Monday Scramble: Spectation
Ross Douthat’s column about the impact of the economy upon generational voting trends is even more interesting for what it omits than it is for what it says.
Recessions, it seems, only benefit liberals when an activist government is perceived to have answers to the crisis. When liberal interventions seem to be effective, a downturn can help midwife an enduring Democratic majority. But if they don’t seem to be working — or worse, if they seem to be working for insiders and favored constituencies, rather than for the common man — then suspicion of state power can trump disillusionment with free markets.
Among voters at large, that’s what seems to be happening at the moment. Nothing the government has done across the last 12 months has inspired much public confidence. Of the billions poured out in bailouts and stimulus, a substantial share has gone to privileged insiders and liberal interest groups — Wall Street bankers, auto unions, public-sector employees. Beltway Democrats have spent months laboring on an enormous health care bill that feels irrelevant, at best, to the continuing unemployment crisis. And Obama and his advisers overpromised on the stimulus package, whose economic boost, while real, remains imperceptible to a nation coping with a double-digit jobless rate.
That makes sense of course, and it links nicely to the fact that older voters (including most Boomers) have moved rightward over time. What Mr Douthat does not say, however, is that older voters have proved to be singularly unwilling to demand more of elected officials, particularly in the form of campaign-finance reform but also with regard to everything from legislative “rules” — the power-concentrating protocols according to which many state chambers determine seniority and consider bills — to the appointment of federal judges.
It is often tempting to conclude that a generation raised on television (as ours was the first to be) naturally regards government as a kind of reality show that, aside from periodic votes, asks nothing of citizens but passive spectation. (NYT)