So was the recent election simply a repudiation of the Bush administration and its GOP allies in Congress, or a more substantive “realignment” of political philosophy by the American people? Are we moving to the left, or not?
Depends on who you talk to.
In yesterday’s WSJ, pollster Scott Rasmussen suggests that President-elect Obama may not have the mandate he might think:
A Rasmussen survey conducted Oct. 2 found that 59% agreed with the sentiment expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Just 28% disagreed with this sentiment.
Mr. Obama won the White House promising tax cuts, but he will be governing with a Democratic Congress bursting with desire for a more activist government. As he faces this challenge, he might remember the fate of another man who made taxes the central part of his campaign: the first President Bush, whose most memorable campaign line — “Read my lips, no new taxes” — was as central to his victory as Mr. Obama’s promise to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. George H.W. Bush famously reneged on that promise. Voters rejected his bid for a second term.
At National Review online, the great Mark Steyn takes a dimmer view:
My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a “center-right” country. Americans didn’t vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a Dancing With The Stars election: Obama’s a star and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn’t mean they’re suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.
Up to a point. Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter. Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It’s pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn’t make any difference who controls Congress, who’s in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (ie, the center and the right) and barely 20 per cent are “liberals.” And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.
“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Now who does that remind you of?
This is the basic challange: Can “reformist” conservatives develop a set of policy initiatives that provide a better answer to middle-class anxieties than “just cut taxes,” but which don’t lay the foundations for ever-expanding government?
