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October 31, 2006

The War at Home

With a week left until Election Day, tempers are flaring and we can expect tension to continue building at least through next Wednesday, and possibly longer depending on how long it takes to determine who won the elections. This, then, is the state of American politics today: whoever wins Tuesday's elections, roughly half the country will wake up Wednesday convinced that the end times are near. (On the plus side, there is a nontrivial segment of the Republican base that may consider that good news.)

I won't pretend there aren't reasons to be concerned. As I noted yesterday, between gerrymandering, negative advertising, and the combination of low voter turnout and GOTV, our 'leaders' have been working very hard to make sure that the voters don't really have much influence over their jobs. That is not a recipe for a healthy republic; while I am heartily skeptical of democracy, when our representatives feel they need cater only to the extremists on one side or the other, and it should not be overly surprising that it results in the kind of shoddy governance we've endured for the past (pick a number) of years.

But, at the risk of driving my friends on either side quite mad, I'm not going to get overly worked up about this election. Would I prefer to see the Democrats take at least one house of Congress? Absolutely, but I'm not going to pretend I think we're going to see huge changes if that does occurs.

Cue the screams from the false equivalence crowd. Done? Good.

Let's look at a best case scenario for the Democrats: they pick up seven seats in the Senate and 40 in the House, putting both chambers under their control. Then what? Speaker Pelosi puts the gavel in the hands of America's children (hopefully she'll at least require them to wash their hands first), goes through with her plan for the first 100 hours, and then what? Best case, Congress will take its oversight responsibilities more seriously and will start digging into the various problems of the Bush administration with an eye towards fixing them. More likely, the search for scalps will begin, maybe up to the point of drawing up articles of impeachment against President Bush. They may even impeach him, with a 40-seat swing. But the Senate's not going to convict, unless they actually unearth enough things to convince the American people that the President has to go, and that's no easy task. Remember how well the impeachment of President Clinton worked out for the Republicans? Yes, yes, I know that perjury is no big deal, and the President Bush's crimes are far greater than what President Clinton did, but without at least a near-majority of Americans who agree that what President Bush has done merits impeachment, it's unlikely to end any better than the Republican attempt, since it will take at least fifteen Republicans to convict in the Senate.

Further, while I respect Pelosi's desire to fix some of the structural problems inherent in the Congress, I question how eagerly her fellow Democrats will follow her down that path. Remember that Newt Gingrich's Contract with America failed to pass only one item in the House: term limits. Pork spending may not be quite as hot an issue among incumbents as term limits, but it's not far behind, either. Once they're back wielding the levers of power, Democrats may find themselves a lot less eager to restrict their ability to manipulate them. There will certainly be some changes on the margin, but people expecting a narrowly-divided Congress that includes two very distinct flavors of Democrat to make major changes in the direction of the government are fooling themselves.

The bottom line is very simple: the system of government in the United States is broken. The incentives all point to venality and misuse of government power. People may say they want less government spending, but when they're pressed to cut spending, it doesn't happen. A government that is incapable of cutting subsidies for mohair is unlikely to be able to even begin to address real fiscal reform. Until and unless people actually start to directly observe the effects of federal spending, we'll see continued deficit spending mixed with tax increases.

Does this election matter? Sure. There are quite a few things the Bush administration is doing that I'd like to see curtailed. But let's not forget something important: the government can only get away with those things we allow it to do. To use the example of the civil rights movement, government action was not what changed racial attitudes in this country and helped to move us a little closer to the ideals we hold ourselves to. The hard work and sacrifice of the men and women in the movement, who brought to light the injustices faced by black Americans, forced white Americans to take a hard look at themselves and change their ways. The 1965 Civil Rights Act was made possible by the changing attitudes of the American public. Winning elections is, in the final analysis, a lot less important than changing people's minds.