America on the Brink
The 2022 midterm election is tomorrow. It is the most important election of our lifetime so far, just like the last one and the one before that. In 2022, America always seems to be a nation on the brink. The stakes keep getting higher with each passing day, and as the major parties jockey for votes, the endgame is coming into focus. The MAGA Party (formerly known as Republicans) are on the move, boldly and fearlessly pushing their agenda from Trump on high. They seamlessly coordinate their talking points, always draw the brightest spotlights, and let criticism wash over them as if being baptized anew. Always on message, always in support of Trump, and never caring what anybody else thinks of them.
The Democrats also have candidates for office on the ballot.
Whereas once the Democrats were favored to hold the House, that’s looking less likely by the day. Deadlocked already, the Senate is a wildcard, with RealClearPolitics currently showing EIGHT races in the toss-up column. The bottom line? It’s going to be close, and there is a very real possibility that January 2023 sees MAGA in control of both houses of Congress. One can only imagine the shenanigans in store should that happen.
It’s common wisdom that midterm election are always bad for the incumbent party. One might be fooled into thinking this is just the traditional ebb and flow of politics, but this seemingly familiar trend appears to be working together with another axiom of politics: never underestimate a Democrat’s ability to fold a winning hand.
This election should have been different. When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, Democrats were handed a rallying cry not heard in generations. Instead of taking that fight to the insurgents, the last line of defense against the Orange Man and his Basket of Deplorables appears to be dissolving like a wet noodle.
The reality of polarized America is that the only thing truly in a position to oppose the MAGA movement is the Democratic Party. Like it or not, our two-party system places America’s future in their hands. So what happened? In a sane world, any Democrat with a pulse who stood for anything and fought back against MAGA rhetoric should have wiped the movement from the history books.
Joe Biden says a lot of the right things, but he’s one foot in the grave. He was elected specifically because he’s the boring alternative. It boggles the mind that he’s even THINKING about reelection. Kamala Harris has been even less effective; the few times we’ve seen her, she’s barely been able to complete a meaningful sentence, to say nothing of actually persuading anyone of anything. The rest of the group includes a stroke victim who doesn’t know when to quit, a southern preacher incapable of summoning fire OR brimstone, Chuck Schumer, and…some other people whose names you’ve forgotten more than once now. Even AOC — one of the most talented and charismatic politicians in the country — just dances in the obscurity of a town hall while America sees itself out.
So while Democrats have been woefully inadequate and absolutely deserve the blame for not being better, this ragtag band of nitwits are not the villains of this story. Like Tom Bombadil, they’re content to live in their own little world, conspicuously absent from the fight.
It’s always difficult to avoid hyperbole. It’s even harder when Trump is such a larger than life personality who himself can’t get enough of it. The Democrats who aren’t ducking for cover have failed in that struggle by telling America that this election is our last chance to save democracy. They’ll tell you that the threat of MAGA authoritarianism is akin to 1930’s Germany. Of course they may be right, but even in this vanishingly rare instance when Godwin’s Law is actually appropriate, Americans are so inured to the stability of our democracy that this is just not an effective argument. Crucially, it fails to capture how and why this is all happening.
The MAGA playbook started, of course, with Donald Trump. The 2016 election was its proving ground, co-opting establishment Republicans, seeding a new crop of MAGA’s across the country, and setting the stage for a deliberate, multidimensional attack on what turns out are flimsy guardrails of law and politics. As John Adams prophetically wrote: “[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Cloaked in a perverse morality and grotesque religiosity, MAGA has provided the real world consummation of of Adams’s fears.
To this day, Donald Trump insists (publicly, at least) that he won the 2020 election. Years later, he still hasn’t cited any actual evidence for this, and every single court case and audit that came back confirmed the fact that there was simply no widespread fraud. That makes it a lie, and a really big one. How it can surprise anyone that Trump would lie about anything at all, is really just a question for psychiatrists at this point. Trump has been lying about everything, in public, for decades. His psyche simply can’t handle the idea that he is not the best at something, or the strongest, or the smartest, or the most manly. It used to be the part of his persona that was so appealing: Trump, always a winner. In retrospect, it’s almost unbelievable that we ever associated the name of someone who managed to bankrupt a casino, a success. But here we are.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me thousands of times over the span of 4 years, there’s just no excuse. I can forgive people who supported Trump in 2016. For many, he was simply a buffoon who…wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Fine. But after four years of naked corruption, shameless lies, deliberate cruelty, and the destruction of a once-great political party, Trump left this country broken. He left it broken morally, legally, politically, and spiritually. In doing so, he sowed the seeds for a new cohort of MAGA politicians — ones who will do his bidding without regard for anything else. These crusades have already begun.
