Something Moved

Something moved in the midterm elections. Something important. Maybe something transcendent.

But in all the commentary so far, I don’t think anyone put a finger on precisely what it was.

Surely it had something to do with “identity” — that abused and overused word for the most superficial aspects of a person’s being.

More Black pols got elected than at any time since Reconstruction. A Black man from Brooklyn will be the next House Majority Leader. Seven of the eight top statewide offices in Georgia will be held by Black women. Mississippi will have its first Black Senator since Reconstruction. And Georgia’s two senators will be a Jew and a Black Reverend. The South, we can hope, will never rise again, at least not with racism, sexism and white supremacy as guiding principles.

But “strange” things happened that involved a lot more than “race” and gender. We’ll have Hispanic governors of California and Texas, and a Native American governor in New Mexico. We’ll have them nearly two centuries after our ancestors stole California and Texas from Mexico with a combination of massive non-Mexican and non-Native immigration and the force of arms.

As a famous folk song suggests, Texans still celebrate the Alamo. There, a small band of famed US frontiersmen all died in a futile (but posthumously successful) attempt to keep Texas from being ruled by brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people. Now both California and Texas will be governed by American descendants of those same folk.

The once-industrial state of Michigan will have our nation’s first-ever practicing Muslim as a senator, Abdul El-Sayed.

The most important thing about El-Sayed is not his faith, to which he rarely refers except to repel religious prejudice. It’s the fact that he’s a medical doctor who went into public health, and then into politics, because our mostly private medical system makes a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath. He changed his career after seeing a Black woman, whom his hospital had refused to sequester to “dry her out” from drugs, passed out, alone and forlorn, on the seats of a subway.

El-Sayed’s keen mind warned him that a “health”-care system based on profit and extreme capitalism can never do its job. So he set out to fix it. And to fix it he has to change our system. Otherwise, public-spirited medicine will continue to die, just as have so many not-for-profit, rural Catholic hospitals after being bought up by “private equity,” stripped of assets, and left to waste away.

Maybe that explains why, when our next Congress convenes, it will have at least 21 M.D.s in it. Are so many doctors going into politics, just like El-Sayed, because they recognize how broken our “health-care” system is? As careful analysis reveals, there is no such thing as a “market” in health care. You don’t “bargain” over what you need to escape excruciating pain or death.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good and marvelous thing that “race,” gender, religion and ancestral national origin are fading into the background. It’s good that most voters are — apparently for the first time ever — looking beyond “identity” to see who a candidate really is and what he/she/they really stand for.

This change has been a loooooong time coming. Our Civil War — the deadliest (for us) in our history — should have forced it. But it didn’t. A racist fifth columnist named Andrew Johnson stopped it cold, after he escaped removal after impeachment by a single vote in our Senate. (In that respect the slave-owners who had designed our Constitution planned well. All it would have taken to remove Johnson in any decent parliamentary democracy would have been a simple majority “no confidence” vote in parliament. For us it would have taken, and still takes, a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Does anyone really think our Founders made it so tough for any reason other than preserving slavery?)

The careful planning of the slavers among our Founders has borne bitter fruit. The voting rights of Black people have had to wait yet another century until the peculiar combination of MLK’s awesome intellect and political genius joined the political skill of LBJ (who had so many other pols’ “peckers in mah pocket”) to provide equal voting rights by legislation. When those voting rights met yet another putsch by the current retrogrades on our Supreme Court, a critical mass of voters apparently said “enough!”

All this, or course, is remarkable and inspiring. But I still don’t think it captures the essence of what happened in the midterms.

What specific motivation led a critical mass of voters at last to see common sense? Was it empathy with the many underdogs, coming to the fore at last? If so, why did it take so long?

No, the sad facts of our species are that fear and hate are stronger than love. If they weren’t, our ancestors wouldn’t have jumped away from the saber-tooth tiger and lived long enough to reproduce. We wouldn’t be here.

So what fear and hate caused the Blue Wave? The answer, I think, is simple. A critical mass of voters began to fear and hate their own current government and the selfish, lawless, lying, hateful, and careless men (nearly all men!) who have led it. The results of this abysmal leadership were obvious: a failing economy, unaffordable food, clothing and housing, inaccessible health care, close-knit neighborhoods being destroyed by masked ICE agents with automatic weapons, and even unplanned deficiencies in our Patriot-Missile defenses due to yet another “optional,” poorly planned and apparently endless foreign war. All these things made voters fear that the “American Dream” was fading away for them and their progeny. And rightly so.

I’m not a cynical person. I recognize the talent, intellect and inspirational messages that so many of our current Democratic pols display every day. My heart rises to praise them.

But my intellect tells me it was not those things that turned the tide. It was a last-minute realization, on the part of a critical mass of voters, that life in this nation — especially for people who work for others to make a living — is slipping into the abyss, and that the people who claim to be in charge are responsible.

Instead of “saving” us from what they urge us to fear and hate, our “leaders” are, when not glorifying themselves and demonizing their scapegoats, robbing this country blind. In the process they are neglecting virtually all big risks that face us, especially the loss of an on-shore base for manufacturing anything but ultra-processed foods and AI chips and the species-wide threat of planetary heating. Another few years of their intelligence-free, self-focused “leadership” would convert our once greatest nation on Earth into a reasonable simulacrum of a banana republic.

So “what moved” in the Blue Wave, as beautiful as it may be, is NOT the apparent explosion of acceptance of minority leaders. It’s not the sudden re-emergence of a party (the Dems) who previously had blown every chance by focusing on tiny minorities such as trans people (however deserving of equal rights). It’s the simple fact that the fear mongers have themselves become objects of fear, quite properly, because they have: (1) enriched and aggrandized themselves; (2) oversold hate and fear with lies and little or no cause; and (3) grossly neglected the nation and the people’s business in the process.

Accordingly, the best — and perhaps the only — way for the Dems to entrench their gains from the Blue Wave is to focus on those things in reverse order and to refrain religiously from indulging in (1) and (2) themselves.

As for DEI, it was a well-intentioned but failed enterprise. It sprang from the erroneous notion that equality can be taught and prejudice untaught in a classroom. Perhaps the notion of implicit bias can be taught; but that takes about a half-hour. The rest is best taught by having well-qualified supervisors and leaders of all “races,” colors, religions and ancestries and having to accept their leadership or find other employment. (That’s why Pete Hegseth — at most a Major! — replacing Black Four-Star General Lloyd J. Austin III as Secretary of Defense and then firing Black Four-Star General Charles Q. Brown Jr., as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was such an insult to simple competence, let alone any facade of equal treatment on merit.)

The Blue Wave’s “promotion” of so many diverse and well-qualified leaders should help advance the cause of equality dramatically, both by example and by personal acquaintance. Now the Dems’ Job One is making as dramatic and quick progress as possible in improving the quality of average workers’ lives and in reversing, in form and substance, our slide down the pathway to the most precipitous national decline since Nero, Caligula and Commodus ruled ancient Rome. If we want to cut that decline short, it’s got to be all substance, not form, from here on, with the biggest problems getting the most attention and strictly coming first. I would start with repealing the Trump tariffs, expanding subsidized health care and getting those four-stars back in charge of our military ASAP.