Big Idea #3: "Listen to Your Heart"
FYI: It is still A-OK to take your conservative values with you into the voting booth next Tuesday and NOT vote Republican. And voting Democrat isn't mandatory for liberals, either.
I hate that this is a thing for me, but quite often the first thing I do in the morning—before prying myself out of bed—is check my email from my phone. Just to see if there’s anything pressing in there that has to be attended to before actuating my normal morning routine.***
This morning’s semi-conscious scanning of subject lines provided a particularly bleak and/or alarmist start to my day:
“A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe”
“Top Democrats Question Their Party’s Strategy as Midterm Worries Grow”
“Why Lifelong Democrats in Oregon Say They’re Ready to Vote Red”
And that last (and most blunt) headline was from a Substack newsletter called The Liberal Patriot, for frig’s sake!
But I’m not lamenting the notion of conservatives taking over Congress. I’m scared s#!tless of MAGA Republicans taking over Congress. There’s a difference.
The Big Idea: MAGA Republicans are inherently conservative. But conservatives are not inherently MAGA Republicans.
By the time this posts, it will be less than one week until the 2022 midterm elections. And if you’re in a purplish state, you sure as hell know that fact very well.
Over last weekend, I traveled from Tennessee to Indiana (decidedly NOT purplish states) to pick up my mom and aunt and drive them up through Ohio and into Southern Michigan. We stayed in the Michigan cities of rural Adrian and college-town Ann Arbor. Each are close enough to the Ohio border that our Holiday Inn Express TV channel selections included local stations from both Detroit, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio.
(NOTE #1: I’m not a qualified political commentator, but I did stay in two Holiday Inn Expresses last weekend…)
But for the love of Peter, Paul and Mary—the political ads!! So many political ads!!!
I almost never watch live TV, but I stumbled upon a marathon of The Office and got sucked in pretty good. So good that I even watched the commercial breaks chock-full of hissin’, spittin’, venom-spewin’, ridiculin’ election ads that were equal parts entertaining, painful, and depressing.
Most political connoisseurs designate Ohio as a red state these days. It’s my birth state, and I was always proud that, until Trumpism, it could end up going either way depending on the election, the candidates, and the issues at hand. According to some polls, it may actually buck the red trend this year and elect Tim Ryan to the Senate over TINO J.D. Vance.
(“TINO” = “Trumpian In Name Only.” Because Vance hated on Trump but then kissed Trump’s ass for an endorsement when it became abundantly clear it was the only way he was gonna have a shot at winning. So, yeah, he’s a “TINO,” I came up with that myself. Just now, actually, off the top of my head and everything.)
But anyway. Vance might lose, but it’d be an anomaly. Ohio still pretty much hates Biden as far as I can tell, and loves Trump.
Michigan’s harder to figure out. Militias are big there. And it was one of the first states Trump and his supporters turned to for help in appointing fake electors who would declare him the winner of the 2020 election. A crew even planned to hide themselves in the Michigan statehouse overnight so they could sneak into the state Senate chamber and certify for Trump before (relatively) cooler heads prevailed.
But the governor—who was in real danger of being kidnapped and likely killed by Michigan militia members not long ago—is a Democrat. Plus there’s a glut of college towns all across the lower part of the state, from medium-sized Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan, and Western Michigan to the bigger Big Ten schools of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.
Doesn’t mean all those areas are necessarily liberal havens, but college communities usually do lean more progressive.
So both states have complicated constituencies. I’d love it if the self-proclaimed moderate, Ryan, won in Ohio, which would serve as a high-profile defeat for Trumpism. And it’d be heartening if current Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer beat her far-right opponent, Tudor Dixon.
(NOTE #2: On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad would it be if I suggested this governor’s race is the hottest hot-mom governor’s race in American history? Feel free to place your score in the Comments. But, I mean…right??)
It doesn’t seem crazy to say Whitmer and Ryan might win their races. But the general consensus is that, overall, Republicans are destined to dominate statewide races on Tuesday. And well over 300 of those Republicans—which means well over half of them—are 2020 election deniers.
(NOTE #3: In my strong opinion, this does not mean they literally do not believe Biden won the presidency fair and square. I roll my eyes when pundits exasperatedly bellow that all 300-plus “believe the election was stolen.” They don’t. Not all of them, at least, or anywhere near a majority of them.
Maybe a small chunk of them really, truly, in their heart of hearts believe it. But I’d betcha my Gene Simmons-and-Paul Stanley-signed wedding glove my buddy Mike and I simultaneously caught at the Cleveland Kiss Konvention in 1995 when a couple got married and Gene and Paul and us fans were their witnesses and the bride threw the glove out into the crowd and…
…wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah—I’d bet that glove that most of these “election deniers” are total TINOs, just saying whatever they need to say to win over the MAGA faithful. [Mike currently has custody of the glove so it’s probably a good thing there’s no way anybody can prove me wrong in this.])
