About that Cresting Red Wave

One year after a (purportedly) red wave washed over Virginia, will a red wave also anoint much of the country? And would it make a difference?

This post comes in three parts:

1. Breezy observations about Do-nothing Republicans.

2. The fiction that the Republicans’ (barely) successful campaign in 2021 in Virginia reveals much about how Republicans could win going forward.

3. The apparent delusion of the Democratic leadership that its problems really come down to nothing more than inadequate “messaging.” 

1. Will Do-nothing Republicans strike again?

Polls and betting markets anticipate the Republican party to secure a robust majority in the 435-member House of Representatives.  Those same polls and betting markets anticipate the Republican party to secure a majority of at least a few seats in the 100-seat Senate.  That is not the end of it.  The polls and markets anticipate Republican candidates to prevail over a handful of incumbent Democratic governors in a least a few states.  Of the 50 states, more than 30 may end up in the “red” column.

Suppose all of this unfolds.  Would it make a difference in policy-making at the federal level (in Washington) or in the states?  Observers can point to outcomes like that of the 2010 election in which the Republicans took back control of both the Senate and House after two years of Democratic party monopoly in Washington.  It is not obvious that those Senate and House majorities managed to do anything other than allow the Obama administration to frame them as “Do-nothing Republicans.”

Framing the opposition as Do-nothing is surely what executives facing opposing legislative majorities have done ever since executives have had to face opposing legislative majorities.  In the lore of Presidential politics, for example, Harry Truman prevailed in the 1948 election by framing Republican majorities in just that way.  Indeed, the polls—actually, the one Gallup poll, as I understand it—indicated a robust Republican victory, but the thing that invested the lore with lore is the understanding that Gallup had managed to over-sample Republicans in its polling.  Some media had famously gone to press reporting a Republican victory.  Everyone got up the next morning to the news that Truman had actually prevailed. 

Then there are those majorities, whether Republican or Democratic, that expend their energies rather too vigorously, exhausting themselves and the country with vindictive investigations of the executive.  In 1998, it was the Clinton-Lewinsky business.  In 1994, the Republicans had secured control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952.  The Clinton White House and the Republican House went on to cut some deals.  By 1996, the parties had collectively managed to secure a reform of telecommunications regulation as well as “welfare reform”.  Bill Clinton was thus able to follow through on a 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.”

Clinton went on to win re-election in 1996.  Part of the lore is that the Clinton administration had managed to secure winning coalitions in Congress to get legislation passed.  These coalitions brought together representatives from the two major parties.  Observers on the left complained that the business of securing cross-party majorities amounted to a very sordid business of “triangulation.”  (Look up “Clinton” and “triangulation strategy” in any search engine.)  The Republicans, for their part, seemed to learn that enabling the executive of the opposing party to secure some legislative wins amounted to bad politics.  They complained that the administration was co-opting their own issues and that they needed to find ways of opposing the administration.  They came up with Monica Lewinsky.  That was the best they could do?

If those same Republicans could take a “mulligan” (a do-over) on the Lewinsky affair, would they do it?  This author would hope so.  Be that as it may, the business of trying to assemble winning coalitions that span the major parties—the business of cutting deals, making compromises, of “triangulation”—seems to have perished.  Instead, we seem locked with the politics of not affording the executive any opportunity to secure legislative wins.  We end up with persistent gridlock.

One can debate whether or not gridlock is necessarily so bad—recall that Jeffersonian aphorism that “The best government is that which governs least”—but we do have experience of gridlock even when one party ostensibly monopolizes the executive and Congress.  For example, were Republican majorities in Congress really interested in supporting the initiatives of the Trump administration?  Among other things, they effectively blocked “Building the Wall.”  The Trump administration really does deserve credit for then outflanking Republican opponents in Congress and managing to build a virtual wall by way of the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

So, …  the imminent election may bring in robust Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.  The “Tea Party” populists of 2010 may have driven Republican electoral success in the mid-term elections of that same year, but those freshmen congressmen did not prove to constitute a vigorous and enterprising coalition.  The Republican leadership comprised of John Boehner (Ohio), Eric Cantor (Virginia) and Paul Ryan (Wisconsin) proceeded to marginalize the contributions of those people and to do a lot of nothing for the next eight years.

It would be wrong to criticize the Republican establishment alone post-1996 for giving up on coalition building, the stuff the angry left flank of the Democratic party has dismissed as “triangulation.”  The angry left assumed control of the House of Representatives in 2018, and it has spent most of its energies breaking democratic norms, all in the name of “Our Democracy™” … and all the while complaining that Donald Trump was bad for “breaking democratic norms,” which involved something about tweeting too much and otherwise being effective in the face of broad, bipartisan opposition.

