Säg den glädje som varar

Det republikanska partiets segrar i gårdagens amerikanska mellanårsval imponerar. Stackars president Barack Obama får nu all skuld för demokraternas motgångar. En smula orättvist. Ebola, oron i världen och andra faktorer som presidenten inte har så mycket makt över har bidragit till resultatet.

Hur som helst har nu nästa politiska kamp i USA just börjat på allvar: presidentvalet i november 2016.

Kommer republikanerna att hantera makten över kongressen på ett sätt som bidrar till att en GOP-kandidat kan bli vald till president då ?

Det finns många skäl för GOP-bekymmer. David Frum, en högst fritänkande republikan, pekade i en Foreign Affairs-essä nyligen på behovet av nytänkande inom GOP. Han pekade t ex på det faktum att GOP idag är pensionärernas parti:

One of the direst effects of being a party of the old is the risk of becoming infected by the pessimism of the old. It is overwhelmingly tempting to people contemplating mortality to infer that what holds true for them must also hold true for the nation. Who wants to imagine that things will get really good just as they shuffle off the scene? The tone of recent conservatism has been elegiac when it hasn’t been reckless. “To those who say it was never so, that America’s not been better, I say you’re wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.” So said the Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to the Republican delegates in San Diego in 1996. I was there. I saw it. I remember how they cheered — and how wrong they were.

Over the decade and a half that followed Dole’s speech, the United States achieved what likely ranks as the swiftest decline in crime in human history. The Internet revolutionized life and business. Auto fatalities plunged, dropping by 8,000 a year. The emissions that cause acid rain were cut in half. The abortion rate dropped to its lowest level since abortions were legalized, in 1973, and tobacco and alcohol consumption fell, too. The proportion of black Americans graduating from college passed 20 percent.

Conservatives may not be optimistic by nature. But even they should at least appreciate that Americans have never had so much worth conserving. The angry, insurrectionary mood of the past half-dozen years is as unjustified as it is dangerous to the stability of American government.

For every action, whether in physics or in politics, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The liberal surge of the Obama years invites a conservative response, and a multiethnic, socially tolerant conservatism is waiting to take form. As the poet T. S. Eliot, a political conservative, once gloomily consoled his readers, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The message reads better when translated into American vernacular: “It ain’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over.”