The Cult of Losing

 

     As is very well known these days, Trump lost the House in 2018. He lost the White House in 2020. He lost the Senate in 2021. And he lost the midterms for countless Republicans in 2022. And yet, Republicans are still rallying around Donald Trump like so many ship-wrecked sailors on a dead man's chest. Conventional wisdom and less than a baseline of psychological training would tell you that Republicans are tired of losing under this loser and, to their credit, guys like Chris Christie and Mike Pompeo have whined to the media lately that, "I'm tired of losing."

     Indeed, it seems that Trump's three year-long losing streak will only be broken up by 2023 not being an election year. But it's fallacious to assume that all the blame for the GOP's historic failure in the 2022 midterms that the punditocracy, as usual, got it all wrong by predicting "a red wave" rests at Donald Trump's feet.

     Trump is just part of the problem, or indirectly the problem in some ways. Part of the problem also lies with the GOP itself who, number one, keeps betting on the losing horse that is Donald Trump. Their judgment, obviously, is flawed. And who wants to elect officials who have such tragically fallible judgment?

     But the American voter, and not all of them were Democrats or left-leaning Independents, told the GOP in no uncertain terms that election denialism regarding a two year-old election is a non-starter. Kari Lake found that out the hard way, or she would've if she wasn't denying the results of her own election the Tuesday before last. In fact, of all the election truthers who ran for Secretary of State, only one of them won. In fact, most of Trump's key endorsees lost their respective elections. Only one, J.D. Vance, won his senate election in Ohio fair and square but Vance never embraced the Big Lie, or Trump himself once he got his endorsement.

     So, what's with the Republican cult of losing? One would almost think that's part of the calculus. As it stands now, House Republicans have a razor-thin one or two seat majority. A couple of Republican scandals of congressmen in blue states or ones with Democratic governors could wipe that out, their majority is so close to extinction.

     The American voter also told the GOP that insurrection is a pretty unsexy campaign platform, too, at least outside of GA-14, which is nearly 78% white and seemingly 100% Republican. That's why Marjorie Taylor-Greene is allowed to arrange a pity party for the very rioters whose latter-day lost cause was one of the biggest reasons why her party lost so badly in the first elections after the riots.

     But, again, maybe losing is part of the strategy. It may sound crazy at first but maybe losing is the strategy for bigger and better (or worse) things. After all, you can't perpetually sustain a politics of grievance if, as Trump had promised in 2016, you win all the time.

     Even though Hitler was democratically and lawfully elected in late 1932 and appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, his rise through the ranks of German politics at the end of the Weimar Republic era was based solely on a politics of grievance going back about half a generation to WWI.

     It was the fault of the Jewish bankers that we lost the war, he said, it's the fault of the Jews that we're in a recession, he also said, a lie that set up the Kristallnacht of November 1938. One would think that Hitler should have and would have had a tougher time selling that lie from the pinnacle of German political power. But Germany was in a deep recession, had just lost in humiliating ways a four year-long war and they were spoiling for a fall guy. In fact, they wanted a fall guy so desperately that they either never knew or cared that Hitler had suspended all elections until after the war ended 12 years later.

     That's not the case in latter-day America. We had not gone to war with several nations, we are not in a deep recession, although Republicans will eagerly pretend to be concerned enough with the economy to disingenuously claim we are. But we are slowly turning into a nation of election deniers and there's a vast seedbed of grievance right there.

     It's tough to sustain a revolution of grievance if you're winning. And the closest thing we've come to seeing what that Republican dystopia would look like was what happened on January 6th last year. Yes, one of the very things that kept them from having their red wave on the 8th.

     But look how close they came to shutting the government down. Just as the 9/11 hijackers, as the story goes, changed world history with just a few box cutters, look how close our democracy came to ending on January 6th at the hands of a couple of thousand lunatics armed with little more than flag poles, crutches and bear spray.

     Granted, they were following Trump's thinly-veiled orders to attack the Capitol and they got within 40 feet of Mike Pence and 535 of the most powerful people in the nation ran for their lives.

     The losing is the root of white grievance. And white grievance is impossible without the losing.