It's Nice, But It Won't Be Worth Much
It's Nice, But It Won't Be Worth Much
Don't Expect too much from GOP victories in blue states. Temper expectations in order to better allocate resources, attention, energy and money.
A few weeks ago now, Republicans swept (or shockingly over-performed in) elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and—just as importantly, though it was relatively unnoticed—in a congressional special election in deep-blue San Antonio, Texas.
I admit, I was surprised when Gregg Youngkin was able to surmount the very committed Democrat political machine in Virginia and score a win beyond the margin of certain fraud. The mood in that state—even in reliably blue quarters—must’ve been incredibly toxic for Democrats. Exit polling reveals the Republican performed very well with Latino voters, mirroring the San Antonio results and solidifying an emerging pattern in many of the deepest-red states.
The celebrations on Twitter and in right-leaning media were an authentic display of happiness; I felt a bit like a heel raining on all the parades, but I thought the enthusiasm needed to be tempered a bit—or, at the very least, somehow tied to reason. I knew there would be a sobering dose of reality to come. And it didn’t take long to arrive.
Even before Republicans could come down from their post-election high, 13 liberal Republicans voted for the latest frankensteinesque legislation to emerge from Nancy Pelosi’s drawer, the over $1 trillion “Build Back Better” infrastructure boondoggle. Like all of these products of hard-left lobbyists and activist groups, this bill marries ideological radicalism with deftly-written payoffs to Democrat client groups. Let’s hand it to them: the Democrats understand exactly how to use state power; in politics, power is based on the flow of money from the taxpayer to allies outside of government.
After this betrayal, the once-joyous conservatives turned furious, and justifiably so. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy couldn’t—or, really, wouldn’t—enforce discipline on the wayward blue-state Members of his caucus, even as doing so now (as the crest of a “red wave” and Democrat popularity in free-fall) would be relatively cost-free. In addition, higher profile dissenters in the Senate would’ve given these 13 Republicans who voted with Pelosi some air-cover to buck some of the powerful Democrats in their home districts. But they didn’t.
This is a lesson in expecting too much from Republican victories in blue states—and it’s one that the Right needs to internalize, not only to temper expectations, but to better allocate resources, attention, energy and money.
As I’ve written, the game-show and sportsball nature of recurring elections—and the promise of thrilling, improbable GOP victories in Democrat strongholds—keeps many on the Right trapped in the game, glued to their political horse-race news.
But even more than that, there’s a naive hope many have that we can return to a “normal.” That makes sense, especially for Boomers and some older GenX; I think many are being fooled by a distant memory of New York’s success.
After decades of mismanagement and decline, Rudy Giuliani arrived in City Hall in 1989 and, together with a few common-sense, relatively non-ideological Democrats, fundamentally changed the way New York City is governed. In the 90s it was possible for a solidly blue territory to become the cutting edge of conservative leadership.
When there was relative agreement on the most basic things—when not all that much differentiated the worldviews of Democrats and Republicans—a state or even a city could have relatively moderate politicians of each party, reflective of the electorate. Maybe emphases on certain issues would make one a Republican, or old ethnic politics would make another a Democrat. Back in those days, for example, we could all agree that rising crime was bad.
Thirty years later, New York City is once again on the verge of collapse—and for identical reasons. The City is a high-rent, noisy, Cycle of Regimes in miniature, proving that, however enlightened and hard-charging one leader can be, he cannot halt the tide of political reality: The City is deep-blue, and the leftward radicalization of the Democrat Party makes agreement on even the smallest, most reasonable things impossible.
Of course, this dynamic isn’t limited to New York City—or even to the most deep-blue places in America. In purple and even red states, parents and voters have been alarmed by the Left’s capture of institutions and some local governments, and the radical expression of this takeover. In Virginia, the consensus from both Left and Right is that the GOP owed their fortunes to cultural issues, most prominently the toxicity of Critical Race Theory, especially in education.
As friends like Chris Rufo, James Lindsay and others are well aware, the war on CRT is something of a catch-all fight against several of the Left’s most toxic racial-oriented pathologies. It is a response to the Left’s war on equal justice under the law; the justification for America’s Founding; and, especially, anti-white animus. Virginians elected Youngkin because they, rightly, wanted this craziness to stop.
But this doesn’t mean that electing a Republican governor of a blue state in an off-year election will solve most of these problems. Virginia won’t become Rudy’s New York, ushering in a completely new way of governing that upends generations of liberal and hard-left policy. The administrative state isn’t just in Washington; each state has its own entrenched bureaucracies, fighting to subvert and defeat challenges to their ideological imperatives.
