Those who say they believe the GOP is a threat to the American constitutional order should be livid with Democrats’ failure to moderate — but they aren’t.
Those who say they believe the GOP is a threat to the American constitutional order should be livid with Democrats’ failure to moderate — but they aren’t.
A t the Atlantic, David Frum offers up the banal observation that “people vote for reasons that may be quite contingent, even temporary or incidental, but that seem compelling in the moment — with effects that detonate long afterward”:
The lesson for the 2022 cycle is that the issues that seemed most salient as voters went to the polls will probably be long-forgotten in a few years’ time — but their choice will have had a huge bearing on what becomes of the United States. Voters can’t be expected to apprehend the longer-term consequences of the votes they cast. But their votes have consequences.
The example that Frum uses to illustrate his point is unfit for the purpose. “Good evidence,” he submits, “suggests that the GOP owed its [2014 midterm] sweep to an event almost forgotten in this decade that is now so defined by the COVID-19 pandemic: the panic in the fall of 2014 over the Ebola virus.” Nevertheless, Frum’s broader point is correct: People do vote on what affects them now, and their votes do sometimes have unrelated ramifications down the line. Today the issue is the economy; tomorrow it might be judges. In time, many twains shall meet.
But if that’s true, it raises an important question: “What the hell have the Democrats been playing at since January of last year?”
Frum proposes that:
Ahead of this year’s elections, voters seem motivated above all by cost-of-living issues, with additional concerns about crime and illegal immigration, and possibly cultural issues such as transgender teen athletes seeking to play in girls’ sports leagues, also factoring in. Voters are not much preoccupied by threats to democracy.
People with bills to pay and families to raise have to think about their immediate concerns. If your mortgage payments have spiked because of higher interest rates, or your car was stolen during the post-2020 crime wave, those shocks will, of course, be top of mind. Yet even as voters attend to the immediate, they are also casting a ballot on three issues that may seem remote but have enormous import.
The first is whether former President Donald Trump will face the same legal consequences as any other citizen for his frauds and crimes or whether his party will create a new right of impunity for ex-presidents. The second is whether Republicans will return to their 2011 strategy of using congressional leverage over the debt ceiling to threaten U.S. financial default as a bargaining tactic in budget fights. The third is whether the U.S. will continue to stand by Ukraine as it resists Russia’s invasion.
It is not especially important whether one agrees or disagrees with Frum that these three issues “have enormous import.” What matters is that they are of “enormous import” to both Frum and to the institutional Democratic Party. As Frum observes, voters are always going to prioritize “cost-of-living issues,” “crime and illegal immigration,” and “transgender teen athletes seeking to play in girls’ sports leagues” above secondary matters such as Donald Trump’s legal troubles, hypothetical fights over the budget, and American aid to Ukraine. And, because voters are always going to do that — and because the issues that are of “enormous import” to Frum and the Democrats are thus tied to the issues that voters care about — it was surely pretty damned important for Democrats to get the fundamentals of governance right before the midterms.
Did they?
No, they did not. And nor, for that matter, have they shown any indication that they care about having so spectacularly failed. Despite the obvious risk of inflation, the Democrats spent and spent and spent and spent — and they continued to spend and spend and spend and spend, even after inflation had reached disastrous levels. Despite all the brightly flashing warning signs, Democrats pulled back from the border and refused to correct course on crime. As for the trans issue? One suspects that the Democratic Party will bury itself alive before it admits that there is something wrong there.
Frum contends that “people with bills to pay and families to raise have to think about their immediate concerns.” And yet, like the party with which he has now aligned himself, he does not seem able to follow the point to its logical conclusion. Instead, he sets about downplaying those “immediate concerns” and imploring voters to care more about the things that he cares about. “This year,” Frum writes, “voters would do well to consider not only their immediate discontent but also how their vote will reverberate through the years.” Eventually, he submits, nobody will care “what the price of gasoline was that November.” Why? Because “peace and democracy in Europe will be on the ballot in November too”; because “global financial stability may not be an electoral issue for most voters, but it will nevertheless be on the ballot in November”; because “equal justice under the law, even for the most powerful, is on the ballot in November”; and because, compared to those things, the issues motivating voters in this election are irrelevant.
I disagree with this. As his comparison shows, Frum seems genuinely to believe that the very real problems of inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and trans extremism are of comparable salience to a short-lived Ebola outbreak that wasn’t especially important in the first place, when, in reality, those issues hit Maslow right in the feet. But, I repeat: That’s not the material point. The material point is that, once again, the people who talk the loudest about the supposed threat to our democracy do not actually act as if they believe that the threat is real. If I thought as Frum did — which I don’t — I would be livid with the Democratic Party right about now. Day in, day out, I would be screaming at it to stop trying to have it both ways and get its act together. Convinced that their electoral success was my only hope, I would demand over and over and over that the Democrats moderate; that they listen to what voters are telling them; and that, for now at least, they put their expansive agenda on the back burner. “Stop, stop, stop!” I would cry.
Has Frum done any of this? Of course he hasn’t. His most recent pieces for the Atlantic are about the American Historical Association; the GOP’s supposed “glorification” of “political violence”; the many problems with Ron DeSantis; “the repatriation of stolen objects” in Western museums; the U.K. Constitution’s supposed superiority to America’s constitution; Donald Trump’s having walked into Joe Biden’s “trap”; Joe Biden’s “true” speech at Independence Hall; the cost of the GOP’s “investment in Trump”; Donald Trump’s being “back on the ballot”; the GOP’s inability to tell Donald Trump he’s wrong; and Donald Trump’s having “just told us his master plan.”
Despite an exhaustive search, I couldn’t find a Frum piece anywhere titled, “Hey, Democrats! This is important! What are you playing at, you fools?” Instead, I found an essay in which Frum insisted that, “Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful.”
There’s nothing to worry about, then: A Democratic landslide must be on its way to save the country.