So what’s the state of America at the moment? Your correspondent would barely know. He’s in Manhattan, which is really an island that broke off Europe and drifted west until it hit something and stopped, all its little cafés and antiquarian bookstores and galleries and cosy pubs giving a little wobble as they butted up against that vast land of strip malls and flyovers, of destroyed cities and Applebees, of drive-in churches and dead franchises to the horizon.
In Manhattan, cash is everywhere and everything you need is a $15 taxi ride away. It’s the other city, other than DC, that is nothing like the country it rules, and from which America is incomprehensible. They should move Congress to LA, or somewhere like Des Moines, just some place that has been nothinged out. I watch Fox News and it’s like furiously optimistic radio broadcasts from the Führerbunker, and I watch MSNBC and it’s like a Harvard School of Government seminar on public policy, and CNN has finally reached a sort of zen state of boredom appropriate to its role as universal airport TV.
But look, here’s the upshot.
There’s no great change from yesterday, at time of writing. America has not been swamped by MAGA, there’s been no red wave. The final Senate seats and 30 or so House seats will take days and weeks to finalise, and there’ll be recounts. The Republicans have won a House majority, but it’ll be between two and about 12 seats, it would seem.
If it’s the lower end, it may be more trouble for the GOP leadership, as micro factions dangle the possibility of abstention that they could mount a spurious political rationale for. Their cooperation will have to be bought with more internal power, which will in turn entrench factions, and so it will go.
If it gains even 51 seats in the Senate, it will be able to hold up confirmations of administration appointments at multiple levels, and leave the Biden administration with some serious gaps. In both chambers it will begin investigations… of COVID, of Hunter Biden, of the election, of Hunter Biden, of Russiagate, of Hunter Biden, etc. It’s going to be a messy two years, starting with a refusal to raise the debt ceiling, and possibly ending with another government shutdown.
Through all that, Joe Biden will be on track to run again, and all that can stop him will be actual dementia rather than mild wooliness, or, you know, death. The Democrat establishment simply lacks the ability to sack its own, which is why it has become a gerontocracy. Furthermore, there’s a good argument for him running. If people are living to 90 these days, absolutely routinely, an octogenarian doesn’t seem a problem. And Biden’s great strength is that he’s been able to unite the centre and the left of the party in some form of grudging agreement.
Biden is, by US standards, of the left: recognisably pro-union, willing to call fascists fascists, and certainly to the left of Barack Obama now. But the right’s charge of radical leftist just doesn’t work. It’s Joe. Everyone’s known him for half a century.
For the Republicans, well, they have a lot of strategic questions to work out, and no way of imposing a single direction once they do so. The party centre will want to try and tamp down all the, you know, jokes about the speaker’s husband being maimed in a hammer attack, and the stop the steal, and the anti-Semitism thing — and that’s all the stuff the base is now feeding off.
They are moving serially through different versions of the conspiracy-driven “paranoid style of American politics” — first it was Q, then it was the steal, who knows what’s next — seeking a solace they will never find. They are also being deserted by the Republicans on the key economic issue Donald Trump won for them: anti-globalisation economic nationalism.
The Republicans seem to have not understood that this is what persuaded a large slice of the working class across the divide. Ron DeSantis may be able to reinvent himself as one of these, and he will be joined by Tulsi Gabbard, who will so obviously be running for the Republican nomination, it ain’t funny, and who will be DeSantis’ vice in 2024 — or Trump’s? They didn’t learn the lesson Trump taught them on free market tax cut economics — and they didn’t learn it again when former UK PM Liz Truss taught it to them by default from across the pond. Their ability to wage war on ol’ Joe will be somewhat compromised by their need to wage war on each other until the line is settled.
They have one advantage in their corner that few have noticed. This election, a significant number of Black and Latino people went Republican, following a small switch to them in 2020. This is a class shift, a rising middle bourgeoisie for whom corporate and personal tax cuts would make a real difference, and which then complements conservative Christian values.
If they stay on the Republican side, and the section of the white working class that returned to the Dems can be coaxed back again, then this election will prove to be a false dawn for the Democrats, lulling them into a belief that their “college and colour” coalition has done the trick. It hasn’t, and it may have already started to fall apart.
There’s no better place to see that happen than… New York, which appears to have lost four Democrat House seats, practically losing the House on its own. Crime softness, corruption and complacency are to blame, and that is practically a Democrat trifecta. The rest of the country? Well, the sense of the whole place disappearing, just being eaten up by digital, by exurbanism, by the “contactless world”, will not stop.
I hear America yearning. This is the nothingness from which something comes. What that will be I have even less idea about than I did last week when I was in a Radisson by the freeway. Now I’m going to a dark cosy little pub Paddy Chayefsky and Norman Mailer used to frequent, to drink beer and eat pickles before choosing one of 60 plays to attend, so really, you’re better guessing from where you are than me.
The star-spangled banner is still waving; it may soon, once again, be drowning. Signing off for a few. See you back in the ‘burbs.
Thank you Guy for the, yet again, great insight into that incomprehensible country. Much appreciated.
Guy, enjoy some Wild Turkey and don’t feel the need to channel Hunter S Thompson. This most recent analysis reassures me. I was beginning to worry that the Great American Lobotomy was starting to affect you. I would not want to be where you are now. Thanks for your courageous commentary.
… Manhattan, which is really an island that broke off Europe and drifted west until it hit something and stopped, all its little cafés and antiquarian bookstores and galleries and cosy pubs …
It is now thirty years since I lived for one wonderful year in Manhattan. From that vantage point I could never understand why George HW Bush was president. Other Americans I knew were always telling me that NY was NOT USA. There is some comfort in knowing that is still the case.
Then I read this: … this election will prove to be a false dawn for the Democrats, lulling them into a belief that their “college and colour” coalition has done the trick. It hasn’t, ….There’s no better place to see that happen than… New York, which appears to have lost four Democrat House seats, practically losing the House on its own.
USA ? – I have never really understood it.
New York state vs NYC.
There was never a red wave.
The red wave was just a fox news beat up and everyone fell for it.
America’s Democracy was at stake, women lost their rights, voters were sick and tied of Trump and his lies.
The Republicans had no policies. And the young ones came out in force for Climate Change policy’s.
Biden has done more for voters in two years than the Republicans have done in ten years.
The Democrats with win the Senate.
Biden won.
US media and GOP were trying to induce what Karl Rove described as the ‘bandwagon effect’ i.e. many voters prefer to follow others….
It was allegedly Karl Rove, the GOP poltical consultant and policy adviser, who when Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to Dubya, The Faux Texan said
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
And now the GOP have been shown that reality is the state of things as they are, rather than as they are imagined to be.
Thanks for the last few weeks worth of coverage, Guy. Some great stuff in those.