Well, that was disheartening, dispiriting, and demoralizing.  We went into the party with a president with some of the lowest approval ratings in history and Americans (at least according to the polls) focused like lasers on issues that could be chalked up to Democrat policy failures — namely, inflation and crime.  And yet Republicans are hanging on by a thread, and, as of this writing, it's still possible that Democrats will retain their majority in the House and gain a full majority in the Senate.  If that happens, the American experiment is over, and the Marxist experiment truly begins.

So how did we get here?

In a way, the easiest answer is that our election system is completely corrupt.  It's easy to blame the GOP for letting that happen, but Mollie Hemingway reminds us that a corrupt judge and a forty-year-long consent decree meant that, beginning in 1981, "The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation."

That forty-year period gave the Democrats the ability to lay the groundwork for a fortress of election corruption.  Then, thanks to COVID, the Democrats were able to build high walls for that fortress, walls built from mail-in ballots; drop boxes; ballot-harvesting; driver's licenses for illegal aliens; no ID for actual elections; endless pre-elections; and, most importantly, machines that can be gamed.

In my state, for example, poll workers give us sheets of paper that we feed into a voting machine.  We enter our choices on the screen and then, when we're done, that piece of paper comes back to us with all our choices printed upon it.  We then bring the paper to a scanner that instantly counts the votes.

That sounds good, but here's the dirty little secret: the scanner doesn't read the printed words.  Instead, it reads unintelligible bar codes that we can only hope accurately reflect our votes.  I suspect that if I had any computer smarts and access to the machines voters use, I could game them easily, and no one would be the wiser.  Across America, voting machines are all vulnerable in one way or another to this kind of cheating.

And of course, as every tyrant knows, once you own the voting system, you will always win the elections.  This ends only when a corrupt, totalitarian system collapses from its own weight.

Image: Vote counting by Thomas Nast (1871).  Public domain.

There's also the real possibility that 60 years of nonstop leftist indoctrination — in education; the news media; the entertainment media; and, with accelerating force, the internet — has changed the American people.  Some of us still believe in individual liberty, but most of us don't.  Some of us still believe in a sovereign border, but most of us don't.  Some of us still believe that anthropogenic climate change is an idea cooked up to advance socialist policies, but most of us don't.  Some of us still believe that life begins at conception and is worth protecting, but most of us don't.  And of course, most of us definitely prefer the modern opiates of the people — endlessly streaming media, pot, and government money — to the risks and rewards of liberty.

With those changed beliefs, little things like rising inflation, open borders, rampant crime, and a concerted effort to destroy our children's self-identity and healthy bodies simply don't rank anymore.  H.L. Mencken cynically and accurately wrote that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."  The really hard part is still to come.

Additionally, this election probably marks the end of the Trump era.  As Thomas Lifson wrote, a large part of Ron DeSantis's appeal to conservatives is that he didn't give in to COVID madness.  Of course, blue state governors who killed their elderly and destroyed their economies also won re-election.  The problem for Trump is that his voting base is the side that rewards liberty — and Trump, sadly, paved the way for Fauci, Birx, and the rest to steal that liberty.

The same goes for the 2020 rioting and breakdown of civic order.  DeSantis stood firm against BLM, and voters rewarded him.  Trump, trying not to be the dictator that Democrats claimed he was, gave the rioters free rein.  He didn't endear himself to the left, and he angered the right.

If I were the one advising Trump, I would say he needs to move from candidate to kingmaker.  Although it's entirely unfair that he's not in the White House, his day is gone.  However, if he throws his weight behind DeSantis, their combined popularity may finally be enough to overcome the fortress of fraud that the Democrats have constructed around American elections.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that the GOP is a completely useless, feckless party. The House and Senate leaders seem comfortable as losers, where they get the perks without the responsibility. They've also done nothing to fight against known election fraud, whether it occurs semi-legally (via mail-in ballots or drop-boxes) or completely illegally. They bear a large burden of the responsibility for this disastrous outcome.