Elections

The Results Were Expected

The Republicans won. The Democrats lost.  Obama faces a significant challenge to his leadership.  The Tea Party has come to town.  Politics in the Capital are about to become very interesting.   The political scene has changed.  Now we must deliberately consider: what the play will look like, who the actors will be, what will be their roles, how will they play them, and are we in for a comedy or tragedy.  Some initial food for thought using Alexis de Tocqueville as our guide.

Tocqueville in the 1830s described two types of political parties, great political parties and small political parties.  He explained:

“What I call great political parties are those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men.  These parties generally have nobler features, more generous passions, more real convictions, a franker and bolder aspect than others. Particular interests, which always plays the greatest role in political passions, hides more skillfully here under the veil of public interest…

Small parties, on the contrary, are generally without political faith.  As they do not feel themselves elevated and sustained by great objects, their character is stamped with a selfishness that shows openly in each of their acts. They always become heated in a cool way; their language is violent but their course is timid and uncertain.  The means that they employ are miserable, as is the very goal they propose for themselves. Hence it is that when a time of calm follows a violent revolution, great men seem to disappear all at once and souls withdraw into themselves.

Americans have had great parties; today they no longer exist: it has gained much in happiness, but not in morality.” (link)

Tocqueville thought that the fundamental principles of American political life were established in the great debates between the Democratic – Republicans and the Federalists, between Jefferson, Hamilton, et.al, and that once the order was set, politics would be of a more mundane sort about dividing the spoils and pursuing narrow interests, battles between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum about who would deliver the goods. This is what he thought he saw in Jacksonian America.  He illuminated a contrast in the type of parties in democratic politics, but he missed the principled issues that divided the nation, which ultimately led to a civil war.  Contrary to his expectations the contrast between great and small parties is an ongoing aspect of democratic politics, not a thing of the past.  And it was again in play yesterday.  One of the remarkable aspects of the results last night is how politics, great and small, were both present, in sensible and confused ways, with intriguing practical consequences.

As I indicated yesterday, I think that we are living through a great debate about commonsense, concerning the role of the government in the pursuit of the common good.  It is ironically cast as a debate between two highly successful Republican Presidents, Reagan versus Lincoln, between “government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem” and “government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.”  In Tocqueville’s terms this was an election about this great contrast, and the Republican Party, as the party of Reagan, achieved a great political victory over the Democrats, as the Party of Lincoln.

But clearly many of the people voting were not thinking about such abstract “great” concerns.  They want jobs and an economic recovery, were frustrated by the depth of the economic crisis and weren’t convinced that the programs of the President and the Democrats were effectively addressing their problems.  Deficit reduction sounds good to them, large government bailouts of Wall Street don’t.  But will that lead them to support libertarian positions on Social Security and Medicare, or for that matter repeal of the very desirable benefits of “Obamacare?” Probably not.  And it is beyond me how tax cuts for the very wealthiest and slashing of government programs that benefit the vast majority of the population is either a way of getting out of an economic recession or the road to political popularity.

As the Republicans, led by its Tea Party faction, attack government, as a matter of principle, the small concerns of the American people, those who want practical action to address their very real practical problems, will become disaffected.  But as the small concerns are addressed, those committed to high Tea Party principles will condemn compromise.  It strikes me that there are profound tensions within the Republican Party on these matters, between its identity as a grand and a small political party.  I don’t think the Democrats are so conflicted.  Their ideas about the pragmatic use of the state to address pressing problems permit them to both address small concerns and enact their fundamental principles.  Their challenge is to show that this approach works.  They were unsuccessful at this stage of the deep crisis. It is likely to be more successful as the crisis abates.

In the coming months and years the interplay between grand and small politics will define American politics.  The struggle for each party will be about commonsense, but also about practical everyday concerns.  More about this in my next post.

