The
Deep Midterms
Rarely
in American history have the two parties been so far apart or the choice
between them so stark.
Victor
Davis Hanson Columnist@VDHanson
patriotpost.us 10-22-26
There
are two ways of looking at the midterms, now less than three weeks away.
One
is as a simple referendum on the issues and politicians of the day. The other
involves a far deeper conflict of visions (as Thomas Sowell puts it): socialism
versus capitalism, intrusive versus limited government, and the destruction of
time-honored institutions and traditions versus their preservation and renewal.
Rarely
in American history have the two parties been so far apart or the choice
between them so stark. In brief, Islamist-sympathizing socialism is on the ballot
against free-market capitalism and American exceptionalism.
The
new Islamist-allied socialist Democratic Party is confident, largely because
the party holding the White House has increased its share of House seats in a
midterm election only three times since 1900. Each of those exceptions arose
under unusual circumstances.
In
1934, FDR was still riding the wave of his New Deal promises to end the
Depression.
In
1998, Bill Clinton enjoyed backlash support after the Republicans’ unpopular
impeachment inquiry, at a time when the economy was robust, and the budget was
finally being balanced.
In
2002, George W. Bush had united the nation after 9/11 and had not yet begun
what proved to be an unpopular Iraq War.
In
other words, the party in the White House has gained House seats in only about
10 percent of the 31 midterms over the past 126 years. Pundits also point to
Trump’s approval rating, now below 40% in most polls, and the persistently high
price of regular gasoline ($4.33). Uncertainty over the 33-week Iran war, they
argue, makes it difficult for Trump to preserve his majorities in either the
House or the Senate.
Those
are the issues ostensibly at stake. But the choice goes much further than that:
voters face a “deep” midterm election that will help determine the very future
existence of the nation.
The
new Democratic agenda is not about lowering gas prices. Americans are being
asked to hand Congress to what has become the most radical major party in U.S.
history, as socialists and neo-communists believe they can finally win
statewide races across the country. What would that entail?
Lawfare
The
Democrats have not outlined any agenda other than “Trump! Trump! And more
Trump!”
If
they win the House, Democrats plan to spend the next two years impeaching, investigating,
and hounding Trump, his administration, and his family. Their aim is to block
new Republican legislation and paralyze the remainder of his presidency.
The Iran War
The
Left condemns the effort to denuclearize Iran as a lost war, even though the
United States has nearly destroyed the Iranian theocratic apparatus along with
much of the country’s nuclear, military, industrial, and economic
infrastructure — at a relatively low cost in blood and treasure by
historical standards.
An
enfeebled Iran, stripped of its military and economic dominance and facing an
uncertain future, would no longer be able to blackmail or threaten Europe and
North America as a nuclear-armed theocracy. Its terrorist clients would also
lose funding, weapons, and leadership, with profound consequences for the
Middle East.
When
the war ends — as it soon will — and gas prices return to previous
levels, policies already in place, including tax cuts, deregulation, foreign
investment, energy development, and advances in AI, should help fuel an
economic boom.
But
the Democrats’ plan is simply to withdraw from Iran, count on the goodwill of
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to guarantee free passage in the Strait
of Hormuz, allow Iran to resume full oil production, and accept the Iranian
regime’s word that it will no longer threaten the Gulf states or Israel and
cease its decades-long support for the terrorist proxies — Hezbollah,
Hamas, and, more recently, the Houthis.
Energy
The
party that has repeatedly blocked federal oil and gas leases, canceled the construction
or reconstruction of dozens of pipelines, and spent billions of dollars to
subsidize unreliable, costly, and inefficient solar and wind power is now
promising to lower the price of fossil fuels? Who really believes that?
Instead,
the Left has vowed to end the production of natural gas, diesel, and gasoline
as quickly as possible. Voters need only look at the once robust British and
German economies, now struggling after years of restrictions on oil and natural
gas exploration and development, as well as Germany’s elimination of nuclear
power.
We
should recall Obama’s energy secretary Steven Chu. He infamously let slip that
his goal was to keep American energy prices at European levels. In the UK and
Germany, gasoline is currently around $9 a gallon — a great thing for
Democratic Socialists who see high fuel prices as the best way to cool the
planet and remain in power.
Gasoline
in the United States now averages only $4.33 despite Iranian oil being off the
market, attacks in the Gulf, and Iran’s attempted blockade of the Strait of
Hormuz. The reason is that Democrats were prevented from blocking new fossil
fuel leases, pipelines, refineries, and fracking between 2017 and 2021 and
again from 2025 onward.
Immigration
Almost
none of the current Democratic candidates — at least until the eve of the
2024 election — criticized the Biden administration’s destruction of the
southern border, much less the open-armed embrace with which it welcomed some
10-12 million illegal aliens, including 500,000 criminals.
