Democrats are in the dumps. Poll numbers are cratering for Joe Biden. Paul Krugman says that the Republican field of Senatorial candidates are just spewing hate rather than offering policy alternatives. The Krugman analysis has credibility because Mitch McConnell has said that he is going to run the midterms on inflation, the border, and crime, though he just mentions the topics rather than offers alternative policies. McConnell is just carping, Republicans full of outrage rather than solutions, And why should that not be the case? The Democrats are on the defensive, many of them sure that they will lose both the House and the Senate even if Biden has managed Covid and the Russian Ukraine War quite well. What is the disconnect between governmental results and the electorate? That is the question I want to answer.
Biden has managed the pandemic by relying on science, which practically means not relying on politics as the basis of decision making, allowing experts to decide on a consensus basis, even if some of their decisions are problematic, such as advocating a second booster test, or keeping masks for people on airlines. This is an orderly delegation of authority and much to be preferred to Trump lying that covid would just go away or coming up with pet nastrums or just generally disorganized governmental efforts in making supplies available. Remember that Trump said it was not the government;s job to supply the states with goods related to the pandemic. Yes, it was. It was a public health emergency even if Trump wanted to rid himself and his administration of responsibility.
Similarly, Biden has managed the Ukraine-Russia War well, so far. He has shored up his allies so russia is not likely to try to, let us say, try a grab at estonia. Instead, Sweden and Finland want to enter NARTo. Biden has sent plenty of armaments that probably resulted in thwarting a russian victory by now, though he may be blamed if the Ukrainian defenders are not able to resist the present russian onslaught in the Dumbas region, something Putin could have accomplished through negotiation, Zelensky promising not to join NATO and allowing some kind of autonomy for Dombas. Biden was quick footed enough to see that America could make a difference for this war, but it is uncertain what can happen if Russian reverses continue while the Russian economy implodes and what he might do when cornered. It is very difficult to manage those leaders who do not think things out, calculating what interests to sacrifice and what is their bottom line. Hitler miscalculated starting war in 1939, and Trump never thought much about anything but his own popularity, adopting his conservatism as an expedient for getting the nomination and the presidency since, after all, he had been a New Yorker, not given to prejudice even if wanting large tax benefits for the rich, which is what most republicans want, until he hit the magic button of stating that Mexican illegals were rapists and drug dealers when he announced he was running for President. He had no plans for what to do about that other than the ludicrous idea of building a wall, but then Republicans in general are more about denouncing bad things than proposing good ones.
The reason that the American electorate may discount Biden’s success as an able policy decider and Administration manager is because people just take for granted that Democratic Administrations are competent: they are well briefed, the parts of the executive branch are well coordinated, and are not corrupt, while Republicans mess things up, whether W. lying his way into a war he could not conclude or Trump doing no end of mischief. Democrats are boring, professional, and relentlessly insisting on minding our better angels when concerned with minorities, the poor, and even sexual deviants, as became clear when soon to be Supreme Court Jackson was harrassed about whether she was coddling sex offenders when she was just doing the usual of easing particularly harsh sentencing guidelines. I was tempted that she might lash out and ask Cruz and Crawley whether she really thought she was pro-child molester, but she did the better thing which was not to get ruffled and know the ordeal would soon be over. Republicans always reach to punish most those who are the most maligned, which means the most already beaten down. They never appeal to their better angels. So they will castigate the Democrats if they stumble and never apologize for their own stumbles, both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy having retreated from their criticism of Trump’s support of the insurrection on Jan. 6th, still half of the Republican congresspeople not willing to say that Biden’s was a fair election, and a majority of Republicans polled saying the election was rigged.
I may seem to be overly harsh on Republicans, but I think the idea of two parties viewing one another on their platforms and policies, each one a legitimate heir to the Congress and the Presidency, both of them capable of administrative effectiveness, is no longer the case, at least since George H.W. Bush had to backtrack on his backtrack of “No New Taxes”, ceding domestic policy to the Republicans so to be free to maneuver about foreign policy, which he didn’t manage all that well himself, given that the Kuwait War led to no fly zones over Iraq that couldn’t be sustained and so requiring another invasion by W. that also didn’t do the job either.
What has happened, I think, goes very deep. Modern democracies use anchors into the culture and social structure of their populations so as to stabilize their political system. Most obviously, democracies are solidified through the social classes of their population so that there is a conflict as well as an accommodation between the dominant social classes. That means that the workers and the owners of production remain in an uneasy collaboration to get things done and with other important populations, such as the yeoman peasantry of Ninth Century England that may have eventually been the source of english democracy, there will work out more or less equal populations or coalitions of populations so that a shift of only a small part of the population will lead to the democratic election of one rather than the other party, and that results in the circulation of leadership one party to another. Sometimes one element of the population bees so dominant that it can revolutionize the nation and so not render it democrat as happened when Lenin thought that the triumph of the working class would mean that there had to become a dictatorship of the proletariat which would administer the state while the state was being reorganized, and that eventually the state would wither because it was no longer necessary, leaving a nation run by efficient and well managed economic organizations none of which had to make a profit. On the other hand, Revisionist Marxists like Edward Bernstein thought that the population of a nation would become so overwhelmingly middle class that they would elect socialism combined with democracy as the prevailing party and that is what happened when Labor won the British election in 1945.
