Hope and Apprehension
2022 ended on an encouraging note—though worries about the political future remain
As I explained in a lengthy note at the top of my post last Friday, I’m traveling this week—out to rural Ohio to visit my in-laws. (That’s why this will be the only item I’ll post between now and the start of 2023.) It’s always good to see my mother-in-law, several sisters- and brothers-in-law, and numerous nieces and nephews. But such visits are also good because they get me out of the blue-tinted megalopolis stretching from Washington to Boston. That’s where I was born, raised, and have lived most of my adult life. Rural Ohio isn’t “real America.” But it is another, culturally and politically very different, part of America—one that we need to understand in order to grasp what’s going on in our national politics. My frequent family visits out to the Midwest help to give me that perspective.
A final note: There’s no paywall on today’s post—and none on the audio version of the post either. So if you’re a non-paying subscriber, feel free to take a listen to the audio file when it arrives in a separate email, so you can hear what you’ve been missing—and could regularly enjoy by becoming a paying subscriber!
Nothing would be better for the prospects of a Substack newsletter devoted to analyzing and criticizing the right than for the mood of alarm that’s prevailed for years among liberals, progressives, and other leftists to persist and even deepen. But I value honesty more than profit, and the fact is that the final two months of 2022 have felt almost … hopeful. I don’t at all mean that the darker political currents that rose to the surface of our politics in the mid-2010s are dissipating. But I do mean there are signs both that the right-wing tide may have crested in public opinion and that the center and center-left are fighting back effectively by erecting safeguards to protect the Constitution and key institutions from immediate peril.
The Encouraging News
The results of November’s midterm elections were mixed. Democrats held onto majority control of the Senate and they kept losses in the House to a minimum. Both were much better news than many were expecting, based on recent historical precedent as well as President Biden’s middling-to-weak approval ratings through the year leading up to the vote.
It’s not that voters abandoned the GOP en masse. On the contrary, Republicans received more votes in House elections than the Democrats did (even if that showing failed to translate into a big sweep of seats). But Republicans and GOP-leaning independents did refuse to vote in sufficient numbers for candidates who expressed skepticism about the integrity of the electoral system and a willingness to defy it.
That looks like a lesson in limits. Republicans like fighters, but not enough of them want fighters who will fight so hard that the electoral system ceases to function and outrage inspires insurrectionary violence. Not only did those kinds of extremists lose, but all of them (aside from poor, pathetic Kari Lake out in Arizona) conceded their races, implying that their incendiary claims about the 2020 election may have been more for show than an expression of sincere distrust in our country’s capacity to count votes fairly and accurately.
Then there’s the fortifying fact that Congress passed greatly needed reforms of the Electoral Count Act as part of the omnibus bill that currently awaits Biden’s signature. Those changes clarify the procedures Congress and the Vice President must follow in the event that a future president and/or state legislatures attempt to overturn the will of the voters in the way that President Trump encouraged them to do as part of his self-coup attempt in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, 2021.
Finally, there are the polls showing waning support for Donald Trump among likely Republican primary voters—not to mention news stories of his legal troubles on multiple fronts and reports of his recent lack of energy and focus. Put it all together and it’s possible to imagine Trump failing to win the Republican nomination in 2024. I’m not ready to say such an outcome is likely; until a few weeks ago, I considered his defeat in the primaries a remote possibility. But we appear to be entering a new phase in the Trump saga—one in which he has to fight harder than ever to maintain his preeminence in the Republican Party, and the outcome of such a struggle is somewhat less clear than it appeared just a few months ago.
That, too, is cause for hope.
A Still-Uncertain Future
But hope isn’t the same thing as optimism. The first gives a goal to fight for, combined with the encouraging thought that it may well prevail; the second is an expression of confidence that the goal will be attained. I have no such confidence.
Why not? Because, as I’ve argued more than once these past few months, the United States is a country deeply as well as narrowly divided. It wouldn’t take much for a right-wing populist (one far more competent than Trump) to win the presidency along with unified control of Congress once again. And the Republican electoral coalition currently contains some pretty radical, unstable elements within it.
That means those radical, unstable elements could well end up awfully close to power at some point in the near-to-medium term. This wouldn’t necessarily entail the country facing the distinctive threats associated with giving Trump power again. But there are other bad scenarios that don’t quite rise to the level of a self-coup that overturns electoral democracy.
Millions of Republican voters crave a fix of righteous indignation—and an entire media ecosystem now exists to provide it, not just about elected Democrats and progressive activists but about key institutions of the government, including federal law enforcement, public-health officials, and the “administrative state” more generally. A series of relatively high-brow right-wing websites spew out indignation-fueled arguments about all of the above on daily basis. Tucker Carlson and other media personalities popularize and disseminate these angry arguments to a much wider, appreciative audience. The high ratings then drive up ad rates, generating healthy profits for the media companies that pump civic toxins into the political air.
What profits are for a business, donations and votes are for politicians. That’s how we get Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launching investigations into COVID-19 vaccine safety and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sending busloads of migrants to be dumped outside the Vice President’s residence in Washington DC on Christmas Eve when temperatures are in the teens.
It will be good for the country if the post-Trump GOP stops undermining faith in elections and threatening to overturn democracy. But it will be bad if that renewal of responsibility ends up enabling Republicans to win more votes and greater power, which it then uses to impose policies motivated by ignorance and cruelty because that’s what members of “the base” have been primed by right-wing media to demand.
This might not spell the end of democracy and advent of authoritarianism in America. But it would be something nearly as bad—namely, what author Garry Wills once aptly dubbed government from the fringes.
That leaves me apprehensive about the American future as 2022 draws to a close, even as the year’s modest successes give me a modicum of hope for what lies ahead.
Happy New Year, everyone. See you in 2023.
It's unfortunately too easy to see how the lessons learned by the GOP from 2022 results will not be - don't BE crazy, but instead - don't look like you're crazy. Our grading curve for what constitutes passing candidates has been so skewed that if you're not frothing at the mouth claiming election fraud and space lasers at every rally (oh wait, she was reelected), you appear downright normal. DeSantis is downright cruel to immigrants and his use of govt to punish his enemies is really leaning authoritarian, but the GOP is giving him an A+.
There is also the fear that Dems will misread their successes and see their wins as voters wanting more progressive candidates (you already hear this on left leaning podcasts). This will, of course, give the voters all the excuse they need to vote for the seemingly equally or slightly less crazy Republican. If your choice is between two extremes, pick the one in your camp (see, e.g. Wisconsin).
We can still hope and fight for sanity and moderation to be the norm, even though the last several years has done its best to disabuse is of that hope.
Enjoy the family and the getaway!
Yes there is reason to be SOMEWHAT optimistic, and I'll add another "good news" data point and that is the brewing political strife (I hope it turns into a civil war) in the GOP. Currently this strife centers on the elections of the House Speaker and the RNC chair, and the probable GOP prep primary, will no doubt continue to fester these divides.
But, let's not forget the new driver of reactionary policies that so-called conservatives seek to imposed on 21st century America: The Supreme Court. It does not appear they are reading the tea-leaves and will pull back on their radical agenda. An agenda based on "established traditions" that must reach back to the 1600's before SCOTUS considers them valid.
Also, the fundamental conditions have not changed, which makes me feel that any valid reasons to feel optimistic is just a momentary reprieve. The classic battle between progressive change and conservative traditions is accelerating in the early days of the digital age and has created a Future Shock affect that is truly dividing us and preventing us from sharing a common national narrative.
Happy New Year...(?)