, roughly, 5-point advantage in popular vote, but that was not translated into the sweeping wins expected from that number. But why? Well, there will be quite a bit of analysis around this, but the first, most glaringly likely explanation is Balkanization. The degree of relocating among conservatives in the time since covid has been nothing short of dramatic, and where those red places become redder, necessarily blue places become bluer, and purple places also become bluer. DeSantis picked up way over a million votes, and while Crist is a singularly terrible candidate, and surely a Hurricane Ian boost helped, as did flipping a large number of Hispanics, there’s little doubt that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these DeSantis votes were sapped from previously competitive States.
Now, I take no issue whatsoever with people deciding to up and move for a better life around people who think like they do. It’s only natural to want that, and I have to imagine that it makes for a quite nice experience. But the prospect of Balkanization has serious long-term ramifications for the USA. The tyranny of blue states will continue to drive red to become redder, and, also, drive out the fairly apolitical as quality-of-life declines as well – eventually these flows will appear as refugees. These apolitical likely will stay regional, and they will also likely continue to vote Progressive, as programmed, in their new locations, leading to fewer and fewer swing states. The future of America is, increasingly, those of two peoples who are in the most important ways incompatible.
What are some of these deep incompatibilities? Well, it seems multiple states just voted in overwhelming fashion to not merely enshrine abortion “rights” until the moment of birth, but also declined to require that any child born alive receive medical care – instead, it seems that a significant majority of people (including in at least one red state) think leaving a newborn child on a cold, stainless steel tray to die slowly of exposure is morally acceptable, rather than devilishly reprehensible. That, fundamentally, is a rejection not just of norms, or ethics, but of any value inherent to human life. That is, more broadly extrapolated, a rejection of the entire basis for law and Constitutional order.
This does not appear to be a reversible circumstance, by and large. The natural conclusion will come to be that these two peoples, under these two incompatible ethics, will not be able to share a nation – at least not without a radical federalist structure. The latter can be virtually ruled-out as a possibility, as the side that, essentially, would be satisfied to be left alone is now the side, unsurprisingly, that is losing in the cultural war. The side with every advantage is that which has consistently pressed every advantage, and they will not be satisfied to allow red states to go their way. As such we are in a state of cold civil war that, without serious solutions and intervention, cannot help but to warm.
Elsewhere, states voted to allow the State itself to “transition” children to opposite-sex socially and medically without requiring parental consent or even notification – a practice that will surely be used to remove children from conservative households. As these practices become more authoritarian the backlash can be expected to grow ever-more desperate, and this, in turn, will surely lead to more fear-mongering and dehumanizing of the right by establishment media and government as “domestic violent extremists.” Could there be a more sure method of creating violence than going after children?
Unfortunately, that is my forecast. We will see more division, violence, and hate. We will see less competence, fewer institutions even remotely functional, and escalating grey-zone and political warfare both at home and abroad. It would be a good time to consider where you have chosen to call home, and how sufficient you are capable of being in an emergency. It would be a great time to be able to call Christ your king.