By Charlie Johnston
Sometime in the next couple of weeks I am going to publish my final thoughts on the midterm elections. Back when I was doing radio I would do this for 12-15 races every cycle. It was kind of weird. I got everything right, including upsets no one saw coming, except for one race – which I would get badly wrong. It was never two and only zero once. Always just one. I got to saying that if I ever got them all right, I would quit. Coincidentally, the last time out, I did get them all right, including one decided by a handful of votes.
The thing I have had a real gift for is picking up on undercurrents, sub-themes that dominate a cycle but no one can quite enunciate. These can be hard to pick up on because if there is something really big that is moving people, they tend to be quiet about it, preferring to speak at the ballot box. This insight has often served me well. In 2016 I told a Christian broadcaster, the night before the election, that I expected Donald Trump to prevail despite the overwhelming odds against him, because the media and the left had vastly underestimated the anger at the authoritarian over-reach of the Obama years. In 1994, I predicted the Republicans would take control of the House for the first time in 40 years. I made the initial prediction in March and was full-throated about it the whole time. The late Congressman Phil Crane was telling everyone in Washington about the crazy guy in his district who was insisting on this…and was often right about counter-intuitive things. That earned me a little blurb in the Washington Post after the election as the only media voice in the country who got it right – and got it right eight months before the election happened.
It has not been as sharp since 2010, the first full year of the Obama administration. I don’t think I have gotten worse, just that Obama deranged our politics. Ever since he settled in there has been a growing tendency towards irrational identity politics unmoored from actual policy or performance. It is a form of madness, but it is hard to estimate how many have truly been overtaken by the madness. The problem is that those gone mad are, by far, the loudest, howling at the moon with all their might. TDS, anyone? As they get more vitriolic and violent, normal people get quieter about their intentions. So, for me, it really is a question of how deep the madness has set in. There is very little rational cause to vote for anyone on the left anymore – including Democrats and establishment Republicans. They always make things worse…and not a little worse, a LOT worse on every metric.
Every campaign cycle involves a certain amount of gaslighting. The question is whether you succumb to it or see through it. I have techniques I use to try to clear away the clutter and see things as they actually are. But we have a substantial cohort that has made everything political. For many, ideology has replaced God as their…well…god. That puts politics into the realm of how they identify themselves rather than just how they want to govern themselves. When identity gets heavily into the mix, rationality starts increasingly going out the window. Ideologues will vote for things that have failed badly and visibly because it is what they have staked their entire identity on…it’s who they are. If they are wrong, their whole identity becomes meaningless…and they would rather watch the world burn than suffer that.
When you put your hope in things, you are ever doomed to disappointment. Even if they are otherwise good things. I am very much inclined to St. Augustine’s point of view that our hearts are restless until they rest in Christ. Putting hope in things is like drinking brine to slake your thirst. It gives relief of immediate symptoms at the cost of making the problem progressively worse, making you more and more miserable until you die in bitterness and rage.
I usually roll my eyes at talk of this being the “most important election” of our lifetime. I think 2024 actually was the real deal. If Kamala Harris had won, I believe we would have already been in the midst of a civil war. The leftist Dems do NOT believe in a free system of government. They believe in coercive government by “experts,” the sort of thing tyrants have used different language to justify from time immemorial. This is like unto it.
For at least half of my life, Republicans and Democrats largely agreed on our goals, but differed (sometimes dramatically) on the best way to get there. Those were days in which I had warm relations with a lot of Democrats. A fundamental breach opened up during the Clinton years, a breach that was ripped completely open during the Obama years. The Biden (actually extended Obama) years were an effort to permanently cement the American people’s demotion to subjects in a land they were once sovereign in. It didn’t take, but it did seed a lot of little commissars who delude themselves that they will be among the rulers in this brave new world, but are actually just among the useful idiots that would empower a small, brutal cadre of rulers.
If the left prevails in this election, they will do a LOT of damage and destroy a lot of liberty, but they will be constrained by a president who will not be moved by their demands for tyranny in the name of “saving our democracy.” Their shrieking depredations would make it unlikely they could win two years from now. 2028 WOULD become the most consequential election of all our lifetimes, for it would then decide whether America would remain “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” or degenerate into yet another of the dark, authoritarian states that have so littered world history before collapsing from their internal contradictions and official self-absorption.
Truly, 250 years ago, America burst forth “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A willful, violent, and oddly self-righteous cadre of angry, ignorant elitists want to destroy that “for our own good.” We are in the midst of a great battle testing whether, “that nation or any nation so conceived can long endure.” This election will not decide that question, but will propel us much closer to the final answer. That is why this is the Gettysburg election.
And so, I pray that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of our union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.
Find me on X at @JohnstonPilgrim
The Corps of Renewal and Charity (CORAC)
18208 Preston Rd., Ste. D9-552
Dallas, Texas 75252
Amen.
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