Voters Love Government Programs (Even if They Claim To Be Unhappy With the Government Itself)
If one’s looking to predict the political future, it’s generally futile to follow the ins and outs of elections, since no single election tells us much of anything about the direction in which the country is headed. And this certainly remains true for the election of 2014. While heralded as some sort of indicator of the American voter’s turn toward a demand for free markets and small government, there is no reason at all to believe this, and the American electorate is very much the same electorate that returned Barack Obama to office in 2012. Moreover, 95 percent of incumbents running in 2014 were re-elected. These are the people who have been running the country for the past two years. Virtually all of them are back in Congress today and will continue to be there for a long time because the incumbent re-election rate in 2016 is very likely to be over 90 percent as well.
Exit polls do not in any way suggest a move toward limiting government. Large numbers of voters polled say they are unhappy with the direction of the country and with the president. But this tells us nothing about what voters actually want. Among those who think the government is one the wrong track, many of them believe the government is too “free market” and that we need more politicians like Elizabeth Warren. And if the 2012 and 2010 elections are any indication, what the voters want (or are at least very willing to tolerate) are guarantees of unending social security and Medicare payments, more government action to “fix” the economy, and limitless spending on foreign wars. There is no groundswell to de-fund the NSA, to end the wars, to cut entitlement spending, or to de-regulate the markets.
In the Senate, where the GOP won a majority in 2014, the GOP benefited from the fact that many tight senate races were in GOP-leaning states. This situation will be reversed in 2016, and the Dems will likely recover their majority in the Senate.
Unhappiness with the current president will mean very little in 2016. Much of the dissatisfaction with Obama will be overcome by simply inserting a new candidate to replace him. Indeed, exit polling shows that Hillary Clinton polls quite well, and polls similarly to where Bill Clinton was polling in 1994, two years before he was re-elected in a landslide. (We should remember that after eight years of Clinton, the GOP was only able to tie Al Gore, who only lost because there was a GOP majority on the Supreme Court at the time.) In 2016, the Republicans are likely to run another clone of Mitt Romney, such as Jeb Bush, to be just the latest milquetoast GOP contender who will make no promises to cut any actual government programs.
No Libertarian Candidate Would Win
And why will no major national candidate pledge to cut any government? Because to do so will be political suicide. If he pledges to cut spending on wars, he or she will be accused of collaborating with terrorists. If he even suggests that he might cut social security or Medicare (the biggest welfare programs in America), he or she will be crucified by the AARP and pensioners who reliably vote in droves to protect their welfare programs.
And yet, many libertarians seem to think that the country is secretly brimming with hard-core libertarians and that our problems will be solved if only more libertarians get out and vote or become lobbyists or run for Congress. And yet, in a country where lopsided majorities are fine with NSA spying, endless war, and welfare forever, it’s difficult to see how a few more libertarians turning out to vote for John McCain on election day 2008 would have turned the United States toward policies that would be significantly different from what we have today.
What all of this tells us is that the United States has a problem that is primarily ideological in nature. There is a tendency among libertarians to assume that the majority is secretly with them. That people really hate war, and that big government only prevails because the voters have been somehow tricked. This was what Richard Cobden believed about the British population in the early days of his career. He thought that the people of Britain would vote for anti-imperialism and peace if given the chance. He turned out to be very wrong. The immense popularity of the Crimean War and of British imperialism in general disabused him of such fanciful notions.
The same is true of Americans. Most of us truly believe that the government keeps us safe, that we deserve our government pensions, and that “you have nothing to hide if you haven’t done anything wrong.” The majority hold the opinion that the court system is “impartial” and that only criminals are prosecuted by the government, and that greedy businessmen should be regulated.
Ultimately, every government relies on the consent (or at least the tolerance) of the governed, whether a dictatorship or a mass democracy. The US government enjoys at least the toleration of the American population in spades.
National Politics Are Not the Answer
It should always be remembered that electoral politics are a lagging indicator of the population’s ideology. Voting populations skew old, and those who have a stake in the government’s status quo are over-represented.
But even as a new generation of Americans — those who have seen the writing on the wall — suspects that they cannot be taken care of from cradle to grave and made “safe” by a bankrupt government — they nonetheless correctly sense that the system cannot be “fixed” by voting. And they are right. The American republic after 1787 has always been designed for purposes of centralization and has a strong tendency to be controlled by large interest groups national in scope. Localized or smaller groups are systematically excluded from exercising any power. James Madison wanted it this way, as explained in Federalist #10.
This bias toward centralization and huge national interests is furthermore accentuated by the sheer size of the nation and by the two party system reinforced by the first-past-the-post system of choosing winners in elections. This is hardwired into the American political system, and it ensures that American politics at the national level will always favor whatever political organization that can promise the most free stuff to the largest numbers of people.
The answer lies in action from below, namely unilateral decentralization from below in the form of nullification and secession.
In recent years, we’ve already seen four states nullify federal drug laws on cannabis (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) plus more threats (and even some enactments) of nullification on federal drug laws, Obamacare, REAL ID, and more. Reforming drug laws at the national level has been a futile enterprise, and it is notable that the administration only began talking seriously about scaling back on drug prosecutions afternullification began.
As the central government becomes more and more insolvent, nullification and de facto secession (often more prudent than de jure secession) will become all the more practical and meaningful.
The national government in DC will remain wedded to the same old interests: senior citizens, “defense” contractors, bankers, and others who will continue to squeeze what last remaining wealth they can from the general population. As always, the system will continue to be constructed to neutralize any efforts at reform. The only hope for real reform will come at the local levels, and how this reform will likely take place is described in Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s essay “What Must be Done” in which he explains the futility of top-down reform and explains the bottom-up strategy.
Meanwhile, the question is often asked if one should join Congress and reform the government “from the inside” like Ron Paul. In considering this assertion, it quickly becomes evident that Ron Paul never reformed the government from the inside. All his notable contributions were in inciting non-politicians to demand reforms from the outside. Ron Paul passed almost no legislation while in Congress. The Party elites saw to that. What he did do was lead an intellectual movement, using his seat in Congress as a way to reach a national audience. The success of the Ron Paul movement has been founded on external pressure applied from outside government. Virtually nothing has been done “from the inside.”
We should also admit that in the vast majority of Congressional districts, anyone who says that sorts of things Ron Paul said while in office, would be voted out of office ASAP. Paul’s situation was atypical, and even though he rallied a new movement from a seat in the national government, the true fruits of his reforms will come at the local levels.
There will be no meaningful reforms from inside DC. The king will not abdicate. The income tax will not be repealed. The NSA will not be reined in by Congress. Indeed, Congress is now irrelevant. The president rules by executive order, and the Fed sets economic policy.
As has happened with countless other dying empires, the centralized regime will weaken, and then we can only hope that people who actually understand economics and markets and human rights will be there to pick up the pieces. In this task, education is vitally important. Our critics tell us that we’re wasting our time teaching people about markets and freedom. That we should be lobbying DC instead. This is a fatal mistake. Concentrating on DC has been an utter failure so far, and will be all the more pointless in the future. If the 2014 election was not enough to make this evident, 2016 will make it all the more clear.
2:39 pm on December 3, 2014
