On growing spine
Tonight is the start of a war. I hate to say it, but it is. The election of a Republican majority in the House and a far tighter Senate will spark an era of extreme partisan divide that will lead to what I can only expect to be a series of bloody and bitter battles that will give fodder for the country to be split in two. Rationale will fly out the window, civility will be a bygone memory, and little to nothing will escape the fray. Washington will go to a standstill, and the needs of Americans of all stripes will be forgotten in the name of ideological divide.
What remains to be seen is how the parties will respond. The Republicans appear set to put their rhetoric into action: they’ve declared that compromise will involve the Democrats meeting them all the way over on the right rather than halfway in the middle. The Democrats are yet to throw the gauntlet down. In one predictable light, the Democrats can be trusted to back away from the fight, deciding to take a Republican platform as evidence of “incremental gains.” The caucus will disintegrate, and any positive change will be credited to the “fresh ideas” of the right.
The Democrats cannot shy away from the fight that confronts them. They must set an agenda and follow it. They must get their party together on a core set of principles that make it clear that government not only can but must be trusted to take care of its citizens. Set aside the moral obligation that the government ensure the security of personhood for its citizens (more on that in a graduate thesis); this is a time where the strategy of recovery must be followed. There should be no doubt that the economy will improve; booms bust, then they even out and boom again, usually within the span of five years, and since we haven’t really learned much about self-control we can only assume that the boom will have the same rate and magnitude as our bust had. This model implies that the outlook will become much better by the time the next election rolls around. The people, however, don’t understand this; they think it’s the leaders that drive it, which is a better explanation for tonight’s wave than any other. When the people see a positive outlook, they think the incumbent had a say in it; when the positive outlook happens, then, the incumbent Democrats will look much better for it.
But this won’t happen if the narrative becomes driven by Republican ideas. If, say, a Republican-written tax bill gets the support of enough Senate Democrats to pass, it suddenly turns into the Republicans benefiting the economy. The “fresh ideas” of the right turn into the ideas that are changing the country. The wave, then, will continue. If, instead, the Democrats refuse to comply and run with their own agenda and the country improves in the vacuum of progress, their ideas are the narrative. Their ideas save the country. Their ideas stem the tide.
Tonight and the next two years ought to make it incredibly clear that an economic look at political science simply is ineffective. We’re told as political scientists to believe that a legislative body behaves like a market, with bills passing on lines that create the smallest of consensus possible. Politics is not a rational event. Politicians know that their jobs are on the line when they appear to lose spine; they not only let their platforms fall by the wayside but also earn scorn from their supporters for a refusal to follow their principles. This draws the politician to dig his heels in. The model should not be a left-right continuum where the median voter is the point where a bill passes. It is instead a model where the middle is no man’s land; the sides are on different pieces of paper. Nothing will pass.
While it would be nice to call for civility, we must also know what is too much. We must know what needs to be seen out (health care reform, economic stimulus, banking and credit reform). We must realize that with forward-thinking ideas, we don’t need to adapt them to the countervailing voices that destroyed this country in the first place. Intransigence may be the best thing for this country right now. The key will be spine. Do Democrats have enough of it to stand firm, stand principled, and stand by their record? One can only hope; moreover, one can only doubt.
