Realignment?
Tuesday last, as I slept fitfully prior to an early morning journey to Latrobe, Pennsylvania to speak on Montesquieu and the present discontents at St. Vincent’s College, Peter Robinson posted a piece entitled Dr. Rahe, Call Your Office – in which he reported on a conversation that he had had with “a distinguished political scientist here at Stanford, a friend who's a lot more conservative than not.”
When asked whether we were “witnessing a realignment? A decisive rejection of the welfare state?” Peter’s friend “simply stared” at him, “wide-eyed with disbelief. ‘Of course not,’ he replied. ‘What we're seeing is a simple reassertion of the great American center.’ Voters didn't want a lurch to the right under Bush, he explained, so they punished Republicans in the midterm election of 2006. In the presidential election of 2008, voters threw their support behind Barack Obama not because he was a man of the left but because he seemed, in the midst of the economic crisis, calmer and more competent than John McCain. Now that voters have discovered Obama isn't a post-partisan figure but an ideologue after all, they're preparing to punish him in November by electing Republicans. ‘Voters don't want a conservative revolution,’ my friend said. ‘They just want Washington to adopt a pragmatic, moderate, problem-solving approach.’”
When I read Peter’s post late Wednesday afternoon, I was on the verge of going off to attend a dinner and deliver my talk, so I posted a brief comment and went on my way. When I made it back to Hillsdale, I had a lot of catching up to do. So I left it at that.
The question posed retains its interest, however. And so, as briefly as I can, I will respond. Better late, than never.
Peter’s friend has a point. For the most part, we Americans outsource politics. Ours is a representative democracy. Most of the time, we ignore what is going on and leave governance to the officials we elect. The center of our lives lies in the private sphere. As long as we are left alone, we are to a considerable degree content. We don’t like lurching left or right. That having been said, Peter’s friend misses the point.
To begin with, there was no “lurch to the right” under George W. Bush. In domestic affairs, there was a gentle drift to the left. Witness No Child Left Behind and the prescription-drug benefit. Witness the attempt made by Margaret Spellings at the Department of Education to use the accrediting agencies as an instrument for dictating the curricula of our colleges and universities. There was considerable discontent with Bush, to be sure. It had to do with an occupation of Iraq grossly mismanaged, and it took a shellacking of his party at the polls in 2006 to get Bush back on track.
But, to be fair, this is a side issue. Peter’s friend is correct that, in 2008, the voters had more faith in Obama than in McCain. This was partly due to the economic crisis and the fact that a Republican was President at the time of the crash; it was partly due to tactical brilliance on the part of Obama and his campaign team; and it was partly due to the fact that Bush had to a considerable degree alienated his base, to the fact that those angry at Bush had even greater reason to distrust McCain, and to the obvious ineptitude of the Arizona Senator.
All of this is true, and all of it is irrelevant today. The heart of the matter now is that Obama has not left us alone. He has upset our apple cart – both with the so-called “stimulus” bill, the massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and the gigantic increase in the federal debt – and with Obamacare, which has left nearly all of us fearful as to what our situation will be when the bureaucrats have worked out all of the details. Whether we are at this point employed or not (and far too many of us are not), our lives have been disrupted – and when we have expressed our misgivings, we have been denounced as Astroturf, Nazis, teabaggers, racists, and fools. And now we are hopping mad – and when folks get hopping mad, they really are ready for a revolution of sorts.
On Sunday, I posted on BigGovernment.com a piece entitled Can We Trust the Polls? In it, I question whether even Rasmussen has the numbers right. No one, I point out, predicted that Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell would defeat Lisa Mukowski and Mike Castle. No pollster thought either race close. And yet both insurgents won handily: one might even say decisively. The old formulas – based on prior elections – seem no longer to apply, which suggests that the Republicans will do considerably better than the polls suggest.
Furthermore, I noted, a recent survey run by Glenn Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies suggests that, in the 66 House districts classified as a tossup in the Cook Report when he did the survey, the Republicans have a decisive lead in the generic ballot. My guess is that the Republicans will retain every seat they currently hold and that they will gain somewhere between 70 and 100 seats now occupied by the Democrats. If this sounds optimistic, ask yourself this: Who imagined, before January 2009, that Scott Brown would win Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate?
