Why are Freedom-Haters behaving like cornered animals since the election? Because that's what they are

Robert W. Merry at The National Interest has a great piece today on voting trends and the FHers's predicament.

He cites two other post-election observations that form his case.

One was a New York Timescommentary, published on November 11, by Thomas B. Edsall, who has few peers as a political analyst of the left. Entitled “The Demise of the White Democratic Voter,” the piece pulled together voting and polling statistics suggesting that the Democratic Party is in danger of losing the white vote almost entirely. Edsall points out that whites made up 75 percent of this year’s electorate and voted for Republican House candidates by a 24-point margin—62 percent to 38 percent. He notes that 72 percent of whites without college degrees—generally, what is known as the white working class—believe that “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” And these same people voted for Republican House candidates 64 percent to 34 percent.

Edsall reminds us that whites, by overwhelming numbers, say that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act will make things worse for them and their familiesand also will harm the nation generally. He notes that the health measure shifts health-care benefits and tax burdens from upper-income Americans to lower-income Americans and “from largely white constituencies to beneficiaries disproportionately made up of racial and ethnic minorities.” It reduces spending, for example, on Medicare—which serves a population that is 77 percent white—by $500 billion over ten years. And it transfers much of that money to Medicaid, whose recipients are 59 percent minority.

Edsall says the Republicans have a plan to pull in a large chunk of the remaining white Democratic voters—middle-income suburbanites, who are socially liberal, but increasingly conservative on fiscal matters. 

And this one:

The next day the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger weighed in with a piece entitled, “It Wasn’t Just Obama.” He covered much of the same territory as Edsall in assessing the significance of the election returns—the stunning GOP victory in Maryland, Scott Walker’s reelection in Wisconsin, Republican gubernatorial wins in Massachusetts and Illinois. And he goes further in exploring the Democratic tax-and-spend policies that seemed to stir voter ire at the polls. Particularly noteworthy was the tax spree of Maryland’s outgoing Democratic governor, Martin O’Malley, who in two terms raised some forty taxes and fees. These included the corporate income tax, sales tax, personal income tax and a “millionaire’s tax,” as well as a passel of fees on license plates, liquor, fishing, birth and death certificates, “even something called ‘stormwater management fees’ based on the size of people’s roofs, driveways, patios and such.”
Henninger zooms in on the significance of all this in noting that the Democrats are the party of the state and public sector. “Over a long period,” he writes, “the costs of maintaining the state have risen inexorably, especially in the North due to public-union costs and transfer payments.” The problem is that there isn’t enough money in the public coffers to pay for the governmental structure that is the foundation of the Democrats’ political standing.

Unwilling to restructure government, state Democrats turned to taxes. “First,” writes Henninger, “they raised taxes on large business. Then the ‘wealthy.’ Then came the fees and regulatory costs for smaller businesses. In Maryland and Illinois, companies and the wealthy fled.” 

Merry then makes his own observation on what the FHers are doing, which basically amounts to whistling past the graveyard:

Based on endless television interviews and Obama’s postelection news conference, it seems the Democrats are salving their wounds with two thoughts—first, this is merely the midterm elections and in presidential elections their constituency will come out in force and rescue them again; and second, those troublesome whites are going to be overrun demographically at some point, anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about.

This isn’t a governing philosophy. It isn’t even a philosophy. Many Democratic analysts figured that the demographic changes washing over America would hand them a governing position in the country without a fight. But that isn’t how democratic politics works. There’s always a fight, as the 2014 election returns demonstrate. 

Indeed, always a fight.  That is why Pubs had better be about something - have that governing philosophy of which Merry speaks.

I would add that last night's Keystone vote in the Senate, pitting the likes of Joe Manchin and, of course, Landrieu, against Harry Reid, Sheldon Whitehouse et al, is indicative of some ideological fissures among the FHers that are not going to be helpful as we move further into this interesting era.