I think Virginia parents will be disappointed (though hopefully not dispirited) when they finally engage in the CRT battle in earnest; it’s one thing to mobilize parents and voters to win an election, and another thing for government officials to go toe-to-toe with the education establishment and teachers’ unions on their own turf. I believe it’s possible to arrest this insanity in many of our schools, but I’m not particularly optimistic about parents’ ability to do it in blue states saturated with hard-left activists and ideologues. The teachers unions and the education establishment are fanatics about CRT; they’ll very gladly burn the school to the ground before abandoning the fanaticism that has come to fill the very human religious impulse.
Those blue-state Republicans who voted with Nancy Pelosi are not “traitors”—at least, not in the sense that they performed unexpectedly in service of the enemy. They’re doing what you should’ve expected them to do—which is to side with Democrats when it really matters. Unless these legislators aspire to burn-out brightly as one-term Congressmen, they are at the mercy of a vindictive Democratic machine that (quite reasonably) will re-district them out of a job before the next election if they really step out of line. Even Adam Kinzinger—who was more hostile to Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans than many rank-and-file Democrats—ended up being expendable; the Illinois Democrats who’ve got a vice-grip on the state’s politics simply erased him.
As the pot comes to a boil in America, look for Democrats to be less tolerant of small contingents of Republicans in their states, and to continue to use as many procedural tricks as possible to eliminate them. Now, of course, red state machines should be putting the squeeze to lonely Democrat office-holders, as well.
This is neither illegal nor immoral; it’s politics in the Late Republic—and, at least, it has the virtue of honestly reflecting our differences. As I’ve argued many times elsewhere, coming to grips with the reality and implications of these philosophical differences is knowing “what time it is” in America. There is no virtue in refusing to admit where we are in the movie, because it will lead us to make disastrous decisions.
For those of us on the Right, there is a political task ahead of us that is more important than anything else: (1) we must make red states more red; (2) we must make purple states into red states; (3) we must not care all that much about what happens in blue states.
Life is too short, and we’ve got work to do.
Focus on geographic locations where we are able to influence events, bringing the state and local governments to bear in crucial fights. Take advantage of communities with favorable numbers of Right-leaning citizens to set up activist networks—without the fear of harassment, intimidation or violence from a Leftist infrastructure that exists in order to dispirit grassroots Right-wing activism.
Back on Instagram
I launched my IG account when I moved to Texas in 2014, and very quickly understood the power of the visual-only content. I had fun curating it, presenting images, photos, movie stills and other stuff. Years passed, and I stopped making it a regular part of my social media life; things change, priorities shift, etc.
Then, in late 2020, when I took a job and registered as a foreign agent for the Hungarian government, I was amused to find that attack pieces from the Left featured my Instagram account prominently. Several were generated in Hungarian, but one that made it stateside was Talking Points Memo; they made me laugh with, “Why Did Hungary’s Strongman Hire An American Strong Man?”
A south Florida bodybuilder with a “pugilistic” Twitter presence secured a contract last year to spearhead a campaign by Hungary as the central European nation sought to ingratiate itself with the MAGA right.
Meet David Reaboi, a Hungarian-speaking, self-described aficionado of both jazz and “political warfare,” who spent three months hawking the nation to which Tucker Carlson and a host of notable conservatives have paid homage over the past year.
Amazing. I mean, you can’t pay for press like that.
Anyway, I grew tired of trolls and creepy people peeking through my photos for use in their political warfare ops. After a period of hibernation, I wanted to get back to it. Feel free to follow me there, as well as on Twitter.
On the Turntable
I turned 45 last week. Completely coincidentally, I was drawn deeply into a series of recordings made exactly 45 years ago. On Keith Jarrett’s November 1976 tour of Japan, the great pianist played a series of improvised solo piano concerts. He created, spontaneously, works of overwhelming beauty, logic and depth. To show up for a two-hour concert prepared with no material—mind and imagination wiped clean until seated to play the first note, and allowing structures of melody and harmony to be created spontaneously in such a profoundly architectural way. Many great musicians have performed completely improvised concerts; only Keith Jarrett routinely creates masterpieces of invention.
So I bought myself the original Japanese pressing of the Sun Bear Concerts 10LP box set on ECM. It’s a giant hard cardboard box containing what’s essentially a mammoth coffee table book. The box opens with the Kyoto concert—and it’s one of the most enchanting and mysterious pieces of music I’ve ever heard.
Unfortunately—in a pretty inexplicable oversight during the 1978 release of the Sun Bear Concerts—the more compact and song-like encores from each performance were not included. The CD box set in the mid-90s corrected this, and Jarrett’s improvised encore from Tokyo has since gone on to be among his most famous and beloved works. It’s such a masterpiece—nothing out of place—that it’s not surprising Radiohead stole it to create their song “Paranoid Android.”