The lessons of the Nov. 2 election
Sociology Professor Darnell Hunt is director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
America’s 2010 midterm elections have come and gone, and yet, critical questions remain about where our nation is headed. The people’s first black president, who was swept into the White House just two years ago by a popular mandate for change, now finds himself admonished by an electorate impatient with the nation’s inability to climb out of the financial rut it’s been in since the financial collapse of 2008.
Of course, this predicament is the payout from decades of standard Republican policy shenanigans — tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of the financial markets, failure to invest in the nation’s infrastructure and so forth — policies that have significantly increased the gap between the haves and have-nots in America and gradually (and perhaps irreversibly at this point) undermined our ability to turn this ship around.
But the people seem to have a short memory, and Democrats evidently don’t know what to do with power when they get it.
Besieged by incoherent messaging, saddled with a lack of party discipline and seemingly doomed to advancing tepid policy agendas, Democrats have once again taken it on the chin. Indeed, President Obama has characterized the results of this election — his party’s stunning loss of more than 60 seats in the House of Representatives and its remaining, razor-thin hold on the Senate — as a “shellacking.” Already there are rumblings coming from within the Democratic Party about the inevitability of the “c-word.” To be sure, compromises of all sorts regarding once-popular Democratic promises loom large. Universal healthcare, ending an unpopular war, reversing tax cuts for those who should pay more, alternative energy policy and gay rights are just a few of the targets likely in the crosshairs. Republicans, if nothing else, know how to make the most of their numbers.
For what it’s worth, California seems to have bucked the national trend. Instead of moving back to the right after a two-year flirtation with hopes for meaningful change, California voters rejected a billionaire Republican candidate for governor who sunk more than $140 million into her own campaign by (re)electing a seasoned, progressive-minded Democrat who actually thinks like the majority. Perhaps the passage of a proposition that replaces a two-thirds vote requirement on budgetary matters with a simple majority vote requirement — when combined with a governor who knows what it means to govern — will ease the gridlock that’s become synonymous with the California legislature in recent years.
Meanwhile, California voters also rejected a billionaire candidate for one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats, returning the incumbent Democrat back to Washington instead. That there is no guarantee money can buy an election, at least, seems somewhat reassuring.
What all of this means, in the end, remains an open question. Although the hopes most of us had in 2008 for meaningful change seem to be morphing into more of the same, what Gramsci referred to as the “organic consciousness” of the people — the understandings and mobilizations associated with raw, material circumstances — is an ever-present, unpredictable force.
May the force be with us.
