Democrats Win

November 9, 2022

Yesterday, for the first time in decades, Democrats flipped the houses of the legislature in Michigan from Republican to Democratic control. It hasn't happened in so long that most people don't have a lot to say about it: we Democrats are starting out "in the sands", due to how long they've been out of power in the Michigan legislature.

Just imagine how much drek has accumulated from decades of calcified, Republican control, and how much of the grossness associated with that is going to be swept away so suddenly, it will be surprising to see just how bad of shape we were in before, that we hardly noticed.

Today is a celebratory day, but it's a celebration colored by the lingering thought that perhaps we've taken on a monumental task of righting a ship so long off course, and we almost can't see where, and when, it lost its bearings.

It's a celebration colored, that is, by the sensation that this is the calm before the storm; the absolute stillness of a race just before the starting gun goes off. The worry even years ago, when retaking the legislature was just a pipe dream, was that the problem might be so big that the Democrats re-taking control might not even be enough to fix it.

Well, the years have gone by, and it's clearly not a pipe dream anymore that Democrats could control both houses of the state legislature, and I think I get why that worry was stated in the years before. 

The Michigan Republican paradox of embracing racial and gender stereotypes, while denying that they were embracing them eventually destroyed their organizational structure from within. But at the same time it made discussions of race and gender issues toxic in the public sphere. The only available space for genuine progress, avoiding the toxicity provoked by this Republican collapse, is class politics, which is what the Democrats have progressively to a greater extent been campaigning on. The coup that was the CHIPS Act, though it has provoked dissent over the procedure of building that high-tech economy, has opened up the space for exactly that kind of progressive, labor-based contention of the Democratic Party thrives on.