It’s beginning to dawn on Americans that unending political warfare may be their collective lot for years to come, if not decades.

The so-called “red wave” predicted for the 2022 midterm elections that was supposed to set the country on a new course away from Joe Biden’s far-left policies, simply didn’t materialize.

Instead, the country voted for the status quo, a political stalemate that will only exacerbate the hatred and gridlock on all sides.

Voters in Pennsylvania, to take just one stunning example, chose to elect a dead man and someone suffering from incapacitating brain damage rather than a Republican.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

According to John T. Woolley at the American Presidency Project, in the 22 midterm elections from 1934 to 2018 the president’s party has lost an average of 28 House seats and four Senate seats.

And that’s the average. With Joe Biden having the lowest approval ratings of any president since Jimmy Carter, it was not unreasonable to expect the Democrats to see an even bigger repudiation.

Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a military fiasco not seen since the American military fled Saigon in disgrace in 1975. Homelessness and crime are ravaging America’s biggest cities. And even Biden himself admits that the country is closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Plus, rather than addressing the economic concerns of ordinary people, the Democrats seem focused solely on prosecuting Donald Trump and shutting down the social media accounts of “election deniers” and anyone who disagreed about COVID policies.

Yet despite this, it looks like the Democrats will lose only a handful House seats and may keep control of the Senate.

The Democrats and their supporters in corporate media convinced enough people – especially those under 30 – that the midterm elections were a referendum on fascism.

Public figures from TV comedian Bill Maher to Howard Stern insisted that “democracy was on the ballot,” that a vote for a Republican Congress was a vote for the return of Nazi Germany and extra-judicial executions.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who advises Joe Biden regularly, insisted that if Republicans won in 2022 then America’s children in the future “will be arrested and conceivably killed."

"We could be six days away from losing our rule of law," Beschloss said gravely. "We're on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system, and it could be a week away."

Days before the election, Sunny Hostin, a co-host of ABC’s The View, likened suburban women voting Republican to “roaches voting for Raid.”

Generation Z bought it hook, line and sinker.

In a similar speech that even many older liberals found chilling, Joe Biden declared that “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” and insisted that anyone who doubted the honesty and fairness of America’s bumbling electoral system was a “semi-fascist” and danger to democracy.

In states across America, many voted to keep Democrats in power – the same Democrats who imposed draconian lock-down rules that experts now agree were counter-productive and destroyed thousands of businesses.

Democrat governors in deep blue Michigan, New York, California, Illinois, Colorado, Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all won by sizable margins. Worse, Democrats took control of legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota while also gaining full control of state capitols in Maryland and Massachusetts.

In short: half of America – young people, city dwellers, immigrants, ethnic minorities -- wants what the Democrats offer, even if that means some degree of economic stagnation and rising crime.

Pro-abortion initiatives – some legalizing abortion up to birth – passed in Michigan, California, and Vermont.

Voters in supposedly conservative Montana even appear to be shooting down a “born alive” referendum, which would require medical care to be provided to infants born alive after a failed abortion.

Given the choice between the current status quo or more political warfare as represented by Donald Trump and his supporters, the American public appears to be voting for the status quo – despite polls showing that 71 percent of registered voters believe America is headed in the wrong direction and 54 percent believe Joe Biden lacks the mental capacity to be president.

As for what the future holds, no one knows.

Polls show that Biden’s far-left economic policies and racial identity politics remain unpopular, even among many Democrats.

What Americans seem to crave most of all is a return to normalcy, the America of, say, the 1990s or even the mid-2000s – before COVID, men getting pregnant and race riots.

What they are getting instead is politics as usual – the rule of a Republicrat oligarchy that simply won’t tolerate dissent from either the Bernie Bro left or the MAGA Right.

This is the “democracy” that America voted to keep.