Elections

This time next year, Republicans expect to be back in control of Congress. They are already celebrating, as 2022 sees Glenn Youngkin newly sworn in as governor of Virginia. For a wide swath of GOP activists and consultants (and not a few voters, too), Youngkin is the face of a Republican Party that can win — with or without Donald Trump. Youngkin had Trump’s endorsement last November. Youngkin was as eager to promote this as his Democratic opponent was, but the endorsement helped rather than hurt him. Trump voters’ residual skepticism toward a nominee who had recently been head of the Carlyle Group — a private equity firm long synonymous with insiderdom and globalism — was overcome by the rise of Critical Race Theory as a pivotal campaign issue.

Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is contested, as it was during the Cold War. The future could have been capitalist or communist, or perhaps a blend of both systems — ‘convergence’ was a trendy notion for a time — but one way or another the alternatives were clear. After the Cold War, there were no alternatives. Capitalism, democracy and liberalism were here to stay, and soon they would be everywhere else too. All the Islamic world needed if it was to join us at the end of history was a nudge: regime change would speedily bring about social and economic change.

It’s becoming spooky season, by which I mean not Halloween but elections — at least in Virginia and New Jersey, which have gubernatorial races. They are, incidentally, two of the three states I’ve lived in (I’m in Virginia now; the other one was Maryland). National elections have ceased to be fun for some time now, and I’m not sure my own state’s gubernatorial race is going to be much better. I’m supposed to choose between a washed-up former governor and a businessman-turned-political-neophyte who enthusiastically hawks his endorsement by the businessman-turned-political-neophyte who last occupied the White House.

Who’d have thought — I wouldn’t have, speaking as a seventh-generation Texan — that the Texas legislature would be held up nationally for a good moral beating? Wham! Wham! Ow! Ow! Yet here we are. Our lawmakers, according to the standard media narrative, have been working to narrow the voting rights of the poor and the non-white. But then legislative Democrats saved us from this awful fate. On the last day of the session, as nasty white Republicans sought to pass a piece of mendacity disguised as voting reform, House Democrats decamped from the Capitol, denying the Republicans their quorum. Take that, you neo-Confederate Trump-lovers! Or so goes the narrative, which is bosh mingled with rubbish.

On Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi dragooned all but one Democrat into voting for her total rewrite of the nation’s election laws: House of Representatives Bill 1, or HR 1. The final vote was 220 to 210. The bill now goes to the Senate. Republicans promise a filibuster there to stop it. Every American should hope they succeed. HR 1 would cement all of the worst changes in election law made in blue states in 2020 and nationalize them. Federal control of elections would be the norm, with states relegated to being colonial outposts that carry out Washington DC’s mandates.  Two amendments to impose yet more federal controls failed before final passage.

On Tuesday, Chicago voters head to the polls to vote for Rahm Emanuel’s successor as Da Mayor. ‘Why vote in late February?’ you might ask. ‘Didn’t Chicago just vote in November for House members and Governor?’ Oh, you naive soul. For decades, Chicago has held its elections in February precisely because it is cold, often snowy, and hard to get to the polls. When you suppress ordinary voters, who is left? For many years, it was reliable voters for the old Chicago Democratic Machine. Some of them drove city busses or garbage trucks; others shuffled papers in city offices. Some filled potholes. Many more watched their co-workers fill potholes while they grabbed a cigarette. What better way to ensure that insiders get reelected?

The exact scale of Democratic victory in the US midterms remains unclear, but a shortage of numbers has not prevented many media outlets proclaiming a historic shift, a stern rebuke to Donald Trump, and above all, a key augury for the 2020 presidential contest. Some polls imagine Trump in 2020 losing to any number of a wide range of hypothetical Democrats. I will differ. I have now lived long enough to see so many elections that were portrayed at the time as historic, decisive and/or transformative, but most of these supposed watershed contests were nothing of the kind. In several electoral cycles over the past half-century, we have supposedly seen the imminent extinction of Party X, or at least a near-death experience.