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What Happens After the Election?
Assume because it’s a safe bet that Hillary Clinton wins the presidency by a wide margin. Assume a double-digit disaster in down-ticket races, perhaps with the GOP narrowly keeping the House. (I assume it will because there are few real swing seats; filing deadlines have passed, and many seats don’t have a strong Democratic challenger.) Odds look better-than-even that the Democrats will gain four seats and take back the Senate. It’s possible, if less likely, that they pick up a filibuster-proof majority.
We the People are already nearly at each other’s throats. I don’t see what could happen between now and the election that could reduce America’s political, social, and economic polarization. Hillary Clinton will be the most unpopular president ever to be elected. Trump’s supporters will be embittered. Given Trump’s enthusiasm for conspiracy theories, I can readily imagine him claiming voter fraud or otherwise challenging the legitimacy of the election. Congress will be close to gridlock from Day 1.
No matter who’s elected, the next four years are apt to be tough. Our infrastructure is crumbling and the consequences of this will increasingly be obvious. We’re on the edge of several geopolitical precipices. It’s highly likely that America will either be forced into a humiliating retreat, internationally, or war. There will be more terrorist attacks, certainly, and more mass shootings. In the best scenario, there will only be a normal cyclical recession, but in the worst, there will be another big economic shock. And we’re out of tools to deal with it. No one is going to get the economic security they’re longing for in the coming four years.
This would all be true even if Lincoln were about to enter the Oval Office. But it won’t be Lincoln. It will be Hillary Clinton, who is despised and distrusted by a large part of the electorate. To her left is a large minority who despises and distrusts her just as much as the right does. (Read the comments here, for example.) She won’t be entering office with a large reservoir of public hope and good will to draw upon.
The ugliness and bitterness of this campaign won’t end. No matter who takes office in November, the first thing the rest of the world will do is test the president’s resolve. Right now, the election is sucking up so much media oxygen that Americans aren’t paying much attention to the warning signs of dangerous confrontations to come. But the global balance of power has been so destabilized that no one should hope otherwise.
So what will happen when the things that have created a groundswell of support for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get worse?
In 1994, Edward Luttwak wrote Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future. I wish it didn’t seem prophetic, but it does.
He concludes:
… Thus neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.
A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot, and which Zhirinovsky’s bizarre excesses are now occupying in the peculiar conditions of Russia, where personal economic insecurity is the only problem that counts for most people … And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying if not blocking barriers against globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.
Is he wrong?
Published in General
This has, in fact, happened, but I don’t think conservatives in particular shoulder much, if any, blame. The erosion of the checks and balances has come largely at the hands of SCOTUS. We should also remember that there was a government shutdown only a few years ago that simply didn’t play. It’s very difficult to effect budgetary change, regardless of the outcomes of off-year elections, if one does not control the presidency or have huge majorities. I blame Bush!
Another fascist idea is free college education provided by the national government. People seem to like that idea, too. Basically, people like fascism, and they will run large risks of losing their freedom to get the benefits. Look at the risks people are willing to take with their right to privacy–it’s been shall we say, lost. But the Internet is cool so it’s progress.
Be serious, DocJay. You know as well as I do that Republican pundits and operates rarely lose their jobs, no matter how stupid and incompetent they are. In fact, after the election I expect many of these same stupid, incompetent pundits to come on The Ricochet Podcast to plug some books with titles like How Conservatives Can Win the Future…By Giving Me More Money. Many will probably appear on Uncommon Knowledge, the same dead Conservative and Greek philosophers will be quoted, and then every episode will end with the same quote by Buckley about the wells of regeneration being infinitely filled with lead, or whatever. Nothing will change on your side, and then your side will repeat their actions in four years.
I hope your side doesn’t change. Their fecklessness allows my side to dominate this country. May they continue with their behavior forever so that my side’s dominance will be eternal.
Whoever wins, I plan to spend the next four years throwing recriminations and imprecations against the GOPe.
My opinion is that many on my side, whatever that is for I am a sheep dog ( never ever a sheep) will quit reading and we will descend in to Idiocracy. You may well be right though.
I make no predictions this election cycle, who knows but Hillary looks horrible these days maybe she’s elected then can’t serve due to health reasons.
We won in 2012, too, Brent. There’re plenty of reasons for the failure to make use of those victories, including the right side’s demand for their way or nothing, their refusal to compromise. That’s part of the mistakes that need to be addressed over the next four years during, hopefully, a Trump presidency.
It’s not too late to do that, but we need to recognize who the enemy is and stop shooting at each other because we’re not republican enough or conservative enough to suit the shooter.
Eric Hines
Viruscop,
I don’t see how your side dominates the country. They manage it at best. When your policies keep expanding the third world within our cities you’ll see more injustice. You’ll have a small elite, with a large mass of low-class state dependent corrupted humans. I don’t know where you live but you better be rich or it’s going to suck.
No worries, Bill and Huma will run a shadow government.
Maybe Huma, Bill isn’t looking good either
According to the constant wailing on this site, we dominate the country. You watch the movies that the people on my side create, you watch our tv shows, you have a government that accepts our views on its proper role. None of these things, especially with this election, are going to change anytime soon.
Von Snrub, what did you think of the rest of my comment? What did you think of its main point?
What the hell are you talking about? Your ‘side’ may have many creative roles but who cares. You fail to take care of your constituents. They live in slums and they continue to live in slums. Thanks to you. Good job. What are you going to do about it, hire more social workers to make yourself feel good about yourself. LOLS! All the cities in the US have mini South America’s growing inside of them. Good job. You might think this is progress, if you’re an idiot. South America has higher crime, higher violent crime, and lower standard of living, but you love that. But then again, you don’t live there.
