Significance of GOP victory deserves a thought or two.
The bottom line is that our democracy has become so hollowed out and most people so alienated that what we're watching is simply a street fight between factions in the country's power elite. For some it has entertainment value, but it's not even an interesting matchup any more. The hard right libertarian faction has been wiping the floor with a weak opponent, a feckless, dispirited remnant of the old liberal managerial elite, which loses ground with every passing decade, even if it seems to win a round now and then as it did in 2008.
We're seeing again the continuation of a pattern in place since 1980 in which the hard right obtains power, then aggressively rigs things in its favor, pisses everybody off, gets voted out, and then consolidates its gains while obstructing the Democrats until it gets back in power again. Which it does inevitably because everybody is frustrated with the obstructed Democrats inability to get anything done. The American people apparently don't pay attention enough or care enough to break this pattern. The hope of Democrats that they have a long-term demographic advantage is ridiculous so long as they continue to be a party that nobody could be bothered to vote for.
The idea of giving the Republicans any kind of serious responsibility is crazy because its leaders are captured by an Ayn Randian ideology that makes them crazy. At least the old liberal managerial elite had some sense of the common good, even if their technocratic attempts to achieve it were often misguided.
So it is what it is. But we shouldn't see this as democracy in action. This country ceased being a robust democracy decades ago, already before WWI, but elections like this matter as a kind of bellwether regarding the state of the nation's soul, and it looks like things will continue to get worse unless something happens to wake us up. I'm not optimistic, and I think in twenty years time we could very well wind up becoming a corporatist authoritarian state like many of the countries in Latin America during the 80s. The Leo Strauss faction will eventually supplant the Ayn Rand faction.
But not in the next two years because we're still protected to a certain extent by inertia in the Deep State and because Obama will veto anything really crazy that the new GOP congressional majorities come up with, but a vicious pattern continues, and it will continue to continue.
I still have very limited amount of time to read and think, but I want to write more about the long decline of the managerial liberal state. I was never a fan, but the libertarian alternative always struck me as adolescent. I was inclined to accept the managerial state as a necessity so long as there was a means to constrain it with a collective commitment to the principle of subsidiarity. Maybe eventually that's where we'll end up, but not in my lifetime.
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