Three takeaways from the US mid-terms

To score off voters’ anger about the Trumpster’s betrayals amounts to a platform that has “We’re not Trump” as its sturdiest if not sole plank. “We’re not Trump” is not a political strategy. There is nothing in it to suggest an alternative vision or program that promises a new way forward for America and its 99.99 percent.  “We’re not Trump” is a betrayal all its own when all a party has on offer is a profession of what it is not. American voters just expressed their anger by way of a system that affords the narrowest of choices. This is not an endorsement of the Democrats’ one-plank platform. It is delusional to read the results today otherwise.

Patrick Lawrence, November 4, 2026

Bearing in mind the accuracy – for those to whom actions speak louder than words, facts more forcefully than narratives however deep pocketed – of this assessment by Chris Hedges …

Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

Chris Hedges (abridged) – Let’s stop pretending America is a meaningful democracy

… corporate media analyses of what just happened and why in the imperial hub Land of the Free will be of limited use. Yet three things, none of them entirely lost on those media, may be said.

First: other than a presidency enduring the biggest mid-term wipe out since Richard Nixon was punished fifty-two years ago for Watergate, the big loser yesterday was the Israel lobby. AIPAC funding proved not so much in vain as positively counter-productive; a truth that Owen Jones – while still labouring, for all his sideswipes at the Democrat Party aristocracy, under the delusion that US democracy is not an oxymoron and can be fixed from within – ably set out in just under thirty minutes yesterday evening.

Second: Vice President Vance, swiftly and predictably distancing himself from his own complicit passivity, got it part right in an X tweet, “The reason we lost is the war”. He meant the criminal war – I use the c-word literally – on Iran and I say part right because had that act of unprovoked aggression succeeded, and not blown back as supply-led inflation, those same corrupt media, including their globalist liberal wings, would have seen to it that such empire thuggery met with resounding approval on Elm Street America.

This is important. Those who refuse to be fooled by a duopoly masquerading as a democracy will note that what divides the US ruling class (a split only weakly and diffusely reflected along red-blue lines when cross party Neocon/Neoliberal separators afford the better indicator) is not whether Iran poses a threat to its licence to loot the planet. It is how that threat is best handled.

Third: the interregnum now opened up, prior to the redistribution of Senate and House seats on January 3, is fraught with danger in respect of all out war on Iran. For reasons I’ve given many times – here for instance – I do not share the view of Professor Mearsheimer, lead exponent of “offensive realism“, that Israel rules the US. And as with many other worthy commentators on the region, he credits the US presidency with too much power; the corporate elites who buy and by that fact own its incumbents with too little. ¹

Nevertheless his is a voice, subject to these caveats, I take seriously.

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Let me leave you with a second snippet from the Patrick Lawrence piece, well deserving of a read, I opened with:

One of the interesting features of the midterm election season is the extent to which voters—finally, at last—are beginning to recognize the connection between the conduct of empire and the decay of American democracy. It is also of interest, I must quickly add, that few of those who just ran campaigns for office—Democrats as well as Republicans, let’s not miss—showed any willingness to address this fundamental contradiction.

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1. My two caveats on Mearsheimer and “many other worthy commentators” are informed by the same weakness in their work. Though superior to mainstream media analysts (an abysmally low bar) their failure to put class in the oppositional sense at the heart of their understanding leads on the one hand to seeing US middle east policy as not in America’s interests (which they conflate with those of its elites) on the other to see foreign policy as driven, subject to constitutional checks and balances, primarily from the Oval Office.