A few days before this week’s midterm elections, which saw Democrats run the table and reclaim control of the House and Senate, The Wall Street Journal’s nonsubstantive Peggy Noonan said this was exactly what she was hoping for. Unfortunately for her and other terrible people like her, she got what she wanted but not for the reasons she thinks.
In an Oct. 29 column, Noonan, who has a penchant for never naming a single source, no matter how useless the source’s insight, wrote that a Democrat blowout is just what the Republican Party needs. “If MAGA takes it full in the face on Tuesday, it will begin to shatter on the state level, where it matters,” she said. “In that shattering, room will be created in which not fully MAGA figures can start to rise. The Republican Party has to get healthy again.”
By “healthy again,” Noonan assured readers she didn’t mean the “establishment” GOP of the 1980s and 1990s, but a party “with standards and driven by beliefs, not resentments,” and one that’s “for regular people, normal people, ‘the little guy.’”
But of course Republicans like Noonan, Bill Kristol, and others have been claiming to be “for regular people” since the 1980s. And when Donald Trump came along, demolishing the Republican convention, proposing a different course for the party, Noonan and the rest resisted him and his legions of supporters every step of the way. These people have nothing new to offer and have gained no new perspective that would equip them to direct a political party in a more productive, “healthy” direction. They simply want Trump and his supporters gone.
The election was about one thing: An unpopular, unnecessary war and the enormous cost it has been, and continues to be, on Americans. It negated nearly every positive thing that Trump did in his first year in office. And on the main thing Trump has still done relatively well — deportations — more voters said they still trust Republicans to handle immigration than they do Democrats (43 percent to 41).
It’s the war. The war that Trump said was over one month after it began. We are now more than eight months in, and gas prices are up nearly 40 percent. That means the cost of transporting people and things is up 40 percent. Anyone could admire Trump’s determination to achieve some sense of victory in Iran, but he’s not bearing that burden. We are. The people who voted for him under the impression he wouldn’t start another intractable war are. By contrast, Trump is getting stupidly rich on crypto coins and niggling with his bedazzled ballroom.
The only people who love this war are neocons, the very people who voters said they’d had enough of in the 2016 election. They want to assert themselves now that the party has crumbled, declaring a rebirth, a “post-Trump” GOP. That’s not what just happened.
What happened is another rejection of neoconism, a rejection of unnecessary wars waged in quicksand, and a rejection of romantic endeavors abroad that sound brave but end up with America yet again stuck.
It’s unfortunate for voters that they made a logical choice — voting for the alternative to the status quo — and yet won’t see any change from that choice, at least as far as prices are concerned. The only change there will come from the president. The sooner that change can come, the sooner the party can rebuild, but not at all in the way neocons hope.
