That was the first of the two central ides that I explored in last week’s column. Let me remind the reader of the most troubling and astonishing aspect of this impact: Trump has so degraded nearly all the cherished, historic institutions of liberal democracy that Trump’s America now remarkably looks like many of the authoritarian and dysfunctional regimes of the Third World. In support of this thesis, I offered as evidence many of the policies and actions of Trump and Trumpism, together with their impact. The first idea is the fear and dread that if Trump and the Republicans won and retained control of both houses of parliament, America might tip over into the precipice of a homegrown, brutal and corrupt autocracy supported by tens of millions of Americans, most of them White and either openly defending white supremacy or quietly colluding with it. This is the central axis of the ideas and reflections that I wish to explore in this piece.Īt this point in the discussion, permit me to restate the two basic ideas that I explored last week in the runup to midterm election 2018. This “strategy” has been dealt a crippling blow, a devastating refutation by the size and spread of the Democratic “blue wave” of midterm election of 2018. In other words, for a long time now, the Republican party has been struggling to widen its appeal, its support far beyond the long racial dominance of Whites Trump and Trumpism came on a mission to cast off diversity, inclusion and coalition-building, in the belief that Whites will still constitute the majority and will probably do so for a few more decades. Since Whites are still a dominant majority in the populace and the electorate, the great gender gap between women and men in party and electoral affiliation is a huge factor in the current and increasingly shrinking demographic and political spread of the Republican electoral base. Thus, while the electoral base of the party of Trump is primarily – if indeed not exclusively – Whites buffeted by the restrictive community of Cuban Americans of Florida, here is the “rainbow coalition” makeup of the Democratic blue wave: African Americans Asian Americans Native Americans women, especially black women the youth population under the age of 30 of all demographic constituencies. In my own opinion, the single most important aspect of the astonishing victory of the Democrats in midterm elections 2018, is the extreme broad base, the diversity and the astute coalition politics undergirding the so-called “blue wave”. Given the fact that the Democrats were defending 10 seats in solid “red states” and the Republicans only one seat in a “blue state”, it was a great feat for the Democrats to have staved off the maniacal marathon campaigns of Trump to retake all the 10 seats in “red states” held by the Democrats. It is still probable that they, the Republicans, will still have control of the Senate when all the counting of votes might have been concluded, but the increase in Republican control is likely to be no more than, at most, two. But lo and behold, in subsequent days and as the continuing counting of the remaining votes progressed, Senate seats that the Republicans thought they had won turned out to have been won by the Democrats. As a matter of fact, on Wednesday, the day after the election, the Republicans thought that they had not only retained the control of the Senate but had in fact substantially increased the size of their control of that upper chamber of Congress. Of course, the Democrats did not take control of the Senate. Please remember that all they needed to win to regain control of the House was 23 votes. Of the 11 seats in the recent midterm election remaining for pickup by either party, the general expectation is that, going by the trends in the ongoing vote counts, the Democrats will pick up the majority of the seats, bringing the margin of their control of the House to around 36 or 37. Already, this is a margin of victory of historic proportions it is much larger, for instance, than the Tea Party “red wave” of 2010 under the presidency of Barrack Obama.
As things stand now, the Democrats have 225 seats to 199 seats for the Republicans, the party of Trump. First, in regaining control of the House of Representatives, the Democrats have outperformed all expectations of a whopping electoral victory.
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