Thoughts after Election Day

So, the Democrats won both houses of Congress, a majority of the governerships, and Rumsfeld's head on a platter. Happy days are here, right? A new golden age of peace, prosperity and virtuous government is upon us at last, right? We'll see. In 1994, when the GOP swept both houses of Congress, I was still an active Democrat, but I wasn't terribly sorry about the results of that election. I thought it would do some good for the Democrats to be a minority again and spend some time in the political wilderness. I thought the GOP might actually make some needed reforms and do some good. And in a few small cases like welfare reform, I thought they did. But whatever change they brought was pretty far from the bold promises of the "Contract with America" (which, you might remember, included term limits for members of Congress). I vividly remember John Kasich telling a reporter, who asked in 1997 why the Republicans hadn't eliminated hundreds of useless federal programs like they'd promised, "You just don't get it. The jig is up around here when it comes to cutting the budget." Apparently the spirit of reform that had brought them to power two years earlier evaporated quickly once they were in the majority. My cynicism about our two-party system deepened, and when George W. Bush "won" the presidency in 2000, I made this prediction to some of my close friends, Republican and Democrat alike: even if he served for a full eight years, we would still have a Marxist tax code, social security, estate taxes and abortion when he left office. I said it to my Democratic friends to put their minds at ease, and I said it to my Republican friends as a cynical statement of just how far I believed Bush would really push his "conservative" agenda. And I stand by that prediction. Aside from his consistently conservative social-religious views, there was (and still is) little that is genuinely conservative about this president, or about most Republicans these days. The fact is, whatever spirit of reform occasionally grips one of our two major parties, it always evaporates quickly once they're in power. Despite some sincere people on both sides of the aisle, neither of these two parties has a serious, lasting interest in any kind of meaningful reform. Above all else, they are interested in seizing and maintaining power. With a system that effectively shuts out third parties and thus healthy competition, they have no compelling reason to change, so this cycle continues every decade or so. Now the pendulum has swung back in the Democrats' favor... for a time. We'll see how long it lasts and how much good they actually do. My expectations are pretty low, considering the sorry act they're following. If they could at least provide some restraint on federal spending and a recklessly interventionist foreign policy, I would be grateful. But I'm not holding my breath.