Midterms Made Clear There is No Return to Pre-2020

The Left dominates the institutions. It is not possible right now to take back those sources of power. The Right must attack them instead.

Like dogs to their vomit, the conservative chattering class returned to its worst instincts in the aftermath of the midterms. Apologies to my fellow commentators, but Ron DeSantis should not run for president in 2024. Donald Trump’s “divisiveness” is not the problem. And, no, screaming louder about the culture war won’t save the country.

The same people who have always, deep down, despised Trump simply cannot resist the latest opportunity to pull out their knives and stab him yet again. They interpret the results of the midterms without any regard to the events of the last seven years. These midwits act as if the 2020 election fiasco simply did not happen.

Utterly moronic. Donald Trump is the moderate big-tent conservative the “smart people” in the GOP said we needed. He had enormous broad-based appeal in 2016—winning first time voters and Obama voters by the millions. Donald Trump’s platform centered on bipartisan consensus issues like immigration, trade, and war.

No other sitting president has won, numerically, more voters than Donald Trump did in 2020. You cannot drive anywhere in rural America without running into an endless parade of Trump flags and signs. The Make America Great Again agenda is enormously popular with white middle class and blue-collar voters as evidenced by the massive crowds that Trump garners everywhere he goes in the nation’s heartland.

Between 2016 and 2020 Donald Trump massively increased his vote total from 62.9 million to 74.2 million. Despite everything the media, corporations, and D.C. ruling class threw at him, Trump massively increased his support across the country.

That Trump lost in 2020 is the single most bizarre and unprecedented election result in American history. It simply does not make sense. Without acknowledging that fact, no political analyst will be able to make sense of the political landscape after that watershed moment.

Trump is the first incumbent president since Martin Van Buren in 1840 (!) to have increased his popular vote total but then lost reelection. Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush all lost reelection after losing substantial popular support. In each case, the raw vote totals for each of these presidents went down in their attempts to regain office.

Even Van Buren is not a useful comparison. In 1836, he won against a field of five serious candidates. In 1840, he faced only a single opponent.

Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection effort defies all political common sense, just as the Democratic Party’s unusually strong midterm showing in 2022 makes a mockery of our traditional understanding of political fundamentals. Since 1922 there have been only three previous instances—1934, 1962, and 2002—in which the president’s party gained (or did not lose) Senate seats and lost fewer than 10 House seats in the president’s first midterms.

And all this happened while Joe Biden remains underwater in popularity, inflation is at historic levels, and voters overwhelmingly believe the country is on the wrong track. Brushing aside the Republican failure as simply a result of poor candidate quality and a national love of abortion is idiotic.

Democrats ran a literal stroke victim and a dead guy this cycle and both candidates won. This is not politics as usual. Trying to fit the 2022 or 2020 elections into our traditional understanding of the American electorate simply won’t work. That’s because the establishment altered the rules of the game post-Trump.

Donald Trump broke with the liberal consensus. He didn’t start new wars, he tried to get along with establishment boogeymen like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and he called for a wall on the southern border. The oligarchy that runs the country simply could not countenance a second term by this traitor to their class. Trump abandoned the ruling establishment in order to become a champion of the people. That alliance posed (and still poses) a deadly threat to the hegemony of our ruling class.

White middle-class Americans, in the rulers’ view, are subjects and not citizens. The aim of every election after 1945 and before 2016 was to give the rubes the illusion of political choice while maintaining a consensus in favor of globalist liberalism. Trump smashed that old understanding and ushered in the possibility of a new kind of politics.

For that sin, the oligarchs banded together to destroy Trump. In February 2020, Trump was riding high. It seemed clear he was going to cruise toward an utterly crushing reelection victory. Soleimani was dead. Gas prices were under $3 a gallon nationwide. The stock market was at all time highs. Russiagate had fallen apart. The Democratic primaries were a mess: Joe Biden had lost primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

And then, all of a sudden, the entire world lost its mind over COVID. None of this was an accident. The ensuing changes to the American electoral process that dramatically expanded mail-in voting were designed intentionally to make a Trump victory impossible. Despite barely campaigning and an utter lack of voter enthusiasm or personal likeability, we are expected to believe that career politician and twice-failed presidential candidate Joe Biden won a crushing and completely legitimate victory in November 2020 after the implementation of these radical changes in election law.

Anyone who takes this proposition seriously does not understand the real character of our regime. The Left utterly dominates every institution of American political life. We are not a republic governed by a constitution but a despotism ruled by an elite class. American elections are neither secure nor legitimate. They no longer represent the rational and deliberate will of the nation’s citizens. The millions of mail-in ballots that get injected into the process now during every election cycle make such secure deliberation impossible. The massive party machinery erected by the Democrats, backed by billions of dollars in activist, corporate, and media support, can spew out desired results with little regard to the actual will of the people.

