August 16th was Primary Election Day in Wyoming. From our perspective, of the imminent crises facing the state, the nation, and the world, we draw several conclusions.
For readers who are not residents of Wyoming, the political reality here, broadly drawn, is this. The state is overwhelmingly Republican. Most elective state and local offices are decided in the primaries, because it is a foregone conclusion that the Republican nominee will win the general election.
It is commonplace for our scattering of left-liberal neighbors, who would be proud Democrats in other states, to register as Republicans in Wyoming so they can vote in the Republican primaries and have some influence on the election. As in many other states, party switching or crossover voting is easy; some even change their party registration at the polls on election day, vote in the primary, and then switch back to their true brand. Others just "identify as" Republicans year-round with a smirk and an eye-roll, allowing them to participate in precinct, county, and state party processes. They are joined by slightly less cynical life-long "Republicans" of the "moderate" sort who have not received the memo about the importance of being serious and picking sides in the increasingly polarized struggle for the state and the nation's future.
Cowboy State Daily reports that:
"From January 1 to Aug. 16 – the date of the election – the Republican party gained 19,016 registered voters, while the Wyoming registry as a whole gained just 6,273. That's an internal shift of 12,743 voters into the Republican party."
The political class (if you need a definition, read Angelo Codevilla's classic, The Ruling Class) refuses to place legal restraints on crossover voting, and much of that entrenched political class is of the "landed gentry," "country club," "socially liberal" wing of the Republican party who are embarrassed by the sort of conservative upstarts who would overturn tables in the temple.
Said conservatives are themselves (as is normal in modern America) plagued by infighting and discord. In stark contrast to the unity of the Left, they fight among themselves over everything. They tend to be ideological purists, but there are several grades and varieties of purity. Many are, when it comes down to it, single issue voters, motivated primarily by, for instance, Second Amendment issues, or opposition to abortion. But even on those topics, they come from all corners into the ring with a "holier than thou" attitude based on minor differences in emphasis and strategy.
The first example above is a powerful case-in-point of how conservatives (pun intended) shoot themselves in the foot. Wyoming Gun Owners (WYGO), which had a hand in some rare but significant gun rights victories years ago, has become a fundraising organization that advances bills with no chance of passage, in every legislative session, after which it sends emergency smoke signals out to its followers for more money so they can "save our endangered gun rights." This would be more palatable if the organization were not run by out-of-staters, or if it showed a hint of legislative savvy by supporting bills that could actually pass, or if it and its legislative mouthpiece and founder Anthony Bouchard did not call every critic an "idiot" or worse. Bouchard campaigned for Cheney's Congressional seat with a similar approach, and got only 2.6% of the vote. Of the 37 legislators or challengers backed by WYGO as meeting their absolutist and dysfunctional definition of "100% pro-gun," 24 of them of them lost their primaries.
Still, the best of the conservatives who are in fact Wyomingites have worked through the county and state-level party processes to draft a Republican platform that articulates a broad conservative program.
It's a good platform, and receives benign neglect from most of the political class. Adhering to it would be difficult, politically dangerous, and socially distasteful. The folks who have worked on first their county platform and then the state Republican platform have a reasonable expectation that people holding or running for office as Republicans will support the party's platform and be guided by it; a reasonable but naïve expectation, since no one running for office in the state has any chance of victory if they don't put an "R" after their name, so it's a very big tent indeed. Many who don't simply ignore the platform give it lip service, and then ignore it when it conflicts with "the way the things have always been done" or with their own progressive tendencies, or with the expectations and guidance of the entrenched "good old boys" system and its inevitable patronage and - dare we say it? - corruption.
Faced with these realities, those who are willing to roll in the mud pit of politics do their best, and achieved a few victories in this 2022 primary. Liz Cheney was decisively repudiated and Harriet Hageman will bring brilliance and principled adulthood to replace her in our U.S. House of Representatives seat. Some key offices at the state level were secured by Constitutional conservatives (you can identify them by the vitriol they receive from the shocked establishment), such as Chuck Gray for Secretary of State, with a strong commitment to ensuring election integrity. Aside from wholesale crossover voting, which is a legal if detestable practice, there's little if any evidence of voter fraud in the state; but in the nation at large it's a huge issue and one that we are not optimistic about, going into the November general election.
A few legislative seats were gained by conservatives and some good incumbents like Rachel Rodriguez-Williams and Tim French held onto their seats, and Dan Laursen is moving from the Wyoming House into the Senate. But others like Tom James lost their bid to hold their seats, and too many conservative challengers failed to come out of their echo chambers soon enough to be savvy about how to get elected, without which their principles or abilities won't matter. No few entrenched old-guard legislators like Driskill and Case shrugged off challengers for the typical reasons - they bring home the bacon. Some incumbents, like Sandy Newsome in House District 24, the sort for whom the title of "Republican In Name Only" was coined, squeaked through against a strong challenger on the strength of patronage and family connections, despite voting against the Republican platform 70% of the time in the current term.
Governor Mark Gordon easily defeated his primary challengers for the same reasons, even though his only truly conservative positions have been taken in the last 12 months as the re-election season heated up. We need a Governor who will stand alongside his peers from Texas, Florida and other states against federal overreach, but absent a major change of heart in our entitled Governor, he will not stand in the front rank.
So, as a state we will, as the old saying goes, get the government we deserve. That much is normal: muddling along, winning some, losing some. Fighters fight. As for the rest, this quote (from a surprising source) is pertinent:
"It shouldn't be a bragging point that 'Oh, I don't get involved in politics,' as if that makes someone cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable." -- Bill Maher
But there's an edge on it this year. We are on the brink of a devastating depression, if not outright economic collapse, brought on by less than two years of malign or incompetent governance from Washington since the third-world election theft of 2020. The committed Left has seized the reins of power in America and are busily cutting through them to let the maddened horse run over the edge of the cliff. International order - such as it ever was - has frayed dangerously. A combination of corruption, collusion, and belligerence has brought the Western world to the brink of war with Russia, emboldened China to make its long-prepared move on Taiwan (we wait daily for that shoe to fall), and brought Iran to the very edge of deploying nuclear weapons with an explicit goal of genocide and national suicide. All of this, combined with climate-change folly and the unnecessary, cascading consequences of two years of misguided "pandemic" response, have raised the specter of global food and fuel shortages that will not be easily avoided, or fixed.
The question that occurs to us as we peruse the primary election returns is, "What were you thinking, Wyoming voters?" We have confirmed or placed in office far too many people who are variously clueless, complacent, corrupt, or marginally capable in normal conditions - placing them in positions of influence and leadership in a time of impending crises on a scale America has never experienced. Some of our fellow citizens are avoiding this uncomfortable fact, while others see it - through a glass, darkly - but imagine that Wyoming will somehow be sheltered from the impact of what is coming. Both stances represent foolish complacency.
If we have never experienced true crisis on the scale of (for instance) 1945 in Central Europe, which is the case for most of us, only historical literacy, common sense, and imagination will allow us to appreciate how badly and how quickly the "sanctuary of normalcy" may be shattered. Our elected "leaders," in large part, lack these attributes. We will soon see their quality, as they rise or fall to the occasion. May they not fall too far or too hard.