Change ordinarily refreshes a democracy. Nobody feels that’s the case in today’s America

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Things are going to be a lot different in Washington two months from now. Big transformations in the American capital already are in train. This year’s midterm congressional elections had enormous contention – but also has vast consequences.

Change ordinarily refreshes a democracy. The advent of a Republican Congress after the 1994 midterm elections swept away 40 years of near-despotic Democratic rule that even some powerful party figures acknowledged had left the institution ossified. The elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama brought new generations of leadership to national political life, revitalizing American politics and transforming the country’s image overseas and across the Canadian border.

Nobody feels that’s the case today.

The Democrats retain power in the Senate, but the Republicans have established a new power base with their assumption of control of the House. The lawmakers elected to the chamber in the midterms – the newcomers who tip the body into Republican hands – harnessed the American political system. But they do not fully believe in its customs of comity, as frayed as those folkways have been in recent years. They expect (and deserve) a peaceful transition between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her successor. But they almost certainly would have joined other Republicans in the effort to deny such a transition to Joe Biden after his 2020 defeat of president Donald Trump.

Republicans win slim U.S. House majority, complicating ambitious agenda

Though the House Republican majority is slim and fractious – Kevin McCarthy’s route to the Speaker’s gavel is not assured – the mere fact that the GOP will control the flow of legislation onto the House floor and command majorities in every committee means a complete upending of legislative practices and priorities.

Climate change is the flavour of the last hour, coal and fossil fuels the taste of the dawning day. Abortion will be top of mind – but in an entirely different way, the goal being restriction rather than preservation or expansion. The investigation of the 2021 Capitol is a dead letter, the focus now turning to the financial activities of Hunter Biden, the President’s son. The future of massive American aid to Ukraine is in doubt, the result of the newly empowered Republicans’ skepticism of investment and involvement beyond the two ocean moats of the country.

Washington will not necessarily welcome these changes; the Republicans are not fully wrong when they speak of a permanent, unelected bureaucracy with a mind of its own, though their term “deep state” is possessed of a dark penumbra that disregards the expertise, historical knowledge and commitment of lifetime government employees. The State Department has its own rhythms and preferences, and since 1947 (and perhaps even 1917), it has favoured containment of Russian adventurism; that notion now will face fierce questioning. Washington’s regulators believe in regulating; that art, in decline in the new century anyway, will be in deep disrepute for the next two years.

The old saw was that Washington loved a liberal or moderate Republican. In coming weeks that torch song will be sung, if at all, to an empty taproom in a capital where the liberal Republicans vanished a generation ago and the moderates fled to the hills – or, in many cases, to the fluttering banner of Donald Trump.

Sturdy, reliable stereotypes about American politics will need to be revised, or abandoned altogether.

The old iron law that the Republicans are the party of big business will be overhauled. The assumption that the Republicans will carry the water of the commercial class is null and void. In a bow to the Book of Joshua, this new crowd instead might be regarded as hewers of wood, the phrase that the Canadian scholar Harold Innis adopted in his classic 1930 The Fur Trade in Canada to speak of a country’s reliance on natural resources – lumber in the old Canadian example, extractive hydrocarbon resources in the case of the contemporary United States.

The strains in the once-durable alliance of big business and Republicans began when the GOP insurgents took over the House in the 1994 rebellion led by Newt Gingrich, whose Republican House was more interested in the entreaties of the NFIB (formerly the National Federation of Independent Business), which represents small business in Washington, than in the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the traditional business interest group.

The Republican rebels of 2022 are resentful of the way business lobby groups and big companies (Delta Airlines, the Walt Disney Company, high-tech companies) adopted progressive attitudes on climate change, gay rights and racial activism and, in some cases, made large symbolic contributions to organizations that promoted those causes. They are critical of Wall Street mandarins who contributed to Democrats and whose views on social progressivism are at odds with the new conservative zeitgeist.

The change in GOP views of business in just the past several years is dramatic; as recently as 2019, 54 per cent of Republicans believed that big businesses had a positive effect on the country. By 2021, the figure had dropped to 30 per cent, according to the Pew Research Center. High-tech companies also fell in Republican eyes, from 58-per-cent positive to 38-per-cent positive (while 63 per cent of Democrats gave tech companies high marks).

The GOP takeover of the House will cause great strains.

No one has had a Rolodex in Washington since the turn of the century, but the old phone numbers (cell, not land) won’t be answered by the same people at the end of the line. The ways of doing things that have hardened in the past two years suddenly no longer apply. No Red Wave, perhaps, but a powerful undertow nonetheless. Once again, in the perpetual motion of American politics, the political world has been remade.