This is all a farce. Republicans watching this unfolding crisis are often tempted to despair: “What can we possibly do now.” Plenty, but the Right needs to grasp the true nature of its situation.

The old constitutional order is dead. The 2020 election made that perfectly clear. In many places, winning elections is no longer a feasible option for the Right, no matter how popular its message is among middle class and blue-collar Americans that make up the backbone of the nation’s might.

But victory at the ballot box is not the only way to seize power. Instead of despairing at the unfairness of it all, the Right needs to get tougher, stronger, and more focused.

Donald Trump prevailed by embracing a platform of national survival. His heirs should do the same. Republican candidates at every level should never open their mouths to speak about political matters without mentioning reducing immigration, ending unfair trade, and putting an end to foolish American involvement in foreign wars.

There is little sense in committing to fighting a culture war when we don’t even have a country. Without a platform of national survival, the Republican Party will not win on issues of the family, marriage, and abortion. Defeating the radical gender apologists will only be possible once we address deeper existential issues.

Open borders, a limitless flow of cheap Chinese goods into the country, and endless overseas wars sap the blood and treasure of the American heartland. These poisons enervate us as a nation and as a people. Mass immigration is the greatest scheme of voter fraud in American history. Democrats will let democracy choose the nation’s rulers . . . just as long as they get to choose the demos (or people) doing the voting!

The modern Democratic Party has become a vehicle for communism. This is not to say that modern liberals are fervent believers in the Marxist materialist dialectic. Rather, they are motivated by the fundamental impulse behind Marxism—resentment of the strong, beautiful, and excellent. Communism is a movement of biological and spiritual losers against the continued existence of western civilization.

The vicious and racist character of the modern Left is perfectly understandable within this framework. These radicals hate America, hate its heroes, and, most of all, hate its people. The fact that America was once (and still remains) a white majority country is enough to drive the Left to madness. The 2020 riots and critical race theory are just two expressions of this ethnic narcissism, resentment, and anger.

The Right isn’t going to triumph in this spiritual war for the future of mankind by adopting the One Weird Trick mentality of midwit conservative commentators with their credentials, policy proposals, and 10,000-word essays. What is needed now is the inculcation of toughness, a gritting of the teeth. The Right needs to get strong and not only in a metaphorical sense.

The Right needs to inspire and motivate the people in ways that only Donald Trump has touched on. It needs to be able to mobilize millions. The mass rally, general strike, and paralyzing protest are the most promising political weapons of the future Right.

This movement must cultivate extra-legal sources of power. The Left dominates the institutions. It is not possible right now to take back those sources of power. The Right must attack them instead. It must cultivate distrust toward the entire liberal project and make the illegitimacy of all institutional authorities clear. The same doctors mandating that you get the jab believe that mutilating a child’s genitals is “affirming” and just, and that a baby in the womb is not a human being. Their authority and “expertise” is fundamentally worthless.

It seems doubtful whether the Right can win national elections going forward. The oligarchy has made clear it will not brook this kind of dissent. But that does not make voting or attempts at seizing power through these avenues wholly useless. Republicans in red states should tamp down on election misbehavior. Voting should be done in line with the Constitution—on a single day, not over the course of weeks, months, or seasons. Voting should be done on paper ballots, in-person, and with valid identification.

Voters should be required to re-register for each and every election in order to ensure that voter rolls are as clean as possible. Requiring even the most basic effort from citizens in order to vote will dramatically reduce liberal success at the polls. The more secure the election, the less likely it is that Democrats will win. Funny how that works.

But these measures to save republican and constitutional government are unlikely to be enough. They will, however, make crystal clear to every observer the radical differences that result from secure and insecure elections. This will help further delegitimize the authority of the elites.

The Right is down but it is not out. It does not need massive institutional support, financial backing, or propaganda to win. It has the truth on its side. The Mujahideen fighters who brought the Soviets to their knees in Afghanistan were outmanned and outgunned. And yet they removed the godless occupiers from their land. The modern American Right should take the same attitude. We are not bound to the four-year election cycle. We fight on God’s time. We will fight for our country, our faith, and our children until we win. God is on our side. Glory be to God.

“We are not bound to the four-year election cycle. We fight on God’s time. We will fight for our country, our faith, and our children until we win. God is on our side. Glory be to God.”

This is the correct attitude to take. Not “who’s the fastest horse in the race?” but “FIGHT THEM.”

DT won in 2016 because he FOUGHT.

“Because you would be in jail right now.” Remember when he said that? Oh, how the blessed punditz screeched and squawked because someone in the GOP was actually FIGHTING BACK.

DT paid dearly for stepping outside the box. Now the US is paying for allowing our electoral process to be made a mockery of.

