A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

I have been pondering the results of the recent presidential election, as you have too. The talk at the dinner table often withers away for lack of any key to the outcome, except to say that more money was spent on ridiculous rumors and conspiracies than the Dems had the heart to circulate. Which may be true, or not. But the more I crave an answer, one that lies deeper than the heart, may have some other logic attached to it. For one thing, we are not alone in the breadth of rejection of an incumbent regime. Italy booted its traditional party leadership, and so perhaps will Ireland. Britain's elections are increasingly headed to the center and a little to the left, even if PM Keir Starmer is about as charismatic as Biden. Rivals of Putin come and go, but he has rigged his system more skillfully than any of us could do here in the US. But the blood is raging in the West and it was time to do some serious regime changing, even if the choices are narrow and the benefits for the working classes pie in the sky.

            There are few apologists making sense of the results, but I have heard insinuations from Bernie Sanders that the Dems catered to the educated middle class too long while neglecting a vast section of middle America to be harvested for votes by the Republicans. It's my feeling that the Old South, now disguised as MAGA fanatics and devotees, has risen again with renewed spite and cold-hearted vengeance, and will welcome in almost any party that adopts its age-old grudges against egalitarianism and DEI, and all the other bogeymen of southern prejudice. And it was Trump's genius, if I may call it that, to re-apply his own terrifying rage against immigrants and the trans population. He worked his crowds with expertise and may have lost some of the fringes of the mass cult in pampering his base, but he took the risk. As he was fond of saying at his later rallies, "We don't need your vote." His internal polling showed he had a leading edge against Harris, and he could dance on stage in silence for 39 solid minutes while Kristi Noem, Republican governor of South Dakota, pretended to be enjoying flapping her arms a step or two behind him. Trump knew a lot more than the pollsters for the Democrats were calculating. Perhaps that more than anything shocked the literate and well aware the most -- that no one could advise Harris that she was too far behind to win. Tim Waltz, her running mate, was a good football coach for the young, but no politician with killer instincts. So we slept lightly and woke to the nightmare of four more years.

            But there's more to the neglect of the American blue collar masses. They were frightened by the pandemic and the corrosive effects of inflation on the family budget. Biden's good leadership on the labor front was not enough to assuage their worst fears. The rumors (at best) of a broken border letting in a flood of immigrants from unwanted and troubled countries around the world was the salt Trump rubbed into the wounds of Latinos, Blacks, some Asians, and other minorities who were hoping that by closing the doors at Mexico and Canada they would be allowed to live in peace. Very crafty, and a deadly strategy. No wonder Trump kept dancing. And behind him was Elon Musk, who had soured on traditional democracy and thought he could get a foothold in the White House with the wily and perpetually distrustful Trump. He was wrong, and his role as sycophant will be a lonely one in the coming years.

            There are other dangers out there : the war in Ukraine, and Putin's coyness in launching powerful new ICBMs (sans nuclear bombs) was just the pepper to make the sauce too hard to swallow. The destruction of the Palestinian territories by the Israeli Defense Forces and the settlers, and the devastation of southern Lebanon, were other destabilizing temblors threatening to let collapse a buffer zone between Israel and the Middle East. The once safe allies of the US were wobbly and about to collapse, and made for a prime opportunity to a hungry dictator, and Trump had his arms open to snatch it.

            All this stuff about Project 2025, Christian Nationalism, vigilantes and private armies armed to the teeth in Idaho and points even more remote, was window dressing, the kind of paper tigers that might be useful to deploy when the time came, but for now, were a gift to put before a naive, largely uninformed proletariat. The time was ripe to seek revenge on the Democrats, who had strutted their superior education and hold on power for decades. Even if the Republicans had no particular plan to improve health care, child care, elderly services, dying cities and a suffering environment, they did have Iago's temperament to pour poison into the ears of the gullible citizen. And the money poured into the RNC's coffers, much of it from the billionaires who stood to gain the most in putting off renewable fuels, clean energy, better building materials and insulation, stemming the housing crisis, punishing the evils of Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. That was mere socialist doctrine eating away at the American spirit, or so the public was told.

            Some thoughtful voices in the Senate and the House remarked that the Republicans were better at telling their story than the Democrats, and they were right. If you can't flap your jaws and casts spells on the public you won't hold onto power for very long. Not in this accelerating world of high tech and automated commerce and banking. Biden's aging body and placid reserve were not enough to soothe the grave fears felt by an entire nation. And his support of Israel seemed more stubborn than informed as a foreign policy. He didn't show any muscle against Netanyahu, alas, who bullied him into passivity. No manner of street protests and editorial outrage from MSNBC were enough to pressure Chuck Shumer into shouting from his own bully pulpit in the Senate. The impression I get is that most Dems were okay with the way things were going, and with the crowds assembling at the Harris rallies. It didn't matter that Taylor Swift was sending flowers and Beyonce was dancing for the crowds. The die was cast, and the fate of a nation was being decided by Iago's army of whisperers and taunters and a host of scofflaws working their way back into power.