2021 general election

[pbrower2a]

At 7:41 PM. Youngkin has a lead, but that is largely in rural counties that tend Red.

[pbrower2a]

ABC News predicts that the Republican nominee for Governor will win.

[David Horn]

(11-02-2021, 11:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: ABC News predicts that the Republican nominee for Governor will win.

... and win he did.  A lot of what happened was due to circumstances outside the control of anyone: inflation caused by artificial scarcity, failure to close the big issues in Congress in an expeditious manner and the lingering effects of COVID.  On the other hand, the Dems seem tone-deaf to the issues, and fail to toot their own horns when taking credit is due.  It's amazing to me how bad they are at their chosen profession.

[pbrower2a]

Republicans remain highly adept at creating and exploiting phantom threats such as "critical race theory" and avant-garde concepts such as "defund the police". Republicans have one built-in advantage in that the reactionary ideas that they espouse are somehow familiar (the Devil that you know) and that the avant-garde offers a venture into the unconventional and unknown (the Devil that you don't know). Republicans can still offer a comforting view of the world to many (at least the steel mills were open) even if they can't recreate that world. It is obviously impossible to attract the coal that has already been mined from coal seams that have been played out.

Republicans love to remind us all of a simpler time in America when real estate was much cheaper (and for most people that would be better) and farmers could thrive on smaller farms than they can today, Of course we have about twice as many people competing for the same square-footage of property that can be developed, especially in those few urban areas that have  vibrant economies, so the real cost of living in Greater Boston will be much more expensive than it was in the 1960's. That America had only one big division  of ethnicity, between blacks and whites, was easier to deal with if blacks got nothing more than what white people cast off (which meant bad housing, fewer economic opportunities, more economic pressure, less and lower-quality education, substandard housing, and in some places no right to participate in the political process).

Republicans do best in the most decrepit parts of America in which white people predominate. Note that Youngkin did far better in rural Virginia  (which is more like the rural South) than in urban Virginia (which is more like Massachusetts. But note well: it could be that contemporary politics at the statewide level could play a role. After a few years of political dominance any agenda gets stale. Of course the Republicans keep offering nostalgia without being able to recreate the conditions that make that nostalgia possible.

The Good Old Days weren't as good as people remember. Vehicle collisions were more common and deadlier due to the lack of safety features on cars and far-worse roads. Polio was real, and it crippled people for life. Race relations were awful. Even the cuisine of the time was awful by current standards. That's before I even address the wider array of culture available (not ignoring that there is even more schlock as a share) in mass media. Maybe reading Moby Dick from a dead-tree edition is far preferable to watching "Ultimate Fighting" or The Jerry Springer Show, but three channels of broadcast TV in a city like Milwaukee (and none in Fort Wayne because that city was cut out of VHF channels) can't offer as much as 200 channels of cable TV.  But even worse -- efforts to return to the "Good Old Days" require that multitudes of people no longer be around, that people discard many modern technologies (including medical innovations), many consumer choices disappear, that some unpleasant superstition and ignorance become intellectual norms again, and that some people return (both figuratively and literally) to the back of the bus. The only part of the Good Old Days to which we can reliably return is to the belief that Big Business can pay low taxes, pollute at will, and treat customers badly, and because that is good for maximal profits it has the generous support of political reactionaries who know what they are doing.

The GOP agenda remains hierarchical, reactionary, and abusive, just as were those European political parties active into the 1930's that still advocated a return to feudal social structure and attitudes on behalf of big landowners and tycoons. Just think of the old DNVP (Deutschnationaler Volkspartei) that was the non-Nazi Right in Germany before some fellow with a Charlie Chaplin mustache took over. The backers of this Fascism Light discovered that they really could dismantle labor unions, make huge profits from rearmament, quest for a population boom (plenty of cheap labor in farms and mills, and of course cannon fodder, with a need to expand into places in which the Nazi way of life was unwelcome), and crush any political and cultural modernity other than nationalist and racist propaganda. America's GOP is beginning to resemble the old DNVP in Germany. With some allowance for different times and institutions:

from Wikipedia on the German National People's Party 

Quote:In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, journalist and historian William Shirer wrote that the DNVP's status as a far-right party rather than a mainstream conservative party was one of the main reasons for the Weimar Republic's downfall. In Shirer's view, the DNVP's refusal to "take a responsible position either in the government or in the opposition" during most of Weimar's existence denied Weimar "that stability provided in many other countries by a truly conservative party."[210] Along similar lines, conservative British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote about in his book The Nemesis of Power about the DNVP the following:

Quote:Had the German Conservatives reconciled themselves to the Republic—bringing to it that wealth of experience and knowledge which they had accumulated in the past, and performing those invaluable services which are always fulfilled in the government of any country by an able constitutional Opposition, ready to take office should the occasion arise—they would have conferred a considerable benefit not only upon Germany—to whom they would have given that which she had so long lacked, a genuine Conservative Party—but also upon the cause of Conservatism throughout the world. They did not do this. Under the cloak of loyalty to the Monarchy, they either held aloof or sabotaged the efforts of successive Chancellors to give a stable government to the Republic. The truth is that after 1918 many German Nationalists were more influenced by feelings of disloyalty to the Republic than of loyalty to the Kaiser, and it was this motive which led them to make their fatal contribution to bringing Hitler to power. The sequel is to be found in the long list of noble names among those executed after the Putsch of July 20, 1944, when many expiated upon the scaffold the sins which they or their fathers had committed a generation earlier.[211]

The Republican Party has, like the DNVP in Germany, done much to brutalize American political life, to foster bigotry (the DNVP stoked antisemitic bigotry in Germany), and thwarted social progress. It has done well at promoting mass delusion for political convenience. Know well: the Devil that you know isn't quite the predictable entity that you think you know. It and the Devil that you don't know are the same entity, and in the early 1930's in Germany the Devil that people thought that they knew well (the DNVP) faded out of existence and morphed into the Devil that people did not know (the Nazi Party). I'm not saying that we are headed to World War III in which time America consigns millions of people to mass death for the "renovation" of society. At worst I can imagine an economic philosophy of the sort that existed in Pinochet's Chile, in which the super-rich lived like sultans and everyone else had no purpose in life except to augment the power, indulgence, and gain of those sultans while making sure to demonstrate a complete absence of dissent. I can still imagine a fraudulent America in which most people are obliged to suffer for entrenched elites, working to exhaustion yet remaining on the brink of hunger and homelessness, yet always remembering to smile because such is the Will of God. Perhaps instead of Lebensraum the Right will offer what it did in the Gilded Age: the promise of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die. The differences from the Gilded Age will be that there will not be such obvious innovations in commerce and technology that can make life easier, and that the technology that we have will be well honed to keep people in line.

Should such an America come to be, then Come, Sweet Stroke! I am nearly the right age for such.