In the Before-fore Times, this post would open with “The results are in …” But this is the now-now in Clown World. So we won’t have the exact vote count from last night’s midterms for weeks – if ever.
People hate prognosticators who make rosy predictions that turn out wrong. The only thing they dislike more are people who make grim predictions that come true.
It is in the latter place that I find myself tonight, after having reminded everyone that elections don’t matter, and voting in national races is a waste of time.
But amid the crowds of Steven Crowder clones, zombified Zoomers, and oblivious BoomerCons chanting “Vote harder!” someone has to tell it like it is.
And one disguised blessing of this election, unlike 2020, is all I have to say is John Fetterman.
Comparing the declines of America and Rome is a popular pastime on the dissident right. Now that meme has fresh fodder, since Pennsylvania’s election of a brain-damaged senator mirrors the ancient attempt to make Caligula’s horse a consul.
As with the MAGA paradox, Fetterman’s win presents inveterate vooters with an irreconcilable contradiction. Because only two explanations for his election exist:
- The vote was rigged
- A man with brain damage accurately represents the voters.
Either explanation is a definitive argument against voting in national elections. The latter offers the bonus of putting paid to the whole concept of democracy.
Contra the MAGApedes cope-posting online, this midterm result was the best that anyone interested in saving the nation could have hoped for. Even holdouts who convinced themselves that 2020 was somehow an aberration were red pilled on the folly of democracy last night.
Once more for the latecomers, America’s federal election system now only serves to insulate our unaccountable rulers from the consequences of their disastrous actions. As with the catastrophic fallout from the Hart-Celler Act, the Global War on Terror, and the COVID response, elections allow the regime to point at the people and say, “You asked for this!”
But that deflection relies on most people showing up to the polls again and again like slot machine-addicted gamblers. If national turnout fell a significant margin below 50 percent, the regime’s claims of a mandate would sound absurd to even the slowest citizen.
And it looks like our corrupt rulers’ abuses are indeed waking normies up. Last night’s turnout was 30 percent below 2020 levels. Midterms always draw smaller crowds than presidential elections, but that steep drop off suggests that millions of people have wised up to the rigged game. Removing the regime’s fig leaf isn’t the only – or even the main – reason we should want this trend to continue. Another detrimental effect of voting is it provides a release valve to vent the public’s frustrations.
We live in a materialistic age. We’re taught that all problems can be addressed with technical solutions provided by systems. But the defeat of several pro-life measures last night should disabuse us of the notion that we face technical problems. The disease that’s driven America mad and is now making her waste away is spiritual in origin.
Yes, crime is spiking. Inflation is robbing people blind. The worst abominations are infesting our schools and even our legislatures.
And as the last two elections proved, we’re not voting our way out of this mess.
Our insane regime’s motives are pride and hatred for God. They do not admit of material explanations. Instead, they arise from spiritual evil.
You cannot defeat spiritual evil by voting. The only material means of combating Satan are the sacraments, because God empowers their natural matter to achieve supernatural ends.
When the enemy has seized the moral high ground, you fight him with superior morals. When his motivation is spiritual evil, you conquer him with spiritual goods.
And as much as Late Modern Americans recoil from this reality, the only spiritual good that can confront the evil threatening to destroy us is suffering embraced as penance for sin.
People are suffering now. We are going to suffer more. The choice before us is to try making an end run around our discomfort, which will only lead us into deeper suffering, or take up our crosses for God’s sake.
That’s why the Conservatives – including Christians, who should know better – that continue clinging to Trump do everyone a disservice.
Look, it’s understandable that generations raised by TV, the internet, and smartphones would pin their hopes on a secular savior from the mass media. I admit to indulging in cautious optimism back in the day.
One unambiguous message sent last night is that the final curtain has fallen on the Trump movement. Winning the states he needs in 2024 is now a mathematical impossibility.
But some Zoomers are getting their first real taste of nostalgia, and their rose-colored remembrance of 2016 is luring them into a trap.
This member of Generation Y understands the nostalgia trap all too well. The best year is always the one gone by, and pining for it can be as addictive as any opiate.
But this is crucial: You have to let go.
You will never be able to live a full live if you don’t put the past in its proper context. Letting your past overshadow your future condemns you to the same fate as the forty-year-old loser still reliving his high school quarterback glory days.
Yet there’s nothing new under the sun, and the cure for our spiritual ills remains the same:
Put your trust in Jesus Christ; trust not in princes.
That includes not giving money or votes to people who hate you.
Amen.
It also occurs to me that this might be a lesson particularly hard for Americans to learn. Not only does Protestantism not have a tradition of accepting suffering, Americans are used to thinking that evil can and should be fought by plucky rebels who inevitably win. Neither have they ever been conquered or fallen from power into irrelevance. As an Irishman, these ideas are far more familiar to me – they are part and parcel of my culture’s heritage.
Spot on. Most US Boomers still think of Americans as the rugged yeoman farmers who gave King George what for. They have so far avoided confronting the fact that their children will be hated minorities within a decade.
What the guys in tricorn hats waving pocket constitutions have missed for years is that they were conquered long ago. If 1776 were going to commence again, it would have by now.
Guys like the Z Man have pointed out the Irish resistance to England as the model for American dissidents going forward (they and I disavow violence; we mean in terms of acknowledging the power differential).
An interesting fact: there’s a famous story that the men who intended to launch the Easter Rising were so conscientious that before carrying it out, they sent a delegation to Rome in order to (discreetly) ask the Pope whether such an armed insurrection would be morally permissible.
One of the most sacred conservative Boomer beliefs is that the politics is a pendulum that eventually swings back to the other side. This causes them both to not make use of advantages (“we’ll just bring about the inevitable dem return to power sooner!”) and also to shrug off failures (“we may have lost this time, but that only means our victory in the next cycle is even more assured.”) In the end they end up not doing much of anything, expecting the sacred political pendulum to their work for them.
I’ve heard boomers say that they would prefer losing to winning for more than a couple of election cycles in a row since winning too often would make the inevitable blowback too great.
What’s particularly crazy about this is that the democrats controlled the House for literally Boomers entire adult lives until 1995, and also controlled the Senate for most of that period, so they should know better than anyone that power does not have to reliably shift back and forth between the parties.
I particularly dislike “the pendulum will swing!” rhetoric. It’s an unconscious admission of the Right’s Hegelian worldview (which itself is rooted in gnosticism and the occult) and an inapt analogy.
A pendulum in nature is stationary. The same force that causes it to swing can also hold it in one direction or another indefinitely. Let’s call this force “the invisible hand,” but also let’s not call it something of God.
And if you look a little closer at those plucky rebels, as Curtis Yarvin said, “your desire to remain a Whig is now somewhere between your desire to join the Crips and your desire to volunteer for the Waffen SS.”
It’s very telling to me how many white male “conservatives” are saying that the party needs to bend the knee on abortion so they can win the coveted unmarried woman vote and elect a Con Inc neo-con who will eventually bend the knee on transgenderism.
God didn’t send his only begotten son to save us from the Globalist Regime. He did so to save us from sin and spiritual death.
Anyone who can suggest supporting infanticide to win elections is a sociopath. The more honest approach would be to admit that conservatism is an utter failure and move on to something else.