Editor’s Page

Containment or rollback? Of the Republicans, I mean—not communism in the 1950s. It is a question about the (happy) results of the midterm elections. Were they just a vote against George W. Bush or do they represent a decisive shift in the orientation of Americans? Has conservatism been contained or has the American center, which moved right in recent decades, shifted ground? In one way, it doesn’t matter. Bush’s Washington gave us the Baghdad Botch, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the Katrina Calamity, disinvestment in America’s future (aka “tax relief” for the top percentiles), an effort to privatize Social Security, a pharmaceutical reform that is the Medicare equivalent to three-card monte, and non-treatment of our ailing health care system. So voters opted for Democratic checks—both the reality and institutional kinds—on Republican governance.

It is not enough. Americans are disenchanted by the Iraq War, but they aren’t re-enchanted by liberalism. Polls show that only 27 percent of them call the vote a Democratic mandate, while 64 percent say only that it repudiates Republican leadership. Just 13 percent ascribe Democratic victory to support for Democratic programs, only 16 percent to opposition to Republican programs, but 63 percent to anti-Bush sentiment (CNN/Opinion Research Corporation). Studies show no great ideological shifts between 2004 and today: about a fifth of Americans identify as liberals, a third as conservatives, and the rest in the...