The yammering cacophony of nitwit analysis about yesterday’s election won’t subside for quite some time. I made my stupid contribution to the great “why” circle jerk on Sunday, the short version of which is that a terrible economy combined with right wing fear and an unlimited spigot of money from plutocrats equaled a very bad night for the Blues. But now that we know how it turned out, what’s going to happen? The short version is that a lot of little people are going to get hurt until the next time there’s a purge of fantasy-based elected officials. It would be better if that happens sooner rather than later.
There were a lot of problems with the Bush Administration, but the fundamental filament that connected them all was their disdain for what they derisively referred to as “discernable reality”. They were ideologues through and through, and they believed that ideological fervency was the solution to every problem. But the properties of CO2 molecules don’t change because a person believes in free market absolutism. The massive plunge in federal revenue cannot be erased by really caring a lot about supply side economic theories. Biology continues to operate on evolutionary principals no matter how many Bibles get thumped.
There is no evidence that this new crop of Red politicians sees the world any differently. If anything, they seem even more committed to ideological purity as an all purpose tool. And therein lays the problem, because the one thing we know for sure is that hard core Red ideas about governing don’t work. Tax cuts for millionaires don’t stimulate the economy and do wreck the federal budget. Restrictions on sex ed, contraception and abortion don’t lead to less abortions, they just harm women. Cracking down on illegal immigrants with more border controls and more deportations doesn’t lead to less immigration, it just makes minorities easier to exploit.
The question now isn’t, “Can any of their policies work?” We know they can’t. The question is, “How long it will take for their failure to be widely recognized?” It’s possible that it will take only two years. The Reds might go nuts in some very ugly ways with their new power, and Obama could be re-elected in 2012 and take the House back while he’s at it. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that it will take much longer than that.
The nightmare scenario is that the Reds use their newfound power in the House to basically jam up the federal government for two years. Without serious federal action, the economy will continue to suck and unemployment will remain high (and don’t forget that an outright government shutdown will cost the economy substantially). Obama goes down in 2012, almost certainly taking the Senate with him (the Blues will be defending all those gains from 2006), and we get four more years of policies that are ideologically correct and disastrously costly in every other regard.
This country is amazingly strong and unfathomably wealthy, and if it can take eight years of Bush the Younger it can certainly take four years of Rich Dullwasp, or whoever the Reds nominate in 2012. But not all of this country’s people are amazingly strong and unfathomably wealthy. A lot of them had their lives ruined or outright ended by eight years of Bush the Younger, and another go round of fantasy based Red government will inevitably mean more pain for them.
End Note: Much as I’d like to, I can’t blame it all on the politicians. Proposition 19 was the first legitimate ray of hope for ending the massive waste of human life that is the drug war, and it went down badly.
