The Ideological Battle
Arthur Brooks writes about the ideological battle that is going on within the United States right now. It is far deeper than the midterm election. Even a victory today for the Democrats will not be a victory for the left. For the divisions are deeper and broader.
….This midterm election, in the view of many optimistic liberals, will be a forceful repudiation of the inevitability of American conservatism. A victory after so many years of losses will mark the beginning of the end to the country's nightmarish reactionary drift. According to Howard Dean, "The American people are fed up and want to change course. Democrats are offering the American people a new direction." But will it really be the dawn of a new day for the American left? After a cold look at the evidence, liberals might decide to take the champagne off the ice. The victory, assuming there is one, will hardly be glorious, and long-term trends are still distinctly right wing.
Some doomsday scenarios envision a 45-seat shift in the House of Representatives and a substantial Democratic majority in the Senate. These predictions, when looking at the actual data, are probably unrealistic. My colleague Danny Hayes, a political scientist who studies polling, says that the most reasonable picture has the Democrats winning 20-30 seats and taking narrow control of the House, while failing to win the Senate. This assessment is consistent with what most mainstream pollsters are predicting.
No bloodbath–but still major progress for the left, right? Not really. We are in the midst of a deeply unpopular war, and an electorate in a foul mood. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that more than 30% of likely voters planned to cast their ballots on Nov. 7 for Democrats specifically as a sign of opposition to George Bush. Congressional Republicans are hardly helping their own cause, between corruption and sexual misconduct. And the Republican Congress has so alienated authentic conservative voters with its porky profligacy that lots of Republicans will probably stay home.
I've had the commenters here who say things like, "The nightmare will be over when the Democrats win." Which says rather more about the commenter's lack of maturity and complete fundamental lack of understanding about how politics work than it does about the two political parties. But Brooks takes a very hard look at real trends and points out three major areas where the left is losing the ideological battle, and losing rather badly. Those areas are religion, immigration and the nation's youth. You do have to read his analysis to understand how he reaches the conclusions he does, so I won't excerpt it.
The bottom line on the election, though, is that it does not look like a tsunami for the Democrats and there yet may well be a number of surprises. But even if the Dems win control of one or both chambers, they have some serious, long-term challenges ahead. And this won't be at all what the left tells one another in their echo chambers.
