Now What?
"The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
An oddly warm morning out there, 64 degrees and a little light rain here and there.
We tell ourselves that the weather in western New York is so much different than in past years, but memory is a funny thing, and past fall days really weren't as we recall. In this age we have what amounts to a magic time machine, the photo library on our phones, and it's simply a matter of scrolling back to this day or this week in each of those years from 2020 to now. That, in turn, reveals pretty much the same image you're seeing this morning, with dampness and leaves dropping and folks wearing coats but not enduring the brutal cold that comes later. One year, 2020, there was a dusting of snow in the morning, but the photos on either side of that date show about the same scene as now. I don't think there's any question it's warmer than in years past, but the difference isn't as stark as memory might suggest.
Pondering on some things, this day after the day after the most seismic political event in my lifetime. Some random thoughts:
1. It really was a seismic event, compared to others. The 2024 election only seems such because it opened the door to an authoritarian coup--the actual result was a pretty evenly divided country, and given the fact that one party pulled its nominee for president only four months or so before the election, the real surprise is that it was so close. This week's elections call to mind the 1974 post-Watergate bloodbath the Rs took: back then the Ds gained 49 seats in the House, and 3 or 4 in the Senate. This year it was 35 in the House and 7 in the Senate, most likely.
2. The Rs have learned nothing from this week, at least not on the surface and not yet. To hear their pundits talk, the country still loves them and Dear Leader, but didn't like the Iran War. This means you probably aren't going to see any soul searching between now and this time in 2028 (they'd need a sould for that, after all), and the campaign of corruption, cruelty, overt racism and misogyny will continue. Good for the Ds.
3. Remember Trump commanding the state legislatures to go gerrymander him a few more safely Republican House districts? They did, and it didn't seem to help them all that much. In fact, it completely backfired to the extent the gerrymanders were premised on the notion that the new MAGA coalition of hispanics and conservative blacks would hold despite administration policies that expressly targeted those folks. By putting blocks of presumed Republican voters in former Democratic districts, they ended up making their own incumbents vulnerable.
I'm looking forward to seeing the names and narratives in the Epstein files, finally.
5. The Orange Despot has promised to veto everything the new Congress sends his way. Let him do that. Let the American people see him reject legislation that addresses the needs of ordinary citizens. Make what's left of the Republicans either disavow Dear Leader or show the world who they really are. Or both.
6. As for what that legislation might contain, there are already some interesting ideas out there. J.B. Pritzker, who's eyeing his own presidential run, released a 200 page agenda yesterday with specific legislative goals directed to improving the lives of everyday Americans:
What a novel thought.
And here's a really tantalizing possibility, a game-changer beyond anything we've done since women's suffrage: there may be the votes among states to do away with the Electoral College as it currently exists, and replace it with a system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote always wins the presidential election.
It's the nightmare scenario the Southern Founding Fathers fought so hard to avoid: the places where people actually live will not be discounted in favor of rural areas that have always been overrepresented in presidential elections. The conventional wisdom is that, given the makeup of the Electoral College, the Ds have to win by maybe five points to pull even. Now the voters in New York and Los Angeles will count the same as those in Laramie. Given that the MAGA movement is as much about rural versus urban as anything else (the R congressional candidate in this NY congressional district won by double-digits on Tuesday, in a state that's hard Blue at the statewide level), such a move could finish the Republican party as it currently exists. And that needs to happen before something better can rise up in its place.
So, exciting times. We'll see if anything come of it. The one thing the Dems can't do is let bygones be bygones, and start pushing reconciliation before there's repentance. That was the mistake of 1865. Let's not repeat it.
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