Change Elections

 Amidst the endless attempts to explain the unthinkable results of the presidential election last November, one persistent theme keeps emerging: the Democrats, we are told, lost because they were perceived as the party of the establishment. They had become the party of the status quo. Whereas Trump, bizarrely (since he was in office just four years ago) was once again perceived as the "change candidate." And Americans love change. 

So long as the Democrats had been perceived, by contrast, as the party of radical renovation—so this argument goes—they could still win elections. Obama was able to sail to victory twice because he had a message of "hope and change." But after eight years in office, Democrats had become the Powers That Be. Innumerable people said things like: "I voted for Obama, but then everything stayed the same." Or, eight years later, they said the same thing about Biden and Harris. So, out of vengeful disappointment, they voted for Trump the next time around. 

This has given rise to the belief that the Democrats have lost their edge. They need to recover their anti-establishment vibes, we are told, if they are going to start winning elections again. Innumerable Americans feel that the status quo is against them. So, the Democrats need to show that they are against the status quo. Even one of Harris's top pollsters has apparently been making this argument in hindsight: stop talking about defending norms and institutions, she said—in so many words—because many voters out there don't care about preserving them. They want to shake these things up. 

But—at the risk of sounding heretical—I have to ask: do we in fact need to change everything? Does every political party need to be the party of "change"? I know I'm sounding more Burkean by the day as I age, but seriously: if we just aim to change everything, every four years, then how will society function with any kind of continuity? Is politics supposed to be entirely about change? Or is it not also in part supposed to be about Keeping Things the Same? Is it not also in part about preserving political institutions for the next generation and ensuring a complex society holds together just a little bit longer without collapsing? 

As I get older, and the Burkean side of me comes ever more to the fore, I start to realize what a miracle it is that civil society, a functioning economy, and democratic elections exist anywhere at all. And so, there's something to be said for a caretaker government that merely aims to pass a budget each year, keep the lights on, and hand the keys over to their successor after four years without burning the house down in the meantime. This, sometimes, is victory enough. So: not every election needs to be about "change." Not every political party needs to keep promising to make a radical overhaul of society as soon as they take office. 

But Americans, it seems, will not have it so. Change they must have, from every candidate and every party—and they don't particularly seem to care in which direction it runs: that is, whether it is change for the better or for the worse. I am reminded of a line from the great satirical poet Samuel Butler, in his seventeenth century parody of sectarian fanaticism and strife, Hudibras. Butler observes, of the extreme Protestants and puritans at the time of Britain's civil conflict, that they talk "As if religion were intended/ For nothing else but to be mended." So too with Americans of our time: except they act as if politics were intended for "nothing else but to be mended."

In short, we have become a nation of cultural Maoists, demanding permanent revolution. We must have change every four years and nothing else. And yet, I repeat... perhaps that is not actually what politics should be about. This does not, of course, actually mean (as I said above) that it needs to focus only on keeping things the same either. I was being facetious when I implied as much above. What politics actually ought to be about is, of course, something much more nuanced. It ought to be about changing what needs to be changed, keeping the same what ought to be kept the same—and, perhaps most importantly of all, having the wisdom to tell the difference...