First things first, some reminders. Monday, October 5 is then last day to register or to correct any registration issues, like “Suspense.” Early voting, the next best way to voting by mail, runs from Monday, October 19 through Friday, October 30; and, includes the weekend of the 24th and 25th. The earlier the better. If you fail to vote early or by mail, Election Day is last chance Tuesday, November 3.
Democrats need to be reminded because sometimes they get carried away by charismatic candidates and margin of error polls. Some Democrats even get carried away by the fantasy that Republicans will see the error of voting against their self interest and for politicians who gorge on prime rib from Argentina but feed voters with culture crumbs. Surely when that West Texas oilman sees a 765KV transmission line rip his trophy ranch he’ll turn deep blue.
Maybe, but probably not. Since 2016 and one battle after another, writers on the left have struggled to answer some questions. How did this thing happen? Don’t Republicans know what they’re doing? A Bandera Republican — a pretty good guy, down to earth, straight shooter, head on his shoulders — put it this way in 2016.
Sometimes God uses Satan’s minions to prevail in the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness. Trump is God’s tool. God, like some clever master of martial arts, uses the tool to pry open the struggle, mobilize his Christian soldiers and make America great again.
Leave aside the glaring illogic and the stunning arrogance that presumes to know God’s ways. Do not, however, rudely dismiss this answer as a clumsy version of the Manichaean heresy. It is instead a thumbnail version of a much broader pattern the repeats itself in world history and the lives of nation-states.
Humans are goal seeking creatures. They consider how things are, imagine how they might be otherwise, and devise grand plans for getting from here to there. The problem arises when then plans fail, which they have a nasty habit of doing quite often. Humans start looking for the causes of failure and usually turn to one of three general explanations.
People blame themselves. “If I hadn’t partied so hard in high school, I wouldn’t have to compete with illegals for these bottom feeder jobs.” Or, they blame each other. “All those illegals sneaking across the border are getting free DEI stuff from the woke liberals in D.C.” Or, they blame forces whose reality they can only infer from hunches, hints, speculation, connecting the dots, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. “They opened the border to millions of illegals who dropped anchor babies and got into public schools so they could vote for Democrats and other Communists in rigged elections, especially by mail.”
So here we are. Republicans will vote in spite of their politicians’ obsessive destruction of their own voters’ chance to live a good life in America. Their politicians have supercharged inflation and the deficit with a 19th Century tariff war and a renewal of the Bush-Cheney crusade against Islam. They spend billions on the ICE reincarnation of plantation slave patrols and the Miller-Vance fever dream of ethnic cleansing. They sicken us with food borne illness and infectious diseases. They make Flock flicks of quick runs to the store for milk and, one suspects, feed them to DPS Tahoes. In Texas as elsewhere, they give away our air, water, energy, farm and range land, streams and canyons and open space to whatever oligarchs drop a dime in their bucket.
Anyone who dares oppose them — RINO, libertarian, woke liberal, intellectual elitist — gets the Roy Cohn treatment. Like the dogmatic Bolshevik, the first duty of a right wing revolutionary is to win, hold power and use it ruthlessly.
Democrats may reach deep into their hearts and squeeze out forgiveness for these Republicans, believing they know not what they do. If Democrats fail to turn out in numbers, however, they will have validated Simone Weil, as recently quoted in the New York Review of Books. “On the whole, our present situation more or less resembles that of a party of absolutely ignorant travelers who find themselves in a motor-car launched at full speed and driverless across a broken country.”
Tom Denyer has resided in Bandera County since 1979. His favorite Hill Country plant is the Sycamore Leaf Snowbell.
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