The Home Stretch

 Here we are again, approaching the next Most Important Election of our Lifetimes. Early voting has already begun in many places; I dropped off my ballot at a drop-box on Friday, so my deed is done. So it’s time to talk about this election in “now” time, rather than in some amorphous future.

What happens with this election is going to send the country careening in one direction or another. Or possibly several.

The Republicans aren’t even hiding their intentions anymore. They’re explicitly saying they want to enact a national abortion ban, overturn the right to same-sex marriage, further restrict contraception, and cut back on Social Security and Medicare.

All of those scare the piss out of me because there’s no reason to think they won’t try to do what they say they’re going to do. Many people thought Republicans would never really kill Roe v Wade, but here we are. They put the right religious nutjobs in place and they did what they intended to do all along. We should not have been surprised.

Granted, they’re not exactly running on all those points. You won’t see many commercials saying “Hey, I want to take your (or your parents’/grandparents’) social security check away, vote for me!” No, they’re busy trying to scare you about crime and inflation. Fear… it’s what works.

That their threats are hollow doesn’t matter. They know most people won’t learn that the highest crime states are the ones that went for TFG two years ago. And they know that inflation is a global phenomenon, with many countries worse off than we are, but they don’t care. Nor do they have any kind of plan to reduce inflation themselves. They just blame Biden and the Democrats.

The funny thing is that the new British Prime Minister just got yanked out of office when her tax cuts and supply-side economic plans torpedoed their economy, the same idea Republicans enact every chance they get.

I suppose they could always ask their wealthy business-owning donors to do them a favor and stop price-gouging so hard for a little while. But I doubt they’ll even do that because they don’t give a shit. Do you think Mitch McConnell gives a rip about how much milk costs? Not a chance. He’s too wrapped up in setting a price for how much a Congressman costs.

So these are the ads and memes we’re seeing this week. Prices are high so vote Republican. Crime is still here so vote out the Democrats.

For me, the situation is numbingly simple. Assuming that the Dems really are at fault for high prices, (and I don’t believe for a second that they are), I’ll gladly pay a few more bucks for gas and groceries if that will buy half of our citizens the right of bodily self-determination, Social Security and Medicare gets shored up rather than cut down, everyone can love whomever they choose, use whatever birth control they choose, and the rest of the government takes climate change as seriously as the military does. Prices go up and down and always will, but you can’t put a price on basic human rights. And the right of rational people not to have to abide by the fever dreams of religious wingnuts is supreme.

I do think there may be enough votes out there to keep Congress under Democratic control; I just worry about how far those people who have weaseled their way into positions of influence over elections will go to ensure the outcome they desire. What are all those hired to “watch” and “challenge” voters going to do? How many state legislatures, who have gerrymandered themselves into permanent positions of power, will seek to overturn legal results that they deem fraudulent, for no other reason than that they don’t like the outcome?

We only survived the last election with a degree of sanity because there were so many people of high integrity, from both parties, who were running things. Unfortunately, many of those principled individuals have been driven from the position by harassment and death threats, making room for the aforementioned weasels. I think the aftermath of this one is going to be bad. Like, “democracy-killing” bad. If we’ve learned anything in the last two years, it’s that it doesn’t take much to get a crowd of idiots to take up arms against the government, out of “patriotism.”