Gazing over the wreckage of the Martha Coakley campaign, trying to work out why so many voters in Massachusetts chose a Republican they had only heard of a few weeks before, and who seems to have no political record at all, I reach the conclusion this was yet another Vote For Change.
That's after a VFC in 2006, and another in 2008. Sure, in those elections 'change' meant voting in Democrats, so the winning vote consisted of a core of Democrats, plus a bunch of 'others' who wanted to Throw The Bums Out; and this time you can substitute 'Republicans' in the previous phrase.
But it seems clear that very many Americans have a really short attention span. Just a year after voting in Democrats, a lot of them have decided they are 'the enemy' in government. And so they've either withheld their vote, or switched to vote for a bland non-entity who will fit in perfectly with the pre-2006 Republicans who were The Bums only a few years ago.
The immediate result will be more gridlock in Congress. Threatened filibusters, real filibusters, watering down of bills to satisfy any politician in the middle who sees their chance for a tiny bit of influence, promises to examine proposals in greater detail and call for more studies that delay any actual decisions until another election has happened, and a different kind of change has been voted for; it will all mean that any kind of change in any direction becomes less and less likely. The irony is that the demand of the electorate for 'the end of Washington business as usual' that Brown ran on this time just produces more and more of it.
The Republicans are lucky that this sclerosis of politics has happened when most of their preferences had the upper hand; so, for instance, it seems next to impossible to get universal health care in the United States. In the UK, health policy has solidified with the National Health Service in place, and the libertarian wing of the Conservative party has to hold its tongue and let David Cameron promise to keep government health spending high. But the electorate wants a different set of people in charge, even if it won't make a real difference. It's negative personality politics - voters blame their problems on the faces they see on TV, and it's easier to think a different person will fix things than working out a meaningful change in direction.
To get out of the cycle of changing the party in charge, and then swapping back before they would have a chance to enact policies with visible results, it seems you need a prolonged period of economic wellbeing, so that enough of the floating voters stay at home out of apathy. It happened in the late 90s in the US, and the early 2000s in the UK. But since the voters don't give the politicians a chance to make a difference, this seems to happen by accident rather than by design.
There's one more way to get the electorate to hesitate about Voting For Change: spread fear about 'security'. This works well for Republicans in the US, but not so much elsewhere in the developed world (or for the Democrats). In 2004, it got Bush back in, together with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress; but they couldn't push through their Big Idea, no matter the political capital Bush thought he had, because they wanted to use it to threaten a different kind of security - Social Security.
When it comes to actual policy, most voters cling on to what they have. So we have a basically capitalist system in the developed world, with slight differences in the size of social safety net between countries, and it's not going to change. Even when the bankers show they're slightly more clueless than the average person, we still stick with the same system in which manipulating money is the best way to get a share of it, and we're willing to spend lots of government money to keep it that way.
I wish I could see an end to this, but I can't. It's not so much 'The End of History', more 'The End of Political Action', for the USA, Europe and other 'western' countries. Countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa still have the ability to change, but I'm beginning to see the 'developed world' as the Stalled World. And the US has stalled a bit further to the right than most of it. Maybe the worst aspect is that this has happened when our way of life is still turning out enough carbon dioxide to ruin the planet. Copenhagen was gridlock too, and the result of 'each country will go back and work out it's own way to fix things' stands no chance of finding solutions in the churn of domestic politics.
I fear we'll move from 'developed world' to 'stalled world' to 'decayed world'. And that's not progress.