Posted on 11/06/2014 9:03:50 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Much has been written, and more will be, about what the 2014 elections mean, and most of it will focus on the small stuff—whether it was a “wave” or not, whether it was an anti-incumbency or anti-Obama phenomenon, what the president does now, what happens to gridlock and so on. Place all that to the side for the moment, and let’s get to the big picture on what this election demonstrates.
It demonstrates that nobody can govern America from the left, because the country doesn’t want to go there, and because whenever it has been tried in recent decades, it has failed. While the elites of the media, academia and the managerial class can’t seem to absorb this fundamental reality, the American people know it.
This reality comes into focus with a review of the country’s history since the emergence of the Great Depression of 1929-1942. Franklin Roosevelt attacked the problem from the left, marshaling governmental power as never before and rolling over traditional views, going back to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, about small government and strict construction of the Constitution. Many conservative thinkers—for example, in recent years, Amity Shlaes—have argued that FDR’s policies failed to address the persistent economic dislocation. But in political terms, Roosevelt was a great success. He spurred substantial economic growth year after year and demonstrated that, in times such as those, governing the country from the left was not only acceptable, but probably necessary. The country loved the guy.
But we should be mindful of what happened to Roosevelt’s New Deal—the greatest aggrandizement of governmental power in our history—after his 1936 landslide reelection and his ill-conceived effort to aggrandize his power further by “packing” the Supreme Court. The voters concluded that Roosevelt had gone far enough, and they placed a clamp on his presidency. Republicans picked up eighty House seats in 1938 and six Senate seats. There was no New Deal reversal, nor would there be one, because the American people liked the country’s new power alignments. But further significant governmental expansion now wasn’t in the cards.
That was the state of play in American politics through the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who never sought to dismantle the New Deal, because he knew the voters wouldn’t stand for it. At the same time, he also knew the voters weren’t looking for any serious expansion.
But the country faced a huge agenda of unfinished business in the area of civil rights, and Lyndon Johnson leveraged the civic emotions of the Kennedy assassination to address that lingering necessity through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the process, he fostered a further expansion in the scope and reach of the federal government, then extended this expansion further with his Great Society initiatives to fight poverty, establish Medicare and Medicaid, and address housing, education and nutrition issues. Again, the American people generally accepted this expanded governmental role, over the loud objections of conservatives, but then resisted efforts to expand it further.
That has been the state of play in American politics ever since. The great fault line has been on the question of governmental aggrandizement. And, while there have been some initiatives along these lines over the years (creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and the Education and Energy departments), the country generally has resisted building upon the New Deal and Great Society in any serious way. That means little prospect for presidents to succeed while seeking to govern from the left.
Consider the history. Jimmy Carter tried to govern from the left—and failed. Bill Clinton tried it for his first two years—and had his head handed to him in the 1994 midterm elections, when the country gave both houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in more than forty years. At that point, Clinton brilliantly defaulted to a carefully calibrated governing philosophy designed to place him just to the left of center. It worked handsomely, and his presidency generally is considered to have been a success.
Then came Obama, whose grand aim was to achieve historical greatness by building upon the governmental structures created by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. This was seen in his big economic stimulus program, his Affordable Care Act, his “cap and trade” energy initiative, his Dodd-Frank bill with its new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and expansive bureaucratic meddling into markets, his plans to use the tax code for income redistribution, his expansion of the country’s regulatory apparatus and his exploitation of executive powers far beyond anything seen before in any president. His aim was to establish a new era of big government. As the New York Times’ David Brooks has written, “Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.”
It didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because the American people never gave him a mandate for that kind of governmental expansion. This is reflected most starkly in the way his congressional allies pushed through Congress the Affordable Care Act—by distorting traditional procedures, without collecting a single vote from the opposition party. Neither Roosevelt, nor Johnson would have dreamed of embracing such a politically dangerous tack when they sought to take the country into new territory of governmental expansion. They knew such initiatives had to be undertaken with a broad national consensus or shouldn’t be undertaken at all. They mustered the requisite mandates before proceeding. Obama didn’t.
