The King Of The Rains

The Institute for the Study of War, normally a snoozer on my list of sites to visit, gave me a surprising flash of insight in last night's summation of the Ukraine war:

A pro-war Russian ideologist, Alexander Dugin, openly criticized Putin — whom he referred to as the autocrat — for failing to uphold Russian ideology by surrendering Kherson City on November 12. Dugin said this Russian ideology defines Russia’s responsibility to defend “Russian cities” such as Kherson, Belgorod, Kursk, Donetsk, and Simferopol. Dugin noted that an autocrat has a responsibility to save his nation all by himself or face the fate of “king of the rains,” a reference to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough in which a king was killed because he was unable to deliver rain amidst a drought.

I hadn't thought of Frazer in decades. I ran into him in graduate school, a 19th century bourgeois optimist along the line of Hegel, Darwin, or Carlyle, a distinctly minor figure, but the trope was so intriguing that I followed it up. From The Golden Bough p 107:

The priesthood of the Alfai, as he is called by the Barea and Kunama, is a remarkable one; he is believed to be able to make rain. . . . The people bring him tribute in the form of clothes and fruits, and cultivate for him a large field of his own.. . . He is supposed to conjure down rain and to drive away the locusts. But if he disappoints the people’s expectation and a great drought arises in the land, the Alfai is stoned to death, and his nearest relations are obliged to cast the first stone at him.

For now, this may apply to Putin, but I haven't been thinking about Putin lately; I've been thinking about Tuesday's election. There's a sense that Trump is behind the results, but as I've pointed out, his endorsements performed, if anything, slightly better than in previous years. Few other analyses have been illuminating, but the best one I found I haven't been able to find again. That writer made the point that Trump's first three years, as well as his 2015-16 campaign, were good. His final year, 2020, was a disaster.

He'd previously made monkeys of figures ranging from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton, but by 2020, Dr Fauci managed to make a monkey of Trump. I thought this was a productive insight, but I didn't fully grasp it until I looked at the king of the rains. The electorate would tolerate Trump's abrasiveness as long as they could sense it brought results, but after all, the buck stops at the president's desk. He was in fact the king of the rains, and COVID was definitely drought and locusts together, especially for the working class.

Masks and social distance, after all, were annoyances, and for at least some in the gentry they were even public displays of assent. But everyone could put up with a mask if they needed to go out. The problem was for the millions who were locked out of jobs or had their children locked out of schools. That was more than an annoyance.

So let's look at the few clear winners from Tuesday: Selfish DeSantis Takes Entire Red Wave For Himself:

Donald Trump has appeared unphased by his young rival's selfish stockpiling of precious red wave, an act that purportedly made the 45th president's handpicked MAGA candidates look like incompetent morons, costing the party vital seats in the House and Senate. To demonstrate how unfettered he was by DeSantis, Trump went to TRUTH Social and Truthed, "Little Ronnie DeSelfish won't know what hit him when I very soon will reveal a redder, wavier wave, bigger than any wave that's ever waved. Huge wave. Huge, red wave!"

The few other surfers on the red wave were all governors who won landslides after taking highly visible positions against lockdowns, school and business closures, and mandatory vaccinations, Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott,and Kristi Noem. Kemp and Abbott In fact, are currently thought to have ended the careers of prominent opponents Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke in much the same way that Trump ended the careers of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in 2016. There have been almost no other bright spots for Republicans in the aftermath of the election.

In fact, an indication of Trump's tone deafness after 2020 was his continuing claim, correct as far as it went, to have fostered the development of COVID vaccines under "Operation Warp Speed" -- fine, but the vaccines didn't work and became the cause of much annoyance themselves, especially among working class and military voters, where they worked in combination to prolong other failed policies like school restrictions and lockdowns.

Thus I think I was correct in saying before the election that its big subtext was going to be COVID -- I just didn't quite grasp the spin this would take. Trump in 2020 was the king of the rains. If that was what he claimed to be, he should have driven away the locusts and the drought, especially for the poorest, and he didn't. Nor, of course, did any other prominent Washington Republicans, including McCarthy and McConnell. I would look to this as a key motivator for what's to come.