Things have not been going well for the United States on many fronts, abroad and especially at home, and those problems go a long way to explain the retreat into history and its uncertain certainties that have characterized the past two years of American politics.
On Tuesday, the resurgent Republican Party will gain many seats in the House of Representatives, likely enough to form a majority, and will improve its standing in the Senate.
What has produced this surge – a variation on the usual setbacks suffered by the White House party in midterm elections – has been a mixture of anger at painful realities, a noisy reaffirmation of some traditional U.S. values, and an apparent sense that the problems of today's complicated world can best be solved by a return to the memories of simpler times.
Only twice since the Civil War – in 1934 and 2002 – has the White House party gained seats in midterm elections. So the only issue on Tuesday is how many House seats the Democrats will lose. Republicans are already measuring the carpets for the new offices their chieftains will occupy as chairs of House committees, thereby further deepening the paralytic congressional divides that have so plagued Barack Obama' administration's efforts to pass legislation.
Some of the new Republicans will have been backed by the Tea Party movement and the shadowy billionaires and political action committees that have financed the movement's activities. The Tea Party crowd won't form a majority of the Republican congressional contingent, but the fact they've arrived in Washington at all will push the contingent further to the political right – which is to say further back into historical reveries.
The Tea Party advocates are the advance guard of the retreat from today's hard realities – the 9-plus per cent unemployment, the blighted neighbourhoods of foreclosed homes, the disappearance of factories to Asia (mostly China), the burgeoning fiscal deficits, the rising national indebtedness, the bankrupt states, the pain of returning wounded or dead veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lobby-infested, money-soaked swamps of U.S. politics, especially in Washington.
Faced with these realities, the Obama administration tried to set the country on different courses, reckoning that former policies had contributed to these realities. The President responded to the recession with more spending, to climate change with a cap-and-trade system (and investments in clean technology), to the budget deficit with a proposal for a bipartisan congressional committee, to modest restraints on lobbying, and to the astronomical national costs of health care and the huge holes in the system with a complicated new plan.
The country's problems, induced by the recession, don't lend themselves to quick fixes. The stimulus spending, at best, was only going to help make things from getting worse; the health-care reform would unfold over many years (with the spending up front and the putative savings later); the promise to increase U.S. exports, thereby creating jobs, was just that: a promise, and a long-term one at that.
The Republican answer to these realities is a return, more mythical than actual, to smaller government, lower taxes and more growth, all producing a result that such policies have never achieved: a lower deficit. All of the Obama initiatives, the Republicans say, are too complicated, costly and bureaucratic, and should be replaced by something simpler: smaller government and lower taxes.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with either, or both, except if they're packaged (as they are now) as plausible answers to chronic fiscal and budgetary deficits, worsening infrastructure, a warming climate, rising national indebtedness and the transfer of factories and jobs to Asia. They are, under current circumstances, voodoo solutions to real problems.
But when times are very tough, it's tempting to retreat to old verities, the stuff that "made the country strong," and to assert that the virtues of the Founding Fathers, if rediscovered and applied today, would be the elixir that the country needs. The mixture of quick fixes and nostalgia is a potent political brew for winning elections in hard times, especially if the alternative has been disappointing.