At last there is real hope for the future of American democracy
The outright winner of the US midterm elections is sanity. Coming in a close second is the integrity of America’s democratic institutions. In the end, the people did not buy the crazy alternative reality that Donald Trump was selling – or at least, not enough of them bought it to make it viable as a way of understanding the country.
What we will see now is an unremarkable set of midterm results in which the party in power in the White House loses control of Congress. No big deal. No revolutionary Red Wave. No Trumpite sweep. Back to life in Washington as we have always known it and probably back to a rational spectrum of argument between liberals and conservatives.
The Trump appeal had always been that the official politics of the nation was so out of touch with the needs and desires of ordinary people that it needed to be reinvented. There was a not-so-silent majority out there who longed for an entirely new voice to speak for them. His appeal was precisely that he was outside the normal bounds of party discourse. What he said – and the way that he said it – was outrageously beyond the accepted order.
In truth, he was not really a Republican at all. His views and his rhetoric were from somewhere else altogether. That was an electoral advantage – until it wasn’t. The shock of it, which seemed so exhilarating at the beginning, became something much more frightening and alien when his troops invaded the Capitol on that fatal January day, and he and an ever-smaller coterie of deluded confidantes tried to discredit the election that he had clearly lost.