This year, for the first time, I'm teaching AP Comparative Government. I have a smidgen of background on the topics, but I'm basically diving into the true depths of this issue as we go along.
I thought I would throw out some thoughts and, optimistically, insights into this fall's electoral craziness through the medium of the course I'm teaching.
I also request that if you know more than me, please correct my misinterpretations.
First up: Institutions
The book we use is Patrick O'Neil's Essential of Comparative Politics, and the basic tack used is to examine a country's political institutions. An institution being "an organization or activity that is self-perpetuating and valued for its own sake." In other words, marriage, baseball or voting would be institutions.
How we look at institutions helps determine where we are in politics.
Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, basically said that institutions that have evolved over time are more important and represent more wisdom than any intentional tinkering with society. This is why he paradoxically supported the American Revolution, because he saw the Americans as defending their institutions against a monarch who sought to undermine them. It's also why he opposed the French Revolution, because that revolution destroyed many of the institutions in France.
Which leads me, of course, to Election '08 (though mercifully not to Sarah Palin).
We have seen the Rove-McCain playbook in the past few days in full throated glory. Nonsensical attacks bouncing around the media echo chamber. Someone (I think at TPM) suggested satirically that Obama start calling himself a conservative just to fuck with the right.
Perhaps he should. Seriously.
From a political science POV, Bush is less a conservative than a reactionary. The modern GOP in general is a reactionary body, trying to reinsert religion into the public square, restart the Cold War (more on that tomorrow), destroy Social Security and un-do collective security arrangements in place since 1945.
I think Obama could make a plausible case that he is going to preserve the institutions that American's care about: Social Security, equality (in the form of equal pay for equal work), our role as a beacon of liberty in the world, the freedom to practice religion (or not) as YOU please, not the theocrats.
This would not be a "shift right" on any substantive issue. But it would appeal to the tempermental conservativism that most Americans embrace.
By arguing that the GOP (and McCain) want to destroy American institutions and only by "changing Washington" can we preserve what we hold deal, he can both win the "change vote" and not appear too "scary" and Blackazoid!
It also has the additional pleasure of driving the right nuts.
I think Sarah Palin (SHIT! I wasn't going to mention her.) has knocked the entire Democratic/Left off it's moorings. We spend hours obsessing over her knowledge of Georgia's relationship to NATO and lose the initiative.
Institutions matter to people, otherwise they wouldn't be institutions. By appealing to the people as a protector of institutions, Obama could accomplish three things.
- Appeal to voters who want "change" but not "change!" Those who want a different direction, but worry about what that might look like. Think about "preserving the Clinton Tax Code". Or run an ad with Susan Eisenhower comparing her grampas Interstate System to Obama's Energy Plan.
- Drive the wingnutus crazy. "How dare Obama say he's a conservative!" Watch Limbaugh's head explode!
- Cast the entire GOP and McCain and Bush together as a failed ideology that want's to un-do progress and destroy things that we take for granted like Social Security and government competence.
I think part of the GOP's electoral success has been that Americans tend to be tempermentally conservative when it comes to change. We only make a major course correction when we have to. Now is clearly a time to change course, but Obama can reassure people by casting his language of change as a preservation of American Institutions that are being threatened by a GOP that wants to destroy them.