Midterms

Not long after I returned from Italy the mid-term elections took place and I have to say I was a bit flabbergasted by the results.  Of course California bucked the trend, but what the hell is going on with the hinterlanders?  They had some sort of conniption.  Now, I get the anger over the Wall Street bailout.  The too-big-to-fail banks should have been bankrupted and broken up.  Their shareholders’ should have been hosed and their executives fired with no severance.  The Obama team was entirely too cozy with Wall Street and gave them too sweet a deal.  But does that justify a wholesale insurrection?  And do the voters actually believe the Repubs are less cozy with Wall Street?  To vote them in is like saying you’ve decided you don’t like rodents so you’re going to replace your gerbil with a rat. 

If, as some say, this debacle was engineered by blue-collar Democrats trying to “send a message,” I’m not sure what that message was.  Were they upset that Obama and the Dems hadn’t fixed the recession fast enough?  Or were they upset about the deficit?  You can be one or the other with consistency, but not both.  To be both is to complain that it’s too hot and too cold at the same time, because to get unemployment down would have required more spending, not less. 

Anyway, they may think they’ve sent some sort of message, but all they’ve really accomplished is to insure that the federal government will be relatively paralyzed for the next two years or, possibly worse, if the Hooverites they’ve voted in have their way and significant spending reductions are put in place, that the recession will take a second dip and unemployment will increase (and therefore revenue will decrease and deficit reduction will be minimal).   

One thing that’s clear is that this vote was not a carefully reasoned one, but an emotional outburst of pure pique.  Meanwhile, as we spin our wheels in backbiting and recrimination, China will continue to seize the future with steady, strategic, well-reasoned steps.  While the Tea Partiers frolic in their free-market fantasies, the Chinese brand of authoritarian state capitalism is laying the groundwork for its domination of the next century, or two, or three.  These wayward voters of ours may wake up one day to discover that the message they have actually sent is that democracy is not going to be the prevailing political paradigm of the future, because in its emotional turbulence it cannot compete with the sheer juggernaut efficiency of authoritarian capitalism.