Coop Scoop: Brace Yourself!

Hope for the best -- Expect the Worst

November 4, 2022

By Marc Cooper

Unlike the Great Bloviator, Michael Moore, I am not about to make breathless public predictions about the midterms happening four days from now,  especially the one he made that Democrats are going to “win” the election because of an undetected women and youth vote.

Maybe. I don’t know. Unlike Moore, I also fail as a clairvoyant.  The best I can do at this juncture is to string together a couple of fizzy bromides: Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst.  Or Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will.  In other words: Brace Yourselves!

Let me state the real point of this note before I even get into the election.  The midterms are of great importance but they are not all-important.  We will better off if the Republicans do not sweep, but we are hardly going to be in some great place if the Democrats come out on top – something increasingly unlikely anyway.  In turn, expectations must be adjusted as much as possible. Either way. It’s damn important who is in power.  But there are other realities that are just as imposing and crucial to understand.

Once the election is over there will still be three constants in place:  1) about half the country now on a firm anti-democratic tack and psychologically immersed in mind set that is both paranoid and highly aggressive. I refer not just to MAGA, but to the entire Republican Party. 2) a growing array of social crises from radical inequality, to a coast to coast drug and opioid epidemic, a brutal and often inaccessible health care system, decent housing beyond the reach of many, out of control military spending, crime, a college tuition and soon to be admission crisis, a runaway Supreme Court, interminable turmoil around public school curriculum, a sclerotic political system, a population that often stumbles around in a forest of disinformation and national shibboleths, and, oh yea, a global array of military bases and deployments that not only get us in trouble but also cost a fortune to maintain.

If the folks included in my first point – MAGA—are victorious on Tuesday than all of the items in my second point will get worse.  If they lose and the Dems magically win, then things in point two will get marginally better.  Marginally.

The Future of Democracy, well, that’s a bit more complicated.  Every indicator you can rustle up tells you that we are on a long slide away from democracy and headed in almost all aspects in life toward more centralized, more technological, more distant and faceless forms of social relations.  Democracy itself will not be decided on Tuesday.  But with some 300 MAGA election deniers running for office, we are bound to come out of the election more diseased than before, and that much closer to illiberal rule.

The January 6 committee has performed yeoman’s work in exposing the fascists, and they are fascists, who plotted and attempted to block Joe Biden from democratically ascending to power and turning Trump into an American Dictator – a job to which Trump still aspires.  All of the ugliness has been put on display and appropriately been placed at Trump’s door, but it certainly seems that most of the electorate is not much interested in acting on that information.

That, in part, can be credited to the Democrats’ totally miserable “messaging” over the last yea  Messaging is in quotes because that’s the euphemism employed to stand for giving people a reason to support you, join you and vote for you. That’s a lot more than a message.

In this category, the Democrats have totally failed.  Right up to election day there’s still uncertainty in the Democrats’ ability to define themselves, thereby allowing every half-wit, incel, fascist and political consultant to define them as they please. “Commie queer groomers”.

Republicans have a lot to look forward to come Tuesday.  According to CNN, Biden is down to a 42% approval rating, with 47% strongly disapproving.  More than 60% of likely voters say Biden has not paid enough attention to national problems. 51% say the economy is the number one issue with abortion coming in second at 15%.  I am not sure what this says about the electorate other than “it’s the economy, stupid.” Only 28% say the country is in fair or good shape. And an enormous 75% say they feel the economy is already in recession.

Given that a super-majority of my people cannot define “recession” we will credit this number to our sensationalist media who have been promoting a coming recession for the last 10 months!  Maybe they will finally get it.

You can rebut these numbers or as I have partially done, try to find the source of the discontent.  But they all do add up to some concrete outcomes. Again, what I am about to list are not predictions per se, but a reach to see what material political changes we are in for.

The House left us a long time ago.  Democrats MIGHT squeeze out 50 senate seats, but Republicans are likely headed for 52+.  The names Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams very will might be remembered in history, according to The Atlantic, as “superstar losers.”  Maybe Fetterman as well/ The nice Democratic lady Senator that nobody pays attention to in Nevada is on the chopping block. As is Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly.   The cretinous, to be polite, Senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, is miraculously surviving.  Kari Lake the ruthless and unhinged MAGA candidate for Arizona Governor – to whom the Democrats gave support in the primary—more likely than not will win. And if she does, mark my word, is in first place –ahead of DeSantis—to succeed Trump in the netherworld he leads.  I think those predicting an additional “shocker” loss, like Patty Murray in Washington or the Republicans winning the Oregon governorship, or that of New York as well, are not out to lunch.

The real fight for America’s future, and therefore the fight for Democracy probably restarts and escalates the day after the election. We are in sort of a lose-lose situation come 2023.  If the GOP had been victorious in the midterms, we will see rolling congressional investigations, impeachment attempts, spurious legislation that—at least for 2 more years—can be vetoed by Biden. And if the Republicans should lose in general or in some specific races, we can be sure to see Act Two of Stop the Steal opening in your city next Wednesday morning.  Have you yet thought what we are going to be in when Trump runs again for president but this time under federal indictment?  I shudder.

