The Red Wave That Wasn’t

Last month in Jerusalem, former US ambassador to Israel David Friedman asked Ben Shapiro whether he viewed the United States as a nation in rapid decline. Shapiro replied that he has never been more optimistic about America’s future, and that he foresaw a massive backlash gathering against the entirety of woke culture.

At the time, I thought Shapiro was being far too upbeat, and likely placing too great an emphasis on electoral politics, while ignoring the increasingly monolithic control by woke ideology of the medical and legal professions and of academia.

But it turns out that even the electoral tsunami Shapiro anticipated failed to materialize, despite the most favorable conditions imaginable for Republicans. The out-of-power party almost always does better in midterm elections, and the chief determinant has traditionally been the president’s approval rating and the state of the economy.

Well, Joe Biden’s approval rating is the lowest of any president since Truman; inflation is at its highest levels in four decades; crime has returned to 1990s levels, largely fueled by no-cash bail laws and George Soros–sponsored district attorneys eager not to prosecute; once-idyllic Democratic strongholds like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis have become largely uninhabitable by virtue of homelessness and crime; and parents are increasingly aware of what is being taught in schools and shown in school library books.