I wonder sometimes if American students are even taught any longer that the American system is designed to be slow, not fast. The idea of the Constitution is to limit power not make it easier to use power.

For that matter I’m beginning to wonder of modern politicians realize it. Especially on the Democrat side, and I’m not trying to pick on the Democrats, but at the moment they seem to be the most guilty. But here let’s not make the same mistake – this isn’t a short problem in the making but a long one. It’s taken more than four decades for our political system to get in this big of a mess. And the Democrats are not alone in causing the problem. But at the moment they seem to be the most shortsighted.

The last four years have been turbulent to say the least, and regardless of the reasons why they thought they were doing what they were doing, the Democrats caused considerable harm to our American democracy. Now I know what you’re thinking, that they had to get rid of that big old evil orange man who is bad. And that no price was too high to pay for that end. Even assuming that the first part of that statement is true the second is not.

The biggest problem in discussing politics is the same exact word can mean completely different things in different contexts. As a graduate student I once had a three hour argument with two other graduate students that hinged on the definitions of left and right. Sounds silly? It really isn’t, because in American politics and in European politics those very familiar terms have extremely different implications.

Here we run into that problem when I use the term Democrat. Do I mean registered Democrats? Do I mean people who identify as Democrats? Do I mean people who think they’re a Democrat but aren’t? Do I mean people who wouldn’t identify as Democrats but who allied themselves to the Democrats? At the moment it’s all of the above. Oddly enough that’s a perfectly valid way to define the term. And yes, this works for Republican as well.

But back to the topic, as I stated I’m using the term Democrat to mean all Democrats registered, identifying as, or allied to. Because is not just the Democrats in office who caused the problem although they will be the first to feel the effects.

Lincoln supposedly stated, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”  We’ll leave it to historians to fight out the details but since attributions go back as far as the 1880’s at least, we’re going with the premise that Lincoln did indeed say it or something very like it. More important than who said it is whether or not it’s true.

There is another, equally hard to nail down, quote: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Attributed to almost everyone in the last three hundred years, let’s just say some variant of it has been around for a very long time.

Today, of course, it’s literally true. The internet and mass media allow lies to spread with frightening speed. Those lies aren’t usually harmless and they pose real problems for those who the affect – and for those who value the truth. But whether it’s limping, well shod or wearing breeches, the important part is that the truth DOES arrive. Eventually, the truth is known.

The drawback to a system that allows lies to spread instantaneously is that it allows truth to follow immediately behind. At least, it’s a drawback to those invested in the lie. Scandals that once took decades to sort out are falling apart within only a year or so – and that’s the ones that are from the tightest of conspiracies. The reality is, conspiracies are very, very leaky ships – and they leave a whole lot of oil and debris behind them. Used to, it took some effort to hunt down the proverbial oil slick or to dig through the sometimes literal trash – now a diligent person with a laptop can do the same job from the comfort of their home and in a fraction of the time.

Big, flashy and outrageous conspiracies only attract more attention faster. It’s not one guy wearing a tin foil hat – it’s hundreds of soccer moms wondering why their kids cant go to the park. Thousands of irate people just wanting to go back to work. Millions of voters who can’t believe a guy that hid in his basement got more votes than Barack Obama in his landslide. And all of these people had computers, internet and time.

Even without the lockdowns, we live in a leisure driven society (ironic given America’s drive for productivity) that maxes the workweek at forty hours. Even those who work more can find a minute or two to look up something of interest. Imagine what people with a few free hours can do. It’s not that corruption will soon be conquered – that would require a change to human nature – but it’s getting a LOT harder to hide, especially if you are high profile like a celebrity, a government or a big corporation.

At the time of this writing there are YouTube channels that have more daily views than all of CNN’s viewership. And YouTube is getting to be an every smaller slice of a very, very big internet pie. Twitter’s user base is losing volume – not that it was ever representative but let’s jut say that only a certain sliver of the political spectrum can effectively use Twitter any longer – it’s simply not relevant for businesses or causes trying to get their word out. Because it doesn’t have the membership it once enjoyed.

