The Outstater
An Electorate Gone Bad
OK, LET’S QUIT KIDDING OURSELVES. The reality of Nov. 8 is that thanks to universal suffrage, civil rights gone amok and the Great Replacement, we have a bone-headed electorate with ever larger activated factions of narcissistic youth, women against families, entitlement warriors, unassimilated immigrants, embittered single mothers, the Biblically illiterate, Shakespeare deniers, union-programmed public employees and the sexually confused.
The best analysis I have read so far is from Scott McKay writing in the American Spectator under the headline, “Maybe America Hasn’t Suffered Enough“:
“There are so many utterly horrid Democrats who will remain in office after this election that it should be offensive to average Americans. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of believing there must be wholesale corruption in American elections, but the problem with going there is that there must be proof before it’s actionable. Until some is presented, we’ll have to deal with something very unpleasant. Namely, here’s the truth that we on the Right are going to have to accept: The American electorate in 2022 is awful.”
This may be temporary, maybe not. Right now, though, these people will vote for a turnip if it promises to make life more miserable for hapless white, middle-class, middle-aged, cisgender males on which are assigned all manner of imagined evils of Western Civilization.
So understand just this: They didn’t elect John Fetterman because they were unaware he was bent on destroying this society. That was the point; he is their in-your-face poster boy.
The Democrats strategists, you see, have a secret weapon — envy. They spray it on every speech and program. The midterm campaigns dripped of it. Republican strategists, knowing that they and all men are susceptible to envy — they perhaps more than most — seemed powerless against it. “Democrats had a strong night, and we lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than any Democratic president’s first midterm election in the last 40 years,” taunted Joe Biden this week.
He has a point. McKay adds that voters don’t prefer Mitch McConnell to Chuck Schumer — “or, if they do, not by a lot.”
That is a new political world. The electorate itself has held until recently what could be called the Christian view, that is, envy is a sin and it must be forgiven and resisted and should never be institutionalized in government policy. It wasn’t so long ago that the ethicist and cleric Richard John Neuhaus could write:
“The American people have proven themselves to be stubbornly un-resentful of the rich. In the view of many, this is a chief reason why more candidly socialist proposals have never gained much of a popular constituency in this country, in sharp contrast to, for example, developed societies in Europe.”
Not any more. Our choices at the ballot box increasing seem to be choices between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. This election was a field day for envy with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi crisscrossing the nation spouting their petty resentments, trying hard to move us a step closer to getting the government we deserve.
And Indiana has its own champion of envy in Rep. Andre Carson with his unworkable ideas on equal pay for equal work, ideas unchallenged by either the media or the Republican Party. (There’s no need to bring the ineffectual Eric Holcomb or the corrupt House Republican Campaign Committee into the discussion at this time.)
The psychologist and author Jordan Peterson explains envy’s political appeal:
“There is a dark side to it, which means everyone who has more than you got it by stealing it from you. And that really appeals to the Cain-like element of the human spirit. ‘Everyone who has more than me got it in a manner that was corrupt and that justifies not only my envy but my actions to level the field so to speak, and to look virtuous while doing it.’ There is a tremendous philosophy of resentment that I think is driven now by a pathological anti-human ethos.”
The economist Ludwig von Mises noted that this is so even when the resultant policies are disastrous to those who support them: “Resentment is at work when one so hates somebody for his more favorable circumstances that one is prepared to bear heavy losses if only the hated one might also come to harm.”
My grandfather raised a family during the Depression. He was the son of German immigrants not only denied U.S. citizenship during WWI but required to carry a card reading “enemy alien.” He was in the first generation offered Social Security but he refused to sign up, explaining in halting but prophetic English that it wasn’t fair to the next generation and that he didn’t see how it could work anyway.
The electorate has changed. We had better adjust our political stance accordingly. — tcl
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