All Politics is (Still) Local

It is no secret to political observers that much of the contemporary American Right is of a revolutionary mindset, and is supportive of large-scale, seismic changes to the way government interacts with society.  This certainly exists in libertarian and quasi-libertarian quarters, whose policy goals have always appealed to me intellectualy, and it is equally true among movement conservatives who feel that, three decades into the Reagan Revolution, America is still a nation where tax rates are too progressive, where the state is too powerful, where abortion is still pretty much available on demand, and where tyranny continues to exist in too great a portion of the world.  The right-wing revolutionaries view the Tea Party movement as evidence that their ideology is finally catching on among the greater populace, and Scott Brown’s election earlier this year in Massachusetts was supposed to pave the way for unprecedented Republican gains this fall that would launch the Reagan Revolution 2.0.  All of this is supposed to culminate in a revolutionary conservative being elected to the presidency in 2012, perhaps someone like Sarah Palin, who would then proceed to repeal the 16th Amendment, overturn Roe v. Wade, and spread democracy to the far side of the world.

I submit to you that the election results suggest that no such thing is going to happen, and that a return to the pre-Obama status quo is more likely to come to pass after 2012 than anyone’s revolution.  The simple fact of the matter is that Decision 2010 simply does not portend a second American revolution.  It was not a victory for movement conservatism, but for small-c conservatism, the sort that resists the very kinds of top-down, ideology-driven, bold and sweeping changes that all revolutionaries desire.

First — and I touched on this last week — the Republican gains at the congressional level, while near-historic for the post-war era, are misleading when only the topline results are taken into account.  Yes, Republicans are poised to seat 244 members of their party when the 112th Congress convenes.  What those numbers don’t tell you is that, absent a net gain of 14 House seats in Southern states as compared to the last Republican House in 2005-06, the incoming GOP majority would look a lot like the one that came to power in 2004.  The GOP’s massive Rust Belt gains were pretty much due to taking back territory lost in ’06 and ’08.  Ditto the gains out West.  Other than that, the GOP traded some newfound strength in the Midwest for some seats that remained Democratic in New England, but it was the South that was really responsible for the largest Republican congressional caucus since the 1940s.

These results suggest that the 2010 election was, in most of the country, a repudiation of Obama, and not a call for revolution.  A return to normalcy, not a fundamental re-ordering of American politics.  To be sure, I do not mean to downplay the significance of the Republican gains in the House.  One fascinating statistic, ignored by pretty much everyone on all sides, is that there are 216 congressional districts that voted Republican in 2004, Republican in 2010, and Democratic at some point in the interim.  That means that just over 49 percent of the nation’s congressional districts are likely to vote Republican absent a perfect storm of economic, cultural, international, and ethical dilemmas such as those that plagued Republicans in 2006/08.  And that doesn’t take into account districts like TN-06, which was Democratic for generations but which moved into the GOP column in 2010 due to a blue dog retirement, nor does any of this take into account the re-districting that will take place over the next couple of years, which will almost certainly create a few more solid red districts.  As such, it is plausible that we are on the verge of a structural Republican majority in the House of Representatives.  That is to say, absent a complete Republican meltdown, the GOP should control the majority of seats in the House for the foreseeable future.

As such, Republicans may have a lock on the House just as the Democrats did during the mid-20th Century.  But still, that does not a revoluton make.  Had this been a revolutionary electorate, we would have seen scores of Scott Browns poised to take office throughout the Northeast and the West Coast.  We would have seen Republicans claim new territory in the Rust Belt and the Rockies, not just take back the territory that they lost during the GOP’s incompetence/corruption/Katrina/Iraq/economic-meltdown era.  And we most certainly would have seen Harry Reid go down in Nevada.  The fact that none of this happened suggests that what we’re really seeing is a rejection of Obama’s brand of change, not the promotion of another sort of change, that which is advocated by the Revolutionary Right.  If 2008 was the Change Election, 2010 was the Take-Your-Change-And-Shove-It Election.

Indeed, Reid’s re-election against the backdrop of Republicans taking, say, the Maine state legislature is a perfect example of how small-c conservatism won the day.  In an election that was about big-picture ideology, Republicans would be expected to do similarly well down the ballot.  Voters, one would reason, would pull the lever for a Republican for Senate, a Republican for Congress, a Republican for Governor, and a Republican for Legislator.  But that’s not what they did at all.  Instead, the closer the office was to the local level, the better Republicans did.  Republicans did better at winning state offices than they did at winning national office.  They did better at winning House seats than at winning Senate seats.  Many voters cast ballots for, say, Corbett for Pennsylvania governor while selecting Sestak for Senate.  They voted against Rory Reid and for Harry Reid.  What gives?

