Dismal Blue Wave

imagine a boot nurturing a human face

Election results. Let’s slide into this backward.

At the height of the pandemic weirdness, I had a conversation with a mom from our daughter’s old school, and she said that she was very angry — because she was seeing in the news how wonderfully European governments were sheltering and nurturing their populations during a moment of danger, and she was heartbroken that our government had left us to suffer alone. She wanted more. She was devastated by the absence of a national lockdown order, which made her feel that she wasn’t being cared for. Prison is a warm hug. Remember the long historical moment when all your proggie relatives kept telling you that Jacinda Ardern was heroically kind and decent, and they didn’t understand your weird response?

I can’t find it, now, but back in 2020 people were circulating a cartoon of two toddlers going down two dangerously steep playground slides. On the slide labeled “Europe,” government-mommy was waiting at the bottom to safely catch the child; on the slide labeled “USA,” there was no mommy, because there was no national protection-catcher waiting at the bottom. “But…this means…we’re all…helpless…babies?” I said, entirely missing the warm and nurturing point about our mommy-state not locking us up in a safe place.

So. Yesterday was a disaster for the useless party, and a tremendous success for the evil party. Deep Red Kentucky reelected a Democratic governor who was a mommy at the bottom of the slide; Virginia, one of the great national battlegrounds regarding parental involvement in schools and the warm nurturing of transgender children by their real mommy, government, gave the Democrats control of both houses of the legislature. The people have spoken, and holy shit.

The election I take as a national metaphor happened in San Diego County, a natural beachfront paradise that was quite reliably red in recent memory. In District 4, the supervisorial candidates were Amy Reichert, a vicious Republican monster who criticized lockdowns, and the wonderfully caring Monica Montgomery Steppe, whose kind and warm campaign promises precisely echoed the assurance that Santa Claus will give you everything your heart desires. In a debate, and in campaign mailers, the caring candidate went hard on the theme that the evil Reichert doesn’t believe in science.

Here, in two short paragraphs from the story linked above, is the quality of the policy debate in this campaign:

Montgomery Steppe continued, claiming Reichert had been seen with conservative figures like Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.  

“There might be people … in the room that totally and completely agree with those folks … and that is totally fine, but in my opinion, that is right wing extremism,” Montgomery Steppe said. 

Reichert had been seen with Tucker Carlson! That’s being extremist!

Here’s the result of this dismal adult-toddler gibbering:

It’s very important that San Diego County not be burdened by contact with people who’ve met Tucker Carlson, the most important crisis facing the region.

There’s a great deal of discussion, today, about the future of abortion politics, the dismal state of the RNC, poor messaging, bad funding, vote-switching ballot software, and so on. But the heart of the problem is that a large American population buys the mommy-state talk. Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman who occasionally says things that don’t make me physically ill, made these quite interesting claims this week:

I never paid for school, so I don’t have much student loan debt — but I spent a long time in grad school, borrowing to do research travel and to supplement a not-opulent TA salary and GI Bill payments, so I have some. The federal pause on student loan interest and payments made me pay my loans much more aggressively, because every penny went to principal. When I saw headlines about court challenges and policy changes, I read the stories, because changes in student loan policies had to do with me. I paid attention, in some fairly basic ways. It was, how can I say this, not really hard to do.

The argument that “2/3rds of student loan borrowers say they didn’t know their payments were restarting” is an unexamined claim that adults with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt have no obligation to pay attention to a burden they’ve chosen to accept. Ro Khanna shows up for the game thinking the players on his team are adult children who have no ability to keep up with their own extremely obvious responsibilities; then he concludes, from that assumption, that the inability or unwillingness to manage an obligation means that you should be freed from it. By the same nurturing state that locks you up inside your house to keep you safe.

It does seem that a lot of voters are quite happy to accept the claim that they should be given things, a lot, and that they should have no responsibility for anything, but they especially shouldn’t have any responsibility at all for themselves. Our mommy the government is very popular. That’s where we are.