Does that headline seem a little overblown? Well, don’t worry, it’s not from me. But it’s entirely possible that in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts’s special election to fill the Senate seat left vacant following Ted Kennedy’s death, you’ve seen a few similar headlines around the blogosphere. I know I have. Not shockingly, they’re all from liberals. Now I’m not going to say that liberals shouldn’t be upset about the Brown victory. After all, if you subscribe to that particular political philosophy, then Brown’s election is a stinging rebuke, and will almost certainly derail the “progressive agenda” for the time being. That’s a hard pill for some people to swallow. However, I think that a little perspective is needed.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: the election of Scott Brown was a straight-up referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama made it so by heading to Massachusetts to campaign for the bumbling Martha Coakley, and didn’t even attempt to deny when stumping for her. But Scott Brown also made it so by running on an explicitly anti-Obama platform. It’s not like Brown was trying to hide his conservative stripes from the electorate. In fact, what makes his victory so astonishing is that he actually ran as a tax-cutting national security hawk who promised to be the forty-first vote against Obama’s health care monstrosity. A full 72% of the electorate believed that Brown was at least somewhat conservative, compared to only 22% that saw him as a moderate. And he won! In liberal Massachusetts, a state that hadn’t elected a Republican Senator since 1972, he won a seat that hadn’t been held by a Republican since Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952. Add that to the fact that fully 56% of voters said that health care was the issue that most influenced their vote; that 50% of voters said it would be better to pass no bill at all than the bill before Congress; and that 51% percent of voters flat-out oppose the current health bill (with 41% percent strongly opposing it), and it becomes difficult to see the election as anything other than a slap in the President’s face. (All figures from Rasmussen Reports.)
And you know, that’s not a shock either. What President hasn’t faced some sort of rebuke from the public? It happens. In fact, it’s meant to happen. Our particular form of democratic republicanism is structured to enable the electorate to let their government know when it’s going to far. The Founding Fathers were fearful of rapid change spurred by momentary eruptions of public outrage, and when they wrote the Constitution, they installed mechanisms to prevent it. There’s no question about that. Insofar as the results of the election reflected the will of the people of Massachusetts – and by extrapolation the will of the American people, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be strongly against the President’s current health care proposal – the system worked.
But the liberal literati seem to think that far from being a perfect example of the electorate exercising its power over the government through the system, Brown’s election demonstrates that American democracy is in fact broken. Yes, their interpretation of the results is that because the public consciously chose to derail the Obama agenda, the system has in fact failed. How do they arrive at that conclusion? Well, I can’t claim to know what lurks in the mind of every liberal, but my instinct tells me that the reaction comes from a paradox, which is a necessary condition of the liberal philosophy as it exists in modern America.
The fact is that the progressive agenda that drives liberals cannot be fully enacted by the will of the American people. This is because it is in many ways fundamentally at odds with the traditional American ideas of individualism and self-reliance, and consequently is relegated to minority status among American philosophies. (Witness this Gallup poll, which found that only 21% of Americans identified themselves as liberals by the end of 2009.) However, the general thinking among progressives is that despite their agenda’s unpopularity – and they recognize it as unpopular, or else they wouldn’t feel the need to disguise it every election cycle – it must be enacted in the name of social justice. And there is the dilemma. Liberals recognize that their policies are not widely supported by the American people, yet they believe that those policies must be implemented in the name of righting societal wrongs.
When the electorate votes them into office, liberals naturally celebrate. They seem to think that the people have finally come around to them; that they have accepted the progressive agenda and recognized the genius of their enlightened leaders. In short, the agenda has won people over. But when they are voted out of office, liberals refuse to believe that their agenda lost people. Instead they panic, because suddenly the system no longer serves their goals. They realize that under a system in which people can turn against the enlightened agenda so quickly, no true “progress” can be made. Consequently, this system – the system of American democracy – has failed them. It is at this point that they claim to have lost faith in democracy.
