TIA Daily • September 10, 2010
COMMENTARY
Prophecies, Part 2
This article is continued from the previous edition of TIA Daily.
So we have looked at the best prophesy for what is likely to happen in this fall's election. But what is causing it? Let's go back to a few accurate predictions that were made or linked to in TIA Daily, which identify some of the causes of the electoral backlash against the left.
I should point out (if it needs any pointing out) that I am not always right in my political predictions. It's an inherently unpredictable business, and understanding the big intellectual trends only gets you so far. But there are a few comments I have made or prominently linked to in the past few years that hold up pretty well and help to illuminate why the Democrats are imploding and the Republicans are in a position to make such enormous gains this year.
My first big prediction came in 2008, when I first realized exactly how the Democrats had managed to get a majority in Congress—and exactly how badly it was going to backfire on them, in the long run. Here is what I wrote in the May 21, 2008, edition of TIA Daily.
The Democrats have cheated death over the past few years by recruiting and supporting a greater number of conservative Democrats—even as the views of the party's leaders and core supporters have moved farther to the left.
In essence, the party's strategy—openly admitted in the New York Times analysis [here]—is to recruit conservative Democrats to pad out the party's congressional majority, so that the far left can pass its agenda.... Democratic leaders are seeking to use the conservative Democrats essentially as bench warmers to keep the Republican minority too small to put up effective resistance. They will then magnanimously allow [a few] conservative Democrats to vote against controversial legislation so as not to anger constituents back in Louisiana—so long as the far left still gets it way in the end.
This is an obvious plan to exploit conservative Democrats as pawns of the far left. It is also a plan for ideological fragmentation that has got to have explosive consequences. In the long run, death can't be cheated. And when a far-left party runs relatively conservative candidates, eventually something has got to give.
I followed up on this observation exactly a year ago, in the September 10, 2009, edition of TIA Daily.
After the 2004 election, the Democratic Party looked dead: it didn't have the presidency, it didn't control either house of Congress, and it had lost all realistic hope of taking back a majority on the Supreme Court. All this after a campaign against a not terribly strong incumbent who had just allowed the occupation of Iraq to collapse into a full-blown insurgency. If the Democrats couldn't win then, they were in trouble.
In the past few years, of course, the Democrats have been winning again, but it turns out they are still in trouble. Why? Because of how they won. They cheated death—but they can't cheat it forever.
The Democrats cobbled together a congressional majority by recruiting relatively conservative candidates to run in relatively conservative districts. This created a huge gap between the rank and file Democrats in the House and the Democratic leadership. The rank and file is full of conservative "blue dogs" from the South and West—while the leadership is full of Barney Franks and Nancy Pelosis, ultra-leftists from Massachusetts and San Francisco.
The ideological gap between the average congressional Democrat and the Democratic committee chairmen is the widest it has ever been, and that means that something's got to give. So far, the health care bill is what's giving.
Unfortunately, the health care bill did not give, but that just delayed the day of reckoning. Something still has to give, and it looks like what's going to give is the Democrats' congressional majority.
But the context for this is the fact that the pseudo-conservative Democrats are being punished because the public—including "swing voters" who moved left in 2008—have rejected the views of the far left. Why?
Shortly after the last election, in the November 12, 2008, edition, I linked to an absolutely essential column by Tony Blankley, who offered a revealing historical analogy.
Consider that in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won his first presidential election, the public was self-identified as 46 percent moderate, 28 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal. But by the 1984 Reagan re-election the public had shifted to 42 percent moderate, 33 percent conservative and 16 percent liberal—a statistically significant shift to the right. In those four years Mr. Reagan had convinced 5 percent of the electorate to move largely from moderate to conservative. And that 5 percent have stayed conservative for 24 years, right through the 2008 election. It is that 5 percent that has made America a center-right country, rather than a centrist country—allowing a fairly conservative Republican Party to win both congressional and presidential elections most of the time.
That is why it is so vital for both the Republican Party and a newly aroused conservative movement to work feverishly to make the case to the broadest possible public for our right-of-center views over the next four years. Mr. Obama has not made his case yet. Just as Mr. Reagan won in 1980 in part because a lot of moderates were tired of Jimmy Carter—double digit interest rates, stagflation, Soviets in Afghanistan, Iranian hostage crisis—so a lot of moderates voted for Mr. Obama because of housing market crash, financial crisis, drop in 401(k) account values, and two wars.
