Marching Into Georgia, With The Senate In Sight

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson

by Victor Davis Hanson: The distortions in the campaign and voting that we saw on November 3 will likely be child’s play compared with what will march through Georgia next January.

If recounts don’t change the November 3, 2020, result, the January 5, 2021, Georgia senatorial election becomes a black-swan event like none other in our age.

Incumbent senators rarely have runoff elections. Even if they do, states almost never have two senators up for reelection at once — and never both in runoffs. While control of the Senate has sometimes hinged on the outcome of one senatorial race, rarely has the fate of the nation hinged on two — from the same state.

In January, we will discover whether the Republicans hold the Senate, or whether Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris announce that it is past time to junk many of the very rules by which America makes its rules.

Such melodramatic language is justified. Unlike normal changes of senatorial control, this time around the Democrats have boasted that with a Democratic Joe Biden, a Democrat-controlled House and Senate, Americans will see changes not just in policy per se but in the very manner of how we are governed. Or as now revolutionary Chuck Schumer in melodramatic fashion boasts from the metaphorical barricades: “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world.”

If Democrats pick up both seats, first anticipate the end of the Senate filibuster. With its disappearance after 180 years will go the last check on hard-Left power. Then expect a 15-person Supreme Court. With the end of that 151-year tradition will come the birth of a new “living” and fluid Constitution.

Watch for novel efforts, by hook or crook, to navigate around the amendment process of the U.S. Constitution to end the 233-year-old Electoral College. With all the reins of power, perhaps the Left will figure out a way, on Obama’s prior prompting, to admit two new states (and thus four more reliably Democratic senators).

Don’t count out efforts to see congressional legislation to override state legislatures’ voting laws and enforce on the states lunatic new protocols of the sort we saw this November. The effort will be to “broaden” the electorate, discourage “voter suppression,” and enhance “equity and inclusion” — everything from enfranchising 17-year-old voters, ex-felons, and legal non-citizen residents to mandated early and mail-in voting and rules against requiring an ID to vote.

Georgia’s outcome will determine whether federal legislation will likely smother gun rights akin to Europe’s restrictions, strangle the First Amendment to prevent “hate speech,” and re-create an open border and with it hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens — future progressive constituents all in need of amnesties. Knocking down the wall seems absurd, but such nihilism may offer powerful iconic and psychological relief to the unhinged Trump-hating Left and their Never Trump allies.

One could go on with such political Armageddon scenarios. But suffice it to say, fairly or not, Georgia will not have seen anything like the upheaval since Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Atlanta to Savannah.

After the ongoing contested presidential election, the Georgia-election contours of the known unknowns of the race are pretty clear. That map with a sea of red-county rural expanse pitted against the deep-blue urban cores on Election Day will reappear inside Georgia.

The greater Atlanta metropolitan area and its environs of over 6 million make up a little more than half the Georgia population. The sprawl is supposedly becoming a blue continent inside a red state. So in a fairly evenly matched race, will the Trump base rise up and come out to vote in numbers sufficient to offset urban minorities and suburban professionals?

How many, if any, appearances will Trump make to refashion his campaign rallies on behalf of incumbents David Perdue (if he does not win outright a projected Georgia recount) and Kelly Loeffler? And will some embittered conservative primary voters split on the two?

Will Trump’s perceived utility in Georgia depend on his own fate and status in the current contested election — or intimations that he may run in 2024, that in Jacksonian fashion that he was cheated in a “crooked bargain” by the very miasmic forces he was elected to drain?

Will the “deplorable” vote in two months hinge on perceptions of how well the Republican Party got fired up over charges of fraud inherent in November mail-in voting and computer-glitched distortions that seemed always to go one way? Like it or not, a mob of 2024 Republican wannabe presidential candidates will pour into Georgia, and they will likely, willingly or not, reflect MAGA agendas to the core.

We more easily can anticipate the Democratic strategy, based on the party’s tactics in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Remember how the stealthy Left won back the House in 2018 on the deception that veterans, conservative women, and moderate business people were running as Democrats to reclaim their party from the socialists?

So too radicals Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will campaign as third-way Bill Clinton circa 1992 — on the correct assumption that the hard Left tolerates these deceptions for the greater good of getting power over the supposedly blinkered nation.

For a few weeks during the campaign, both Warnock and Ossoff will shed their former fringe-liberal positions on abortion, guns, support for fringe leftists, open borders, the new Green Deal, radical identity politics, and Israel. Then, like shedding a constraining exoskeleton, all that moderate sheath will be replaced by a renewed robust liberal coating after the election.

