The Republican Party Deserves Their Bad Election Night

Brutal election night for Republicans, though the ugliness mostly happened in blue states and probably has limited meaning over the long term. A long series of “however” paragraphs follow.

Abigail Spanberger is a harbinger, East Coast Katie Hobbs: bland, empty, relentlessly platitudinous, tactically cowardly. The fact that she won comfortably tells you what’s going to win comfortably. Listen if you must to her NPR interview this morning, where she says literally nothing for seven minutes.

“What’s on your agenda for day one?” She’s going to urgently work with the legislature to pass legislation, and she’s going to sign orders, and the legislation and the orders aren’t going to move Virginia backward; they’re going to move Virginia forward.

Completely soulless human-shaped object with a background entirely in government jobs, the new normal. She feels very strongly that we must do things that are good, and not do things that are bad, and rest assured that she will not hesitate to say that we must move forward and do things that are positive for the people of Virginia.

My great error, recently, has been to live in a world that has information in it. Watching man-on-the-street voter interviews, I have learned that we have to vote for Democrats because Donald Trump turned women into handmaids who don’t have any rights at all and have to be slaves to the brutal Christian nationalist patriarchy, because we need government grocery stores to make food abundant and affordable, because Donald Trump ordered health insurance costs to double, because Virginia’s state government is going to put an immediate stop to the deportations, and because we have to vote against our dictator king who said that we’re not allowed to have freedom anymore. The “No Kings” protests worked.

See, this poor man was in the military, and he fought for our freedom for twenty years — only to see Donald Trump take away our freedom:

We’re in the death camps, now, being slaughtered by the secret police. My response to this stuff has mostly been to ask people if they were born this way or incurred their brain injury later in life, but it’s clear that there are a lot of them. You live in a world of information that doesn’t exist for a bunch of the people who pass you on the sidewalk. Only one man can truly understand what that feels like:

I summarize my view of this election by asking you to watch a campaign video from a progressive, never-had-a-job nepo baby who may or may not be the next mayor of Seattle. Below, Katie Wilson explains why pizza has become so expensive, and it’s because the government hasn’t made housing affordable, which means that people have to spend a lot of money on rent, so they have less money for pizza, so demand plummets, so pizza restaurants have to make their profit from a smaller group of customers, so they raise prices. See, as demand falls, prices soar. Falling demand causes higher prices. The less consumers want something, the more it costs.

NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY WE NEED GOVERNMENT-SUBSIDIZED HOUSING!?!?!? It’s so pizza can be cheap again, by making people be able to buy it, driving demand upward, and so reducing the price. Obviously.

I have assumed that legacy media and machine politicians are now so obviously insipid and pathetic and moronic and worthless, and hold on a minute while I consult a thesaurus that no one could possibly be listening to them, anymore, or falling for their dismal act. But clearly, this is not the case. Zombie political culture is still eating brains.

Related, I had a conversation last night with a person who has a deep concern about conspiracy theories, and so only accepts information from trusted media sources like the New York Times, where highly credentialed professional journalists rigorously fact-check all of their reporting. I said, “I can’t believe that Jay Jones sent those text messages and still got elected,” and the person I was talking to looked at me with a perfectly blank face and said, “Text messages? What are you talking about?”

That boulder has to be pushed up the hill, forever, and it’s going to keep rolling back to the bottom. The foundational problem is an information problem.

Related, as I just wrote, Democrats are saying that the government shutdown is ripping food out of the mouths of hungry families:

Food comes from government. If Donald Trump doesn’t feed 42 million Americans, they’ll starve. Not having the government give away free things is cruel.

What are Republicans saying about it? This:

Food comes from government. If Democrats don’t vote to feed 42 million Americans, they’ll starve. Not having the government give away free things is cruel. It’s the same message, with a different word slotted into the blame slot. Josh Hawley:

Families are hungry because Democrats won’t give us 60 votes to fund the government. Food comes from government. So does everything else:

Democrats say that Republicans are keeping you from having your free government programs, and Republicans say that Democrats are keeping you from having your free government programs. Hawley went hard on the argument in the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Sample paragraph from a Republican senator:

Federal food benefits, distributed in partnership with the states, have grown to be one of our most vital forms of aid. My constituents in Missouri will tell you. A few days ago, a retired teacher from southwest Missouri wrote me about her four grandchildren. They rely on SNAP to buy groceries. Upon hearing that assistance may soon be unavailable, one of the children asked her: “Grandma, what will we do? How will we eat?”

The Republican Party had a horrible night, but the Republican Party offered … what? Excluding the one Vast Orange Outlier, what does the party offer?

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles. Find his Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.