Notes On The Midterms--And Beyond

This won’t be a post mortem, but instead we’ll try to provide some perspective on what we can learn from the results and what might be the shape of things going forward.

Let’s start with abortion, which was the big issue for the Dems—until they found out that people weren’t listening. Then they switched to the Death of Democracy Unless We Win meme. However, in the wake of the Midterms there has been an attempt to form a new abortion narrative, based on the defeat of a number of anti-abortion ballot initiatives. There are a number of problems with that approach, starting with the fact that each of these initiatives were typically unique to the individual states. For more perspective, we turn first to American Conservative:

Abortion Didn’t Hold Back Republicans

Tuesday may have been disappointing for Republicans, but pro-abortion fanatics didn’t win big either.

The bottom line is simple and unsurprising:

If anything was less impressive on election night than the “red wave,” it was the abortion wave. Blue states protected abortion rights as expected, but public officials who have supported or enforced limits on abortion in nearly 20 red states were re-elected.

Americans have learned since June that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t make abortion illegal in the Dobbs decision. Instead, after decades of jurisprudence that effectively taught Americans to embrace abortion, the Court made abortion an issue for voters, for Congress, and for states.

Since June, the states have been actively forming their own policy.

What this means is that Dems made no progress in advancing their abortion regime across the country, no progress in flipping states in that direction. Going forward, this simply means that the pro-life groups will need to tailor their approach on a state by state basis—again, no surprise.

You can get more details at the link, as well as at Red State: These Pro-Life Republican Victories Show Abortion Radicalism Isn’t The Winner Democrats Want It To Be. However, this tweet speaks volumes:

The lesson to be learned from this—not only on abortion but on multiple culture war issues—is that Republican candidates need to get out of their defensive crouch: The Big Midterm Lesson: Defensive ‘Victories’ On The Right Aren’t Going To Save The Country.

There is also data explaining where this is coming from that sheds light on the dynamics behind the abortion push. Steve Sailer has been on to the so-called gender gap for nearly two decades. Today he provides a handy table of exit polling results from CNN. I’m unable to copy the table, but the bottom line is that the only demographic in which Republicans lost, when sorted for marriage (married v. unmarried, men and women) was unmarried women.

And that leads right into this article from American Greatness:

Exit Polls: 70 Percent of Unmarried Women Voted for Democrats

Several conservative commentators pointed out that the stark contrast between married women and single women’s political affiliations appear to support the crucial role that family plays in determining one’s values and ideals. Although the marriage rate in the 1950s was at its highest levels ever, those numbers have since dropped over the last 70 years by 50 percent. According to the Brookings Institution, while nearly 80 percent of American households had married couples, that number had dropped to just 48 percent by 2010.

The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway tweeted that “one of the fascinating things about our ongoing political realignment is the massive political incentive Democrats have to keep women unmarried.”

“The welfare state has incentivized women to marry the government, and men to abandon their financial responsibilities,” said Larry Elder, former talk radio host and the Republican nominee for Governor of California in the 2021 recall election.

…

Inez Stepman, senior policy analyst for the International Women’s Forum, said that the combination of unmarried status and the rise of younger voters will spell certain disaster for the country.

“On the right, we love to mock and complain about this, but Millennials will have the highest proportion of unmarried and childless women hitting 40, probably in all of human history,” Stepman said on Twitter. “And they will vote to ruin your life.”

How to address this marriage gap, and the resulting instability of so much of American society, is the conundrum. This is a cultural phenomenon that was enabled by political and legal changes—above all, by the rise of the welfare state—but those political and legal changes themselves reflect a cultural shift that has happened in the West. Our way of life is in for some shocks in the near future, and marriage may well make a comeback as a survival fallback position—contrary to Liberaltarianism, man isn’t an island. We’re already beginning to experience these shocks, which will affect our politics as well. There may be no political solution to the marriage related problems per se, but politics will play a role.

Next we turn to a sort of odd couple looking at the this from their own perspectives, but in a complementary way. Keep marriage in mind as you read.