Just as the pollsters disgraced their profession to massage the vote in November 2020, so too will they at some point show a blue surge and all sorts of bizarre and contorted reasons why particular demographics have switched, flipped, evolved, and changed to supposedly make Georgia a blue state? If a disreputable Washington Post and ABC could claim that Trump was toast in being down in Wisconsin by 17 points five days before the election, why won’t they broadcast late-December polls showing Perdue and Loeffler as down by 10 and sure losers in Georgia?

Georgia’s ability to run an early-voting/mail-in second election in little more than two months will hinge on what the looming manual recount tells us about the accuracy of its unproven new computer balloting and its misadventure in early voting and mail-in voting.

The media, we know, will muzzle some news, and blare out other news. But it may have less effect on a state electorate that has access to local TV channels not entirely on board with the monolithic narratives crafted by the national networks, the cable stations, and public television and radio. More “fact-checkers” will appear to sort out “disinformation” by contextualizing crazy left-wing narratives and trashing conservative “conspiracy” blogs.

We know the Hollywood celebrity script. By late December, “they” — second tier, has-been stars eager for a virtue-signaling career-boost — will began appearing in “We Are the World”–like commercials, convinced of their limitless power to seduce Georgians into becoming as enlightened as those in Malibu — so they will “do the right thing” and thus vote accordingly.

Silicon Valley will issue warnings about “misleading,” “deceptive,” and “unsubstantiated” tweets, postings, and ads. Twitter, Facebook, and Google in partisan fashion will deplatform, cancel, blue-check, and suspend what is considered incorrect and unhelpful — all in an effort to provide several hundred million dollars in free advertising.

The noble liberal commentariat will advocate patently unethical, illegal, and unhinged nostrums to warp the vote that they think they will otherwise lose. Already the New York Times’ Tom Friedman, as the voice of the good citizen, has urged the anointed to take advantage of Georgia’s liberal voter-residency requirement and move temporarily to the Peach State to deform the vote there: “I hope everybody moves to Georgia, you know, in the next month or two, and votes for these two Democratic senators.”

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang fleshed out Friedman’s rhetoric by claiming he was soon going to do just that: The best thing we could do for Joe is to get him a Democratic Senate. There should be coordination of resources. Everyone who campaigned for Joe should get ready to head to Georgia. I’ll go. It’s the only way to sideline Mitch and give Joe a unified government.

Note the left-wing emphasis on subverting Georgia law as “the only way to . . . ”

Meanwhile, Georgia officials reminded such humanitarians and civil libertarians that it is a felony to move to Georgia temporarily to take advantage of its residency laws in order to vote.

The subtext of these elite contortions is, of course, fear that Georgians might still be Georgians. And thus too many of them just might not be entirely deluded by the charade that Warnock and Ossoff are moderates — and thereby something other than the will of the people is needed. Or as Yang put it more clearly: “It looks like Democrats have an uphill climb in Georgia. It seems like it’s because Democratic voters actually need a little bit more awareness.” Is that the logic — dumb Georgians must be made a “little bit” more aware by undermining voting laws?

Should Biden have won the election, the Georgia race will be a showcase for every jockeying Biden-administration wannabe to prove how his greater fealty and zeal deserve greater career spoils. The ubiquitous fabulist Stacey Abrams will hover about, claiming all sorts of superhuman feats to justify an administration appointment.

In the age of No Dark Money, expect left-wing billionaires to pour cash in. Michael Bloomberg, the Steyers, George Soros, and Silicon Valley zillionaires all vie for the honor of “who won Georgia” for the Enlightenment.

In such a climate, Georgia might at least remind us (again) of the new progressive convergence of unverifiable early/mail-in voting, looming threats of street violence, third-party vote harvesting, court-ordered nullification of constitutionally and legislatively sacrosanct state election laws, massaged polling, 1984 Big Tech Trotskyization, billionaire gifting, celebrity vanity, and pathetic elite appeals to alter the voting electorate — all in service of the noble cause of ensuring a packed Supreme Court or ending the Electoral College.

So there is a pattern to all this. The progressive project has — and feels it must have — all the powers of American capitalism, information, technology, and government on its side.

Yet despite all those assets, why does the “people’s party” still act as if it lacks the people?
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Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. H/T National Review

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