Embittered election postmortem (please let's just have this one thread to vent)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Mods: Like the title says, please let me/us just have this one thread to vent and make moan in. But feel free to move it if it would be better or less obtrusive someplace else.

Fellow Democrats/liberals/leftists: Let's try to keep the more extreme negativity confined to this thread and ones like it for now. We'll have plenty of time to complain all over US General once this pack of imbeciles takes office in January. And we should.

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A great cry and the making of great dole is heard across America tonight. It is heard because Herbivore America lies bleeding.

This is worse than expected, worse than imagined, worse even in many respects than 2010. A party whose platform and personalities are rankly and utterly morally indefensible even in the abstract has been rewarded for years of spitefulness and small cruelties with a Senate majority, increased House majority, and the triumphant reelections of some of the most odious governors in recent American history. The American equivalent of what Michael Frayn called “Carnivore Britain” has surged triumphantly to victory, and with it a sociocultural ideology that is an affront to man and socioeconomic ideology that is an affront to God.

In state after state soul-sickeningly immoral governance has been rewarded and more humane alternatives have been spurned. From Florida’s Orlokian felon Rick Scott to Maine’s vulgar thug Paul LePage, from Kansas’s slavering Savonarola fanatic Sam Brownback to Wisconsin’s insensate C.S. Lewis villain Scott Walker, Republican governors have made good. They carry with them the stench of hypocrisy, the stench of selfishness, the stench of man’s inhumanity to man. The only issues on which the ideology that their party represents could conceivably (conceivably! Certainly not with any degree of certitude) be argued to have theoretically good points—abortion and certain technical aspects of monetary policy—they carry to ridiculous extremes that end up reflecting through a perverse prism the inhumanity of the rest of their otherwise altogether almost objectively vile positions.

I have a genuinely difficult time understanding how this happened. Certain aspects of it I can comprehend. Mark Udall was stupid enough and Bruce Braley snobbish enough that they probably deserved to be defeated, and to paraphrase a profoundly stupid and snobbish man, they lost their elections to the opponents that they had, not the opponents that one might want or wish them to have had. Mary Landrieu’s political survival and Alison Lundergan Grimes’s political flourishing were stymied by aspects of the cultures of their states that, while depressing, were not surprising. Asa Hutchinson ran a flawless campaign, and Charlie Baker faced a spiritually anemic and widely disliked human being. But Bruce Rauner, Governor of Illinois? Thom Tillis, architect of the plunder of North Carolina, now Senator from that state? Ed Gillespie nearly making the Beltway’s seemingly insane prophecies about him reality, failing only by one of the night’s narrowest of margins? The only explanation is that my country has, for this election at least, taken on spiritual and cultural characteristics that I neither recognize nor like and worn them as closely and as disgustingly as Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.

I am serious about this. In an even somewhat functioning democracy, the results of an election are an expression of the values, interests, and priorities of the community, and the values, interests, and priorities of community after community across the United States as expressed in this election are morally alien to me and, in all honesty, ought to be to anybody of good taste and judgment, to anybody governed by sound reason and true religion. They are neither Christian nor charitable nor even humane. They are delusional, being founded upon falsifications. They are callous, being motivated by selfishness and by self-possession. They are cruel, being filled with joy in the suffering of those perceived as less deserving.

About these things such posters as HockeyDude, with whom I disagree on a whole host of issues, are entirely right, and I would like to reach out to them and to other like-minded forum leftists with this proposition:

Don’t care any more. At least, not in quite the same way.

Don’t try to advance our ideas, at this point. Maybe at some point in the future we’ll be able to. For now, let’s just be political hesychasts. Let’s just deny and attack what ought to be attacked and denied wherever we find it, and believe me, we will find ample opportunity over the next two or four or six or however many years some of these grotesques of homo politicus remain in positions of power.

I also agree with Harry that this election, like others in the past with ideologically similar outcomes, has some pretty horrendous things to say about the conceptual nature of American masculinity.

Whatever.

Junk election. Junk country. May God have mercy on us.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'll vent, but in a different manner than others are doing. Really I want to address posts like these:

It's really mystifying to me what the GOP stands for, or why the US electorate saw fit to send 245+ of them in the House.

I don't really understand these results and I can think of a lot of really angry snipes at the Republicans but before I feel comfortable doing that... I still fundamentally don't comprehend what policies, platform, or message they actually have and ran on so successfully.

I cannot comprehend why people would want to vote for such an evil to the roots party.

What a load of crap, to be quite honest. You don't think you understand why people vote this way? Go  listen to Republican voters and hear what they think. Maybe their reasons are facile, or they voted off of falsehood. But reasons are reasons, and we have a duty to reach out.

I can think of many reasons why someone would vote Republican this cycle:
-Given we want to cast a pox on all congresspeople anyway, we may as well vote the ones who are at least promising to shake up the system.
-Incidents from ebola to the secret service have shown how messed up the federal administration is, and we need to elect people to keep them in check.
-We still haven't recovered from the recession, and I like people who promise not to raise taxes.
-None of them seem divisive on social issues, and to hell with the law if they want to regulate our lives anyway. Their character matters most.
-Democrats are a bunch of elitists, litigious and uncaring, and they seem to take pride in it.
-Barack Obama does not represent our values.

And so forth. The Democrats can counter these points, but it takes time. What happened was that the hundreds of millions that could have been spent to counter these points were burnt on social issue zealotry, amassing a turnout that never did materialize. And why would they - after four years of gridlock and getting zero promised improvements, why would the Obama coalition reach out again?

Everyone plays identity politics. Don't hide in your Democrat bastions and pretend as if you can't understand identities outside of your own. Of course you do - take the time to learn it.

You can hide in your states, Democrat bastions, and insult the voters further. The presidency's on the line.

Well, of course I understand it on an intellectual level. But on an emotional level, not at all.

After a night's sleep, this is about where I am.

Anyway, I think this thread has served its purpose and run its course. Unless anybody has something really new and interesting that they're itching to say, I'm locking it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I also kind of feel like I overreacted in the first place.

I was really overstimulated and overwhelmed last night. I'm sorry, for the most part.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm not getting the Brownback/Savonarola comparison...?

He was a religious-fanatical Asshole Of History (tm) whose name alliterates with 'slavering'. That's about it. I certainly don't think it's one of the more inspired phrases in that post.

Also, you all are just silly. This election has nothing to do with some sort of pyscho cruel mindset among Americans or the "nature of American masculinity" whatever the Hell that means. The reason the GOP triumphed is extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo, which, correctly or incorrectly, is associated with Obama. Combine that with bad campaigning and midterm demographics and you get last night.

What's funny is that at the same time forum lefties are comparing American voters to neanderthals and bemoaning the idiocy of the electorate, they're also whining about how a majority of people actually do support their policies. Are you people proud of the fact that a nation of dumbs supports your policies?

On further reflection, the issue isn't so much the fact that the opposition to Obama won as the fact that the opposition to Obama has the policies and ethos that the Republican Party has. It's the political and cultural environment that produced this as our 'center-right' party in the first place.

It's really only some specific races that actually sickened me enough that I felt the need to make that post, namely the four reelections of incumbent Republican governors to which I referred, the North Carolina Senate race, and the undue closeness of the New Hampshire and Virginia Senate races. Everything else was understandable, albeit upsetting.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If there be a silver lining to this, its that there's a firm progressive majority on most political issues.

Even that's not much consolation if nothing can be done to translate that into policy.