This is a very good victory for President Obama. As this blog has said before, the election was Romney’s to lose and he lost it. It was much tighter than the electoral college tally suggests, but even so the current showing of the President ahead of the challenger by over 2.5 million votes is convincing. Unfortunately a polarised country has ended up with almost the exact political picture it set out to revise; one of deadlock. A Democrat in the White House with a majority in the Senate blocked, by a Republican majority in the House. In setting up the lauded checks and balances in the new nation’s constitutional arrangements, the founding fathers chose a structure which does not provide an easy route to coalition, unlike the parliamentary democracies of Europe. This has the alarming potential to render the country ungovernable, over fiscal matters especially, and that potential now looms ahead.
The Republicans, smarting at their blown opportunity to walk easily into the White House, will be tempted to flex all their muscles in Congress. They must be very careful. While thinking about how they should act, time could be taken to read their favourite book about the Civil War period; a subject which has more written about it than any other in history. They will see that Lincoln believed in one country, controlled by a Federal government, which acted for the common good in the belief that government can help the progress and prosperity of the nation. Obama believes the same and proclaimed it throughout the campaign. Lincoln was determined to end the scourge of slavery, recognising that the United States was the last advanced country in the world to retain the notion of labour in bondage, with human beings as saleable property, on the same terms as farm animals.
Obama was determined to introduce universal health-care. Again the United States is the last country left, among advanced nations and beyond, not to have this basic necessity of compassionate civilisation. In both cases a major segment of the population believed these humane policies to be an assault upon the American dream, founded on individual freedom from the yoke of heavy government. In 1860 the argument sundered the nation well before its centenary, and led to unprecedented bloodshed, unequalled even to this day. All the States of the South rose in rebellion and formed themselves into the Confederacy. In the bloodbath to follow they were conquered and the Union was restored by force. Slavery ended, but the schism in the notion of the nature and purpose of the United States was swept out of sight, but not out of mind.
In the following century and a half the two political parties swapped places. The Democrats became the party of compassion and reform and the Republicans assumed the role of guardians of fundamental notions of small government, low taxes and bootstrap self reliance. At first it worked. The Republicans were in power in the post WWII period more than the Democrats, but as the GOP drifted further and further to the right, another shadow of history began to fall across its path.
In 1860 the Confederates believed they had right upon their side and that God, in whom they trusted with simplistic fervour and literal interpretation, was with them. They also believed the North were in the main not from the old families who had founded the country, but had their numbers swelled by new immigrants from every corner of Europe and this combination somehow made northerners ninnies and unable to fight. To add to this delusional analysis came the supposition that Britain and France would recognise the Confederacy and come into the fight on its side.
They were wrong on every count. Especially they failed to see that the Northern ninnies had the majority in the population, almost all the industrial assets, and were moving forward at a pace. They also had an economy which though cruel by modern standards, accepted that it was the duty of government to give every citizen a square deal. The South by contrast, was noble, principled and proud, but living entirely in a fading past.
Yesterday Romney won every Southern state except Virginia and maybe at the time of writing this, Florida, together with all of the West. But Obama won all the financial East Coast, all the industrial North and North East and the whole West Coast, including the technological engine of silicone valley and the north western stronghold of Boeing and Microsoft. The reason for this stunning clean sweep of America’s economic assets by the Democrats is that they know, just as northerners knew in 1860, that the demographics have changed. Romney had a majority of white males, but Obama led among women, the young, Hispanics and African Americans, the last two by huge margins. This is where the majority now lies and by 2016 it will be even bigger, while the gun slinging white males of the National Rifle Association will, as a minority, get ever smaller.
In determining how they come to recognise the realities of the fiscal cliff and what it means and how to reach a compromise, the Republican party may find time to ponder another issue. Their own survival as a party of power. In five of the last six Presidential elections the Democrats have polled more votes. Like the rising debt mountain which everyone ignored until it began to blot out the sun, this trend is not, for Republicans, good news. If they drift ever farther to the right, times for them will get harder still. In the end, whilst occasionally flirting with extremes, democracies prefer to be governed from the centre, because that is where consensus lies. That is why democracy works.
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