"David, what happened in Michigan on Tuesday?"
I was watching a Babylon 5 episode earlier today (so… yeah, only two of you even know what I’m talking about). G’Kar, after returning from a mission where he found the allies of the Shadows on the move again, says to his aid Na’Toth:
Weep for the future Na'Toth. Weep for us all.
So on that subject, the Democrats had a much better than generally predicted election night last Tuesday, winning control of all three branches of Michigan state government… yeah, that is very much not great. Very much not great.
More than one person sent me a message to say something like “What happened, David? I thought Whitmer was a terrible leader.” (And she is.) “What happened?” I thought I would offer just a few thoughts in response. I have no insider information here, I’m just an intelligent guy watching the world around him. And per usual, I don’t think it was any one thing, but rather a combination of factors, some “local” in time to this election, some long-running trends in US life, and even some “5000-year-old human nature trying to exist in the present technological environment” problems. Much more could be said, but here are four quick thoughts.
Democrats getting in the ballots
There was an interesting Twitter thread a few days ago that said Republicans are still focused on getting “votes”, whereas Democrats are playing the new game, which is getting “ballots”.
Put another way, we might say that Republicans are focused on trying to inform the populace as to why they should vote Republican, and then hoping you will vote accordingly. Democrats, by contrast, only really care about getting those ballots marked “Democrat” into the system. They don’t really care, at all, about whether or not the people filling them out are well-informed or true believers or any of that, just get the “properly marked” ballots into the system.
“Are you suggesting vote fraud, David?” For the most part, I think that isn’t really necessary. Some certainly happens, and we know this because occasionally someone gets caught. If memory serves there was recently a case in Florida where someone got busted paying people in cash for their vote-by-mail ballots. The losing Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan put out a bulletin alleging several instances of misconduct last election. Did they really happen? I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Look, the party that says “photo ID is too much of an imposition!” also wanted everyone to carry a digital vaccine ID pass to visit the grocery store. So they’re clearly lying about the former, and now ask yourself why.
But generally, I think, Democrats have reconfigured the rules to make (legal) “ballot harvesting” easier, and frankly they work very hard to get the low-information, Democratic votes into the system. It seems clear to me now that, when COVID happened, some progressive officials immediately saw it as an opportunity to rewrite election rules in their favor (e.g. with mail-in and early voting for everyone) and grabbed it. (Early voting, by the way, is inherently lower-information voting. The polls in Michigan this election, as the election day approached, improved for the good candidates and for “no” votes on the proposals. As people got better informed they were inclined to make better choices. But ah, how many ballots had already been cast?) Democrats work especially hard to turn out the college vote (I saw this in person myself on MSU’s campus) and, without making it too much of an insult, college students are especially prone to have poorly thought out, easily manipulated politics, and especially prone to be attracted to totalitarianism.
So, I suspect, for the most part it’s all legal, but Democrats are focused now on “getting ballots” and they do it well. I already knew this before the election, and was skeptical of “red wave” predictions for exactly this reason. “But last big election, Republicans outperformed the polling by…” sure they did. But that was a “voting” election, and now we have “balloting” elections. The rules have changed.
Conservatives made some pitiful arguments for their positions
I wrote previously on this so I won’t belabor it again, but it remains true that, although they are often insane, progressives employ strong moral language in support of their politics. And conservatives, for some dumb reason, often remain scared to do the same. “Confusing and extreme” was an absolutely terrible choice for a slogan against Michigan’s abortion Proposition 3. Yeah, we’re only against abortion because we’re confused, that’s it.
Some local Roman Catholics (at least I think they were behind these signs, maybe not) seemed to recognize that, and played off of Whitmer saying she would “fight like hell” for abortion.
Make a clear moral case for your beliefs already, conservatives. Give people an actual reason to care. I’ll quote the good Prof. Cooper here.
Technological propaganda / Presentism
Third, the present technological environment, one, encourages people to live always in the now and quickly forget anything that happened more than two weeks ago. And two, that same technological environment makes it easier than ever before in human history to subject humans to the same message 500 times in a row… and that does tend to work on people.
Per the first… a lot of us wanted folks like Whitmer to be punished for ruling like little dictators during COVID. I think when people write to me and say, “but isn’t Whitmer a terrible leader?”, those memories are one big thing on their mind. But many people, in a sense, don’t have those memories at all anymore. As PoliMath pointed out, no Democrat in the United States seemed to be running on the message, “vote for me because I was such a great leader during COVID!” No, they barely brought it up at all, and when they did it was often through a lie like “I pushed for schools to be reopened” when they did not such thing. So they were quite happy to have the public just largely not even think about the way they really behaved during COVID… and I think that largely worked. Because 2020, 2021, that’s like so long ago man. Who can even remember what happened so long ago? People vote on how they feel about stuff this week, on what people have told them is true this week.
And two… you tell people the same lie 500 times, human nature being what it is people will naturally think it is true. If everyone is telling us something we think that something is true. Repetition is probably the most common propaganda technique today, and it works. On the abortion issue… some people are pro-abortion because they hate God and love doing evil. That’s some people, you can identify them because they look and sound like demons. But I think I would say that a good number of other people just have really screwy thinking on the topic. Why do they have such screwy thinking? Because every glowing screen in their life has told them nothing but lies for forty years in a row. Well that’ll do its work, people… especially when they (like nearly all college students) have no family or children of their own, to locally contradict the glowing screen messages. I think I saw Peter Schiff say that, when the voting age was 21, most people were married by that age. Now the voting age is 18 and… when are people getting married?
But optimistically, as one person told me, the fact that the pro-life movement is still as strong as it is, under that assault, is because of the power of the actual truth. You can’t really bury the truth even under 500 lies. But you can muddle the thinking of a whole lot of people.
Bad public education
Oh, many more things could be said but this post is long enough already. So I’ll end with… not much to say here that hasn’t already been said, but the US public education system has been abysmal for a very long time, and now we see the fruits of that terribleness. Public education actually encourages presentism, while a good education helps you see beyond your chronological moment. Many people are not thinking their way through issues, at all. Many people have no conscious political philosophy of any seriousness, at all. They feel their way through things, and feelings with no strong rooting are easily manipulated.
My first post-election tweet went something like “well, I’m still not sure how this election worked out, but clearly America needs some generational fixes. So back to the work of classical Christian education it is.”
Not directly about presentism, but: I've found it extraordinary how little willingness most people seem to have to talk in any depth about lockdowns and their lives during them. That could be a byproduct of screen life.
First I'm reading about presentism, would like to know more!