My reaction to the US election was, like for many people, one of depression and deja-vu. I had gone into election night with the foreboding familiar to any supporter of the England soccer team in a major tournament – having written off their chances after a lacklustre qualifying campaign, supporters’ spirits are lifted by a sudden finding of form in the first rounds, only to be dashed and deflated by the inevitable defeat in the latter stages of the knockout contest. So yes, things were looking promising, but the polls were showing Bush with a slight lead and plenty could still go wrong, which of course it did, and by the time CNN was showing urban precincts in Florida swinging to Bush and tradesports.com veered from betting 70% for Kerry to win to 80% for Bush, I went to bed, awaking on Wednesday to find the bad dream was for real.
There is plenty to feel negative and depressed about this result, and I detail my principal negative thoughts further below, but there are things to feel more positive about as well, which I will explore first.
The positive spin
- The poisoned chalice and the pendulum effect. One can take the view that the election did not represent any kind of secular shift in US politics. The US electorate saw Bush as committed to “seeing the business through” in Iraq, the troops were strongly pro-Bush, and Kerry’s message on Iraq was opaque to say the least. The Democrats were never going to comfortably “own” the Iraq war, something the electorate will have sensed, and a Kerry administration would have been hamstrung from the start by the problems of Iraq and the deficit. As a friend commented, “some races you wish you could just sit out.” The reasonable hope would be that in four years’ time there will be intense Bush and Republican fatigue and the Democrats will have a good chance of across the board electoral successes.
- Republican over-reach. The combination of Bush trumpeting his mandate, the majorities in Congress, and the zeal of Republican true-believers in wishing to forge new realities ahead of any political consensus supporting them, could well lead to Republicans pushing a moral, tax-cutting and pre-emptive foreign policy agenda beyond the ability of even Karl Rove to stitch together an electoral coalition in support of it.
- Secular liberal trends. One could characterise the victory of “moral” politics in the election as a kind of “last hurrah” for those conservatives still morally indignant about the sexual revolution. The trend towards sexual liberalism was not started by government and will not easily be reversed by government. The realities of a sexually liberated society do not stack up with the fearful prognostications of conservative moralists and hence there is a hollowness at the core or their politics. There just is no widespread appetite in the US for going back to the 1950s and any electoral advantage from flirting with this idea might be exected to be short-lived. The fact that conservatives are only successfully fighting gay marriage, rather than acceptance of gay sex for instance, shows how far they have already lost this battle.
- Bush support was not “whacko”. It has been too easy for liberals to characterise the Bush administration as malevolent, incompetent and corrupt and for anyone who supports it to be somehow venal or stupid. But in fact plenty of intelligent, down-to-earth and astute people supported Bush, and it was always a fatal weakness of much liberal rhetoric that this was simply not possible. I first thought the election would go to Bush after the Republican National Convention, where a powerful display of moderate Republican support for Bush just gave the lie to the idea that Bush was an incompetent tool of crazy neo-cons. Too many respectable and patriotic Americans were supporting him for this to ring true. A lot of credit must go to Giuliani and McCain for standing square with Bush to bolster this image of solid, sensible support, but there were intelligent and moderate Bush supporters the country-over who would have provided powerful reassurance to less politically plugged-in voters that Bush was not the crazy danger he was being caricatured as. Bush has, and needs to retain, the support of intelligent, moderate conservatives, and this will be some bar on how bad things can get for liberals.
- Hard-assed approach to global security. It just may be the case that the aggressive, pre-emptive use of US military force is the best solution to the current crisis in the middle east, with its simmering threats to the security of Israel and to global oil supplies. The case for this cannot be “proved”, but it is the essence of the neo-con idea that by the time a threat can be proved satisfactorily to the “reality based community” then it is too late. This hard-assed neo-con approach is susceptible to self-deception, into becoming nothing more than blood-soaked neo-imperialism, but it could also in retrospect be seen to have been boldly pre-emptive. We may never really get to know the truth of this, but the latter interpretation cannot simply be ruled out, and a willingness to believe in this was a cornerstone of Bush’s electoral support.
The negative spin
- Mendacity and nastiness of the Right. Those of us who follow politics closely are acutely aware of the nature of much of the punditry and politicking of the Right during the election, something which I think the vast majority of the electorate were unaware of. There is a positive spin in this to the extent that voters were not endorsing this mendacity and dirtiness because they were not conscious of it, but there is a negative spin in that there is a real threat to democracy from the way in which certain conservatives are prepared to play politics in order to gain power. Bush and his leading supporters were not “straight-up” with the public about all of the reasons for the war in Iraq (the security power-play in the region has long term implications which are just not touched on in the mainstream public discourse), about the deficit (a deliberate “starving of the beast” to outflank any Democrat spending initiatives), the tax-cuts (portraying them as benefiting the middle class and small businesses), the gay marriage constitutional amendment (which had no chance of being enacted), to give just some examples. The Swift Boat smear campaign, the naked partisanship from evangelical pulpits, the dangling of gay-baiting and anti-abortion red meat with no hope or intention of delivering on a back-to-the-1950s moral agenda, all leave a sour taste in the mouth about the mendacity of a Rovian conservative politics which was cheered to the rafters by plenty of commentators in the mainstream media and the blogosphere who should have known better. Democrats have to stand for civility, forbearance and respect in political discourse, and for them to follow the Republicans down the Rovian path would be for them to lose their rasion d’etre. But if Rove’s is the elixir for winning elections in the current US polity, then Democrats have plenty to be depressed and afraid about.
- Sense of being a politically exposed minority. The Democrat coalition has long been seen as fragile, tacking together as it does urban liberals, socially conservative Hispanics and African Americans and parts of the white working class. Perhaps the combination of security, moral values and Rovian tactics might be sufficient to sunder the Democrat coalition to the extent that it has no realistic chance of power without a major transformation of the political landscape. Urban liberals would become a besieged minority in an America perhaps increasingly succumbing to a politics based on an appeal to patriotism and “religious values”, a kind of demagogic politics akin to Franco’s Spain or Peron’s Argentina. And while one could expect liberal Republicans to balk at these comparisons, there are ample warnings from history to make them ponder their complicity in the fruits of Rovian politics.
- The transformative Republican gameplan. In the 2004 election the Democrats were already significantly outflanked by having to take a patriotic position on an ugly neo-con war and a tax-raising, limited-spending position due to an ugly Republican deficit. This outflanking could be seen as part of a deliberate Republican effort to transform the political landscape in a way which would make it hard for Democrats to win elections or, more significantly perhaps, to have much room for manoeuvre if they did win them. With the more ample mandate and control over Congress that the Republicans now enjoy, it can only be a source of fear for Democrats what new projects will be undertaken to outflank them still further come the next elections.
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