The New Religion: Reflections on the Recent American Midterm Elections

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.  —D. H. Lawrence

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.  —Aldous Huxley

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.  —G. K. Chesterton

     At the time of writing this, five days after midterm election day in America, the votes still have not been counted in several states. Enough votes have been counted, though, to demonstrate that the pollsters were wrong again. Almost everyone, including some panicked and dejected Democrat elites, were expecting a nationwide “red wave,” maybe even a “red tsunami”; but although something of the sort did occur in a few states like Florida, Ohio, Kentucky, and North Carolina, with some notable success even in the socialist state of New York, and the Republicans did gain ground overall, the Democrats did remarkably well. They even elected a man with obvious and literal brain damage, who can hardly speak coherently, as a new senator for the state of Pennsylvania. Then again, two years ago they elected a feeble, corrupt, child-groping old man with obvious dementia as our nation’s President. Another strange event is that one of the candidates for governor of Arizona, a state with notoriously incompetent and/or suspicious election results, with the ballots still not counted four days after the election—I say one of these candidates is responsible for overseeing the counting of the ballots deciding whether or not she herself will win the election. She did not recuse herself due to the obvious conflict of interest, and the leadership of the Republican Party, to say nothing of the Democrats, say nothing about it.

     Anyway, aside from the red tsunami not happening (except, as I say, in a few states), and aside from the Republicans gaining some ground in general, for example by gaining a modest majority in the House of Representatives, the news, as I see it, is as follows. America continues to polarize. Democrat states tended to become more democrat (though not necessarily democratic), and Republican states tended to become more Republican. At present 23 states, almost half of them, have a governor, senate, and house of representatives that are all firmly under the control of the Republican Party…with the Democrats having California and a few others like this on their side, though not nearly as many. The Democrats were not rebuked, humiliated, and shamed in this election, which probably means that the radical leftist policies that are threatening to drive the country into the ground, or tear it apart, and are clearly at odds with empirical reality, will not change. How much the Republican Party will change remains to be seen, though there is some chance that one or two of the globalist neoconservatives running the show will be ejected from positions of power. It would be nice if Mitch McConnell were to be voted out of his leadership over the Republican half, at least, of the US Senate, but conservatives, champions of the status quo that they are, tend not to accomplish much (this is much preferable, however, to the other party’s tendency, especially lately, to aggressively make things much worse.

     A big question is: Why did the left do as well as they did, and have been doing? The majority of the country believes that the USA is going in the wrong direction, and the aforementioned feeble and senile President is more unpopular than any President in recent decades, including the demonized Orange Man, “Cheeto Hitler.” (Literally Cheeto Hitler.) We are enduring rampant inflation and would be well into a recession if the Powers That Be hadn’t conveniently redefined the word “recession.” Also, the Democratic Party endorses such unpopular policies as being anti-police and pro-criminal; wide open borders with economic rewards for illegal border crossers; abortion on demand up to the moment of birth; anti-whitism; anti-masculinity; a resentment and desire to change, if not scrap altogether, the US Constitution; tranny story hour for toddlers; sex changes for children without their parents’ consent; and on and on. The nation is governed at present very incompetently, with many key positions, including the Vice President and a Supreme Court judge, being granted on the grounds of “diversity” rather than on the grounds of actual qualifications. And so, why in hell does the Republican Party, which champions the traditional values of the USA and is clearly less incompetent at this point, why does it continue to struggle? I will attempt to give a few answers, because the issue is not a simple one.

     I will begin with what the Republicans did wrong, and this one IS fairly simple to explain. The Republican Party is still in the process of restructuring itself, with the old guard of the globalist ruling elite resisting this change as well as they can manage. Consequently, the Republican Party sees the nationalists and populists swelling its ranks as possibly more of an enemy than the Democrats. The GOP leadership abandoned many key races simply because the Republican candidate was a nationalist and pro-Trump. At the same time Mitch McConnell sent some nine million dollars to support a neoconservative anti-Trump candidate against another Republican, this one a pro-Trump nationalist. The globalist neocon elite of the Party is now turning against their own voters and are willing to lose to Democrats, rather than lose power over their own Party by helping nationalist candidates to win. They are on the way out, and are thoroughly despised by the majority of their own Party by this point, but, like the Democrats, all they do is double down no matter how wrong or unpopular they are. Like Liz Cheney and Paul Ryan, the likes of Mitch McConnell will endorse Democrat candidates and betray their own voters even after they have been banished from power. Simply stated, if the ruling elite of the Republican Party had supported nationalist candidates instead of ignoring or even denouncing them, the GOP would have a solid majority in the House and a slim majority in the Senate. But they would be America First nationalists who interfere with the globalist gravy train.

