Having been a conservative Republican through the 1960’s and 1970’s, I know about losing elections. For kids who first became aware of politics around 1994, tonight must be harder to take. The only people who will be devastated, though, are the political insiders who grew comfortable with the assumption that pork, gerrymandering and incumbency are adequate substitutes for action and ideas. Those work all right when the waters are smooth; in stormy weather, they can’t keep a party afloat.
The most striking facts about this election are, first, the breadth of sentiment among Republicans that our party deserved to lose, second, the complete fecklessness of the opposition party, and, third, the failure of partisans on both sides to face up to the fact that, like it or not, we are in the middle of a long, difficult war, which will only become longer and harder if we pretend it isn’t there.
The masochistic Republican sentiment, which I expect will be trumpeted in tomorrow’s blogs, is understandable. In my own view, the disgruntled gave the Republican Congress too little credit for tax cuts, welfare reform, trade liberalization, judicial confirmations and other excellent achievements, but their lack of gruntlement wasn’t irrational. When the party of limited government increases discretionary spending at a rapid clip and gets cozy with K Street, it isn’t going to please its rank-and-file.
The GOP leadership also, IMHO, committed one spectacular blunder. Egged on by certain right-wing circles (whose judgment is generally better than this), it turned immigration into a major issue, in the transparent expectation of tapping a current of restrictionist feeling. But, as past elections have abundantly proven, the immigration hardliners are a small cadre, almost all of whom vote Republican in any event. Pandering to their whims succeeded only in making a lot of them so angry at President Bush that they became less attached to the Republican Party. The decision to build “The Fence” wasn’t enough to please them, as I’ve noted elsewhere. Instead, they remained angry and evidently infected a portion of the GOP base with their discontent. If illegal immigration had to be addressed at all this year (and it is a festering irritant rather than any kind of crisis), an approach on Mike Pence’s lines would have been truer to free enterprise principles, and the restrictionists might not have sniffed at The Fence if it had been the concession made to them as part of a bigger package.
The conventional wisdom-to-be is almost certain to be that Republicans are the authors of their own misfortunes. Just because it will be conventional doesn’t mean that it won’t be correct.
On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic success most nearly resembles that won by the GOP sixty years ago on a similarly negative platform. “Had Enough?” was the slogan then. Unhappily for the Taft-Martin Republicans, it wasn’t a persuasive cry they faced re-election two years later. The 80th Congress proved to be a meaningless blip in the Democrats’ 60-year run as the country’s “natural” majority party. It’s highly likely that the 110th will have a similar distinction.
In a way, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are in a worse position. Despite Harry Truman’s “do-nothing 80th Congress” rhetoric, the Republican majority did quite a bit, including repeal of wartime wage-price controls (which leading liberals wanted to make permanent), passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (over a Truman veto) and enactment of the Marshall Plan. Next year, the majority party’s leadership will be far to the left of the mainstream of Congress, with its extremely narrow majorities (or majority; as I write, the balance of power in the Senate isn’t determined) dependent on members who ran as moderates or conservatives in Republican-leaning districts. The Democrats will be in a good position to harass the Administration and perhaps impose defeat in Iraq. Their positive accomplishments will be ignominiously paltry. By 2008, I expect the electorate to be heartily sick of their shrill impotence.
I could almost relax and look forward to a happy November 5, 2008. The problem is that America and the world can’t hibernate until then. If Congress insists on withdrawal from Iraq, Hassan Nasrallah has already told us the mufsidun propaganda line: Anyone who puts his trust in America is a fool, and the triumph of the jihad is inevitable.
We can’t wish Islamofascism away, and every victory it can claim is bound to enhance its prestige and power, both in the Middle East and, increasingly, in South Asia and Europe. Sure, there’s an ocean between us and them. Perhaps, if we do nothing, massive terrorism won’t become a reality over here. But a confident Islamofascist movement, backed by a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, will have little trouble overthrowing the fearful, weakening regimes in Saudi-controlled Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates, or at least compelling them to subsidize terrorism. Nancy Pelosi’s grand strategy, to the extent that she has one, is to move the focus of the War on Terror to Afghanistan. Why does she imagine that the enemy will follow us there rather than descend on the rich pickings in the Gulf?
Anyone who thinks that we and the world have nothing to fear from a Middle East dominated by fanatical, anti-Western ideologues, or to worry about from a Europe and Asia with an expanding population of Islamofascist sympathizers, belongs in the cock-eyed company of the America Firsters. Putting the War on Terror on hold for two years while John Conyers assembles “evidence” for his grand conspiracy theories just means that we will have to deal with a more dangerous enemy when we wake up again.
Oh, well. There were times when the will to defeat communism seemed at a vanishingly low ebb. The West has reserves of strength, and I remain confident that, fifty years from now, there will be more cathedrals in Tehran than mosques in Chicago.
Tonight is a disappointment. It is not the moment to say “Kismet”. Nor is it the time for those of us who wish to press ahead with the War on Terror to sink into a quagmire of recriminations. Let’s learn defeat’s not-too-disguised lessons and get on with our work.
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