Two of America’s top cartoonists perform their postmortem on the 2022 midterm elections. Ted Rall and Scott Stantis discuss what happened and, more importantly, what will happen going forward into 2023 and divided government, and a certain former president’s plans for the near future. They also revisit their pre-election predictions which were, (as Bob Uecker might say), juuuust a little outside.
You can’t blame the Democrats for spinning the fact that their losses fell short of worst-case scenarios. But elections are arithmetic, not calculus. A loss is a loss. Democrats lost the midterms.
Why They Lost
What Democrats Can Do Now
Act how House Republicans do when they’re out of power. It works.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Leftie cartoonist Ted Rall and rightie cartoonist Scott Stantis file their last analysis and handicap before the 2022 midterm elections, both in agreement that things currently bleak for Democrats. Evidence surfaces implicating the British Navy in the bombing of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline. Congressional progressive Democrats are humiliated by having to withdraw their tepid call for diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia. Speculation abounds surrounding the brutal hammer attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their San Francisco home.
“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.” —Situationist slogan, 1968.
Demand #1: The $30-per-hour Minimum Wage.
Not phased in over so many years that today’s $30 is worth $20 by the time it takes effect. $30 an hour for all workers, no exceptions, now. This is an eminently reasonable demand. If anything, it’s too little to ask. $7.25 is a sick joke. Congress’ abdication of its moral duty to reward American workers for their extraordinary productivity by increasing the minimum wage at or faster than inflation has eroded the base salary since the Vietnam era. Corporate profits have soared as workers’ wages have stagnated.
The federal minimum wage was $1.60 in 1968. Adjusting for the official inflation rate, that’s $30.00 today. Let’s party like it’s 1968.
Demand #2: Free national healthcare.
Not market-based, not a hybrid—we need real, actual, universal healthcare. Every nurse and every doctor becomes a federal employee. Health insurance vanishes as a business sector. Every check-up, every test, every doctor’s visit, every medication, every surgical procedure is fully covered, no questions asked, as long as it’s approved by a physician.
This is not too much to ask. Germany, where only 0.5% of the population is uninsured, pays only 10.7% of GDP for healthcare, compared to 16% here in the U.S. Norway, where hospitals are operated by the government, has a $210 per citizen per year deductible after which the government picks up the tab for everything; like Germany, overall healthcare costs in Norway are about 60% of ours.
Throw in dental, vision and mental health.
Demand #3: Slash military spending by 80%.
We’re not the world’s policeman. We’re its deranged serial killer. The U.S. squanders $800 billion a year to invade, occupy, assassinate, intimidate and bomb people who mean us no harm and destroy their infrastructure. That’s more than the next nine biggest-spending militarist nations combined. And those countries total 10 times our population.
Slashing the Pentagon budget would make the world safer. Fewer U.S. wars and proxy wars would reduce anti-Americanism and thus reduce the chance of another terrorist attack, save thousands of American lives and millions of people overseas, not to mention massively helping out the environment.
Those savings would easily cover…
Demand #4: Free four-year college.
Young Americans have long been coerced into a devil’s bargain: without a college degree, they’ve been told, you won’t land a decent-paying job. College is insanely expensive so you’ll have to accept the burden of student loan debt. If you don’t make enough money after graduation due to bad luck or a bad economy or a changing workplace, too bad, you still have to pay. You can’t even discharge the loans in bankruptcy.
If the corporations who own our politicians require job applicants to have a college degree, a college degree should be free. 39 countries have free college. We deserve, and can afford, the same as Kenya, Iceland and Panama.
Demand #5: Leadership to ban the most frightening weapons.
As the world’s most aggressive militaristic nation and its biggest international arms dealer, only the U.S. has the standing and power to stop the arms races we’re starting. The U.S. should forswear its currently-stated, insane option of launching a nuclear first strike and invite all other nuclear powers to make the same commitment. It should join the 80% of the world’s nations that have pledged not to use landmines. It should ban drone-based weapons in its military, police and civilian sectors and demand that other nations do the same. The world must come together to ban lethal autonomous weapons; the U.S.’ early lead in this technology gives it leverage to lead the way.
