The 2021 Election Post Mortem. The Mortem and Self Interest Addition.

Okay, I wasn't going to comment on the 2021 off year election, but the combined impact of pundit bloviating and mutual left wing crying and gnashing of tofu encrusted teeth has caused me to reverse course on this.

Whitaker Chambers, 1948.

First, something to consider.

Virginia,in it's off year election, has only once elected a person from the same party as the sitting President.  So the results of its election are probably completely meaningless.  Why Virginians think that the interest of their state automatically lie with whomever is not in the Oval Office is an open question, but they probably do.

Or at least those who show up do, which is important to consider.

For some incredably odd reason, people tend to get really mad at the sitting President really quickly.  There's no real way that most Presidents can make any real difference in things in less than at least three years, but the public seems to think that if they haven't made the world perfect in about six months, they're a failure.  That explains part of the typical mid term election shift, and it probably applies to early off year elections as well.

And in an off year election, moreover, only the really motivated show up.  It's been noted that Republicans in general tend to show up, while Democrats do not unless they're in passionate love with a candidate.

Things like that, I'd note, are a consideration in things like bond issues.  Some strategists put bond issues in off year elections thinking that the motivated will show up and nobody else. Trouble is, the most motivated are those who vote "no", which is why that's not a good strategy.  When the general public shows up at a general election, those things tend to pass.

Anyhow, if we're really going to try to put some meaning into the Virginia election, and we probably ought not to, that's about it.  If we go a tad further, and we ought not to, it might be that the GOP candidate pretty much tried to run without anyone mentioning Trump.

There may be a real lesson in that.  

If we go a tad further than that, and some Democratic punditry certainly is, a potential lesson of the 2021 midterms in general is that the American public didn't suddenly take down their Reagan posters from the secret recesses of their homes and put up AoC posters.  People turn out to be middle of the road conservatives, just as they have been since, well, 1492, at least on a lot of things.

None of which has kept liberals from screaming out into the street decrying the benighted public as ignorant dolts who should never be allowed to vote.  

And this is no surprise. The left doesn't really like democracy very much.

The wailing is particularly noticable in regard to the supposed case of "white women", who we recently read were abandoning the GOP in droves and supporting the Democrats, which made the same Democrats at the time chortle.  Now that it turns out that "white women" are voting more conservatively, like white men. . . and like Hispanic men and women. . .and also like black men and women in some places, which means in the view of progressives they're ignorant fools who need to be sent to the Gulag.  The general trend isn't mentioned, however, just the "white women" part of it right now.  Similar stories on "white men" must have run their course.  And progressives engage in the preverbial whistling past the grave yard when the growing conservatism of Hispanics and some African American demographis are mentioned.

Part of this is based on a left wing view of what's in people's "best interest".  And in the view of liberals, allowing abortion on demand is pretty much in women's best interest.  Witness the following:

57% of white women in Virginia voted for a Republican *the day after* Republicans spent an entire day in court trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, and *actual professionals* in charge of Democratic messaging are going to blame it on Beloved.

And consider the following: 

Nobody votes against their best interests like white women.

This latter one caused some wag to amusingly note: 

Why is the left calling them, "white women"? I thought they called them "white birthing persons who chest feed"?

While that last item was in jest, there's actually more than a little truth to it.   Part of the reason that "white women", Hispanic women and black women, among others, are voting more conservatively is that they are women and want that recognized.  Progressives have entered an era in which biology doesn't exist.  It actually does, and people don't like pretending otherwise.

Much of the liberal angst here, of course, is about abortion.  Abortion is about killing a fetus so that it's not born.  There's no two ways about it, and anyone honest with themselves and with reality has to admit it. Basically, we're more comfortable with killing people we don't see, and as we haven't seen the baby yet, we're okay with that to a surprising extent.  It's the same reason we're okay with drone strikes in remote regions of the globe.  We don't see the people we're offing, even though they're just as dead as if we went out and hit them in the head with an axe.

Of course, killing people is generally an uncomfortable topic for most people, so we camouflage it, and in the case of abortion the left likes to call it "reproductive rights" now days.  That's just goofy.  It's actually "anti reproductive rights" if we are going to use the word "reproductive", which at least is some progress in acknowledging reality.  It's almost a societal admission that abortion in the United States is mostly about birth control, rather than rape or incest.  Of note in the area of progress also, recently pro abortion advocates have been encouraging women to speak about their own abortions, which at least is honest, and in doing so they're drawing the inevitable "I just didn't want to have a baby" admissions.  Having a baby is serious to be sure, but that admission is referring is pretty much the same as simply admitting that when a person presents you with a serious life difficulty, you ought to be allowed to off them, or should be able to at least if they're helpless.  And again, the speakers haven't tended to be "I was attacked" so much as women in their 20s admitting that sex causes people, and they didn't want to be burdened with a person, so they killed it.  It was convenient.

