The Midterms

A Red Herring

Most contemporary political analysis rests on a single, rarely examined assumption: that the midterms remain the decisive point toward which current events are converging.

That assumption structures almost everything. However extreme present behaviour may appear, it is interpreted as instrumental. Approval ratings will eventually discipline excess. Electoral pressure will force recalibration. Institutions will reassert themselves at the appropriate moment.

It is worth questioning whether this assumption still holds.

Not because democracy is fragile, or norms are eroding, or because the word authoritarian needs another outing. Those frameworks have become so familiar that they now dull rather than sharpen perception. The more relevant question is whether power itself is still behaving as though it expects to be judged, reversed, or peacefully relinquished.

This is a hypothesis, not a conclusion. But it increasingly fits the observable evidence better than the explanations that dominate public debate.

Political systems, like markets and legal frameworks, are built on reversibility. Actors assume that outcomes can be undone, that overreach will be corrected, and that today’s winners may be tomorrow’s losers. That expectation of eventual accountability disciplines behaviour…