On the night he was elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan stood on a stage in Los Angeles with his wife Nancy beside him and said that winning the presidency was \u00a0\u201cthe most humbling moment in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now there\u2019s a contrast. \u00a0Judging from his \u201cour failure was we talked too fast for the people to comprehend\u201d message in Wednesday\u2019s press conference and Sunday\u2019s 60 Minutes <\/em>interview, it\u2019s a fair bet that no election ever left President Obama feeling that way.<\/p>\n But humbling or not, last week\u2019s ballot produced a stunning Republican victory, overall the fourth biggest midterm win since 1900, according to scholars at the American Enterprise Institute speaking at an election recap forum on Thursday. \u00a0It has also given us a divided government, with the House Republican, the White House Democrat, and the Senate effectively neither.<\/p>\n At that AEI conference, election scholar Henry Olson was asked if he ascribed any significance to the global enthusiasm for divided government. Britain has it, as do Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada. Yes, he said. \u00a0As working classes have become more affluent and welfare states closer to financial exhaustion, we have seen a rising desire to rein in but not eliminate social welfare spending. \u00a0Seeking reform that\u2019s not too hot and not too cold, Goldilocks electorates have given country after country divided government.<\/p>\n The development has been a long time coming. \u00a0In 2000, in a Wilson Quarterly <\/em>article, Seymour Martin Lipset, among the most eminent American political scientists of his day, wrote about the move of one socialist party after another, from Britain to Sweden and Denmark, to Spain, Germany and Italy, away from the hard left towards something, as he put it, \u201cfar more like the Democrats and Republicans, instead of socialists and capitalists.\u201d<\/p>\n Lipset argued that, \u201cMany political analysts here and abroad still do not fully appreciate the extent to which the left\u2019s new course, its centrist Third Way, is the product of common developments throughout the economically advanced democracies rather than of events or leaders peculiar to each country.\u201d<\/p>\n These changes included the decline of national working classes and the increase in middle class numbers, the availability of advanced education, the growing economic productivity that has diminished lifestyle differences among Europe\u2019s classes, the decline of unionism, the rise of the knowledge and service industries, the new ease of global communications and travel, and the rising appeal to young people of self-employment and entrepreneurship, which is in part a result of all these other developments.<\/p>\n Olson\u2019s assessment is Lipset\u2019s adjusted for the developments of the past decade. \u00a0Still, in the United States, at least, something else is going on, too.<\/p>\n All great movements in American politics have been responses to the shifting place of the U.S. in the global economy. \u00a0I\u2019m thinking of the epochal movements that brought to power the McKinley Republicans in the 1890s, the Roosevelt Democrats in the 1930s, and the Reagan Republicans in the 1980s. \u00a0All shaped our politics for the decades that followed.<\/p>\n After the Civil War, the great need of our industrializing economy was to draw investment capital, primarily from Europe. \u00a0The GOP coalition that formed then and reformed with McKinley was dedicated to that end. \u00a0Then came World War I.<\/p>\n All of a sudden Europe was the one that needed investment capital. It took a decade for our politics to start to adjust, as happened with Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s election, and in more effective ways after World War II during the Truman and Eisenhower years. The economic policies that the new politics inaugurated sharply favored consumption over investment. \u00a0For war-devastated economies desperately needing to reflate, they combined to absorb global goods while pushing out capital, restoring global and, in particular after World War II, European and Japanese liquidity. \u00a0And for that reason, a reason largely unappreciated among policy makers then and now, they worked for the U.S. economy, too. \u00a0Real incomes rose; real personal wealth, broadly shared, increased.<\/p>\n But with the late 60s, the job was done. \u00a0Europe and Japan had recovered. U.S. policies that had worked stopped working. \u00a0The growth and rising incomes of the 50s and 60s were replaced by the stagflation and falling incomes of the 70s. The U.S. needed both to attract capital and create more capital at home.<\/p>\n The Reagan election brought in economic policies responsive to that need, which continues to this day. \u00a0The ideologically driven Obama administration has tried to turn back the clock to the now utterly inappropriate policies of the 1930s, a devastating disconnect with reality. \u00a0In the Washington <\/em>Post<\/em> this Sunday, an outgoing Democratic governor put this disconnect in the personal and gut gripping way most of us experience it. Tennessee\u2019s Phil Bredesen told the Post<\/em>, \u201cThere doesn\u2019t seem to be anybody in the White House who\u2019s got an idea what it\u2019s like to lie awake at night worried about money and worried about things slipping away.\u201d \u00a0(see: http:\/\/tiny.cc\/66i2x)<\/a><\/p>\n The nation has an urgent need to align its economic policies to the world as it is. \u00a0The election has moved us in that direction. \u00a0As has occurred so often throughout our history, the wisdom of the American people is greater than that of our leaders — which should be enough to leave any leader humble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the night he was elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan stood on a stage in Los Angeles with his wife Nancy beside him and said that winning the presidency was \u00a0\u201cthe most humbling moment in my life.\u201d Now there\u2019s a contrast. \u00a0Judging from his \u201cour failure was we talked too fast for the people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}