By Charlie Johnston
Since 2012 I have been badly wrong on what I expected to happen in three election cycles – 2012, 2018 and yesterday. That is about as many as I had my entire lifetime before that. Clearly, I do not have my finger on the pulse of who we are in this country anymore.
There will surely be cries of fraud in many places – and I have no doubt there was more than a little. But having cut my teeth in Illinois politics, I have a pretty good fraud detector. I only saw red flags of big fraudulent activity in Pennsylvania and Arizona. Unless fraud was built into the voting machine programming or transfers, this election was a pretty accurate picture of who we are as a country right now. With a few minor exceptions, I am inclined to believe the latter.
Nearly half the country (maybe more than half) looked at the economic destruction the left has caused, the politicization of the justice system, the sexualizing and abuse of our children, tyrannical and errant medical mandates that maim and kill, a system in which officials and bureaucrats rule rather than serve, the assault on rights as enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and the destruction of ordered liberty; shrugged their shoulders and effectively said, “Yeah, this is good.” That is a country which is entirely alien to me.
It is likely that Republicans will take control of the House – but by a relatively small margin. Who will hold the Senate is unclear as I write this. But even if the GOP controls both houses, it is not enough. The margins are too small. On the Republican side of the aisle, the “reach across the aisle” caucus will prevail, even under the best of now possible outcomes. The left will be empowered to continue to arrest people for their political views, such as being pro-life and otherwise conservative or Christian. Our long, national nightmare is not over; it has just begun.
I really did not believe that voters would effectively vote to continue what has been going on these last few years. Just how violent, lawless, and impoverished do we have to become for people to say enough? I honestly do not understand it at this point. Do left-wing enthusiasts believe that they will be counted among the rulers instead of the ruled? If so, they know nothing of history. Of course, throughout history, tyrannical rule by a tiny elite class has usually been initially welcomed by cheering crowds deceived that they were going to be part of that ruling elite, wielding life and death power over their opponents. They all realized too late that all they had done was help give that tiny, elite class life and death power over themselves. I never thought it would happen in America. I knew we could be foolish for a time. But I thought love of liberty and flinty competence was ingrained deeply enough into our national character that we would make decisive course corrections when the consequences of our folly were clear enough. They were clear enough yesterday. I guess many of us have not felt enough pain yet to cause us to shed our delusions. (Hat tip to my friend, Jim Graham, for that insight).
In 2008 a friend was trying to recruit me to go to work for the RNC crafting themes and slogans. I declined for several reasons. But the most salient one I told her was that I feared the stupids may have become the majority – and if that was the case we would just have to ultimately crash and burn, then rebuild from the ashes they left.
Perhaps I was engaged in wishful thinking, hoping that we weren’t as terribly divided as we clearly are. As bad as things are here in America, our love of faith, family and freedom is not nearly as degraded as it is in most of the rest of the world. One of the real stunners for me these last couple of years was seeing how eagerly Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even England embraced the new tyranny. As deep as the divisions run in America now, though, it is much more likely that we will see a division of the country into free states and captive states. That was a largely unremarked trend yesterday. For the most part, red states got redder and blue states demanded more of what we have been getting these last few years. I find it far more likely than a day ago that we will enter into some form of separation, at least for a time. Whether it will take the form of the legal fiction of China and Taiwan – one nation, two systems – or a formal separation, I don’t know. But I find it hard to believe that those red states which got redder yesterday will long accept forced impoverishment, rampant crime, and criminalizing political dissent.
