Midterms again - the wave election

I have to thank Rand Simberg for this fascinating find from Stuart Rothenberg, in April 2009: "April Madness: Can GOP Win Back the House in 2010?" Here's how Rothenberg answers his own question:

Yes, Republicans have plenty of opportunities in good districts following their loss of 53 House seats over the past two cycles. And yes, there are signs that the Republican hemorrhage has stopped and even possibly that the party’s fortunes have begun to reverse course.

But there are no signs of a dramatic rebound for the party, and the chance of Republicans winning control of either chamber in the 2010 midterm elections is zero. Not “close to zero.” Not “slight” or “small.” Zero.

Why? Well, because --

Big changes in the House require a political wave. You can cherry-pick your way to a five- or eight-seat gain, but to win dozens of seats, a party needs a wave. 

...

Waves are built on dissatisfaction and frustration, and there is little in national survey data that suggest most voters are upset with President Barack Obama’s performance or the performance of his party.

Granted, this was a year and a half out, but over a year later he was still saying, "At this point, Republicans appear poised to gain two or three dozen seats but fall short of the majority." In the end, of course, they gained 64 seats, a bigger swing than anything seen since 1948. It's not just, in other words, that it was a "wave" election, and not just that it was a wave of historic proportions, but that it was a monster wave that developed so fast and so apparently mysteriously.

Not that losing politicians, pundits, and spinners don't have their usual assortment of hind-sight explanations --  bad economy, bad communications, "outside" money, fear and anger, bitter clinging, racism, blah, and more blah. Any of which would be fine for a more normal mid-term "correction", but none of which seem sufficient to account for what actually happened.

Now, I think, on a kind of meta-political level, the only thing that can really account for it is the idea of a longer-term shift in the political fulcrum, as I posted previously. But on the surface, what's the one explanation you don't hear from anyone on the liberal left? The answer: bad policies, or at least a rejection of Democratic policies by the electorate. But, as Mickey Kaus points out with reference to a distinctly odd, and even misleading column by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, that's an explanation that actually accounts for some statistical correlations: "the more [the House Democrats] opposed the Obama agenda on health care, the stimulus, and cap and trade, the better they did given the makeup of their district." Well, no doubt the lib-left is a little shell-shocked, and even grief-stricken -- but, if they're going to make opportunistic adjustments in time for the next electoral tide in 2012, they'll need to emerge from the denial stage soon.

A week out from the midterm

I should preface this with a reminder that I'm a Canadian, and so an observer rather than a voter. But US elections have a significant impact north of the border too -- the effect is more indirect, obviously, than our own elections, but it may well be deeper, in the influence on our political culture generally.

In any case, while I think of myself as a long-range optimist, in shorter ranges I'm inclined to prepare for worst-case scenarios. So, a week away from the mid-terms, I'm concerned that predictions of a huge Republican sweep are over-confident, and anything short of a monumental overturn will be taken as a Democrat "moral victory". Not that that means much except in the immediate aftermath, but it would have been better to see more modest expectations, and be pleasantly surprised, rather than the opposite. My own sense is that the Republicans should retake control of the House, and make gains in the Senate but be short of a majority -- that seems to me a reasonable expectation, with anything significantly more than that being a genuine Republican victory, anything less a genuine Democratic victory.

My real point, though, is that it's a mistake to look upon any one election or set of elections as some epochal, climactic, make-or-break event. That's an understandable tendency when things seem dire (and I don't doubt it's easier to say when you're out of the fray yourself, as I am) but it invites all the risks of triumphal overconfidence when things go one way, and despairing resignation when they go the other. When what's really needed is a long-term focus on changing the underlying political culture I spoke of above.

Along those lines, it can be helpful to stand back a bit and look at the real nature of the political alternatives before us, or the dimensions of political space. Elections tend to force alternatives into the single dimension of left and right, but political realities are usually more complex. So, for example, despite the general BigGov/smaller-state distinction between Democrats and Republicans, there is a BigGov, corporatist wing of the Republican Party too, just as there is limited state, free-market/capitalist wing of the Democrats. And on both sides there are the usual divisions over "social issues". But the social issues needn't separate people politically, unless they see the state as a means of enforcing their particular views or values -- in other words, it makes sense to pursue a long-term strategy of forging alliances among smaller government proponents, who are prepared to use persuasion rather than power to advance their values. And that, as I've said elsewhere, would be truly progressive.

How do people change their politics?