I’m not going to pretend that conservatives always handle electoral defeats with grace and dignity. But I will say that I’ve never heard a conservative rail against the system itself simply because the people have dealt them a defeat. Most conservatives simply try to figure out how to win next time, how to win the people’s favor once more. Liberals, though, seem to want to cut the people out of the process entirely, because to them, anything that stands in the way of enacting the progressive agenda now must be eliminated.
But that’s nothing new. It’s just the logical extension of a philosophy that holds at its core the belief that not only does an enlightened elite knows what’s better for a country than the citizenry as a whole, but that it is the right of that elite to see its agenda implemented, regardless of public opposition.
And so you see, the latest electoral setback that liberals have endured – the victory of Scott Brown – may have inspired headlines like the one above. However, for liberals, faith in American democracy did not just evaporate because of Scott Brown. It vanished a long time ago, when they chose to embrace a philosophy that holds as its highest virtue the service of “social justice,” rather than the service of the will of the people.
As one of the people who expressed this sentiment, let me clarify. I do not see the MA election result as signifying the “end of my faith in American democracy” because I was disappointed in Coakley’s loss or Brown’s win, nor because I feel like the Dems have any inherent right to 60 Senate seats. My reaction was because of what the results signal about the way electoral politics operate in our country.
I strongly believe that Coakley’s loss was not a referendum on her policy beliefs, nor on Obama’s presidency – polls in MA show that both are still favored by majorities. One key factor was that she ran a horrible campaign, seeming out of touch with a core MA identity – messing up Red Sox issues is a third rail in Boston! In many instances, she was all-but-daring voters to like her. But the broader sentiment was a repudiation the way Washington has been operating, leveraging a widespread anger against how the recession recovery has helped bankers over workers, how health care has been compromised to cater to medical industries and specific Senatorial kickbacks over any clear principles, how calls of change and reform have seemed more incremental and measured than promised. Basically, many people who supported Obama are let down on how his first year has not delivered on the hopes that many of us felt his election represented. Remember – a good portion of those anti-HCR voters were objecting from the left, not the right.
In other words, the MA electorate is nowhere near as conservative as Brown, and clear majorities favor Coakley’s stance on issues over Brown’s. People voted against their policy beliefs to “send a message” to Dems that they feel overlooked – and Brown did a good job seeming like a populist despite a stance on issues that point the other way. And I respect the desire to avoid voting for a distasteful candidate just because they play for your nominal team.
So why is my faith lost? Two key reasons: first, the two-party system is so corrupt at the moment that voters rarely have options beyond voting for the lesser of two evils. While there are substantial differences between the parties, many MA voters had to either vote for someone they disliked but agreed with in broad principle, or someone they found more agreeable but was much further to the right of them on most issues – and knowing that once he’s in DC, Brown will line-up with the far right-wing Senators to block all Dem policy wins. So the choice is status quo ineptitude, or “change” in the form of obstructionism. (Or to not vote, which seemed to be the preference of most young voters…)
The second is that the election coverage furthered the politics-as-game frame that infuriates me. Now that the GOP can (and seems intent to) filibuster everything, the entire political coverage is about scoring points, racking up the additional vote, strategies to block the filibuster, etc. Any focus on actual issues of governance or policy becomes overwhelmed by the game – and that disgusts me. (This is why I could never live in DC…)
I won’t try to argue with you about policy or so-called “traditional American ideals” – but don’t assume that the disenchanted left is somehow sorer losers or refuse to accept electoral results based on a few isolated tweets. (And I’d heartily disagree that the right is somehow more gracious in losing, as evidenced by the birthers and others who believe that Obama’s win was stolen without any actual evidence or rationale!)
OK – back to agreeing about important things like television…
Two things:
1) I think that a large part of the Massachusetts electorate’s disgust with “business as usual” reflects Obama’s policy decisions. While they may be broadly sympathetic to his agenda and reluctant to abandon him politically, I don’t think that Brown would have had a chance if support for Obama was a deep as it is broad within the state.
2) I think that in practice, Brown is more likely to be a John McCain Republican than a Jim DeMint Republican. Expect conservative votes on health care, economic policy, and national security issues, but don’t be shocked if he crosses the aisle on judicial appointments, among other possible items.
And yes, I’ve already got my DVR set for Lost…