Lessons Still Not Learned

I've said it before and I'll say it again, American elections come down to very simple demographics. This week proved me right - again! - but all the paid opinion-makers are trying to spin it as indicative of cultural trends or something.

It's not. Let's just get that clear: Americans do not change with the times and they sure as hell don't change their minds.

A single election is a textbook case of sampling bias as factors that have nothing to do with policy or the irreversible decline of the American Empire decide who shows up at the polls. Mid-Terms draw a different crowd than the presidential election which draws a different crowd than doldrum years like 2015. But take them all together and you'll see a pattern as constant as the Northern Star.

The South is the Confederacy. It's been clear to anyone willing to look since 2004, but every state in the larger red blob of Dixie Culture is just getting meaner and stupider every year. Their local and congressional politics all come down to which White Protestant can bluster better while taking it up the backside from every moneyed interest. And your average cracker is okay with this, because everything is Obama's fault anyway.

Democrats own the coastal enclaves. That was the only lesson to be drawn from the 2013 elections so of course nobody respectable would mention it. Chris Christie is as popular as he ever was with the Republican faithful - which isn't saying much - but the Washington Post would like for you to believe New Jersey voting out three Republican dog catchers is a blow against his campaign. WaPo also printed an indictment of Denmark's economy based entirely on the critique of a traveling food critic, because they're just really fucking stupid.

There's some acknowledgment that voter turnout was less this year than during a presidential run -  a retroactive admission that the Tea Party surge of 2010 was just a fart in the wind - but you can still expect some opinion pieces over the next few weeks about how Bush III needs to woo the homophobes back from Carson or whether or not "values voters" might swing the country Republican next year.

They won't. They can't. Because they're dying faster than fruit flies. Despite Houston's refusal of wealthy gay professionals, the reactionaries of the Bush Years are losing more and more ground to younger, browner people. This doesn't mean America is looking at a succession of Democratic administrations, simply that the aggrieved old white people who cry about socialism while collecting Medicare are headed the way of the dodo, and their policies are following.

Good riddance.