As the GOP prepares for post-mortems and mutual recriminations -- and some of that will be necessary -- it's also important to keep in mind that in any contest, the other team has strengths as well, and they get their time with the ball too. And that they're going to score.
We got a little self-deluded about abortion having all but vanished as a factor in the race. It didn't.
Abortion was a costly victory. That doesn't mean you don't take the victory; only a GOPe Grifter would say that you perpetually run on an issue and never actually try to win that issue on a policy level.
But winning the issue of abortion, finally, did provoke a powerful backlash from the 40% of the country that considers abortion to be an unholy sacrament.
Just as Obamacare was a costly victory that, from the Democrats' perspective, they absolutely needed to seize and accept the fallout as unavoidable consequences, so too does the GOP have to take the win on abortion, but with the unavoidable consequence of a riled-up leftwing progressive base.
And on that, even though abortion faded as an issue as we got close to election day, millions and millions of votes were cast weeks and even a month before election day. I checked the Pennsylvania mail-in voting rules; the website didn't give a firm date, but it said early voting usually takes place "4-6 weeks" before election day.
So people were casting votes for Fetterneck in the last week of September. When the July-August passions over Dobbs were still hot.
Another important factor is that the Democrat Party, being now the party of smug, comfortable affluent white professionals and civil servants who imagine themselves to be of the professional class, is now less of a political party than a Lifestyle Brand. By which I mean: they are affluent enough to not care as much about minor little things like gas costing six dollars a gallon and chicken breast costing almost $8 a pound (when you can even get it!). Or even that their 401K's have lost one third to 40% of their value.
They like advertising the fact -- or advertising the pretense -- that they're so wealthy that they don't care about the trivial worries of money that so concern the Lumpenproletariat:
Does anyone think this Bearded BBW is really unconcerned about the price of carbohydrates? Because I sure don't.
The Lifestyle Brand Liberals are fine with the price of gasoline, which they understand must Necessarily Skyrocket (TM) if we're to save the world from Carbon Dioxide (The Invisible Killer). They don't love paying more for gas, but they also don't love paying more in taxes. They accept doing so, however, as tithings they pay to the Universal Church of the God-State.
One sad lesson we learned in Iraq is that any tyranny has its fervent supporters -- there is no such thing as a tyranny that is hated by everyone. Such a tyranny would not last more than a day and an hour.
The Democrats' Covid Tyranny, of course, has millions of passionate Mask Baathists who voted not for Covid Amnesty but for Covid Vengeance, vengeance against those who have dared to unmask over the past year. The Democrats still very much count upon these jihadists as party loyalists.
Finally, the Lifestyle Brand that is the Democrat Party has little to pitch its smug, affluent white Karen core of extraordinarily mediocre careerists who think they're genius world-beaters except constant validation and slurs against the proles -- narcissistic mediocrities of the sort that make up the Democrat Party need to be constantly assured that there are huge swathes of people who are inferior to them.
The Democrat Party exists nearly exclusively to invent Nazi-like dehumanization campaigns against half the country so that the intellectually insecure sub-mediocrities of the civil-service and mid-management mid-wits can feel they're Superior to someone.
And the Democrat Party is creating these dehumanization campaigns effectively enough. The last campaign convinced the midwits that the people the Democrat Party is using government power to censor, surveil, and jail are The Real Fascists, and that the midwits should therefore feel Scorn towards them, and feel a swell of Unearned Superiority towards them.
And they reward the Democrat Party with their votes for this service.
No one will ever vote against someone who makes them feel like Somebody.
This is all primal and primally ugly stuff, but the Democrat Party has always been about this very base tribalism. They've been doing it for 100 years. They're good at it.
We maybe forgot that a bit.
That doesn't let us off the hook for having failed to counter this. That doesn't let us off the hook for having failed to beat them.
But we should keep it in perspective. Patton warned against soldiers imagining the Nazis to be ten-foot-tall giants who were unbeatable in battle.
But we should likewise resist imagining the Democrats as one-foot-tall Jonah Goldbergs unable to take three steps without stepping on the dick of the better-endowed studs servicing their wives. They are the nastiest race hustlers the modern world has created, in bed with Hollywood and Madison Avenue with access to all the expertise that professionals and artists in the fields of emotional manipulation and brainwashing can grant them, and they get to run their plays, too.
And they can run race- and class-baiting plays for Suburban White Karen against lower-class white men just the same as they used to run race-baiting plays for black and Hispanic voters against rich whites. They can run whatever racial/class play they need to. They are amoral and without conscience. Their only morality is Marxism.
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