In the last midterm election in 2006, Democrats got 55 per cent of the Catholic vote. Last week, 44 per cent of Catholics voted for Republicans. Democrats also suffered losses among other religious groups, but the differences do not straddle the magic 50 per cent needed to win an election. So Catholics may be a decisive part of the
electorate, but there is no conceivable way that the Church’s integral teachings will cease to be divided by America’s polarised electorate. Indeed, the dominant fact that emerges from the midterm elections is that both parties were driven to their ideological extremes. In a widely circulated election analysis, Catholic University of America professor Steve Schneck wrote that “moderate pro-life and pro-Catholic Social Teaching candidates were defeated by currents in contemporary American political life that are pushing both the GOP [the “Grand Old Party” as the Republicans are sometimes known] and the Democrats toward their respective right and left wings. Not only do both of those wings stand in tension with the Church’s traditional teachings, but their polarisation undercuts the possibility for any real advance on the issues that are priorities for the Church.” Schneck suggested that when the United States bishops hold their annual plenary later this month, they should consider what they can do to heal the polarisation and divisiveness that has afflicted the body politic, a polarisa- tion that is sadly as evident among Catholics.
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owhere will that polarisation be more apparent than on the issue that is probably of greatest con- cern to the Catholic bishops in
the next two years: immigration reform. The Tea Party activists that energised the Republican Party have adopted a fiercely anti- immigrant posture. One of their most prominent candidates ran a racist television commercial that showed swarthy Latino men climbing over a fence while ominous music played in the background and a voice-over warned about “illegal aliens” threatening America. The Tea Party lost as many races as it won, but it proved itself capable of winning GOP primaries, defeating several long-serving moderates in favour of Tea Party candidates. So, any moderate Republican who might be willing to work with President Obama and the Democrats to achieve immigration reform would risk being challenged in two years from the Right. Incoming Speaker Boehner is unlikely to even permit a vote on the issue. In Caritas in Veritate, the Pope called for
moral, even anthropological, consistency. Last week, the American people voted for change. But, so long as Pelosi and Boehner are running the congressional show, neither the Pontiff nor the people are likely to get their wish. Forecasters predict increased polarisation and gridlock in Washington because the polit- ical orthodoxies of both parties have made compromise impossible and the common good a distant, unattainable goal.
■Michael Sean Winters writes for The Tablet from Washington DC.
CLIFFORD LONGLEY
‘We are in danger of being governed by an unelected dictatorship’
If you paid a builder to build you a house, and after much digging, banging and sawing he produced you a shop, you might be aggrieved. Your anger would hardly be placated when the builder explained he’d merged with another company, and they didn’t do houses. General elections are like contract negotiations: the political parties promise to do this and that in their manifestos, and we vote for them if we like what they say. If they win, and then begin to implement their manifesto commitments, they can claim to have a democratic mandate. But what we have now learnt is that if two parties join to form a coalition, both manifestos are promptly torn up. Policies are agreed that neither of them mentioned to the electorate beforehand: certainly the whole package never was. We have heard plenty about the nation’s financial deficit. The much more serious deficit is the democratic one. Lord Hailsham once warned that Britain’s democratic system produced an elective dictatorship because of the nature of the governing party’s majority; now we are in danger of being governed by an unelected dictatorship. Benign in intentions, maybe. But likely to do much harm, almost certainly.
All the commentators were of one mind, before the election, that coalition governments were bad because they bred indecision and uncertainty as two opposed schools of thought struggled to find common ground. Clearly these commentators were looking in the wrong direction. Instead, the tearing-up of manifesto promises prior to the formation of the coalition seems, paradoxically, to have produced a state of almost manic euphoria. Ministers feel liberated. Theyhave broken the chains that tied them to their pre-election promises, and they are free to think the unthinkable, do the undoable. The result is a tidal wave of radical policies across the board, with sacred cows being herded for the slaughter. The BBC budget, aircraft carriers, police numbers, prisons, university tuition fees, welfare benefits, the running of the NHS and the administration of schools … the list
of surprises, upsets and reversals seems endless. Rarely in peacetime has an administration tossed so many balls into the air at once, or so fast. Often all these policies have in common is that they are a lot cheaper than what went before. Money- saving has become the guiding, and near to being the only, consideration. Governments are normally constrained from being too radical both by their manifesto promises and by a natural caution – a certain conservatism, if you like – that understands the phrase “fools rush in”. Yet inexperienced ministers have spent no time at all getting the feel of the thing, nor in most cases have they based these new policies on sound research or a period of thoughtful public debate. The pace has been breathtaking. These are not gradual incremental changes. Many are revolutionary. Only time will tell how many of them are rash. Every one may turn out to be ultimately for the public benefit. But the chances must be remote. Every one of these policies is defying the odds that they will not run aground on the law of unintended consequences, which says that any fix for one problem will give rise to another problem so far unforeseen, possibly even more intractable. Nor is this joined-up government.
The knock-on effects will be everywhere. Changes in the housing and unemployment benefit systems may force large numbers of people to move in search of accommodation or work. What pressure does that put on schools or hospitals, where places are provided on the basis of a stable population? The withdrawal of some benefits may increase crime – how do ministers intend to cope with that with fewer police, fewer courts and fewer prisons? A great deal of stress is being applied to vulnerable people – can the mental- health services cope? And so on. The Government’s worst nightmare must be that the wheels will simultaneously start to fall off many of these policies – at about the time the public wakes up to the fact that it didn’t vote for them. In so far as the last election had a moral, it was that the public do not trust politicians at large, and hence do not want to put too much power in the hands of any of them. Instead we have the opposite, a government inebriated by the lack of democratic restraint, seeking to make rapid and fundamental changes to almost every aspect of national life. It almost feels as if we have been invaded by a foreign power – one with few inhibitions about how far it may go.
13 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 5
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