The New Neo

Ordinarily I’d write “more post-election thoughts,” but the election’s still going on. It will go on for a while.

But my stomach doesn’t feel good about the final outcome. It didn’t feel good last night, either, even when Trump was winning. I knew the left had a lot more up its sleeve.

So today I’m not going to do what some blogs do – give a state-by-state rundown, with counts and possibilities. Everything is in flux right now, with the outcome unknown but trending in the wrong direction. I know that Trump won’t give up without an enormous fight, and he could win that fight, but I’m not optimistic about either his chances or the increased hatred and multiple coup attempts if he were to win.

And speaking of unknowns – if Biden/Harris do win, it’s not the least bit certain how long Biden would last in the top position.

It’s not even so clear that such a switch would matter much, either, except to those who care about having a First Woman President (I’m not one of those people; identity politics is of zero importance to me). It would be fitting and almost humorous (bitterly humorous, but humorous nonetheless) if the first female president were to be someone who was not elected to that office as well as being deeply unpopular – so unable to get votes on her own that she dropped out of her party’s primaries early, and who was chosen solely for her leftism, race, and sex.

I hope the Senate stays in GOP hands. That won’t help the foreign policy and executive order problems inherent in a leftist administration, but it would help a lot of other things.

It’s hard to be optimistic, but I’m trying.

[ADDENDUM: I want to add that, based on what we know so far, the cheating seems obvious and egregious.

However, what will the solid evidence actually show (evidence that would hold up in court, that is)? And what will the courts will ultimately say? That, I can’t predict.

The plan of the Democrats was always to claim victory even if they were behind Election Night, and then to “find” enough votes to win or at least to win in court. The plan for Trump was to claim victory when ahead on Election Night, and then to challenge the “found” votes in court.

That is always what I thought was mostly likely to happen. The part I didn’t know and still don’t know is how good the evidence of fraud will be, what the courts will say, how long it will take to decide, what the immediate reaction of the country will be until then, and how the ultimate loser’s constituents will react.

The entire thing is fraught with peril.

I’ve also just put up a new post on voter fraud.]

And this hangover will last a long time, I’m afraid.

Actually, a hangover isn’t really the proper metaphor, because this illness has been going on for a long time. We’ve had the drift leftward, the institutional rot, and the 50/50 division that makes for too many election squeakers and allows fraud – or at the very least the strong incentive for and possibility of fraud – to become a big player in the results.

And then the resultant court battles.

Did I expect this? Mostly. At least, it was always one very strong possibility and probably the leading scenario in my mind: that Election Night would end with the results close but Trump ahead, followed by the “found” mail-in votes, followed by the weeks or months of fighting in the courts, leaving half of America with the lingering feeling that the winner was illegitimate.

Another possibility was that the polls were right and Biden would sweep in a big victory. Although that would say something terrible about America – that it preferred a corrupt, addled nonentity who would be controlled by the left to a strong, vulgar, smart, America-loving can-do sort of person – it still would have been an unequivocal result that would leave no doubt about what voters intended. Another scenario was an enormous Trump victory that some had sensed and predicted, but in my opinion that was always the longest longshot of all.

I don’t understand how half of America could vote for Biden, even though I know how it happened because many of the people I know are consumed by such hatred of Trump that they would vote for an old tree stump if had gotten the Democratic nomination. And so the prospect of voting for Biden – who, after all, was the sainted Obama’s vice president – and the off-putting leftist Harris was no problem at all, although I’ve yet to hear a single person actually praise either of them.

If Biden/Harris end up winning, this will be the first time we have a president and a vice-president whom no one likes. That would be remarkable. And not good.

Trump’s voters are not going away. Most will feel betrayed, and rightly so. There are reports of massive dumps of all-Biden ballots in the contested states, and although I don’t know if those reports are correct, the strong perception will be that Biden won through fraud. What I do know for certain is that the way voting was set up in many states, ostensibly because of COVID, was at the very least an invitation to fraud. If mail-in votes aren’t counted first, that’s what opens the door to “finding” just the right number to make up for any lead that Trump might have. So when we see leads evaporating, it’s easy to believe fraud is the explanation.

That’s where the courts come in, but they can only take us so far. And an election decided by the courts is not good, as we’ve learned before.

Whatever has led to this moment and this awful situation has been a long time coming. The Gramscian march and leftist dominance, especially in education. The degeneration of the media into a mendacious and partisan facade. The decline of standards of behavior and integrity, in personal and public life.

Trump alone was certainly never going to fix it. That will require much more.

In the end, I think it helps to have faith – in God, in a higher power – and to try to figure out what part you can play in the “more” that is required.

I noticed a comment on another blog to this effect: “I can understand not voting if you don’t think either candidate should be president.”

That’s one of those statements that looks logical on its face but really is not, because (barring some very bizarre circumstances) one of these candidates will be president whatever you think. Of course, in the case of Joe Biden, Kamala might be president, but you’re voting or not voting for the ticket not the candidate. It’s a twofer.

If you choose not to vote, or vote third-party for someone with no chance, it should be because you honestly and sincerely feel you cannot decide which of the two main candidates would be better and which worse. Although that was a position that had some validity in 2016, I just don’t see how anyone can argue that today. So I view abstaining from voting this year as an exercise in virtue-signaling, a way to say “I won’t dirty my hands to vote for either of these extremely flawed humans. I am morally above it all.” And by taking such a stance in the real world rather than the ideal world of your imagination, you are in fact dirtying your hands by allowing others to possibly choose the worse candidate of the two.

People who live in deep deep red or deep deep blue states have a bit more of an excuse not to vote for either candidate, because they know (or think they know) how their state’s electoral votes will be alloted. But I still don’t think it’s a good excuse, because although the general popular vote doesn’t matter in the legal political sense it matters in the psychological political sense – as we’ve seen since 2016.