By Michael F. Duggan
I know that this is not an original idea and that I am not alone in feeling this way, but the 2022 midterm elections loom on the close horizon as ominous horsemen of unknown intent. The riders are still too far out for one to discern their countenances or adumbrate their purpose. But one cannot look at events at home and abroad without a sense of national and world-historical foreboding of what they bring.
Again, this idea is not entirely mine; a friend called yesterday and offered the speculation that the ’22 midterms have the potential to make or break the nation, and by extension, the world. Without the hoopla of a presidential year, many Americans do not even follow midterm races. And yet next year’s elections could be the most consequential in U.S. history and will determine how we address our considerable national problems and an increasingly chaotic world to include the unfolding crises of the environment.
Next year’s contests will offer a choice for the nation that is as binary as the two-party system: either a possibility of hope and redemption, or else infamy and perhaps the end of the game, the end of what Jefferson called our experiment. And as the world’s largest economy, it is likely accurate to say, “as goes the United States, so goes the world.”