Here is a list of political riddles for us as we contemplate the meaning of the 2014 Midterms:
How do you create the business friendly conditions that promote economic prosperity without compromising the economic security of low-skilled and entry level workers?
How do you ensure health insurance as an entitlement without profound degradation to the quality of services that comes with bureaucratization?
How do you ensure a strong national security policy without the risk of over-involvement overseas and/or heavy reliance on the surveillance state at home?
How, in a phrase, can we have our cake and eat it too?
Some years ago fans of the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report noticed something strange when the film went to DVD. The last scene was cut out. The film was an adaptation of a Philip K Dick story about a government program, called Precrime, that succeeded in eliminating crime by the use of psychic beings whose visions helped predict and pre-empt crimes before they would happen. In typical Philip K Dick style, the program proved to be imperfect and a villain from inside the program used his insider’s knowledge to conceal a murder he committed. The program was disbanded and the three psychic beings were sent to a place of idyllic isolation.
In the last scene the audience sees a text that announced that the year after the program was disbanded crime and murder returned. This was the scene that was cut out of the DVD version of Minority Report. What was cut out of the film, in other words, was the acknowledged downside of the policy decision to eliminate Precrime.
There’s something of a debate as to why Mr. Spielberg made this editorial decision, but I think it was an obvious political decision to not complicate the political narrative of a movie intended to reveal the dark side of the surveillance state by acknowledging that there is a cost to be born by such decisions however justified they may be. Spielberg, like our political class, didn’t want to dilute the message with complicated realities.
This is the obvious analogy to our present political environment. While our world may be Philip K Dickian, our politics are Spielbergian. Inconvenient facts are obscured or completely edited out of our public political discourse to avoid an honest discussion of the political downsides of competing policies. And when those facts make themselves felt in the form of real consequence of poorly considered policy, the accumulative effect looks a lot like the 2014 Midterms.
As if to help me illustrate this point, a recent clip of one of the architects of Obamacare has just surfaced acknowledging the important role lack of transparency had in passing the Affordable Care Act. This combined with what we now know was a deliberate decision the President made to not alter his claim that American’s won’t lose their insurance under Obamacare reveals different instances of the reigning political mindset in Washington D.C., a mindset which is perfectly comfortable leaving inconvenient facts on the Spielbergian editing floor to ensure the purity of their preferred political narrative. While it is true that 2014 could be interpreted as a refutation of this kind of politics, Republicans should be very careful to not over-interpret the 2014 Midterm elections as an endorsement of Republican policy. A more complicated picture may be that it is a rejection by a voting public that has been systematically insulated from the fact that all policy options have downsides, even, it bears emphasizing, the conservative alternatives to the liberal policies rejected in this most recent midterm.
The more problematic fact is Democratic policy has a certain competitive advantage in this environment. While it’s true that the party has taken significant hits across the board and all the way down the political food chain, it bears noting that president Obama achieved his goal of transformation and can look forward to a post presidential career of reaping the rewards from his particular constituencies who are not among the roughly 55-60% of Americans who view the president unfavorably. In a manner of speaking, President Obama is a brand that is successfully completing its product lifecycle and will be phased out in 2016. Meanwhile, his potential democratic successor using the same brain trust that Obama used in 2012 will attempt to formulate a brand identity that integrates America’s perception of Obama’s failures by offering a contrast to his administration, even while in matters of substance Hillary will be using the same political class that gave us Obama’s policies. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
I’ve already written on the practical consequences of this sort of politics, why our political culture reeks of this epistemic detachment and why our society appears to be insensitive to its effects. The sum result is our policy making institutions bear an unfortunate resemblance to a well meaning, oblivious and nearsighted old man, bumbling through a dangerous world and narrowly escaping highly consequential effects of bad policy. 2014 was the result of voters taking note and voting (or in case of democratic voters not voting) accordingly. But there is a difference between voters responding to the vivid consequences of bad policy, and endorsing an alternative set of policies that, if they are presented responsibly, will be honest about their own downsides.
The good news is there is some talent among Republicans that appear to be willing to give the public the benefit of the doubt, Scott Walker and Tom Cotton being two. The bad news is there is so much work to do.