So, obviously I was wrong about how that one was going to go. And here’s why:
1. I underestimated the turnout among minorities.
2. I underestimated the lopsided majorities for minorities that OFA was able to generate for the President.
3. I overestimated how many folks would come out to vote for Romney and friends.
So, basically those things add up to make the electorate of D+6. And Republicans are obviously not going to do so well in such an environment. The figures are still coming in, but basically seven of the most Republican-leaning counties in Ohio had a massive drop in voter turnout . I suspect the same will be true in the panhandle counties in Florida and the western and southern parts of Virginia. Colorado and Iowa, I’m not going to pretend to guess. The former is a rough one because of the Hispanic vote and the latter I dunno, but Bush 2004 was the only time in recent history (basically 1992 and onward) that has carried it for the Republicans.
There’s going to be a lot of infighting on the Right about “How this happen??” but what doesn’t help is this assumption that the Right must absolutely throw out everything that makes it distinct in order to win anything. Just today the beloved, nonpartisan NYT ran some article about how the GOP is can’t appeal to minorities and so we must drop our opposition to big government. Pretty hilarious-it’s tails you win, heads I lose. George W. Bush didn’t do everything right, but he did make a really good attempt at reaching out to hispanics, who are, as they say, “fellow-travelers” in the realm of free enterprise and socially conservative values. In a year that saw very similar arguments to 2004, Bush won 40% of the hispanic vote. If Romney got anywhere close to that level of support, he would have won the election, period. I assume I don’t have to even go into it why the GOP or conservative types need to drop their opposition to the sort of policies being pursued by the Dems-we just lost what was a close election. It’s not like the entire country repudiated conservative ideas on every issue across the board. It’s more like 50.4% of the country decided Obama would be better for the country on whatever issues they thought most important.
Which gets us to why, exactly, the Right is so despondent, what it tells us about the Right and what could give us a good direction in the future.
First and foremost, we love this country. We don’t love everything about it, but we really, really do love this place. And we think there’s nowhere to go. For this and many other reasons, we aren’t conservatives like you find elsewhere in the western world. After the 2004 election, some thoughtful liberal-leaning guy said “you know, conservatives do love this country more than us. I just don’t get it, but I know that if I treated my wife the way I treat a country I tell people I love-if I kept pointing out flaws and mistakes, nobody, not even my wife, would really believe that I loved them after I did that long enough.” And it’s true. We’re not obsessed about a “project.” We don’t think government can truly fix all the social ills that continue to wreck havoc in the lives of too many. We think politics has its limits.
All that being said, if liberals are guilty of only being proud of some future country that they fundamentally remade, conservatives are guilty of wishing to bring about a new paradise of conservative principles governing all, “restoring” the United States to whatever greatness we believe existed at some point in the past. The reason why there’s so many cranky old conservatives isn’t just because of Churchill’s maxim of “no young conservative, no old liberal” but because they think either in nostalgia of a time from their childhood or a time before they were born, and hold that up for as what we ought to aim to get back to. Which makes sense-conservatives don’t like socially liberal movements, so they want to get back to an America where there was a consensus on what was socially acceptable. I’m not entirely convinced that’s a helpful way of framing what appropriate policy is for any government, nor do I think it is fair to the present, the past or the future. I can act as nostalgic as I want for the 1990s-a period where gays were mostly in the closet, but then I must think-what about partial birth abortion, before Bush banned it? Then I can go back to the 1950s and think “wow, what a great consensus on socially conservative ideas!” and then I think: “Well, wait, an entire segment of our population couldn’t get a bus, and people like my grandma were viewed with distrust because she was a widow with kids. That’s not fair.” Not all social conservatives have this false-historical-era-as-the-goal, but too many do.
…And that leads to how we as conservatives frame issues like this. We make a lot of hay about elections and the will of the people and if people are behind our policies and ideas or not. Because we very, very wary of embracing the idea that politics-as-executed (i.e. the campaigning, the lies, the entire part of the political process outside of actual policy-making and administering the government-which, coincidentally, is what we really focused on in 2012). We love this country, we love the constitution, and because we frame elections as almost holy things, of like Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, we lose sight of a view things.
The first mistake such a view leads to is confusing popularity of a candidate with the endorsement of policies or even governing philosophies and worldviews. Obama was elected, but nearly every statewide ballot to raise taxes was defeated, and in Michigan, an effort to consitutionalize union power was soundly defeated. Like most things in life, the truth is hard to discern, and in the end is mostly subjective in nature. It is probably foolhardy to try to understand the will of the nation based on the results of 130 million votes (and the 80 million-odd non-votes by eligible voting folks). The GOP learned the hard way in Bush’s second term that even Presidential elections don’t confer mandates for particular policies. Social Security reform and an immigration overhaul were non-starters, even with a Republican congress. In the same way, Clinton’s entire presidency serves as a good case example of what a “split-mandate” between Presidential and Congressional preferences can mean, as Clinton’s presidency began with an assault weapons ban, DADT and an attempt at health care reform, led to workfare, a capital gains tax, a budget surplus. I’m under no illusions-Obama is not Clinton, he has no interest (as of yet) to work across the aisle to find common ground.