After decades of Republicans crying states rights over abortion, MAGA now wants to ban abortion federally. In many states, they will impose criminal penalties for any abortion, no matter how early, and with no exceptions for things like rape, incest, or even in vitro fertilization. A complicated issue with loads of grey area, reduced to a power grab in the most cruel and arbitrary way imaginable. Anything for the culture war.
More recently, MAGA has waged war on transgender Americans, whom they see as one of the few people left they can get away with being openly bigoted against. In 2021, MAGAs proposed 147 anti-trans bills in 34 states. For what? They’ll usually claim it’s about the integrity of sports, to prevent men from competing as women and upending fair competition. Again, they have taken a complicated topic and used it as a veneer for a campaign of hate across the country that targets its most vulnerable citizens. As they are wont to do, MAGA always looks to find sprawling “solutions” to nonexistent problems. In Utah, MAGA lawmakers passed a law that bans transgender students from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity.
With so many other pressing problems in this country, there must have been a wave of transgender students dominating in Utah sports, right? This important legislation must have been shining a light on an age-old wrong? To quote Utah Governor (and real Republican) Charlie Cox — whose veto was overridden by the legislature — it affected just “[f]our kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day.” Four. In the entire state. If that’s not virtue signaling, I don’t know what is.
Arkansas went even further, banning all gender-affirming care of any kind for anyone under 18. When pressed by Jon Stewart as to the reasoning behind the law, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge — who came on his show to try and defend the law, no less — couldn’t point to any medical organizations or medical research that would support a need to limit these interventions for trans youth. To the contrary, all of the major medical organizations, both physical and psychiatric, have proven guidelines for how to approach this sort of care and significantly improve outcomes for trans kids.
Of course none of this is new, and none of it is surprising. They’re not even hiding the hate very well anymore. Authoritarians have been stirring up support by going after marginalized people for all of recorded history. It works. They do it with discriminatory laws, they do it in the name of religion, and sometimes they do it out in the open when they know their audience. But that doesn’t make it any less vile.
If anybody still believes that MAGA’s position on abortion, race, religiosity, honesty, integrity, or shame is because of anything but a naked pursuit of power, money, and notoriety, let’s take a walk down to Georgia.
To Georgia’s credit, it was something of a success story in the 2020 election. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger didn’t blink when Trump called to get him to “find” the exact number of votes he needed to win the state. Lindsay Graham apparently did something similar and is being compelled to testify to a grand jury about it. Georgia had multiple recounts and audits, and the state lawfully went to its winner, Joe Biden.
But Georgia isn’t all good news. I could write an entire treatise on the bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit of Margie Three-Toes, but as disgusting as the QAnon Congresswoman is, MAGA is laid bare more by its choice of nominee for the US Senate, Herschel Walker. A longtime celebrity in Georgia from his years as a football player, he has absolutely no experience in politics. He had to move from Texas to Georgia just to be eligible for the seat. Walker has a long history of mental illness, violence, and reckless behavior. He has obvious brain damage from all the hits to the head in his football days. And despite all evidence to the contrary, he holds himself out as being a faithful Christian, virtuous above all others. He equates abortion with murder and has zero grasp of any policy. He impersonates law enforcement. Frankly, there’s no way around saying that he’s a dangerous idiot. But also profoundly ill. Notwithstanding that, he is so obviously and manifestly unfit to be a US Senator it defies all logic, but the only qualification he needs is that he’s MAGA. As MAGA, all else can be forgiven. A yes vote for the party.
