— by Odysseus
The sweeping defeat of the Democratic party in the 2014 mid-term election provides evidence that the theory that notable radio commentator Rush Limbaugh has been advancing in the last couple of weeks has serious flaws. Mr. Limbaugh has proposed that the American voters of the last 30 years have “drifted back to the Democrats whenever they feel it is safe to do so”. He has characterized the Republican victories as merely reactions to the inescapable bad results of the Democratic Party’s governance, without voters being truly committed to the Republican message of the Founding Father’s vision of a non-intrusive, limited, government. This is not true. The broad-based defeat of the Democrats in congressional races, governors’ races, the United States Senate races, and all the way down the ticket shows that a majority of the public still opposes a bully government. The election of leftist Democrats does not occur when the public feels safe to go back to them. Rather, it occurs when the Republicans nominate a candidate who is barely distinguishable from the leftist Democrat candidate.
Mr. Limbaugh’s study of the evidence is correct, but his analysis is off because he misinterprets the motivations behind the voters’ mood. He correctly notes that President Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the founding ideals of self-reliance and limited government brought an economic, diplomatic, military and social bonanza that continued to carry the country through the administration of President Bill Clinton. In Mr. Limbaugh’s theory, the voters rejected President Clinton’s predecessor George H.W. Bush in his quest for a second term because they were safe enough and prosperous enough to dally with a Democrat again in the form of President Bill Clinton. Limbaugh correctly notes that, after merely two years of Mr. Clinton’s radical actions, which were aided and abetted by a Democratic-held House of Representatives and Senate, the voters were shocked into turning both houses of Congress over the the Republican Party for the first time in the post World War II era. Likewise, according to Mr. Limbaugh’s theory, the voters started feeling safe enough to begin to turn back to the Democrats in the sixth year of George W. Bush’s presidency and then elected the Democrats again in the form of President Barack Hussein Obama after President Bush’s tenure ended.
The critical point of Mr. Limbaugh’s relapse theorem is that the voters’ return to the Democrats is the result of the Republicans’ inability to connect the failing, unpopular policies of the Democrats to the Democratic, leftist ideology. He believes that there is a failure of communication on the part of the Republicans to help the voters connect the economic, diplomatic, and military failings to the Democrats and their leftist, big-government agenda. In his commentary, he implies that it is either the Republicans’ erroneous belief that the evidence is self-explanatory and requires no speech-making on their part, or, alternatively, that the Republicans are too soft on the Democrats with their subtle, gentlemanly notions of fair play and magnanimity in victory.
Unfortunately, Mr. Limbaugh’s analysis fails because he is, simultaneously, too pessimistic about the wisdom of the voters and too optimistic about the Republicans. This is although, Mr. Limbaugh has, more recently, acknowledged that the institutional wing of the Republican Party is also secretly the party of big government since it is the federal government that puts the bread on their tables, and the Mercedes vehicles in their long, curving driveways in the same neighborhoods that they share with Democrat government officials.
The reality is that the American voters rejected President George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election because he failed in his duty to follow through on what he was elected to do, which was to continue to follow his predecessor Ronald Reagan’s policies. He was rejected because he broke his promises, not because the public suddenly re-embraced leftist liberalism. In his four years in office, George H.W. Bush raised taxes, enacted a ban on the import of many kinds of rifles (which gifted the leftist gun grabbers one of their fondest desires), signed into law sweeping, unneeded, new race-based big government intrusions re-named as “civil rights” regulations, and, altogether, failed to continue articulating Ronald Reagan’s message of reduced governance through individual responsibility. Instead, George H.W. Bush inarticulately blathered about “a thousand points of light”, which came out sounding more like 1960s Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s famous quote about every citizen’s duty to obey, support, and finance their lords in the government, rather than Ronald Reagan’s belief that we have a responsibility to “do for ourselves”.
Likewise, the public did not merely revert to the Democratic norm in 2006 and 2008. The George W. Bush administration had recoiled from the blistering media criticism and had failed to articulate the Founders’ message. President Bush had exploded the reach of government power and surveillance through the Patriot Act and had added an unsustainable, new entitlement and placed a massive new segment of the population on the dole through the vast expansion of Medicare. This was a move that exceeded Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wildest dreams. President Bush also spent a half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to bail out private banks during the 2008 banking industry collapse, injecting the federal government — funded by taxpayers dollars — into picking winners and losers in the economy. Then, the Republican Party nominated Arizona Senator John McCain to run for president against Barack Hussein Obama even though Senator McCain had spent the previous eight years in attacking Ronald Reagan’s Republican ideas and advocating for continued expansion of the role of the federal government into the lives of citizens. The only difference between Senator McCain, the Annapolis graduate, son of an Admiral, and lifelong government employee, versus Senator Obama, the quasi-communist college professor, was that McCain loved America while Obama disliked it. Otherwise, both Senators were outspoken advocates for a universally benevolent, activist federal government.
The majority of the American voters still distrusts the federal government because everyone’s experience, when on the receiving end of government, continually proves, at best, that government’s inevitable, callous indifference to its citizens, and, at worst, its all-too-frequent, institutionally-fermented malice. The lies and incompetence surrounding Ebola, the threat of ISIS, the continued backing of every wrong horse in the Middle East, while undermining America’s allies were on the voting public’s mind during this election. Government is usually incompetent and untrustworthy, but big government is even more hugely incompetent and monumentally untrustworthy. The only people who “like” big government are the implementers (read: government bureaucrats and employees), rather than the receivers of its efforts. History teaches us that government does nothing well, except organized violence, and, when it fails in its attempt at doing anything else, it reverts back to organized violence to re-attempt its goal through force.
It is true that there has been a growing support for some issues that belong on the agenda of the left and public opinion has moved markedly on those issues. However, where the public has embraced leftist agenda, it has been about the reduction, and not the growth, of the federal government. The successful social advances by the left over the past 30 years have been the ones that emphasize individual freedom over governmental intrusion. Marijuana legalization laws are about removing the government’s intrusion. The new gay marriage laws are about removing government intrusion’s into individual privacy. Abortion and women’s rights issues have succeeded because they are about removing government intrusion.
Republicans do not fail because American voters drift back to the Democrats. Republicans fail when they make efforts to expand the government’s power and reduce individual freedom. Democrats are popular on any issues where they are advocating the reduction of government power and the expansion of individual freedom. Democrats, too, become unpopular when, once again, their overall policy implementation reveals to the public that the Democratic Party is the party of big government, tight controls, and ever-expanding government mandates.
Mr. Limbaugh is correct, however, that the Republican Party needs to spend more time in articulating the ideology of the country’s Founders and of Ronald Reagan. However, the deeper truth is that the party that articulates and implements policies that reduce the size, power, and intrusiveness of government will be the party that is the most successful.
The message of the mid-Term elections of 2014 for both parties is that individual freedom is always popular, and that voters still recognize the government leviathan as the single most dangerous thing to their lives, liberties, and properties.