More to come.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Democrats reacted with outraged contempt after then-candidate Donald Trump pledged in 2016 to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Trump’s proposal, Brown political-science professor Corey Brettschneider wrote in a Politico piece typical of the response, “would run contrary to our long-established understanding of the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press.”
So what’s with their crowing over the nearly $1 billion a Connecticut jury ordered Infowars host Alex Jones to pay the families of eight children murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school?
Jones behaved reprehensibly. He repeatedly ranted on the airwaves that the 2012 massacre was a false-flag hoax perpetuated by the government in order to justify gun control, the parents were “crisis actors” and that the victims either never existed or might have been murdered by their own parents. Some people believed this garbage; 20% of Americans told a poll they think mass shootings are faked. Families reported receiving death threats and vicious communications from Jones’ followers.
Jones finally admitted the tragedy was “100% real” this past August.
Jones has a long history of cruelty and reckless rhetoric for profit. “He has had a role in spreading virtually every incendiary lie to dominate headlines over the past decade, including Pizzagate, the false claim that Democrats trafficked children from a Washington pizzeria; the ‘great replacement theory’ that ignited deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; Covid vaccine lies; and the 2020 presidential election falsehoods that brought a violent mob to the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” noted The New York Times.
Despite committing a litany of the most egregious crimes against journalism, however, Jones is a journalist. Not a good journalist. Nor a responsible one. Because no one, certainly no media organization I can think of, can credibly or clearly draw a line between a “conspiracy theorist” like Jones and an acceptable “mainstream” publication that speculates about nonexistent links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, missing WMDs that were actually found or quashes the Hunter Biden laptop story before finally admitting that it’s actually a real thing. Let he who is without misinformation cast the first editorial—not that self-awareness has made much of an appearance following the Jones verdict.
Suing the media is hard because in a world where reporters are human, turning honest mistakes into legal causes of action would make journalism impossible. The wide latitude given to press organizations has a downside: it protects bad actors like Jones.
In the Jones case, however, the legal system was also a justice system. Defamation is a clearly defined exception to the First Amendment; the pain and trouble Jones caused a group of grieving parents merits punitive compensation. The guilty verdict was justified. But the $1 billion damage award?
Hell yes, say liberal commentators. WBUR, the NPR affiliate in Boston, said $1 billion “is a start.”
“A small but crucial consolation,” observed Slate.
“Alex Jones’ lawsuit losses are not enough,” an editorialist opined at NBC News’ website.
“Tonight, I come to you with a spring in my step, a song in my heart, emotionally and spiritually refreshed,” said Stephen Colbert. “You know how, as humans, we have to accept the fact that, sometimes, bad things happen to good people? Well, by the grace of God, sometimes, bad things happen to Alex Jones. That’s a good thing.”
The tap-dancing on Jones’ presumed fiscal grave falls along ideological lines. Democrats, it seems, do approve of Trump’s wish to “open up the libel laws”—when the perpetrator is, like Jones, a Trumpian Republican.
In 1994 an angry jury in New Mexico ordered McDonald’s to pay $2.9 million (equivalent to $5.8 million today) to a woman who was severely scalded by a spill of the fast food chain’s coffee. The verdict, subsequently reduced by the trial judge to a quarter of that amount, was dubbed the “poster child of excessive lawsuits” by ABC News and energized the tort reform movement.
A fact that particularly agitated the jury was that McDonald’s had received 700 other complaints about burns from its coffee, which was hotter than industry norms, yet had refused to lower the temperature. The plaintiff’s injuries were severe; she required reconstructive surgery.
Even by the eye-popping standards of some of the biggest libel verdicts in recent history, the scale of the Jones figure is breathtaking. Oberlin College ordered to pay $33 million to a local bakery it helped to smear as racist; Amber Heard dinged for $10 million for falsely accusing Johnny Depp of abuse; blogger Tasha K told to remit $4 million to Cardi B for saying she was a coke-addicted prostitute suffering from sexually transmitted diseases; other high-profile verdicts amount to pennies on the dollar compared to the Jones verdict.
Alex Jones’ behavior was repugnant. But no one was injured as a result. Was his behavior 200 times more egregious or harmful than McDonald’s?
