It is a foolish fancy, perhaps, but indulge me for a moment by making the assumption that the 1994 mid-term election results signified that a plurality of our voting fellow citizens wanted their rulers to think more as the Republicans than as the Democrats do. Just imagine, if you can, that more people liked the Republican “Contract with America” than liked what the Clinton administration has done for the past two years—or the Democratic Congress for the past forty. Far-fetched as these assumptions may seem to our political and media sophisticates, who are so well practiced at looking into the true and hidden meanings of such epiphenomena, suppose that the actual explanation of the election results were also the simplest. What then would we make of the veritable frenzy of analysis carried on by those same sophisticates in order to come up with subtler and more sinister explanations?
The hidden meanings of the Republican victory were not discoverable by just anybody. It took a special talent at ferreting out the secrets of right-wing appeal. Nor was there exactly unanimity among the subtlest of analysts. But, roughly speaking, their diagnosis of the social pathology so lamentably revealed by the late elections involved the adumbration of at least seven discrete but possibly overlapping syndromes, any one of which could easily be fatal to the cause of civilization and decency.
To start at the top:
Voter cynicism.As I noted in this space in the earliest phase of