One of the more interesting comments to come out of the Juan Williams brouhaha (as opposed to a foofarah) is this one  by Doctor Zero, "Juan Williams And The Preference Cascade". A "preference cascade" is a phrase he borrowed from Instapundit himself, Glenn Reynolds, and the good Doctor defines it thusly: "a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts." That consensus might be "manufactured" in a variety of ways, some crude, some subtle -- e.g., a crude totalitarian surveillance, or a more subtle social imposition of "right thinking" -- but however it's done, it becomes increasingly fragile under circumstances that undermine it, including, obviously, those who question it. At some point, there need be only a small event, a single voice, to trigger the "preference cascade" that suddenly shatters the consensus. Doc Zero's contention is that Williams was fired because he threatened to be that voice, with the firing intended to shore up the consensus by sending the message that such sentiments, such "feelings", cannot even be expressed within the confines of the bien pensant liberal orthodoxy that NPR symbolizes.

Whatever the case may be with respect to this episode, however, I think the idea of a preference cascade is a handy one, in the way it can be used to explain fairly sudden, and otherwise quite surprising, changes, not only in political groups, but within individuals as well. It's not just a social consensus, in other words, that gets undermined or hollowed out by disconfirming events, it's also one's own overt beliefs. One can continue to think of oneself as liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, even as one's opinions about this or that particular issue are the opposite of one's long-standing self-labeling -- until something occurs, and it may be quite small in itself, that precipitates a kind of internal cascade, and the old labels just don't seem to have the same relevance any longer. It's why change sometimes seems to come in lurches.

The moving fulcrum

In a previous post I talked about some signs of a slow retreat from statism in terms of an ebbing tide. But I'm thinking now, because of the cyclic aspect of tides, that wasn't quite the right metaphor. It's not that there aren't cycles in historical change, because there are, in political change especially, as we can see in the oscillations between left and right in most democratic polities, and in, for example, US Presidential politics over the last few decades. But those cycles tend to obscure deeper movements that are more directional -- a spiral would be a better model than a simple cycle, and a pendulum whose hinge or fulcrum is moving would be better still. A pendulum swing, after all, is a familiar trope in politics, and we saw it illustrated in the 2008 election that swept not just Obama but Democrats everywhere into power after the Bush years. The swing seemed to have enough momentum that liberals and so-called "progressives" could be excused in thinking it would carry them and their statist agenda into a new era. But when the pendulum's fulcrum itself is moving, and moving in a direction contrary to the swing, the momentum is dampened considerably -- and that's exactly what the statist liberals have run into, with the startling rise of the Tea Party phenomenon and the sharp resistance to additional state intrusions, spending, and taxes.

In other words, the primary movement of the American polity, over and above the usual back and forth oscillations, is to the right, and this is shifting the terms of the debate on both right and left. Marxist terminology, once common on the left, has now almost completely disappeared, apart from some zombified remnants on college campuses, and Hayek and markets are at least more widely understood than ever -- as Brad DeLong nicely illustrates with this post, "How Much Does the Market Organization of Economic Life Matter?", and its revealing little chart of the results of an historical experiment. And even more telling is this confessional article by Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones, on "Schools and Poverty":

I'm going to get the ed people mad at me again — and I guess I'll add the poverty people too this time — but I continue to think that the biggest problem here is simply that no one has any really compelling answers. Movies like Waiting for Superman (which I haven't seen), along with an endless stream of credulous punditry, keep suggesting that the answers are out there if only we'll fund them and take them seriously. But they aren't.

His despair goes beyond the usual left lament that people are maybe tapped out when it comes to yet more tax increases -- he actually begins to question whether the taxes would do any good anyway:

... the tolerance of the middle class for raising its own taxes to improve education is pretty low. One reason, I suspect, is that people have largely lost faith that their taxes are being used for anything useful. If they pay more, they won't get better schools, they'll just get higher teacher salaries as the teachers unions hoover up all the dough.

And this is in Mother Jones!

Of course, as Adam Schaeffer says, in the post from which I got the link ("Why Won’t this Pig Fly? We’ve Tried Everything to Fix Education and Poverty. . ."), there actually are some answers or approaches that can address these problems:

We know what improves education, allows success to scale quickly, and saves money as well; a real market in education, aka private school choice, the freer and broader the better. The education problem is intractable only if the government continues to monopolize education services.

But getting to such solutions will still require a change in fundamental political mindset -- the hinge of the pendulum still has a distance to go.

Tide going out?