I still think we could’ve won with better candidates, especially Pennsylvania. I understand McCormick was a rhino but he probably would’ve won and we could’ve possibly gotten majority. Arizona masters seems like a nice guy, but I think he was too inexperienced. At this point Georgia. I’m hoping we win. we just have to get better candidates.

And we need to get people engaged in mail in ballots. They’re here to stay. Florida does a phenomenal job on mail in ballots. Republicans here love them! I’m not sure why we don’t go house to house trying to sign up people for mail in ballots and then bug them every day until they fill them out. There’s nothing Illegal doing that. We just need to change our grassroots methods a little bit.

"That Trump lost in 2020 is the single most bizarre and unprecedented election result in American history. It simply does not make sense. Without acknowledging that fact, no political analyst will be able to make sense of the political landscape after that watershed moment."

But, but...Biden got 81 million votes in 2020. More votes than any other president ever. And, if Trump gets 82 million votes in 2024...92 million votes will magically appear for Joetato.

There is a return to pre-2020, and Trump hinted at it last night. The democrats own what has happened in the last two years and they will own the continued and more rapid fall in the next two years.

And as leftists age, they naturally become more conservative, generally speaking. That means there will be a lot of testimonials by “former leftists”.

It’s clear the Lord is not done with this war yet. The bad news is that we are still in a lost and fallen world, and sometimes it brings acute pain, as it did in the early 1940’s.

The partisans of the Right need to lift weights, buy guns, and find comrades. The future of the fight against the latest iteration of global communism requires that young men especially take up the cause of liberty and moral righteousness. They are needed now more than ever. The Boomers, whatever their virtues and vices, do not represent the future.

If the militia meets to play paintball in the woods, the G-men are interested in who they are, and will try to manufacture an excuse to arrest people.

The Right needs to inspire and motivate the people in ways that only Donald Trump has touched on. It needs to be able to mobilize millions. The mass rally, general strike, and paralyzing protest are the most promising political weapons of the future Right.

A general strike of the railroad workers, longshoremen, and truck drivers could cripple the economy. An economic boycott of Chinese made goods, Big Box stores, and Big Tech like Amazon would inflict much economic loss on the ruling globalist elite. That can be done one person at a time. Yet, we still have people here who won't turn off FAUX News. We aren't going to vote ourselves out of this mess because the elections are corrupted and get stolen regularly. We need nontraditional solutions to solve that problem.

Great article.

Unfortunately, the fallacy is the list of fixes for elections. Long ago, the Democrats recognized that in national elections, roughly half the registered voters didn’t vote and in mid-term elections it ranges between half and three-quarters of registered voters didn’t vote. With readily available information about voters today (name, birthdate, SSN, etc.), they are able to create endless lists of potential “ghost” voters.

Their Christmas wish came true in 2020 with Covid with the mail in ballots. They were already getting away with “requiring” voter registration when acquiring/renewing driver’s licenses and using other government services, but the mail-in ballots became the treasure trove of voting. They went to town limiting the security required when using the ballots, added in military ballots (because of much lower security requirements) and voila’, they have a now, true, tried and tested method of ballot box stuffing.

They’ve managed to take over state legislators and have spread out across the country implementing these changes wherever they can. When they started targeting electoral rich states and battleground states they’ve managed to secure presidential elections as well local elections.

Because in so many of these states the Democrats control the legislators, there is almost no chance that Republicans can affect any changes to election laws to fix these issues. And there is almost no chance Republicans in these states can fairly win elections with current state of election laws.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, just a guy with pretty good instincts. Joe Biden didn’t “receive” 81 million votes (it’s statistically impossible) and the Democrats didn’t avoid the “red wave” with legal votes.

I don’t know how they did it, but they did it . . .

I like this piece up to a point and I can understand the authors ideas but the following line has it backwards:

"There is little sense in committing to fighting a culture war when we don’t even have a country. Without a platform of national survival, the Republican Party will not win on issues of the family, marriage, and abortion. Defeating the radical gender apologists will only be possible once we address deeper existential issues."

The culture of Western Civilization came before our great nation. Abandoning God is why we are where we are now. We will not be able to do anything without trying to right our culture. Now, there are different ways and methods to go about doing this, and if that is the criticism I am open to hear it but by abandoning the foundation you cannot build a sturdy house.

The USSC was correct in rejecting Roe v. Wade, it was the right thing to do morally and legally. This was the result of a 50 years culture war against the left. It was a great victory of what is going to be a very long war. Now the strategy and battles going forward will have to change, what's the strategy? I'm not sure but it will not be like Roe v. Wade that is for sure. Most likely more like guerilla war and even more ugly.

This presumes that voters have the same affinity for Trump that they did in 2016 and even 2020. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The tide could always change, but we’ll see.

This is a very good observation.

On another note, since Trump announced yesterday (I did not see the speech) there are already many stating he was "low energy". What? Trump low energy? People want him to act more Presidential so now he is low energy?

Stupid.

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