SEPTEMBER 3, 2009, 4:27 A.M. ET.
The Revolt of the Masses
Electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
The ever-entertaining Karl Marx described a society's least politically engaged people as the lumpen proletariat. Well, it's beginning to look as if the globe's lumpen proletariat has decided they've had about enough of the lumpen bureaucratariat. It could be a revolution under way, though not the one predicted by the boys at the barricades.
To Mr. Marx, the lumpen proletariat (often slurred into a single word, lumpenproletariat) was the most marginalized, hopeless, faceless swath of the underclass. Were he alive at this moment, it is not beyond imagining that Karl would have joined the charge against what has become a lumpen bureaucratariat—the permanent, often faceless overclass of gerrymandered politicians, bureaucrats for life and the public unions and special interests that swim alongside like pilot fish.
The vote in somnolent Japan suggests that electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships. The same weekend the Japanese unloaded the Liberal Democratic Party, German voters withdrew Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling majorities in the state legislatures of Thuringia and Saarland.
In the U.S., political handicappers are predicting heavy Democratic losses in the House next November. This just four years after ending GOP control of Congress in the 2006 elections and two years after sweeping into office Barack Obama and his Democratic partners.
Congress's approval rating remains stuck around 30%. This number may be more important as an indicator of public sentiment toward the nation's leadership than presidential approval.
Some search for an ideological trend toward the left or right in these votes, but the only evident trend is to strike out at whichever blob is currently in power. Even as Americans turned over their country to liberal Democrats, opinion polls showed that the British people were turning toward the Conservatives for relief from listless Labour.
What accounts for the global electorate's growing disgust with the political overclass? Try this: No matter the ideological cast of these governments, they all hold in common one policy: the inexorable upward march of national indebtedness. It has arrived at the edge of the cliff.
Associated Press Representatives in Connecticut played solitaire on their computers as the House convened this week to vote on a new budget for the fiscal year.
Japan's gross debt is currently estimated at some 180% of its gross domestic product, the highest among the world's theoretically serious economies. Look elsewhere and one sees the same fiscal obesity.
As measured by the OECD, the growth in gross debt as a percentage of GDP since the dawn of the new century is stunning. The data isn't exactly comparable across individual countries, but the trend line is unmistakable.
In the U.S., debt as a percentage of GDP rose to 87% in 2009 from 55% in 2000. In the U.K., to 75% from 45%; Germany, to 78% from 60%; France, 86% from 66%. There are exceptions to this trend, such as Canada, New Zealand and notably Australia, whose debt has fallen to 16% of GDP from 25%. But for all the countries in the OECD's basket the claim of indebtedness on GDP grew to 92% from 69% the past nine years.
In short, the lumpen electorate works, and the lumpen bureaucratariat spends. They get away with it because they have perfected the illusion that no human hand causes these commitments. The payroll tax just happens. Entitlements are "off-budget," presumably in the hands of God. This is government without the responsibility of governance.
Unable to identify who or what has put them in hock to the horizon, national electorates are attempting accountability by voting whole parties out of power. Rasmussen recently found that 57% of voters would throw out Congress en masse if they could. Gerrymandered districts ensure that they can't.
Problem is, the lumpen bureaucratariat can't stop spending and borrowing and won't incentivize growth. Amid the phenomenal spending on the financial mess here, they tried to pass a cap-and-trade bill whose centerpiece was an auction of carbon credits to flow trillions of dollars toward the bureaucracies. Mr. Obama's people seem weirdly oblivious to the scale of their outlays, programs and dreams.
The decision by the voters of Japan to turn out the LDP after 54 years argues that in real democracies, political self-entrenchment and enrichment can arrive at limits. In 2000, more astonishingly, Mexicans defeated the PRI after 71 years in office, then re-elected the new party's candidate in 2006. Now it looks like similar forces are bubbling out of town halls across the United States. If American elections since 2006 (or 1994) tell us anything, it is that the target of their wrath is the party of the Beltway.
This is hardly a fair fight. The political overclass everywhere holds the power to print money and grab it back with taxes and inflation. Still, the election returns suggest that something is stirring. Maybe we should call it the revolt of the masses.
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