Have you ever been to a title 1 school in Manhattan or the Bronx? They are a mess and nothing will change that. No amount of bleeding heart gay marriage movies will make you or us send our children to those schools. You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. But I’m sure you’ll pretend you will, and in some cases schools play games where they send the top kids to the bad schools. But for those parents know they’re kids are tracked into the advanced classes. It’s like a mini Harvard in the center of Crown heights.
On our side, we’re really doing fine. We make good money, live in rich neighborhoods alongside you. Nothing’s really hurting us.
No, they aren’t, but “dominate the country” is too strong a term. I can probably buy “dominate” the culture, higher education, and the national bureaucracy. That’s a lot, but given the large number of individual states resistant to the overtures of “lie back and just enjoy,” the country as a whole has a ways to go.
Viruscop, I do agree with your main point though. Hence my attraction to Milo Yiannapoulis and Adam Corolla. They don’t speak in this worthless edu-speak that makes me want to vomit.
To tell you the truth Viruscop, I don’t comment on here often because I get a smell of elitism every time I read a thread. They never taught in the Bronx either. It’s all academic.
Isn’t France in a state of emergency? Aren’t many civil rights suspended or limited? Disturbingly, this does not seem to concern Americans. It is not written about much.
It’s not helpful that people equate Nazism and fascism but they do it. Nazis were national socialists.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/french-president-killing-of-police-officials-undeniably-a-terrorist-attack/2016/06/14/db71760f-68be-48d3-96e9-df35dc5d7e5b_story.html
I actually wrote a post on some of the things that you touch upon in the comment above.
Our code of conduct here is Peter Robinson, who I love, speech policing. I don’t communicate my messages through the filter of 12 million year old scholars but I can make the same point.
We need to laugh at the left and their pathetic worthlessness in changing anything for their wards of the state. Great job allowing people to grow up without a father, suffer from gun violence, and just regular violence. Good job!
I agree with this 100%. That has really been the story for me over the last couple of years. We did win. The GOP asked us to deliver a two-chamber congressional majority, and that’s what they got. And last year’s budget gave the Democrats everything they could want.
So now, the GOP says that also need the White House and they can’t do anything without the White House. Yeah. We’ve heard all this before. I agree that the congress has indeed enabled the imperial presidency. The administrative bureaucracy wields its ever-increasing power by stealing such power from Congress, and Congress does nothing about it.
Even so, if the economy was humming, all of this would be Sunday-morning talk show filler – no one would really care.
That post is pretty weak VC. You’ve been around for a while, and like to poke the hornet’s nest every now and again. It’s clear from the expansion of the lower classes, and the bifurcation of home values that your side fails. A house in Newark is 70 grand, in Summit, NJ 700K at least, but we pretend there’s an affordable median home value in the NJ. HAHA. No there’s not, there’s buy a 700k house or live in hell.
While the middle classes are slowly becoming lower classes, it’s thanks to your awesome attitudes about drugs and sex that bring us an otherwise perfect upstate NY to be a Methed out **** hole. All I gotta say is kick ass job!
The only part of your policies that seem to be benefiting anyone is abortion. By slaughtering millions of children you keep your dependent population under better control. Once again, congratulations. Hash tag black lives are a line item on Planned parenthoods balance sheet.
Texas does not need to. Once we are independent and exile Austin to Bernie-land – a large swath of states from Florida, through the midwest, up to and including the Canadian prairie provinces will join us.
(Only half joking now)
John Marshall did it in Marbury v. Madison. No guns were necessary. I think the governors can find a way to finesse it without the use of guns.
Yes, this has been a generational struggle. A few generations are already done and lost. I think this is the last gasp for our freedom.
I read the comments so far and I looked at my old comments and say spelling errors and poor sentence structure. And an and I’d change it but this pro-Xlinton thred disirves it.
#clintonbrainMRI
Not true. Their favorable ratings are comparable but Trump’s unfavorable ratings are higher than Hillary, especially among independents where it really matters.
Well, my statement is not scientific. But it’s not really contradicted by your poll data. I think that people who view Hillary favorably in polls view her favorably as an abstract concept candidate, not as a person. Whereas people who favor Trump tend to like him personally. As far as Trump’s unfavorables, it’s amazing they are not higher because he’s been continuously denounced by both parties since he announced his candidacy. If large segments of Hillary’s party continuously pointed out how unsuitable she was, her unfavorables would be way higher than Trump’s- she would have lost to Bernie Sanders. Trump’s persistence shows that he somehow has very strong appeal.
My contention is that to achieve any real, lasting reforms under our Constitution you need to control both Congress and the Presidency. Obama’s signature, lasting achievement was Obamacare, which the Dems could only ram through by controlling both.
The elections of 2010 and 2014 were crucial because by winning the GOP was able to check Obama and run out the clock on his presidency. Yes he did some things via executive order, but those can all be undone at the stroke of a pen by the next GOP president.
The stars were all in alignment. We had a deep bench of proven conservative candidates, candidates who would be too conservative to win in a normal year but all of whom were out-polling the extraordinarily unpopular Hillary. With a GOP Congress plus a President Walker, Perry, Rubio, or Cruz, we would finally have had the ability to pass real, lasting conservative reforms.
And we blew it all by nominating Trump.
I agree to achieve real reforms, but we can stop funding the nonsense.
We blew it long before Trump.
Even if the Republicans keep the Senate and the House it won’t matter because there will still be a Democrat in the White House – even if Hillary loses.
Seawriter
I don’t think this is a year for making predictions.