The first bullet-pointed link listed above is to an episode of The Ezra Klein Show (here it is again for your convenience). The show notes state:
An increasingly Trumpist, anti-democratic Republican Party is poised to take over at least one chamber of Congress. And the Democratic Party, facing an inflationary economy and with an unpopular president in office, looks helpless to stop them.
My voting habits do usually skew Democratic, but I don’t really consider myself a Democrat. I wish there were a better party, with better candidates—a concept I think I’ll be exploring next Tuesday. (Which, did I mention next Tuesday is Election Day? What can I do to help get you to go vote? If you’re in Nashville I’ll be your personal driver to the polls, how would that be?)
I’d like to say I try to give modern-day Republicans a fair hearing on the issues, but they don’t seem to want to bring any real issues up. Certainly there were very few if any real issues being mentioned in those Ohio and Michigan political ads I mentioned. It was all “this lady is a toady for Biden” and “this guy is a Trump sycophant” and “this guy’s lying about his military service.” Tudor Dixon may have one, but I never saw a commercial of hers touting her extreme anti-abortion views—presumably because they are not popular views, even for the vast majority of conservatives.
But it’s that “anti-democratic” part of the quote above that’s the biggest problem, here. My fervent hope is that conservatives who usually vote Republican will see fit to reject candidates who represent themselves as election deniers. Because as phony as I believe they are when pledging their allegiance to Trump and his Big Lie, I have no doubt they’ll fall in line and conduct their own subversion of democracy in the future.
If they win.
In addition to their hopes of transitioning us into the Authoritarian States of Trumplandia, the MAGA movement is just freakin’ mean, man. Call me a snowflake if you want (“SNOWFLAKE!”), but I just can’t believe that a majority of conservatives want us to be a country of total dickheads.
This weekend I saw an “FJB” t-shirt on a Michigan trick-or-treater; I wish I could say he was otherwise dressed to the hilt, but it was just the shirt and some fake vampire teeth. Didn’t even bother with the obligatory squirt of fake blood at the corners of his mouth.
Scratched into the entire circumference of a toilet seat at an Ohio rest area was “BIDEN - I DID THAT.” An impressive rural sawmill somewhere in Lenawee County, Michigan, prominently flew a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag. And one of the many mean-spirited MAGA windshield stickers I saw on the road proclaimed, “You have your family, I have mine”; in place of a mommy, daddy, kids, and pets were an AR-15, a rifle, a handgun, and a pistol.
The reasons behind the MAGA crowd’s grievances are legitimate. But nothing I see from Republican candidates in the 2020s suggests they have any intention of addressing those legit problems. If they take Congress, they might do some things that’ll make MAGA folks feel warm and fuzzy for awhile. They’ll probably get revenge for Trump’s impeachments and impeach Biden. And, contradicting their longtime insistence that “it should be left up to the states,” they may very well ban abortion on the national level.
But when they cut the ultra-wealthy’s taxes, and slash or eliminate taxes on corporations, and start slicing off slabs of Medicare and Social Security, and snuffing out Medicaid, and all of that only exacerbates inflation and adds to the deficit…I’ve just gotta believe any fleeting rush that culture war wins might provide won’t be worth it to everyday average Americans who might hold conservative values, but aren’t extremists. They might not want Big Government, but they don’t want no government, either.
Not all, or even anywhere near a majority of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 are MAGA jerkwads.
Not all, or even anywhere near a majority of the 81 million Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 are woke assmunches.
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. - Bullet-point #3 at the top of this entry (here it is again for your convenience) makes a pretty convincing case for liberal Oregonians’ support of the state’s Republican candidate for governor. Apparently she is not MAGA, is not an election denier, and espouses pretty traditional conservative viewpoints and objectives. Homelessness and crime is up throughout the whole country, but it’s especially bad in Oregon, and while I’m not sure I’d vote that way (actually I’m sure I wouldn’t vote that way), it does make sense why some folks might hold their noses and vote Republican when they’ve been exposed to violence and vandalism and other crime to such an extreme—the culprits being, to them, lenient laws and lax law enforcement.
*** What’s my morning routine? Oh, thanks for asking! I “make” my bed (i.e. pull the comforter up over my pillow and smooth it out a little), read a few Apple News stories in my office (i.e. bathroom), eat breakfast (6 oz. of cold brew and oatmeal with natural unsweetened peanut butter and cinnamon), meditate for 15 minutes (I recommend the Ten Percent Happier app—co-founded by formerly skeptical ABC News journalist Dan Harris), write in my “One Line a Day” journal (which ends up being many tiny lines crammed into the tiny allowed space because I can never manage to write down just one line), and of course, obviously, play Wordle (I’m about to click that damn Something doesn’t look right link, by the way—I’ve only ever been stumped by three Wordles total, and those were like at the very beginning when I wasn’t taking it seriously. Not that I’m taking it seriously now BUT WHY AREN’T THEY ROUNDING UP IT SHOULD BE 99%).