9 comments to The Results Were Expected

  • Eric Friedman

    Interestingly, Boehner seized the moment last night, when Republican victory in the House was clear, with tears streaming down his cheeks, to call upon “great” and fundamental principles dear to many in his party. Reproducing the unbounded ideology of meritocratic capitalism, Boehner said, “I spent my whole life [tears] chasing the American Dream…I started out mopping floors…working every rotten job there was.” His speech reproduces the fundamental idea that one’s success should be (and can be) earned through one’s hard efforts and it signifies a rejection of sorts (for the camera anyway) of those born into well-to-do circumstances, those “others,” those elitists who never held a mop handle. Politics as a vocation.

  • Alex

    The question is, will Boehner’s tears prove as critical as Hillary Clinton’s before the New Hampshire primary in 2008. . .

    Newsweek January 7th, 2008:
    http://www.newsweek.com/2008/01/06/hillary-tears-up.print.html

    “Some people think elections are a game: who’s up or who’s down,” Clinton said, her voice breaking and tears welling. “It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ future. It’s about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some difficult odds.”

  • Michael Corey

    Tocqueville seems to demonstrate that great political parties once existed as actualized imaginaries, and now it is possible that they have morphed into imaginary actualities displaced by drives to satisfy special interests. I’m not sure what Republican and Democrat stand for anymore, and I am equally confused about Liberal and Conservative identities.

    The dissatisfaction expressed in the recent election involves great and small issues. Currently the private, public and governmental spheres may be irrevocably intertwined, and existent ideological divisions seem inadequate to address them. The intensity of the dissatisfaction expressed in the election may be linked to the unwillingness to discuss and resolve longer-term issues.

    There needs to be a re-engagement of great political ideas supported by workable alternatives. It isn’t clear that there is an appetite or process to accomplish this. If there isn’t, then the unresolved structural issues will become crises, and ultimately force us to address them. Unfortunately, as the structural problems become larger, palatable solutions will become fewer. Perhaps Deliberately Considered can help bring attention to them sooner.

  • Iris

    After reading this post and taking in the news of the day, it’s frightening to think how the Republicans will interpret their gains. Certainly many voters were ideologically driven on both sides. Good old-fashioned American individualism, ginned up by Fox news ideologues during the anxious times of an unprecedented recession, maybe mixed with some good old-fashioned American racism, created the Tea Party and played a big role. People voting for Democrats could be ideological, but also understood the practicalities involved in governing and were willing to give them more time. They could understand Obama’s analogy of the car in the ditch with the slurpee-sipping Republicans just whining on the sidelines, and could remember as far back as two years ago.

    But all day what did I hear and read about? The independents! The independent voter made all the difference. Who is the independent voter? They don’t understand ideology, and even if they do, they don’t adhere to any. They flit and float. If they don’t feel good, they’ll vote for the other guy. It doesn’t matter if the other guy is the cause of their problems in the first place, or will make things worse. They just know what’s right in front of them at the moment, and if it’s not good, then there must be something wrong with what they’ve got.

    Such people are the ones who decide elections and they decided this one. In other words there was no message other than get the economy going again. There is no mandate for how that should be done. Perhaps the only problem for Democrats is that their loss wasn’t larger. Under the present circumstances I can’t see that anything can get done in Congress. Perhaps Obama will be forced to compromise, and the rich will retain their tax cuts for a while longer, but that’s just going to add to the debt the tea party is railing against.

    Will “independent voters” switch again next time? Will the Republicans be on the hook if the unemployment rate is still high, or will Democrats be blamed since they still have the Presidency and the majority in the Senate? Or if things miraculously improve, will it be interpreted by the independents that their last vote was a good one? Shudder to think that thought, though I’m still hoping beyond hope for times to get better.

  • Billy

    Love the title. “It has happened, therefore it must have happened that way.”

    By using the passive voice, you deny responsibility to any one party. Thus, the title becomes true because only one person somewhere somehow need ‘expect’ the results that we see today, to some extent, and you are not a liar. But what does that really mean? The results were expected. Does that mean that there was no point in voting, that we were exercising a futile right and need not? Does it mean that… I don’t know.