Not that society at large doesn't engage in this.  The "no abortions except. . . " line of logic, which is very common, feeds into this as well.  If a person is a person since conception, and science at this point says it is, a person is still a person no matter how horrific the circumstances of their conception may be.

Of course all of this is rarely in mind, which is why the recent debate style changes in the pro abortion camp have made some in that camp nervous.  People grew pretty acclimated to a combined clinical speech pattern in which the humanity of a fetus was never addressed as well as the talking point that all those getting an abortion are 13 year old incest victims.  Turns out this isn't true and a surprising number of women who receive an abortion really knew what they were doing.  That debate is more honest, but it may backfire as well.

Indeed, it might already be backfiring.

Anyhow, "white women", like perhaps most women everywhere, might simply feel that that's just too much.  I.e, they might not be buying into the liberal logic that a fetus isn't a person, or is't a person we need to pay attention to, or put another way, they may have the view that science and politics aren't frozen in the year 1973.  That doesn't mean that they're voting against their own interest.  They're voting for it. If they feel that their interest is preserving life, and women have always held that more closely than men, they're voting for their interests.

And it's a big assumption that this is a "white women" think, as this post from a black woman noted:

Lol Democrats are blaming white women for Glenn Youngkin's victory. These people are insane. Your guy lost. Get over it

Well exactly.

Most voters aren't single issue voters anyhow, and there's no real reason to believe that somehow white women, if they'd been aware of this, which is assuming that they would not have been, would have voted for the Democrat.  It just doesn't seem to be the case.  I.e., the liberal logic that its de facto in women's best interest to allow for wide-ranging abortions is an assumption without support. Why would that be in their best interests?  The answer would have to be that they might get pregnant, and if that occurred they'd need to have an abortion.  They may have instead included that if they get pregnant they'll choose life over death.

It's also assuming a lot to assume they were not aware of their self-interest.  Indeed, the single biggest problem in American politics today might be people over identifying with their self-interest.  People do, in fact, vote against their long term best interest, but typically in doing so they vote for their short term self-interest.  I.e, "I make money doing 'X', therefore the 'X' industry is good for business/the economy/the nation/the environment/ etc., and (believe it or not) somehow authorized by God".  You see this all the time.

On the topic of abortion, proponents who are voting on best interest or self interests are usually voting for hypothetical short term self-interest, which isn't at all the same as long term best interests.  So here, when "white women", or brown women, or black women, vote against abortion, they're actually weighing personal belief and long term societal best interests.  

When liberals, however, decry this as not voting in "best interests", what they really mean is not voting to ratify the liberal, or progressive, ideal, which pretty much regards children, and even people, in a theoretical rather than real way.  Indeed, it appears the overwhelming majority of Americans are not now, and never have been, for the liberal ideal.  Abortion was very much part of that.

Back in the 60s and 70s liberals promulgated a world view based on what they thought an ideal world looked like, and the feminism of the period was very much part of it.  Feminist of the period imagined that men lived in an industrial workplace paradise and that if only women could break into it, their lives would be as prefect as men's were.  In that world that they imagined gender practically didn't exist, except in terms of having sex.  

Sex by feminist of the period had oddly enough adopted the same view of sex that Hugh Hefner had adopted earlier, with slight variations in the view.  Hefner had advanced the idea that women, all of whom had big boobs in his world, were available for sex on demand and they were all sterile.  Feminists weren't as fascinated by huge mammaries, but they glommed onto the concept of sex as existing for nothing other than entertainment.  Unlike Hefner's sterile chesty dimwits, however, they took it a step further and assumed that sex doomed women to second class citizenship as they knew it could cause children.  Pharmaceuticals and abortion, however, took care of that.

This mattered to them as they tended to have a sort of quasi Marxist view of sex.  There's been a lot of ink spilled on "critical race theory" recently, but it might be better to spill it on Marxism in the bedroom.  Marx was an enemy of marriage and normal child rearing and early Communists really picked that up.  Up until the the October Revolution Communists were aggressive in separating sex from reproduction and had a view of it nearly identical to 1970s feminists, something that's rarely noted.  When they came into power they interesting pretty quickly became prudes, but even well into the 20s and 30s there were communists outside the USSR, including women, who were aggressively anti marrage and aggressively libertines in this area.  Whitaker Chambers, who was a bisexual until his rejection of Communism, goes into this a little bit in Witness, noting that the decision of he and his wife to have children was contrary to the American Communist world view at the time which universally favored abortion.

