The Terrible Teens

On one hand, it's hard for me to believe that 20 years have passed since New Year's Day 2000. On the other hand, a lot has happened since then and I guess it seems like about 20 years' worth.

I'm not going to write a post attempting to wrap up the past decade, but I did want to note that with 10 years of hindsight, it's pretty clear that the Aughts would probably best be labeled the DistrAughts because they were dominated by 9/11, the civil repression and fake war that followed, and the Great Recession. The Teens are not as easy to label, but I am persuaded by Doug Muder's recent post on the Weekly Sift that we will come to know them as the Decade of Democracy's Decline, and recommend his full post highly.

Even before Mafia Mulligan, we had the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate ensuring the minority got its way, but increasingly throughout the decade Republicans have gerrymandered their way to unearned majorities in legislatures, too, and held onto the House (and still hold more seats than their votes would account for). As Muder puts it:

In the 2016 presidential election, Trump got 62,984,828 votes (46.1%) while Hillary Clinton got 65,853,514 (48.2%). In the 2018 elections for the House, Republican candidates got 50,861,970 votes (44.8%) and Democrats 60,572,245 (53.4%).

Computing the Senate popular vote is a little more complicated, because it takes six years for all the seats to come up, so you have to total across three elections. In 2014, Republican candidates got 24,631,488 votes (51.7%) and Democrats 20,875,493 votes (43.8%). In 2016 it was Republicans 40,402,790 (42.4%), Democrats 51,496,682 (53.8%). In 2018, Republicans got 34,723,013 (38.8%) and Democrats 52,260,651 (58.4%).

That works out to a total of 99,575,291 Republican votes and 124,632,826 Democratic votes. (The totals are roughly double the House totals because each state elects two senators.) That 25 million vote margin for the Democrats (roughly 55%-45%) has produced a 53-47 Republican majority.

Joan Walsh in the Nation just posted her own analysis of what she calls "this f&$%ing decade" and the unbalanced nature of "bothsiderism" so beloved of our mainstream media, which is partly responsible for bringing us to where we are. That's a frequent critique these days (at least, among the folks I read) but she does a good job of recounting examples back to 2009.

And now, barring some way of literally (not figuratively) declaring the 2016 election void, we're stuck with hundreds of Mulligan-appointed judges, the loss of thousands of dedicated federal civil servants who've quit or retired rather than work for this administration, plus all the wasted time needed to reconstruct everything he's destroyed. Assuming he loses the 2020 election in the first place and the Democrats take the Senate and keep the House.

It's a bit of gloom and doom here today at DN3, I'm afraid. But at least we know what we have to work for.