By MR Josse
NEW YORK, NY: Though America’s midterm elections are long over, a brief overall assessment here may be in order. To sum up in most general terms what is a truly complex post-poll situation: both the Republicans and the Democrats emerged with something to show for itself, thought neither secured all they hoped to achieve.
To wit, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives while President Donald Trump’s Republican party maintained their hold of the Senate, as also claiming a larger share of the gubernatorial victories – this despite the fact that a tiny number of electoral results are still up in the air, at this writing.
RURAL/URBAN AMERICA
In my opinion the Wall Street Journal was on the ball when it pronounced that, post-polls, “Republicans are the party of rural America, the Democrats of the cities and the suburbs.”
Columnist Paul Krugman, in the New York Times (NYT), explained this revealing dichotomy in his headline: Real America versus Senate America. Elaborating, he stated: “For economic and demographic trends have interacted with political change to make the Senate deeply unrepresentative of American reality. His thesis: Real America is mainly metropolitan, while Senate America is still largely rural.”
A revealing if pithy NYT conclusion was: the Democratic party maintained their focus on their pet issues while the Republicans lost their unity and grip on messaging.
Although Trump tried to sooth post-election relations with presumptative House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even a neophyte can predict that the next two years – leading up to the presidential elections in November 2020 – will see a battle royale between the two parties as they joist and maneuver for control in the stormy political seas ahead.
A whiff of what is in store could be had when a number of Democratic leaders warned of “a constitutional crisis” if President Trump’s ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions in any way affects the Russia probe being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Though only a few pundits would go out on a limb suggesting the possibility of impeachment of the president – for a host of alleged political and miscellaneous sins – Trump in his combative post-electoral press conference (or ‘presser’ in the tabloid lingo) warned that if the Democrats were in a mood to fight rather than cooperate with him, there would be hell to pay.
In fact, in the turbulent press encounter Trump alternately cajoled and threatened, as he clearly seemed to sense the prospect of an unfriendly House.
While both parties had interpreted the high rate of voter turnout as a positive augury for their respective parties, I was also struck – though not flabbergasted – how little if at all foreign/security policy seemed to figure in the hectic campaigning that preceded the polls.
Presumably, in the 2020 presidential elections that will not be the case.
Let me close this segment with excerpts from a column in NYT by Nicholas Kristof: “In the end, it was only a blue ripple, and thus should prompt soul searching among Democrats, particularly as everyone looks ahead to 2020….President Trump was wildly exaggerating when he tweeted that the election was a ‘big win’ for him, but he did okay by historical standards.
“Democrats won the House but lost seats in the Senate; in the 39 midterm elections since 1862, the president’s party lost Senate seats 24 times and House seats 35 times.”
Now for a vastly different take, this time telling jottings from a thought-provocative book, “Suicide of a Super Power: Will America Survive to 2025?” by paleoconservative Patrick J. Buchanan, published in 2011:
“We have moved from a nation of makers to a nation of takers: This is our reward for turning our backs on the economic nationalism of men who made America and embracing the free trade ideology of economists and academics who never made anything…
“Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it and it feeds them. The larger the government becomes, the more agencies are established, the more bureaucrats are hired, the more citizens receiving benefits or checks, the more deeply entrenched is the Party of Government…
“Ours is the oldest constitutional republic, the model for all that followed. But if our elected leaders are incapable of imposing the sacrifices needed to pull the nation back from devaluation and default, is democracy really the future of mankind?…
“Religion is the foundation of morality and only a moral people can sustain a free republic…Without religion, morality withers and dies, the community disintegrates, the nation fails. Our fathers’ insight goes far towards explaining the current crisis of the republic, for America has ceased to be a Christian country they and we grew up in.”
NATIONALISM OR PATRIORISM?
On November 11, the world marked the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One – at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. At a carefully orchestrated centennial in Paris that day world leaders made impassioned pleas for global cooperation with several, according to National Pubic Radio (NPR), making forceful denouncements against rising forces of nationalism.
“In a speech at the Arc de Triomphe, French President Emmanuel Macron took aim at the style of nationalism embraced by President Trump, warning a crowd of dignitaries and heads of state about how the splintering of multilateral institutions led to the first World War and now threaten to divide the world once again…Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism…Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying, ‘Our interest first, whatever happens to the others’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: its moral values.”
Without in anyway referencing Trump, I wonder how many in the developing world would agree with Macron that ‘nationalism’ is a dirty political word or that it is vastly at variance with patriotism?
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