Takeaways from the midterms
Abortion is a no-go for Republicans. And should we hope Trumpism survives?
Trumpism dying is not in of itself a good thing. Let me explain.
There is a civil war brewing within the Republican party between the DeSantis wing and the MAGA wing. They share all of the negative traits associated with American conservatism: DeSantis is a Yale educated elitist, a neocon loyalist to the current hegemonic order.
He thinks billionaires deserve tax cuts because he fears that universal programs for American workers might reward slackers and moochers. And oh, he’s a fanatic pro-Israel zionist too. All of these things can be said of Trump too, but his story is different in its own way.
Trump caused shock waves in Washington DC in 2016 when he ran a campaign in which he vowed to replace a failed & corrupt political establishment. His final campaign ad contrasted the corporate skyscrapers of New York to the faces of industrial workers across America, a message laced with the class contradictions of America delivered by a staunchly anti-communist Republican who ironically and perhaps accidentally stumbled into a populist messaging that resonated across the country. The ad went on to name and shame the 1993 NAFTA trade deal, the 2015 Trans-Pacific Partnership and “economic & foreign policies that have bled our country dry”.
Days after this ad was released, Trump won. By then, the CIA and the FBI were already concocting the Russiagate saga. Democrat leader Chuck Schumer warned on MSNBC that Trump did not know what kind of trouble he was getting himself into with the intelligence community. We all know how his presidency ensued: He was relentlessly mauled by the intelligence community, even as he filled his administration with John Bolton neocon types and caved on multiple foreign policy issues.
The American regime did not particularly mind his actual policies during his presidency, how could they object to his destruction of the Iran nuclear deal or his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or his pulling out of treaties with Russia? No, his crime was introducing, especially during his campaign, an establishment-hostile populism within mainstream American discourse previously only seen in fringe left-wing or Alex Jonesian right wing internet circles. Not even Bernie Sanders, whose faux populism was exposed way earlier than Trump’s, has ever dared challenging the CIA the way Trump did before his presidency.
That subversive element within Trumpism is why neocons like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh and other never Trumpers on the right who reluctantly joined the Trump movement when he won, are now trying to purge the right of Trumpism and replace it with DeSantis neoconservatism. The civil war on the right is in fact a political purge, and it has been accelerated by the midterm results.
If the Shapiro types get their way, they’ll keep all the shitty elements of Trumpism but rid themselves of all the subsersive traits. The war between the CIA/FBI/NSA and the Republican party will be over. What we’ll left with is a return to Bush era Republican politics, the complete victory of neoconservatism within both parties, and the total purge of all anti-neoconservative rhetoric everywhere in mainstream America.
Abortion is a losing issue for Republicans
Republicans went into the midterms facing a historically unpopular opponent lead by a historically unpopular president during a year of mass inflation and economic hardship. Yet they lost.
Most of us suspected that Republicans merely looking twice at abortion rights would amount to electoral suicide, but even they now concede that they underestimated the motivating effect it would have on voters.
Republicans are left with a very clear lesson: If they ever want to win elections again, be it presidential or on a state level, the words “abortion ban” should never be uttered by them in public again.
Of course, abortion is a complicated question. While Democrats until very (very) recent history saw it as a necessary evil (remember the slogan “safe, legal and rare”?), some Democrats have more recently embraced a sort of nihilistic approach to the question, presenting it as a mundane procedure, some even as a positive good. This position, that abortion is warranted in any circumstance and at any point within the pregnancy, without any ethical problems attached to it, is as unpopular as a total ban.
But Democrats did not run on unlimited abortion during this election. Instead, they successfully highlighted the extremism of a total ban. It has now lead to prominent Republican influencers like Christopher Rufo to float a 15 week compromise, merely to get this question out of the way, a compromise that by the way is more liberal than most European abortion laws.
This corrective effect on the right is a positive outcome of this election. If Biden now passes a federal pro-choice bill with a 15 week limitation, the most popular abortion solution among American voters, no Republican would try to challenge it unless losing is their game plan.
Problem is, Biden and Democrats at large would never pass federal abortion legislation because it would shelve this nuclear issue once and for all. And from an electoral perspective, why would Democrats do that?