U.S. election results are more of the same

by George J. Dance

NBC News has declared Democratic candidate Joe Biden the President-elect of the United States. Democrats also retained control of the House of Representatives (although they lost seats). They have not as yet taken the Senate; right now they are projected to win 48 seats in the 100-seat upper chamber. However, two seats will be decided in a January run-off election in Georgia, a state Biden won; winning those would give the Democrats control of the Senate (thanks to the tie-breaking vote of the vice-president). That will hand the Democrats a 'hat trick' – control of the presidency and both houses of Congress – a hyuge change from just three years ago, when the Republicans controlled all three.

I am reminded of a French saying – <plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose> – the more things change, the more they stay the same. This hat trick phenomenon is not novel, but has characterized U.S. politics throughout the new century:

• With Bill Clinton's election in 1992, the Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. The Republicans won both houses in 1994, and retained control for the rest of his presidency. So that....
• With George W. Bush's election in 2000, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. They briefly lost their Senate majority, after a GOP Senator switched to the Democrats, but won it back in 2002. They retained control of both houses until 2006, when the Democrats retook both. So that....
• With Barack Obama's election in 2008, the Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. They lost the House in 2010, and the Senate in 2014. So that....
• With Donald Trump's election in 2016, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress.

The players and winners may change, but the pattern stays the same. American voters give one duopoly party complete control of the federal government. They are invariably disappointed by the outcome. They then react to this disappointment by giving the other party the same complete control. They are following a strategy best expressed in this cartoon:

I believe that human ideas are the chief determinants of  human behavior. So what idea(s) can be driving this recurring behavior?

When I was a lad, big "liberal" democratic government was widely seen as the vehicle that would lead us to utopia. That view had begun to fray by 1970, and by the end of the century was nowhere to be found. What happened? Why did utopia never arrive?

There are two different views. The minority, or libertarian, view is that big governments necessarily have structural flaws that prevent them from functioning as promised. The majority or populist view is that big governments work just fine; however, they keep getting captured by bad people who keep perverting them. This populist belief – a faith in governments, combined with a mistrust of the people running them – dominates in U.S. federal politics, and its dominance looks like the best explanation for the cyclical pattern noted above. 

The big difference this time is that the cycle completed in just four years rather than eight. It remains unknown whether that shorter cycle was a mere blip caused by the incumbent president, or whether the cycle has in fact speeded up. My prediction is that the cycle has permanently speeded up, and we will see yet another Republican hat trick in 2024.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.