The result of the US election reveals a
country deeply split, geographically and ideologically -
or rather theologically - and a people deeply conflicted
internally, since so many Bush voters ended up casting
their ballots for a president whose actual policies on
many issues they disagree with.
The mismatch can
be seen in the victory of the referendum in Florida to
raise the minimum wage - a plank of the John Kerry
campaign nationally, which George W Bush has resolutely
opposed in Washington, but which, as he showed during
the debates, he was totally evasive about during the
campaign. More than 72% of Floridians voted for the
raise, which means that at least 60% of Bush voters
supported a measure that is socially and economically
the antithesis of what their candidate stands for.
There even seems to be some evidence that even
some black religious voters, long a traditional vote
bank for the Democrats, may have succumbed on the "gay
marriage/evangelical" issues and voted for a party that
in some localities is the direct descendant of the
Dixiecrats and the Klan. It was a triumph of the Bush
campaign to do that while still successfully evoking the
coded racism that has been so successful for it across
the country.
In fact, the polls from the
University of Maryland showed that the Bush campaign had
concealed much of its real political and economic agenda
from its supporters, who actually came out on the left
of John Kerry on many issues.
Despite this level
of voter ignorance, even though this was the most
expensive US election in history, with more spent on the
presidential campaigns - more than US$4 billion - than
some small countries' gross domestic products, it also
had more popular participation than ever before. Set
rolling by Howard Dean's grassroots campaign, volunteers
went to work on the Democratic campaign on a scale
unprecedented for many decades.
From safer
states such as New York and Massachusetts, thousands had
taken weeks off work to get out the vote in swing states
such as Pennsylvania - where, incidentally, a core of
British Labour and union volunteers defied Prime
Minister Tony Blair to go and canvass for Kerry.
That flood of volunteers, voter registrations,
and, by US standards, high turnout led to great
Democratic optimism. However, unremarked by them, the
evangelical voters were also turning out in large
numbers. They were motivated in part by state referenda
seeking to ban homosexual marriages, and by the abortion
issue, one of those peculiarly American touchstone
issues that drive away all rational considerations of
war and peace, prosperity and poverty.
However,
while most Kerry supporters were clear on what they were
voting against, the Kerry campaign was much less clear
in showing voters what they would be voting for.
But the key issue was security and terrorism,
where the war on Iraq and, as so many of them still
believe, the "war on terror" of which it is part
motivated Bush voters whose views on these matters were
as faith-based as so much of their voting. As recent
polls have shown, more than 70% of Bush supporters
believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found
in Iraq, and that Saddam Hussein was behind September
11, 2001.
The Bush campaign successfully fudged
these issues, just as the Kerry campaign failed to
articulate them convincingly, even though it was indeed
an uphill struggle against the constant intellectual
erosion of overtly partisan news and talk shows from
Blair's friend.
So what are the consequences,
apart from renewed scrutiny of the US constitution's
creakily democratic processes? I know some New Yorkers
who had already applied for Canadian immigration papers
in fear of a Bush win. Another option, and in some ways
a sensible though unlikely one, would be for the west
coast and northeastern states to secede from the New
Confederacy and join Canada, leaving the cowboy
heartland and the south to the fate they deserve.
However, slightly more likely is that the
Republican Party, under the renewed control of the
deeply conservative ideologues, will march down the dead
end charted by the British Conservative Party and reduce
itself to an unelectable rump by shedding the saner and
more tolerant Republicans, such as governor George
Pataki in New York and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in
California, whose politics are not as right-wing as the
Bible Belt would wish.
And finally, heartened by
the unprecedented mobilization on behalf of the John
Kerry-John Edwards ticket, the Democratic Party may
escape from being a bran-tub of special interests and
minorities and begin to develop an agenda that can
appeal across the board.
At present, so many
blue-collar workers whose wages are frozen, who face
export of their jobs abroad, and whose unemployment
benefits are about to disappear continue to abhor the
Democrats as the party of abortion and gay marriage. If
the Democrats cannot frame a platform that appeals to
those voters, then there is little hope for the
Democratic Party - or for the US, for that matter.
The rest of the world just has to get down and
begin to work out how to carry on together without the
constructive input of the world's strongest military
power.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
