Results of the 3 November 2026 midterm elections bear much good news:
The
victories of Sherrod Brown in Ohio and James Talarico in Texas were heartening
confirmation of the good news that we were coming to expect. While less than a perfect person, Peltola in
victory should she outlast others in the ranked voting scheme would be a
welcome addition to the already burgeoning senatorial count. I am elated at the victory of Annie Andrews
in South Carolina and the apparent squeaker of a victory for Scott Colom over
the offensive Cindy Hyde-Smith should those post-marked mailed ballots go his
way and (along with a favorable Peltola outcome) bring the Senate total for
Democrats to 56. And, given that the
outcome seemed far from assured, I am very most moved by Gina Hinojosa’s win as
governor for Texas.
My most
grieving moments have been for the stalwart independent Dan Osborn, who seemed
the ideal, highly intelligent, blue-collar candidate to take Nebraska and early
in the evening seemed to be on a trek to victory.
Great
news, all of this but the latter, but I am no more optimistic now than I was
before the election.
And I do
not think that the United States electorate performed any noble action on
Tuesday.
Perpend >>>>>
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I'm an
optimistic guy (which surprises some people who witness my activist
stances and view me as an angry rabble-rouser [and to be sure, I thrill at
rousing the rabble on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and
elsewhere in the education establishment]). I am indeed, though,
optimistic by nature, my maternal grandmother's in-her-mold grandson. And
then activists tend heavily toward the optimistic:
Did
Martin Luther King or Gloria Steinem not think that they were going to induce
change?
I
maintain that this is the best time to be alive:
Despite
the lower middle class, alienated male reactionaries who have resented the
gains of nonwhite and female populations over these many decades, those gains
are a matter of fact and will not recede; and then we added
great advancement of LGBTQ citizens to the aspirations many of us had in
the sixties and early seventies. But the opposition of those
blue-collar male reactionaries, the demagogues who have duped them, and
the intellectual far right (Federalist Society; Heritage Foundation) is
formidable.
,
That
opposition is another reason for my optimism, and for saying that this is the
best time in United States history. With democracy under siege, we have
had a chance to defend our great institutions. So there went the
organizations Indivisible, Run for Something, and the stalwart American Civil
Liberties Union; and here came No Kings.
To those
who complain about government, my rejoinder abides >>>>>
"If
you don't like the government in a democratic society, then you do not like
yourself:
You are
the government."
As Tim
Snyder maintains so eloquently, citizens in a democratic society must be ever
vigilant: The threat is eternal, so the fight must ever abide.
The
nobility in our contemporary political history has lain with those who worked
for the political advancement of women, nonwhite populations, and people of
various sexual and gender identities;
and in the on-the-ground activities of those already acting and
continuing to act in the manner prescribed by Tim Snyder.
But the
United States electorate only tangentially if at all acted nobly on Tuesday.
People were
paying more than they wanted to pay at the gas pump and for all manner of goods
(beef, coffee, canned goods, produce, electronic goods, digital devices,
clothes, furniture, cars, paper goods) at Walmart and Cosco.
So in the
same way that that they had voted for Trump because they thought that he would
bring them lower prices, they voted him out because he hadn’t. Then some claimed that that they had had
come-to-Jesus moments in response to Trump’s treatment of women, immigrants,
nonwhite populations, the press, and anyone who oppose Donald J.; but these are what I call, “made-up reasons” >>>>> at best, ancillary sentiments,
rationalizations. The United States
electorate rejected Trump because voters lamented the price of goods and in
some cases were experiencing elevated financial pain.
When we
walk down any sidewalk, we are likely to pass people 40% of whom still voted
for authoritarianism on Tuesday; that
would be four out of every ten people we pass, almost as likely to pass them as
those who voted against authoritarianism, whatever their actual fiscal reasons.
Democracy
will prevail not because of what happened on Tuesday but because we had
brilliant framers who generated the most amazing governmental document ever
created in the United States Constitution.
Ironically, most of the very greatest proponents of liberty were slave
owners, many of whom knew that the source of their income was wrong and who
conceived a document that could and did eventually legislate their slave-owning
class out of existence.
And they
made a way for Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Kwame Toure, Robin Morgan,
and the stalwarts in those door-pounding, ground-trekking, political activists
who prove that in a democracy the people rule and government is never any enemy
unless we allow ourselves to be our own enemies.
My
optimism, then, lies in citizenship in a democracy.
I have
selected for the main target of my own activist energies the most important of
all our institutions for the production of citizens: the public schools. And when I go six feet under, I will know
that I have done all that I could do, with documents left behind to show others
the way.
