The dominant narrative of the MSM (Main Stream Media) in the months leading up to the 2022 midterm election never seemed plausible to me. The chief executives of MSM have fashioned a dated political line based on voter modeling going back 40 years, back to the beginning of the late 20th century conservative hegemony in the Reagan era. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.
The two Democratic presidents elected during that long reign of neo-liberal capitalism’s ideological conquest of the commanding heights of the economy and political culture, Clinton and Obama, were essentially negotiating the terms of surrender of the working class to the gleaming chrome T800 exoskeleton of the financialized new transnational world order.
The key to the surprisingly good electoral outcome in a midterm election with a relatively unpopular president and a shaky economy was a massive miscalculation by the leadership of the Republican Party. Instead of running on kitchen table issues that might have mollified the discontented center-right rank-and-file establishment Republicans and ‘independents’ (i.e. educated conservatives who will reliably vote GOP but don’t want the stink of the Republican brand on them), the MAGA Q wing ran buck wild on a newly manufactured transphobic moral panic.
The public faces of that MAGA Q party faction are the deranged Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the degenerate Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. Their mastery of the dark arts of the politics of vulgar and violent spectacle put them at the head of the class.
Joe Biden’s political assessment from the start of the 2020 primary season has been vindicated. He was smarter than the coastal political pundit class when he asserted that the American people wanted to turn down the volume on politics. His confident assertion that the vast right-wing Republican media hate machine would be unable to gin up the visceral hatred they generated for an educated cosmopolitan black man like Barack Obama or a girl boss feminist icon woman like Hillary Clinton has been proven correct. Biden, as a standard issue old white guy Democrat classic who is too old to be woke, neutralized the toxins of the right-wing media. Joe was right.
The inability of the Republican establishment to reassert their power after being eclipsed by Trump and the MAGA Q insurrection has led to a breakdown in message discipline that is turning off ‘normal white people’. Instead of going on about inflation, declining national prestige, and the rise of the Chinese Empire as a peer competitor in the 21st century, the Republican primary base went off the deep end with culture war issues that are not intelligible to a normal person who is not steeped in the deep lore of Fox/OAN/NewsMax cable news, right-wing talk radio, and Breitbart News and the Daily Wire on the internet. Why did the mere existence of maybe a few hundred thousand trans people in the U.S., who have always lived among us, become, in 2022, the burning existential threat to the republic?
The Republican Party message sounds whack to most Americans under 40 years old. They wildly overestimated the cultural appeal of their brand of paranoid culture war politics. Republican establishment strategists were correct in their post-election post-mortem: they fumbled the bag on an election that historically should have been a red wave shellacking. We got lucky.
On the local front, I was deeply relieved by the solid win in the CA 12th Assembly District by veteran labor-backed North Bay politician Damon Connolly over Coastal Commissioner Sarah Aminzadeh. I was prepared to accept his opponent Aminzadeh as a talented newcomer who would eventually become a California Democratic Party star. My enthusiasm was dimmed by her constant deployment of the gender identity card on the campaign trail. That cultural fad has faded. I hope that she is better advised in future runs for office.
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