2022: What the GOP Got Wrong, How To Get It Right.

The Red Tsunami never came.

Maverick consultant Dick Morris, pandering to the mob on the eve of destruction, predicted a "mass extinction event" for Democrats, " ... something more than a tsunami, more than a tidal wave, more than an earthquake. Do you remember ... how ... a meteorite [writer's note: the Chicxulub impactor asteroid] hit the Earth ... and made [the dinosaurs] extinct? Well, that's the magnitude of what I think is going to happen."

Didn't happen. The Republicans failed to gain a Senate majority, lost many important state offices.

However, the tide did turn for the GOP with respect to the U.S. House (most notably): later yesterday. 

The deep fissures in the GOP, between the 'til-the-last-dog-dies MAGAs and the Party Regulars, will largely paralyze the Congress. Good.

Gridlock can be a Rube Goldberg way of promoting smaller government.

Not as pretty as a Goldilocks policy of liberty and justice for all. But still, pretty effective.

What's happening? There's a lot of finger-pointing going on.

The Republican Regulars, like The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, and the Conservative Establishment, such as the National Review, are mostly calling out Donald Trump.

The Republican WSJ: "Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat. ... Now Mr. Trump has botched the 2022 elections. 'We're going to win so much,' Mr. Trump once said, 'that you're going to get sick and tired of winning.' Maybe by now Republicans are sick and tired of losing."

The conservative National Review: "The former president chose poor candidates based on their fealty to him and his fevered and destructive 2020 delusions, spent hardly anything, made himself the center of attention to the extent he could, and conducted himself with his characteristic selfishness and lack of judgment."

The Reactionary Republicans are pointing their fingers mainly at the Establishment including vote counters, the mass media, and Regular Republicans. In the wake of Blake Masters' decisive loss in Arizona, per Yahoo! News, "An online freakout from Donald Trump about this week's midterm elections contained a positively hilarious typo Friday. 'They stole the Electron from Blake Masters. Do Election over again!'"

Trump piles it higher. Per Vanity Fair, in " ... an hours-long meltdown ... 'Trump is livid' and 'screaming at everyone,' an adviser to the ex-president told CNN's Jim Acosta Wednesday morning, with the adviser adding that his boss only had himself to blame for backing 'bad candidates.'"

Such political vituperation is all well and good. Yet in the final analysis it's a tale … full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

What's really happening? Our political system has become unhinged.

There are some fundamental reasons why our politics, per William Butler Yeats, "fall(s) apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned. ... "

What's causing this unraveling?

First, the Big Story that framed our lives for most of a century collapsed. The story we lived by was the story of Good versus Evil, how we, the liberal republican heroic West, are fighting the evil forces of totalitarianism (imperialist, fascist and communist villains) in a century of war.

This story collapsed when the USSR lowered its flag for the last time on Christmas 1991. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 1988: "'Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy,' said Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for U.S and Canada Studies."

"It's historical, it's human, you have to have an enemy," he said. "So much was built out of this role of the enemy. Your foreign policy, quite a bit of your economy, even your feelings about your country. To have a really good empire, you have to have a really evil empire."

No enemy? No unity.

A second big factor? Inflation.

The Republicans have forgotten how Ronald Reagan, together with Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, slayed the inflation dragon. How did they do it?

Let's go back to first principles.

Copernicus, "… THERE ARE COUNTLESS MALADIES that are forever causing the decline of kingdoms, princedoms, and republics, the following four (in my judgment) are the most serious: civil discord, a high death rate, sterility of the soil, and the debasement of coinage. ... [T]he fourth one, which has to do with money ... gradually overthrows governments, and in a hidden, insidious way."

Yes, there are "countless maladies." That said, memo to Republicans, both Regular and Reactionary.

To restore greatness to America: Give us a story of good vs. evil that allows us to identify with a noble cause.

Meanwhile, as Copernicus advised the Prussian nobles (who ignored his advice and saw their governments insidiously overthrown): get militant about protecting our money from debasement.

To set American politics to rights, bring on a story of credible national greatness. And, per Rep. Alex Mooney, R-WVa., make the dollar good as gold again.

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.