The meaning of the election.

I'm still trying to absorb the events of the past few days. For all of my cynicism about the Democratic party - the cumulative result of 12 years of Clintonian triangulation, spineless appeasement, and outright prostitution to corporate interests - I must confess to being more than a little delighted with the outcome of last Tuesday's election. Even the most optimistic leftist had no reason to predict that the Bush administration would receive such a through, comprehensive trouncing.

What can we make of this? As has already been observed by others, this was not a typical mid-term election. While Bush still has a significant minority of the country behind him, it seems that the 60% or so who disapprove of him did so with enough animosity to trump many other local concerns. Add up all the small-government conservatives, the anti-Bush liberals, and those "centrists" who want their leaders to exhibit some sort of rational flexibility in the face of material reality (i.e. facts), and you have a fairly comprehensive bloc of voters willing to pull the "D" switch.

The first thing we need to realize now is that the Democrats had to make some tremendous compromises in order to pull this off - and this from a party that had already long since sold most of its values down the river. Many of the Democrats who won Senate seats or governorships are, in fact, quite conservative. There are pro-lifers, pro-war democrats, and far too many of the Clintonian corporate appeasers in the mix here - although there is some consolation in the fact we have also acquired progressive voices like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. The party succeeded by opening a very wide umbrella, focusing on those very few topics upon which they could agree (our failure in Iraq, along with health care, minimum wage, and a few other populist concerns), and essentially ignoring those points where there is bound to be substantial disagreement. They didn't talk about divisive social issues, they professed tolerance of differing views, and they stayed on message.

We must not, therefore, misconstrue the Democratic victory as being a victory for secular liberalism. Many of the very same voting districts which bolted from the Republicans also voted, with equal fervor, to ban gay marriage. And the widespread support for raising the minimum wage is a consequence of it having been left untouched for a full decade - let it go long enough, and even conservative Republicans will have had enough. The country is not, in any sense, moving to the left.

The mainstream revolt against Bush was not, sadly, a protest of his political ideals, but rather an expression of disappointment at his not having lived up to them. The Democrats won this election because small-government conservatives resent Bush's big-government spending, because pro-war centrists have finally come to accept his colossal incompetence, and because the evangelicals have come to see the Republican party as rife with corruption and scandal. Like Jesus to the moneylenders, they want to cast the thieves from the temple.

This last point is crucial; were it not for the perfect storm of scandals of almost every conceivable variety in the months leading up to Election Tuesday, the Democrats would have been toast. Abramoff, Iraq, and few homo-erotic instant messages did more to propel them to victory in 2006 than two years of George Soros, Daily Kos, and Move On combined (this is not to discount the efforts of those groups, and the valuable work they did to bring cleaner elections and "outside the box" candidates to the fore across the country). The Democrats must also thank, with no small irony, the Bush administration's own hubris, the vastness of which never fails to astonish. The very same over-confidence that led them to believe the Iraq invasion would be a "cakewalk" left them feeling secure in the outcome of the election. This is amply demonstrated by the comically atrocious timing of Rumsfeld's resignation - had it occurred one week earlier, things may have gone quite differently.

The Democrats, to put it bluntly, got lucky. They had it handed to them. This is, I suppose, a karmic return for Bush's victory in 2000, in which a perfect storm of righteous Naderites, racist voter-roll purges, crappy ballots that were not elderly-proof, and an inept challenge by Gore (which I blame for having forced the Supreme Court's decision) which made the boy-blunderer with less popular support than his opponent become King of the World. (I've always seen a certain dark poetry in this - that the "butterfly effect" of world history should be instigated by "butterfly ballots"; a few hundred misread slips of paper, and world history is changed). We must keep this in mind - it is still a conservative country, and the Democrats will only survive in power by embracing the Right. They are not going to go to bat for civil liberties, for a less murderous foreign policy, a saner drug policy, corporate accountability...name any liberal cause you like, and watch them steer clear of it like radioactive slag. Instead, they will claim to be better fighters of the War on Terror, more fiscally responsible, more committed to preserving the "best" of those halcyon robber-baron days, the 1990's. In short, they will try to out-Republican the Republicans. If you don't believe me, just read their official platform. It reads like classic Gingrich, with a few isolationist pipe-dreams thrown into the mix.

The United States can no longer lay claim to a liberal political party. We have a Fascist party, in which a few genuine conservatives can still be found, and a Centrist party, in which a smattering of genuine liberals can be found.

We need much more than a new party in Congress. We need a new dialogue, and a whole new set of premises. I will explain exactly what I mean by this, and how it might be brought about, in the coming days.