Let's Try the Other Foot

As I and many others hoped, the election in the US has represented a tide turning against Trump. Massively. The Democrats have won both houses of Congress and have done so winning seats that have been Republican for decades. Why did voters turn on Trump? It seems like a question with an absurdly obvious answer but Trump was always an on-the-nose sleazebag, which is what made his victories so maddeningly inexplicable to so many. The conservative site The Free Press offers this insight: "He also lost his common touch. On Saturday evening, he was at his resort in Mar-a-Lago at a lavish jungle-themed Halloween party where guests were served caviar and Alaskan king crab. Before that, Trump rambled on about the posterior of GOP Senate nominee Jon Husted at a rally in Ohio. " Oh, yeah, because he was always such a model of austerity and discretion before.

So what was it really? The grotesque cruelties of ICE? The Epstein files? I don't think it was the Iran war. Americans may be upset by gas prices but left and right have bandied Iran as a villain back and forth often enough that I don't think it could be used as solid leverage by either side for a political play. I think it was primarily the Epstein files. That's the one thing left and right definitely agree on. The base, I mean, not the Republican politicians forced to do rhetorical contortions to pretend the files don't implicate Trump on every conceivable metric, technical, legal spiritual, colloquial, and comedic. And not even that many Republican politicians were doing that.

Left and right in the US can agree now that transgressive sexuality is a bad look, and unfortunately that too often goes for legal, consensual transgressive sexuality, too. I think I underestimated how much of the sexual freedom of the late '90s and '00s had to do with liberals being contrary in respect to Clinton's impeachment. For a long time, the motto was that sex, even adultery, was not something you could use to judge a politician. Now we're far enough from Clinton's presidency the left feels comfortable disposing of that mission.

Now the question is, will the dissatisfaction with the invariable tone-deafness of Washington in an ever worsening economic crisis lead voters to blame the Democratic congress and vote Republican the next presidential election? Or will there be cost of living riots, like the ones in France and Germany, in America too? How long can we keep going like this?