HENRY OLSEN thinks Republicans will gain 55 to 72 seats in the House, with 64 being his best estimate.
That will give the GOP243 seats, its highest total since the election of 1946 and the second highest since the Great Depression.
More interesting than his political guesstimate, however, is his analysis of why the Great Repudiation (my term) is happening.
Mr. Olsen, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, sees a fifty-year war in the Democratic Party between "moderate progressives" (think Bill Clinton) and "liberal progressives" (President Obama).
Today's liberal progressives are directly descended from the "New Left" of the 1960s. By this I do not mean student radicals, SDS members, Yippies, and other of the radical fringe of this movement. Instead, I define the "New Left" as those Americans -- largely bearers of college and postgraduate degrees -- who sought not merely to ameliorate some of the hardest edges of American life, as FDR did with the New Deal, but rather to transform American life now. They sought to eliminate, not emeliorate, poverty now. They saw Americans' pursuit of ever-increasing wealth as an impediment to these goals; why should already well-off families have more when some people had little? And they saw American defense spending as a crucial obstacle to these goals; if no one was attacking us directly, why shouldn't we spend on butter rather han bombs?
The New Left was characterized as much by its impatience as by its lofty ambitions. It's advocates saw the non-attainment [read nonattainment] of their goals as a moral crime. As such, those who stood in the way of those goals were not merely adversaries, they were enemies: selfish, unlettered, in need of enlightenment. This sentiment is the source of the arrogant condescension that many Americans and most conservatives felt all to frequently is is a defining feature of today's Left.
Mr. Olsen says a majority of Democrats "are not of this lineage."
Moderate progressives . . . view Americans today as wanting the same things economically that their parents and grandparents wanted from the New Deal: an active safety net that helps them move up in American life. In this view, Americans support Democrats when they use government to support and enhance middle-class values and aspirations. Moderate progressives believe Democrats got away from that heritage when they started to be perceived as worrying more about people who did not work than about those who did, as worrying more about criminals than the victims of crimes, as worry more about American aggressive than about the freedom of the West.
Mr. Olsen says, I do, that the key to Obamism is the president's desire to fundamentally transform America.
From the start, President Obama, with the enthusiastic backing of liberal progressives, declared that his would be a transformative presidency. This meant that his agenda would largely be that of the liberal progressives: health-care reform with a major emphasis on near-universal coverage, cap-and-trade, a large economic stimulus focused more on government projects than on tax relief, a consumer-protection agency to regulate financial instruments. Truly, this crisis would not be allowed to go to waste: Forty years of wandering in the political wilderness would finally be over.
Political urgency was coupled with this intellectual impetus. Democrats were acutely aware that they had supermajorities they had not possessed since 1980. With the increase of the partisan use of the filibuster, a phenomenon not widely seen until the Clinton years, they felt they would not have this degree of power again in the near future. Many argued that the window for bold action was narrow, and it could not be let to close without fulfilling liberal-progressive dreams.
Mr. Obama's agenda offended not only conservatives, predictably, but also moderate progressives in his own party.
The administration has been criticized by many for not engaging in Clintonian triangulation, in not bending to the political winds to pass something incremental and obtainable. Speaker Pelosi's decision to push her caucus to a floor vote on cap-and-trade legislation that was unlikely to pass the Senate might cost dozens of Democrats their seats. The decision to push the health-care bill after Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election to the Senate has helped to define the entire 2010 campaign. Had they not done these things, many moderate progressives argue, Democrats could have staved off the massive defeat they are now certain to suffer.
But this argument essentially says that Hillary Clinton should have won the presidency. . . .
Mr. Olsen argues that American voters fundamentally reject what the liberal progressives have to offer.
He offers four test cases: Democratic supermajorities in 1965-1966 (after the Kennedy assassination), 1977-1980 (after Watergate), 1993-1994 (Mr. Clinton's first two years), and 2009-2010 (the Obama majorities).
In each of the three previous instances, Democrats suffered landslide reversals in Congress within four years of obtaining their supermajorities. They will do so again this year. The only time they did not also then lose the presidency was in 1966, when the triangulator Bill Clinton was reelected.
In each case, Mr. Olsen says, Democrats were repudiated by the white working class. His analysis of why this is so is fascinating. He identifies "seven salient values or tendencies" of this group. Here are three:
Pride in their lives: . . . They are not "bitter people, clinging to religion or guns"; they celebrate their lives and crave respect from the educated and wealthy classes. They flock to politicians who show genuine respect for their lives, and turn on those who display contempt or disdain.
Anger at being disrespected: . . . They particularly dislike having their lives belittled as unsophisticated or inferior to the lives of educated or wealthy folk. . . .
Patriotism: . . . Working-class voters . . . love their country openly in ways that often seem odd and embarrassing to the educated class. They are likelier to express open support of and deference to the military . . . ; their children volunteer for the military in much greater numbers than those of any other class. This is partly economic . . . but it is also genuinely patriotic. / This sentiment is particularly strong among recent immigrants.
. . . .
Now consider these values in the light of the primary features of liberal progressivism. Liberal progressives crave rapid, transformational change; working-class voters abhor it. . . . The impatience that characterizes liberal progressivism often leads to the impression that its apostles feel contemp and disdain for those who disagree; working class voters sense this and react against it. . . .
. . . .
Some of President Obama's personal habits also rub working-class voters the wrong way. The president's urbane articulateness and emphasis on rational argumentation attracts many highly educated voters, but is offputting [read off-putting] to the working class. His preternatural clam and seeming lack of emotion also work against him. . . . [Historically,] working-class voters have been drawn to politicians who connect with them on an emotional level, from FDR to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton. They need their politicans to demonstrate warmth and humor; they respond to speakers who use example, story, and narrative as much as specific analysis to make their points. President Obama's aloof and academic manner is the exact opposite of what working-class voters want in their leaders.
Mr. Olsen's conclusion is sobering for conservatives.
Conservatives often assume that elections like 2010 show America has a consistent conservative majority. I think it is more accurate to say that they show that America has a consistent anti-progressive majority. The task conservatives have today is to transform the anti-progressive majority into a pro-conservative one. This will be harder than it seems.
The American conservative movement was founded in explicit opposition to the progressive project. It was also founded on the premise that a return to the governing principles of the Founders' Constitution was feasible and desirable. The first principle is anti-progressive; the second is pro-conservative. The dynamics of working- and middle-class attitudes I have outlined above raises the specter that these principles . . . can be politically incompatible.
. . . .
Today's conservatives have a rendezvous with destiny. The peculiar political challenge of our time -- repairing our nation's finances and avoiding national bankruptcy -- requires us to reform our welfare state. This forces us to confront the tensions outlined above [e.g., the tensions between advancing freedom and respecting stability], and to do so in a way that reassures rather than frightens the vast American middle that has turned to us now in response to the last two years. If we seize this opportunity and act with principle and prudence, we truly can say we have met our challenge. In so doing, we truly will have "preserved for our children this, the last best hope for man on earth."
(Henry Olsen, "Day of the Democratic Dead," nationalreview.com, November 1, 2010)
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Thanks to Kevin Whited for pointing Unca D to this fine essay. Read it if you have time.
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