As we contemplate the ascendancy of the Republican Party, there is some good news.
But first, we ought to consider what losing the Senate, the House and several governorships to Republicans might mean:
1/ Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Mitch McConnell, Gov. Abbott, will be sworn in and will strut and preen and continue doing what they are already doing.
2/ Congress might pass a national ban on abortion, but at least for 2 years, that will be vetoed by the Democratic President.
Planned Parenthood will shut down, but other organizations will spring up to provide contraception, except where state laws outlaw contraception.
Deaths from back alley abortions will increase slightly, but most media attention, especially through FOX NEWS will focus on women who got septic after incomplete abortions induced by abortion pills they bought online and once they recover, they will be tried for murder and the coverage of these trials will make FOX even more watched than it is today.
3/ Religious schools will receive state funds and private and charter schools as well.
Public schools in some, but not all districts will collapse or simply regress into holding pens for the poor, the marginalized kids, who will simply quit and go looking for work or join criminal gangs.
Laws to fund religious schools will pass in the Red States and some purple states and the Supreme Court will find them legal.
Any teaching of the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, slavery will be forbidden in public schools in all Red State as woke "Critical Race Theory." Discussion in classrooms of anything which might reflect poorly on the American Past will be forbidden.
This will mean, eventually, schools will teach only reading, writing and 'rithmetic.
4/ The Supreme Court will strike down Affirmative Action. But that will, for now, affect only colleges, which will do just fine with less diversity, as the University of California system is currently doing.
The Court will strike down efforts to prevent voter suppression or redistricting which will lock in Republican safe seats in Congress.
5/ Immigrants will continue to cross the Southern Border but much theater will ensue showing how harshly they are dealt with and Democrats will try to embarrass Republicans with images of children being mistreated in border prisons. Nothing will change along the Southern border, although much theater will play out there.
6/ More and more states will encourage open carry gun laws and gun deaths will increase.
7/ All efforts at ameliorating climate change will cease and coal fired power plants and oil drilling will stoke up. Plastic will choke the sea and its creatures.
8/ As resurgences of COVID occur, schools will remain open and the proportion of the population over the age of 70, which has been steadily rising as baby boomers age, will decrease, as high mortality rates cull grandparents across the nation.
But the overwhelming of hospitals will likely be only brief, during January and then decline as the warm months ensue.
9/ Efforts to defund Medicare and Social Security or to privatize it will be vetoed by a Democratic President.
10/ A new form of entertainment: Congressional Inquisition, starring Jim Jordan and a whole host of Republican stars will bring Tony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi before the Committees for a Republican attempt to imitate the January 6th hearings.
All and all, it won't be all that bad.
We've certainly been through worse: Only 100 years ago opposition to the draft, criticism of the government, of the war was outlawed and people went to prison. Eugene Debbs spent years in prison, ran for the Presidency from prison and got millions of votes. His crime was voicing opposition to sending American boys to fight in World War One.
The famous phrase, "You can't falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater," was actually Oliver Wendel Holmes's line in a case about people who published a pamphlet opposing America's draft for World War One. Holmes sent the men who wrote that pamphlet to prison for 10 years because he considered opposition to the draft "a clear and present danger" to the nation, its government and the war effort. It was not Holmes's best moment. He later recanted and decided people ought to be able to dissent without going to jail but those men who wrote the pamphlet languished in prison, so his change of mind did not help them.
Influenza was far worse than COVID, and the government's response to it was ineffectual and millions died in wave after new wave and the toll was not as high among the elderly as it was among young men and women.
There was no such thing as Social Security or Medicare 100 years ago and people died in poverty and old age was much briefer. In fact, without Medicare and Social Security, the likelihood is the nation, demographically, would be far younger, as the elderly would tend to die shortly after their 65th birthdays.
Gun violence in the South was just as high or higher in the 1920's as it is around the country today. Lynchings were even more common than now and the murderers of Emmet Till were acquitted because in the South it was not accepted that White men killing Black people should be illegal.
Before the 1920's America was open to immigration, but around 1924 a campaign among American elites, who embraced "eugenics" and who included Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and virtually all the faculties of the Ivy League, and they advocated restricted immigration of "subhumans" from Southern Europe and Jews and Africans and Asians. To allow non white immigrants was "racial suicide" according to Teddy Roosevelt, whose image is today carved into Mount Rushmore.
Elite colleges refused to admit Jews and country clubs refused to admit Catholics. Irish need not apply for jobs and Negroes were controlled by Jim Crow in the South.
So, will the world we are entering be so much worse?
It will be unpalatable, illiberal and it will be Scoundrel Time, but that is no different than for most of our history.
Making America Great Again, will mean going back 100 years, when life in America was remarkably mean and violent. But we'll be no worse off in 2023 than we were in 1923.
The problem is, really, we thought we were better. When Obama won, we thought we had turned a corner.
We were fooling ourselves.
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