We live in a Ten Percent Democracy. Despite national revulsion against a host of horrors—the war, corruption, hypocrisy, and the whole posturing, bragging, macho nature of this administration—only ten percent of House seats were actually in play. Ten percent—approximately 40 out of 435. The other 405 seats (90%) were safely out of the voters’ reach. Victory in that 90% was automatic, those House seats as secure as a seat on the Supreme Court. The House has been so gerrymandered that it comes close to being democracy-proof.
Consider this: In the 40 seats where there was a meaningful election, Democrats won 75%. In the Senate, which can’t be gerrymandered, 33 seats were up for election, and Democrats (including the two Independents who will caucus with them), won 24, or 72%. That’s the real scope of the rejection of right wing government, a rejection masked by the gerrymandering in the House, and by the fact that only a third of the Senate had to face the voters.
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Democrats remain hopelessly inept at countering Republican attacks. Bush and company yell that Democrats have no exit plan for Iraq. That’s like a guy who insists he can drive his new pickup through a swampy stretch of red clay road, jeering at warnings about how deep the water is and how thick the mud. He plows full speed ahead, pigheadedly ignoring the advice and pleas of his wife and kids. When the truck begins to bog down, he says “No problem,” gives it the gas, spins his wheels, guns the engine again, tries to rock back and forth (“changing his tactics”}, digs himself deeper and deeper, and buries the truck to the hubs. He wades out to look things over, and discovers that the truck’s frame is resting on the ground. Then he turns around and screams at everybody sitting in the truck because they can’t tell him how to get out?
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The election was an overwhelming rejection of “rubber stamp Republicans.” It must have seemed like a great deal once: Take your marching orders from the White House, and climb aboard the Gravy Train. Every lobbyist in Washington wants to stuff dollar bills in your pocket, and your destination is Permanent Power. All you have to do is close your ears to the lies, your eyes to the torture, your faith to the poor, and your patriotism to the loss of liberties. A classic Faustian bargain—and the Devil came around to collect.
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Can it be that folks have finally seen through Karl Rove’s use of smear, fear, queer, and racial prejudice? (Granted, however, that racist ads may have tipped the scales in Tennessee.) Polls consistently showed voters worried the country was “headed in the wrong direction,” and Rove’s brand of putrid politics gets a lot of credit for that perception. This election wasn’t ideological; it was visceral. Millions of people couldn’t stomach this administration any longer, and in the election booth, they did what they could to vomit it out.
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Evangelicals have finally lost their faith—in Republican politicians. For more than two decades, the Republican party has been building victory on three bases—first, corporate support (including most major media); second, the well-to-do and people who aspire to be well-to-do (Bush: “I call you ‘my base.’”); and third, evangelicals and fundamentalists of all stripes. To put it plainly, evangelicals were useful dupes for the other two groups, voting—can we say it?—religiously for Republicans. Mention abortion or gay marriage, and they salivated like Pavlov’s dog—then yanked the Republican lever at the polls. Believing that Mr. Bush and his cronies shared and would act on their vision, zealous Christians swallowed an unjust war, ignored the assault on Creation by corporate predators, and blinked at the abandonment of the common good for policies to fatten the rich. (Don’t forget abortion and gay marriage!) But in the last couple of months, as revelations of corruption and hypocrisy and the contempt Republican insiders felt for the ‘religious nuts’ flooded out, many evangelicals became independent thinkers. Bless them.
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On a related note, Democratic candidates benefited from the flare-up of a dying faith—faith that ordinary people can still bring about a response to their strongest hopes for their country; faith that liberties already traded away can be regained; faith that a planet in peril can yet be saved; faith that the right to vote and have your vote counted will be guaranteed; faith that light will be shone in dark places, and hidden crimes will be revealed; faith that we can find our way back from an illegal, immoral, unwinnable war. That is the faith that lifted Democrats, deserving and undeserving alike, to victory last Tuesday. The victory was given in hope, not out of trust. Democrats have to earn that.
© Tony Russell, 2006
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