Of the reams of analysis I have pored over regarding the midterms, one piece popped out this morning that really hit me.  The headline on Liza Featherstone’s piece in Jacobin titled The Democrats Will Probably Lose The Midterms Because Society Is Falling Apart, sort of sums it up neatly.  My long time friend Liza chides “our side” for not being realistic about the probably outcomes that could create “a political disastrous implications possibly even worse than the 2016 election 

Says Liza, “Democrats and progressives have been spectacularly dismissive on issues that matter to people and the messaging has been awful, not to mention the optics of drinking champagne with fancy donors while Americans line up for food banks…The Republicans are poised for victory because our whole society is falling apart in ways that mainstream Democrats are structurally ill equipped to address.”

Roger that! And to make her case, Liza takes up CRIME as one of the most revealing issues, mostly because the center-left and especially the left, exhaust themselves by denying it is an issue and by telling people who are scared that they just need stop being scared.

I live ten miles from downtown Portland, one of the five most liberal cities in America, and I can tell you that an overwhelming majority of Portlanders have become afraid to be in the streets. It’s not just murders and shootings, but also rampant property crimes, a sharp escalation in catalytic converter theft, but also a staggering amount of the homeless and the addicted under every highway underpass, around every park and on the sidewalks.

Liza lays it out:

“Crime is a real problem in some cities, and to dismiss it by claiming it’s exaggerated by right-wing media is not an adequate response. In New York City, all crime has increased dramatically since 2019, the last pre-pandemic year (in the case of murder, the most consistently reported and frightening crime, by 35 percent). Over the past year, murder hasn’t increased – small mercies – but all other major felonies are up 24 percent. The Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, is leading Trumper Lee Zeldin by an astonishingly thin margin mainly for this reason, and she could lose.

“All that mainstream Democrats seem able to do, in response to Republicans’ blaming humane reforms (in the case of New York State, ending the cash bail system), is to backslide and agree that the reforms are the problem. It’s a stupid reaction, because if Democratic policies were to blame, why shouldn’t voters concerned about public safety try the Republican law-and-order approach…What’s more, the general societal breakdown of which crime is the most widely reported symptom is playing out in many other ways. Antisocial behavior of all kinds has increased — including kinds that Republicans don’t really care about one way or the other, like domestic violence and dangerously reckless driving. The difficulty that service sector employers are having finding labor is partly due to customers being so rude to workers. ”

Yes. Yes. There is that general societal breakdown. And with it, an ongoing erosion of democracy because that term should mean more than a certain form of government. Democracy is also a norm, an attitude, lubricant for civil society.  But what kind of civil society do we have when major politicians of a major party, along with millions of fairly crazed followers, mock, laugh at, question the truth of an 82 year old man getting hammered in the head over what are political disagreements. I am sorry. The act was horrendous and delusional. The response on the right has been that of fascists.

I reach similar, rather dark conclusions when I look at the Walker-Warnock race.   I challenge you to find any two candidates anywhere else this election year who present a deeper contrast. Whatever one thinks of Warnock’s politic, he’s an educated, rational man, a man of God, a worker for social justice, and the guy who now preaches in MLK’s pulpit.  Walker is a brain-battered giant who cannot complete a given sentence or even string together two rational thoughts. He’s a serial liar, a world-class hypocrite, a woman beater and somebody clearly and totally unfit to be a US Senator.

And to be fair, he’s also a victim of Trump-MAGA world who has put him on public display knowing very well he was severely damaged.  The people behind that are fascists. And the thought that Walker could get more than 20% of the vote, especially against someone like Warnock, tests the imagination. That he can get 45, or 48% or win the seat – as he very might—tells us that those Americans election him are fertile ground for supporting fascists should they appear.

The underlying problem, Liza argues and I fully agree, is that to solve these issues and the others that stalk us, we need radical intervention by national, state and local governments along with affected communities to provide more funding and support for programs that abate the incubation of crime  It’s a similar argument that I use regarding gun control. Absolutely necessary.  Possible ONLY through mitigation of source causes.

In other words, we can expect no real and serious reform of society unless we somehow grow a political class that is willing to speak the truth about our social ills and engage the population in solving those issues rather than using those issues to divide the electorate. 

I suppose we can expect THAT sometime after Hell freezes over and defrosts.  Until then, hang on to the notion that Americans don’t know much about politics and that a coming Republican majority might be met with the same sort of mass opposition when it too fails to solve the problems that most affect Americans.

The most I will ask from my friends on the Center-Left is an honest post-mortem probing the weaknesses and the mistakes incurred during these past 5 years.  Not holding my breath on that one either.

See you on the other side!  ++

The year ahead of us is going to be consequential.  2023 could easily determine the course of the country for decades to come.

I want to have the resources available to properly cover what is coming.

Indeed, I would like to spend a week reporting only for Coop Scoop from Georgia and maybe Arizona for obvious reasons.

That costs money. Period.

In mid-November I will create a new paywalled section for paid subscribers. I am not ending the free Coop Scoop. That will continue. But I will be adding extra content for paid subs, including a projected podcast on the history of US interventions abroad.

Paid subs will have access to the podcast, as well as additional text posts.  Six Ask Me Anything zoom meet ups a year, and a new subscriber chat function.

I suggest you get ahead of the curve and subscribe now.   It’s very likely sub rate will increase next month with the redesign.