“Now what?”
One wing of ‘the war party’ has trounced the other.
4 NOVEMBER—A reader with a gift for cutting comment wrote in response to the column published in this space prior to yesterday’s elections:
The U.S. election is very important to many tens of thousands of people. It will change the lives of at least 535 members of Congress. It’ll define the career opportunities for 1000s of staffers and party bureaucrats. Relative to each other, some factions in the American elite will gain, others will lose.
Of 340 million Americans, maybe 0.01% will have a different future based on U.S. election results.
I imagine the observations of Merfy Mac, as this reader identifies, may seem unduly dismissive now that the results of Tuesday’s polls are in. Sooner than expected as the vote counts proceeded it was unambiguously clear that the Democrats would shellack the Republicans not quite across the board but nearly. At writing—with Alaska and Mississippi still tallying their totals—Democrats have majorities of at least 54 seats in the Senate and 50 in the House. A lot of states previously controlled by the G.O.P. have “flipped.” There are some big wins: Abdul El–Sayed defeated Mike Rogers, the Zionist hawk, for a Michigan Senate seat; Susan Collins, the dreary Republican hack from Maine, is finally out.
There is electricity in the American air, to put it mildly. The post–Trump era has begun, as various corporate media reported with evident excitement. Just after 10 Tuesday evening the tiresome liberals at MS NOW passed out candy while on air.
O.K. Now what?
The G.O.P. majorities in Congress have reminded me these past two years of those photographs LIFE used to publish during the Cold War, showing every right hand in the Duma raised in approval of whatever measure the Soviet leadership had introduced. This, the Trumpster’s rubber-stamp legislature, has been voted out. But what will the Democrats do with their congressional majorities? What difference will the Democrats’ new power make, taking Merfy Mac’s figure, to the 99.99 percent of Americans who enjoy no great fortunes and no proximity to power?
The elections just concluded, to turn the point another way, were put across as the most important in modern American history. You can’t not vote this time, many of those who don’t pull levers heard again and again. Every election I can recall was advertised one or another way as crucial, decisive, America’s-future-hangs-in-the-balance. Placard on a front lawn spotted the other day out in the Pacific Northwest: “Voting is power.” This is not a new story.
And what is now to come will not be a new story, either. To go straight at it, Merfy Mac is likely to prove a lot righter than hyperbolic as the next two years unfurl.
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It looks as though the fun will begin for the Democrats more or less immediately. From Connor Stringer, The Telegraph’s chief Washington correspondent, as published 1 November under the headline, “Trump preparing to steamroll Congress if Democrats win”:
The White House has developed a secret plan to keep major parts of Donald Trump’s political agenda on track if Democrats seize control of Congress in the midterm elections.
Senior White House officials, including Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, have spent months drawing up a plan that would allow Mr Trump to continue to pass laws without congressional approval.
Will Scharf, the White House counsel, and his team are also looking at “what Mr Trump can legally do on his own, where he could push the limits of his authority and how to defend those decisions in court,” an official told Reuters.
It is impossible to say at his early moment what may be in store given The Telegraph’s report. President Trump, magnanimous man, told The New York Times Tuesday evening that he is “absolutely willing” to accept the Democrats’ victory. “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” Trump said on the very eve of his lame-duck years.
Any such thought may at first seem preposterous. But as the record indicates plainly, it is not at all far-fetched to assert, as Stringer reports, that the Trump White House and the Congress will contrive to “cooperate,” bitter as this word seems in this context. “We’ll probably work something out,” Trump told The Times in that Tuesday evening interview.
As is universally understood, the Democrats rode a wave of national discontent on their way to victory. Let’s parse this carefully.
To score off voters’ anger about all the Trumpster’s betrayals amounts to a platform that has “We’re not Trump” as its sturdiest, if not, indeed, its sole plank. “We’re not Trump” is not a political strategy. There is nothing in it to suggest an alternative vision or a program that promises a new way forward for America and its 99.99 percent. At the horizon, “We’re not Trump” is a betrayal all its own when all a party has on offer is a profession of what it is not. Turning this upside-down, American voters just expressed their anger by way of a system that affords them the narrowest of choices. This does not constitute an endorsement of the Democrats’ one-plank platform. It is delusional to read the results today otherwise.
