Election
Was Conservative
Repudiation of Bush
By Chilton Williamson,
Jr.
egarding
the elections of 2006, it is tempting to conclude that the
Republican Party got what it deserved, while the Democratic
Party got what it did not. Although that seems, overall,
a fair assessment, it is markedly unfair to those brave
Republican House members who stood strong almost a year
ago, and once more last spring, against both their President
and the Senate, who had strong-armed them to pass a disastrous
immigration "reform" bill that promised to wreck
what little remains of the old America to have survived
previous generations of Washington sappers, saboteurs, and
fifth columnists. Yet, on Tuesday, November 7, only about
six of those members were voted out of office. Furthermore,
the members of Rep. Tom Tancredo's anti-immigration coalition
lost fewer seats, proportionately, than did other House
Republicans. An accurate reconciliation of these data with
the overall election figures may provide a key to understanding
the election itself, and to predicting the American political
future over the next two years.
A
political analyst at CNN reported that many voters temeritously
marked their ballots for Democratic candidates whose names
they did not recognize, in their eager desire to oust Republicans
from every nook and cranny in government where they could
discover one cowering, no matter whether at the federal,
state, or local level. Considering the botch the Republicans
have made of their majority, and the mess to which they
have reduced the nation, the impulse was an understandable
one. It was also foolish because self-defeating, and self-defeating
for the reason that it issued from emotion rather than a
sense of strategy. For example: How could the Arizona electorate
vote both for three tough anti-illegal immigrant ballot
amendments AND to return Jon Kyl, who backs the President's
amnesty and guest-worker program (though he rejects conferral
of citizenship on former illegals), to the Senate? The thing
is unreasonable; and it is unreasonable because the average
voter, who pays little attention to politics between elections,
cannot, or does not, or will not think strategically. Rather,
he votes all over the map, in response to visceral urges
to get even or "send a message," and leaves it
to the politicians to read significance into the resulting
national Rorsach blot, which they interpret in accordance
with their own preferences and strategic ends. This is how
"meanings" are imposed upon our confused-and confusing-elections,
"messages" read into them, and strategies developed
to take advantage of them; herein lies, perhaps, democratic
government's greatest, and probably insurmountable, weakness.
Thus Republicans, conservative Democrats, and conservative
independents came together to punish President Bush for
his ill-judgment and temerity in invading Iraq, his fiscal
recklessness, and his arrogant disregard of the constitutional
balance of powers at the cost of bringing upon on themselves
the impending immigration disaster Bush could not have brought
off, absent their own unwitting efforts in handing Congress
to the Democratic Party.
The
Iraq War is indisputably a disaster, yet it hardly amounts
to national catastrophe on the scale of legalizing 20 million-and
perhaps, according to revised estimates, many more than
that-illegal immigrants, at the expense of an estimated
$127 billion, assuming the official "count" of
around 12 million. Wars, and rumours of wars, are perennial
occurences, after all; the invasion, facilitated by its
so-called leaders, of a sovereign nation by tens and scores
of more or less hostile and poverty-stricken aliens by contrast
is something new under the sun. A country that will not
tolerate the deaths of less than 3000 of its volunteer combatants-hardly
more than the toll of a skirmish in, say, the War Between
the States-over a period of three and a half years probably
has no business fielding an army at all. On the other hand,
a nation that refuses to defend itself against hordes of
aggressive invaders on a scale that dwarfs the invasion
of the Roman Empire by the German barbarians no longer deserves
to be called a country, in any acceptable sense of the word.
If
this assessment of the elections seems overly pessimistic,
that is because immigration "reform" of the kind
proposed by the President and passed by the Senate last
spring would inevitably push the United States past what
Pat Buchanan in State of Emergency calls a tipping point,
beyond the redemptive benefits of all other legislative
initiatives and political realignments. Setting the threat
of amnesty aside, however, there do appear, even at this
short remove from the event, to be reasons for optimism
in November's electoral results that are potentially more
far-reaching in the long term than the necessary curtailment
of George Bush's War and the White House's plans for a total
security state.
It is received wisdom already that the voters, in handing
the House and Senate to the Democrats, were repudiating
Bush and his war, and a working hypothesis on the part of
political analysts that the 110th Congress will include
many newly-created Democratic solons considerably more conservative
on social issues and gun control than the party as a whole.
Whether the reason behind-for instance-the conservative,
anti-immigration James Webb's choosing to run for a Virginia
Senate seat on the Democratic ticket rather than the Republican
one also explains why he was elected to office by a coalition
of Republicans and Democrats alike, only time will tell,
if in fact it ever does. (Webb, a decorated former Marine
and father of a Marine just posted to Iraq, is the great-great-grandson
of a member of Bedford Forrest's Critter Company.) Yet what
may very well be discovered to have happened is that a telling
number of informal conservatives, hitherto supporters of
the GOP, have become so disillusioned over the past six
years by the party's inept and aggressive foreign policy,
its economic irresponsibility and callousness in respect
of both the deficit and of free trade, its cynical handling
and mishandling of social issues such as gay marriage, its
cavalier treatment of the constitition, and the Administration's
unfathomable commitment to what amounts to open borders
and an internationalized labor and welfare system, that
they have given up on the Republicans and, in a desperate
gamble, thrown their support-for now, anyway--to the Democrats.
It is partly in anticipation of just such an electoral situation
as this one that the two national parties are determined
to brand any third party one of nature's obscenely embarassing
mistakes. They fail to recognize that a significant constituency
deprived of a party structure and machine can be consigned
only indefinitely to political limbo. In fact, major parties
have been taken over time and again in American history,
as in the ante-bellum period. Conservative voters are not
made less conservative by being denied a conservative vehicle,
nor do they become liberalized by dint of voting Democratic.
Rather, they have the potential to conservatize whatever
party they may vote with--if they continue to vote with
it long enough and in sufficient numbers--and to transform
it, eventually, in their own image.
What
Democrats, and liberals generally, fail to recognize in
their time of triumph this fall is that the vote against
President Bush--his war, his deficit, his security state,
his imperial presidency, his immigration policy--was in
no sense a liberal, but rather a conservative, one. They
are prevented from understanding this by their misunderstanding
of American populism, which they-together with Republicans
and movement conservatives-misconstrue as being of a leftist
pursuasion. The election of 2006 was, among other things,
a vigorous protest against the global economy, free trade,
the transfer of manufacturing plant and jobs overseas, outsourcing,
corporate greed and corruption, and the unaffordability
of health care. Had not liberals and "conservatives"
long ago determined to ignore whatever paleoconservatives
have to say, they would have recognized all of these concerns
as, in fact, pedigreed conservative ones. But, since they
are, the Democratic Party should feel almost as confounded
by the results of this last election as it was by the Republican
"triumphs" (or "Republican" triumphs)
of 2000 and 2004.
There
are, it appears, two ways by which the Democratic and the
Republican Parties, respectively, can carry the country:
the one by (shamelessly) appealing to the anti-liberal majority,
the other by manipulating and lying to that majority, and
then tricking it into voting for them--as, in the past,
the Republicans did, and the Democrats now have done.
The
game has proved a winning one for years, but no game succeeds
forever, especially when it consists of old tricks pulled
repetitively by a set of unctuously arrogant players with
tin ears and no real knowledge of their country and its
people. As long as the real America exists, there remains
hope that it will yet discover its effective political vehicle,
and, through it, accurate political representation. Unfortunately,
with "comprehensive immigration reform" darkening
the country like a biblical cloud, time in which to discover
that vehicle-and thus to preserve the real America--is now
perilously short.
