The Red Ripple - A Post-Mortem

Well, I'm glad THAT'S over

So it looks like election 2022 is finally over (well, for the most part). Before I get back to posting about the usual things I tend to write about on here, I would like to take a few moments to give my assessment of Tuesday’s election results. For those of us on the broad Right (both dissident and normie), I’m sure the results were disappointing. For weeks, there had been a psychological buildup for a coming “Red Wave” that was going to sweep away the Democrats and finally punish them as they deserved. Sadly, this didn’t really happen, as we all know by now. Instead, what we saw essentially shook out to be a maintaining election - one where not much changes. Certainly, there was not the cataclysmic bloodbath for the Democrats that we hoped to see.

However, as disappointing as this was, we shouldn’t let it mask the fact that the election really wasn’t that bad for the Republicans, when viewed on an absolute scale. They still took back the House of Representatives, even if by a slender margin, which should allow them to monkeywrench a lot of the Democratic agenda for the next two years (assuming the Republicans in Congress show some spine, which I’ll admit is a big ask). A lot of state and local level races all across the country went their way. Control of various state legislatures was taken and/or buffed up and local control in much of the country was consolidated. Red state governours, by and large, retained their seats by wide margins. Really, if you don't live in an urban area with Democratic vote fraud baked into the local culture, chances are the GOP probably did pretty good in your local elections.

So it could have been a lot, lot worse.

However, there are probably some structural factors in play that will affect American elections moving forward that we should be aware of. The first of these is the reality that demographic change is altering the face of the electorate, which has been a deliberate policy of the Left for decades (since the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965). Simply put, you can’t jam millions of foreigners into a country and not expect them to distort the fabric of the country around them. This will be the case electorally when you have one party that basically promises a grab bag of goodies and preferential legal treatment to immigrants to, in effect, buy their votes. Like it or not, this is true, and presents the GOP with two alternatives moving forward - try to find ways to peel off and integrate one or more major immigrant groups into their own coalition or else find a way to actually do something about the open borders and anchor baby phenomenon before it’s too late. However, I don’t believe this is the major factor driving the failure of the Red Wave, for reasons I’ll explain further down.

Yet, this does highlight another structural problem that I see for Republicans, which is the fact that they are actually not very good at what they are supposed to be doing. Yes, some like Mitch McConnell may be very good at politicking, i.e., at the schmoozing and whipping GOP caucus members into line and all the rest. But overall, the GOP is not very good at protecting or providing for their base. See, the Democrats understand patronage and rewarding their voters while the GOP does not. Part of this is because the Democratic base tends to be lower IQ and thus only understands direct high-time preference arguments and behaviour. Meanwhile, the GOP tends to make second-order arguments about policy decisions involving more distant cost vs. benefit. However, at some point you need to start giving your base what they want or you’ll lose them. You need to start building the wall and bringing jobs back to the homeland and protecting people from lefties trying to turn their kids into trannies. If you don’t, expect future elections to get progressively harder for you. And if the Republican Party is not interested in representing its voters, they will eventually be replaced with someone else who will.

Of course, the simple polarisation of the American population plays a major role as well.

Farther and farther…

One of the things that goes along with the increasing polarisation is the fact that there are simply fewer persuadable people around. As a result, there are fewer people who are going to respond to “rational” inputs like inflation, etc. which normally would result in a wave election that punishes the side that screwed things up. Now it’s all political tribalism, which isn’t too surprising considering the overall social tribalism that is creating a widening divide in the American population. But basically, this means that there are very few people out there who will really care about it when you point out legitimate bad things the Democrats have done if they don’t already care. Since making dialectical arguments instead of rhetorical ones is going to pay increasingly sparse dividends over time, Republicans would do well to adjust their tactical approaches to the voters.

The last structural factor I’d point out is also, unfortunately, the most important and the most difficult to overcome. This is the fact of the baked in vote fraud that now systematically exists in any and all Democrat-ran population centres that are involved in determining how vital swing states will go in an election. Of course, the Democrats have been defrauding elections since the 1960s or before. But their usual methods are designed to "run in the background” so that while people may know that they exist notionally, they’re rarely noticeable to the average person. In a sense, the fraud we saw in the 2020 election was an aberration simply because of how blatant it had to be to overcome what really was shaping up to be a Trump blowout. This year, as with previous elections, the fraud was more endemic and therefore less noticeable. The Democrats have spent decades refining their techniques and coupled with newly minted tools like mail-in voting that gives free rein to ballot harvesting, they have positioned themselves to be basically unassailable in any state that relies on those tools in its elections.

So how is the GOP supposed to overcome this sort of perma-rigging outside of waiting for the eventual collapse of the American system? Truthfully, they may end up not being able to do so. After all, the catch-22 for all of this is that once the vote fraud apparatus is put into place, it will maintain itself because vote fraud (of course). Combatting that structural advantage will be a long, hard slog at its very best. The trick, however, will be to use whatever opportunities do present themselves to use power at their disposal to push through election reforms that halt Democratic abuses of the system. This will, of course, require the Republican Party to grow a spine and actually seize these opportunities when they come.

