(Image by FutUndBeidl at Flickr)
This year it’s election season in both of my countries, the USA and UK. The USA has definite timetables. The UK will hold its general election when the Prime Minister decides to call it, sometime no later than January a year from now.
UK Situation is Simpler
The UK appears to be ready to toss power to anyone other than the Tories. Swinging to a Labour government is most likely.
Liberal Democrats have recovered from being badly used in coalition government with the Tories, which decimated them at the following election. They hoped to moderate Tory tendencies. They couldn’t and they came away stained by such close association.
Lately they’re winning a significant proportion of byelections to fill seats vacated in mid-term. One of the earliest was my constituency. It was a major upset. This seat had been Tory almost continuously ever since it was set up. In the past century it had only not been Tory for two lonely years around the time of World War I. It wasn’t easy to get the attention of our ousted MP. I managed to meet with him once and wasn’t well impressed. Our new MP is everywhere, holding town hall meetings in villages and attending local events. She is also into everything. It’s all photographed and pumped into social media steadily. She and her staff are a complete turnaround for us.
Lib Dems don’t have the resources to handle a general election with the same intensity they put into byelections like hers. I don’t see how they can win enough seats to form a government. What if they continue to target their resources well? Coalition government with the Tories was a disaster. Coalition with Labour could turn out well, now that Lib Dems have learned the hard way about what to do and what to avoid.
On their way out the door, the Tories seem intent on running everything into the ground. This has happened in some USA election cycles too. The idea is that if the successors inherit a wreck too big to fix in one governmental cycle, voters can easily be convinced in the next election to forget who made the mess, blame it on the ones who got stuck with cleanup, and put the ones who trashed the country back into power. Many voters have short memories and poor understanding of politics and government, so propaganda takes effect readily on them. The scheme often works.
USA Situation is More Dangerous
The USA is so much bigger in every way (population, economic size, geography, raw power), there are currents and eddies and whirlpools in its politics far beyond anything happening in the UK. The consequences are also more dangerous for both the USA and the rest of the world.
This morning the BBC is already anointing Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee based on the Iowa caucuses. He probably is the nominee unless the wheels of justice speed up and the 14th Amendment kicks in at last. But most people don’t understand the difference between caucuses and primaries, or how far from USA averages the people of Iowa are.
The votes people cast for the Presidential nominee in a caucus state matter only in the sense that they are essentially a ticket to allow participation in the caucus meetings that day. Most people simply cast a vote and go home. Only the most motivated turn up for the caucus meetings. In those meetings only those who can stir up the most other people to stick with them prevail. It’s possible for a candidate to win the votes and lose in the caucuses, in which case the headline is that they lost.
Caucuses favor fanatics. Trump’s core supporters are fanatics.
Results from primaries will give us a clearer picture. He’s likely to win there too, but whether he wins is not the only important outcome to watch. It’s even more important to see how many Republicans vote in those primaries and how many stay away. If he wins and turnout is high, that signals big trouble.
I just finished reading Enough, Cassidy Hutchinson’s book (disclosure: that is an affiliate link) about her life, with emphasis on her time working at the White House and testifying to the January 6th Committee in Congress. It isn’t great literature. She isn’t as self-aware as she wants to believe she is. She’s so young, it doesn’t have the depths of insight someone with more years on them could offer—and it also doesn’t have the layers of artifice someone older might paint over the top. It’s as close to an unvarnished view inside Trump’s organization as we are ever likely to get.
If you aren’t sure letting Trump into the White House again would tip the USA over the edge, read Hutchinson’s book.
The entire world is painfully aware that the USA’s democratic system is badly damaged, warped, and still on the precipice of being destroyed.
This is not a year to vote third party or demand perfection of the Democratic candidate before you’ll be willing to cast your vote at all. The whole shebang is on the line. Please wield your vote accordingly, in primaries and caucuses and the election itself.
You hit it right on the nose: "The idea is that if the successors inherit a wreck too big to fix in one governmental cycle, voters can easily be convinced in the next election to forget who made the mess, blame it on the ones who got stuck with cleanup, and put the ones who trashed the country back into power. Many voters have short memories and poor understanding of politics and government, so propaganda takes effect readily on them. The scheme often works." -
With so many willfully ignorant and entitled people voting for the extremist right-wing, I'm fearful that America will be trashed to the ground.
Kudos to Cassidy Hutchinson for the expose', but even Trumpers will be trashed by MAGATS (Make America Great Again Trump Supporters) if they show the slightest tendency to tarnish their Golden Calf. MAGATS (yes, rhymes with maggots) will believe absolutely no one except those who cater to their sense of entitlement, their hatreds, and their worship of a very evil man.