By the time he’s old enough to vote, maybe the future of American politics that liberals are said to own will have come at last. But it’s not here yet.

Robert G. Kaiser clearly wrote his current piece in the November 6, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books – on “Our Conservative, Criminal Politicians” – before the November 4 US midterm elections. But I read it just after. And it helped me do something with my private thoughts about the future of democracy in America. I’m just not sure what.

One passage from Kaiser’s article especially seems to fit the mood of the broader American progressive left, as it were, just after the allegedly disastrous midterm elections of 2014 : “Today we have dreadful politics that feature unrestrained partisan warfare, a gridlocked government, and unprecedented public cynicism about politics and politicians. One of our two parties is dominated by a faction eager to undermine the functioning of the government. This grim situation may seem to have arisen since Barack Obama became president in 2009, but it has much deeper roots in the events of the 1960s and 1970s.”

The immediate big question at the end of the week of the great fall 2014 disaster is will the new Republican majority in both the House and the Senate somehow break through the gridlock, and  at least moderate the partisan warfare? Officially, all sides are sounding conciliatory. This past Friday President Obama and Congressional leaders had lunch. But then the clips from the lunch on the TV news seemed tense. There may be something of a growing consensus that the answer to the immediate big question is probably no, and certainly not in any big way.

President Obama with his new nominee for US attorney general, current US attorney in Brooklyn, Loretta Lynch. November 8, 2014.

The Kentucky gentleman Mitch McConnell summarized the general situation early on : “I don’t expect the president to wake up tomorrow and view the world any differently than he did when he woke up this morning. He knows I won’t either.” If there are a few small things the two sides can agree on, maybe something can get done. But what may still crazily loom over Robert G. Kaiser’s America is a still bigger and possibly alarming question. Can a melodramatic destabilizing clash between the legislative and executive branches of the US federal government – over something like Obamacare or Immigration or who knows what else? –  somehow be happily avoided, or evaded, or escaped, or otherwise removed from the real world agenda?

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(1) NON TO MICHAEL GERSON ON OBAMA’S HARMFUL GIFTS. I disagree myself with the main thrust and much else of Michael Gerson’s November 6, 2014 opinion piece in the Washington Post : “Obama’s harmful ‘gifts’ to the nation and the Democrats.”

The executive branch in the White House.

As proof you can often enough find worthwhile things in good political writing you essentially disagree with, I also found two such passages (more or less) in Gerson’s article :

* “Obama clearly regards the ‘two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday’ as a more favorable audience than the discontented third who turned out.” I give this above-average marks for wit. But I also think it’s worth stressing that Barack Obama was elected twice in a row by far more people from all over the USA than anyone who was elected to anything on November 4, 2014.

* “Changing demography is the long-term context of US politics. But the coalition of the ascendant is not a standing political army, sent into battle by get-out-the-vote technology. ‘Liberals may still own the future of American politics,’ says Jonathan Chait, ‘but the future is taking a very long time to arrive.’” Sad but mostly true too, no doubt. And again nicely put. And the Democrats have some fresh learning to do about the all-important margins of today’s dreadful American politics. Still, liberals still do own the future. And that probably helps explain why so many conservatives are so much on edge.

(2) A FOREIGN POLICY PRESIDENT? Also on November 6, 2014, Fareed Zakaria, who of course must know that Barack Obama has read his book on The Post-American World, posted an intriguing note headlined “Will Obama become a foreign policy president?”

The legislative branch on Capitol Hill.

I hope myself that the president at least staunchly defends the progress he has made on domestic policy over his last two years. But I think Fareed Zakaria makes a strong argument as well :

“Despite this week’s elections, President Obama has the time and scope to do big things over the next two years. But they will have to be in the world beyond Washington. Next week’s trip to Asia would be a good place to start … It has been clear for a while that there is little prospect of working with the Republican Party on major domestic initiatives. This is hardly unprecedented. Administrations often devote their last few years in office to international affairs, an arena where they have latitude for unilateral action …”

In fact, the president leaves for China today (just after our Canadian PM Stephen Harper, and just before that the premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne). For the moment the Chinese seem too sensitive to the symbolic defeat Barack Obama sustained in some minds on November 4.  See “China media rips Obama ahead of visit.” At the same time, Asia means much more than China. And the president’s current Chinese visit will just mark “the start of a week-long economic and trade trip that will also take him to conferences in Burma and Australia.”

Obama caught reading Fareed Zakaria’s book!

More generally, historians may eventually discover that by the autumn leaves of 2014 foreign policy had already become one of the Obama administration’s stronger hands. The president is recurrently criticized on foreign policy issues, by critics right across the ordinary ideological spectrum. And then events show that what he’s doing is actually working. See, eg, another November 6 report on how “Islamic State’s wave of might turning into a ripple.”