Moving forward, I think it’s pretty obvious that the Republican Party is going to have to adopt the Florida model which we have clearly seen on display in recent years. Back when Jeb Bush was governour, Florida initiated election reforms which were more recently enhanced under DeSantis’ leadership. Further, the state GOP was able to break the backs of the Broward and Miami-Dade Democratic political machines. As a result, Florida is a rare example of a “purple-state-trending-blue” which has completely reversed direction and can safely be said to be solidly Red now. Whenever possible, Republicans must emulate what Florida did to achieve this success.

Included in this consideration is the matter of candidate quality - though I don’t mean this in the same sense that the establishment insider types do. In and of itself, being on the “far right” is not really an actual problem in many locales. JD Vance won his senate race in Ohio, Ron DeSantis absolutely thrashed Charlie Crist in Florida, and it still remains to be seen whether the Democrats will succeed in cheating Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Adam Laxalt out of their rightfully earned seats. But let’s be honest - there were also a lot of duds who were obviously not vetted at very early stages before they ever got anywhere. A good example would be J.R. Majewski, who was running against Marcie Kaptur in the OH-9 congressional district. The stolen valour stuff was not a good look at all and made an already tough race almost impossible to win. Yet, this is something that should have been caught before he ever became a serious candidate in the primary.

But this does highlight the danger in simply running with a candidate just because they have Trump’s seal of approval (as Majewski did). I mean, what can we say about Dr. Oz? That should have been an easily winnable race against a mouth breathing ogre who can barely string a coherent sentence together. While Oz’s primary opponent David McCormick wasn’t as conservative as we’d like for him to be, one still gets the sense that he’d have been able to beat Fetterman, which would still be preferable to putting the mouth breathing ogre in the Senate. Yet Trump chose to back a Muslim foreign national who doesn’t live in the state and who gives off the vibe of being a walking multilevel marketing scheme - this in a Rust Belt state that’s already been losing jobs to foreigners for decades.

Whatever Trump’s other strengths may be - and he still has many as a potential candidate for 2024 - he’s been pretty hit or miss on his ability to select candidates to support. Personal loyalty to himself and/or being celebrities with whom he is familiar does not always make for good candidates in the political realm. This belies Trump’s fundamental problem with understanding the difference between business acumen and political power/electoral politics. Obviously, other Trump aligned candidates did quite well, such as JD Vance in his senate race and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who won her election to the governourship of Arkansas. But still, one gets the sense that Trump’s much touted record for backing the winning horse comes from choosing candidates who were already pretty much going to win anywise; when he follows his own instincts and goes out on a limb, he has a much more mixed record.

But this goes back to the Florida model as well. Like it or not, Ron DeSantis is a much better long-term model for leadership than Trump is. Both inside his administration and on the campaign trail, Trump often had terrible instincts when it came to choosing personnel to support and surround himself with. As a result, he found himself undercut and largely neutered in his swamp-draining efforts. DeSantis, on the other hand, has shown actual competence in administration (e.g. the Hurricane Ian response) as well as a willingness to fight culture wars that a lot of GOPers (even many of the grifter types supposedly in the dissident Right) shrink from. In short, Trump seems to be mostly talk while DeSantis actually gets things done. Further, I would argue that a lot of the things that Trump did do that were good during his administration were things that someone like DeSantis would also have done in the same contextual circumstances.

Now all of this being said, looking forward to 2024 my personal preference would be to see Trump at the head of the Republican presidential ticket while DeSantis stays at the state level. Of course, this is mainly because I believe that the states should, and will, continue to become more important vis-a-vis the federal government going forward. Hence, it’s in our long-term interest to retain younger, talented leadership at state and local levels where they can be more effective in exercising power. The present election results will only embolden the Left to take the brakes off even further. This necessarily means that the states will have to act as alternative power centres to the federal government, quickening the already-existing trend toward decentralisation that is already taking place. Certainly, enhancing state and local power would be a good thing as this is the best way to channel the impending collapse and national divorce into peaceful directions, hopefully avoiding an open shooting civil war.

This, again, is basically the Florida model in action. Along with other states, Florida has been increasingly resistant to federal impositions, most recently refusing to allow federal election monitors from the DoJ to enter into polling places (a level of insubordination that would have been unthinkable even thirty years ago). Local Rightist leaders need to be purposefully pushing this inclination toward further decentralisation, so it makes sense to try to retain up-and-coming talent at the state level instead of losing them to federal cooptation. If the federal level is being shut out to our side by systematic fraud, then every effort should be made to move power outward. The caveat is, of course, that this will require Republican politicians to display courage and convictions.

However, the further power slips from the federal grasp and states resist federal impositions, the better it is for all of us. The more left-wing excesses provoke state and local responses, the sooner we’ll get through this. Let’s be honest - it’s in our interest to see the present system destabilise as much as possible. Frankly, I would advocate for the “plebian secession” which I wrote about earlier so as to increasingly sever our ties to Blue Tribe and help this decentralisation along.

In summary, there are several things that I believe the Republican Party needs to bear in mind moving forward if they want to retain competitiveness. Ultimately though, the broad Right needs to be preparing for life after federal relevancy as that is the direction which all of our demographic-structural trends are headed. Cultivating new talent and exercising power whenever possible is necessary at all levels but will be especially important at the state and local tiers moving forward. The Democrats are tightening their grip on the levers of federal power but may be doing so too late for their efforts to guarantee them the permanent lock on power that they desperately desire. Our aims should be to ironically help them accelerate, but to channel this in the directions that benefit our side and our people.