There are a combination of factors at play: increasingly extreme rhetoric, increasingly heavy handed moderation and just flat out lies. It’s not unique to Twitter – it’s been happening across the social media and traditional media spectrum. And the results are catastrophic – only Facebook retains anything like its high membership rates (this may be an artifact of the way Facebook was initially marketed and the needs of Baby Boomers who didn’t grow up in a cell phone world). None of the traditional media outlets are doing particularly well – and not just because the election cycle is (mostly) over. That drop in interest is normal – what isn’t normal are the plunging ratings that began before the end of the election.

Communication, my journalism professor long ago assured me, requires two people. You can’t exchange information if no one is listening. The monopoly on information never truly existed – and the powerful distribution centers that did exist are in increasingly dire straights. The number of new platforms is exploding in response to Big Tech censorship. Payment platforms are also growing in number in response to ‘deplatforming’ efforts by the likes of Patreon and Paypal.

Tech monopolies NEED government. Red tape, not technical advancement, is the biggest limiting factor in competition within the electronic banking / payment sector. People have lost bank accounts to banks that didn’t like their politics and there are fears of similar issues using Mastercard’s monopolistic network of fund transfers.

Which is why Congress has had a few interesting investigations and committee probes. Now, they aren’t nearly enough – but that they exist at all is an indication of tremendous political pressure. 2022 is eighteen months away – and the Democrats have a very slim majority and a LOT of really angry people adversely affected by their policies.

I know what you’re thinking – elections aren’t real anymore. Not so fast – 19 states have passed election integrity laws SO FAR. Arizona is finishing up its audit and both Georgia and Pennsylvania are looking at audits of their own. Maybe we’re not fooling all of the people anymore, huh?

Remember that truth is slower than lies – but it DOES get there. Six months into the Hiden admin and the indicators for 2022 are already looking brutal. And I don’t mean the polling (it’s too early for even good polls to be reliable), I mean things like school board turn out (when people show up en masse to the school board meeting it’s almost always a bad sign for that school board), run off results (those really have been brutal for the Democrats with mostly losses) and small donors going heavily to the Trump fund – not the RNC or the DNC. Those are all strong indicators of a fed up public.

I expect the Republicans to retake both houses of Congress in 2022. That’s not at all unusual – but I suspect it’s going to be even more brutal than a normal midterm. Democrats haven’t just ticked off conservatives – they have ticked off their most active base at present, the Far Left. And that base tends to throw rocks rather than vote (looking at you, Portland) – which means in a fair election, the Democrats will probably perform much worse than usual – maybe even worse than I’m expecting.

Less clear is how loyal the liberal base is – frankly, there are signs that it’s cracking badly. A lot of the flight out of blue states is probably from conservatives – but there are indications that moderates and disaffected liberals are also fleeing. How will they vote? At first, probably as independents and more centrist. That is the backlash against their former party. But as they become part of their new communities, they are going to be exposed to conservatism in ways that weren’t possible in blue monocultures – and while they won’t all go get prolife bumper stickers and gun licenses a lot will start voting more moderate to conservative. I don’t see a purple wave, but a red one.

Of course, none of that happens if we all sit around assuming the fight is won. That was the critical mistake Big Tech and Big Media both made – they assumed that they had enough power and influence that they could safely silence protest and dissenting opinions. Despite massive efforts, Hiden barely squeaked into office (yes, I know the numbers – but both candidates got unreal levels of turnout – suspiciously so. Anyway, in those proportions, the margin was thin) and only just managed to hold the House and sorta gain the Senate (seriously, you aren’t much of a majority if you are relying on the VP to get your bills passed).

Here’s the point: the days of fooling most of the people are over. And the lies are ducking for cover because Truth just walked in the door.