     As for what the Democrats did “right,” I suppose first I may as well mention money. The billionaires tend to be leftists, or pseudo-leftists, globalists anyhow; and they see the Democratic Party as their main chance in America for setting up the socialized, feminized, globalist Brave New World Order, with them of course at the top of it all; and so the left has most of the money to spend on election campaigns. The Democrats allegedly outspent the Republicans by around three to one.

     In addition to this, the globalized left of course has control of most of the mass media (and they bitterly resent Elon Musk for threatening to allow free speech, alias “misinformation” and “hate speech,” on Twitter); and so they largely control the mainstream narrative. At least they influence it profoundly, especially with regard to young, naive voters who do not yet see much point in questioning their indoctrinators. So the globalist left, with the help of their propaganda arm the mainstream media, played on the fears and the gullibility of the American people, especially the young, more gullible ones. They claimed that reversing Roe vs. Wade was going to kill women and deprive them of their sacred right to abort their own offspring, when really all it did was to follow the Constitution and the democratic process by allowing individual states to *democratically* decide abortion issues on their own. They made up the tale that a homeless nudist illegal alien in San Francisco who attacked the Speaker of the House’s husband was a (typical, violent) MAGA Republican. They also repeated the absurd lie, and the President repeated it as well, that American nationalists who want their government to promote American interests first and foremost, are “fascists,” or at least, in Biden’s words, “semi-fascists.” Globalist pundits were comparing this election to the end of the Weimar Republic, with of course the non-globalists as the Nazis who would immediately end democracy and start killing people as soon as they got the chance. Conservative Republicans are “a threat to our democracy,” as many propagandist journalists announced in exactly the same words with exactly the same look of patriotic concern on their plastic faces. Conservatives, who are standing for the values of the mainstream not so long ago, are now the “extremists,” while those who supposedly aren’t extremists are championing such radical ideas that the Democrats themselves would have declared them insane less than ten years ago. As is usually the case, the accusations leveled against the right by the left were much more true of the left…but that’s politics.

     One refrain that is heard from the left and also the neoconservative quasi-right is that the Republicans really would have enjoyed a red tsunami across the country, if not for Donald Trump. On the other hand, I have heard that Trump endorsed a total of 235 candidates in this election cycle, and 219 of them won. That’s a 93% success rate, which is much better than the success rate of the pollsters and “experts.” Donald Trump caused Republican candidates to lose mainly because, as I pointed out above, the GOP ruling establishment, desperately and vehemently clinging to power, threw Trump’s favored candidates under the bus whenever they could. They still won at an overwhelming rate, but Trump’s success rate would have been considerably higher if, say, Mitch McConnell had sent some of the money he sent to the globalist neocon Murkowsky in Alaska, running against another Republican, to some of the MAGA candidates in Arizona, Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire.

     The main reason why the elites blame Trump is because they absolutely dread his becoming President in 2024. That would be a terrible blow to the globalist cause, so they play up feuds between Trump and the governor of Florida, gloat over some of his picks that didn’t win, and claim that he is an albatross around the collective Republican neck. They also call the majority of the Republican Party a “cult of personality,” though the cultishness, of course, is more to be found on the left. Hence their willingness to elect politicians with literal debilitating brain damage. Literally. All they have to do is rubber stamp the leftist agenda, and genuine intelligence may be a hindrance to this.

