Hadley Arkes: An Austen Chamberlain Moment for the Democrats
[Hadley Arkes is the Edward N. Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.]
The points of caution have already been noted by conservative commentators: The public anger over the passage of Obamacare may well subside by November, especially if the economy continues its healing. And so the Democrats, having desperately gone for broke, may be delivered from their danger and find themselves surviving with wreckage vast, yet not terminal....
My own reckoning is that the passions of this season will endure: that the Hand of Justice will pass over the house of Democrats and leave very few standing. Even Democrats who voted against Obamacare will not be spared, for the public seems to have been brought to the threshold of a judgment so binary that the choices before us now require the sweeping away of any Democrat. A vote for any Democratic candidate is a vote to keep in power Pelosi and Reid and the rest of the people who imposed this scheme on us....
There’s a suggestive analogy to our current situation: the crisis in British politics in 1923-24.
There had been a bruising general election in 1922. The Conservatives had won 344 seats, giving them more than the Liberal and Labour parties combined, but Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought a fresh mandate the next year to deal with the problem of unemployment by a return of protectionism. This policy brought the Liberal party to close ranks in support of free trade. The Liberal share of the House of Commons increased in the 1923 election from 62 to 158, and Labour surged too, from 142 to 191. The Conservatives fell to 258, still the dominant party, but no longer strong enough to form a government on their own.
There had not yet been in Britain a Labour government. The dread of bringing forth the first one was an incentive to form a coalition between the “constitutional parties”—i.e., the parties not threatening to change radically the powers and reach of the state. This view was held by the Conservative leadership, including the Tory statesman Austen Chamberlain—older half-brother of Neville Chamberlain. Some of them were actually willing to have the Conservatives take second place and support a Liberal government with H.H. Asquith returning as prime minister. But the Liberal recoil from the protectionism of the Conservatives was so pronounced that Asquith went the other way. The Liberals would back Labour and in that way install the first socialist government in Britain.
Austen Chamberlain saw with an uncommon clarity what this decision meant. Asquith, he said, “has taken his choice, and he has by that choice constituted his own immortality.” For “he will go down to history as the last Prime Minister of a Liberal Administration. He has sung the swan song of the Liberal Party”...
It took but a short while to learn just how prophetic Chamberlain had been. The tensions within the new government forced a new election within a year. For the voters, the maze of issues faded against what Chamberlain had rightly seen as the momentous fact overriding everything else: socialism or not. With this stark choice before the public, the Conservatives surged to 412 seats, regaining their dominance. Labour fell to 151, but the Liberals sunk to the terminal condition of 40 seats. They had lost their place as one of the two major players among the parties in British politics. To this date there has not been another Liberal prime minister.
We could be at the threshold of a similar moment right now if the conservative leadership holds fast to its focus on repealing and replacing Obamacare. As Burke warned, refined policy is ever the parent of confusion. This is no time to be sorting through the provisions of medical care to see which ones might be salvaged. There will be time to piece things together later by building anew. The worst thing is to encourage people to get lost in the labyrinth of strands making up that bill of 2,000 pages. For the strands of complication recede when set against the takeover of a vast system that cannot possibly be grasped and administered under a system of command and control. The unforeseen consequences are already starting to dangle forth, with the changes in the liabilities of corporations. More of them will be coming, with more unsettling surprises, as the year proceeds. Let them come....
Read entire article at Weekly Standard
The points of caution have already been noted by conservative commentators: The public anger over the passage of Obamacare may well subside by November, especially if the economy continues its healing. And so the Democrats, having desperately gone for broke, may be delivered from their danger and find themselves surviving with wreckage vast, yet not terminal....
My own reckoning is that the passions of this season will endure: that the Hand of Justice will pass over the house of Democrats and leave very few standing. Even Democrats who voted against Obamacare will not be spared, for the public seems to have been brought to the threshold of a judgment so binary that the choices before us now require the sweeping away of any Democrat. A vote for any Democratic candidate is a vote to keep in power Pelosi and Reid and the rest of the people who imposed this scheme on us....
There’s a suggestive analogy to our current situation: the crisis in British politics in 1923-24.
There had been a bruising general election in 1922. The Conservatives had won 344 seats, giving them more than the Liberal and Labour parties combined, but Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought a fresh mandate the next year to deal with the problem of unemployment by a return of protectionism. This policy brought the Liberal party to close ranks in support of free trade. The Liberal share of the House of Commons increased in the 1923 election from 62 to 158, and Labour surged too, from 142 to 191. The Conservatives fell to 258, still the dominant party, but no longer strong enough to form a government on their own.
There had not yet been in Britain a Labour government. The dread of bringing forth the first one was an incentive to form a coalition between the “constitutional parties”—i.e., the parties not threatening to change radically the powers and reach of the state. This view was held by the Conservative leadership, including the Tory statesman Austen Chamberlain—older half-brother of Neville Chamberlain. Some of them were actually willing to have the Conservatives take second place and support a Liberal government with H.H. Asquith returning as prime minister. But the Liberal recoil from the protectionism of the Conservatives was so pronounced that Asquith went the other way. The Liberals would back Labour and in that way install the first socialist government in Britain.
Austen Chamberlain saw with an uncommon clarity what this decision meant. Asquith, he said, “has taken his choice, and he has by that choice constituted his own immortality.” For “he will go down to history as the last Prime Minister of a Liberal Administration. He has sung the swan song of the Liberal Party”...
It took but a short while to learn just how prophetic Chamberlain had been. The tensions within the new government forced a new election within a year. For the voters, the maze of issues faded against what Chamberlain had rightly seen as the momentous fact overriding everything else: socialism or not. With this stark choice before the public, the Conservatives surged to 412 seats, regaining their dominance. Labour fell to 151, but the Liberals sunk to the terminal condition of 40 seats. They had lost their place as one of the two major players among the parties in British politics. To this date there has not been another Liberal prime minister.
We could be at the threshold of a similar moment right now if the conservative leadership holds fast to its focus on repealing and replacing Obamacare. As Burke warned, refined policy is ever the parent of confusion. This is no time to be sorting through the provisions of medical care to see which ones might be salvaged. There will be time to piece things together later by building anew. The worst thing is to encourage people to get lost in the labyrinth of strands making up that bill of 2,000 pages. For the strands of complication recede when set against the takeover of a vast system that cannot possibly be grasped and administered under a system of command and control. The unforeseen consequences are already starting to dangle forth, with the changes in the liabilities of corporations. More of them will be coming, with more unsettling surprises, as the year proceeds. Let them come....