I voted this morning between 6 and 7 AM; if the early turnout at one Queens polling station is any indicator, expect a blowout today. But also expect a civil and peaceful election. While we were using paper ballots rather than the voting machines most of us have grown used to, there were plenty of election officials around to help confused voters through the process, and I heard several statements from election officials along the lines of “Vote for whoever you want, dear.” “On Election Day you have to choose for yourself.” “I’m a Democrat but sometimes I vote for the other side.” “Your ballot is secret. Nobody will know how you voted.”
In this one gym of this one public school, democracy was on full display this morning as dozens of Americans, most stopping by on their way to work, trooped to the polls and did their civic duty, patiently, undramatically, yet with a sense of commitment and determination. On the way to the polls a Chinese-speaking woman struggled with her bad English to ask me about her voting district; I couldn’t answer her questions but a Chinese speaking poll-watcher could and did. It was a very Norman Rockwell kind of scene: democracy without glitz, busy Queens working people in drably ordinary weekday clothes, doing their duty quietly but with a lot of inherent human dignity and civic pride.
After a bitter and hardfought campaign in which both sides have plenty of reasons to complain about the underhanded attacks and unfair methods used by their opponents, it’s refreshing to see the campaign ending in an election. The people have heard both sides, they have deliberated in their own way, and now the people will speak.
I may not like what they say this time around. I said last spring that I wouldn’t endorse a candidate on this site, but it can’t be much of a secret to regular VM readers that I’m not in the front ranks of the Obama juggernaut. In the last election, I voted for then-Senator Obama; this time around my views have cooled. I don’t hate the President, I don’t think he’s a secret socialist out to destroy American freedom, and I certainly don’t think that everything he’s done has been a failure, but overall this has not been an inspiring four years. Worse, historically speaking, presidents have tended to be less effective in their second four years than they were in their first. Usually scandal dogged, controversial and often out of ideas and staffed by second stringers, second terms rarely add to the luster of the first.
But whatever the voters decide, I’m deeply grateful to be living in a country where we settle contests for power through an election. And I understand that “elections have consequences” as the President so memorably put it, and that whoever wins today has a moral as well as a legal right to take office on Inauguration Day.
In this election, Americans have been trapped between the same basically unsatisfactory alternatives we’ve faced since 2000. Democrats, representing most of the intelligentsia and the custodians of key institutions inside and outside of government, promise a “smooth ride”: competent administration, technocratic adjustment, a crisis-free foreign policy as they attempt to conserve, preserve and to some degree extend the New Deal-Great Society status quo.
Republicans charge that the old models are unsustainable and that Democratic ideas will simply lock us into an even bigger debt and deficit crunch down the road, and that their promised “smooth road” in international relations will end in tears.
In 2008 I, and I suspect a lot of other people, bought a smooth ride ticket both because the last few years had been so extremely bumpy and because in 2008 neither the Republican Party nor its standard bearer commanded much confidence. It felt like the safety vote. But to say that a choice was clear isn’t to say that the alternatives were satisfactory. In my view, they weren’t.
I felt then what I feel even more strongly now: America’s problem is that we stand on the cusp of a new kind of society and a new kind of politics. Republicans are right when they say that the old methods and old models don’t work anymore and that to follow the time honored FDR/LBJ path is to chase diminishing returns with borrowed money. But Democrats are right when they say that Republicans haven’t put forward a clear alternative and that the systems we have, flawed as they are, are vital to the economic security and well being of millions of Americans who don’t trust the Republican Party and it’s sometimes sketchy ideas about change. Would you want Newt Gingrich to be in charge of your mother’s health care and retirement security?
The situation is complicated when it comes to cultural and sexual issues. Here it is the Republicans who sometimes seem to be hankering for a return to an unsustainable past, while it is Democrats who seem willing to throw the tried and true out the window in the hopes that whatever comes next will be better.
These days, the country’s greatest need seems to be the development of a new post-blue social vision and the construction of policies and institutions that can bring that vision into the real world. The big box school, the big box company job, the big box entitlement program and the big box church all seem to be in a state of decay; we need a period of social and intellectual ferment as we stumble our way toward the world’s first information age society.
We haven’t stood still since 2000. Whatever you think of them, Paul Ryan’s ideas about Medicare and Medicaid are much better worked out than the GOP’s entitlement reform ideas three cycles ago. And the mainstreaming of school choice, to the point where many Democrats as well as Republicans are ready to embrace charter schools and vouchers constitutes a serious forward movement of American politics. I’ve just finished a fascinating book by the brilliant University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales (A Capitalism for the People) that points toward some refreshingly non-conventional but practical ideas. But we need more: better ideas for retooling America for the 21st century.
Frankly, I think some of the ideas for the future will come from Democrats and some from Republicans. Democrats wrestling with urban governance questions under tight fiscal constraints will be an important source for innovative ideas about making government cheaper and better; Republicans angry about crony capitalism and the Wall Street-Treasury axis of power will help us rethink what free competition really means under 21st century conditions.
What the country probably needs most now is for politicians and political activists to spend less time spouting ideological slogans, interesting and inspiring though these are, and to start working on governance: solving problems, remodeling institutions, starting new and better schools and so on.
I think the voters will reward the party that does the best at finding and implementing solutions. The most ideological parts of the country—the hardcore red states sweeping from Texas through Dixie and the New England-New York axis of blue—are going to vote ideology almost no matter what. But the Middle West is the swing region of American politics, and as a group Midwesterners tend to be less ideological and more pragmatic than their southern and northeastern counterparts.
I’m actually glad that it’s states like Ohio, Wisconsin and maybe Pennsylvania that decide our fate tonight rather than the Vermonts, the Californias and my own dear native state of South Carolina. Whether I agree with them about a particular choice or not, I’m quite comfortable with the idea that the voters of Ohio and the Middle West are empowered by our system. Let the hotheads and the zealots from New England and the South make their best case, and let the Middle West decide who gets the nod.
So to liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, here’s the Via Meadia tip for the day: your job in the next few years isn’t to grouse and to demonstrate. It isn’t to yell at the other side on cable TV. Your job is to apply your guiding philosophy to the changing circumstances of the American people and come up with concrete things we can do that will make our lives richer, our country stronger, and our society more open and fair.
Americans, especially Middle Westerners living in swing states, are ultimately pragmatists. We are like Deng Xiaopeng: we don’t care if it’s a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches the mouse. Red cat or blue cat: the way to lasting political power in the United States is to start catching mice. That’s particularly true now, when so many Americans in both parties think the mice have gotten out of control and are halfway to taking over the house.
In any case, as always I’m moved and inspired by the ritual of voting, and of watching this great nation make its choice. The mightiest armed forces in the history of the world stand ready to accept the orders of whoever is chosen by the people as their next commander in chief; embittered partisans will, grudgingly, accept the peoples’ choice; the machinery of American popular government, a machinery that has long outlasted the supercilious monarchs and blue blooded snobs who once scoffed at it, will once again, perhaps after some court fights and recounts, produce a winner, and once again, as we have done with one tragic exception since 1789, Americans will settle down to live, under the law, with the president chosen by the people at large.