The second mistake is that this is not the beginning of some new era of social liberalism. The free-love 1960s was followed by Nixon. The real growth of gay-as-“normal” began during the last decade while Bush was in the Oval Office. Beyond that, using electoral results as proxy for what the mood is of the country in terms of social policy is sort of silly. The government does have limited power in pushing the country in one way or another, but what’s considered socially acceptable is usually driven by what influences wider culture. And in that way, conservatives have much to be happy about. For too long, liberals have owned K-12 education, the universities, the media and even the mainline Protestant churches, but those are all changing. Within a decade, the majority of kids won’t be in a public school, at least not as currently constituted. The higher education bubble will pop within the next few years. The media is changing at an incredible pace-witness the shuttering of Newsweek. Protestant mainlines are on their way out, as they pay for putting what’s socially acceptable ahead of any conviction or adherence to anything higher. And none of these things came about because Bush or Obama were elected-all these phenomena are by and large independent of partisan ideology (that could be because the push to help the middle-class earn a college degree was bipartisan, though). All that aside, the culture is changing. But Marx and Fukuyama were wrong. History does not have a pre-ordained course. Social conservatives who care about such things should be concerned that voters in three states approved gay marriage (first time ever approved by voters rather than court-ordered) and marijuana, but it should spur the religious right to do more to explain their view on marriage. And it should spur a greater debate with the Right about what path-libertarianism (“the state shall not recognize any marriage” and as part of tax reform get rid of most deductions) or social conservatism ought to be pursued. I could write a lot about this, but basically it comes down to being the Party that tells people that not everything is equally acceptable. Which comes off as really mean and a non-starter, but in my experience, most people are at least willing to hear the argument, if not out-right agree with it. But that requires not just a good argument but a wider control of the culture, because right now there is an unsustainable cultural Marxism that has been there since the 1960s and has continued to today.
So, in the end, elections are important, but we need not fall in to despair. Democracy is great, but in times like these it is best to think of them as Churchill did: “the worst system except for all the alternatives.”
Second, conservatives are very sad because we think Obamacare fully implemented will bring about a new level of dependency upon the government, and that will screw us forever. I understand the sentiment, but 1) it’s not like Obama and friends had any idea what in the hell they were doing when they crafted the bill-while long term it is definitely going to lead to a total government takeover, in the near-term it will 2) mean the end of medical plans for a lot of people and 3) drive the costs up for everyone. 4) Its chief goal, to insure everyone will also fail to meet expectations as reality will catch up with rhetoric. In no place in the world does socialized medicine actually deliver quality care to everybody for free. And that’s in places where there’s actually an existing bureaucracy to deal with it-i.e. not here. And while this isn’t full-on socialized medicine, it will disrupt the health care market in an unbelievable way. If anything, this terrible piece of legislation will drive more people to conservatives as people see just how incompetent the government truly is. And it is. I have socialized health care.
And this gives the GOP an opportunity in the next four years to really think hard about how it would do things differently. Government bureaucracies are next to immortal, but it won’t be like that forever. It only seems that way because we have had the money for so long to try out as many dumb policies as we wanted, but I suspect it will not go on forever. The fight over Obamacare definitely elevated our thinking about health care policy, and it will continue to do so. A lot of good people are going to suffer because of this awful bill, and the conservatives need to be ready with an actual thought-out plan with how we will rehaul the rehaul. It will be disruptive, and it will make some people mad, but that will be a fait accompli as the next Republican president takes office under the cloud of austerity.
Third, conservatives are very sad because we know that this will be an economic disaster. And it will be. The Obama recession will continue for four more years, meaning we will have a lost decade of growth. My generation will now never have the earning power we could have had, and will ironically be pissed about their joblessness as they stumble through the second Obama term they so desired. We already see the vote of the markets-they are plunging more than they have in a year. The dollar is crashing. Capital flight will continue at a much faster clip, probably never to return. The fiscal cliff will not only raise taxes on everybody, it will destroy businesses. Dodd-Frank, like Obamacare, is essentially a corporatist scheme, as these government-assisted corporations will disrupt and destroy the natural flow of capital. Massive unemployment will be as unavoidable as it is tragic. And for this, I don’t have much more analysis. It’s not like we’re unique here-we’ve seen this show in Japan in the early 1990s. The only difference is, is that we are the largest economy and our double-dip recession will crush the rest of the world. I’m pretty confident the social fabric will hold and we won’t actually hit Greece-like levels of instability, but we’re on the same road.
