The White House and the Justice Department encouraged selected U.S. attorneys to bring voter fraud prosecutions, despite studies showing that election fraud isn’t a widespread problem.[30]
So vote suppression is a part of the movement conservative political strategy. It can be decisive in close elections, which means that as a quantitative matter vote suppression is in the same class as the mobilization of the religious right—but not in the same class as the exploitation of white racial backlash, which remains at the heart of movement conservatism’s ability to achieve electoral success.
The truly frightening question is whether electoral cheating has gone or will go beyond vote suppression to corruption of the vote count itself. The biggest concern involves touch-screen electronic voting machines. In August 2007 the state of California sharply restricted the use of touch-screen machines after an audit by University of California researchers confirmed voting activists’ worst fears: Machines from Diebold, Sequoia, and other major suppliers are, indeed, extremely vulnerable to hacking that alters election results. This raises the question—which I won’t even try to answer—of whether there was in fact electronic fraud in 2002 and 2004, and possibly even in 2006. More important, there is the disturbing possibility that the favorable political trends I’ll discuss in the next chapter might be offset by increased fraud. And given the history of movement conservatism, such worries can’t simply be dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories. If large-scale vote stealing does take place, all bets are off—and America will be in much worse shape than even pessimists imagine.
So what’s the matter with America? Why have politicians who advocate policies that hurt most people been able to win elections? The view that movement conservatives have found sure-fire ways to distract the public and get people to vote against their own interests isn’t completely false, but it’s been greatly overstated. Instead the ability of conservatives to win in spite of antipopulist policies has mainly rested on the exploitation of racial division. Religion and invocations of moral values have had some effect, but have been far less important; national security was decisive in 2002 and 2004, but not before. And there are indications that most of the ways movement conservatism has found to distract voters are losing their effectiveness. Racism and social intolerance are on the decline, and the Iraq debacle has gone a long way toward discrediting the GOP on national security. Meanwhile concerns about inequality and economic insecurity are on the rise. This is, in short, a time of political opportunity for those who think we’ve been going in the wrong direction. The remainder of this book lays out the dimensions of that opportunity, and what we should do with it.
10 THE NEW POLITICS OF EQUALITY
The Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm election came as a shock to many, even though it had been telegraphed by polls well in advance. Many analysts had invested themselves emotionally and professionally in the idea of over whelming Republican political superiority. I have a whole shelf of books from 2005 and 2006 explaining, in sorrow, triumph, or simply awe, how the superior organization of the GOP, the enthusiasm of its supporters, its advantage in money, its ownership of the national security issue, and—by some accounts—its ability to rig elections made it invincible. Believing that Republicans had a lock on power, some couldn’t believe what the polls were saying—namely, that the American people had had enough.
Even after the election results were in, there was a visible reluctance to acknowledge fully what had happened. For months after the vote many news analyses asserted one of two things: that it was only a narrow victory for the Democrats, and/or that the Democrats who won did so by being conservative. The first claim was just false, the second mostly so.
The new Democratic margin in the House of Representatives wasn’t narrow. In fact, it was wider than any Republican majority during the GOP’s twelve-year reign. The new Democratic majority in the Senate was paper thin, but achieving even that starting from a five-seat deficit was something of a miracle, because only a third of the Senate is elected at a time. As it was, Democrats and independents allied with the Democrats won twenty-four of the thirty-three Senate seats at stake. The Democrats also took six governorships, and gained control of eight state legislative chambers.
The claim that Democrats won by becoming conservative is only slightly less false. Some of the new faces in Congress were Democrats who won in relatively conservative districts, and were themselves a bit more conservative than the average Democrat. But it remained true that every Democrat was to the left of every Republican, so that the shift in control drastically tilted the political balance to the left.[1] And the truly relevant comparison is between the Democratic majority now and the Democratic majority in 1993–94, the last time the party was in control. By any measure the new majority, which doesn’t depend on a wing of conservative Southern Democrats, is far more liberal. Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, made headlines by becoming the first woman to hold the position—but she is also the most progressive Speaker ever.
But what did the Democratic victory and the leftward shift in Congress mean? Was it an aberrational event, a consequence of the special ineptitude of the Bush administration? Or was it a sign of fundamental political realignment?
Nobody can be completely sure. In this chapter, however, I’ll make the case for believing that the 2006 election wasn’t an aberration, that the U.S. public is actually ready for something different—a new politics of equality. But the emergence of this new politics isn’t a foregone conclusion. It will happen only if liberal politicians seize the opportunity.
“In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?” asked Gallup in June 2007. Only 24 percent were satisfied, compared with 74 percent unsatisfied. As I write this in the summer of 2007, Americans are very unhappy about the country’s direction.
A lot of that has to with the quagmire in Iraq. But what’s remarkable is how little the national mood seems to have been lifted by what looks, at first glance, like a pretty good economy. Gross domestic product has been rising for almost six years; the unemployment rate is only 4.5 percent, comparable to its levels in the late nineties; the stock market has been hitting new highs. Yet when Gallup asked, “How would you rate economic conditions in this country?” only about a third of the respondents answered “Excellent” or “Good.” The proportion was twice as high in the late nineties.
Conservatives, looking for someone to blame, complain that the media aren’t reporting the good news about the economy—just as they aren’t reporting the good news about Iraq. More seriously, ill-feeling about the war probably bleeds into the public’s views on other matters. Still, it’s worth noting that consumer confidence in 1968—the year of the Tet offensive, huge antiwar protests, and, as I documented in chapter 5, a pervasive sense that things were falling apart—was much higher than it is in the summer of 2007.[2] This suggests that there are limits on the extent to which dismay about other aspects of the national situation can color perceptions of how the economy is doing, which in turn suggests that public unhappiness with the economy isn’t just a projection of bad feelings about the war. And there’s one more crucial point: It actually makes perfect sense for most people to be unhappy about the state of the economy. Due to rising inequality, good performance in overall numbers like GDP hasn’t translated into gains for ordinary workers.
30.
“Was Campaigning Against Voter Fraud a Republican Ploy?” McClatchy Washington Bureau, July 1, 2007, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/ homepage/story/17532.html.
2.
See Sydney Ludvigson, “Consumer Confidence and Consumer Spending,”