04 November 2022 | The Arrogance of Inevitability

It is not that Democrats won’t lose seats or other races this cycle: of course they will. It’s just that the level of overconfidence and arrogance about that loss that is striking me as...wrong. I am making sure not to say things that make me feel better that are divorced from reality. At the same time, as I noted the other day, there is something off about the entire narrative of GOP inevitability.

It is a truism that control of Congress changes hands when one party controls the White House. To that end, why should this midterm buck the pattern? Yet by all rights, everything *does* feel different because we are engulfed with a bumper crop of imbeciles and outright incompetent GOP candidates who have spouted the endless lie about a stolen election. It's one thing to contest an election: this is a legal right that people have. It's another thing to lie about the *outcome* of the 2020 election, a lie whose purpose is to deceive others and whip them into a frenzy where violence is their only recourse. See Jan 6. But the denials coming from the Republican Party are trying to make that domestic terror attack into nothing big or even normal. And this why this particular midterm is different from the others, especially for those who see the long term danger.

Now, if Democrats lose control of Congress, or at least one branch, instead of seeing as the usual pattern of how people vote in this country, the Media Whores will insist it's a “drubbing of historic proportions.” This is, of course, garbage: scores of Democrats won seats in 2018 and the media never mentioned the phrase “blue wave” at all. But owing to their long-standing fear and subservience to the Republican Party and its right-wing tentacles, they will describe a Democratic loss precisely that way. And it's the media's repetition of GOP talking points and framing that adds to the arrogance and overconfidence of that party at large. “Soul searching” is not a phrase the media applies to the GOP when they lose: that's reserved for Democrats and Democratic supporters **whom they do not fear at all.**And given Democratic proclivity for defeatism and self-loathing, they will take that seriously and engage in their well-known cutting problem.

But for voters in general? Well, that's an entirely different blog entry.