American pollsters from 1940 on to demographics in general rather than just the class structure as the anchor for politics. Coalitions were made up of minorities and education strata and rural/urban strata to add up together to a viable party. Politics were more creative in that one party or the other would add to its ranks other kinds of people or added percentages of some otf one of its groupings so as to make a party major, which means within distance of having enough to elect state and federal officials. The to party systemained only two party because each party would adjust to its circumstances though the Republican Party has for twenty years now been reluct to reach out its Hispanic platoon so as to make it a majority population, although it was ready enough to enroll disgruntled whiote Southerners who turned away from the democratic Party when it championed Civil Rights legislation. The reach for a majority by contending parties means that a third party is not likely ever to arise even if in European third parties, as in Germany do balance the difference between the two major parties. But not in America or Britain. The disadvantage of a polarizing two party system shows up in America with Trump taking over one major party and Republican supporters did not leave the party in droves even though there was a decline afterwards of educated suburban white Republican women. Similarly, Marie Le Pen was the main alternative to Macron, all the right wing elements shuffling themselves together.
But what if class and demographics cannot arrive at a stable system? This prospect arrived in the past few generations in America. What held Republicans together was ideology. It appealed to what was then considered social issues so as to distinguish it from the economic issues which Democrats said were the real issues in that people were voting against their own pocketbooks, and so were somewhat demented. But abortion and white dominance and crime were determinative for their voters and not what just a party says ought to be the ones voters should credit as the important issues.And that got us through from the Seventies to close to the present, to the trump era.
Another alternative to the economic/demographic anchoring of politics is to give up on sorting out which elements of the population are downwardly or upwardly mobile and so settling which party to be aligned, forcing people to consider how to vote without really knowing what their interests are but only a feeling for their situations. Instead, people vote on the appearances of the candidates, which ones are charismatic or simply solid or conveying grandeur, as with Eisenhower, or affability, that the case with Reagan.That does not make politics very well anchored, people bobbling about just like movie stars, as some of them are, and hardly reflecting some social or economic trend in the nation that a political party and a candidate will respond to. That makes democratic politics much too uncertain, but there you have it and so Reagan and Clinton and Obama win because they are charming rather than because of their issues. The trouble, however, is that it does not explain Trump, who was neither charming nor ideologically driven and yet defeated his primary challenger with one liner put downs. Is that all it takes to make someone a President? Then the system is unanchored.
The result of having separated democracy from its moorings is very profound. It makes democracy solipsistic in that the electorate can no longer refer to evidence or values or even personality as a basis for making its decisions.and so what is left can be considered an anarchic version of democracy. What has happened in America, building for a decade but not in full flower until the Trump Administration, is a division between two different feelings. There are those who are meanspirited or claim to be in that cynicism seems to be wisdom, and there are those who are generous spirited or claim to be in that sounding like a conventional positive morality puts you among the respectable even if that seems platitudinous, as when you want to give food stamps to illegal enemies because they need the money, never mind if that just attracts more of them. A good example of this division was offered when a Conservative Senator wondered why the federal government was giving smartphones to illegal immigrants so that the government could keep track of where they were through their phone GPS system. It was just a more advanced system than requiring people to wear an arm bracelet. But the Senator argued that why should illegals get smart phones when smartphones were not being distributed to everyone who was poor, apparently even poor people to be preferred to illegals, who were indeed way down at the bottom of the heap. I suggest the senator was mean spirited in that the illegals should be punished, not given benefits, even if it was for a useful cause, while the good spirited approved of these giveaways because they expedited their ends even if it seemed a kind of advantage. The conservtive side reflected the idea of the old days when people charged the family for the food given to prisoners or to buy for the bullets used for the executions.Being mean or generous is all there is, a point of view rather than an ideology or a policy, just emotion, in this case rancor, while the other side offers sweetness and light, something progressives for a long time was considered a touchstone of the future, however much progressives are a title for largely ethnic and gender considerations.Maybe the conservatives knew the other half, that the smartphones were of some administrative use, but what they were doing was emphasizing being shocked at any one doing anything that was of any use to this very low underclass, the illegals perhaps just a step above the child molesters who the conservatives were claiming liberals, like soon to be Justice Jackson, was cuddling them.
Perhaps I want a return to an anchored and non anarchistic democracy. I don’t see how modern democracy can work without its anchors. Perhaps this is a temporary lapse in democracy engendered by what will be the long wake of the trauma of having even for just one term a President surely unfit to be one, not merely disorganized but himself mean spirited. The American people have to weigh their candidates much more seriously, not always assuming that whomever is elected will rise to the challenge and wondering how to rearrange laws so as to protect the nation even if a miscreant is elected. The military seem to have found a way in that generals are aware that they can only obey legal orders and ordering secrets to be sent to Putin or launching nuclear weapons would not under most circumstances be legal. But maybe we have gone beyond that and must consider a way to find some new bearings, some new basis for being democratic--or else Leninism, as inspired by the Right run by oligarchs and venal politicians, including those who proclaim the Big Lie that Biden was not legitimately elected- is the next step after modern democracy. Maybe not a likely story in that English and American governments are remarkably resilient in avoiding turning authoritarian, but it could happen here, given the shock to the system during the unprecedented events of Jan. 6th.