Unless you are part of the vast majority of Americans who sat out the mid-term elections last Tuesday, it would be hard to miss that the Democrats got clobbered. Like quail flushed from their hiding spots, Democrats fled from their position alongside President Obama, only to find themselves shot down by the brace by well-funded, angry Republicans who promised, above all, to take their country back and to stop that evil man in the White House.
Of course, taking back the country from whom is an open question and it remains to be seen exactly how the GOP could stop Obama even more, given their control of the House and their paralyzation of the Senate through the filibuster. It was enough, however, to simply “send a message” to the liberal establishment that the country is on the wrong track. Yet, considering the country has been on the wrong track since 1972, this seems perhaps a bit far-fetched. Still, given the results and our omnipresent need to talk about them, what are we to make of shellacking that the Democrats took?
The first way to look at the results is to write them off due to the one-time vagaries of the American electoral cycle. Democratic voters are famously unwilling to turn out in non-presidential elections, and the determination of the GOP to take the Senate motivated their elderly, mostly white, mostly religious voters to head to the polls en masse. That, plus a few inroads by the GOP into a few select groups — not large but enough in a low-turnout election, and a Democratic rout is what you get. Couple that with the fact that the electoral map was tilted toward the Republicans, and the result was totally predictable, as indeed it was months out from Election Day.
Another fashionable hypothesis among progressives and Democrats loyal to Obama is that mediocre candidates and the scattering of red-state Dems away from Obama in the long run-up to the election did little rally public support for the party. There is some degree of truth to this. Obama’s record is relatively good: no huge troop deployments overseas, a diminishing federal deficit, good job growth, and even low gas prices.
Likewise, not every candidate fielded by America’s liberal party this year is deserving of progressive support — just look at Sen. Mary Landrieu from Louisiana and that sad sack of a candidate in Kentucky who wouldn’t even admit that she may have voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Such worthless cowardice doesn’t deserve to win.
Perpetuating a culture of ignorance, fear and loathing
Bad electoral terrain, bad messaging and worse candidates explain a lot of why the Democrats were defeated so soundly this year. Yet it does not quite explain why these candidates decided that running away from Obama was a viable option. After all, like any second-term president in his sixth year in office, Obama is likely to not be at the peak of his popularity, but he is not so unpopular that he should be altogether shunned. He remains relatively popular and the general opinion of the country toward Republicans, notwithstanding the election results, stands far lower. (Indeed, the same could be said of Republican policies, insofar that they actually offered any this electoral cycle.)
Meanwhile, Democrats may have fallen like flies, but left-leaning ballot initiatives did very well. Yet on the matters that those who voted this year seemed to believe most important, Republicans appear to have a substantial lead, especially on combatting terrorism. While foreign policy is rarely thought to move elections substantially, the ongoing sinking of America into the quagmire that is the Middle East while other nations, especially Russia, are on the march seems to be an important factor. The breakthrough of ISIS into large swathes of Iraq and the collapse of our “ally” there this past summer likely had an impact (though, as predicted here months ago, the group’s advance has already been stalled by Obama’s light-footed intervention). Their defeat is inevitable, but that is essentially meaningless because some other group, in whack-a-mole fashion, will pop up in their place.
Likewise with the Ebola scare and the exodus of children from Central America and into our border states — issues which heightened fear to near hysterical levels in the past months. Ebola has turned out to be dangerous, but not world-ending — even despite incompetence in Dallas, while the stream of children has, if not tapered off, largely fallen off the media’s radar screen. As with ISIS, these problems are amenable to being managed via prudent and rational action that works over time. But that is not what our immature people, used to being sold a story about America’s ability to wave its hands and make the world pure and good, want to accept. For too many Americans ignorantly and irrationally spooked by the world around them, skilled and knowledgeable technocratic management of complex problems beyond their education and understanding is not what is wanted. Instead, they seek populist action that looks like it’s doing something even if it accomplishes nothing or makes the problem worse.
This, in turn, explains how the Republicans won so easily: ignorance, fear and loathing were heightened among their voter base, which reliably turned out on Election Day. This can be easily seen by anyone who keeps track of grassroots conservatives online or even has Facebook friends who count themselves among the opposition. References to the defeat of that “Muslim” Obama were of course chock-a-block and par for the course, a subtle reminder that vast numbers of Americans still detest America having a black president, but are too cowardly to say so, relying instead on generalized anti-Muslim bigotry to hid their own racism. Also common were happy harrumphs from self-described right-wing Christians that the “dictator” Obama had been defeated, though survey results reveal these are exactly the Americans most willing to use torture and other unconstitutional methods when dealing with the nation’s enemies.
And then there’s Alabama…
Among all the outcomes of Election Day, perhaps that which best encapsulates the mood of the electorate that just sent a Republican majority to the Senate happened in that bastion of the Western enlightenment: Alabama.
There, the brave defenders of American orthodoxy passed an amendment to the state constitution — which also includes poll taxes and literacy restrictions on voting, a ban on using state dollars on internal improvements, and a ban on “any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro” — to prohibit foreign laws (meaning, of course, Sharia) from having any writ within the state.
This, it begs to be noted, is the same state which installed into its Supreme Court a man who fought to have the Ten Commandments posted in his courthouse and who said Buddhists and Muslims weren’t deserving of constitutional protection, then named him Chief Justice.
It is maybe a bit unfair to generalize from Alabama, a state mostly known for football, Jesus and the blowing up of black churches in the 1960s, to the rest of conservative America, but the underlying unease with a world that is increasingly not firmly in the control of a white, Christian political majority is clearly there. Obama is “The Other,” and he always has been to these people. Fear of a complex world that is too complicated for most to understand, let alone the hate-talk cretins they turn to for guidance, has made them increasingly afraid of their own shadow. Little wonder, then, that a party which campaigned on fear of exactly those issues — The Other, the outside world, the changing times — should do so well on Election Day.
Fear and loathing coupled with ignorance always wins when nothing is there to combat it — and not just in Alabama.