The Rantings of the Insane

Election season is nearing the finishing line here in the US. Thanks be to God. We are less than two weeks away from the election. I do have a degree in political science, so I do keep an eye on such things. In my younger, more idealistic days, I found civic discourse and the pursuance thereof to be noble public virtue. As I have gotten older and more well read, I still follow politics closely. I have ever more increasingly come to believe in my political philosophy that I have held for many years: salvation cometh not from politicians. 

I live in a state that has traditionally been what some refer to as a "deep red" state. In American parlance, that generally means more conservative and Republican. More liberal Democrat lead states are referred to a "deep blue." I have never quite been able to track down exactly why American media moved to referring to conservatives as reds and liberals as blues. It was not always that way. If you go back and look at election night coverage from 1980, you will notice the media is using the more traditional "blue" for conservative states and "red" for liberal states on their electoral maps in the background. For instance:

Certainly in places like England, blue is usually the color associated with parties that are more conservative and red for parties that have more socialist or liberal tendencies. In the Tory party, there are (or at least historically were) blue Tories and red Tories. Blue Tories tended to be more laissez faire capitalist and anti-welfare state conservatives, whereas Red Tories were generally content with modern welfare state social laws. Red Tories might gripe on camera about the excesses of the nanny state, but if elected would do nothing to actually change any of it. Likewise, the Labour Party, which is more left of center than the Tory Conservative party, has a national symbol of the Red Rose.

At what point the American media pulled the old switcheroo and started using reds for conservatives and blues for liberals\progressives is something I have never quite been able to track down. It appears by the 1984 election returns videos that the media had switched to the red for conservatives/blues for liberals and every Presidential election night news feed I could find thereafter seems to have switched to that color scheme. My educated guess is this was a media reaction to the Reagan revolution, which was a significant political shift in American politics. Reagan's upset was one of the major political surprises on the later 20th century.

Most political theorists at the time never thought a majority of Americans would shift that far back to the right. If one looks at the political landscape of the mid-1970s, it is easy to understand why. The Nixon/Ford wing of the Republican party was extremely socially fairly liberal. Richard Nixon, of all the people, was remarkably liberal on social policy. If you listen to the debates of 1976 between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Ford was by far more liberal in a lot of ways than was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, for all his warts, was actually a fairly old school Jeffersonian Conservative. He is the last agrarian President that really did in many ways espouse Jefferson's vision of Federalism actually. One has only to read Carter's rather remarkable autobiography, An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood, to see how remarkably Jeffersonian his upbringing and his ties to the land as a farmer really ran. There will probably never be an old Virginian-style Agrarian president again in our lifetime. Credible Presidential candidates now are either professional career politicians (Biden/Bernie Sanders, etc), often with law degrees (Clintons/Obama/Harris/JD Vance/Ron DeSantis/virtually anyone in the US Senate) or possibly medical degrees (Ben Carson) but not always, or else self made entrepreneur billionaire types (Trump/Ramaswamy/Michael Bloomberg).

That brings me back to my original reason for writing this post. Even though I live in a fairly conservative state, there is a weird confluence of political forces at work here. This is probably because my state along with Maine apportions its electoral vote by district. I am convinced that is why Harris picked Walz, who is originally from Nebraska, in the hopes of picking up Omaha's electoral vote, should it come down to a tie in the electoral college. I think that was a tactical error in my opinion because I think the governor of Pennsylvania would have been a better choice to try an get that state to vote Democrat. But that is neither here nor there. Also there is a rather interesting, if annoying, run by an independent running against an incumbent Republican for US Senate here that is making waves.

I say annoying because he's really a Democrat running as an independent, which I find disingenuous. Not that that in itself is a bad thing, but my point is the level of dark money advertisements this guy has managed to wrangle this election is amazing. For a supposed independent candidate, I have never seen the like of it before. You can't turn on any radio, TV, or internet site in this state without getting bombarded by vicious ads for this guy. (I have overheard multiple people complain about this, so I know it is not just me who finds this annoying.) There must be a large fortune in advertising being spent for this guy, and it has to be from out of state because the guy is a welder by trade. Of course, the Republicans in response have ramped up the mud slinging ads on their own. It's just wall to wall pig pen mud wrestling here, and we are not even really a swing state, at least in my district. I imagine it's way worse up in Omaha, but that's not my district. 

Also on ballot here are two interesting Constitutional amendments for and against abortion. The pro-Abortion one has been run by out of state lobbying money to get it on the ballot for over two years. They have paid canvassers out collecting signatures for months leading up to the filing deadline. They were aggressive signature canvassers too. They were everywhere for months: football games, parking lots at Walmart, door to door, you name it. The interesting this was that they barely got enough signatures to get it on the ballot after months of aggressive canvassing. To counter that, the Pro-life crown decided rather late in the game to float their own amendment limiting abortions. In a very short time and with completely volunteer canvassers, actually ended up getting virtually same amount of signatures to get their version of an amendment on the ballot, to the utter shock and horror of the Pro-abortion lobby that spend huge money paying professional canvassers for months. So, both are on the Nebraska ballot. That's led to a whole bunch of rancor political ads as well. 

If both of those amendments end up passing, that is going to be a very interesting constitutional crisis the State courts are going to have to sort out. My guess is that the State Court will probably end up picking sides and deciding the issue, which really defeats the whole purpose of having a Constitutional amendment vote if the courts are yet again going to decide the issue.

As I am forced to listen to the absolute horrendous political ads over and over, it reinforces in my mind that salvation cometh not from politicians. These ads really are the rantings of the insane. I guess that's appropriate, as it's the end of October. I may dress up as a politician. It truly is the scariest Halloween costume this year.