That faction has protected and elevated yet other factions and individuals within the bureaucracy.  Individuals would include the beatified Anthony Fauci, and the Babylon Bee’s “Man of the Year,” Rachel Levine, as well as those individuals who populate the leadership of the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex in the CDC and NIH.  A change of parties in the House and Senate may generate something in the spirit of Church Committee investigations of the public policy failures of all of these people and of all of their agencies.  Perhaps this election season will, unlike 2010, usher in a cohort of effective performers in place of the usual “Do-nothing” Republicans.  Could the new Congress pursue effective oversight, or will it proceed to dishonor “democratic norms?” 

I admit some optimism on this count.  No less optimistic is my friend Chauncey Gardiner who has placed some number of bets in the markets.  He likes to watch the markets, and he perceives that, for the last two decades, most polls have tended to under-sample Republicans.  He is betting on big gains for the Republicans in Congress and in the state governors’ mansions.  He may grace us with a guest essay post-election. 

And may this election be efficient.  In 1975, France dispensed with its experiment with mail-in ballots.  (The Corsicans manufactured more than 100,000 fraudulent votes via mail-in ballots in that election year.)  Think about that.  France.  1975. 

France has since stuck to game day voting on paper ballots, and it manages to assemble complete tallies by the next day.  So, beware claims that election outcomes may not be known for some days.  Like, what is the purpose of electronic voting if the infrastructure of electronic voting can’t assemble reliable counts faster than manual counts of analog ballots?

2. Glenn Youngkin, the Accidental Republican Governor of Virginia

Glenn Youngkin put himself up for governor of Virginia in Virginia’s 2021 elections for state-wide offices.  He ran as part of a trio of candidates.  Winsome Sears ran for the office of Lieutenant Governor.  Jason Miyares ran for the office of Attorney General.  All three candidates prevailed.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the trio of Youngkin, Sears and Miyares prevailed, because they refused to align themselves with “Trump,” and they stood up for parental rights in education.

The business of aligning with “Trump” or not aligning with “Trump” amounted then and amounts now to cheap-and-easy branding of little consequence.  The Republican primary to select the Republican candidate for the general election did feature at least one candidate who presented herself as “Trump in high heels.”  That was the principal substance of her campaign, an easy-to-remember marketing label.  Then there was the candidate Pete Snyder.  His schtick was “I am a tech guy.”  His brand was, “I am a disrupter!”  Candidate Kirk Cox clocked in as the sure-footed agent of the Republican establishment in Virginia.  His appeal mostly amounted to a long list of endorsements by other figures in the Republican establishment.

None of these candidates made a point of advancing any particular policy preferences.  Their campaigns extended little beyond forgettable slogans and labels.  Again, these four candidates adopted the labels Not-Trump, Trumpy, Disruptor, and Safe Establishment Bet.  Indeed, across all of the candidates for all of the offices up for election, one of the few campaigns that did hazard a policy preference was that of “Commander” Chuck Smith (retired Navy JAG).  Chuck put himself up for Attorney General, and made noises about “school choice.”  He very nearly beat Jason Miyares for the nomination.

What to make of “Commander Chuck’s” bid?: That speaking up affirmatively for a policy can make for a good strategy, or that doing nothing (avoiding any expression of affirmative policy preferences) makes for better electoral politics?

It turns out that Commander Chuck might have been on to something, for the trio of Youngkin, Sears and Miyares ended up securing a winning edge (barely) by ultimately aligning themselves with concerned parents on questions of the content of education in the Virginia public schools.  But, it was through little doing of their own.  The matter fell into their lap.  They had the good sense to not ignore it.  I had thus written back in August:

Had Glenn Youngkin not won the gubernatorial election, the incoming governor, Clinton protégé Terry McAuliffe would have moved to impose more restrictions on schools. He made a big point of doing just that during the campaign. But, it is to the credit of the new administration that it did not do not impose more restrictions and requirements. Rather, the Youngkin campaign distinguished itself by taking on concerns about “education.” But that almost did not happen. A listless, risk-averse, do-nothing campaign did not motivate the “education” issue. Rather, the education issue found the campaign, and the campaign had just enough gumption to run with it.

Parents in very, very blue and very affluent Loudon County right outside of Washington, DC started speaking up in their school board meetings against the implementation of Critical Race Theory in their children’s curricula. They had not paid attention to school curricula before, but, with schools closed and their children doing school work online at home, they finally got a first-hand view into the content that the Loudon County school system had been channeling into their kids’ minds. Parents started to organize and speak up. They even attracted the attention of the Biden Administration, which subsequently instructed the Department of Justice and the FBI to harass and investigate Loudon County parents.