Conservatives, Adam Serwer writes in an Atlantic essay sarcastically titled “The Martyrdom of Alex Jones,” “defend their own right to defame others while insisting that the law itself should be changed to make it easier for powerful political figures to silence their critics. What they conceive of is a society, backed by right-wing control of the federal judiciary, in which they have a right to say whatever they want about you, and you have a right to shut up and like it.”
Unlike Serwer, I don’t know what conservatives are secretly thinking. I do know that, whatever was said, no matter how outrageous the speech was, a $1 billion judgement sends a chilling message to anyone who expresses themselves in a public space. The message of the Jones verdict is not that lies or disinformation are harmful, but that there are two classes of libel defendants in American courts—one organized, corporate, connected and protected by judges and fellow members of the establishment and thus barely accountable; the other individual, ostracized, on the outside and thus fair game for jurors and judges seeking to make outsized points.
The gleeful reactions of otherwise sober editorialists to this bloated verdict speaks to how rageful partisanship has become a blinding force in American politics. Defeating an ideological adversary is no longer enough. Like the nuclear weapons that can destroy humanity many times over, nothing short of radical overkill will do. Foes must be obliterated, proportionality and oft-repeated devotions to free speech be damned.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
In this edition of the DMZ America Podcast, nationally-recognized Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis discuss the quickly-approaching midterm elections. How the Democrats are blowing it and why it will be partly their fault if a bunch of MAGA nutbags get elected. Also: what does Haiti have to do with Ukraine?
Freight-train conductor Toby Kemp joins political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) for a behind-the-scenes look at life for railroad workers in the run-up to a likely national rail transport workers strike next month. Between 30% and 40% of all freight moves via rail, so a strike would cause major supply-chain disruptions as the country faces down higher interest rates and an OPEC-led oil shock. Rall and Stantis discuss the political and economic implications while Kemp provides a fascinating look at an important sector of the workforce that often gets ignored.
From The Washington Post: “Just after 11 a.m. on Friday morning, two young climate protesters entered a room in the National Gallery in London containing one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings: ‘Sunflowers.’ They opened two cans of Heinz tomato soup, flung them on the painting, then glued their hands to the wall.”
Phoebe Plummer of the Just Stop Oil movement, 21, shouted: “What is worth more, art or life?” She continued: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet?”
If you didn’t follow this story, you can easily imagine the response of many liberals: this action was stupid. Vincent Van Gogh had nothing to do with global warming. It’s counterproductive. It’s going to turn off people against the environmental movement. Liberals, who claim to care deeply about climate change, similarly deplored the group’s disruption of traffic and sporting events.
“They sure know how to get attention. And while their passion is admirable, their tactics are repugnant,” said Mother Jones magazine editor Michael Mechanic. “All you did was anger the very people you’re trying to appeal to,” tweeted American comic book artist Jamal Igle. “Attacking Van Gogh’s Sunflowers—one of the world’s most loved paintings—will not gain public support, which is what is needed for real change,” said art historian Ruth Millington.
It is largely forgotten that Van Gogh was a populist and a Marxist. Odds are, he would have approved of this attempt to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
There was no damage to the painting, which was protected by a sheet of glass. The incident nevertheless reminded me of the discussion over the 2001 dynamiting of the giant Buddha statues at Bamian, Afghanistan, which prompted global outrage. The Taliban government, which had previously protected the statues, reversed course when a Swedish delegation along with UNESCO traveled to Afghanistan and offered money to buy and preserve the 1400-year-old sandstone relics at a time that the country was reeling under the weight of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, requests for medical and food assistance for living, breathing flesh-and-blood human beings fell on deaf ears.
Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, an adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar explained, “[Our] scholars told them that instead of spending money on statues, why didn’t they help our children who are dying of malnutrition? They rejected that, saying, ‘This money is only for statues.’” Incensed, the Taliban decided to blow up the Buddhas to express their outrage. “If money is going to statues while children are dying of malnutrition next door, then that makes it harmful, and we destroy it,” Rahmatullah said.
