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THE MYTH OF THE UNSTOPPABLE ADVERSARY.
Like Kevin, I'm often a bit surprised by how bought in liberals are to the myth of the unstoppable adversary. Conservatives are always better organized, better funded, more ruthless, more strategic, have larger institutions, are protected by better messaging, get to campaign on simple and unanswerable fear-mongering, and are able to fight without food or water for days on end. How can they be beat? Meanwhile, get around conservatives and you hear much the same story. Liberals are better organized, better funded; more ruthless, get to campaign on cookies and ice cream and government giveaways, are protected by Hollywood and academia and culture and Brookings, and have rocket launchers where their legs should be. How can they be beat?
Meanwhile, the past couple of years have been impressive for how unstoppable both sides proved not to be. George W. Bush lost one election by a tiny margin and won another by an extremely small margin. His party presided over the greatest rallying event in modern American history and got no more than a handful of congressional seats out of the deal. Domestically, his popularity and political skill helped him pass a couple rounds of tax cuts and two massive expansions of the state (NCLB and Medicare Part D) that were essentially capitulations to the liberal agenda. Social Security Privatization was a huge failure.
By 2006, liberals were up against the most unpopular president in modern American history. His administration's failures were beginning to seem more like cautionary fable than actual history. Congressional Republicans were alternately going to jail and being caught molesting pages. Democrats won a load of seats, and managed to do extremely little with their majority. They couldn't get out of Iraq, couldn't pass minor changes to Medicare Part D (much less health care), couldn't pass cap-and-trade, couldn't pass much of anything. Running against an incumbent Republican with Genghis Khan-like numbers and his 700-year-old successor, they're ahead by a handful of points, not by landslide numbers.
All of which is to say, both parties have had their moments over the past decade or so, but neither has demonstrated much in the way of insurmountable structural advantages or total political dominance. Politics remains close, and the two parties relatively evenly matched. There's a tendency to try to explain elections in terms of political skill, because that's how we like to understand politics, but in reality, the major forces have been external events: Crudely speaking, the Republican ascendance was powered by 9/11, and its decline by Iraq and Katrina and congressional scandals. And if Democrats win big this year, it'll probably be because of the economy and Iraq, not because, or not just because, Barack Obama is an uncommonly talented politician.
Photo used under a Creative Commons license from TCM Hitchhiker.
COMMENTS (10)
Um, well... yeah.
But don't discount our winning ways on the natural appeal of cookies and ice cream. :)
Posted by: weboy | July 18, 2008 10:15 AM
i find this "events" theory quite odd coming from an activist-journalist. It may not be your intention to convince the public that their actions don't matter, but I imagine it is the effect.
Posted by: Anonymous | July 18, 2008 10:26 AM
I think many of us are more concerned about the fact that the media tends to overplay Republican appeal and the Democrats' lack thereof, and to (sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly) reinforce Republican arguments on everything from taxes to the usefulness of war as a political instrument.
I mean, remember, the media spent most of April trying to figure out whether some heated sermonizing from Obama's pastor was the end of his professional career, or merely the end of his presidential aspirations.
This persistent bias has a noticeable effect on our politics, and I think we are rightly concerned about the media-enabled "bombshell" to strike at a particularly vulnerable moment in a campaign. And I don't count on the media to bury stories reflecting badly on Dems the way they did with Bush's drunk driving in 2000 or his illegal spying on American citizens in 2004.
Posted by: brewmn | July 18, 2008 10:42 AM
I agree with you that its a mistake to see our opponents as unbeatable, and I think you poke some holes in this thinking. But isn't it rather odd to describe Iraq and Katrina as external events? The Iraq invasion and occupation were policy decisions made in the White House and approved by Congress. That Iraq has severely damaged the GOP's credibility is a reflection on of some event outside of their control, but of a whole series of intellectual and practical failures on their part. Similarly, while Katrina was obviously not an public policy , the inept response was, and that's why the work "Katrina" crystallizes the failures of Bush and the GOP. It seems to me that pointing to the very ineptitude of the GOP is the best disproof of the myth that they are unstoppable.
