A rchive Date
[ 06-11-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Salim_Mansur/2004/11/05/702382.html
America's pendulum will swing left again
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
Sat, November 6, 2004
Four years ago, U.S. President George Bush lost the popular vote, and yet in winning the heavily contested Florida ballots, he took the presidency by a slim majority of electoral college votes.
Four years later as a war president, Bush has won re-election with an unprecedented mandate of historic proportions.
How did this happen and what does this say about American politics?
In August of this year, Czeslaw Milosz, born in 1911 in Lithuania and recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, died in California. He was a poet and writer of great insight into life within a totalitarian society, having survived German nazism and escaped from Soviet communism.
In his book, The Captive Mind, Milosz quotes the saying of an old Jew of Galicia: "When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal."
George Bush is the sort of man who is 55% right, as were Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman.
Americans gave Bush the largest number of total votes in U.S. electoral history this week, 58.9 million, or 51% of the total vote count.
Yet the disdain for Bush among lib-left intellectuals and the Michael Moore/Hollywood crowd is indicative of those possessing a view of themselves being 75% right or more. It is such self-assuredness that breeds contempt for ordinary folks who make the world go round.
The 2004 election was also a consummation of an historic shift reconfiguring the centre of American politics -- a shift begun in 1980 with the election of Reagan.
Nearly 50 years earlier, on the heels of the great depression, Franklin Roosevelt defined the centre of American politics with the aims of New Deal liberalism. It would be reinvigorated with John Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
Democrats' purpose
Through these years, the Democratic party found its purpose in greatly enlarging the role of the federal government in the making of a welfare state.
But every expansion is followed by a contraction, or a reverse swing of the pendulum. Reagan's presidency marked the beginning of this swing.
Republicans sought to limit the activism of the federal government, and alter the relationship of the individual with the state, in favour of the former.
The political significance of the 2004 election is that under Bush's leadership, the Republican party has completed the cycle of reversing the Democratic dominance.
American politics once defined by Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism has been reconstituted by a blend of Reagan's conservatism in domestic economic policies and idealism in supporting freedom abroad.
Now Republicans control both houses of the U.S. Congress, the presidency, a majority of state governors and, quite likely, the Supreme Court may acquire a conservative majority with appointments made during Bush's second term.
Hence, this election marks the noontide of Republican conservatism. A new political centre has emerged in the U.S. within a world dramatically changed since Reagan was elected nearly a generation ago.
But such concentration of political power goes against the spirit of American democracy and the mechanism of U.S. constitutional checks and balances.
Re-establishing relevance
It will be worth watching how the Democratic party claws back to political relevance and power once again.
This will happen in some form presently unclear. Even as Republicans savour their control in Washington, the more astute among them know there is an ebb and flow of tides in the nature of all things.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at: smansurca@yahoo.ca Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com Home Page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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