The political season, a (one-sided) return to sanity, and the need for a landslide

By traditional assessment, in a US election year, early September is when the broad American public starts turning its attention to the choice looming in early November.  To those readers blessed to live in normal countries, where campaigning is limited by law to just three or four weeks before an election, a two-month political season probably seems absurdly long -- but I can assure you, the media and parties here have already been barraging us with election stuff for what feels like an eternity.  As far back as late May, we had already been so interminably inundated that 62% of Americans were feeling burned out on politics and sick of hearing about it.

Nevertheless, here we are.  Two more months of this to slog through, and then we can finally put it behind us.

One major political event has already happened -- the replacement of Biden by Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate.  Biden's next-term plans included higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, beginning to roll back some of the damage of decades of tax cuts for those ultra-wealthy which have turned this country into an oligarchy dominated by billionaire kleptocrats.  To prevent this, the oligarchs, using the mass media they (indirectly) own plus some Democratic politicians they have corrupted via campaign contributions, set out to hound Biden out of the race, seizing upon a sickly debate performance to smear him as cognitively impaired (which he isn't, though Trump is).  The media, at least, hoped for an exciting messy divisive fight over the nomination, but Democrats thwarted them by quickly rallying around Harris and staying unified.  The oligarchs are now pressing Harris to abandon Biden's plan to raise their taxes.  This may seem like just one issue among many, but it is not.  The oligarchs have already demonstrated their excessive power by forcing a sitting president to abandon his run for re-election.  If Harris bows down to them on the very issue which led them to bare their fangs, it will show that no American leader can stand against them, and that the parasite class now has unchallenged control over US tax policy.

We need to watch Harris carefully to see if she stands firm on this.  In the meantime, on another ongoing sickness of American democracy, things are looking hopeful -- at least on the Democratic side.

I've argued before (scroll down to "The country needs a landslide") that, yes, the country needs a landslide.  Whoever wins, the larger the margin of victory the better.  For years now, both parties have been in the grip of various lunatic-fringe ideas and outright reality-denial.  If one party suffers a massive, crushing defeat, there's hope that it will allow that party's moderates to gain the upper hand over the crazies and bring about a return to sanity, so that from then on we'll have at least one party we can vote for without feeling like we're unleashing a madhouse on ourselves.

On the Democratic side, however, there are already clear signs that the crazy stuff is in retreat, without needing a massive electoral loss as an incentive.  The first important example came in June, when the Biden administration renounced its support for the medical "transitioning" of minors.  Further positive signs came with the rejection by Democratic primary voters of two members of the Israel-bashing "Squad", Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush; voters nominated moderates instead.  There have been other, less-high-profile examples of Democrats choosing moderates over radicals, including here in Oregon.  No one talks much about "reparations" or "defund the police" any more.  One thing that did look really bad, right after Harris's ascension, was a flurry of online events segregated by race and sex ("white guys for Harris", etc) -- a lurch backward to the identity politics which even most Democrats now realize are toxic and un-American, evoking separate water fountains and people being allowed to sit only in their assigned part of the bus.  But these events haven't continued.  Even the activist types seem to have realized, on some level, how creepy they looked to mainstream voters.  Instead, Democrats left the identity politics to Trump, who has obliged with a barrage of cringey, ugly insults targeting Harris's race and self-definition.  It's he, not the Democrats, who owns the obsession with race that revolts normal people.

(And Trump has actually been the ultimate identity-politics candidate all along.  He initially succeeded by embodying the grievances and resentment of a particular demographic -- race-conscious and mostly highly-religious white Christians -- and so, even as president, he was never a real national leader, only a factional leader.)

So the Democrats are plainly taking first steps back toward the sane center, however far there remains to go.  What about the Republicans?  For one thing, as an exploration of the right-wing blogosphere will confirm, they have a lot more different kinds of crazy to deal with.  Vaccines are poison, global warming isn't real, the 2020 election was stolen, the Ukraine war is a money-laundering operation, the January 6 insurrection was just a peaceful protest (or a leftist false flag), Michelle Obama is actually a man, Dr Fauci helped create covid and is thus a mass murderer -- and those are just some of the commoner delusions (here are a few examples, but right-wing blogs are full of an endless morass of this stuff).  The common thread is that nothing is real.  To these people, everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag or fake news.  The problem is made even worse by the fact that the Republican party has degenerated into a Trump personality cult, so that whatever nonsense Trump happens to babble forth becomes sacred dogma which few Republicans dare question.

The only thing I could point to as a sign of Republican moderation is some of Trump's recent statements on abortion, that he does not support a federal ban and would not prohibit mail distribution of abortion pills.  However, this does not represent a change in the party itself (yes, the platform has been changed, but that too reflects Trump's will alone), and the backlash from the Christian Right has been so severe that Trump is already backing down.  Some other Republican politicians are trying to evade the topic, realizing it's a vote-loser.  But until they start actually repealing forced-birth laws in states where they hold power, we cannot trust them.  And if Trump becomes president again with Republican House and Senate majorities, and they pass a national abortion ban, it's inconceivable that he would veto it.

So for the Republicans, it remains true that only a landslide election defeat (or more likely several) will shock them back to sanity.  The truly deluded will still just dismiss such losses as more election-stealing, conspiracies, etc.  But the leaders will know what's really happening, and I've argued earlier that even many rank-and-file wingnuts who embrace conspiratardia actually know deep down that it's bullshit.  It will be a hard battle, but the party can probably marginalize its crazies eventually, if massive losses create a strong incentive.

As to that, I stand by what I said here, that the most likely scenario this November is a Democratic landslide.  The reasons I cited in that post are mostly unaffected by the change from Biden to Harris; if anything, the enthusiasm for Harris may help win some close House and Senate races.  But the bigger the win, the better.  It's for the Republicans' own good, and the country's.