First, Joel Kotkin, courtesy of Powerline. Kotkin, a liberal, points out that the political future could be bumpy for the Left. I include Kotkin here with Don Surber, below, because Kotkin brings in—by implication—the effects of the Covid Regime in the form of a dropping lifespan, as well as the skewed demographics of the Dems’ appeal (above—what Sailer refers to as a “coalition of the fringes”) and the role that global affairs will play in defining America in the years ahead:

For all their cautious optimism yesterday, a mild Midterms victory may prove the last thing the Democrats need. If they had performed as predicted, the Democrats and their media adjuncts would now be busily dissecting their defeat. But what has to be considered a lost Republican opportunity — gaining little in a country where lifespans are now dropping — also means that the Democrats will be slower to address their weaknesses, and may be forced to accept the unpopular Joe Biden as their leader in 2024.

With no sign of a Republican resurgence, the Democrats will likely be lulled into thinking that Biden’s polarising agenda is a vote-winner . . . When Democrats performed poorly in the past, they were forced to rethink their politics. …

So, rather than using the next two years to regroup and craft a political programme that could win the next election, the Democrats now appear stuck with a weak leader who appears unfit to deal with the global challenges that will define America in the coming decade. Internally, too, the Democrats look increasingly unstable. A stronger-than-expected Midterms performance doesn’t mask the fact that the progressives remain a dominant faction in the party — with an associated agenda that, outside of deep blue-college towns and core cities, commands remarkably low levels of support, as Barack Obama and others have warned.

Surber is even more pointed:

After the election, the truth emerges

The day after the election, CNBC reported, "The job cuts in tech land are piling up, as companies that led the 10-year stock bull market adapt to a new reality.

I’ll skip the summary of economic conditions, but follow the link for the details. Surber concludes with a rock ‘em sock ‘em several paragraphs that in many ways reflects a similar view to the one that Kim Dotcom posted (and I copied) a few days ago:

The economy is tanking and the media is not admitting Bidenomics did this. Flooding the economy with $6 trillion in money we don't have and imposing economic sanctions on Russia did this. Shutting down production of hydrocarbon fuel in the USA did not help.

After the election, Zero Hedge reported, "Economic storm clouds are gathering worldwide as some of the largest shipping companies warn about sliding global trade. US shipper FedEx and Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S have been vocal about emerging signs of a global slowdown. Both of these companies are widely seen as a barometer for international trade. 

…

It is not a global downturn. It is an American one. We just are still large enough to bring everyone else down with us.

Stocks crashed 25% this year. The housing market is at a standstill. On top of that, we have inflation at its highest in 40 years.

Would laying people before the election have changed anything? I doubt it. But the real problem in America is that Big Tech didn't chance it. Our Online oligarchs and the Deep State are in cahoots. That's the definition of fascism. Their working in tandem won't save the economy because that is not their concern. Accumulating power and control is. Covid gave them a taste of world dominance.

Surber’s view mirrors that of Andrei Martyanov this morning, who discusses the Kherson withdrawal and places it in this context. After contrasting Desert Storm with the Ukraine SMO under three points, he provides the bigger picture, which is the reason why Kherson doesn’t figure as largely in Russian calculations as some expected. Compare this to Surber and Kotkin, above:

4. In the end, the main objectives of the warring sides are: for the US--a preservation, however impossible, of its hegemony, for Russia--a destruction of globalism and unification of the Eurasian realm into massive economic force. US Iraq's adventure was an Exhibit A of Ledeen Doctrine: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world that we mean business.” Today's events are orders of magnitude larger than any Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, utterly embarrassing for the US, and are about effective survival of human civilization as a concert of nations who respect their own history and national traditions. For that, the combined West must be defeated. The scale of a struggle is titanic and truly global.

Willy nilly, Americans will need to get a handle on this emerging new world order. Much, most, of this went unmentioned during the leadup to the Midterms, but it was all there and these issues are not going away. It’s been building for decades.