Indirectly through Jonathan Bernstein, I came upon a jaw dropping article by Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator, 2014: a Wave Election or an Earthquake? The article goes into some detail describing what the difference is between a “wave” election and an “earthquake” election. It doesn’t help that he seems to have made up the term “earthquake election.” But according to him, a wave election is when one party does really well but it is ephemeral. An earthquake election is where one party does really well and it represents a long lasting political realignment.

The problem with the article is the subtext. This conservative hack is certain that the Republicans will win big in November. Never mind that polls indicate that the Democrats just look stronger and stronger in the Senate and have always looked good in the governorship races. Lord just knows this is a big year for the Republicans.

He also doesn’t actually get the idea of a wave election right. Both 2008 and 2010 were wave elections because the prevailing political tide dragged along a lot of candidates who wouldn’t normally have been elected. Even if the Republicans do really well this year, it won’t be a wave. In the Senate, we are seeing the results of the Democrats’ 2008 wave. There are a lot of Democratic Senators up for re-election in states that are generally pretty hostile to Democrats. The fact that only one of the six main Senate election models give the Republicans an even modest advantage (Just 4 percentage points!) shows this is no kind of wave.

But Lord has a major ax to grind. He claims that the Republicans made major gains in 1994 because Clinton turned to the left. He also claims Carter (the proto-New Democrat who was really quite conservative) lost to Reagan because he was liberal and not because of the bad economy and the Iran hostage crisis. Clearly, Lord is one of the true believers who thinks that if only the Republicans ran the Platonic ideal of the pure conservative, they would win elections for the next century.

Similarly, he complains (This is unbelievable!) that Thad Cochran isn’t a real conservative because he voted to affirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. He likens Ginsburg to Robert Bork. So okay, Jeffrey Lord is not just a conservative hack, he’s also an ignoramus. But he is entirely typical of the whole of the Republican Party. What we hear from him today goes right along with what we heard everywhere in 2012 about Mitt Romney winning the presidency. Remember Peggy Noonan’s belief that Romney was going to win because she was seeing more yard signs? That’s what’s going on here.

In Lord’s defense, he does write, “The GOP establishment panicking over re-electing Pat Roberts in red state Kansas is not a sign of an earthquake election — and maybe not even a wave election.” There are 33 Senate seats up for election this year. Of them, 21 are currently held by Democrats. The Republicans should easily be able to take the Senate. But there is a very good chance that they won’t even be able to do that. Regardless of what happens, 2014 will not be a wave election.

But if the economy keeps improving, 2016 will be a wave election. For the Democrats. And it might even be an earthquake.

Yesterday, over at FiveThirtyEight, David Wasserman wrote, After The Midterms, The Diversity Gap in the House Will Be Wider Than Ever. The numbers are stark. In fact, it would not at all be incorrect to call the Republicans the White Man’s Party. I do a lot of work for a black Baptist church and it has a far larger white constituency than the Republican Party has women or minority groups.

The United States is 31% white male. But the Republicans in the House of Representatives are 89% white male. And the trend is in the wrong direction. It was only 86% before the 2012 election. And since then, it has gotten worse still. There have been six special elections when Republicans won and every one of them was a white male.

Compare this to the Democrats. After the 2012 election, of the 201 Democrats in the House, there were “61 women, 43 African-Americans and six LGBT members.” The Republicans have no openly gay members of the House. But to be fair, the Republican Party has always been a big supporter of self-hating closeted gay politicians. Oh, and in the two special elections since 2012, the Democrats have picked up two more women.

What this all makes me think of is William Buckley statement, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…” This is the basis of the Republican Party. Forget “freedom” and “responsibility.” This is all about the fact that white men have traditionally had ultimate power in this country. And they are afraid they are losing it. This is why they vilify the poor, because it is a way of arguing that white men deserve to be rich because they are better. The poor are over-represented by minority groups. This includes the LGBT community, who are poorer than their straight counterparts.

So a conservative really is someone who stands athwart equal opportunity, yelling stop! Worse than that. He doesn’t just yell stop. He uses the privilege that he has from centuries of repressing other groups to distort the system so that those who have been repressed continue to be repressed. At the same time, he yells, “It’s their own fault!” And he works the system he mostly controls to make sure that when he screws up, the government is there to bail him out. At the same time, he yells, “Food stamps are welfare that must be stopped!” And he congratulates himself on all his philanthropy, that mostly involves being a Job Creator™. At the same time, he yells, “If only there were no minimum wage, I’d hire more 8-year-olds to work in my business.”

Well America, what’s it gonna be? Are you going to continue to vote for politicians who not only don’t look like you, they don’t look after you? You might think that the country is badly in need of change. But these rich white Republicans don’t agree. They stand athwart your attempt to improve your life and yell, stop! And they have an army of lawyers, cops, and PR men to enforce their demand.

As regular readers know, I hate football. I think it is the most boring game ever invented. The primary focus of the game is very big men running into each other. It has very little of the raw athletic beauty of basketball (which I also find tiresome) or the technical grace of baseball (which I must admit to having a great fondness for). But the recent NFL scandals really have gotten my attention and they’ve made me really angry. But I’m not angry in the way you may assume.

I just do not care. Why is anyone surprised that a bunch of steroid cases playing a game that is modeled on old-style symmetric warfare would produce a bunch of violent men? The game itself appeals to the worst instincts in men. It is one big orgy of testosterone. While the rich have made a fetish of greed, the rest of our society has made a fetish of violence.

What angers me is that this is not the problem of the NFL. This is the problem of the people who watch the NFL. The NFL is approaching the problem the same way that any business would. The new domestic abuse guidelines are a farce, meant to tell the nation that everything’s okay; they have it handled. They take domestic abuse seriously! Of course, they don’t. They take the bad PR of domestic abuse seriously. I’m sure they realize that for a lot of viewers, the fact that players act like animals off the field as well as on only makes the game more exciting. It makes it more real. This is not professional wrestling!

The whole thing reminds me of racism in America. We are a deeply racist country, but we spend most of our time pretending that we aren’t. And then, when some comedian uses the n-word, everyone is outraged. I maintain that this outrage has nothing to do with the word. The outrage is about the fact that someone screwed up and made us admit that, yes, there is racism. But using the n-word is one of the most benign forms of racism. I don’t think Michael Richards was necessarily any more racist than I am. It’s our hidden assumptions about different people that most harm society.

Similarly, with the NFL we glorify violence. But as a society we pretend that it doesn’t mean anything else. It is compartmentalized. The billions we pay to owners and the millions we pay to players of this violent game are not supposed to be about anything but the game — it isn’t about violence! But obviously, the people who play this game well are going to be more testosterone fueled and more violent than the average person. In the eight years that Roger Goodell has been head of the NFL, there have been 56 domestic abuse allegations — that’s seven per year. And I’m sure that is just a small percentage of what’s really going on.

I admit it: I don’t like football. I’d love for it to go away so that people could spend their time in more edifying ways. But I don’t see how anyone can watch the NFL and not acknowledge that an automatic part of that is that women and children will be brutalized off the field. And it isn’t just the players who are doing the violence. Five years ago, a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that watching football increased domestic violence. According to an article on it in Slate, “Based on domestic violence police reports from the years 1995-2006, the report finds that when an NFL game ends in an upset, the home state of the losing team experiences a sudden, brief uptick in domestic violence.”

So enjoy your football games. I really don’t mind. But don’t pretend that the associated domestic violence is about bad apples or a cultural problem. Domestic and other forms of violence are fundamental to the game of football.