Finally, what does the November 7 announcement that “US to Send 1,500 More Troops to Iraq” mean ???? Those making the announcement apparently strongly demurred on any connections with the midterm elections. Some have nonetheless seen the 1,500 new troops as an opening salvo of White House goodwill  on military issues. (Just as others moan and groan in shame! How far will compromise on this front go? )

(3) KRUGMAN vs BROOKS – IF ONLY THE GREAT DIVIDE IN THE REAL USA WERE LIKE THE ONE IN THE NY TIMES! Contrasting analyses in the November 6, 2014 New York Times, by Paul Krugman on the left and David Brooks on the right, gave one version (or two?) of what is going on these days, in the immediate wake of the US midterm elections.

The political stability that’s so good for economic growth ... aka mercifully asleep at last, for a while ...Â

Krugman’s piece was cleverly called “Triumph of the Wrong”.  And here’s a sample : “it’s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday … the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy … Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity – and they punished his party … Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.”

David Brooks’s November 6 analysis is just called “The Governing Party.” Its essential claim is that with the 2014 midterm elections the Republicans in the USA have established a significant bulwark against any too sudden realization of the liberal future in American politics.

New Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst “carries more than just lipstick in her purse,” her campaign ads explained.

Eg : “Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm… Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party. Republicans now control 69 of 99 state legislative bodies. Republicans hold 31 governorships to Democrats’ 18 …  When the next Congress convenes in January, Republicans will have their largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1931; they will have a majority in the Senate, dominate gubernatorial power in the Midwest, and have more legislative power nationwide than anytime over the past century … This year, Republicans won among white-working-class voters by 30 percentage points. They tied Democrats among Asian-Americans. They severely cut their losses among Hispanics.”  And yet … perhaps the admirably reasonable conservative Mr. Brooks is also a bit too idealistic. Sarah Palin goes but … the surely certifiable new Senator from Iowa, Ms Joni Ernst, has risen to take her place.

(4) APPENDIX : ROBERT G. KAISER IS AN INTRIGUING AND EVEN RELEVANT CASE IN HIS OWN RIGHT? The Robert G. Kaiser who has written “Our Conservative, Criminal Politicians” in the November 6, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books was born in 1943, and is now nicely into his early 70s.  He offers much food for thought on what is wrong with various playboys of the western world today.

Robert G. Kaiser.

He was born in Washington, DC – albeit to the kind of family that sent him to Yale and the London School of Economics. He worked as a summer intern at the Washington Post while still a college student in 1963. He then worked for the same newspaper for half a century, and continued to live in the city of his birth.  He has most recently abandoned Washington for New York – as recounted earlier this year in “How Republicans lost their mind, Democrats lost their soul and Washington lost its appeal.”

Meanwhile :

* “59% Think New GOP Congress Likely to Be A Disappointment …  A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that most voters will be disappointed with Republicans in Congress before the 2016 elections. That includes 36% who say it’s Very Likely.”

* “Obama chooses US prosecutor Lynch to be next attorney general, ahead of expected confirmation showdown … Lynch will still face a difficult confirmation process in Congress. Republicans have already told the White House that pushing any nominee through Congress while Democrats still have control of the Senate will be difficult and politically damaging.”

Anton Schwartz in flight.

* Thursday, November 6, 2014, marked the 200th birthday of Adolphe Sax. Today he’s best known as the inventor of the saxophone … that consumately American musical instrument (even though it was invented by a Belgian working in Paris, in the early 1840s).  I was apprised of this important occasion by the Pacific Northwest jazz maestro, Anton Shwartz, currently based in Seattle but also a frequent instructor at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley, CA. I think it’s a fair bet that he did not vote Republican on November 4 — just like the West Coast Americans who elected Democrat Jerry Brown to an unprecedented fourth term as Governor of California.

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At last, what does it mean that, as Robert G.Kaiser urges, the current grim political situation in the USA “may seem to have arisen since Barack Obama became president in 2009, but it has much deeper roots in the events of the 1960s and 1970s”?

California baby hearing good news that Democrat Jerry Brown is re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term as Governor of California.

I think it ultimately means that the various harsh and I think essentially cultural conflicts which haunt American politics today also have deep roots. And all this will still take many years to resolve into some kind of stable democratic “clash of opinion,” from which something more truthful can finally arise (as in the democratic theory of John Stuart Mill).

Or, the self-described “liberal hawk” and New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait is right. Liberals do still own the future of American politics. But it will still be quite a while before this future seriously starts to arrive – especially in big states like Florida and Texas (as well as California, New York, and Pennsylvania, all of which already have Democratic governors, even after the 2014 midterm elections).

Meanwhile again, “living well is the best revenge.” As Jackie Kennedy tried to make clear to America, back in the early 1960s – when Hillary Clinton was just “an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat.”