She believes that “November 3rd Was a Rejection of the Democratic Party.” She says the Dems may have won “the Presidency by the skin of their teeth, but the rest of this election was no cause for celebration” for their party.
“I know,” she adds, “I’m not alone in feeling as though if the pandemic had not happened, not only would the President have won, it would have been a landslide. Not only would he have won Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina, but almost indefinitely would have taken Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan as well. The incredible thing is, this should have been a landslide victory for the Democrats.” Instead “Democrats still managed to lose state legislature races in a redistricting year, a number of House seats, and utterly failed to take the Senate…. I’m not sure Democrats have any idea what’s coming in 2024, 2028, or even as soon as 2022 when the midterms are held. There is no Donald Trump the boogeyman for them to hide behind anymore. Now it will be Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the helm, with a gridlocked government, no coronavirus relief plan until February at the earliest, and four years of the no fundamental change that Biden promised…. [I]t has never been more necessary to point out that unless the Democratic party drastically changes course, the next Donald Trump is coming. Not only are they coming, but they will be much smarter, far more capable, more palatable, and likely even more in tune with the right-wing populism he harnessed.”
For Martinchek, moreover, “the left didn’t cost any elections in 2020. Rather, they salvaged it.” She says “the left is not through with the Democratic party. While the liberals go back to brunch, we’ll gladly be getting ready for primaries. We don’t have the time, nor the patience to sit here and listen while loyal liberal voters inevitably tell us to pipe down because midterms are on the way. You had 2020. We’ll take it from here.”
This reminds me of a story from the P.I., about a group of inmates in the national penitentiary who were led by a man who claimed to have a powerful amulet, worn as a neckpiece, that made him bullet-proof, like Superman. The likeness of the amulet was drawn on several pieces of paper over which Super-inmate prayed. The pieces of paper were then swallowed by his followers. Led by Super-inmate, they let out a battle cry as they ran toward their prison guards…who proceeded to shoot them all down. As they were dying — so the story goes — one of the inmates asked their leader why their amulet didn’t work. The leader replied, “The amulet works, but we just didn’t have enough faith in it.”
oOo
Economist Donald J. Boudreaux noted that many of our Progressive friends “are among the first and the loudest to point out…the ridiculous scientific pretenses that constitute so-called ‘Scientific Creationism,’ yet this same ‘Progressive’ is also among the first and loudest to endorse the equally ridiculous scientific pretenses that constitute ‘Progressivism’ — the superstition that the economy is the creation of a higher power (the state) that will intervene in benevolent and all-knowing ways if it receives from the faithful enough prayers, devotion, and blind obedience.”
Another economist, F.A. Hayek, once declared that the “curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
But when running for office, politicians who want to win must say that he or she knows exactly what should be done to “fix” things, the economy included. To paraphrase the British historian and writer Dominic Green, most well-meaning politicians (which means almost all of them) are pretty sure that people are problems to be fixed by legislation. These are politicians of principle — “the principle being that [they] know what’s best for everyone else and therefore have a right to impose it on us.”
Or, in the words of Kevin Williamson, “thorny social problems can be solved (with no unpleasant tradeoffs!) by giving the right people power to manage” the rest of us.
Don Boudreaux again: “I’ve always had difficulty understanding the thought processes of people who fancy themselves fit to intervene into the affairs of other adults in ways that will improve the lives of other adults as judged by these other adults. I understand the desire to help others, and I also understand that individuals often err in the pursuit of their own best interests. What I don’t understand is Jones’s presumption that he, who is a stranger to Smith, can know enough to force Smith to modify his behavior in ways that will improve Smith’s long-term well-being. Honestly, such a presumption has struck me for all of my adult life as being so preposterous as to be inexplicable. I cannot begin to get my head around it.”
Intentions are not results. This should be, by now, self-evident to voters who remember what were promised to them in the previous elections and what the actual results were. But politicians will always tell us that their amulet works — we just need more faith. And many of us will believe them. Because, you know: Hope! Change!
See you in the next elections!
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