     Again and again over the course of this blog I have pointed out, and I point out again, that the “progressive movement” (as though decline and fall were progress) is essentially an atheistic religion, much as Marxism 1.0 was an atheistic religion, and much like early Christianity was classical Rome’s rough equivalent to the “progressives” of today. The Christians of the Roman Empire were also a doomsday cult, preaching fervently the idea that the world is coming to an end but that following them was the only hope of salvation. The early Christians, like later ones, made much of guilt and atonement for the sins of their distant ancestors, and generally hated their own country. The Christians of the Empire also harped on compassion and acceptance…but ONLY for their own side, with any opposition hated fervently and demonized, and persecuted as soon as the “progressives” gained the power to do so. The Christians of the Empire also insisted upon an absurd narrative that must be believed in order for a person not to be counted among the demonic “extremists.” For example, a Jewish carpenter turned miracle rabbi is the only Son of God and the Creator of the Universe. Some of the new “progressive” (i.e. quasi-religious globalist, American style) ideas are hardly less absurd, like menstruating men or women with balls, for example. But I don’t feel like picking on Christians.

     Right-wing Christians in the west generally combine, fairly effectively, their religion and their politics. The left appears to have turned their politics into a religion of its own, with any traditional-seeming religion in their life being mutated into a mouthpiece for their politics, more than anything really traditional. (Think of rainbow flags fluttering in front of Methodist churches, Unitarians celebrating “trans” children, Buddhist groups teaching mindfulness of white privilege, and so on.) The right shares some responsibility for this also, with some outliers evidently really looking on Trump as some quasi-divine Savior; though the left has taken the faith-ball and run with it into uncharted atheistic and irrational territory.

     I believe the people of the west have largely replaced religion with politics, with the main exception being the Christian traditionalists who have dovetailed Protestant values with traditionally Protestant capitalism and all that goes with it. The animosity of right vs. left in America today is reminiscent of Christians vs. Pagans in Rome, Protestants vs. Catholics in 16th-century England under Mary Tudor, Protestants vs. Catholics in Bohemia during the Thirty Years War, Muslims vs. Hindus at the post-colonial partition of India, etc.

     Victor D. Hanson, a classical scholar and one of my favorite political commentators lately, points to Rome in his own way, referring to the ups and downs of the Eternal City during classical times. Bear in mind that the second Emperor was already the sadist Tiberius, and next after him was Caligula! The Empire almost fell apart several times before its final collapse (and every civilization eventually collapses, usually through internal rot more than external barbarians), but then a strong Emperor like Claudius Gothicus or Aurelian came to power and started kicking unholy ass on all enemies, foreign and domestic. (Both of the aforementioned “savior Emperors” died on military campaigns, and were better generals than peacetime rulers.) So Hanson optimistically prefers to believe that we are in a temporary upheaval rather than the beginning of the final collapse. I really am not sure how the decadence of the postmodern west is going to be overcome without the shit really hitting the fan, though: emasculated soyboys aren’t suddenly going to grow a pair and start watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. It’s going to take hard times to make strong men, so maybe the hole that Democrat/Globalist government is driving us into will be sufficient to grow some strong men capable of making America, and the West, great again.

     One possibility is that America could balkanize like Italy did in post-Roman times. This resulted in warring states, and even warring aristocratic families within cities. Plus throughout most of that time a blood feud was raging between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines over who should rule Italy: the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. Anyone who has read Dante’s Inferno knows the seething hatred for each other between these two groups. In some cases the hate was a major reason why these people were in Hell. BUT…it was largely the chaos of a fractious Italy that gave birth to the Renaissance. Chaos is a kind of freedom, and real freedom—not just the freedom to choose one’s own perversions, hair colors, and tattoos—is necessary for genius to grow and blossom.

     It remains mildly astonishing to me that with well over half of the American adult population believing that America is currently on the wrong track, a great many of these same people holding this opinion went ahead and voted for the very people with the very policies that are causing it to be on the wrong track. Then again, postmodern leftism is a faith-based and fear-based religion with the kind of ridiculous beliefs that only religion, intoxicants, insanity, or mass hysteria can inspire. Faith-based religions tend to be a form of mental illness anyhow, compelling their followers to believe any narrative, regardless of how obviously silly it may appear to the unindoctrinated. Then again, the lefties believe the same stuff about us.