I wouldn’t have detonated the charge to blow up those statues. I’m too much of a history geek. But I saw Rahmatullah’s point. Sometimes the world needs a slap across its face to force it to pay attention.
My first reaction to the Just Stop Oil action was: what good is a painting that no one will be around to see in 50 years?
Then—and that’s where I am now—I thought, good for them. Radically mitigating climate change should be humanity’s top priority. 69% of all animals on earth died between 1970 and 2018. Since 1900, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish species have died 72 times faster than “normal.” Droughts are severe. Storms are getting more violent. This isn’t an emergency. It’s THE emergency.
But international organizations aren’t doing anything, because the politicians who belong to them prioritize profits over the planet. Capitalism rules, so the politicians aren’t doing anything. (Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030, as Biden promises, is so not going to happen that it’s hardly worth mentioning.) Citizens don’t understand how awful the situation is, or they feel alone in their understanding, so they’re aren’t doing anything.
We aren’t engaged in sustained protest. We aren’t rioting. We aren’t overthrowing our do-nothing governments. We aren’t even voting against politicians who aren’t doing anything. Here in the United States, only the Green Party cares about climate change—and their votes amount to a rounding error. And the media hardly ever talks about it.
Truly, it’s the ultimate madness. The house is on fire, flames all around, and we’re not even calling 911, much less reaching for a bucket of water. We are all going to die, or if we’re old our children will, yet we remain oblivious, passive, resigned, disconnected, alienated, stupid—for no reason. 99.9% of humanity does not own energy stocks and we’re all willing to die for the tiny minority who do.
So what if the Just Stop Oil activists bum out art lovers? If your blood boils over what they did more than it does over what they’re talking about, you’re too dumb to be won over in the first place. Complacency kills; outrage fights complacency.
Pardon the young people who kinda-sort-of desecrate Van Goghs. For they may or may not know what they’re doing but they certainly know what’s important. If we’re all going to die for no good reason, some of us have the right to go out screaming.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
At least at first, America’s founders famously disliked political parties, and so failed to provide for them in the Constitution. Like them or not, however, the two-party system has prevailed for 95% of our history. Given that third parties face high barriers to obtain ballot access, are shut out of televised debates and routinely denied media exposure, the duopoly is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future.
A corollary to Toqueville’s observation that a well-informed electorate is essential to democracy is that fuzziness and confusion at the ballot box means that voters cannot make an informed decision, will feel cheated and fooled, and will eventually lose faith in electoral politics altogether.
Alas, our two-party system is being corrupted by forces and reforms that trick and manipulate voters.
I’m not talking merely about the longstanding phenomenon of the conservative DINO Democrat or the liberal RINO Republican, though gray-zone wishy-washies do muddy the waters. What used to be a relatively simple choice between the party of liberalism and the common man versus the party of tradition and business is under heavy fire.
This year, for example, Democrats spent $53 million on ads across nine states on “six gubernatorial races, two Senate contests, and five House campaigns,” according to The Washington Post, in order to help far-right MAGA candidates and smear their moderate Republican opponents in GOP primaries—in the words of The New York Post editorial board, “putting their money where Donald Trump’s mouth is” on a bet that Trump-aligned Republicans will be easier to beat this November. Democratic interference worked in four of those.
Both parties have done this sort of thing before, but on nothing close to this scale.
Setting aside the hypocrisy of Democrats characterizing extremist Republicans as an existential threat to democracy and financing those nutty right-wingers so they advance closer to elected office, funneling funds across party lines is a fraud against voters of both parties. Democratic donors don’t send checks to the Democratic Party in order to support the Republican Party. If Dems asked their supporters for permission to divert their donations to their supposed political enemies, that would be something else—but there’s no evidence of that.
At the same time, the money sidelined for this mother of all Democratic dirty tricks covert operation might otherwise have been directed to cash-poor Democratic candidates who could have used it to prevail in the general election. The whole party is thus arguably a fraud.
If Republican primaries aren’t a forum for debate and discussion between and for Republicans only, what’s the meaning of a Republican nominee? Perhaps in an open- primary state they should be listed on general-election ballots as “Mostly Republican” or “Somewhat Republican,” since it’s theoretically possible for more than half the voters in a primary race to be Democrats.
