MARK HEMINGWAY: 2024 Is Shaping Up To Be The ‘We Were Right About Everything’ Election.
Obviously, making this broad observation is not necessarily an endorsement of Trump or the GOP, and there are probably some finer policy points where you can plausibly disagree. But on just about every issue that has dominated the public discourse post-Trump, the pro-Democrat establishment either staked out a fringe position or was proven wrong by subsequent events. It’s hard to even know where to begin.
On Covid, it’s abundantly clear that red states that refused mass shutdowns and excessive regulations didn’t see any worse health outcomes — and the damage from the shutdowns and Covid mandates is still lasting. The idea that our strained health care system was laying off people for refusing to take a “vaccine” that we now know doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus has been a disaster, to say nothing of our strained military, in the middle of a massive recruiting crisis, forcibly ejecting thousands over vaccine mandates.
Then there’s the fact that Covid killed off 200,000 businesses in just the first year. How many businesses could have been saved with more reasonable Covid regulations? Then there was the distrust sewn with the public through all of the coronavirus propaganda and social media censorship. Your posts could be banned from Facebook for even speculating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an outcome that the government now acknowledges is more likely than not.
The worst outcome, however, might have been the Biden administration irresponsibly outsourcing its Covid policy on schools to the teachers unions, who fought to keep schools closed for more than a year in some places, followed by an insistence on ineffective and difficult-to-enforce mask mandates on children. Even left-wing publications now openly acknowledge Covid school closures were unnecessary and disastrous for America’s kids, but by the time they found the courage to say what was abundantly obvious to the rest of us, the damage was done.
The bottom line is that the Covid response fundamentally eroded trust between citizens and the government like no other issue in generations, and Democrat lawmakers were pretty clearly on, as they like to say, “the wrong side of history.”
Of course, the school closures issue was just emblematic of the long-running decline of American education, which is almost wholly a result of teachers unions. Their enormous donations to Democrats effectively serve as protection money, and for decades, this unholy alliance effectively made even the most basic education reforms impossible.
Post-Covid, however, Americans who were forced to see what their kids were learning via remote schooling have largely woken up to the fact that education has been politicized beyond repair. In just the last three years, West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana have all passed school-choice legislation, and more states such as Texas are likely to enact it soon. The good news is homeschooling is skyrocketing in popularity, and private and religious schools are popping up everywhere.
Read the whole thing, including Hemingway’s conclusion that “Abortion is almost the sole issue where things are complicated for the right, and we probably shouldn’t underestimate the Republican Party’s ability to lose winnable elections,” so don’t get cocky, to coin an Insta-phrase. On the other hand, if he’s looking for a campaign theme, perhaps Trump should borrow from Kingley Amis’ suggestion that Robert Conquest’s history of the Soviet Union deserved to be retitled, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
(Though he’d have to be awfully sotto voce about his role in the Covid lockdowns and then freaking out over red states opening up first, of course.)
And on the gripping hand, Jim Treacher writes: “If you’re stressed out about the election, now that it’s too late for either party* to pick an acceptable candidate, you just need to relax. My friend Jarvis has the right idea:”
As Treacher concludes, “It’s a win/win. No matter what happens, I will be swimming in schadenfreude. So I got that goin’ for me.”
*Bob Torricelli smiles.