    How can you perpetuate the myth that the fact that the election results are fait accompli after they occur means that your vote cannot make an impact?

    Also, your argument here could use some working. You quote the T’ville’s statement that a big party is committed to principles, not consequences, then use the consequences of a tax cut(rich people will get all of their money and you won’t!) as justification to undercut the principles that Republicans are appealing to (people generally have a right to the money they’ve earned, which was a common speaking point of Abraham Lincoln. It was a centerpiece of his argument for the freedom of the enslaved.).

    On the other hand, we have Iris here, who speaks from the assumption that she knows the best for America, and hopefully the ignorant independants wake up before anything bad happens to them…. like tax cuts for the only people in America in the financial position to create desperately needed jobs.

  • Scott

    Billy, the two percenters are not the only people in position to create jobs. Have you ever heard of small business loans? And don’t hold your breath on the richest Americans will creating jobs here, tax cut or no tax cut. That is a myth. They are investing abroad, and will keep doing so, for various reasons.

    YOu see, its ironic that you should bring up Lincoln, because anything short of slave labor, along with a total disregard for the environment, will bring those jobs back. Adams Smith once said that shareholders were properly “citizens of the world” and had only weak allegiance to their country of origin. That insight is even more true now than it was then. That’s what makes the “Citizens United” case so ironic. Citizens? Of where exactly? Is it not telling that Dick Army was, until he was forced to resign, a lobbyist for a GLOBAL law firm?

    But I digress. There was still a bright side to the election results. Loons like Palidino, Tancredo, O’Donnell, and Angle were defeated. And thank heavens!

  • Iris

    Thanks, Scott. I interpret your reply in part as coming to my defense, as I was criticized by Billy for saying tax cuts for the rich won’t lower unemployment. Ah, if only I were a two-percenter! That’s a nice thought, but only a dream, higher taxes and all. I don’t understand people who seem to want something for nothing. It’s to the benefit of the rich and everybody else that we live in a functioning society. It’s possible to close your eyes or live in gated communities with private security, but what happens if you leave that little bubble?

    Maybe I’m just a bleeding heart liberal, but even though I have health insurance, it pains me to think that there are those in this advanced and rich country who can’t afford it, or are kept from buying it. Just today the new Republican leadership is saying they have a mandate for repeal of the health care law. What do they mean by “common sense solutions?” It seems to me that’s been done already. There’ll be no government takeover, just common sense pooling of individuals to enable them to buy as a group.

    Eric and Alex, I was also struck by Boehner’s tears as he recalled that he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. I’d like to know more about it. Did he do it during a great recession? Did he get any education or small business loans? Was he ever uninsured? Oh, there are so many questions.

  • Scott

    Yes,Iris, and there is also this dangerous myth that “good, hardworking, decent, real etc etc” Americans are so wont to believe– that the richest Americans actually produce anything or really care more about their blessed land of the free, home of the etc etc etc, than making money from the money they’ve already made. That is what John Boehner really should be shedding tears about, but he’s actually laughing all the way to the gavel. Perhaps that is being too cynical, but it is extremely frustrating to hear the same thing repeated over and over again. Perhaps this idea is a throwback to the days of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and the rest, when, for all their avarice, the extremely rich still seemed to have some sense of social responsibility. But perhaps that is a myth as well.

    From this point on though, it will be interesting to see how those “mad as hell” voters manage their cognitive dissonance as very little changes in a substantive way, even while their party is on the ascendent. Perhaps they will settle for sloganeering and symbolic change, which is all they’re likely to get in the short term. They’re main goal seems to be to defeat Obama in 2012 rather than actually get something done. Politics is indeed their vocation.

  • […] I often interpret them using the insights of Tocqueville from understanding the nature of the American party system and for contemporary political debate, such as the struggle over workers’ rights in […]

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