Why can the Left never win? Around the world, the election of Barack Obama inspired the hope of a new era of progressive politics, coming as it did after the spectacular failures of extreme conservatism under George W. Bush. But on Tuesday night, only one year after his inauguration, these hopes were suddenly destroyed.
The crushing defeat of the Democratic candidate to succeed the late Edward Kennedy as senator for Massachusetts, does not only wreck Mr Obama’s hopes of signing a health reform Bill this month, the main objective of his first year as President; far worse, as Massachusetts is the most solidly Democratic state in the union, it portends defeat for Democrats all across America in November’s congressional elections.
Massachusetts was the only state to vote Democrat in the most lopsided election in US history, the 1972 re-election of Richard Nixon. So the import of this defeat is undeniable even to the most Panglossian of left-wingers: if the Democrats could not hold Teddy Kennedy’s seat, no Democratic legislator anywhere in the US is secure.
The implication is that America and the world must now prepare for the longest lame-duck presidency in history, lasting at least until the 2012 election and, perhaps, until 2016 in the quite possible event that Mr Obama is re-elected alongside a Republican Congress determined to obstruct every idea that he represents. At a time when the need for effective government within America and the challenges for US global leadership are greater than for a generation, this is a potential disaster.
There is one hope. Left-of-centre parties the world over might learn from this electoral disaster. They might start to understand why conservatism has an inbuilt advantage in all advanced democracies and why the near-collapse of the capitalist system has apparently done conservative parties no harm. Progressive parties can hope to overcome this only by ruthless unity and a narrow focus on limited goals.
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The conservatives’ advantage is simple: they know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They seek to preserve, as far as possible, existing structures of economic privilege, power and social traditions. That means, of course, the preservation of the capitalist system. The more that it appears in danger, the greater will be the fear of change among the natural majority in any reasonably affluent society, and their main priority will always be to keep the privileges and lifestyles they enjoy. To achieve this, conservative politicians and voters are willing to bury all minor ideological differences and use every conceivable mechanism to keep power.
Progressives, by contrast, are united only by what they are against. They do not like the status quo, which they consider unjust. But once they gain power, as shown by the Democrats’ internecine struggles over healthcare, they are riven by conflicts. Because progressives are fighting for an infinite range of possible reforms, it is much harder to unite behind any specific programme.
The only way for progressive parties to win and keep power in modern democracies is to show great discipline in uniting around a clear and narrow agenda and to behave extremely aggressively towards their conservative opponents.
The Democrats’ failure to capitalise on the post-Lehman economic crisis could serve as an object lesson in how not to do this. Instead of heaping all the blame on the Bush Administration and the extreme free-market ideology of the congressional Republicans, the Democrats tried to pursue a bipartisan approach in Washington, while directing their political fire against bankers on Wall Street. The Republicans were delighted to join the rhetorical attacks on bankers, as it distracted from their own primary responsibility for the disaster.
The Democrats could have argued, quite justly, that what turned a relatively normal boom-bust cycle in housing into the greatest financial disaster in history was the Bush Administration’s incompetence and its ideological refusal to intervene in the mortgage markets and the banking system much earlier.
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Instead, Mr Obama effectively exonerated the Bush Administration by accepting personal responsibility for the crisis from the moment of his inauguration. This was brave but foolhardy. As a result, voters now blame the Democrats, not the Republicans, for unemployment. Polls show that the Democrats’ $800 billion jobs and stimulus programme, which is partly responsible for pulling the economy out of recession, is widely confused with the hated $780 billion bank bailout package introduced by the Republicans under President Bush.
Contrast this with how Republicans handled the deeper economic crisis that confronted President Reagan in 1981. Democrats take some comfort that Reagan lost popularity during his first year just as quickly as Mr Obama, but went on to win a landslide victory in 1984.
The key difference, as noted by E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post political commentator, before this week’s Massachusetts debacle, was that Reagan refused to take responsibility for the economic crisis. Instead, he devoted the first two years of his presidency to convincing voters that this economic disaster was entirely the responsibility of Jimmy Carter and the liberal progressive elite. By the time that the economy started improving, voters were so convinced by this that the credit went entirely to Reaganomics.
The economic pattern of the early 1980s may well be repeated. The US economy is likely to start to recover strongly, with a growth rate of more than 5 per cent expected this month.
But it looks increasingly doubtful that Mr Obama and the Democrats will enjoy the benefits. Having won Massachusetts, the Republicans will have no compunction in claiming that what saved the US economy was the conservative backlash. If the Democrats fail to challenge them, this is the version of reality that American voters will start to believe.