Mommy, come wipe my butt!!!!!

I think the Republicans who are prancing around gleefully this week would do well to remember 2005, when George Bush tried to push through Social Security reform. Do you remember that? Do you remember what happened? He failed miserably.

My point is that it's wrong to interpret struggles over heatlh care reform as some kind of mass ideological opposition. Does anybody really think that the same people who supported Ted Kennedy and John Kerry in their last elections suddenly decided that they wanted to be virulent anti-statists? People do not change their fundamental views of the role of government in that short of a period. And, as has been stated frequently, polls show support for the specific provisions of the law (though, admittedly, polls that measure policy preferences are hugely sensitive to question wording).

My point is not to try to interpret the Mass. senatorial election; instead, my point is that the problems with health care reform have come from the unwieldiness of the modern legislative process, and not primarily from mass ideological opposition. At the National level, lawmaking has become extraordinarily difficult. Here's a good treatment of this from the NYTimes's Ross Douthat.

It has always been difficult in the United States to pass major changes. Usually, it has to be precipitated by some kind of crisis (i.e., the Great Depression or 9/11). To quote Baumgartner and Jones (Agendas and Instability in American Politics), the general pattern is one of "punctuated equilibrium." There are long periods of policy stability, followed by "punctuations" of change. Punctuations usually result from some kind of perceived crisis, or to use John Kingdon's Mulitiple Streams framework, from the "problem stream." Baumgartner and Jones talk about a few other, non-crisis ways for these punctuations to happen, such as changing the "policy image" or changing the "policy venue (i.e., federal, state, legislation, courts, etc).

I guess I'm claiming that these punctuations are becoming less and less likely, due to a variety of institutional factors. One is the filibuster, which I complained about several days ago and won't rehash here. Another is that interest groups are incredibly powerful now. Theodore Lowi was complaining about this, i.e., the impossibility of making purposeful, reformational legislation due to the incredible influence of interest groups at all levels of government, back in the 70s with his famous book, The End of Liberalism.

Another is that the President's "power to persuade" is now drowned out by the cacophany of punditry from all sides of the political spectrum. Remember the days when Ronald Reagan could interupt your sit-com to talk to you about his plan to save you from thieving poor people? When he did that, most of the people in the country were watching. Now, our media is so fragmented that there is no way to reach everybody, particularly without the ideological filter of whatever channel you happen to be watching. Now, I'm not saying this is bad...it just means that Presidency has a harder time marshalling public support for legislation than it did in the past.

Look, I'm not one of those lefties who thinks that all of the great unwashed out there in America are secret socialists. This is, without a doubt, a moderate country. I think what we're seeing is that people don't trust anything that can kick their ass, be it a government or large corporation, and they don't trust change of any kind. That's not ideological...that's some kind of deep human psychology (how else can you explain that the same people who love Medicare hate "big government"?). But, that hasn't really changed much over the last 70 years. Even as the parties have polarized, the electorate has stayed fairly moderate and fairly stable. And, undoubtedly, public ideology is important in understanding why polarized parties have failed to pass polarized policies (Bush and the results of 9/11 notwithstanding). But there's more to it than that...there seems to be a fundamental inability to deal with large problems in a concerted, purposeful way. Conservatives tend to benefit from this, because their ideology prefers no action, most of the time. But, as Social Security reform showed, sometimes the status quo is big government, and that's not likely to change either.

So, I guess my overall point is this: we can't even wipe our own asses anymore.