“Actuality,” Stephen Colbert remarked on the White Home Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, “has a well known liberal bias.” That was again when he performed a caricature of a conservative as a substitute of a caricature of a liberal (I assume that’s the purpose of his present late-night position, at the least), and the road rolled out brilliantly into the midst of a decade the place actuality was delivering some punishing blows to the Republican Celebration’s theories of the world.
In that interval, the years from the invasion of Iraq by the re-election of Barack Obama, the G.O.P. staked itself to the vanity that the Iraq battle would disarm a dictator (the armaments in query principally didn’t exist) and revolutionize the Center East (it did, however not for the higher). It staked its home coverage on tax cuts and a housing bubble, touting the energy of the George W. Bush-era financial system proper as much as the purpose when the worst monetary disaster for the reason that Twenties hit.
Then in Obama’s first time period, the G.O.P. staked itself to the claims that deficit spending and simple cash would result in runaway inflation or debt disaster (they didn’t), that Obamacare would wreck the well being care market (flaws and all, it didn’t), that entitlement reform was an acceptable prescription in a slowly recovering financial system (it was an excellent long-term aim however not a perfect 2010 precedence). And as a small capstone, the G.O.P. assumed that the polls had been skewed in opposition to Mitt Romney in 2012, which they emphatically weren’t.
I used to be a participant in a few of this, overestimating the urgency of the deficit downside and the dangers of Obamacare. So I’ve expertise from which to look at that the Democrats in 2022 discover themselves struggling as a result of actuality has lastly modified sides, and now has a conservative bias.
What has actuality delivered? To a Democratic Celebration that satisfied itself there have been few near-term limits on how a lot stimulus might be pumped into the financial system, it has delivered the worst inflation for the reason that Nineteen Eighties.
To a Democratic Celebration that spent the Trump period speaking itself right into a perception that immigration enforcement is presumptively immoral and {that a} de facto amnesty doesn’t have actual downsides, it has delivered the southern border’s highest-recorded charge of unlawful crossings.
And to a Democratic Celebration whose 2020 platform promised to “finish the period of mass incarceration and dramatically cut back the variety of People held in jails and prisons whereas persevering with to cut back crime charges,” it has delivered a multiyear spike in murder charges that’s erased at the least 20 years of positive aspects.
The important thing factor to emphasize about all of those developments is that they don’t show that liberals are merely “incorrect about crime” or “incorrect about inflation,” any greater than the occasions of 2003-12 merely proved that conservatives are “incorrect about international coverage” or “incorrect about entitlements.”
Slightly, ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with actuality. You may get issues proper for some time, generally a protracted whereas, after which all of a sudden you go a tipping level and your prescription begins delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you just satisfied your self didn’t exist.
Thus within the present scenario, the truth that proper now America is struggling a critical crime wave doesn’t show that Democrats (and plenty of Republicans) had been incorrect about prison justice reform 10 or 15 years in the past. It simply means that there’s a degree at which de-carceration or decriminalization might have a tough-on-crime corrective.
Likewise Democrats weren’t incorrect in regards to the dangers of inflation being low within the Obama period or within the current previous. It’s simply that aside from just a few Cassandras like Larry Summers they had been incorrect to think about that these dangers might be endlessly minimized, that there was no higher certain on Covid-era spending. In the identical means right this moment’s inflation doesn’t retrospectively vindicate the Obama period’s deficit hawks — nevertheless it does counsel that a few of their proposals may be price revisiting.
So the query for the aftermath of Tuesday’s election isn’t whether or not Democrats will abandon their ideology however whether or not that ideology can adapt itself to what actuality is saying.
And whether or not for Joe Biden or for his doable successors, a current mannequin is on the market: Simply after the period when Colbert’s quip had chunk, a pacesetter emerged who persuaded the G.O.P. to desert its fixation on deficits and simply run the financial system scorching, who endorsed common medical insurance and pledged to guard entitlements, and who acknowledged that the Iraq battle had been a grave mistake and promised a much less utopian, extra real looking international coverage.
That’s proper: It was Donald Trump who closed the hole — in rhetoric, if not at all times in his eventual policymaking — between the Republican Celebration and actuality. Now the Democrats, dealing with a chilly rendezvous with actuality’s conservative bias, want leaders who can do the identical.