So, here were parents who were mostly solid blue Biden voters being harassed for speaking up. And a pivotal group of them who had voted for Biden in 2020 ended upvoting not for the Democrat (McAuliffe) in the 2021 gubernatorial election but rather voted for the nominal Republican Glenn Youngkin.  The election was tight, but Loudon County swung ten points from the 2020 to the 2021 election in favor of Republicans.  That ten-point swing in Loudon County comprised the entire winning margin in the election.  One would think that there would be a lesson in that result for Republicans, Democrats or any other politicians. But will such typically do-nothing politicians see the lesson, absorb the lesson, and act on it?

An opportunity of no making of its own fell into the lap of the Youngkin campaign. The campaign gets credit for taking advantage of the opportunity. It made the difference between winning and losing. And winning kept the Democrats from doing what they wanted to do: impose vaccine mandates on “students, teachers and healthcare workers,” and impose more gratuitously racialized curricula.

Over the last year, the Youngkin administration has quietly pushed back on all of the Woke business in the schools and has not indulged in COVID hysteria.  Virginia seems almost normal, quite the contrast with what the Biden administration had ostensibly promised to deliver.  The Biden administration had advanced the language of “return to normal” or the return of the “adults,” but not everyone in the electorate will have been surprised to see that the administration really has been serious about promoting all of the Woke business and about imposing a costly “transition” to Green Utopia.  That “normal” rhetoric was nothing more than just that: cheap rhetoric.

3.  “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Since at least the Obama years, the Democratic establishment complains that it has not had more legislative success, Because Messaging.  Just punch “Democrats” and “messaging” into any search engine, and you will get any number of hits.  Here’s one hit from the top of the list of a search I had just punched in: “Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?” (Vanity Fair, June 6, 2022).

After recently revisiting Vladimir Lenin’s essay, “What is to be done?” (1901), I’ve come to understand that the Democrats’ “messaging problem” is that they really do believe in their message but cannot understand why much (most?) of the electorate will not buy into it.  Lenin basically complained that the Revolution needed to recruit the masses of peasants and industrial laborers.  But, these people seemed to have had a hard time looking beyond their own parochial interests.  They needed to learn to appreciate that they could actively channel great historical currents—if only they had greater vision and understanding.  And so, it would be up to Lenin and his acolytes to go forth from the universities like Jesuit missionaries and proselytize among the masses.

It is not obvious that Lenin and his Bolsheviks had much success.  Indeed, on my interpretation, they ultimately had success by turning around and appealing to the parochial interests of the masses.  In 1917, the slogan “Peace, Land, Bread!” worked.  The Bolsheviks promised to get Russia out of the war with Germany (“Peace!”).  And they promised to redistribute land so that the peasants could get on with their lives (“Land!”).  The industrial workers would get also get some security in the new order (“Bread!”).

A century later, the Democrats still seem stuck on proselytizing among the masses.  And they are stuck on it, because they really believe in their message.  They really believe that their program of a centrally-planned, low-carbon society in which the children are all our children (“It Takes a Village”) illuminates the shining path to Heaven on Earth.  Wittingly or not, they take a page from Rousseau in believing that, if other folks don’t want to go down the path, it’s because they’re either uninformed, misinformed, stupid or corrupt.  Better “messaging” can sway the uninformed and misinformed.  The others are irredeemable.

Among other things, these true believers take a page from Book IV, Chapter VII of Du Contrat Social (1762) titled “De la Censure” (“On Censorship”).  Here the idea is that the self-anointed, best-and-brightest Philosopher Kings who run everything are justified in suppressing wrongthink, because the people who express wrongthink are either stupid or corrupt and may yet corrupt the thinking of the people who would yet prove amenable to better messaging.  The purveyors of wrongthink have to be stopped.

The Supertanker of Woke is beginning to turn.  The 2022 midterm elections may affirm that it is turning.  Even in Canada there are suggestions that things may be beginning to turn.  At the very least, “On April 25, 2022, the Government of Canada established the Public Order Emergency Commission to inquire into the circumstances that led to the declaration of emergency that was in place from February 14-23, 2022, and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency.”  I do not have strong impressions or opinions, yet, about what might come of the proceedings of this Commission, but there are proceedings that one can tap into.  I’ve only seen selected clips, but these proceedings have given voice to people who have thus far been subject to severe penalties for exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.  For an entertaining perspective on these serious issues, I’d refer the reader to Russell Brand’s podcast of November 3.

Britain, meanwhile, seems to be lagging the restive colonies in North America in that its latest government-of-the-week is making an ostentatious point of keeping the country on the shining path to immiseration via low-carbon mandates and the implementation of Central Bank Digital Currencies.  (CBDC’s macht frei, friends.  Cue brother Russell again.)