Bovine byproducts

In 2004, after George W. Bush won re-election despite the war controversies that had battered his approval ratings, the line went like this: The turnout machine built by campaign advisers Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman was so technologically superior that—combined with the natural GOP advantage on national security—Republicans held an advantage that would allow them to dominate national politics for the next generation. Rove, in the afterglow of victory, famously declared that “a conservative era in American governance could be starting now” and discussed the possibility of a permanent majority.

Two years later, Democrats won control of Congress, and two years after that, the Obama era launched a new set of “for the next generation” narratives. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s data wizards had lapped Republicans in the former art and now science of voter outreach and mobilization. Meanwhile, the GOP was the party of old, white, male straight conservatives in a country that is increasingly less of all those things.

While throwing myself on the mercy of the court let me hasten to plead that there is a difference between pure B.S., and much of what colleagues I respect produce—an alloy of partial B.S. merged with some genuine measure of intelligent and conscientious effort to divine larger truths about the broad patterns shaping our political life.

Those earlier narratives that were served up with such emphatic confidence weren’t flatly wrong. They just failed to reckon with the reality of life: Current trends never continue indefinitely. Politics especially is an infinitely fluid process, refreshed continually by new issues, new circumstances and, above all, new voters with different generational perspectives. Politicians are intelligent people, whose ambitions naturally orient them to accommodate change and find a way to prosper in it.