Mid-term elections

Before you reach for the knob, let me remind myself of the wise words of an old Englishman who once warned me that it's bad enough understanding our own politics, but American politics sound like a different form of chess in which the pawns move backwards and there's no king and queen. He could have added in which, also, the bishops control Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

I'm going to talk about Tuesday's national election in the House of Representatives, mainly as it reflects not just on America's problems, but on the problems of government that are common to the whole Western world, or should I say the democratic world, including Europe, Australasia, India, Israel and Japan.

I'm not thinking of foreign policy, of what to do about the Middle East, the nuclear freeze, trade with the Soviet Union and so on, about which the senators who sit for six years have most to say. I'm thinking rather of the clash between two philosophies of domestic government that are now out in the open and in the works in Britain and Germany and France and Spain and Sweden, as much as in America. You can give this clash several labels. Call it the welfare state versus the trickle-down theory, or Lord Keynes versus Milton Friedman, or government planning versus free enterprise, or Roosevelt's famous advice to a loyal henchmen, 'Tax and tax and spend and spend!' versus cut taxes and balance the budget.

Two years ago, Ronald Reagan said he'd been elected to reverse 50 years of a government philosophy that had, in the long run, practically bankrupted the country. The philosophy was that of the New Deal which asserted a new belief in this country that the government, the national government, has a permanent and prior duty to take care of the poor, the sick, the disabled, the dispossessed and the unemployed. As Roosevelt put it 'to soak the rich' to pay for these irrevocable services and if taxes weren't enough, then print more money.

If Ronald Reagan had been an Englishman, a new prime minister with a similar message, he would have said he'd been elected to reverse 75 years of that philosophy, since 25 years before Roosevelt, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill initiated their 'New Deal' which accustomed us to old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and much else as permanent obligations of government.

Well, let's look at the American election, what it was about and what happened. It was, as I say, a national election though not a presidential one. We call it a mid-term election because, if I may say so, two and two make four. The president is elected for a four-year term, the 435 members of the House of Representatives are elected for only two years. So, halfway through the president's term, the whole House is turned out and a new House elected and, therefore, the congressional elections are always taken as an opportunity for the people to say whether they think he's doing well or badly.

The issues in 435 congressional districts, over a continent with vastly different climates, livelihoods, economies, grudges, are obviously of great variety and it may be, in fact it's fairly certain to be, that Mr A voting in Detroit and Mrs B voting in California and C, D and E voting in Florida, Maine, Alaska have almost nothing in common by way of what concerns them most.

Let me give you a personal example, one that doesn't concern more than 30-odd thousand voters in the United States but it meant more than anything else in the election, to me and my neighbours. At the end of Long Island, there are two forks, like the fish flukes, that enclose a large, 30-mile long bay. In the middle of this bay is an island. The flaming issue at our end of the island was whether this hilly, beautiful and uninhabited island was to be opened up to what we always call 'development', whether development or degradation is the end in view. Anyway, by the existing limit on saleable plots, 56 families could build on 15 acres each.

Now there were two men running for the state assembly, that is for New York State's Congress, if you like. One, Mr S is all for opening up the island to development. The other, Mr P, was resolutely opposed to it, pointing out that it would require a ferry service, tap the precarious water table still deeper, entail sewage, crowds, not to mention destroying the stillness and beauty of the bay. Well Mr P lost. It's not the end of the matter but I can only say that his defeat caused little selfish us more gloom than the defeat of a family favourite in another state for the United States' Senate.

And yet, with this multitude of regional interests and issues, the national commentators appearing, after all, on national television, have to say that over and above your interests and mine, there is a grand, national purpose. The election in the House, they say, represented a referendum on Mr Reagan's economic policies, known as Reaganomics. Useless for reporters in large parts of the south and in places with comparatively low unemployment to say that Reaganomics was not an issue in their part of the country.

Pointless, or rather insensitive to the point of callousness, to mention that 90 per cent of Americans are at work and, therefore, the election could hardly be a judgement on ten per cent unemployment. Legions of political leaders of both parties either proclaimed or conceded that, yes, Reaganomics was THE national issue and unemployment was Mr Reagan's Achilles heel. I ought to say that what even the Reaganomics fans know and wince at is the fact that for every tenth of one per cent increase in unemployment, the ordinary taxpayers are going to have to pay out many millions more for unemployment benefits.

Yet, in New York State, a Republican who made his principal target the high rate of crime lost the governorship by only 150,000 votes in over five million to a Democrat who kept saying, over and over again, that Reaganomics was the issue, was a failure and the president had said so, which he had not.

Now, it's usual enough to amount to a tradition that in the mid-term election, the party in power, I mean rather the party whose man is in the White House, always loses seats in the House. Why should this be so? I hazard a simple, human answer.

Americans are, by now, in general, cynical about politics to the alarming extent that only 31 per cent of the qualified voters voted in this election, but this minority is all the more concerned and idealistic. More than most nations, they vote for a new president in the fervent belief, or hope, that he is, at last, the Moses they've been looking for. At the end of two years, they discover that he is not Moses. Eisenhower came as close to the hoped-for impersonation as anybody in modern times and, in his mid-term election, he lost only four votes in the House. But there've been other presidents – Truman and Lyndon Johnson as the most glaring examples – who lost heavily, the highest count being, I believe, 70.

Now the pollsters and the statisticians dutifully went through the records of the past 50 years and came up with an average loss in the mid-term of incumbent seats in the House. The average is something like 11.4. An average between wildly swaying extremes doesn't really make much more sense than saying, which was true a few years ago, that the average family in the United States has two and one-quarter children.

Let's just say that when a party loses 20 seats in the House, it's not going to have things all its own way in the new Congress.

Well, the Republicans, who were already in a minority there, lost 26 seats. Does this mean that the president can therefore count on 26 less votes for any policy he wants to put through? Not at all. Because of a misconception that's terribly easy to fall into, especially if you're foreign to American politics and assume that the parties are ideological bodies, Republicans being conservative, Democrats being liberals. It used to be, in the Roosevelt days, much more so, but the Democrats especially are a regional alliance of conservatives in the South, labour leaders in the industrial Midwest, environmentalists here, small businessmen there.

So the more important change to notice is the ideological balance of the new Congress. In the Senate, there is none. The Republicans lost only one seat and will still control the Senate but, in the old House, and I stress 'the House' because it has the last say on money bills, there were about 56 per cent conservatives to 44 per cent liberals. The president was able to rally support for his economic policies from about 25 per cent of the Democrats. This imbalance has now been reversed. There are more, liberally inclined congressmen than conservatives in the new House, which does mean that the president is likely to lose, or perhaps to be wise enough not to bring up, such issues he has wanted to press as prayer in the public schools, the denial of federal funds for abortion and the idea of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.

As for economics, Reaganomics, the president has to maintain his smile and his phlegm and swear that he's going to stay the course but he's already left the course. He is, as he proved in California, a pragmatist. He's not going to be the only one riding up the hill when the majority is riding down. He has practically conceded, though he hates to say so, that government, national government – that is, the working tax payer – must pay for the poor and the sick and the unemployed.

It seems to me most likely that the new House, which is the body that controls the purse strings which says who gets how much for what, will rearrange the priorities as between social services and defence spending and that the president, like every other head of government in the Western world, is going to have to go along with it, and that means releasing more money and that means more inflation which means, in turn, more, not less, taxation.

In all the writhing through economic theories and clashes between the welfare state and the free enterprisers, there is one hard truth that no party can ignore. It is Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's saying that taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.