2012: What might have been

So when the results rolled in, I, of course, ended up disappointed, as did many of my friends on the campus of Hillsdale College, where I was then a sophomore. But it took a while for some of the 2012 election’s more destabilizing effects to wend through our politics. The perception — not entirely unjustified — that Romney did not ‘fight’ hard enough eventually overcame the initial pessimism about the possibilities for the Right in the aftermath of Romney’s defeat, ultimately congealing into the ‘middle finger’ of Donald Trump in 2016. That middle finger owed much of its appeal and potency to the sort of trolling and triumphalism that the Left, convinced its coalition truly was ascending, began to display as Obama’s second term proceeded — especially after Democrats lost control of the Senate and the Left began looking elsewhere, both in the machinery of the state and in the commanding heights of the culture, for victories.

When recounting any history, recent or not, the temptation is to place it in a context of inevitability: x led to y led to z. And while sequence does matter and causality is real, so are contingency and coincidence. Much of what happened in 2012, and led to 2016, did not have to happen. And while it’s perhaps just my nascent nostalgia as someone unused to thinking of my life in terms of decades, I nonetheless look back on the 2012 election as a series of missed opportunities, a better pathway the country decided not to take. Don’t get me wrong: The Romney-Ryan vision for America was hardly perfect, and I myself have evolved away from the immature, incomplete fondness I once had for them and for it. And while not all of the debates conservatism has had internally since then have been productive, some rethinking was clearly necessary. But I still feel like an America without an Obama second term might have been a much saner and more stable place, circumventing much of the civic poison that has come since. (In private, some of my liberal friends have admitted the same to me.) That, however, is not the path we now tread, which is one of many reasons why the 2012 election should still loom large in our memory ten years later.