Less than a week before the election, I was chewing the Zoom-pixels with a colleague about—what else?—the very fate of America and the world! Which is otherwise known as “the election,” to dip into wonky Washington punditese. We were badinaging about ballots because, like everyone who works tangentially in the wild, wooly world of politik, the election was all anyone we knew was gabbing about anyway. Oh, and it could affect the very foundation of the country and our children’s precious future, and all that maudlin, civics Hallmark-y stuff.
Being your typical Washington not-insiders-but-not-complete-outsiders, we came to the conclusion of, to quote from a generous sampling of the Twitter commentariat’s predictions, “it’s close.” We herded our predictive sheep like so many psephologists who are too scared to wake up with egg on their come November 6th, or, if Pennsylvania was to be the deciding factor, maybe some time in January next year, as soon as the waterlogged Hefty bags of ballots were dredged out of the Schuylkill River, separated, industrially dried, then hand counted.
So if you must ask, the egg starts to sag off your cheekbones after staring at returns for six straight hours. And it ceases to be edible once it’s fallen on your grubby stained laptop keys.
To paraphrase everyone’s favorite hapless fool, another presidential election has come and gone. This year’s was the grandest production of them all with all the nation’s cameras trained on Pennsylvania Avenue and who is empowered to wield the ruling scepter over us. Now that the dust is settled, votes tallied, red ballots tossed into the nearest landfill in blue districts, blue ballots burned among leaves in red districts, and various secretaries of state hightailing to the closest Caribbean fastness to duck out extradition requests, Piña Colada in hand and flip-flops on feet, how close is America to boiling over into outright fascist warland?
The glorious, blessed, wonderful, eye-shining answer is: we aren’t! Praise be!
Washington, DC, boarded up its various lunch-rush businesses for naught. President Trump handedly won re-election, hurdling over the famed “blue wall,” expanding his coalition with women and minority men, and making bed with strange fellows like anti-war Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, seed-oil scourge RFK Jr., and flippant battery truck magnate Elon Musk. It can’t by any definition be called “close.” Every swing state swung in Donald’s direciton. The entire comeback saga has come to an end, after a “Strange Interlude”-like length, with the only thing to do is savor the recriminations of Team Donkey, such as Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile having it out, tossing hands and trading sharp words, as Harris conceded.
The problem is, there are no pump houses welling liberal tears from which to fill my Daily Wire tumbler. Harris’s loser oration, stacked with coffee-mug lines, was, if anything, mild, even pathetic. No impassioned call to arms, no mustering the Antifa forces, no “Resistance” pleas, just vague bromides on the need to keep fighting, as if the bell hasn’t already sounded and the spectators aren’t peeling out of the parking lot.
The Morning After™ didn’t feature a diluvial wash of hot blue lacrimae, absent a handful of TikToktresses harvesting clicks with pledges to prune their tresses in pilgarlicky protest. But in protest of what, exactly? A former president prevailing with an even higher vote share than his last victory? A cryptic neo-Nazi winning nearly half of Latino muchahos and twenty percent of black bros? An abusive lech wooing white women? A malign enemy of democracy, a nacarat fascist hiding in plain sight, capturing the popular vote, a first for his autocratic party in two decades?
Multiple Twitter pundits observed a concrete lack of hair-pulling despondency in New York City following Trump’s triumph compared to his seeming fluke pull-off in 2016. Puckish pollster Nate Silver wrote that as he trekked the Big Apple streets in the early hours, “I was surprised at how normal it all felt” compared to eight years prior, which had felt like “the zombie apocalypse.” Critic Kyle Smith concurred that Democrats seem subdued compared to two cycles ago “when they seemed borderline suicidal.” Columnist David Marcus pointed out a “noticeable lack of freak out videos,” which is probably hurting the bottom line of the conservative-click industry.
Where are the blue-mohawked, septum-pierced shriek clips looping on Fox News primetime? Where’s the 34-million-view lib-cry compilation set to the tune of “Flight of the Valkyries”?
The reason we have fewer democraphiles decrying democracy this time around suggests a certain resignation to President Trump: The Sequel, whether it be Dostoyevskian adaptability or just a fatal acceptance that the man who was booked like a common criminal, Neo-dodged a bullet, served up McDonald’s fries, and rode in a garbage truck deserved another Oval Office stint.
Or it could simply be a matter of the vast, non-whining, not-social-media shouting, American middle dumped the brat for the MAGA economy, with its rising wages and low inflation, even if it meant ignoring mean tweets and West Wing personnel churn for the next four years. Yiyun Li calls this middle yearn dynamic the “70 percent rule,” as in, on any given issue, 20 percent virulently disagree, 10 percent noddingly ascent, and the rest shrug without any strong attachment. Ultimately, Li writes, it’s the “population in the middle who decide the result of every presidential election in America.”
So they did again. The American republic, as ever, is beholden to whom Alexander Woollcott called the “small decent people everywhere, the nameless and numberless people of good will who hold, I do proudly believe, the balance of power.”
Mencken’s good and hard part comes next. Onward to our red, white, and blue deserts!
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