Mission Accomplished

Last night the Democratic Party succeeded in doing a very bad thing. Much has been written about why the Health Care Reform Act will damage our health care and our economy, and there will be more. Rather less has been written about how passage of the bill has damaged the national stability that rested upon the widely if not universally held faith that the laws and powers of the state ultimately flowed from the sovereign will of the people as expressed in elections (I stress "expressed"; "we won the election" could be a valid answer to defeated opponents, but never to voters unhappy with their representatives). This essay and some continuations will address the damage the MoveOn Movement and Democratic Party have done to themselves.

As public dissatisfaction with the Obama/Reid/Pelosi threesome has grown I have often heard that the Democrats may have "misread the mandate" of the 2008 elections, that they deceived themselves into thinking Americans wanted policies that they really didn't, and in November they'll pay for their mistake. I never thought this hypothesis had much plausibility, and any it ever had disappeared after Scott Brown's election to the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts. The sad and disgusting truth is that the class of political fixers (which includes many Republican "insiders" like Karl Rove, most op-ed product reps, and virtually all political scientists) thinks that one of government's permanent and essential functions is that of deceiving the governed in order to maintain their consent and quiescence. The Democratic leadership never even thought they had a mandate from the people, or that they needed one. They just thought they needed to develop a better formula or "program" for opinion engineering than the other side's, and that in 2008 they had achieved such optimal results that they might never have to worry about an opposition for a long time.

As far as the believers in Maximum Administration are concerned, the express train to the future has merely experienced a inconvenient delay, because somehow a wagon train of reenactors was permitted to cross the track the train is on: in other words, because somehow the "Right" temporarily figured out a better way to deceive the public. Are highly educated lawyers and journalists supposed to listen to the public? I doubt it ever crossed a single liberal's mind. The political fixers don't believe there's any public to listen to. It's the public that listens. What else could they do? Anybody who took Psych 101 would know that the public is just a herd of animals that needs feed, shots and exercise like the other animals. The fixers and spokespuppets produce polls telling the voters what they themselves think! How many times since 2007 have they said "The public doesn't care about (this question you're asking); they're concerned about making ends meet, etc." And if the voters should perversely listen to anyone but the liberals, then that only means the liberals are due to update their opinion engineering software. They have experts working on it, the best, and in the meantime, they and their media bobbleheads will just keep shouting louder and more abusively in hopes of drowning out the voices that they insist must be "Right Wing" bobbleheads. And that's what Obama/Pelosi/Reid and their talking-points-talkers have been doing.


But the fixers were wrong. Liberalism succeeded in this country because people were basically satisfied with it, not because of its message. As long as the country was properous, safe, and secure, most Americans were content to have the government incrementally redistribute some of the prosperity in ways that did not appear to violate the general sense of how the good was achieved. Who could blame them? And that was liberalism's mandate from the people, one that Republican statesmen prudently respected, just as Democratic statesmen prudently avoided the appearance of infringing upon spheres of personal responsibility that Americans regarded as both a pleasure of citizenship and a source of prosperity and security.


Obama was elected in 2008 because at that time he appeared the more reassuring candidate. It was not particularly hard to reassure an American public that had almost never seen a president or presidential candidate who dared disturb the mood of public complacency intrinsic to the American Dream. American politicians know that enjoyment of the American Dream requires quiet, uninterrupted sleep. The Bush-Cheney administration had made, and given the liberal media excuses to make, too much noise. No Democrat had been been within earshot since 2000, and all the Democratic presidents and presidential candidates within memory--all since LBJ--had been much quieter than Bush-Cheney. A switch in parties was not even really a switch, but an automatic adjustment, like changing sides in bed. The two parties were like chocolate and vanilla, a choice of preferences. To voters who thought the job of a president was to keep the neighborhood quiet while the people were enjoying the American Dream, it was uncharacteristic to think of the presidential nominee of a Major Party as stealthy. Nobody had to convince them not to worry about Barack Obama. How bad could the Democratic nominee be? He seemed all right. He'd make the kind of history that could let everyone go back to sleep and forget about making history.


Well, to change metaphors slightly--"the honeymoon is over" is putting it mildly. The groom might as well have asked the bride one night if she'd be open to a polyamorous relationship with some of his friends from a nudist camp he'd frequented before he knew her--meet Harry, Nancy, and their son Michael Moore. YIKES!! This whole thing is abnormal. Don't get near me! I don't know you! Send my things to my mother's!