Mr. Obama will try to convert those temporary moderate and conservative votes of his into permanent liberal and moderate voters, just as Mr. Reagan did in reverse between 1981–1984. If we conservatives can make our case, the election of 2008 will be a blip, just a kick-the-bums-out election. If Mr. Obama makes his case, he may have moved the center of political gravity to the left for a generation. Every conservative man and woman to battle stations.
Well, we went to battle stations—and we're winning.
(A brief note on terminology. I don't refer to myself as a "conservative," the term used by Blankley, because that implies a whole philosophy of religion, traditionalism, and a deep suspicion of "ideology." Nor do I describe myself as a "libertarian," which also implies a whole, detailed program, including heavy doses of subjectivist philosophy and a pacifist foreign policy. But I do describe myself as being "on the right," a much vaguer term which—if you were to ask the average person on the street—mostly refers to advocacy of free markets and a strong national defense.)
But on the deepest level, what makes this victory possible? Here, I found it interesting to look up what I said about a year and a half ago, in response to a news article reporting that President Obama had hit a record high in presidential popularity. (What a difference 18 months can make, eh?) Here is what I wrote in the March 6, 2008, edition of TIA Daily.
This is precisely the FDR formula that Obama has adopted: systematically wreck the economy—then give the people a pep talk and pose as their savior. So far, he is getting away with it.
But he cannot get away with it forever. The only way he could do so is if, in the next year, the economy were to recover smartly on its own. This is precisely the assumption behind the budget plan Obama recently submitted to Congress, which assumes annual economic growth above 3% in 2010, and at 4% in 2011 and beyond. [Update: Current economic growth is about 1.5% and expected to stay there into the indefinite future.] Even if it is the thrift and industry of private individuals that will be responsible for the recovery, and not the president's policies, he will still take credit for the result and count it as a vindication of his agenda.
But precisely because Obama's leftist agenda is so ambitious, this outcome is extremely unlikely. [Update: Current economic growth is about 1.5%—far below Obama's projections—and expected to stay there into the indefinite future.]...
Add to this the fact that, as one of my readers put it to me, "In the 1930s, we hadn't experienced a century of socialism on a grand scale and, more importantly, a certain author's works weren't being picked up by 100,000-plus new readers every year." Socialism is no longer a new and untested theory. Rather, it has been thoroughly tested in every possible variant in dozens of countries around the world, and it has failed every time.
A lot of us have been dismayed that it seems as if America has decided to go "back to economic kindergarten" (in the words of one conservative commentator), acting as if no one had learned the lessons of the 20th century. But we did go through that history, and its lessons are still available, in the minds of today's best thinkers—and, of course, in the works of the thinker who drew the most profound lessons from that history. As a result, we enter the current crisis with far greater reserves of intellectual capital on the issue of capitalism versus socialism than we had in 1932....
America does not need to learn the lessons of socialism's failure all over again; it simply needs a refresher course. This is not at all unusual, by the way, in the way that ideas are learned. A lesson may be learned the first time around, but then the public is practiced upon over a period of years by the leftover partisans of a discredited ideology, who are able to sow enough confusion to regain power and influence. But when they produce the same results the second time around, the lesson is quickly learned again, and retained more fully.
President Obama will be one teacher of this refresher course, playing his unwitting role by implementing a new version of the New Deal and producing the same disastrous results. Ayn Rand and those who are influenced by her and other pro-free-market thinkers will play a more beneficial role. We will be there, armed with everything that we learned from the past century, ready to explain to the public what is going wrong and why—and doing it with the goal of making sure that the lesson sticks this time.
Maybe a massive Democratic defeat at the polls will help it to stick. But there is something else that would make it stick much better. Remember what Blankley said about the turn to the right under Reagan. It is not just the failure of the left that will change America's political culture for the better. It is the success of free markets.
So the battle that begins this November, on the day after the election, is a fight for the rollback of Obama's agenda, for an actual shrinking of government, and for the loosening of economic controls—so that we can demonstrate once again that freedom is prosperity.
People are beginning to re-learn the lesson. But we have a long way still to go to make it stick.—RWT |