The only thing I can think of is that Obama and friends will come to their senses and seek to moderate their economic policies sooner rather than later. But the problem, besides Obama’s apparent inability to negotiate, is that the real drivers of our economic instability are part-and-parcel of the legislative items he pushed in his first 18 months of office, and his administration’s complete lack of understanding in how markets work. And so I think I can safely predict that Obama will not get enough done with the House GOP, and will then seek to do things administratively through Executive Order, leading to a Supreme Court case that will help settle just how much a President can do. And the pressure on the House GOP to do just that will grow exponentially if Benghazi keeps revealing worse and worse things.
Fourth, conservatives are worried because Obama is seeking to basically gut the military for reasons not very clear to anybody-assuming, of course, his “I will veto anything that gets rid of defense cuts, no I mean I will not let sequestration happen” was typical election year opportunistic posturing. His administration has been adrift in terms of overall grand strategy. But just like in health-care, reality gets a vote. Because Israel can’t trust this White House (and it can’t, with apologies to DNC supergenius Debbie Wasserman-Schultz), Israel will attack Iran early next year-probably right after Netanyahu and friends win re-election on January 22nd. That will lead to a regional conflagration that will mean continued US commitment to the region. Or we will leave Israel to figure it out in a time of war. Either way, its not like Islamists hate the US less because Obama is President, and its not like they are going to let up because everyone is giving each other high-fives on Facebook. We’re about to find out what happens when you ignore a problem for the better part of a decade, and I suspect it will upend Obama’s plans for security policy. I have to say, though, that most of this White House’s policies on security have been okay, beyond these possibly-politically guided ideas about cuts, non-existent grand strategy (though to be fair that’s been an issue since 1991) and killing Americans without trial.
Finally, conservatives are pretty sad because this election seems to tell us that ideas don’t matter, that identity politics trump what’s best for the country, that either the country doesn’t care or doesn’t want to listen to us and the actual numbers of economic decline that have been the defining characteristic of the last four years. A man that we really don’t like, who we think lied about Benghazi, who spent trillions we don’t have, that wants to spread the wealth around, and frankly a guy who we think is out of his league. And that goes beyond the whole cult-of-personality, nonthinking garbage that seems to dominate my newsfeed these days. Some of these feelings go to the more objectivist-style thinking (in terms of objective-vs-subjective, not Ayn Rand) that is popular in conservative circles. But it goes deeper. We thought the country was smarter than this guy’s campaign. And 48% of it was. And a huge Republican majority was returned to the House-meaning many more folks voted for a Republican message of budgetary restraint and a check on the White House. The 2010 midterms weren’t a fluke, and it wasn’t the result of 40% turnout and a lot of pissed off white people. It was sustained, and is definitely sustainable unless something remarkable in Obama’s favor happens, which is unlikely given the history of second terms.
We’re also sad because now our fellow citizens are denouncing us as being racist, bigoted and friends of…whatever the opposite of “Forward!” is. We think this confirms our fear that big government will lead to a herd of sheeple that will attack anyone who gets in their way of using the government to take from workers and give to leachers. For a conservative, the real horror story is that perhaps we are too late to stop our beloved country from becoming a place where hard work is suspect, where achievement is mocked, where hand-outs are expected and honor and valor are buzzwords. And we may be there, but I don’t think we are. Obama won not because in four short years we remade the country, he won because we successfully demonized a man who gave more of his income and time to his fellow man than either man in the White House ever has or will. Obama won because he convinced enough people who may not be as politically involved (because, frankly, they have other stuff going on in life-something we ought to remember going forward), that he understands their plight. And while most of white America is way past such things, for too many people the color of one’s skin is a helpful indicator of how much they are willing to help you in your situation. No President has done more to destroy the prospects of minorities in this country than this man, and yet he won. He won because 80%-18% thought he cared more about their situation than Romney. While conservatives want to win on ideas (at least nowadays), and while we don’t want to indulge identity politics or put Marco Rubio up there solely because he is an articulate, hispanic politician of some note, this is democracy. And in democracy, the people choose. And there is an art to getting people to listen, and we failed this time around. Our policies are sound-you can tell when you compare Indiana and Wisconsin to the failed state of Illinois, or when you put Texas next to California. The GOP needs to get smart about party infrastructure, so we can get all our McCain voters out next time. But we need to get smart on our messaging, because we’re failing to show enough of the country that we do care.
We want to win on good ideas, but, again, this is not the best system. It is the least bad. And we love it, and we love this country. So we can’t give up.
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