It’s election day, I can’t vote, and it is driving me crazy (also a very slow morning at work, hence this; a bad combo).  Montana law requires 30 days of residence to vote in a precinct, something we just don’t meet.  We could have voted absentee as Missoula residents, but didn’t do the research soon enough to make that happen.  I have an immense amount of civic guilt about the whole thing.

As everyone has no doubt heard from one source or another, the GOP will likely gain control of the US House by a narrow margen, gain seats in the Senate, and win many governorships.  Here in Montana neither of our Demoratic senators or our Democratic governor are up for re-election, and our Republican US representative hasn’t had to face a substantive challenge in quite some time.  We are witnessing a dog-fight for control of both state houses, some intense local races here in the Flathead valley, and several state ballot initiatives that I consider important (for example, one to cap payday lending rates). 

A lot of this is to be expected.  Since WWII midterm elections have almost always gone against the party that holds the White House, especially after a new president has been elected.  Additionally, modern history shows that the party in power always looses ground during a down economy.  Unless tonights numbers fall towards the margins of expected results, they’ll be largely explicable on the above grounds alone.

The third factor here is, of course, president Obama.  The extent to which many polls, and the rhetoric which spins them, have reported the presumptive election results as a repudiation of the president cannot be explained merely by his status as the leader of the party in power.  President Obama has become an object of fear for many Americans, and it’s worth asking why this is so.

Our president looks different, and given our racially charged history this cannot be dismissed.  Skin color aside, Obama neither resembles nor comports himself like a conventional American political leader.  We as a country seem to like, or at least draw comfort from, outsized figures with oversized displays of confidence.  George W. Bush can be seen as a cartoon come to life of this ideal.  The contemplative style of no-drama Obama is very much at odds here.

Behind this style there is substance, and I think that Obama does have a view of American government that, while it does not lack for precedent, is at odds with certain modern (especially but not exclusively conservative) narratives about the desirable role of government in American life. 

This column, reprinted by NPR, is a good encapsulation of this view.  While it is a not especially charitable example, given the naively broad brush and blatant historical inaccuracies used, it will serve due to it’s directness and brevity.  The author is certainly correct on one point, that the direct equation of liberty with less government has been perhaps the central axiom in American politics, since the revolution.  Thoreau’s formulation in Civil Disobediance, “that that government is best which governs least,” has not only had (as I argued in my senior history thesis in undergrad) a lasting impact in modern life, but was drawn from the populist, Jacksonian spirit of the 1820s and 1830s; a spirit which probably serves as the best historical equivalent to the Tea Party movement.

The problem with this forumation, that liberty and government have a direct and inverse relationship, is absurd.  While the base idea may have merit, in application things are far more complex.  Furthermore, every modern politician knows this (even if they don’t know they know it).  The debate since Regan has not been, contrary to the rhetoric and popular image, not about how much government is right and proper, but over what sort of government is right and proper, and what work we want that government to do.  The competition between liberal-humanist values (women’s rights to an abortion) and Prostestant-conservative values (the sanctity of human lives above all else) is but one example.

Both parties want government to work in the service of liberty, and both realize that laws are necessary.  This understanding predates the US Constitution, going back at least as far as Locke and his refutation of anarchism.  Maximal liberty for the maximal amount of people is not achieved with minimal rules, which gives much liberty to a few at the expense of the many.  Maximal liberty is achieved when judicious rules are put in place which moderately constrain many, more seriously constrain few, and give benefits to many.  The graduated income tax might be the best example of this, and is something which all but the most batshitcrazy of American politicians recognize as an essential feature of modern American democracy.

Still, Americans in general would like to believe that liberty equals less government, and that the government should not take our (my!) money, and that we are indeed taxed enough already.  Ergo John McCain’s effective and disingenuous seizure of Obama’s comment, during the 2008 Joe the Plummer saga, that “spreading the wealth around” was tantamount to socialism, when in fact America has, as an institution, been spreading the wealth around since day one.  Something McCain well knew.  We American’s all know, on a gut level, that taxes are an essential feature of our democracy and of our liberty, and we certainly wouldn’t give up the civic services taxation brings us.  At the same time, we all believe that one day we will become wealthy (a key feature of manifest destiny as it lives on in the American Dream), and are loath to tax our future selves.  Unfortunately, wealth in America is not created in a vacuum, and the legendary tale of rags to riches, up by the bootstraps bildungsroman is not only largely a myth, it is one whose historical complexities are almost always overlooked. 

In the Declaration Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, and for me “created” is the key word.  All people do not have the inalienable right to be equal as they die (and hearses don’t have luggage racks), but all people are entitled to equitable chances at life, liberty, and the pusuit of happiness.  Locke wrote it as life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, and anyone who does not see economic status and opportunity as an inextricable part of the pursuit of happiness has never seen poverty (and the extent to which it precipitates abuse, addiction, and trans-generational trauma).  Theodore Roosevelt, then an ex-president, and one of the most priviledged men ever to become president, wrote one of my favorite formulations of this:

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

Achieving the first requires spreading the wealth around, redressing economic imbalances and the complex historical factors which produced them.  The second is the economic, political, and moral justification for the first.  By way of example, if trans-generational trauma and poverty were ended by an increase in medicaid funding (and medicaid is how I make a living, because private insurance does not see metal health and community activism as a worthy investment [because rich people need it less]) and a truly equitable public school system, medicaid could be largely made an anachronism inside three generations.  Of course, too many election cycles fit into one generation, thus making such a thing politically untenable.  Ergo Obama’s pragmatism, making substantive baby steps towards this end, is both the most responsisble path and guaranteed to piss off everyone during election season.

If the task of fully fulfilling the promise of American democratic liberty requires economic activism, and if our current president recognizes that this is the case, it is only natural that fear of the first will properly inspire fear of the second.  The concluding question is then; why does such a swath of the American political landscape seem to fear economic and social equality?

Post your answer.