This madness of March 2010 is not a little misunderstanding between lovebirds that will be cleared up. It is a political STD. Even the supporters of health care reform realize that Obama is a fraud, because the whole point of nominating him was to let the voters sleep and complete the invasion without a struggle. No wonder members of Congress need such good health care--Obama had to break their arms, legs, backs and balls so that he wouldn't be a lame duck. That's your member of Congress whose teeth are on the floor. Good to know someone's working for you in Washington, huh? And who could sleep through all that racket? Never again will Obama seem "presidential" to anybody, nor will Speaker Pelosi be mistaken for a legislator. This is not, as their fixers will continue to insist, because they are African-American and female and their critics racists and sexists, but because Obama and Pelosi refused to heed the calls of Americans who said the noise they were making was waking up the whole neighborhood.

Obama and Pelosi have even lost their aura of legitimacy as Elected Officials of a Major Party. How can that be? Weren't they elected? Aren't the Democrats a Major Party? Not the way they were before yesterday. The public that thought it was switching flavors got a cone with vermin in it. Yuck! Health code violation! Shut down that joint.


In the past liberals have successfully deflected attacks away from liberalism itself. Liberals didn't shield Communists, they were anti-Communist, or would be if there were any real Communists, just as they'd be real patriots if there were anything to be patriotic about. Liberals weren't anti-business, pro-crime, pro-terror, etc., etc. Liberalism was not the issue. There was nothing to worry about. It was one of the good things about America. Most people didn't worry. They turned over and enjoyed the American Dream.


Well, the American Dream has become less peaceful. "Richest Country on Earth" sounds like it might be somewhere else. And now, for the first time, liberals have made liberalism itself the issue. By undertaking more government intervention in one shot than the public could sleep through, they destroyed the camouflage that has been essential to their past success.


As a result, American political life has entered uncharted waters. To speculate about how many congressional seats the Democrats may lose and Republicans win in November is to imagine the politics of a different time, when the voters decided whether this year they wanted the donkey or the elephant, chocolate or vanilla. The Democratic Party has changed that: for many voters liberalism is now off the menu. Meaning: in passing social welfare legislation against the powerful will of many voters, the Democratic party has for the first time legitimized an effort to repeal an achievement of the liberal agenda. The question of whether this effort can succeed in the near future is much less important than its implications for the long run. As long as the Health Care law is in place, there will be persistent, widespread, and confident efforts to repeal it. It will be subject to constant criticism and evaluation. This criticism will get constantly worse, because the Health Care law will be a legitimate lightning rod for dissatisfaction about any aspect of the national economy. Moreover, it will legitimate, on purely economic grounds, many previously sacrosanct topics, such as immigration legal and illegal, because the cost and functioning of the program is inseparable from the population of the country. And as this repeal movement continues and grows, it will foster a new critical discourse from which no existing entitlement will be entirely exempt.

None of this will require any stoking by Republican politicians. No "Great Communicator" will be needed. There will be no messaging and no issues. Liberalism has announced that its agenda is regime change. It has started a nonviolent war on American soil. It has told the American people that their role in democracy is to be seen and not heard. The American people will not take well to this. Liberalism has made itself a target for the American people. Liberals will win no further victories and suffer many painful losses. That will become clear through elections, but it won't be politics as usual. And in this theater of war, liberalism cannot pull out. It's a sitting duck.


The Democratic Party has placed itself in the position of being on the defensive and exposed to substantive attack permanently. The Guantanomo that opponents will use as a "recruiting tool" against liberalism is one the Democrats cannot even close: Washington itself. The full effects of this will not become immediately apparent, not even this November. The rate of losses may vary, but they will increase over time, and many will be permanent as in the past they were not. Republican and Democrat are no longer like chocolate and vanilla, they're like chocolate and cardboard. Democratic "strategists" will certainly "spin" the gradual death of the Democratic Party as illusory, temporary, and perverse. But they will never convince the voters. The Democrats are now the people who broke in while we were trying to get some sleep. And they're still in the house! Whoever isn't awake yet will be awake soon. And it will be a long time before it feels safe enough to get back in bed.