David Sirota had a good
post the other day showing the post-election spike in the term "center-right" nation. It even has a graph. I bring it up because I was reading
The Liberal Hour
last night -- excellent book, by the way -- and there's a nice encapsulation of what's wrong with the whole center-right idea:
Periods of great policy upheaval are rarities in American history. The American system of governance is by nature conservative. It is a collection of traps and catches designed to hamper majorities, to slow the process of change, to favor the status quo. Most of the time, inertia is the most powerful force in government. Those who succeed change have to succeed at dozens of potential veto points. Those who seek to prevent change usually have to succeed at only one.
The argument that America is a center-right nation tends to proceed from a simple survey of the landscape. We do not have universal health care, we do not have strong unions, we do not have guaranteed paid vacation, we do not have major climate change legislation, Other countries do, and therefore our people are center-right. But this gets the causality backwards. Assuming that policy outcomes are a simple reflection of public opinion is a nasty error. We have a government set up to protect against public opinion. And it works. The Founding Fathers weren't idiots, and the political structure they designed has functioned largely as they expected. Political opinion favors things like universal health care and paid vacation. But our system doesn't favor the passage of major legislation. As such, the outcomes are often conservative, insofar as change chokes to death in the US Senate. On the other hand, the system is no friendlier to right-wing reformism. Medicare and Social Security endure. There are very few examples of social programs being repealed. Privatization was a catastrophic failure. The practical effect of all this, however, is that liberals and conservative reformers alike spend much too much time thinking about how to move public opinion and not nearly enough thinking about how to move legislation through the political process. It's unlikely that reformers will try anything in sharp contrast to voter preferences, and beyond that scenario, it's rare that preferences are strong enough to be initially decisive. But what you tend to see happen is that failed or failing legislation
becomes extremely unpopular. The media writes a lot of stories trying to justify why the bill can't get through the Senate which tends to mean playing up the unpopular aspects of the legislation. They rarely offer up procedural explanations like it's being blocked by the minority party even though,
and in fact because, it would be popular if it passed. But that's generally true. And then, when bills fail, voters tend to punish the failure even if they weren't necessarily of one mind on the original bill. Of course they weren't for that failed, catastrophe of a reform!
