A Little Bit of Old School Sailing

I just completed a voyage on an offshore supply vessel. While these ships tend to stay within a hundred miles of the coast of Texas or Louisiana, this one made a coastwise passage to Panama for specialty cargo. The voyage included a transit of the Panama Canal. As I had learned, the canal is of strategic importance to the United States, but the large majority of ships are in bi-ocean trading across both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, perhaps without a stop at any port of the United States. So, the ship had a little bit of crew internet, but not a Starlink setup. In the offshore supply trade, vessels tend to stay in port or near a rig, where cell service is available. Particularly for the deck department, robust internet during transit from port to rig could be a liability, as there are a lot of obstacles to avoid- including abandoned oil platforms. In my case, the vessel was anchored off the coast of Panama for a good amount of time, so I was able to obtain daily access to Facebook, Reddit, and phone calls once we had completed the journey down the Mosquito Coast. As it was on Election Night, I had gone to sleep in the afternoon, and woke up to a changed America. What had happened? Congress had been punished, as one conservative pundit put it, for not doing its job in reigning in the President’s excesses. Congress was a doormat when it should have acted as a co-equal branch of government. Granted, there were some sensible things the President did, such as paying Coast Guard personnel during the DHS shutdown, reciprocal tariffs (not including punitive tariffs), and as I noticed on my return to the United States, dedicated customs lines for US Citizens, as every other country in the world offers their own citizens. I also thought, what if movement conservativism has won everything it has asked for since the Reagan Administration? Certainly, it has taken decades to appoint court justices, establish legal theories, and move the American consensus from New Deal Liberalism to embracing neoliberal economics. Looking at the checklist of issues, abortion has been returned to the states, second-wave feminism has run its course, parental rights in education (including home schooling, religious education, and charter schools) are the strongest they have been since compulsory schooling began, and firearm rights have expanded from hunting rifles to include handguns and possibly other commonly-owned firearms such as the AR-15. In a way, socially conservative, working-class Republicans got tired of winning. The Republican Party needs to find a path forward, something more inspiring than merely maintaining the status quo. Part of this may include embracing populist economic programs, as right-wing governments have done internationally. While working-class conservative voters may rail against other peoples’ entitlements, nobody wants their iron rice bowl broken.