Some people say the new era looks a lot like the old era, in that Fordice is quite conservative. Other people say it wasn’t ideology, it was truck-stoppery that won for Fordice: he is “more comfortable at the truck stop” than the incumbent he beat. The incumbent went to Harvard Law School. Even worse, given today’s climate, he was an incumbent. That was enough to beat a bunch of people last week.
It is risky wringing ideological or other national portents from local events. Electoral status in a continental democracy sends few decipherable signals. Consider the victory of incumbent (although only recently appointed) Democrat Harris Wofford over Dick Thornburgh, a pillar of the Republican establishment, in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. A liberal revival? New Deal redux? Not necessarily. If the Democrats’ candidate had been Gov. Bob Casey, who last summer put through the largest tax increase in state history, he probably would have been shellacked. Pennsylvania’s voters are as taxophobic as their neighbors in New Jersey. There the voters used state legislative elections to send a message to Democratic Gov. Jim Florio, author of the largest tax increase in state history. The message was, approximately: “Get out of Dodge!” They replaced Democratic majorities with veto-proof Republican majorities in both legislative chambers. And Virginians defeated seven Democratic incumbents in the 40-member state Senate.
Elections produce unpredietable caroms in the pinball game of polities. The Democrats’ Pennsylvania win may cost the Republicans Senate seats in Kansas and New Hampshire. Democrats have a 57-43 Senate majority. At least six Republican seats are very vulnerable in 1992. So the prospect of a Republican majority is receding, and Republicans may even be reduced to the sort of rump-fewer than 40 seats–they were in all of the 1960s and part of the 1970s. This prospect might make private life enticing to two Republicans–Dole of Kansas and Rudman of New Hampshire–who have been thinking about retiring next year.
Perhaps Republicans should be smiling. As their party has become more conservative, conservatism has been distilled to dislike of government. This is expressed in taxophobia. Rage against incumbents expresses the dislike. As for taxophobia, a conservative recently said: Imagine you fell asleep in 1980, when the top income-tax rate was 70 percent, and woke up in 1988 when the Democrats’ most radical presidential candidate was advocating a top rate of 38 percent. You would have been stunned by how conservative the country had become. But it also has become less happy. This is partly because government is botching its essential functions (budgets, safe streets, efficient schools, economic growth). But the electorate also is irritable because it cannot make up its mind about the kind of government it wants.
Government-bashing and its natural concomitant, taxcutting, were good politics last week, but wait. There was a third component of the electorate’s incoherent message. There was a clamor for government-that odious beast-to siphon off gobs more money for an incompetent enormous new entitlement, national health care. What is going on?
There is an ongoing struggle for “America’s Constitutional Soul. " That is the title of a brilliant new book by Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., professor of government at Harvard. He says elections in recent decades have revealed the electorate’s unwillingness to choose between the presidential party and the congressional party.
Our parties now correspond to the two political branches ofgovernment, the legislative and executive. The Democratic Party is the party of order. It is based in the legislative branch, which is suited to the steady, routinized, incremental adjustment upwards of entitlements in response to complaints. Congressional Democrats use constituent service, and media display made possible by the multiplication of subcommittees, to secure perpetual incumbency. They use it for the orderly enlargement of entitlements.
But these breed dependencies-of the poor on welfare, of blacks on affirmative action, of workers on social security, of farmers on subsidies, of industries on protection, of the middle class on student loans, and on and on and on. Dependency is being democratized. Everyone has it. Society is fragmented by the proliferation of group dependencies and cannot think of itself as a whole. Self-restraint by any single group for the purpose of serving the public good is pointless because the aggressiveness of all other groups expanding their entitlements rages on. Thus does the party of order breed disorder.
The Republican Party is based in the presidency, the center of political initiative. It fancies itself the party of opportunity. It responds, primarily with tax cuts, to the distaste for the social stagnation that results from the many dependencies. But Republicans flinch from even a tangential, let alone frontal, challenge to the entitlement mentality and the culture of dependency that it fosters. And Democrats recoil from the only rigor required in such a culture, the willingness to pay taxes.
So we live irritably with a contradiction. We think in traditional terms of government existing to protect private rights exercised by individuals. But we act on the premise that the public good is defined by the aggregation of entitlements. So, Mansfield notes, government seeps throughout society seeking more private activities to permeate with entitlement aspects. The core concept of the American regime-that government must be limited in scope and methods-is lost. Government becomes, infuriatingly, both omnipresent and impotent.
Both parties and most voters are suffering bad consciences because of their bad faith, their apostasy from the austere principles of limited government. The nation is nervously rubbing its temples, futilely trying to assuage a migraine that will not go away until people decide to transcend, or at least pay for, the polities of dependency.
