The election

I suppose I need to say something about this.  The two major disasters yesterday were expected, even inevitable, but that doesn't make the disappointment any less.

Mamdani, who has emerged as something of a messiah figure (if one may use such a term) for left-wing anti-Semitism in the US, was elected mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country.  Before the events of two years ago, I would have confidently said that this simply could not happen.  But as Judenhass in various forms has become more pervasive, open, and normalized on both the right and the left, the Overton window has shifted, frighteningly so.  On the right, at least there are influential voices willing to condemn anti-Semitism and fight those who legitimize it, most recently over Tucker Carlson giving a sympathetic platform to Nick Fuentes (more here).  On the left, neither the leadership nor the activist blogosphere will condemn or even acknowledge what is happening.

So a man who (as I've shown with several links in the last few link round-ups) refuses to condemn jihadist slogans calling for the mass killing of Jews, accuses Israel of "genocide" over its almost inhumanly restrained response to the October 7 horror, has threatened to arrest Netanyahu if he ever comes to New York, and is now threatening to defund the New York campus of Israel's Technion university -- is being accepted and discussed as if he were simply a normal politician.  We are still a long way from Germany of 1933, but this is definitely one more step along the road in that direction.

Nearly half of New Yorkers believe Mamdani will turn the city into a cesspit of rising crime and bigotry and economic stagnation.  If the opposition had not been divided between two candidates (crummy ones at that), perhaps he could have been stopped.  But what's done is done and we are stuck with it.

Equally disastrous, the political parties' unified war against democracy won a major victory in California with the passage of Proposition 50, which will allow the legislature to rig the state's Congressional districts to ensure the best possible outcome for the ruling party regardless of how the voters vote -- exactly as Republicans have done (without even a referendum) in Texas.  Some people worry that Trump might cancel elections in the future (which he can't -- elections are run by the states, not by the federal government), but this plague of gerrymandering is achieving the same de facto result by making elections meaningless, as far as the House of Representatives is concerned.  The two parties are collaborating to reduce the country to a patchwork of fiefdoms in which almost every seat is a safe seat for the dominant party in the state, and the election outcome is dictated in advance regardless of what we the voters want.

Yes, I am very well aware of all the arguments in favor of this that are circulating on the activist fringe.  I've had plenty of opportunity to read them over the last few weeks.  The best that can be said of them is that they're pathetically naïve.  I'll refrain from saying what I really think of them, to avoid burning any last remaining bridges and possibly getting this blog shut down.

I don't think I've ever failed to vote in a single election in the 47 years since I was old enough to vote, and I have always taken the view that people who don't bother to vote have no business complaining if they don't like the outcome.  But for the first time, it seems futile.  With both parties openly and explicitly attacking democracy and conspiring to make our votes meaningless, what is there to vote for?

Yes, there were also some other state and local races elsewhere in the country, and Democrats won most of them, which I suppose is a good thing.  But in the face of the disasters in New York and California, that hardly feels relevant.

Meanwhile, the stupid dick-measuring contest in Congress over the shutdown is still dragging on.  Everyone in power or in the activist fringes cares only about whether their side wins.  Not about all the millions of ordinary people being forced into increasingly desperate straits because of the shutdown.

I know that American democracy has faced much worse threats and more damaging situations in the past, but this is the worst it has been in my lifetime.  I feel physically nauseated.

[Note:  Any comments along the lines of "Yes, Trump can cancel the elections" will just be deleted.  I'm not going to get threadjacked into debating the political equivalent of flat-Earthism.]