It's looking that way -- the tide of statism, that is. There are signs that it may have reached its high-water mark sometime in the 70's of the last century, and has been slowly receding since -- lower marginal tax rates, privatization initiatives, deregulation, etc. And, of course, the momentous collapse of "actually existing" socialism in the early 90's. In the midst of history, as we always are, it can be difficult to see real turning points, and there have certainly been some big waves washing in to obscure the trend. But as we now watch even the welfare states of Europe begin to step back from the path they'd been following, as though from an abyss (to mix metaphors a little), it's increasingly difficult to avoid seeing what's before us. The latest example may be that Nanny State bellwether, Sweden, as an article by Duncan Currie, "Sweden's Quiet Revolution", indicates:

The broader story of the 2010 election is the collapse of Sweden’s old political order, which was dominated by the Social Democrats (who held power for all but nine years and a few months between September 1932 and October 2006). “There is a general change in Swedish society,” Stockholm University political scientist Jenny Madestam told the New York Times prior to the vote. “Social-democratic ideas are losing their grip on Sweden, and we are getting more and more individualistic.” Indeed, the country is a far more market-friendly place today than it was 20 years ago, thanks in part to reforms implemented by the Social Democrats themselves. Over the past two decades, it has been one of Western Europe’s most energetic liberalizers — cutting taxes, loosening regulatory shackles, and increasing competition.

This is what gives the left -- liberal, green, anti-capitalist, or "progressive" -- such willies. For some time now they've had to pin their dwindling hopes not on their ideas, which even they recognize as a bit old and stale, if not sclerotic, but on things like demographics -- more immigration! -- or, or, maybe a great big capitalist crisis! And so, when a great big capitalist crisis (GBCC) came along, as they routinely do, imagine the relief and even exhilaration of the left -- especially as, in the US, it coincided with not just the first black president but with the first black "progressive" President!

Little wonder, then, at their confusion, consternation, and bitterness now, when they see that even a GBCC doesn't seem to be able to turn the tide.

P.S.: here's an earlier take on the bellwether.

UPDATE: Oh, and for a little more on the greens (green being the new red for many old lefties who can't quite bring themselves to say the word "socialism" anymore), here's a piece by Johnathan Adler, "The Sorry Green Giant", showing how much of the politicized environmental movement has been taken over by an ideological rump of displaced anti-capitalists, with the result that that movement too is experiencing the ebbing of trust and interest we see in projects to expand the state everywhere:

The environmentalist love affair with big government leads to counterproductive policies and alienates large portions of the electorate. Americans may support environmental protection, but they don’t support a massive, overweening regulatory state. If the only Green answer to ecological concerns is yet more government control of private economic activity, many Americans will turn away.

This year the environmental movement suffered a tremendous political defeat — some would even call it a reckoning.

Working ourselves up

Ross Douthat:
Paranoid About Paranoia

Makes some good points about the ratcheting up of political rhetoric -- that, apart from some rare but real crazies, the talk is overblown on both sides for effect. Bu$h is Hitler, Obama is an Islamist terrorist, etc. -- these aren't things that anyone really believes but are just ways of verbally puffing oneself up, signalling that "You really need to pay attention to me and what I'm saying, not because it's particularly reasonable but because I'm like, you know, really mad about it!"

In one sense, this is old hat, at least in America -- see the book Infamous Scribblers: the Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns for some good, dirty fun involving attack politics in the early years of the Republic. What seems a bit different now, to me at least, is that the sides are more ideological, or more consciously so, than previously. That too may just be an illusion, due to the shifting nature of the ideological divisions, but, on the other hand, it may be that political venom comes to a head at times of greater political and ideological change. In which case, expect a lot more rhetorical overkill before things calm down.

Living in the midst of history

Two views of this circulating lately on the right -- Charles Krauthammer's sobering if not pessimistic one:

Act One is over. The stimulus, Obamacare, and financial reform have exhausted his first-term mandate. It will bear no more heavy lifting. And the Democrats will pay the price for ideological overreaching by losing one or both houses, whether de facto or de jure. The rest of the first term will be spent consolidating these gains (writing the regulations, for example) and preparing for Act Two.

The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education, and “comprehensive” immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.

That’s why there’s so much tension between Obama and the congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If the Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will likely have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as his foil for his 1996 reelection campaign.

Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do, he knows, must await his next 500 days — those that come after reelection.

So 2012 is the real prize. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans. Republicans underestimate him at their peril.

Versus Jonah Goldberg's optimistic one:

I'm beginning to wonder if the political moment is much, much, more significant than most of us realize. The rules may have changed in ways no one would have predicted two years ago. And perhaps 10 years from now we'll look back on this moment and it will all seem so obvious. ...

For nearly a century now, the rules have said that tough economic times make big government more popular. For more than 40 years it has been a rule that environmental disasters -- and scares over alleged ones -- help environmentalists push tighter regulations. According to the rules, Americans never want to let go of an entitlement once they have it. According to the rules, populism is a force for getting the government to do more, not less. According to the rules, Americans don't care about the deficit during a recession.