The high cost of living and the “affordability crisis,” as we’re calling corporate America’s breaking-point exploitation of working– and middle-class people, the out-of-control profiteering among health insurers, environmental degradation, artificial intelligence and the ruination of many communities—chosen for their vulnerabilities—via the construction of data centers: All sorts of things came up as candidates followed the campaign trail in the political season just passed.
But I heard no word spoken as to a comprehensive set of policies that would point America in a new direction in any of these spheres. F.D.R. first announced his New Deal when he accepted the Democrats’ presidential nomination 94 years ago last July. The banks hated Roosevelt for this, and he took pleasure in hating them. Today’s Democrats simply do not have this kind of vision, imagination, and courage in them. There is no post-election deal of any kind in store for American voters. Instead, what they got during the campaign season and what they will get from here on out is a variation of Bill Clinton’s repellently cynical “I feel your pain.” Rephrased, it comes to: I know Americans are in trouble but I’m not going to do much about it other than at the margins.
From a post-mortem note JD Vance posted on “X” Wednesday morning:
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is…. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone….
Another pollster… told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this…. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
…. Everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
Vance, who opposed the Iran war within the Trump regime and has no great sympathy for Israel, seems to be fighting his own corner here. But his honesty is plain, especially in items 1 and 4. Vance missed this, but, with few and honorable exceptions, candidates on both sides failed the electorate on all four points. There was no mention by either Democrats or Republicans of empire during the campaigns—nothing as to what America’s purported leaders have made of this, our post-republic, nothing about the power of capital and how the imperium serves it.
One of the interesting features of the midterm election season is the extent to which voters—finally, at last—are beginning to recognize the connection between the conduct of empire and the decay of American democracy. It is also of interest, I must quickly add, that few of those who just ran campaigns for office—Democrats as well as Republicans, let’s not miss—showed any willingness to address this fundamental contradiction.
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There was a telling moment in the race for a Senate seat in Michigan that is worth consideration. As widely reported, a political action committee that supported Abdul El–Sayed ran an advertisement connecting the deprivations of most Americans to the money Washington spends on the weaponry the Israelis use to kill Palestinians. El–Sayed had nothing to do with the P.A.C. or the ad, but when he declined to repudiate it absolute hell broke loose such that his campaign briefly appeared to be in jeopardy. The Zionists got their reply to this appalling attempt to censor a perfectly obvious truth with El–Sayed’s 52–to–48 victory.
Americans want to talk about empire. Some 70 percent of them now oppose the U.S.–Israeli war of aggression against the Islamic Republic—a war, they are well aware, whose costs already run to several billion dollars. Will the new Congress reflect the popular will when it sits for the first time come January? I do not find this question of the slightest interest, however much corporate media, in their morning-after coverage, encourage Americans expectantly to pose it.
It will be interesting to see if the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill begins impeachment hearings early next year against Trump and various of his adjutants, chief among them but not only Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. There was much noise to this effect when the Democrats were an out-of-power minority, and such proceedings are well, well warranted given the Trump regime’s serial breaches of law and Constitutional process. Which way this goes will suggest just what “We’re not Trump” means.
Trump’s vulgarity has made it easy for liberal voters to hate him. But what are Democrats in power if not Trump without the coarseness? For them it isn’t the long red neckties or the hair or the obesity or the foul language or the obsession with money. No, for them Trump has run the imperium crudely at a moment American power must be projected with Obama-like subtlety so that Americans do not make the above-noted connections between empire and democracy. Steve Cohen, the late and highly respected Russianist, used to say there is only one major party in American politics: the War Party, he called it. This is my take on what just transpired across the nation. This is what everyone who pulled the lever voted for.
I think of all the energy and good will Americans just invested in the poor remains of the nation’s political process—all the uplifted eyes as of this morning. How can this not bring a certain sadness? How can one not hope that those who just voted come to recognize that the choices they made are paltry next to all they have a right to choose and that the worthy work lies in making their true choices possible?
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Cara Marianna contributed research and analysis.
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