Possible Effects of the U.S. Midterm Elections

Tea Party Influences on the Rise – Xenophobia in and Climate out of Congress

The main worry that the American—and Canadian—public should be concerned about is not the upcoming gridlock in congress or even the pervading concern with the economy and its slow pace of progress. It would be the fact that for the next two years, undisclosed and simmering feelings of xenophobia, propelled in great part by Tea Party propaganda may overtake the U.S. Congress.

Indeed, in 2010 Tea Partiers still shout slogans like “go back to Kenya!” to the president, and yet others insist on seeing his real birth certificate. On the Tea Party Tour Bus, through which Sarah Palin and others travelled America seeking support from regular folk to fuel their “grassroots” movement, there are anonymous writings telling the president to go back to Kenya, to Africa, or to “wherever the hell it is [he] came from.”

But if we are to see Tea Partiers and their Republican supporters come into total control in 2012, we can almost certainly expect to see an even stronger distrust towards the government by Americans, especially in a context of economic worry. America may end up turning inward, momentarily stepping away from social problems at home and abroad in order to allow a freer flow of businesses, particularly small businesses. Indeed, Scotty Greenwood has suggested that “until economic fears die down, the big global issues will probably remain on the back burner.”

This could also mean a proliferation of any and all industries, including the Oil industry as it drains the Alberta Tar Sands of its Black Gold.

And if they continue funding research that negates climate change, it can be expected that processing the black gold will go full steam ahead. If Global Warming does not exist, or if it is “not so serious,” as some of the more moderate Tea Partiers hold, we won’t see much of a concern for the environmental or social footprint this will have on the Earth and on Native Groups that live off of the land and the game – both of which will be overrun with pollutants. The U.S. State Department may already be in the process of approving a TransCanada Pipeline running from Alberta to Texas, a project Hillary Clinton considers a “necessary evil.”

For now, the Tea Party supporters and its major sponsors have been successful in convincing the American electorate that they want less government and less government spending. Some Democrats, including President Obama, argue that what Tea Partiers demand is instant gratification. They hold that Tea Partiers are unable to comprehend that what the American Economy needs is not a quick fix but rather an amendment of the underlying systematic deficiencies that allow things like xenophobia, inequality, social insecurity and environmental abuse to happen.

Merging Views – Cooperation needed within Congress

There are some figureheads like Arthur C. Brooks, president of the conservative think tank called American Enterprise Institute, who argue that Americans (and consequently the rest of the world) are locked into a dispute of Free Enterprise vs. European Style Statism. In this context, he uses words like free-enterprise and entrepreneurship as synonyms for Freedom and Justice, and links income redistribution (through social programs) or emission caps to Statism and Restriction.

But he fails to see the inherit shortcomings of the Free Markets, which many liberal economists and advocates of the Capitalist system such as John M. Keynes and George Cooper have already recognized and proposed addressing through government regulations such as deficit or social spending, for instance. There is a multitude of work that explores these shortcomings and the ways they can be fixed, but if those individuals with the power to influence and educate the electorate fail to acknowledge these works and their propositions, it is certain that any attempt by governments to curtail future crises will again be received with disdain by voters unaware of the alternatives.

The future is uncertain, but what is needed is not a clash of political ideology and a barrage of rhetoric. What Americans need is to reach a consensus on their views; a compromise that will allow all the tools in the entire political spectrum to be employed to fix the economy and the social maladies that plague America and the rest of the world.