On Friday, Samhain Eve, my dearest friend I’ve never met (never in person) challenged me to disabuse him of the notion that the good old US of A might have turned a political corner.
Challenge accepted. After all, what could the topic of my Samhain blog possibly be, if not the results of the election?
Last Tuesday night, Election Night, I was glued to the screen. My computer screen. Watching the son-of-my-heart stream Phantom Blade Zero on Twitch. What can I say? Watching election returns is not my idea of a pleasant evening.
Not that I missed anything. Bogetime (mah boi’s Twitch handle) repeatedly paused the game to share the election updates he was receiving on his phone. My daughter sent me several texts to keep me informed. And my husband kept popping into my office to relay a succession of happy results. I didn’t want for good news.
Correction. Great news.
Voter turnout for this election appears to be lower than turnout for the previous two midterms: 63% (a preliminary tally) as opposed to 69% in 2022 and 79% in 2018. It’s pure conjecture, but I imagine the drop is due to the MAGA base being too indoctrinated with anti-Dem propaganda to vote BLUE, but too disgusted with their own party to vote RED. The folks who did vote emphatically rejected the current administration and the cow-towing Republican “agenda”, rejected those who have been intentionally undermining our democracy, striving to establish a white nationalist government in its place, rewriting our history, robbing us of our rights, our protections, our healthcare, our livelihoods, our educations, and stealing from us to enrich themselves.
Thanks to Donnie & Company’s shameless corruption, blatant disregard for rule of law, and the economic hardships their tariffs and unjust war have levied on Americans across the board, last Tuesday, a majority of 12+ million voters gave Democrats control of both the House and the Senate. The new tally of Governors stands at 28 Democrats to 20 Republicans, with two races still too close to call. Americans are sending a Muslim and a gay man to the Senate for the very first time. California will finally have a Latino in the Governor’s mansion (yay, Xavier, I’ve been rooting for you!). And the first Native American woman, Black woman, and Latina woman have been elected Governors of New Mexico, Georgia, and Texas, respectively.
Speaking of Texas, the Lone Star State not only picked a Democratic Latina for Governor; it will be sending a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1988 and has turned every statewide office BLUE.
The maps have changed. It’s a glorious sight to behold. Check out the AP’s graphics HERE.
But wait! Am I throwing in the towel on the Turn-the-Corner challenge? Has my inner Cassandra been silenced? Can it be these brilliant election results merit no pessimistic rebuttal?
Oh, bless your hearts.
True enough, a beautiful Blue Wave has carried us into the New Year. A Blue Tsunami, if you will. I am genuinely thrilled, truly delighted, and deeply relieved.
But consider. Anything but an irrefutable vote of no confidence, a stunning rebuke, a rout, an overwhelming result would have triggered an immediate authoritarian-playbook response from the Donnie Demento camp. Ballots would have been seized and discounted. Every non-MAGA victory would have been declared null and void. MAGA-aligned losers would have declined to cede. The co-opted propaganda machines and social media platforms would have spewed lies, sowing doubt and confusion in voters’ hearts and minds and fueling the delusional, generational hatreds that brought us to this crisis in the first place.
A Blue Tsunami was the bar we had to clear. And though we cleared it, we are not in the clear.
On Tuesday, our lame-duck Prez was flummoxed. On Friday, Samhain Eve, he rallied, threw Susie Wiles out of a job, and appointed Stephen Miller his new White House Chief-of-Staff. Miller. The architect of the DJT administrations’ most egregious policies. The rabid white nationalist who believes in the “great replacement theory” (POC immigrants are destroying “Western culture”). The bigot who came up with the Muslim Ban. The xenophobe who gave us immigration quotas and ICE enforcement sweeps. The “brains” behind the family separation policy. THAT guy.
Point is, ol’ DJT is not going quiet into that good-night. He’s doubling down.
The sanctity of the election results is far from a done deal. Our Real-Estate Developer-in-Chief has been sowing seeds of electoral doubt and confusion the entire time he’s been in office. He has preemptively filed suits to contest various election results, should his preferred candidate lose. He has systematically replaced career officials in agencies responsible for election security and oversight with his political allies, firing or transferring CISA specialists (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) and dismantling the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and corruption team. Long-time lawyers working for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (that protects voting rights) have been replaced with “conservative” (MAGA) lawyers, some of whom were involved in challenging the 2020 election.
Then there’s his attempts to directly interfere with elections by executive power; issuing orders that change the way elections are managed on the ground. Stuff like ballot seizures (the FBI raid in Fulton County, GA last January, for example), imposing new voter registration requirements, gaining more direct control over voting equipment guidelines. In the lead-up to 3 November, he said outright that changing some election rules would “guarantee” the midterms for Republicans. Restricting mail-in voting, stricter voter ID laws, and gerrymandering, were at top of his list. And, lest we forget, he created the “Government Transparency Task Force” to prove the government was “weaponized” and existing election systems were compromised. A narcissist who’s been screaming about rigged elections for a decade … does anyone think he’s going to graciously concede this one?
Two years ago, the commonly accepted civil (Gregorian) calendar train (aka Election Night USA) and the astronomical (observation-based) solar-seasonal calendar train (aka Samhain Eve) collided. In that fatal intersection, Cassandras like me saw the end of the world as we’d known it.
We weren’t wrong.
The first half of Donnie Demento’s second term in office has been a speedy plummet into a grand-scale dystopian nightmare. Internationally, America has betrayed her closest allies. Domestically, our freely-elected scum of the earth Prez, his handlers, and his enablers have so successfully shaken or destroyed the foundations of our government, the United States is no longer judged to be a full, liberal democracy.
This year, Samhain Eve and Election Night maintained a respectable distance. In the run-up to the midterms and Summer’s End, the polls looked good. Hopes ran high as desperate MAGA and MAGA-adjacent candidates hit appallingly low levels of prevarication while spouting crass rhetoric and slinging mud bigly, slinging incredible mud, slinging it farther than it’s ever been slung before – nobody has ever seen such terrific mudslinging. Everybody was begging, “Please, sir, sling some more!”
But I digress.
For me, turning a corner means heading off in a different direction. I hope we have done. But all I can say for now and for certain is that we have applied some brakes.
To make the turn, we – as a nation – must acknowledge that during the Trump Era, millions of Americans relished the opportunity to vent their frustrations and anger on minority scapegoats, flaunt their racism, bring their homophobia out of the closet, hate on women, and storm the Capitol. We must recognize that the institutions, policies, and laws that used to hold us together as a democracy have been, in large part, eroded or eradicated. We must remember that safeguards have been dismantled, and the Orange-y-Tan on the gilded toilet has a veto. We must assume that those we repudiated at the ballot box will not honor our votes or swear-in our chosen representatives, and that the results of this election will be denied by those currently in power.
We must be prepared to stand firm against the greed and vice of the current administration and Congress if the will of the people is to prevail.
That said, the Wheel of the Year has already made the turn. We’ve got momentum on our side.
“Every morning we are born again; what we do today is what matters most.”
– Gautama Buddha
Happy Winter! Happy Summer to my Down-Under friends! And may all the blessings of the season be yours.
