I didn’t post much about the US midterm elections, partly because I felt there were more than enough non-US sites opinionating wildly but also because the results seemed to be locked in months ago (but the “blue wave” was much bigger than I expected). Now that the votes have been counted, there’s a lot of fault-finding and scapegoat-identifying going on, which is pretty standard for any election. At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter notes that the largest demographic swing seems to have been Gen Z men, who helped Trump get elected two years ago and now have shown just how unhappy they are with the vast chasm between what they hoped for and what Trump gave them:

It usually seems that the GOP are always auditioning for the “runner-up” role.

Let’s not beat around the bush. The US midterms are bad news, and not only for America. What happens in the imperial core has consequences on the periphery, too.

I don’t want to troon out on this. A second-term president losing the midterms is hardly unprecedented. Voters tend to get disillusioned over time. Frustrations mount, and they vote for the other party to punish the incumbent. It’s part of the negative feedback cycle that locks American democracy into its permanent state of hysterical torpor. Every election is the most important election in history, the last election that will ever matter, and then once again nothing ever happens. The new party assumes office, commences gorging on the corruption machine, fritters away its time and political capital on trivial nonsense, and steadfastly refuses to take action on even the most popular 80/20 issues.

The outgoing Republican House and Senate are a case in point. They outright refused to pass the overwhelmingly popular SAVE Act, for instance. I don’t think they passed any meaningful legislation at all over the last two years. They were very enthusiastic about bombing Iran, however.

Odds are the Democrats will prove to be equally disappointing to their base. Judging from their campaign rhetoric, they’re slavering at the opportunity to drag their political enemies into the Congressional torture chamber. Elon Musk has been put on notice to lawyer up, I assume for his role in DOGE, which the Dems are furious about. A lot of Trump’s other appointees and allies are probably going to find themselves subpoenaed. The King in Orange himself may well get to enjoy another round of impeachment theatre. All of this will no doubt be immensely emotionally satisfying for the Democrats. Will it make much difference in the day to day life of the average American? Probably not.

Have Trump or the GOP made much difference in daily life? Trump’s done some good things over the last two years. Gutting USAID, clearing out hundreds of thousands of federal bureaucrats, closing the border, deporting a million or so illegals and motivating the self-deportation of a couple million more. There’s been a chilling effect on DEI, the so-called “vibe shift”, which in practice has mostly meant that large institutions are pretending not to do DEI anymore. All of that’s been great, but it’s been like one percent of what’s actually required.

Deporting a few million people is a drop in the bucket compared to the many tens of millions in the country illegally. Getting woketards to turn down the volume on woke was a nice reprieve, but they remain in control of every institution that isn’t the executive branch of the US government, and they’ve carried right on refusing to hire young white men. “Woke 1 was craaaazy”, as Ocasio-Cortez said. The implication is that there will be a Woke 2. We’re probably about to find out what that looks like. I expect it to be positively psychotic.

There are just so many missed opportunities over the last two years.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a trantifa terrorist, a wave of rage washed through the country, not only at his death but in revulsion at the glee with which the left greeted it. Trump’s administration had every excuse it needed to bring down the hammer. It started well enough, with Antifa being declared an international terrorist group. And then, nothing. Oh, I think they lost a web server recently, they seemed pretty bummed about that. Black-bagging them to Gitmo that was not. Less theatrically, there was every excuse to go after the NGOs and foundations that fund Antifa and Antifa-adjacent groups, bring the hammer down on universities that provide them with a safe place to operate, and put serious pressure on foreign governments (Canada, for instance) which provide funding for Antifa-adjacent left-wing “research organizations”. Instead we got Candace Owens wittering on about how it was really all a Mossad plot or something. The result of all this lack of serious action was that the left felt quite comfortable celebrating the Kirkaversary. One young Brazilian woman went so far as to recite a vicious little death threat in the form of “Night Before Kirksmas” doggerel to a Turning Point USA representative, who for some unfathomable reason was on campus still doing the Debate Me Bro routine a year after the Debate Bro got shot in the neck for debating. There’s some talk that she and her family might get deported, but, call me cynical, I wouldn’t count on that.

Friends have been sounding the alarm for several months now over Trump’s refusal to do anything to ameliorate the plight of young white men in America. They’ve languished under woke for a decade, now. It has absolutely hammered them economically. Six years of that decade have been under Trump, by the way. He didn’t do anything about it during his first term, and during his second what little he did do was mostly performative, things like castigating the universities for not following meritocratic admissions policies and allowing anti-semitism on campus. He tried to freeze research funding to Harvard and a few other universities, sure, but that got blocked in the courts. They got their money and ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, carrying right on with discriminatory admissions as though nothing had happened. In the private sector the toxic confluence of HR girlbossery and AI filtering at the recruitment level, along with an entrenched preference for H1B over American labour within the tech sector, has made it basically impossible for anyone to get a job, but particularly impossible for young white men. There was a study recently which found that something like 98% of new jobs had gone to women, or maybe women and foreigners; either way, young white men have been left out in the cold.

This matters, because the young white men were Trump’s strongest soldiers. In the last election they swung harder for Trump than any other demographic. Much more importantly, they’re the political radicals who push the envelope, make the memes, record the podcasts, write the blogs, and conspire together in secret group chats. They went to war for him in three elections in a row, two of which he won, and the other of which was stolen. Many of them sacrificed careers to do that. The social and therefore professional consequences of being a MAGAt, a Trumptard, a member of the Trump Jugend, can be crippling. Nevertheless they were the ones pushing the envelope, hammering away at the Overton window to widen the permissible boundaries of discourse. And they succeeded. You can say things in public now that would have been absolutely verboten just a few years ago. Things like “retarded”. Go ahead, say it out loud, it’s okay now. “Retarded.” Shout it. “RETARDED!” Doesn’t that feel great?

What is of course genuinely, deeply, epochally, unfathomably retarded is that the reward bestowed upon young white men for their successful decade of service has been … nothing. Nothing at all. No patronage jobs. No grants. No lawfare against the universities refusing to let them in the door, no sanctions against the corporations using H1Bs to replace American tech workers, no ICE raids against blue collar employers undercutting American citizens with illegals, no serious effort to reduce the cost of housing, no free Zyns, no state-assigned beautiful mid gfs. They’ve been thanked by being told to stop playing video games and to go become a plumber at Panda Express.

So, this election, apparently, the young white men swung by 40 points, from something like +30 for Trump to +10 for the Democrats. I saw another tweet claiming that the swing was even larger, so who knows, but the discontented rumblings have been audible, palpable even, for months now. The young men are embittered and furious. I don’t know how much of that swing is in actual political alignment and how much of it was just the zoomerwaffen saying nah, fuck it, Imma stay home and play Age of Empires tonight, but there’s more than a whiff of what happened with the Bernie Bros in 2016. The Dem establishment shat on them, so they defected to Trump, bringing all of that energy to MAGA. Millennial and zoomer men are not institutionally loyal the way boomers are. If you don’t take care of them, if you shit upon their heads and force them to eat it, they will abandon you. As they should.