Post-Script on the Off-Year Elections: Goodbye to the Big Mandate and Other Big Lies

posted at 3:17 pm on November 7, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Elections ]    printer-friendly

In discussion at Zombie Contentions (under “Smackdown from the ‘Burbs,” a piece by Howard Portnoy cross-posted in the GR), we recently had a couple of commenters arguing the “Tuesday’s elections mean nothing, the American troops will never reach Baghdad” Democratic Party line as applied to the political fate of one Governor John Corzine.

One visitor summed up the argument as follows:

Corzine was defeated in New Jersey for three reasons: 1) NJ has the highest taxes in the country and Corzine had actually raised them again; 2) NJ has a horrible problem with political corruption and Corzine was seen as tolerant of it, if not involved in it; and 3) He had had a net unfavorable rating for well over a year.

Conservatives will tend to reply by pointing to certain obvious noses on certain obvious faces – viz:

(h/t The Campaign Spot).

What neither the Democrat spinsters nor their trolling minions seem to understand, or will admit to understanding, is that there’s no essential contradiction between Howard’s “smackdown of Obamaism” argument and their “it was all local, local I tell you” counter. The local is the global, and, while we’re putting things in vaguely New Age-y terms, we can add: as above, so below. In short, New Jersey is not located on some other planet orbiting a distant star. It is a great state of our Union, its political and economic life intimately connected with the political and economic life of the country and indeed the globe.

Being a stone’s throw from NYC ensures that NJ will be even more directly wired to the “financial crisis” than most states. It is quite entirely unsurprising that, at the peak of that financial crisis – a crisis of the post-Reagan political-economic governing compromise that our neo-Marxist friends have helpfully defined as “financialized neo-liberalism” – New Jersey would be governed by former Goldman-Sachs CEO John Corzine… and that said financier extraordinaire would be in trouble.

There is nothing “purely local to New Jersey” about Corzine’s wealth (and campaign war chest), Corzine’s history, and Corzine’s politics and policies: John Corzine and what hardly anyone would even bother to call “Corzinism” are just the Jerseyized excrescence of a 50-state and 200-country political and economic conjuncture. (Incidentally, Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty in New York City reflects many of the same patterns – though he’s even wealthier than Corzine, and was thus able to buy a 3rd term at the obscene cost, it is said, of $100 Million. It’s further typical of how far gone the political culture of the East Coast is that the only alternative to neo-liberal Bloomberg was a more traditional urban liberal.)  Up until rather recently, having been a wealthy financial exec was a plus in a place like New Jersey – especially in the days that you could skim enough off the evil Bush’s or good Clinton’s asset bubbles to finance the neo-liberal state through generally rising revenue. In the familiar pattern, legalized corruption – under the broad heading of constituent service – and outright graft blend more and more into each other over time. It happens to both Republicans and Democrats – as to Whigs and Tories and Nazis and Commies and Roundheads and Augustans and Pericleans – when left in power too long.

So of course Corzine had a net unfavorable rating. He’s a creepy incumbent and owns the creeping catastrophe, and has nothing in his medicine cabinet for coping with gaping fiscal wounds except band-aids that temporarily protect client constituencies while leaving the deeper injuries untreated.

The state (New Jersey’s and America’s and other states, too) can’t be financed without further impairing the Golden Goose – eventually the tax collectors and regulators are reaching all the way up inside the unfortunate Fowl searching for the next golden egg before it’s even been laid. This same syndrome affects state after state as well as the federal government, where the party of putting on the latex gloves and searching hard and ruthlessly for not-yet-laid golden eggs to finance projects and obligations, fully controls 2 out of 3 branches of government, with the 3rd largely uninvolved, having already decided decades ago that it would prefer to look the other way.

In our binary system of government, the Republicans represent “steps in the opposite direction.” They don’t, or don’t yet anyway, represent leaps and bounds in the opposite or a new direction. Both parties in their current incarnations are parties of the Great Compromise – the state expanded beyond its revenue base, the difference financed – which under economic pressure becomes the Great Dilemma, and threatens to pit the party of social welfare and the party of liberty against each other on a more fundamental level.

Whether and, if so, how soon, we’re approaching that tipping point and the unraveling of the Compromise is a subject for another time and place, but we can observe that, up until recently, the Democrats have been enough in thrall to their further left, or confident enough in their position, to invite such a fundamental confrontation – speaking in terms of “realignment,” a new era, a new Roosevelt, the end of Reaganism, etc. Once ensconced in government, they quickly shed the last vestiges of centrism and bi-partisanship that served the President so well in his campaign. At present, still seeking to defend and complete the legislative program that emerged amidst ‘08-’09 triumphalism, they are reluctant to argue the easier case on the Tuesday “smackdown” – that, rather than an elemental rejection of partisan Obamaism, it was merely the trusty old American political pendulum swinging back the other direction within its narrow range.

They can’t just state and accept the obvious: “We went left and lost the middle, as usual.” It would imply a level of defeatism regarding next year’s pendulous mid-terms, put in question the Big Mandate for re-making the country in the phantom image of “hope and change,” render several Big Lies obsolete (not least the “they alone screwed it all up, we alone rescued it” mega-lie), and strip this President and this Democratic Ascendancy of their last pretensions of being something more than the latest creepy incumbents already overdue for comeuppance.

cross-adapted from Zombie Contentions

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