The
Left wants to dismantle border enforcement and the wall and to ensure that the
current near-zero level of illegal immigration expands to the Biden
administration’s peak of 10,000-plus illegal entries per day. Voters may be
disturbed by ICE detentions, but they should remember a high-profile ICE
presence was only necessary because the border was effectively eliminated by
Biden.
By
contrast, it is almost impossible now to find Biden’s millions of illegal
aliens who were deliberately dispersed by the Left throughout the country
— and particularly into Democratic sanctuary-city states. The Left will
never close the border. Nor will it ever allow immigration to become entirely
legal, meritocratic, diverse, and manageable, because to do so would cut off the
Left’s supply of future constituents.
Fraud
Some
estimates put aggregate current federal-program fraud at nearly $500 billion
annually.
There
is also widespread welfare and social services fraud concentrated in blue
states like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York.
In
these states, welfare and social services are generous and, by design, subject
to little scrutiny. Fraud is treated as a minor problem in what Democrats
regard as a successful effort to attract voters with federal and state dollars.
Few major Democratic officeholders sincerely denounce such fraud, since doing
so could cost them votes.
DEI
The
idea that race, outward appearance, gender, and sexual preference are essential
rather than incidental to one’s identity is a central doctrine of the
contemporary Left.
Should
the Left regain power, expect de facto nullification of the bans against racial
tribalism found in federal law and Supreme Court rulings. Race-based hiring,
admissions, dorms, and graduations would return and proliferate.
The
demands for reparations would likely regain traction, as they already are doing
in California, a state with no history of slavery and 27 percent of the
resident population born outside the United States.
The
Left believes that people who were never slaves are owed billions of dollars by
a government already $40 trillion in debt — and that people who never
owned slaves must atone for an institution abolished 161 years ago. Slaveowners
accounted for about 1.4% of the nation, almost all in the South. That some
700,000 Americans died in a civil war that ended slavery seems to be of
absolutely zero importance to the Left.
Islamism
Only
a quarter-century after 9/11, Islamism is somehow on the ballot. After October
7, the Democratic Party embraced the philo-Islamist/socialist view that sees
radical Islam as not so radical after all. For them, theocratic Islamism is a
legitimate and indeed preferable alternative to democratic Israel and
increasingly a legitimate alternative to Western values and laws.
There
is not a single truly democratic state in the Islamic Middle East, where women,
gays, and non-Muslims are de facto second-class citizens. And yet we are told
by many on the new Left that there is no real difference between Iran and
Israel and that the terrorist organization Hamas is Israel’s innocent victim.
The
apparently new leftist-Islamist alliance is actually not so new. We see its
dividends now in a burning Paris. Decades earlier, that political partnership
destroyed the Shah’s regime and ushered in nearly 50 years of Iranian
theocratic tyranny.
Opposition
to radical Islam and illegal immigration, along with justifiable anger toward a
class of elites who seem openly to hate Western civilization, explains why
reform and remigration parties are gaining traction all over Europe. Indeed, in
the continent’s eleventh hour, Europeans are starting to fight open borders,
unassimilated immigration from the Middle East, radical green ideologies, and
disarmament. Why would we vote into power what the Europeans are now
desperately trying to eject from office?
We
already know what will happen when the new Democrats take power. After all,
they are only promising to do to America what socialists have already done to
now-floundering Europe, Canada, and California.
Before
the election, voters should also ask themselves why more than two million
Americans each year are fleeing the blue-state socialist model.
The
answer? On taxes, regulations, cost of living, housing affordability, crime,
and state budgets, red and purple states consistently outperform blue states.
Americans already vote with their feet; they should remember those differences
when they cast their ballots.
Finally,
voters should also ask themselves why the current crop of Islamist-adjacent
socialists always needs to cleanse their social media accounts. Why must they
retract their prior bombast? Why do they attack questioners rather than answer
questions about their past?
Why
do we all know that what they say and do after being elected will be exactly
what they said and did before they ran for office?
By
contrast, are conservatives, Republicans, or independents serially trashing the
United States in the manner of Democratic Socialists like Hasan Piker, who said
that the United States is worse than al-Qaeda?
Is
there a Republican counterpart to James Talarico, who scrambles to retract
remarks describing capitalism as an “oppressive system” that needs to be
“dismantled” or suggesting that “white skin” confers immunity to the “virus of
racism”?
Or
is there anyone among the conservatives remotely resembling Representative
Ilhan Omar, who declared that America is “one of the worst countries”? Or like
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who called the United States “a f-king disgrace”?
Are
they demonizing the majority of the American people in the manner of Zohran
Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver, who declared that homeownership is “a
weapon of white supremacy”? Or like Melat Kiros, who argues that “We were never
really going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to
without reparations”?
Could
anyone imagine Republican or conservative candidates apologizing for terrorism
in the manner of marquee Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who responded to a
cowardly Islamist attack on a synagogue with “Hurt people do hurt people”?
In
short, treat this midterm election as the deep choice that it is.
