President Trump’s election and presidency, and politics are all viewed by the clerisy as lacking legitimacy and certainly as no mandates from the electorate. But recalling the clerisy’s view 8 years earlier, I remember talk from President Obama supporters who seemed to think then that his election did indicate a sort of mandate from the people.
Even
if there was one or two issues of widespread concern to the electorate, the
nature of any mandate by the people regarding an issue is always unclear. Since
there many sub-groups in society operating more or less independently of other
sub-groups, the norms, values, and rhetoric varies among subgroups, and no so
called consensus, common will, or mandate can possibly exist among citizens.
It
is misleading and sometimes perhaps quite harmful to believe in such unity of
political goals. Concern for the environment may well be of primary concern
among a large number of voters but that illusory consensus in the face of actual
policies; it is unlikely a large percentage of citizens don’t want to
government to take over the energy industry. Some may favor taxing carbon
emission or trading carbon quota’s but the divide between the two approaches
immediately revealed the huge divide between the pro-government and the pro-private
policy methods. The same is true in health care. The divide between
pro-government and pro-private methods appears in the debates over single-payer
and health savings accounts.
When
we dig into people’s belief’s about methods of change in society, those
underlying frameworks reveal just how incompatible pro-government and
pro-private problem-solving methods are. That is why policy discussion
inevitably run into the ideological problem of the two incompatible approaches
to societal development and problem-solving that undergird most peoples view of
public policy issues. It also accounts for why progressives remain consistently
pro-government and anti-free market across issues in opposition to libertarians
who remain consistently pro-private problem-solving and anti-government across
issues.
The respected polling firm Rasmussen periodically asks Americans if
they favor fewer government services with lower taxes, or more services with
higher taxes. In late September of 2007, the public—once again—favored smaller
government and lower taxes by a 57% to 31% margin. That difference reflects ideological frameworks at work and is about 20
points more than Obama's victory margin over McCain. If this election was a
reaction to a very unpopular president, any mandate for change simply means
throwing the bums out. We are left and certainly with no idea of exactly what
change that might be.
Today,
of course, the clerisy no long use the idea of a president having a mandate.
The truth is that presidents never have a mandate.