Posted by: Rich C | July 18, 2008 11:17 AM
George W. Bush lost one election by a tiny margin...
And just when I thought you were growing up....
Posted by: El Viajero | July 18, 2008 11:23 AM
both parties have had their moments over the past decade or so, but neither has demonstrated much in the way of insurmountable structural advantages or total political dominance
Wait, you haven't noticed that even with their execrated President, their Congressional minorities, and their damaged "brand", the Republicans continue to totally dominate the political/policy agenda? How about the fact that although McCain is closely associated with the Iraq debacle, and wants it to continue, and although the public at large is overwhelmingly against it, the polling shows the public favors McCain over Obama on ability to handle Iraq? There is certainly some kind of dominance involved here.
Posted by: Herschel | July 18, 2008 11:26 AM
George W. Bush lost one election by a tiny margin...
And just when I thought you were growing up....
You refer, presumably, to Ezra's childish failure to acknowledge that both the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen. I agree. Ezra, grow up!
Posted by: Herschel | July 18, 2008 11:35 AM
I'm going to go out on a limb here. The "events" reason your postulate is certainly part of it. But I think the real reason for this is that the American public as a whole is just really ignorant and lazy when it comes to paying attention to domestic and international policy. My argument isn't even partisan. Our side is plenty guilty of it to. Hell, I'm certainly guilty as well. I make opinions based off the way I want an issue to turn out, even if I haven't researched it throughly. The netroots might be slightly more informed, but also slightly more partisan as we want to both "win" and to actually have good "stuff" happen. The people who don't pay attention and just show up to the polls on election day might as well just cover their eyes and put a finger on the ballot and vote which ever way it lands.
You can blame this on the media, sure. You can blame it on fast-paced life in the 21st Century. For my part, I don't know that we'll ever find the cause.
But there comes a point where we need to make sure we're skeptical of what we're hearing regardless of the source and to revisit our positions constantly. Most people don't do it. I rarely do it. Its because most Americans are lazy.
2008 might be a "reckoning" especially considering everyone's economic woes. There is nothing that brings a revolution more than economic problems.
Posted by: Adrock | July 18, 2008 12:40 PM
Ezra, I think there's a difference in the two scenarios.
Some adversaries are unstoppable in the near turn. Realistically, there wasn't anything that the Republicans could do to wrest control away from the Democrats in the House and Senate from the 50s until the 80s. The structural institutions in place and the benefits of seniority simply made it almost impossible until a generation or two of legislators started retiring and party identification and culture started to shift... both of which take decades. The only exception is when there's a power vacuum, and the house and senate aren't the sorts of places that allow power vacuums to happen.
I really do think that the Democrats had simply no chance of placing an agressively liberal president in office from 1968 until today. All there was had been room for Democrats like Carter and Clinton to maneuver around on the margins.
However, real change does happen due to the character of the individuals in power. The reason we didn't see much change from the House Democrats is because people like Steny Hoyer "don't have it in them." There's little demand for "game changing" on the top level. By contrast, people like Reagan and Gingrich saw themselves and were determined to be "game changers," so you saw a stronger push for changes that you wouldn't have seen if, say, G HW Bush had won the presidency in 1980 or if Gerald Ford had managed to become Speaker of the House, as he had always dreamed of.
Posted by: Tyro | July 18, 2008 1:17 PM
You discount the importance of tax cuts. They allow Republicans to 'pay off' their supporters at the same time they curtail the Democrats abilities to do the same. Clinton was severely constrained by the enormous deficits he inherited and Obama will be as well. It is not a coincidence that the Beltway only starts worrying about deficits when Democrats are about to take over the Executive Branch.
The deficit, influence of Rubinomics and corporate cash, and the Dems hesitancy to raise taxes make it difficult to enact fiscally progressive measures and easy for Dems to settle for centrist half measures.
Posted by: tax cuts are a win-win for Republicans | July 18, 2008 8:48 PM