Tomorrow’s mid-term election portends to be the end of American civilization.
Or not. It will be interesting to watch how these Tea Partysan candidates, who, paradoxically and unconsciously, are running for governing positions on an anti-government platform, will actually function once in government and seated among other governing Republicans. The anti-governmentarians will be a rump within the Republican caucus and they will either consign themselves to irrelevance by holding to their fantastical visions of democratic politics and to their “angry mob” symbolics (and one must consider how much of this anger is real and how much of it is show for the purpose of getting elected by a purportedly angry electorate, as depicted by emocons like Glenn Beck); or they will adapt to business as usual, which means governing according to the principle of compromise (i.e. according to an ethic of responsibility) rather than according to the principle of non-compromise (i.e. according to an ethic of conviction). I suspect they'll soon be fighting to distribute “pork” just like other piggish Democrats and Republicans have for quite a long time now.
However, it is interesting how much the war in Afghanistan is a non-issue, given its costs in human and economic capital.
One foreign policy issue does cut close(r) to home. Insofar as the Mexican diaspora is construed as a terrorist threat, I do expect the new Republican majority to get down to building a Great Wall on the southern border and to seek, at the national level, something akin to Arizona's SB 1070.
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