Here is the heart of the matter. Over the last eighteen months, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have taught the American people a lesson – and that lesson is that, if there is not a conservative revolution, they will not be left to their own devices. It will take a revolution of sorts to force a repeal of Obamacare, an extension of the Bush tax cuts, and a balancing of the federal budget. It will take a revolution of sorts to prevent a collapse in states like Illinois, New York, and California where unfunded pension and medical obligations threaten states with bankruptcy. It will take a conservative revolution to secure the passage of entitlement reforms capable of bringing Social Security and Medicare obligations into line with revenues. I could go on and on, but you get the point.
I have nothing against political scientists. Some of my best friends are political scientists. But Peter’s friend, like nearly all political scientists, operates on the presumption that the near-term future will resemble the recent past. Most of the time this is a reasonable presumption. But it is good to remember that no Sovietologist predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. It took men sensitive to the fact that, in politics, critical moments eventually come – men with historical sense, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Amalrik, Richard Pipes, and Ronald Reagan – to recognize the extent of the rot. The welfare state is on the verge of bankruptcy – not just here, but in Europe as well – and we are on the cusp of something really big.
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Comments :
Jun '10
Re: Realignment?
I have nothing against optimists, Professor Rahe. Heck, some of my best friends are optimists.
May '10
Re: Realignment?
What an encouraging read to start with Monday morning. Thank you, professor.
May '10
Re: Realignment?
I've just read an article by James C. Bennet, "The Great U-Turn" linked at realclearpolitics.com that relates to what you say here. I'd be interested in hearing your take.
Jun '10
Re: Realignment?
In addition to all of the above, no one predicted a conservative grassroots uprising that would see over a million protesters in the streets of Washington DC a mere nine months after inauguration. "Unprecedented" seems almost too weak an adjective to describe the event. How did people in power miss something of this magnitude going on right in front of them?
So the Democrats reverted to default mode and trotted out the "narrative" because he who controls the message owns the truth, right? Instead of apply the brakes, the administration decided to mash down on the accelerator like a drunk going around a blind curve with a belly full of beer. All of a sudden the windshield is filled with the sight of Dave Carter's big rig coming at full speed from the opposite direction. Too late!
May '10
Re: Realignment?
Math. Math. Math. Not electoral math (though maybe that too), but fiscal math guarantees that there must be a shrinking of government in the near future, regardless of whether Americans are right where we'd like them to be ideologically.
May '10
Re: Realignment?
I think watching the meltdown at the state level is also informing Americans' view of the Federal government in a way that Washington fails to appreciate adequately. Many Americans are witnessing fiscal meltdowns of government in real time and while some cheer-lead ever larger infusions of federal spending, plenty of others see that route as clearly unsustainable and irresponsible.
Re: Realignment?
Bennet's essay is splendid. I would only add one thing. The invention of the 401k -- to which I believe Newt Gingrich made a major contribution (Am I right?) -- was of vital importance. It foreshadowed the substitution of defined-contribution retirement plans in the private sector for defined-benefit plans and it gave countless Americans a clear and obvious interest in economic growth. The failure to follow suit in the public sector has had as its consequence the great struggle now underway. See my more extended post on this above.
Edited on Sep 27, 2010 at 10:35amMay '10
Re: Realignment?
Paul A. Rahe "I have nothing against political scientists. Some of my best friends are political scientists. But Peter’s friend, like nearly all political scientists, operates on the presumption that the near-term future will resemble the recent past. Most of the time this is a reasonable presumption. But it is good to remember that no Sovietologist predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union."
This is the crux of the matter. As one who spent many years prognosticating, I discovered early that most people merely project the present into the future. The people who "get it" are those who understand the systems and cycles that drive the current events. They are the ones who recognize when the seeds of destruction are sown and who understand their germination period.
Feb '10
Re: Realignment?
This is why I like the theory of Generational Dynamics. It's not perfect, but after studying it in depth, a lot of things in history became much more clear to me, not to mention things happening today.
Things don't always progress linearly. Neither do exponential curves continue to be exponential forever. System dynamics analysis of a phenomenon usually shows why things ebb and flow, and that what looks like an exponential curve turns into an S curve over time.
We are in a very tumultuous period in the generational cycle. Things will not proceed as in the past, and exact future outcomes are very chaotic and hard to predict. But one thing that is easy to predict is that the polarization and hostility will increase until we experience a major national crisis.