Motus Mentis

From an article in today’s New York Times:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.

That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.

The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too, according to a new analysis of voter registration data by The New York Times. The analysis used voter registration data compiled by L2, a nonpartisan data firm.

Few measurements reflect the luster of a political party’s brand more clearly than the choice by voters to identify with it — whether they register on a clipboard in a supermarket parking lot, at the Department of Motor Vehicles or in the comfort of their own home.

And fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.

Six years ago, looking at the possibility of civil war in America, I wrote this:

Ask yourself: looking at the current chasm in American politics, the fundamentally incompatible visions of America the two sides hold, the degree of dehumanizing hatred they show for each other, the bloody damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power, can we imagine some way forward in which the Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?

Of course not. This fight continues, and intensifies, until either one side is destroyed, or we work out some kind of divorce.

Can it now really be that we are actually, suddenly and almost beyond all hope, winning? Is the spirit of the American nation really awakening, and casting out at last the poisonous pseudoreligion that, for so long now, has infected the empty place where its chest used to be?

It’s too soon to tell. Pendulums swing both ways, and we must always remember that rust, like evil (but I repeat myself!) never sleeps: it can only be subdued, and held at bay. But in these last days it really does seem, for now at least, that the the clouds are parting, the sun is breaking through, and some clean, fresh air is beginning to dissipate the sulphurous vapors of the Pit.