Opinion – Ross Douthat: Reality has finally changed sides and in 2022 has a conservative bias

“Reality is known to have a liberal bias,” noted Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006. This was at the time when Colbert represented a caricature of a conservative rather than a caricature of a liberal (or, least, I imagine that’s what he’s doing on his current late-night talk show), and the phrase sounded perfect in the midst of a decade in which reality slammed into GOP world theories.

Back then, in the years between the invasion of Iraq and the re-election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party bet everything on the idea that the Iraq War would disarm a dictator (most of the weapons in question did not exist) and revolutionize the Middle East. (this she did, but not for the better).

Domestically, he bet on tax cuts and a housing bubble, continuing to trumpet the strength of the economy from the George W. Bush era to the worst financial crisis since the 1920s.

In Obama’s first term, the GOP went all-in on the idea that deficit spending and easy money would trigger rampant inflation or a debt crisis (it didn’t), that Obamacare would devastate the healthcare market (despite its flaws, that it didn’t happen either) and that welfare reform was the right thing to do in an economy that was slowly recovering (it was a good long-term goal, but not an ideal priority for 2010).

And, in a small final touch, the GOP assumed the polls were skewed against Mitt Romney in 2012, something they emphatically were not.

I was part of it all, overestimating the urgency of the deficit problem and the risks of Obamacare. For that very reason, I have experience, from which I observe that Democrats are having a hard time in 2022 because reality has finally shifted and now has a conservative bias.

What did reality bring to the country? For a Democratic Party that became convinced that in the short term there were few limits to how much stimulus could be injected into the economy, the worst inflation since the 1980s. For a Democratic Party that spent the Trump era persuading itself to believe that implementing the immigration is immoral, a priori, and that a “de facto” immigration amnesty has no real disadvantages, the reality has presented the highest rate ever recorded of illegal crossings on the southern border.

And for a Democratic Party whose 2020 platform promised to “end the era of mass incarceration and dramatically reduce the number of Americans held in jails and prisons, while continuing to drive down crime rates,” it has brought homicide rates that have come up a few years ago and that eradicated at least 20 years of improvement in this regard.

The most important point to make about these facts is that they do not prove that progressives are simply “wrong about crime” or “wrong about inflation”, any more than the events of 2003-12 prove that conservatives are “wrong”. about foreign policy” or “are wrong about welfare reform”.

What happens is that ideological and partisan promises and commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get it right for a while, sometimes for a long time, and then you pass a tipping point, and the measures you advocate begin to reveal the negatives that your rivals warned you about and that you convinced yourself didn’t exist.

So, in the current situation, the fact that the US is experiencing a serious crime wave right now does not prove that the Democrats (and many Republicans) were wrong about criminal justice reform 10 or 15 years ago. It only suggests that there is a time when the policy of incarcerating less or decriminalizing may need a fix, a measure of intransigence with crime.

Likewise, Democrats were not wrong about the risks of inflation being low in the Obama era or in the recent past. It’s just that, barring some pessimistic prophetic voices like Larry Summers, they were wrong when they imagined that these risks could be minimized forever, that there was no limit to Covid-era spending.

By the same token, current inflation does not retrospectively confirm the predictions of Obama-era deficit critics — but it does suggest that it may be worth reconsidering some of their proposals.

So the question to be asked after Tuesday’s election is not whether Democrats will abandon their ideology, but whether ideology will be able to adapt to what reality is saying.

And whether it’s for Joe Biden or his would-be successors, there’s a recent model available: just after the era when Colbert’s joke was funny, a leader emerged who persuaded the GOP to abandon its deficit fixation and simply run the economy, which endorsed universal health insurance and committed to protecting social benefits, which recognized that the Iraq War was a serious mistake and promised a less utopian, more pragmatic foreign policy.

That’s right: it was Donald Trump who closed the gap between the Republican Party and reality – in his speech, even if not always in his actual policies. Now, Democrats, faced with an icy encounter with the conservative bias of reality, need leaders who can do the same.