Last week's historic election repudiated the grandiose, left-wing governance schemes of President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. Conservatives are still toasting the victory. But the election, and the two years leading up to it, hold lessons that go well beyond this election cycle. America, it turns out, is a far more resilient nation than we had feared.
When Obama walked through the White House doors in January 2009, several factors suggested that, from a conservative point of view, the world was coming to an end.
Obama had billed himself as postpartisan and pragmatic. But he demonstrated quickly that his "hope and change" program meant not just a tilt to the port side but a hard-left tack. He pushed relentlessly for schemes of unprecedented scope --from a quasi-governmental takeover of health care to potentially economically debilitating cap-and-trade legislation. Conservatives feared that even if such changes prompted grumbling they would eventually embed themselves in voters' expectations.
Obama's allies in his campaign to remake America, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, steered the liberal juggernaut through a Democrat-heavy House and a filibuster-proof Senate. This trio's bare-knuckle, Chicago-style approach seemed almost invincible. They rammed through a deeply unpopular health care bill by using end runs around Senate rules and bald-faced buyoffs, including the infamous "Cornhusker kickback" and "Louisiana Purchase" that finally snared support from Sens. Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu.
Conservatives could also point to larger factors that seemed to signal an ominous long-term trend. After Obama's election, liberal commentators proclaimed that a permanent realignment of single women, young people, blacks and Latinos would soon render conservative politicians extinct. In his 2009 "The Death of Conservatism," Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, announced that the decades-long "Reagan Revolution" was dead and buried and that Big Government was here to stay.
To these prophesies, many conservatives added cultural concerns. They warned of a softening of character and a decline of civil society that threatened to push Americans into government's smothering embrace. They cited the deterioration of the family -- society's most fundamental governmental unit -- and a campaign by elites to redefine marriage itself. And they pointed to an erosion of religion and other cultural guideposts that hold us to a standard higher than "give me mine."
As conservatives looked across the Atlantic, their gloom increased. They feared they saw the end game of Obama's welfare state in chaotic Greece and France, with their ever-expanding public sectors, powerful unions and insatiable sense of entitlement.
But last week's repudiation of Big Government confirmed that we were wrong to be tempted by despair. The election demonstrated that there is something in the American spirit that rejects the siren song of the nanny state.
