Electoral process gets turned into culture war
On Election Day 2018, you and I are living through the best economy of our adult lifetimes. The economy is red hot, wages are rising, blue-collar workers are earning more and there is literally a job for every American who wants one.
And what is America’s response? “Throw the bums out!”
The economy is booming, ISIS is all but gone, we just cut a better NAFTA deal, crime is down, the Red Sox won the Series, the Pats are 7-2 ... and we’re as mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore!
Why? Because we’re stupid.
In 1992, when James Carville posted his now-legendary sign at Bill Clinton HQ , the word “stupid” was meant for the candidate. It was a reminder to the campaign team that every minute they spent talking about anything other than jobs and the economy was a minute lost to political stupidity.
Today, it’s the pundits on our TVs complaining “Why isn’t Trump talking more about the economy?” who sound stupid. Or, to be more kind, out of touch.
Karl Rove can cluck over his whiteboard on Fox News all day long, bemoaning the fact that President Trump spends more time talking about the caravan than about corporate tax cuts, but Trump knows you don’t bring a dry erase marker to a gun fight. David Avella of GOPAC insists that the results-deciding factor in every midterm since 1950 has been a strong economy, but Gallup shows that the percentage of Americans who say the economy is extremely/very important is the lowest for any midterm since 2002.
A majority of Democrats currently tell pollsters that this economy — the best economy ever—isn’t good. Do they mean it? Of course not. They’re just saying it to keep from getting distracted. They’re on a mission: They want to (as West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin said of his GOP opponent last week) “beat the living crap out of ” anyone and anything having any connection to Trump.
This isn’t an election of data and debates. It’s cultural gang warfare waged with attack ads and political twoby-fours in the back alleys of the ballot box.
Tax policy? Deregulation? Taxes and debt? What’s that got to do with elections? We’re voting based on race and identity and culture and class and kneeling at football games and jokes about wounded veterans — you know, the important stuff !
And that’s why this election isn’t about the economy: because we’re stupid.
We have stupidly decided to use the electoral process — a system designed to pick the moderately corrupt city pols and harmlessly inept congressmen to whom we entrust the largely boring work of government — to wage our culture wars. When was the last time you heard politicians debating tax rates or their philosophies of foreign policy?
Why bother? Nobody cares. The voters, having spent their mornings inhaling bias-affirming agitprop from their favorite cable news shows, and their afternoons exhaling partisan hate on Twitter, want to end their day by landing a blow for their cause.
In a moment of political sanity, the party in power would be rolling toward an electoral landslide right now. Normal people would wander into the polls, think “Ain’t broke — don’t fix it,” and cast their ballot for whichever party happened to be in charge. Normal people don’t care much either way.
But “normal” isn’t the new normal. And the man who understands this moment we’re in better than anyone else alive — the feral, political animal who is President Trump — he isn’t wasting is breath stupidly droning on about jobs, growth and taxes.
Because Trump knows what this election is really about: payback. Pure political payback from Democrats for Trump’s win in 2016 and all the punches he’s landed since.
And payback is a … bad thing for Republicans in 2018.