Majorities mandate miasmas

Miasma
1. An unwholesome atmosphere
2. Unhealthy vapours rising from the ground or other sources

After elections the unwholesome atmospheres usually come from ideologues who always know better (but are no better). One commentator saw the 2008 US general elections as “I've read that Obama doesn't have a mandate, but I don't know what planet you have to come from to draw that conclusion” – personally, I come from the planet Earth. Votes in elections may decide winning candidates, but votes in elections do not decide which were the winning ideas. The only tangible consequences of elections are the persons who were elected. The elected then act according to their intangible ideas of what should happen (their own personal mandates). These actions also have consequences, and certain self-confirming superior individuals have always feared the unintended consequences of actions resulting from misguided votes in majoritarian elections – miasmic assertions such as Mitt Romney’s remarks that Obama administration actions “were very generous in what they gave to those groups”, or James Madison’s worry that some groups would not act in the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.
The “majority” is not an entity but a summation of individual actions by multidimensional people with multidimensional ideas. There is no mandate, there are many differing opinions. The idea of a mandate is important to ideologues, almost as if you could average everybody’s views to give one result. There are lies, damned lies, and mandates: for example, did the US 2012 general elections provide a mandate to:

• Do nothing, because Democrats only gained a few seats in the House and the Senate?
• Help middle-class families?
• Show Americans want compromise?
• Work together in the best interest of the USA, and not increase taxes?
• Enact comprehensive immigration reform?
• Proceed on the issue of tax policy, to allow rates on top earners to rise?

After the congressional elections of 2010, when many new Tea Party candidates were elected, each small subgroup of the party acted as if they had a mandate to push their agenda (average opinion) in the name of the party. Perceptions of mandates are malleable, and the tea-party agenda of economic issues such as lower taxes, less spending, and less regulation, became skewed by social issues like illegal immigration, traditional marriage, and voter ID. Perceptions of mandates are usually wrong: people who thought that voting for a tea-party candidate was simply a vote for economic freedom and fiscal responsibility found their candidate in favour of reducing social freedoms and unable to progress in changing the economic status quo because of self-induced legislative gridlock. In 2012 those people often voted for a different candidate, because continued zealotry is difficult to maintain if you an ordinary person: “… the Tea Party-style of rage is not one that wins over converts and makes people lean …  toward them and say ‘I want to listen to you’” (Peggy Noonan) .
And the blame game continues …

Technorati Tags: 2008 presidential election,2012 presidential election,Barack Obama,economic freedom,federalist,fiscal responsibility,James Madison,majoritarian elections,majority,mandate,middle class,mitt romney,Peggy Noonan,social freedom,tea party,traditional marriage