Seven months before the midterm elections, Americans seem disaffected about nearly everything political.
A majority disapprove of both political parties, their leaders and most members of Congress, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
Attitudes are reminiscent of those in 1994 and 2006, when control of Congress switched from one party to the other.
The favorable rating for the Democratic Party has fallen to its lowest level since Gallup began asking the question in 1992 ””its standing has dropped 14 percentage points since President Obama’s election ”” but the Republican Party fares no better. Three of four Americans say they are dissatisfied with the country’s direction.
For several elections Americans, particularly independents and suburban voters, have made it abundantly clear they’re not on board with evangelical social fundamentalism. [i]E.g.[/i] — In 2005 South Dakota’s legislature and governor promulgated a law that was every pro-lifer’s dream. At the next election it was repealed by citizen ballot initiative, in a state where GW Bush garnered 64% of the [i]women’s[/i] in 2004.
Those same crowds of suburban and independent voters have been voicing with even greater clarity their similar disinterest in Marxist economic fundamentalism. New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts were merely warm-up acts. That is unlikely to change drastically before November.
More deeply, it seems to me people are developping a profound, and more militant, understanding that the great divide in America today is between government employees (most often unionised) and those of us pressed by weak-willed governments to cough up ever-increasing tax revenues in order that the secure elite — who typically garner compensation 45% higher than equivalent work in the entrepreneurial world, and with vastly greater job security — can continue to live in the fashion to which they have become accustomed.
I suspect that particular fault line will become rather more disruptively active in the next year or two.
In “The Making of Robert E. Lee”, Michael Fellman wrote, “In general, Lee feared and despised politicians, who represented and exacerbated the wildly emotional nature of American civic life.” Fellmeth adds that Lee wrote, “…politicians are more or less so warped by party feeling, by selfishness, or prejudices, that their minds are not altogether. They are the most difficult to cure of all insane people, politics having so much excitement in them.”
Have we made any progress in 150 years?
Lee, a generationally-removed cousin of mine, was an engineer by training (West Point) and according to family lore based his distrust of politicians on Psalm 146:2, slightly paraphrased as “Don’t trust princes and men of power, because they’ll lead you astray for their own purposes.”
We haven’t made any progress in 3000 years, Bill.
And people wonder why I am a monarchist.
Delightful, Ad Orientem.
This article shows why Indiana’s respected Democratic Senator Evan Bayh not only chose not to run for re-election, but issued one of the most stunning departure speeches of all time, urging the American people to clean house and throw the bums in both parties out this November. I think he was right.
David Handy+
Term limits.