Red wave or blue swamp?

It’s a good thing I don’t have the job of predicting what’s going to happen come November, because I’d have to fire myself. It all depends on which tea leaves I’ve been reading most recently.

This time the totalitarian left has shot itself in the foot. The naked power grabs by blue-state governors have got the attention of a lot of people who, being arguably saner than I am and having better things to do, are not political junkies. People who would really prefer not to waste their time squinting at tea leaves. They just want to do their jobs, and not be constantly interfered with, and vote the same way they have all their lives. Except now – well, they may not be interested in politics, but they’re discovering that politics is interested in them. Anybody whose business has been destroyed, or whose job has disappeared, or whose life has been wrecked not by the coronavirus but by one of the thousands of wannabe dictators who are seizing this opportunity to seize power and trample on the Constitution… surely will not vote for more of the same come November!

Except if they really don’t want to pay attention, the media can keep leading them down the garden path. For anyone who doesn’t want to be bothered looking at the messy details, the media offer a convenient alternative. If the only news you encounter is what your Facebook friend just copied and pasted from CNN, maybe you think you know that everything you’ve suffered since the declaration of the Coronavirus crisis is the fault of a racist, incompetent President and a racist, murderous political party that just wants people to die. ! (Funny how that “explanation” never gets leveled at anybody with a “D” attached to his name, not even NY Governor Cuomo who, by all accounts, has been remarkably successful at arranging for people in his state to die.) With the media creating a virtual shield wall between their chosen narrative and actual facts, what are the chances that enough people will see through their shenanigans? Maybe even those whose lives have been ruined will accept the narrative that our only hope is to give the petty dictators even more power! After all, that’s what the media tells them, and they’re too busy trying to survive to spend any time looking behind the headlines.

A lot of people are really steamed. I know; I’ve talked to them. Even in deep-blue Austin, even in a state which hasn’t gone nearly as lockdown crazy as some places, there are people who are fed up with being told to sit down and shut up and do what their moral and intellectual superiors tell them.

But a lot of people should be upset and aren’t. I don’t have much of a social life these days, but I do have a handful of friends from college days with whom I keep in contact. And they terrify me. They grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance; their American History classes predated the Howard Zinn “America Sucks” attitude that took over colleges and universities and deliberately mis-educated generations of students; they are old enough to remember when people of good will could disagree on policy issues without being declared unpersons. And yet, and yet… they are complacent about the erosion of our civil liberties. They grew up free and now they’re happily enslaving themselves. How does a person get that way?

And you know what’s really scary? They are all perfectly willing to vote for Joe Biden, no matter how many times he forgets what he’s trying to say or how much word mush he produces.

Oh well. The way things are going, I’ll probably lose the last of these old friends for the crime of using “Joe Biden” and “cognitive decline” in the same sentence, and then at least I won’t be depressed by talking to them. But in the meanwhile – what do your tea leaves look like?