Feminist regarded children as the enemy  and took the view that sex couldn't result in children, however, as women always got stuck raising them, which kept women from financial independence and workplace fulfillment, which is where all fulfillment was.  Separate sex from marriage and children from sex was all part of the goal, and then women could join men in the boardroom in marital-less, equality, everybody could make loads of cash, and full equality of every type would bloom forth.

Pharmaceutical sterilization and abortion would help to achieve that, they reasoned.

Problem was, it was all based on a big lie.

And that lie was that men lived in paradise. They didn't.  They never had, but they particularly hadn't after industrialization.

We've dealt with that elsewhere, but what was forgotten is that industrialization took men out of their homes and away from their families to serve industry basically by economic force.  Marx was full of bs about "wage slave" but failed to realize that the economy he was advocating for the "worker" was even more in the nature of bondage.  People, as COVID 19 has shown, just don't naturally decide to spend most of tehir days in cublcles way from their family and kin.  They don't.  Indeed, as feminist knew, but failed to appreciate, men seperated for hours every day from their spouse begin, in some instances, to replicate that relationship with available women at work, with predictable disasterous consequences.  Feminists saw this as a male power play, which in some ways it actually was.

We've dealt with that elsewhere, but what was forgotten is that industrialization took men out of their homes and away from their families to serve industry basically by economic force.  Marx was full of BS about "wage slave" but failed to realize that the economy he was advocating for the "worker" was even more in the nature of bondage.  People, as COVID 19 has shown, just don't naturally decide to spend most of their days in cubicles way from their family and kin.  They don't.  Indeed, as feminist knew, but failed to appreciate, men separated for hours every day from their spouses begin, in some instances, to replicate that relationship with available women at work, with predictable disastrous consequences.  Feminists saw this as a male power play, which in some ways it actually was.  Prior to the 80s some of it was absolute hypocrisy and power in action, no doubt.  But some of it was biology combined with our fallen natures as well.

The fact, however, that such dalliances occurred says something about the overall satisfaction people have with their work.  At least in part people who are married aren't going to spend time chasing skirts if their work brings fulfillment.  And they aren't going to turn to other vices either.  Indeed, people somehow managed to not really note what average work actually was like for men.  Sure, they worked 8 to 5, as a rule, for their families, but the "work place camaraderie" was more likely built in a bar after work than at work itself.  People's work bonds, if they had any, tended to be outside of work, not in it.

The big reveal from the big feminist success of the 1970s and 80s was to expose "work fulfillment" as a lie to a lot of women. A lot of men already knew it was a lie. The lie is still being told, and its part of the pablum of professional schools and organizations.  Lots of pros, from attorneys to accountants, to business workers, to physicians, etc., are fed lines that happiness lives in work in and of itself  If they fail to achieve it, it's due to some problem, probably in them.  Only recently have some of the professions started to look at the profession itself, and wonder if it's them.

The famous quote is that you can't fool all of the people all the time, and that certainly applies to things that are deeply ingrained in nature.  Whereas Cosmopolitan may have imagined a world in which every woman in the office was a libertine who was on her away to a super happy desk job career it turned out that most women, and men, continue to see the world pretty much the way they always have, so regular life including children and marriage kept happening.  What did change, however, was the workplace, which now had not only been opened up to women, but which had now evolved to where their availability was now expected and mandatory.  This has made the lives of some women all the rougher, which takes us back to the liberal impulse.  If women won't abort their children, well then society must find a way to coax women away from children back to the workplace, and universal child care would be that.  With that, women will be allowed back in the workplace soon after giving birth, which is to say that they'll have no excuse not to be there and therefore will have to be.  Nobody of the Bernie Sanders ilk is going to say that, as they aren't thinking of it that way, but that's the reality of it.  Universal child care is a child care subsidy for industry so that the female part of the work force has no good reason not to be back at work.  This too represents "their best interests".

Finally, there's the gross overuse of everything being race related.  This really came out in a NPR Politics episode when Nena Totenburg had a melt down when a lifelong Democrat in Virginia expressed his discontent with the Democrats making everything about race.  Totenburg was practically spewing her coffee through the Iphone to maintain that only the Republicans do this.

Now, in the Virginia race there were no doubt differences in how various demographics voted. But note that the GOP nearly won in New Jersey as well, and not for the first time. And while hardly anyone seems to have noticed it, in spite of everything, the Republican Party's popularity has been going up with some black voters and generally with Hispanic voters.

