What Went Wrong

 The Red Wave that was eagerly awaited by us conservatives and libertarians after suffering through two years of the most radically socialist regime in American history fizzled out quickly and turned out to be red drizzle.  And as of this writing, as more ballots are found, trucked in and counted and recounted, it looks like Republicans will not take the Senate and may not even have a majority in the House.   Like most, I fell victim to unrealistic expectations.   The stage was set for a Democratic thrashing.  Gas prices were astronomical as were food prices as inflation raged.  The economy was contracting.  Our foreign policy was in disarray.   Violent crime was rampant in most American cities.  People were angry.  I felt sure that there would be a massive course correction.

It never materialized.

The talking heads are busy doing their most mortem analysis.  I’ll throw in my two cents but in the final analysis, the reason is quite simple--- there is a fundamental asymmetry at play and unless it gets cured fairly quickly and decisively, America will soon become Venezuela North.   When one side is committed to a vibrant, competitive two party system where candidates fully and and openly fully inform citizens of their positions, and the other side is ruthless, unprincipled and comfortable with deception, you know who will prevail in the end.

But I must do some finger pointing.   While the Democratic party is united in its lust for power (even saying the exact same lines in the weeks before the election, “Democracy is on the ballot this November.”), the Republican party is hopelessly divided. Mitch McConnell dissed several candidates and withheld funds from many while spooning out funds to demi-Democrats like Lisa Murkowski.  Trump damaged the cause by slamming DiSantis three days before the election and both DiSantis and Youngkin immediately after.  Even people that were generally supportive of Trump pounded our heads against the wall on this one.  At some point I knew his costs would outweigh his benefits and we seem to have crossed that line.  DiSantis and Youngkin ironically are the two candidates that explicitly took on Woke ideology head on.  And to say DiSantis was an “average” governor is simply not true.  He may be the most competent on the American stage right now.   I support leaders that put the country ahead of their own narrow interests.  Trump just demonstrated that he can’t put it above is own ego.

Then there is the phenomenon of Illinois, New York, and Michigan.   These three states carried out the most punishing, restrictive and civil liberties crushing COVID policies in the country.   Masking kids, closing schools, requiring vaxx passes, firing unvaccinated workers.  Governor Pritzker canceled the entire 2020 high school football season while no other contiguous state did.  Whitmer chased 70ish barber around for not complying with lockdown.   I assumed that enough anger would rise up to throw these people out of office.  But alas, each was rewarded with another term.  It is beyond comprehension.   Perhaps voters in these states are like abused spouses.  No matter how many beatings they incur, they inexplicably always go back.  And perhaps the net outflow of citizens has been enough to tip the elections.  People that would otherwise have voted against them have already left.

Several years ago, I heard outgoing Democratic leader Dick Gephardt speak at a function.  While I was no big fan of Gephardt in office, he said one thing that stuck with me, “In America, our democracy functions because losers accept the outcome.”   That is no longer the case.  The nonsense that the MAGA wing of the Republican party are election deniers ignores the blatant shenanigans that have been going on, were accelerated by COVID and mail-in ballots and have been perfected by Democrats.   If what is going on now in Arizona had been going on in any Latin American country 10,20, or 30 years ago, American leaders would be screaming for international monitors.   It began with the election of Al Franken in Minnesota, got tested with the election of Brad Schneider in the contested 10^th district in Illinois, where Schneider improbably got 85% of the absentee vote in 2012, just enough to put him over the top.  It is on full display now with ballot harvesting, mail in voting and changing rules to ensure that fraud is nearly undetectable.  The Democratic response was, “There is no evidence of massive fraud!!!”  Well, you don’t really need massive fraud.  You just need a little, coordinated fraud in the right places in close elections.   And there is enough monkey business to shatter faith in the system.

The cheating comes in several forms.  The ballot harvesting and drop boxes are bad enough.  But when Big Tech and the media are controlling information and actively preventing citizens from obtaining relevant information (i.e., hiding Hunter’s laptop and Fetterman’s condition), the system breaks down.  And now we see several avenues of money laundering to Democratic causes—from BLM to FTX (not to mention the Soros DA’s that are breaking down our cities), to 10% for the Big Guy,  the flow of funds is drowning our republic.

To be sure,  there were some small victories.  Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams, creations of the media, have been taken off the game board.   Democrats spent a lot of money trying to get these two elected.  But Abrams served her purpose.  By constantly howling about the fiction of voter suppression, she helped institutionalize mail in voting and ballot harvesting, thus cementing the mechanisms by which Democrats will steer election outcomes for the foreseeable future.  She has been rewarded handsomely for it, going from deeply in debt to having a sizeable net worth in just a few years.

What I fear is really going on is national mitosis.  Mitosis, as you science geeks know, is the process by which a cell divides into two.  It doesn’t happen abruptly but is, in fact, a process.  It’s occurring with outmigration from New York, Illinois and California.  People who can are moving at an accelerating pace away from single party rule and the attendant crime, taxes and corruption.   If it were simply geographic, we’d probably be split by now.  Even Victor Davis Hanson admitted in his last podcast, “We are two nations now.”   Once enough of the population moves, then the optimal solution may be to negotiate a split as Czechoslovakia did under Vaclav Havel.   We do not need a destructive second civil war.