I've been thinking a good bit about Tuesday's elections, as have most of my fellow columnists here at Townhall and elsewhere. Some are pretending the election outcomes don't matter, while others are spreading doom and gloom.
In truth, there's a little bit of truth in both camps. Yeah, these elections were in pretty blue regions, though Virginia swings back and forth like a storm door in a hurricane on statewide elections, or so it seems, and it was always going to break down to Democrats winning in some regard.
But the margins were significant.
And the problem is that all the solutions I can see won't do us a damned bit of good in the midterms.
The truth is that everyone tried to run on affordability as a key part of their platforms, and no, it wasn't just the Democrats who did it. Winsome Earle-Sears and Jack Ciattarelli both had affordability as a concern on their campaign websites because it's an issue that matters to the American people in general, but in New Jersey, New York City, and Virginia, especially, as they were the ones voting this year.
The problem is that many of the problems Democrats were chosen to fix are, in fact, ones Democrats helped create. Things are expensive now because inflation doesn't just drop like a lead balloon simply because Joe Biden left office. Housing in New York City isn't expensive because of the free market, but because zoning regulations, construction costs, and green initiatives make it expensive to build in the Big Apple.
And that goes throughout the nation, too.
I'm not saying Republicans have always gotten it right on issues. While tariffs are supposed to help Americans, some of us are paying more for the things we want or need, and too few feel like they're seeing anything good out of it, for one example.
But the big issue is that many of the problems can be solved. They're solvable, and the solutions aren't difficult. What's difficult, apparently, is getting voters to understand why they're the better course forward.
The Left's long march through our institutions has created a system where many accept progressive and socialist dogma as an inarguable fact, all because their professors told them it was so, and the media, who were indoctrinated by those same professors, keep saying the same things. Those who didn't go to college, or did so before they were indoctrination factories like they are today, often still trust the media to give it to them straight. They repeat the same talking points because they don't know the difference.
Sure, alternative media are all over the internet, but some people just don't mess around with the web, even in this day and age.
The result is that they're unaware of the lies being peddled and the role the Left has played in making their lives so miserable in many cases.
"But Trump won! That means we can win, too."
Yes, Trump won. I'm glad he did, because we'd be screwed if he weren't. Yet Trump had to win in spite of the media. They did him no favors at all, which we're all aware of. Just look at the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, where they edited her word salad response to seem semi-coherent, which is something Harris isn't without help.
They tried to stack the deck and failed, but just because Trump did this, it doesn't mean we can count on it happening consistently without some major changes.
What we need is a change in people's understanding of the world. They see the offers of free buses and free healthcare and can't help but feel like that's a better way forward. They hear about rent control in New York City and think, "I'll finally be able to afford a better apartment," all because they don't understand how the Law of Supply and Demand works, or ponder what happens when landlords can't get enough money from rents to maintain those apartments.
They don't understand the role the government plays in keeping us from creating our own way in the world, of building our own homes on our own dime as cheaply as we can. They don't understand how many things are expensive, not because of greedy capitalists, but because government regulation drives the costs up and up.
We need our own long march through the institutions, one that is kept on the down low so the communists calling the shots don't realize they're being infiltrated. We need to take academia and entertainment, news and sports, until there's a right-leaning tilt on all of them, simply because you can't share anything with the Left, and then we need to educate people on just why their lives are miserable, and it's not because Donald Trump says mean things online.
Until we figure out how to fix the results of the Left's long march, I don't know that we're really going to be able to have the kind of long-term gains this nation truly needs.
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