Failing an electoral realignment, Chait at times suggests that there is an ideological Democratic majority being built. In this respect he is on somewhat stronger ground. I have no doubt that the Republican Party will have to shift its stances on issues. In particular, I think its opposition to marriage equality will die out in my lifetime (though I’m not sure creating more couples like “Modern Family’s” Cameron Tucker and Mitchell Pritchett is really particularly liberal).
But this idea of an ideological realignment quickly runs into the reality of the 111th Congress. On the one hand, Chait refers to the 2012 elections as the Republicans’ last chance to stop “the policy steamroller of the new Democratic majority.” On the other hand, what policy steamroller? The standard progressive response to what Chait earlier calls the right’s “fever dreams” about Obama’s radicalism is to point out that Obama wants to maintain most of the Bush tax cuts, adopted a health care plan that was based on earlier Republican solutions, and passed a weak-tea version of the financial reform that he wanted.
There’s a lot of truth to this; given the talk in the winter of 2009, Republicans got off pretty easy, especially once Arlen Specter gave the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, something they will have a hard time replicating any time soon (for structural reasons). Yet even with this limited version of the progressive agenda, the Democrats lost 63 seats, nearly twice as many as the average economic model of elections suggests they should have. And this doesn’t take into account what the Democrats have ceded over the past 20 years: Obama, the most liberal president of our time, is well to the right of George McGovern on crime, welfare, education policy, taxes, and especially foreign policy.
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