No, Obamacare's Failure Will Not Be The End of Big Government Liberalism

People who analyze politics and elections for a living are prone to breathless, sweeping proclamations of permanent realignment.  When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, most election analysts echoed Karl Rove's long-standing fantasy that a generation-long conservative Republican majority had just been solidified.  Two years later, the Democrats took back both Houses of Congress.  After the 2008 election of Obama, the same people who overinterpreted the 2004 election results returned to tell us that it was the Democrats who now owned the hearts and souls of American voters for the foreseeable future, and that the Republican Party had become a rump regional party of the South similar to the late 19th century Southern Democrats.  Two years later, Republicans picked up the House with a sweeping 63-seat gain in the 2010 midterms.  And after Obama's re-election in 2012, the hourglass was again set on the Republicans' demographic doomsday.  Suffice it to say that I think both parties will be equally strong, on balance, for the rest of my lifetime no matter how much the "coalition of the ascendant" is currently aligned with Democrats.  Political circumstances change and the painful consequences of governing a nation in systemic decline will always pivot the partisan allegiances of the governing party's coalition.

With that in mind, what to make of the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and its political consequences?  In the short-term, it probably means the Democrats are looking at a 2014 midterm election comparable to the 2010 midterm, losing a lot of their coalition from last year that will be rendered losers of Obamacare, functional website or not.  But the long-term political fallout is trickier to calculate.  Democrats will own Obamacare like a scarlet letter for a generation to be sure, but what about all the grandiose, overarching proclamations by histrionic political analysts and giddy right-wing columnists talking about Obamacare's failure representing the permanent death of big government liberalism?  To put it bluntly, ain't gonna happen.  Why not?  Because in today's America, voters have no other choice but government to avoid spiraling into Third World conditions.

Had Medicare proven as disastrous of a policy shift back in the mid-1960s as Obamacare appears poised to be today, it's very possible we would have seen a shift away from big government liberalism.  In a sense we did as the rest of the Great Society legislation was met with widespread voter revulsion and produced the shift towards conservatism in the 1970s and Reaganism in the 1980s.  But big government's overreach in the late 1960s occurred amidst the backdrop of an ascendant middle class who earned the vast majority of their incomes and benefit packages from the unionized private sector that they worked in.  Two generations ago, the majority of Americans could live without the help of activist government in a way they no longer can after nearly 40 years of declining wages and stolen benefits that have skinned and gutted the shrinking middle class.

That's why no matter how much blood is spilled with the implementation (and possible outright collapse) of Obamacare, voters will still look to government to clean up the pieces and provide them a worthy replacement.  Because even amidst Obamacare's hypothetical wreckage, there will be a complete vacuum of private sector remedies, as the puppetmasters in the private sector will respond to Obamacare's collapse in the same way they have responded to everything that's happened in American life in my lifetime....by consolidating resources for themselves and producing no viable alternative for the overwhelming majority of Americans whose grasp on maintaining their livelihoods is slipping more each year.

The demand for services that used to be provided by employers but no longer is will not disappear no matter how outraged Joe Sixpack is at government for Obamacare's failure. And government is the only game in town to fill the void.  If not government, then who?

Nobody.  That's why it's gonna be big government every single time.