RonniSalt
The blue wave won’t wash out the empire
The 2026 US midterm elections have seen Democrats take control of both the House and Senate with large margins, flipping seats deep in red territory once thought unflippable. In South Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, a “bluenami” washed through the country, sweeping away once insurmountable incumbents in Republican strongholds. Texas got a Democrat senator and governor, Kansas saw a blue senator for the first time since the 1930s, and a country that has endured two years of a Trump second term has repudiated his rule at the ballot.
Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim anti-Zionist Senate candidate from Michigan, represents the left end of the spectrum in the vote that the Democrats captured, but he does not represent the essence of the Democrat wave. The median incoming Democrat looks more like Jon Ossoff — willing to criticise Netanyahu and condition some offensive weapons, but unwilling to end all military aid or treat the U.S.–Israel security relationship as illegitimate — than like El-Sayed.
Exit polls and analysis linked the result to frustration over the Iran war, Israeli influence, high costs of living, energy and fuel, plus inflation, but mostly a repudiation of President Donald Trump. All these grievances have changed the DNA of the electoral landscape in the United States.
Before the election, Trump repeatedly framed the elections as a referendum on himself. “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” he said repeatedly to rather small crowds. The historic defeat was a message that went straight to the White House. The President later posted, somewhere in the early stages of grief, flipping in an instant, that he “wasn’t on the Ballot” and if he was he “would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Trump appeared delirious in a series of phone interviews with media after the drubbing, and as the enormity of the results became apparent, the pressure was rapidly sucked out of the Republican cabin. The MAGA soothsayers picked through the bones after the defeat; some willing to talk straight, others inclined to walk the same line that got them to this crisis. They sat on a range of panel shows licking their wounds, showing the clear divide that has cleaved the conservative movement in the US.
Zionist pundits Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, who have leaned on Trump and shaped his decision-making to be in the position he is in today, had the gall to say that Iran wasn’t a factor that influenced the voters. Another Trump whisperer, online-warlock Laura Loomer, who was clocked at a minimum of 138 posts on X in 24 hours, began conjuring a post-apocalyptic fantasy under the yoke of the Democrats and pleaded with Trump to bomb Iran regardless of the result. Those who enabled so much of Trump’s fuckery, destroying his credibility, continued to flog him like a dead horse.
Even MAGA conservatives have seen in the Trump administration something destructive for any objective for the right in America.
The midterms were a repudiation of the President, and a rebuke of his self-centred approach, his wars, his carelessness towards the lives of the people he governs, his compromise in the Epstein files, and how that compromise furthers the aims of those who hold that kompromat.
The repudiation was real — with voters punishing the wars, the spending, and opening up a can on the man who asked them to treat the midterms as a referendum on himself. Yet the institutional and influential incentives that produced those policies remain largely untouched, and largely supported by the incoming Democrats.
Can we celebrate the blue wave that has been returned due to sentiment against Epstein, war and capture by Israel, when many of the returning Democrats are lifetime supporters of Israel, part of the narrative of escalation against Iran, and linked to the same Epstein-associated donor and influence circles as the Republicans they are to replace?
Sure, there is a new cohort of openly anti-Zionist candidates who have inserted themselves into the Democratic architecture through their impressive victories, but when most of their colleagues have signed the weapons packages, and bipartisan bills for military aid, can the result be any more than window dressing for the less insane side of a uniparty blob?
At first the Blue Wave win looks like a breath of hope at a time of despair, but it is a gasp of air in an unsustainable climate. It wasn’t two years ago that the Biden administration was supplying 24/7 weapon airlifts, full spectrum intelligence sharing, and diplomatic cover to Israel to commit its genocide. Nor was it a distant memory when AOC and Bernie Sanders were granting weapons packages to Israel with inadequate excuses, or John Fetterman was hanging with Benjamin Netanyahu. The Democrats have preserved the morbid status quo with the Republicans.
Yeah sure, Trump kidnapped Maduro, and started a war with Iran for the Epstein class, but it wasn’t that long ago when Barack Obama authorised more extrajudicial drone killings in foreign lands than all his predecessors combined, and Hillary Clinton created the conditions that would allow Muammar Gaddafi to be stabbed with swords in a culvert by terrorists-cum-future-Libyan slave traders paid by the West. Many around the world didn’t jump at Kamala Harris offering to prosecute the same relationship with Israel as Biden, and apart from Abdul and a couple of openly anti-Zionist/anti-Establishment examples, it’s hard to be doing backflips for working class Americans or the “Global South” at the moment.
The majority of the Democrats (211 of 264) in the new House next year will still be AIPAC-funded, many of them will still hold stock portfolios that out-compete hedge funds for ROI, some of them will be linked to the same Epstein networks and kompromat that plague those around Trump, and all of them have gotten where they are using the same mechanics of campaigning, intrigue, deal-making and endorsement that have defined the loyalties of Washington politicians since independence.
And for all the talk about blue tsunamis, it is the Nancy Pelosis, Haley Stevenses, John Fettermans, and Debbie Wasserman Schultzes who will still steer the party in its engine room. The hawks at the Democrats have taken their own stances on the Ukrainian War, had their own brand of ramping towards great power conflict with Beijing, and they mostly still support Israel and their UN-declared genocide in body, mind and soul. The Abduls are cracks in the status quo, exceptions to the rule, but not enough to break through the bipartisan orthodoxy of empire.
America has caused the world grief for quite some time now. The tens-of-millions murdered since WWII, the millions dead since the US took the initiative to become a unipolar power in a world full of cowered nations — the constant push and pull, on friend and foe alike, to preserve its interests at the expense of everyone else’s. Democrats and Republicans, time and time again, have both imposed such measures on the rest of the world — they have both wanted to remove Maduro, and they have both dreamed of toppling the government in Iran.
The midterms will change almost nothing structural for Australia. AUKUS force posture, basing access, intelligence sharing, and the political habit of Australian ministers posing gleefully with whoever holds the White House, will continue uninterrupted under a Democratic majority still prepared to fund the same security relationship and manage the same empire endeavours. El-Sayed’s win and the handful of similar exceptions demonstrate that a different foreign-policy language can now win in a swing state — but they do not demonstrate that the peoples’ language has become the governing position of the party that will control Congress. There is still much work to be done.
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