The presidential election is now a close contest, but barring an Electoral College tie, someone is going to win, someone is going to lose, and both sides will have to make sense of it all.
The obvious story line of this election, whoever wins, is that Americans want pragmatic solutions to the relentless distress they have experienced for over a decade, whether that means a more active or a more passive government. They are looking for anyone who can provide a coherent vision of how to fix an economy that is not working for people who work for a living. But rather than a victory for pragmatism, we may well see both the winners and losers take away a very different lesson: that this election was a mandate for another shift to the right.
If Mitt Romney loses, conservatives will no doubt conclude that he just wasn’t conservative enough, that they should have picked someone more appealing to their base. If President Obama loses or squeaks out a victory just four years after President George W. Bush destroyed the economy (which should have discredited conservative economics once and for all), many Democrats are likely to conclude that he tried to move too left too fast when he pushed for a stimulus and health care reform for which Americans were simply not ready, rather than that he simply sold both programs poorly (something he now acknowledges).
Similarly, whichever candidate wins, the first order of business will be deciding which programs to cut — unless a deal to prevent us from going over the fiscal cliff is reached during the lame-duck session of Congress after the election. Most voters intuitively understand that jobs and deficits are linked — too much of an emphasis on deficits leads to too few jobs — because working people with money in their wallets drive demand, whereas wealthier people with money in their wallets drive Jaguars (and send the rest of their income to their hedge fund managers). Even in the heart of red America, people understand that high unemployment and income disparities of the magnitude we are now witnessing are bad for economic growth.
But you have to speak in a way that brings out their inner Keynes, as I discovered when testing the following message in the Deep South: “The only way to cut the deficit is to put Americans back to work.” That message beat the toughest austerity message by over 30 points.
The reality is that our government hasn’t become this dysfunctional because the parties are so “polarized.” It’s because there is only one pole in American politics today, and its magnetic field is so powerful that it has drawn both parties in the same direction — rightward. And it is in that same direction that the magnetic field of contemporary American politics is likely to pull the stories the two parties tell after the election — and the policies the winner pursues.
The data, however, suggest just the opposite — that both candidates have benefited in the general election every time they have taken a left turn. President Obama was in deep political trouble 15 months ago when he cut the closest thing he could to a “grand bargain” with House Speaker John A. Boehner to slash the federal budget by trillions, and he did nothing for his popularity nine months earlier when he extended the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Not until he began talking like a populist did he begin picking up steam in the polls. Indeed, one of the most powerful messages the Democrats chose not to use in the 2010 midterm elections — which would have supported a policy that was extremely popular then and remains as popular now — was a simple message on taxes I tested nationally, which won in every region and with every demographic, including Tea Partyers: “In tough times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.” Once that position (and other populist appeals) became central to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, the election looked like it would be a rout.
BUT then in the first debate, Mr. Romney moved to the center, taking back his promise of tax cuts for the rich and proposing instead to let people choose which tax deductions they wanted to take (for their home mortgages, for example) but limiting the amount that can be deducted. Perhaps understandably, the president didn’t know what to do with a Republican challenger who was outflanking him half the time on his left, and suddenly the race was competitive again. For both men, a pragmatic left-hand turn helped them steer their way toward a middle class desperate for hope.
This should have come as no surprise. A majority of Americans still holds Bush accountable for the Great Recession, and with good reason. We are still breathing the fumes of his toxic brew of deregulation, massive transfers of wealth to the rich and a doubling of the national debt. His policies, and those of a Republican Congress that had its way with the economy for six years, were in fact the culmination of a right-wing ideological revolution led by Ronald Reagan, which changed the way Americans view their government. Mr. Reagan’s shadow continues to loom large, because Democrats have yet to make the case for a compelling alternative and have too often accepted the premises of the right.
There are, of course, differences in how both sides view the role of government. But too often the consensus among the parties is that the solution to what ails us is deficit cutting and attacks on, or failure to support, the unions that gave us the weekend, 20th-century benefits and the eight-hour day. Both candidates have implicitly or explicitly blamed “public employees” with their “bloated pensions” and waste-filled jobs for our economic woes (with Mr. Obama sending a signal by freezing the pay of federal workers, as if tightening their belts would somehow loosen the noose around the Treasury).
The term “public employees” itself evokes faceless bureaucrats, rather than images of firefighters and police officers, E.P.A. scientists monitoring our air and water to protect our children’s health, or the people who get up at the crack of dawn to pick up our trash. Both candidates have been as relentless in their attacks on teachers’ unions as Mr. Reagan was with the air traffic controllers whom he summarily fired for going on strike. Both parties have seen the austerity so many Americans are feeling at the kitchen table and concluded that the answer to austerity is more austerity — with “grand bargains” and “sequestrations” that promise to undo the effects of a stimulus that virtually all economists agree kept us from falling deeper toward a depression in early 2009. Austerity has been a failure almost everywhere governments have tried it, with Spain, where one in four working people is no longer working, being the most recent example. Both parties preach the gospel of free trade, which polls poorly because ordinary Americans can see with their own eyes how we have freely traded the good American wages and benefits away.
SO what underlies this powerful pull to the right? Many factors, but two stand out. The first is campaign money. When Americans saw the scope of the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s, which today seems like just a bad day on the unregulated derivatives market, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III, put nearly a thousand bankers behind bars. In contrast, Mr. Obama’s attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., can’t seem to smell the stench of a fraud that cost millions of people their jobs or homes.
The second is an ideological vacuum. For years, even Republicans accepted the premises of the New Deal, which drew them leftward just as today’s political winds blow everything in their path rightward. President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate highway system. President Richard M. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. Neither believed in the radical dismantling of programs that protected ordinary Americans, and both believed that a crucial role of government is to provide the infrastructure that makes economic prosperity possible.
Then came the conservative movement that ushered in Reagan, whose ideology has dominated our political discourse ever since, even after its proven failure. If Nixon and Bill Clinton were the last gasps of Roosevelt’s breath, then Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama and perhaps Mr. Romney may well be the last gasps of Reagan’s. If the centrifugal pull of the 2012 election is likely to be to the right, is there any potential counterweight?
Perhaps one: both presidential candidates want a legacy. The most important legacy Mr. Obama could have would be to spend his second term using executive orders, judicial appointments and the bully pulpit to return democracy to everyday Americans by demanding clean elections, uncorrupted by money. If Mr. Obama wins a close election on the strength of the country’s changing demographics, he may feel a special responsibility to tackle the seemingly intractable problems that a second-term president can more easily address.
If Mr. Romney wins and wants a second term, he would be wise to wed an economic narrative about innovation with a narrative that will save his party from extinction by making comprehensive immigration reform a central item on his agenda. If Mr. Romney succeeds in reviving a moderate Republicanism that recognizes that an increasingly interconnected world will require an increasingly diverse work force, he could potentially drag his party into the 21st century.
In other words, if the candidate who wins takes a left turn like the one that won him the presidency, the Reagan era would finally be over. We can only hope.
Drew Westen is a psychology professor at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain.”