I think the answer lies in the reality that America is, at its core, a center-right country, and so, all things being equal, the nation’s conservative party is going to be the majority party at the local level.  And for the first time, the nation’s conservative party is undeniably the Republican Party.  Younger observers should take note of the fact that this wasn’t always the case.  As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, scores of Republicans were to the left of lots and lots of Democrats, and vice versa.  The fact that the two parties are now organized on an ideological basis and not on a regional basis, or around shared interests, the way they were for most of America’s history, means that the days of conservative Democrats dominating American politics at the local level is over.  And that means that voters looking for state and local officials to keep property taxes low, or keep crime down, or balance the budget, or otherwise make the trains run on time, will select conservative politicians just as they always have, only those politicians are now more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.

But the closer things got to the national level, the more that specific GOP candidates began to look un-conservative from a classical conservative perspective.  Politicians like Angle, Miller, and Buck ran on a platform of top-down, seismic changes to the way the federal government operates.  By rejecting these revolutionary politicians, voters demonstrated that their goal is not to replace Obama’s hopey, changey policies with a different type of reinvention of the wheel.  What voters really want, it seems, is for all the revolutionary types to go away so that they can get back to business as usual.

This is not the message that right-wing revolutionaries want to hear.  But it was the one delivered by voters.  Nowhere was that clearer than in the Alaska Senate race.  Lisa Murkowski is poised to become the second U.S. Senator in history to win an election via a write-in campaign.  The reason: she was the candidate who was best able and expressly willing to deliver pork to the state of Alaska.  And not only did Alaskans vote for pork, they crawled over broken glass for pork.  Returns show that nearly 90 percent of Murkowski voters followed the rules to the letter of the law when it came to voting for Lisa, including filling in the oval and spelling her name correctly.  No one thought this was possible.  Voters are too apathetic, so the pundits reasoned.  And the right-wing revolutionary energy was on the side of Joe Miller.  But when push came to shove, and when the actual voters got to have their say, the hopey, changey, Joe Miller types were rejected by the same voters who sent the hopey, changey, Obama types packing.  And ideologues on both sides found utopianism kicked to the curb.

None of this should have been surprising.  The 2009 election results served as a primer for this very small-c conservative resurgence.  In those elections, Virginia and New Jersey elected two regionally appropriate conservative governors who applied their conservatism to local issues, and to the concerns of the voters in their respective states.  Both McDonnell and Christie were selected by their state’s primary voters and were the product of organic politics.  Meanwhile, in New York’s 23rd congressional district, Dick Armey and the Tea Party Express, outside groups that had no connection to the district, put their weight behind Doug Hoffman as the revolutionary conservative candidate in the race.  Hoffman spent the campaign talking about ideology and civilizational struggles, and couldn’t be bothered with “parochial” local issues.  As such, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the voters couldn’t be bothered with Hoffman, who has ensured that NY-23 is now a Democratic seat.

So while the 2009/10 election cycle has been very good for Republicans in terms of raw partisan strength, the mandate that Republicans have received, and the mood of the electorate, needs to be correctly interpreted, lest the more revolutionary elements of the Right assume that they have carte blanche to remake the world.  Revolutionaries are, by their nature, folks who are unhappy with the status quo, and who want a sea change in the way things are ordered.  But there is almost no evidence that Americans are in a revolutionary mood, and there exists a mountain of evidence that what Americans want is a return to what they view as the norm.  I’ve often analogized this period to the waning Wilson years, when an academic, liberal president, who came to power because of a schism in the conservative electoral majority, pushed a weary nation towards a desire for a “return to normalcy,” which became one of the slogans of the Harding campaign in 1920.  That election ushered in a decade of conservative governance.  Not revolutionary conservatism, but Coolidge-style, small-c conservatism.  The kind of conservatism that Sean Hannity would almost certainly find so dull that he would begin looking for another line of work.

I will end by pointing out the obvious: it is really, really hard to motivate voters via the sobriety and temperance of small-c conservatism.  Slogans like “Fo’ Mo’ for the Status Quo” would garner about as much energy as did the “Whip Inflation Now” campaign during the Ford years.  And that’s been one of the enduring dilemmas faced by conservatives who wish to build an electoral majority.  It’s hard to convince folks to man the phone banks in order to prevent change, and yet conservatism, in the classical sense, is all about the concept of conserving the present order and being cautious and skeptical of proposed new orders.  But no one is going to trudge through the snow in New Hampshire in order to make sure that change is incremental and organically-imposed, which is why successful grassroots conservative movements are almost always un-conservative in the traditional sense.  As such, if a GOP president and Senate comes to power in 2013, the challenge for Republicans will be clear: to please an electorate that wants to be left alone, with its pork and entitlements, and a base that wants revolution.