US Elections

The big picture

By Jonathan Bradley in Seattle, WA

28 April 2010

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One of my biggest frustrations with contemporary takes on American politics is an insistence on taking the short term view. We saw this in the weeks leading up to the Democrats passing health care reform; the narrative then was that Obama was a failure as a President and that the Republicans had successfully defeated his agenda. But when Congress passed health care, all of a sudden we had a slew of successful Obama accomplishments to admire: not just the unprecedented health care reform, but substantial economic stimulus packages, a rescue of Wall Street from the brink, and significant reforms to the tertiary education system to boot. This, whatever happens in the midterms, is not the picture of a party cowed by adverse political currents. It still looks like an ascendancy.

Which is exactly what Ross Douthat's most recent column suggests:

In a sense, the last eighteen months have been enormously successful for conservatives: The polls have turned decisively against the Democrats, the Obama White House, and liberalism in general; the Republicans have won a series of elections they weren’t expected to win; and conservatives look primed for bigger gains in November. But of course, all of this political success is happening against the backdrop of (and as a backlash against) a series of sweeping liberal policy successes, whose impact promises to be much more enduring than whatever happens in the midterms. Elections come and go, but new entitlements tend to last forever …

Exactly right. And conservatives have shown no signs of having developed credible alternative policies to the Democrat successes Douthat decries. Whatever happens this November, the long term trends are leaning Democrat. Short-term alarmism directed at (or triumphalism directed against) the Democratic agenda does not take this into account.

Tags: America, Conservatives, Democrats, Liberals, Ross Douthat

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