And yet none of these rules seem to be applying; at least not too strongly. Big government seems more unpopular today than ever. The Gulf oil spill should be a Gaiasend for environmentalists, and yet three quarters of the American people oppose Obama's drilling ban. Sixty percent of likely voters want their newly minted right to health care repealed. Unlike Europe, where protestors take to the streets to save their cushy perks and protect a large welfare state, the Tea Party protestors have been taking to the streets to trim back government.

But even on the continent the rules are changing. European governments have turned into deficit hawks to the point where the American president feels the need to lecture them on their stinginess. ...

As a conservative, I'm very reluctant to believe that the rules change easily or often. And there's no end of explanations for the political climate that would leave the rules intact. But it's just becoming harder and harder to shake the feeling that something bigger than politics as usual is at work.

 Which one's right? That's the trouble -- when you look back, even just 10 years, a lot does seem obvious. But history is happening and being made now, and we never have a perspective on now. As Goldberg implies, it probably didn't feel like Rome was falling when it was. Or did anyone say, sometime in the 15th or 16th century, thank God we're done with the Middle Ages? (Are we?)

Well, as Woody said: "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

  But change does happen, at all scales.

More on those liberal chickens coming home

A few posts back I linked to and quoted from a column by Neil Reynolds entitled "The disintegration of the welfare state", in which he talked about the modern welfare state as being the product of a kind of democratic bribe of the entire population, creating a momentum that can't be maintained, and therefore threatens to undermine itself. "It’s apparently easier to give wealth away than it is to take it back," he wrote. "Democracy assembled the welfare state peaceably enough. Can democracy dismantle it as peaceably? No, it can’t. The mobs are not finished."

Along a very similar theme of chickens coming home to roost is a post on Volokh by Kenneth Anderson. It's actually just a part of a post, the bulk of which consists of reflections on Hobbes' Leviathan, but this part has to do with signs of loss of confidence among liberals and "progressives" in democratic processes -- as in, e.g., complaints about the country being "ungovernable" -- which he says in turn arises from forces that such political actors have themselves set in motion:

[T]he problem that progressives today have with democratic process ... arises ... from a sense that social and political processes have lost their ability to cohere and make policy — too many people in a democratic system that has been de-natured into mere interest group politics with no greater sense of common cohesion have been granted a veto.

The irony, to be sure, is that this loss of governing coherence is in large part a creation of progressivism itself — the effects of multiculturalism, particularly, in reducing the extra-rational, extra-interest sense of communal ideals, a demos creating a polis, rather than hoping that pure Hobbesian rationality will create a polis of rationality, without any shared sense of community, alone. The progressive political factions that, in power, bemoan their inability to govern — and leaving aside that perhaps a large part of the inability to govern lies in having handed so much of the task over to professors and academics; I at least have a clear sense of what I would lack as an executive — in large part created these conditions. They did so by de-mythologizing, which is to say de-legitimating, the communal political community, the part that allowed the interest groups to flourish by serving as an extra-rational, extra-interest guarantor of the political community.

In this world, we are all just interest groups now, thanks; that is the sum total of democracy. But also by mythologizing communal, identity politics constituencies within the political community and moreover in its place. Progressive elites then profess surprise when, at least on the progressive end of the spectrum, the notion of political community has no meaning because it has no boundaries to define it. There are still spoils to be divided, but no political community actually to govern. This creates a problem, however, for the many things for which the current rulers actually do want to govern a political community and set the terms for the demos, having, so to speak, sawn off the branch on which it was sitting.

Anti-socialism in Cuba -- everyone benefits except the state

Cuba and North Korea, the last of the exemplars of Actually Existing Socialism, both seem to be wavering lately in their anti-market purity. Even North Korea, by all accounts among the most oppressive and nightmarish totalitarianisms ever seen, is apparently about to try some modest market reforms, out of sheer desperation.

Meanwhile, in Cuba, a prominent intellectual has been expelled by the Cuban Communist Party for writing an article criticizing "corruption" in Cuba, at levels both high and low. The supposition, of course, is that his removal is a result of giving offence to some high officials. But, while there's little doubt that corruption has always existed, the significance of the article has to do with those two levels. At a high level, Morales is referring to supposed preparations among the country's communist elite to grab the prize assets of the economy when and as its communist regime collapses, as happened in the USSR -- which might be both an indicator and a cause of such a collapse. And on the street level, Morales notices various "black market" signs that people are already moving to bypass state bureaucracies -- a tendency which he, still a dedicated communist, views with alarm:

... let us look at something very simple. When is there powdered milk in the black market (which has been rising in price to 70 pesos per kilogram)? When the powdered milk reaches the state-owned warehouses. There's no better example than that. And so it is with the products acquired in the black market by part of a majority of the population. In other words, at the expense of the state's resources, there is an illegal market from which everyone benefits, except the State.