But, if Obama’s program didn’t work in political terms, it also didn’t work in structural terms. The stimulus program didn’t stimulate. Obamacare quickly went awry and has not worked as advertised. The president’s energy program—particularly his opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline—is widely seen as stifling economic growth. His redistributionist plans can’t spur growth. His jobs performance is mediocre at best. His promiscuous use of executive authority is edging the country toward an unnecessary constitutional crisis.
The Obama presidency constitutes one of the great missed opportunities in American political history. He assumed office with an immense reservoir of goodwill at a time when the country was beset by an economic crisis that rendered voters highly receptive to bold action. The opposition party was in disarray as a result of its own failed presidency. Voters were ready for a new direction based upon a new matrix of political thinking that could foster new coalitions of citizens weary of the old fights and hungry for a new national coalescence.
No such national coalescence was possible by building upon the New Deal and Great Society foundations of old. They may have been right for their time, but they aren’t right for ours, as the American people have declared this week with emphatic bluntness. The folks over at MSNBC will never get it, but the next Democratic president should give it some serious thought.
In the meantime, while the country can’t be governed from the left, it has to be governed. And the challenge of new thinking and new coalitions applies to Republicans as much as it does to Democrats. The voters didn’t turn to the GOP this week because they have any particular faith in that party. They turned to the opposition because that’s what they do in our two-party system when they are grappling with a failed presidency.
And so the struggle will continue until one party or the other—or perhaps even a new party—will finally exploit the opportunity born of crisis to lead us out of the current mess.
God has set up His creation such that the ideas of leftism will always fail.
The left doesn’t “govern”...they “rule”....
The only successful way they “rule” is at the end of a gun pointed at your head....
The republican leadership still rules from the left.
As I’ve said, the government we live under today has long since lost its legitimacy of governing at the consent of the governed.
It’s authority now only comes from its ability to legally use deadly force to impose its will on the citizens.
That’s “authority”, but not “legitimate authority”.
A government consistently monopolized by one party (any party) will serve NO ONE.
There are plenty of examples around to prove that.
It’s the reason we need the two party system and functioning properly WITH unbiased media scrutiny.
It would keep everyone honest. But I guess that is a silly old fashioned idea.
A thoughtful and intelligent article, with little or no cheerleading. Thanks for posting.
The permanent bureaucracy goes right on governing from the left, regardless of whose name is on their boss’ door.
We need a casualty list. A list of all the Democrats who lost elections because of Obamacare. I am sure it is pretty long.
List all the Democrat casualties and then ask Democrats if they want to join them by going along with Obama’s illegal amnesty.
Obama’s illegal amnesty is basically a suicide pact. Are the Democrats in or out?
You can’t govern America from either side, eventually the mushy middle always turns against who’s in charge. That’s why there are no permanent majorities. 8 years from now the GOP is going to get the same nut kick, just like they did 8 years ago, and 16 years from now it’ll be the Dems turn.
Clearly, we needed to cancel the midterms. /s
More than half of the senators that voted for Owebamacare are no longer in office. Reid and Pelosi will never lead their party again in the majority.
Owebamacare will implode on it’s own now that O’bastard will be forced to follow it as written without the delays, or accept the changes that will gut it.
Voters are going to get a taste of the pain they voted for in 2008 before the 2016 election. Obama and his agenda will be toxic by 2016. Hillary will hate his evil guts!!
The Left cannot govern but it can rule as it intends to do.
You don't do that without consequences and it was far from the only example. The outrageously illegal usage of the IRS to suppress opposing political organizations, the vigorous abuse of the NSA to spy on them, the deliberate abuses at the Department of Justice to turn that organization into a political weapon; these actions do not come without consequences either. When governing from the left reaches this stage it isn't government at all, but something more approaching tyranny. What the 0bama administrations would have looked like in the absence of this abusive behavior is difficult to imagine, but they would likely have been more successful in meeting the country's interests.
Governing is not ruling. Representing is not leading. And forcing a series of political actions in the belief that they are historically inevitable is not accommodationist, cooperative, bipartisan, or any of those other pleasant labels that have been misapplied like lipstick on a pig.
“The public is more than happy to embrace the degrees of leftism.”
Then you can try explaining why conservatives/Republicans now control 32 states, up from 25.
Two. The public rejected failed policies of Obama. They didn't embrace the GOP or conservatism.
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