Honestly, I feel terrible for Herschel Walker, that he is being so transparently abused by his handlers. When it came out that he had paid for multiple women to have multiple abortions, he denied it. Then he half-admitted it after it was revealed that the woman is the mother of one of his many previously unknown children. He said the money wasn’t for abortions, but something else. The check for the right amount just happened to be tucked in with the get well card. It was painful to watch the denials of things so obviously true just because he had to toe the party line. In a world without politics, Walker did an honorable thing by helping these women pay for their abortions. By thinking about their wellbeing. Instead he’s forced to paint them as liars and sinners in public. Even his pro-Trump son went public denouncing him as an absent and abusive father.
In years past, such revelations would be fatal to any political campaign. But when the most ardent anti-abortion MAGAs came to Georgia to defend Walker despite him clearly participating in what they all say equates to murder, he was forgiven and hailed as Christly. Walker fashions himself more of a Christian than his opponent, Dr. Raphael Warnock, who is literally a pastor. This entire spectacle of ruining an already-broken man’s life is MAGA, distilled. No principles, no integrity, and absolutely no shame.
Let’s not forget racist. In elevating Walker to be a US Senate nominee, MAGAs said out loud that there’s no way we could ever be racist because we're supporting a Black man for the Senate! It’s the political equivalent of “I can’t be racist, I have a Black friend.” The cynical villainy of this is readily apparent: Walker is their political slave, held up on the auction block for all to see. Willing to do anything they tell him. In Walker, they found someone who so completely embodies every negative stereotype of Black men in America, it would almost be comical if it weren’t so calculated and malevolent.
The worst part of all of this? Polling suggests that Walker has a very real chance of winning. It’s the same story for dozens of MAGA politicians across the country, each uniquely vile in their casual disregard for reality, democracy, and basic human decency. It’s never been about the issues. MAGA doesn’t care about qualifications, they don’t care if you actively work against American democracy by attacking the capitol, they don’t care if you lie to them with every breath. They don’t care if you sexually assault women, they don’t care if you incite violence, and they won’t look at simple truths right in front of their faces if instructed not to. This cult of personality only cares about hurting the people not like them. Hurting the minorities whose ascendant equality they resent. Hurting whoever doesn’t look like them or talk like them or live like them.
Then making an example of those who might otherwise succeed on an equal playing field.
These people are cultists, but also victims. Victims of too much comfort, too much rage, and too little empathy. They see the world they knew, they see it changing, and they’ll hold on to anything or anyone who will let them live in their preferred reality. They are victims of a master con-man and, increasingly, a new generation of his political descendants.
It’s no surprise that Democrats don’t have the answer. You can’t connect with people who don’t share your reality. 2020 showed that we can hold together if we don’t succumb to apathy. A nation on the brink is better than one in free fall, but if MAGA establishes the foothold that this election is offering them, we will be pulled over the edge. Perhaps on a larger scale, it’s inevitable. Perhaps it’s America that’s failing, itself a victim of both excess and pettiness. Perhaps a country so easily inured to continuous violence, effortless hate, widespread death, and millions of people who cheer it on from afar deserves that which it tolerates.
In the end, maybe it’s not fair to blame Democrats, even though we must. Maybe it’s a good thing that they don’t have the killer instinct needed to subdue such a threat. Or maybe it’s all just bigger than politics.
That’s not to say there isn’t hope, but there is definitely a reckoning coming, regardless of the election outcome. Trump is poised to announce his 2024 candidacy for president while at the same time, the Department of Justice is waiting for the election to be over to indict him. They don’t call him Teflon Don for nothing, but I think this time is different (and I’ve bitten my tongue from saying that dozens of times). Though he is no doubt guilty of countless crimes throughout his career, justice is catching up to the former president who brazenly stole America’s secrets on his way out the door. The former president who orchestrated an attempt to overthrow a democratic election. The one who did it all in plain sight, lied about it, and knew his followers would only cheer his lawlessness. In New York, Georgia, and/or Washington DC, I’m finally confident in saying that Donald Trump’s long streak of evading the law is coming to an end. Maybe that justice is what will keep America whole, or maybe it will break her. Either way, it won’t be long.
When you vote tomorrow, even if you have to hold your breath a little, treat it as your last opportunity to do so. Vote for anybody who truly wants you to have that vote, and who wants it to matter. If we all do that, I think we’ll be ok.
