The mid-term elections are only a week away, and I await their results with great anticipation. I’ve been unhappy with the ruling Republican party for a host of reasons, including the Iraq war, tax breaks for the rich, and inaction on health care and environmental problems. Poll results have me optimistic that the Democrats can at least take the House. I’m not even “cautiously optimistic” anymore, though I probably should be given the late Republican surge in the election of 2004.

We seem to be at a crossroads, ready to take a turn to the left - which would only take us back to the center, given where we’ve been headed. Lots of people are making similar predictions about the end of a conservative era, including David Brooks of the New York Times. “It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance,” he wrote on October 26. “…[C]onservatives have exhausted their agenda. They have little new left to propose and have lost their edge on issues like fiscal discipline and foreign policy.” He also believes that they are experiencing “the kind of institutional decay that afflicts movements at the end of their political lives.” Witness various scandals now plaguing Republicans.

Brooks believes that the conservative era won’t be replaced by a liberal one. Instead he sees “no dominant political tendency” in the coming era, a situation that he claims last occurred in the 1970s.

Brooks makes another other big-picture prediction in the same column that surprised me for what it said about “the Midwestern plains”:

The center of political gravity will shift. In the liberal era [1932-1968], the urban Northeast dominated the landscape. In the conservative era [1980-2006], it was in the South and in bedroom communities like those in Southern California. In the coming era, the center of gravity will move to the West and the Midwestern plains, and to the pragmatic, untethered office park suburbs sprouting up there.”

As a product of those “office park suburbs” and a resident of the Midwestern region he is describing, I’m interested in Brooks’ comment but unsatisfied by it. It needs a great deal of elaboration to be convincing. I’d like to believe him, but it seems to me that the growing population in the southern part of the country will make that area more important than ever.

Brooks closes his column by commenting on “the new era’s defining problems”:

The first is the continuing rise of Islamic fundamentalism. It’s clear the strategies of the nation-state era — rollback and containment — are not working to reverse extremism, but what will? The second big problem is entitlement spending and the stultification of government.

The third challenge is the emergence of China and India — seizing the opportunities afforded by those new workers, mitigating the pain associated with tougher competition and managing the fiscal imbalances. The fourth is the growing importance of cognitive skills and cultural capital, the need to surround people, especially children, with stable relationships if they are to flourish.

Brooks leaves out fossil fuel dependency and environmental degradation - with the latter including global warming and species extinctions - as major problems. In doing so he shows that he himself is still stuck in the old conservative ideology that has created many of our current problems.

(Note: Subscribers to New York Times Select can read this David Brooks column online.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Politics.