Wil Wilkinson has a fairly puzzling response to Jon Chait's article on the bankruptcy of the liberals-lack-ideas claim. He writes:
He's right: if "ideas" mean novel projects for the technocracy, then liberals are chock ful of them. I think the real complaint here is that there is nothing to be found that is not a specification of "use state power to make things better, according to our peculiar standards of better." The problem for liberals is that if that if they give that up, then they'll stop being who they are. But that's what the voters, the stupid, stupid voters, aren't resonating to. So what we've really got here is a crisis of identity -- the threat that integrity is equivalent to obsolescence.
That's a fairly interesting question. Is the use of state power to achieve socially desirable ends what the voters aren't responding to? In Wil's favor, after the election, Bush bounded out with his new mandate, which seemingly stretched from Iran all the way to pension reform and beyond. Suddenly, a vote that seemed a fairly straightforward foreign policy judgment ("we trust this guy and not the other one") became a resounding popular endorsement of Social Security privatization.
But it turned out that Bush's mandate was a trick of the light, or at least a strategy of the White House. Elections are fought on a full spectrum of issues, some more important than others, but, in the end, they only offer two choices. Are Log Cabin Republicans endorsing conservative homophobia? Probably not, they're just prioritizing gay rights below other policies that they agree with Republicans on. Similarly, the election saw a full range of policy problems enter the discussion, but, like in any squabble, a specific thread of grievance gave the whole thing coherence. This was not, for instance, a health care election. It was not a Social Security election. Social Security was mentioned, but when the President tried to legislate as if the election was a referendum on pension reform, he was rudely rebuffed.