And there you have it: in spite of its illegality, a phenomenon "from which everyone benefits, except the State" -- could there be any more apt definition of capitalism? And might Morales removal itself be a sign that even the current elite are preparing themselves for the inevitable?

Dream and reality

Some things are so good that they bear repeating, and an example is this post from the felicitous Doc Zero, entitled "Awakening from the Collective Dream". The start is a bit slow -- I'm more agnostic about gun rights than many Americans, but then I'm Canadian -- but it picks up steam in the middle, and the by the end it gets the contrast between the simplistic imaginings of the left and the simple realities of experience clear, sharp, and exactly right:

The alternative to ambition and commerce is not “social justice,” but widespread poverty. The absence of growth brings collapse, not sustainability. The Constitutional rights of free people cannot exist alongside “positive rights” provided through redistribution. Abandoning the security of our borders does not produce a melting pot of happy immigrants. The government cannot repeal the laws of supply and demand. The freedom to vote does not render all other freedoms inconsequential. Prosperity for millions cannot be designed by a central committee. Social justice cannot be created by administering controlled viral doses of injustice.

Ironically, this is reminiscent of the words Marx used over a century and a half ago to describe the effect of capitalism: "... man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind." (and see this too):

Waking up from these dreams is not easy. ... The collectivist fantasy can end in a relatively controlled manner, with a widespread rediscovery of how freedom and prosperity are inextricably linked… or it can end with the bloody violence of Greece, as angry dependents strip the last measure of their unsustainable benefits from the hide of the middle class. One way or the other, it is ending. Twilight falls upon the empty dream of the twentieth century: to sanctify a brilliant elite through the sacred ritual of the vote, and be ruled wisely.

Republican metamorphosis?

And now, after bring up David Brooks (one of the "two mighty Davids of conservative intellect") a couple of times, as well as the inimitable T. Coddington Van Vorhees VII, it's time to mention a rising alternative in that neck of the woods (so to speak) -- what Doctor Zero of Hot Air's "Green Room" calls the "yeoman wing" of the Republican Party:

The other Republican party is young and vital. On the 2008 ticket, its banner was carried by Sarah Palin. It’s the yeoman wing of the party, composed of people with middle-class backgrounds and real-world business experience. These people are appalled at the bloated mess in Washington, and the smaller but equally fatal tumors infecting many state capitols. They see a government speeding toward systemic collapse, its doom spelled out in the simple math of unsustainable entitlements and economy-crushing taxation.

The interesting thing is how many non-Republicans -- independents and even some Democrats -- are similarly appalled and energized to do something about it, finally. Further evidence that political space needs more than one dimension.

I'm not a conservative, but...

I liked this column a lot (David Brooks again!): "Two Theories of Change". I happened across it from a post in Greg Mankiw's blog, entitled "Modesty, Gradualism, Balance" (I don't claim these are qualities or approaches I exhibit -- merely that I appreciate), which also has a very small-c conservative ring. Mankiw applied those words, taken from Brooks' column, to his own style of "libertarianism", which I would agree with largely, but with a proviso that I'll get to:

I described myself as a "libertarian at the margin." By that, I meant that given our starting point today, I believe more reliance on individual liberty and less on governmental solutions is usually a step in the right direction, but I often recoil at more radical libertarian positions.

Brooks' column itself had a wider reach -- he began by talking about the two versions of the Enlightenment, one being the much better known French or continental Enlightenment, the other being the lesser known but no less important Scottish/British Enlightenment of Hume, Burke, Adam Smith, and others. And "...if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits." -- which relates to an important part of the "Theme" of this blog. Brooks relates the two versions of Enlightenment to two styles of politics that continue to contend today -- he ends his column thus:

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

And that too I'd largely agree with. But -- this is my proviso and the reason why in the end I'm not really a conservative -- we need more than a style of change. We need a direction. And a reason. And once we have those, we need actually to make change, modestly, gradually, pragmatically, and with balance.

The connection between economic policies and values

Why aren't Big Gov liberals doing better, asks David Brooks, after a deal with the devil seemed to give self-styled "progressives" everything they could want? His answer:

Bitterly and too late, Dr. Faustus recognized that economic policies are about values. If your policies undermine personal responsibility by separating the link between effort and reward, voters will punish you for it.