More fundamentally to democracy, people who vote in these races are unaware of some major facts. If Democratic voters knew that their own party helped the “extreme right” Republican nominee, they might withhold their vote from both candidates in order to protest this practice. On the other hand, Republican voters might not reflexively support “their” party’s nominee if they thought they were being duped. Or they might be more likely to do so in order to teach Democrats a lesson. D vs. R isn’t the same as D vs. R*, though they’re labeled the same.
Federal campaign finance laws ought to be clarified in order to prohibit the redirection of monies raised to support the candidates of one party to those of another party.
Washington, California, Nebraska and Alaska have abolished party primaries in favor of blended primaries in which the top-two vote-getters compete in the general election. The law of unintended consequences is epitomized by this misbegotten attempt to reduce polarized outcomes, which has not worked. California’s top-two system was supposed to increase voter participation; instead Republican voters often stay home in the many districts where the general election is a face-off between a progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. Democrats often recruit insincere Republicans to dilute the Republican field enough to push their name into the top two. “Now you have someone in every little f—ing Assembly race trying to prop up the Republican,” Paul Mitchell with Political Data Inc. told CalMatters. “It’s become a part of the process as much as lawn signs. It’s part of the California campaign war chest.”
In the recent Alaska contest for Congress lost by former governor Sarah Palin, 60% of voters wanted a Republican. Yet a Democrat won.
Blended primaries have disenfranchised California Republicans and made it impossible for the average voter to understand who is paying for whom and why. Furtive motivations behind candidacies are anathema to a vibrant democracy that are supposed to be battles of ideas.
Whatever their flaws, political parties provide concise branding for voters who prefer to spend their time doing something other than studying the 50-page ranked-voting guide sent to New York City voters in the last mayoral race. As a political cartoonist and writer, I am as well informed as any citizen can reasonably be expected to be, yet it isn’t realistic to expect me or anyone else to know about the personal and political history of every minor candidate. Like many voters, I’ve never heard of most of the hopefuls for city council or judges so I vote straight party line on the (hopefully not too incorrect) assumption that party affiliation relates to ideological bent. Nonpartisan primary systems require an excessive level of engagement and should be abolished.
Similarly, open primaries in which people registered to one party may vote in the rival party’s primaries undermine the most appealing aspect of a two-party system, the ability of liberals to choose a liberal standardbearer without conservative influence and vice versa. Half the states have full, or partial open presidential primaries in which independent nonaffiliated voters may participate in a partisan primary.
Especially in races where one party’s nominee runs unopposed, as did Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012, it is tempting for that party’s partisans to vote in the rival party’s open primaries for the express purpose of causing mischief. 7% of votes cast in Georgia’s recent “Republican” primaries were Democrats. Brian Kemp trounced David Perdue, the weaker candidate for whom the crossover Democrats most likely voted. But it isn’t hard to find other examples where 7% would change the outcome.
I would have found it fun and hilarious, if I lived in Georgia, to vote in the Republican primary to mess with the results. As a leftist who believes systems ought to work fairly and intelligently, my right to a good time shouldn’t trump democracy.
I would prefer a parliamentary system. Nations with set or de facto two-party systems like the United States (56% in 2016), the United Kingdom (62%), Canada (62%) and Japan (53%) have significantly lower voter participation rates than those with multi-party democracies like Turkey (89%), Sweden (82%) and Israel (78%). The cause is self-evident. Voters are more motivated to turn up at the polls when their preferred party might win a seat at the table; a minor party may join a coalition government under a parliamentary system.
But let’s stick to reality. Until we free ourselves of the Democratic-Republican stranglehold, we’re stuck with the two-party system. And that system ought to be as easy to navigate as a supermarket shelf. Whether it’s a can of food or a political candidate, what is on the label of a product ought to be contained inside.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) bring the heat in this edition of the DMZ America Podcast. The first segment hears them putting the latest escalation in the Ukraine War into perspective and define what modern warfare has become. Next up, Ted and Scott debate the importance of the 2022 midterm elections. Lastly, these two top cartoonists discuss process in this muddled media market. Finally, they bring in a little French. You should listen.
