In a January 31 Texas special election to fill a vacant state Senate seat, union official Taylor Rehmet beat conservative political activist Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points — in a district where voters picked Donald Trump for president by 17 points only a little over a year ago.

It’s the latest of election victories boosting Democrats’ hopes for a “blue wave” this November and sending Republican political strategists into full-blown panic over the prospect of losing control of one or both houses of Congress.

Even if you’re convinced that the right electoral outcomes can really change the trajectory of events, though, it’s a little early to start celebrating — or mourning.

As Harold Wilson once pointed out, “a week is a long time in politics.”

The midterm congressional elections are, as I write this, 38 weeks away.

A lot can change in 38 weeks. Only 22 weeks separated Abraham Lincoln’s election in November of 1860 from the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861. Only 33 weeks separated George Bush’s inauguration in January of 2001 from the 9/11 attacks.

Events of much less long-term import have their effects as well.

Yes, the party in power historically tends to lose congressional seats in midterm elections. Sometimes a few, sometimes more. Beyond that obvious likelihood, trying to predict the mood of the electorate nine months out is a fool’s errand.

I can, however, confidently predict how much will change as a direct result of the elections’ outcomes, whatever those outcomes may be:

Not much.

Aside from a few firebrands and gadflies — some of whom may even get lucky at the polls — both parties will spend the next nine months tacking toward a wholly imaginary “center.”

We’ll hear a lot, from both sides of the aisle, about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater (even if, as Harry Browne suggested, it’s Rosemary’s Baby).

On immigration enforcement, tariffs, healthcare, you name it, we’ll see a bunch of proposals for tweaking, rather than truly disrupting, business as usual. The only reliable way to tell the two sides apart will be to listen to them yell “fascist!” and “commie!” at each other in between the echoes.

And hey, who knows? Maybe a few of those tweaks will actually get implemented in 2027. The Titanic will still be sinking, but by golly the deck chairs will be nicely arranged for just a little while longer.

Politics won’t get us out of the mess that politics got us into.

But once the celebration that’s already prematurely cranking up ends, we’ll hear endless explanations of, and excuses for, why it didn’t work last time, why it didn’t work this time, and why it will no doubt, for sure, pinky promise work next time if we just keep on voting really, really hard.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When David Brooks claims that his preferred “moderate conservative political philosophy” is in 2026 “so fantastically successful … that moderate Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics,” his intentional sarcasm is clear before the fourth paragraph of his final New York Times column (“Time to Say Goodbye,” February 1): “I’m kidding.”

Even if a reader missed out on the decades of Brooks’s commentary as resolutely as literally-frozen-in-time Futurama protagonist Philip J. Fry, its remainder would beg for the response of Fry’s snarky robotic sidekick Bender: “Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

The very next paragraph, Brooks sees “a weird market failure” failing to provide programs addressing “the fundamental questions of life” (like Cosmos and Star Trek?) and asking “Does America still have a unifying national narrative?” without specifying when one ever existed.

To Brooks, the 2003 of his earliest op-eds was a time before widespread suspicions “that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people.”  He should have heeded the line in The Matrix Reloaded, as applicable to those thronging theaters that year as its in-universe insurgents, on how “we well know that the reason most of us are here is because of our affinity for disobedience.”  A “faith that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity” would have had to explain the long-burst dot-com bubble well before the housing bubble followed (both inflated by the political patronage implied to have left it alone).

The twentieth century is at least distant enough by now to understand how Brooks’s non-total recall pigeonholes the Sixties counterculture as one “less conformist … more creative than the one that came before, though also one that was more atomized” — not one that Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker could quip “gave us both drum solos and drum circles.”

It’s even easier to recount the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressives moving beyond the nineteenth’s supposed “social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis” that would eventually recur in “four decades of hyperindividualism” culminating in the “nihilism personified” of Donald Trump.  After all, even most historians of the period ignore how many of the Progressives, rather than seeking Brooks’s “antidote to nihilism,” remained advocates of the Henry George for whom “all that is necessary for social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—’Land and Liberty!'” Both sides of Georgism derived from the Herbert Spencer who insisted that far from endorsing or excusing “the rebarbarizing effects of the struggle for existence carried on by brute force,” he “had chosen the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than survival of the best because the latter phrase did not cover the facts.”

Brooks acknowledges that “the Iraq war shattered America’s confidence in its own power” (while omitting his role in promoting it).  Cynics who seek not “permission to embrace brutality” but what the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Tim Madigan calls “an enjoyment of worldly pleasures, and a disdain for worldly power” could warn future pundits about similar blunders.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

On January 29, secret federal police (“Homeland Security Investigations”) arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering, and activists Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy for planning and organizing, a protest at a St. Paul, Minnesota church.

Arresting two journalists for covering an event most Americans correctly condemned — if you want to hold a protest during a religious service, hold it somewhere other than in the church — is a great way to create a “chilling effect” on journalism … and distract the public’s attention from other events.

If Crews and Lydell did indeed to conspire to violate the rights of others (a crime under 18 U.S.C. §241) and to interfere with religious worship (a crime under 18 U.S.C. §248), they’ll hopefully be held to appropriate legal account.

But covering such events as news isn’t a crime. It’s unlikely that the charges against Lemon and Fort will avoid dismissal by a judge and make it all the way to trial, and even more unlikely that a jury will convict them. Their arrests were part of a public relations campaign. Look! Shiny object!

So, why arrest them on January 29?

For the same reason president Donald Trump picked that day to declare yet another fake “state of emergency,” this time concerning the sudden and urgent importance  of the “Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba” that US presidents have asserted periodically over the last 72 years.

On January 30, the US Department of Justice three million pages of documents, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images pursuant to its halting, overdue, and partial compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Another three million pages are, according to federal prosecutors, “potentially responsive” the law’s requirements, but DOJ says it’s done bothering with little things like obeying the law where the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein is concerned.

Don’t look, Ethel! (Too late).

At least 4,500 of the three million documents mention Trump himself. Those mentions include evidence that he associated with Epstein for longer, and until later, than he’s previously claimed, and that he flew on Epstein’s private jet more times than he’s previously admitted. They also include allegations — not proven — of his involvement in the sexual abuse of minor girls and the murder of an infant born to one of those girls.

Other documents in the tranche shed light on (or at least bring heat on) Epstein’s relationships with  powerful people such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, and Trump’s prospective nominee to head the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh.

Kinda makes one wonder what’s in the files they AREN’T releasing, doesn’t it?

I guess I can see why Trump and friends picked January 29 to pour some Lemon aid into the ol’ news cycle.

Nice try, but no Cuban cigar.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY