Red tide, Blue wave
A blue wave rose, pushed back the red tide that had long been rising, then crested and broke without reaching shore or managing to sweep away the toxic sludge that is the Republican Party in the Trump era.
That’s my somewhat metaphorical first reading of what happened in the 2018 midterm elections, writing at 5 a.m. the morning after. If journalism is the first draft of history, then this a rough one. The polls in the West closed just a few hours ago. We don’t yet know all the winners, and it will be some time before the finer breakdowns are computed.
President Donald Trump’s attempt to secure a GOP victory by whipping up a frenzy of fear and hatred of immigrants did not work. Most Americans were more worried about losing their health care or being unable to buy medical insurance if they have or develop a pre-existent condition than they were at the specter of some phantom alien invasion.
Democrats won not just in the coastal strongholds. They scored victories in unlikely places, including Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kansas. They also recovered ground in several Midwestern states won by Trump in 2016.
The Democrats won control of the House of Representatives, breaking the GOP stranglehold on the legislative branch. The flip is extremely important. It will make it impossible for Republicans in Congress to trample all over the Democrats and public opinion to pour even more gravy on the plates of the rich or make life miserable for the medically indigent.
The Democrats failed to achieve a blowout or even a really big wave. But there was a clear blue trend. Florida was the deal-breaker and the heartbreaker for the Democrats. Victories by Gillum and Nelson had seemed likely and would have solidified the narrative of a big Democratic national victory, especially if Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia had managed to win in solid red states.
Among Republicans, some of the biggest jackasses won despite the blue trend: Ted Cruz, Steve King, Ron DeSantis, and Rick Scott. Jackasses: I make no concession to a pseudo-civility to those who don’t deserve it at the cost of lucidity.
Among Democrats, some of the least attractive candidates in the party won: Joe Manchin who thinks the Second Amendment is the First Commandment; Bob Menendez, who would be a scandal if Donald Trump’s myriad scandals would not have made Menendez seem like a very minor sinner; and Donna Shalala, who never saw a middle road she didn’t want to take and never stands for principles like academic freedom and health care for all if those principles clash with the interests of those with the money to make big donations to medical schools and centrist political campaigns.
Demography is finally starting to catch up to politics. It takes a long time for changes in the population’s racial and ethnic make-up to have a proportional impact on relations of power. This election was a breakthrough, with not only Latinos and African Americans increasing their power as they have been doing gradually for decades but also an eruption of women in Congress and in State Houses and unlikely victories by two Muslim women.
The impact of the 1965 reform of immigration policy, that abolished racist quotas, has been a long time coming. It has now arrived. One way to read the Trump agenda is a desperate last ditch effort to prevent demography from transmuting into power. I am not talking here about “an alien” take over, only a fair distribution of power and privilege. But, as the Brazilian educator Paolo Freyre taught, when those who have been the oppressors have to share with the oppressed they feel genuinely oppressed. The oppressors see the inequality built-in to the status quo as the natural state, just the way things are (and always have been).
This is key to understanding “white grievance,” the force that has powered the Trump phenomenon. The Donald Trumps, Judge Roy Browns, and Brett Kavanaughs of this world feel genuinely aggrieved when their victims stand up against them, even when they have zero right to feel aggrieved. After all, the slave masters thought they were loved by their slaves, and they felt aggrieved when they found out otherwise.
The question now, which I am not yet prepared to address, is whether this is a watershed moment when the long reactionary Republican counterrevolution begins to lose ground on the way to a definitive rout or another oscillation like the Obama presidency. The 2020 general election should provide a clearer picture.
