Even after you make the maximum allowance for the fact that the elections since November 2008 have been state/local elections, often special elections, and therefore reflect the choices of a reduced, low-turnout, electorate compared to 2008, you're still left with a pretty dramatic sawtoothing of results, swings so dramatic that you really can't explain them entirely on the basis of varying turnout. If you're a Republican, I guess you might find it credible that IN voting for Obama in late 2008, and then MA voting for a Republican Senator in early 2010, means that the electorate has awakened from the magic spell that Obama wove in 2008, and returned, with a vengeance, to its natural pattern of voting Hard Right, Republican values. But if you're in the reality-based community, you have to seek some explanation for this saw-toothing other than turnout or the idea that this is really a Hard Right country.
Without disparaging other reasonable explanations, or claiming that this is the only possible explanation for these wild shifts in voting, I would like to propose that what's going on is the next stage of a revolution in the form and content of governance in this country.
Now, before you revoke my membership in the reality-based community, let me make clear that there is a difference between thinking something will happen and thinking that it's a good thing that should be encouraged, or helped along. I'm not advocating revolution, at all. "Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals", and I've been clean and sober for decades now. But even back when I thought it would be a good idea, when I was much younger, I was clear-headed enough to recognize that having the idea pushed by people like me and my fellow hippie commies (well, pinkos, anyway) was a very clear sign that it wasn't going to catch fire with the masses anytime soon, least of all the hardhat type masses, so it never occurred to me, even then, that revolution was something that it made any sense to encourage or work for.
I no longer think that revolution would be a good idea, even if practicable, because I've come to recognize that, at least in a generally successful society such as our own, revolutions always come from the Right, the hard Right and the privileged classes. If you look at history, the history of the great original revolution that we all look to as a template, the French Revolution, you will see that the idea that it was a movement of the Left is just a myth that both the Left and Right found convenient to collude in after the fact. People on the Left find the idea that anyone should fear our supposed power to make revolution quite flattering, and the Right wanted to disown the eventual results of the revolution it clearly started in 1788 when it blocked Neckar's attempt to tax the rich, even a little bit, to stave off national bankruptcy.
You could even claim that this imposture, this myth of revolution from the Left, was one of those noble lies, in that the fear of revolution from the Left may be the only reason that the Marxist apocalypse was successfully staved off by Social Democracy. And it has proven a very good thing that the privileged classes have had a hereditary distaste for revolution, and therefore haven't made a habit of revolution, of changing the rules of the game radically, and in their favor, on a regular basis.
Well, good effect or not in its day, the illusion of revolution from the Left has pretty clearly lost its power to restrain the privileged classes. They've gone in lately for the Shock Doctrine, which is their natural, wide-based, stance in the absence of a fear of the consequences of exercising their ability to rewrite the rules at their convenience. They had the droit de seigneur, and other exemptions from the normal workings of the law, under the ancien regime, now they have lobbyists and the Shock Doctrine. The result has been a progressively dysfunctional system, economically and politically.
This is where the wild, schizophrenic, swings of voting we've seen lately come in. Just as a market will sawtooth dramatically, with wild upswings punctuated by wild downswings, just before a huge crash, so a political culture will experience these wild swings in party allegiance just before a revolution in the form and content of governance. The voters know that things are not going well, that change is needed, but no longer have the old clear choice to tell them how to vote to manage that change. The Democrats are no longer the social democrats of FDR's day, so voting for them no longer works to put the fear of God into the malefactors of great wealth. Nor are the Republicans the folks to vote for if you want change slowed down, in fact, they are the only party showing any willingness to actually make radical changes.
The obvious problem we face in health care finance right now is that a generation or two without a healthy, disciplining, fear of social democracy, has let monopolies and cartels grow to dominate health insurance and the providers of big ticket medical services, Big Pharma and the hospital chains. We don't really need anything but old fashioned trust-busting, of the kind that even in the era of TR, much less FDR, we would long since have tackled with gusto, to get the system back to holding prices down so that everyone could easily afford the health insurance they want, and would buy if affordable, and the few who couldn't afford it would be taken care of. Tamed, disciplined, private enterprise, run by people with some residual fear of the guillotine, if only in the attenuated form of fear of the social democrats winning the next election, could get the job of social insurance done every bit as well as any direct govt program. That's how social insurance is successfully implemented in most of Europe, where the folks who run insurance companies must still have some residual fear of the guillotine, or Social Democrats. But breaking up the monopolies and cartels in the industry is the one solution you don't hear, from anybody. The folks who profit from the cartels are the unchallenged ruling class, the politically unchallengeable, and so we won't, can't, have any change until we go beyond the current political system, and the ruling class is sent to the showers, if not the guillotine. They've lost their most distant fear of it, and nothing else will restrain them from the daily temptation of rewriting the rules at and to their pleasure. Eventually the revolutions they keep inflicting on the rest of us will dissolve the loyalty of even the hardhat types to the system that hasn't served them for a long time now, and this revolution they are making will slip from their control.
This revolution we are experiencing now, with the unanswered Shock Doctrine inflicted on us by the priviliged, is not a good thing. The revolution slipping from their control is almost guaranteed to be, at least in the short term, a very much worse thing. The White Terror is always bloodier and more destructive than any Red Terror, quite aside from the general and common destruction that will ensue if the revolution we are already in turns violent. History is on our side and all of that, but so much unnecessary grief could be avoided if only we were able to take advantage of the opportunity that our system of governance provides to make revolutionary change in the form and content of governance without violence. But our democracy has devolved beyond that capacity to renew itself, or so it seems. And, oh, that it seems that way to tired, old DFH gtomkins is admittedly of no practical consequence whatever. But when we see the majority of the electorate thrashing about, sawtoothing wildly from one extreme to another in their voting, I think we need to worry that this view of things isn't confined to burn-out cases such as myself. When most people give up on the idea that their votes mean anything, yet very ugly realities dictate that they nevertheless find some way to make their meaning heard and their needs addressed, we will have revolution, whether gtomkins would have it or not.