Totenburg had a fit over the interviewed Democrat noting that the Democrats routinely reduce things to race at the present time, and not only do that, but that they basically demonize "white voters".  A person can question how to even really define "white" voter as that's merely the sort of color of a person's skin and not everyone agrees who is "white".  "White" doesn't really mean anything in and of itself, and the ability to define "white' is increasingly problematic.  Lebanese Americans have long been regarded as white, for example, so why wouldn't recent immigrants from Syria? They're the same ethnicity, separated by their religions.

Some Hispanics consider themselves white and lots of "white" American consider Hispanics without accents to be white.  Like Italians of earlier generations, at some point they'll all be considered "white" and that some point is probably very soon.  As the predictions of the decline of "whites as a majority" is based in large part on the increase in the Hispanic demographic, such predictions are actually completely meaningless.  And they should be, if we're speaking of general European culture, as Hispanics are just as much the heirs of general European culture as people of English ancestry.

Which in reality means that when the press and Democrats speak of a person being "white", what they really mean is what used to be called a WASP, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  And when progressive WASPs decry the election in Virginia, that's what they mean.  It's an internecine spat between the nation's oldest European demographic, paler members of other demographics need not apply.

This spat has been going on forever.  It's always been the case that urban WASP elites have looked down on rural WASP groups. Entire regions look down on others, but even WASP in the cities look down on their cousins in the sticks, and have for about 200 years.

Now some of this does have a real racial and racist expression.  The Southern hinterlands have never been friendly towards African Americans and following the election of Barack Obama old hatreds came back out.  And not just out there, but amazingly out everywhere. Trump made them worse as he fanned those flames for nearly inexplicable reasons.  Praising any group in which the Confederate battle flag shows up is sending some sort of racist message and at a bare minimum people ought to know that.

Nonetheless, the GOP increase in some African American demographics and some Hispanic demographics continued anyway.  A conservatism based on traditional values and traditionalism also existed which isn't really "white" and which isn't racist.  Indeed, church going African Americans and church going white Southerners are at least partially motivated by the same values.  Hispanic culture, as we've noted here before, is actually deeply conservative and much of the liberal social agenda is an anathema to it.

It's those values that that progressives keep slamming, and people voting to preserve them doesn't mean they are voting against their self interests. The Democratic dissing of these values has made them fully fair game for Republicans, the much more conservative party anyway, and that is why conservatives of all stripes and ethnicities have leaned into the GOP.  People who hold traditional views on marriage, sex and even simply biology feel they are being assaulted by a Democratic Party which holds all of those things in absolute contempt.  That doesn't make those voters racist and when they vote Republican, they are voting in their own self-interest.

This doesn't mean that there aren't really dark elements in the GOP. There are.  Genuine racists and bigots of all sorts have crept into it since the 1980s, and this increased during the Obama Administration and Trump took advantage of this.  This has tainted the populist movement no end and the Democrats have made hay with it.  But at this point, they've overplayed their hands.  It's one thing to call people flying the Confederate battle flag racists, as that's a racist symbol for which there is no excuse in 2021.  It's another to hurl the invective "white" at somebody as they feel marriage is only between a couple of the opposite gender or because modern American televised culture reflects a moral sewer.  If you keep doing that, eventually Democrats who were in that party as they sought a socially active country will leave, seeing that their moral values are not wanted, or even under assault.

And that may be one of the lessons of the 2021 election.

It's also dangerous, we'll note, to reduce a person's ethnicity or color to a joke.  Racists did this for decades with blacks and indeed American culture did.  But at some point within the last 20 or so years progressive WASPs started to do it as well and now it's extremely common. To call something "white" or somebody the "whitest" is not only inaccurate, but is meant as a type of racial slur.  If that's done long enough people get pissed off about it.

Indeed, one of the Twitter comments that I didn't post was by a very white woman with bright pink hair complaining about "white women". The irony of this is that this is about as upper class WASPish as a person can be.  When WASPs complaint about WASPs, they ought to look in the mirror.

As for the off year elections, most people might not be voting for Trump with their votes.  But rather, their votes may instead mean that they don't want their nation to be a large-scale soy vegan variant of downtown Amsterdam.

And people get tired of continually being told that their personal views are rubbish and they themselves aren't much better.  Whatever a person thinks of Trump, forty years of that from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party put him in the Oval Office and might again.  The GOP has to deal with that right now, but the Democrats might have to as well if their only response to losing is to have a bunch of white liberals complain that they lost due to white women.  

That's certainly not true.