BTT.
Posted on 11/05/2004 11:13:26 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
As we now know, religion won it for George W Bush. In the closely fought state of Ohio, the name of God was even more effective than that of the Guardian newspaper which, by telling the voters of Clark County to vote for John Kerry, turned them out in unprecedented number for Dubya. Across the nation, only 11 per cent of blacks voted for Bush, but in Ohio that figure was more than 60 per cent higher. Black church leaders in the state urged a Bush vote in order to oppose gay marriage.
These sorts of facts probably dispose most British people to think that nothing comparable could happen here. We don't have so many strong black churches, we don't have many Hispanics (another religiously motivated ethnic group that swung strongly towards Bush), we don't have much religion at all. Except in Northern Ireland, God hasn't got significant numbers of British voters to the polls for more than 50 years.
That last statement is broadly true, but it would be a mistake to look at religion only in a very explicit, churchy sense. What people misleadingly call "the religious Right" in America was voting for the most part on a broad set of moral and cultural questions. The analysts are calling them "values voters". I think they exist in this country.
Here are four people I happen to have met and talked to in the past seven days. Two of them were known to me before this week; two were strangers.
1. The butcher. He does some driving to supplement his income, and he was taking me home from a meeting. He said that he was very patriotic and royalist, and he found that his children at state school were learning nothing about the history of this country, so he mugged it up himself, and taught them. He is not a churchgoer or even a baptised Roman Catholic, but he had transferred two of his children to a Catholic school to get better educational and moral standards, and was pleased with the result.
2. The computer expert. At her son's state primary school, a "special needs" boy in the same class had attacked him on several occasions, once so severely that he needed medical treatment. When she complained to the head, she was told that she was a privileged middle-class person and shouldn't whinge. She took her child out, struggled to find a better school and eventually ended up with one, still state, but more middle-class, where her boy is happy.
3. The secretary. She is trying to find a church secondary school place for her daughter, and has discovered a good Anglican and a good Catholic school, heavily oversubscribed. Under new government rules, these schools are forbidden to interview parents to assess their suitability. The heads, who hate the rules, have to deal with all applications in ways that are absurdly roundabout and opaque. She doesn't yet know whether her daughter has a place.
4. The car mechanic. I met him on a shoot where we were both guests. He said that his next-door neighbour in south London was a single mother whom he liked. Her youngest son became a bit of a latch-key kid and got into bad company, taking drugs. The car mechanic invited the boy to come clay-pigeon shooting with him. He came, he loved it, came again and soon he became a beater in pheasant shoots as well. Then he joined the Army and distinguished himself in Kosovo. The car mechanic was furious at the Government's threat to country sports because he felt that it would choke off healthy opportunities for boys such as this one who enjoy the outdoors more than books, and drive them back to corrosive boredom.
The age range of these four was about 35-60, the annual income range £15,000-£40,000 and the class range from upper working to upper middle. Three were urban and one was suburban. None, so far as I know, was actively involved in a political party. Only one, I think, was a regular churchgoer.
All four are "values voters". What most concerns them is a set of issues that are certainly affected by money but are not, at root, financial. They are issues about culture and morality, and how people - particularly people dear and close to them - can live fulfilled lives.
With greater and lesser degrees of militancy, all four believe that our current culture endangers the values that matter to them. Issues such as marriage (though one is a never-married single mother), standards in school, crime, incivility, respect for Christian ideas, love of country all come together. There is a feeling that life is quite tough for people who try to behave properly and quite easy for those who don't. There is a linked feeling that the public authorities are often actively hostile to good values, particularly in state schools.
For example, it has been reported that, in Islington, the authorities want to change the name of a school from St Mary Magdalene, because a saint's name is "divisive" in a multicultural society. That is the symptom of something very sick, and felt to be sick by millions who never enter a church porch. Special arrangements are being made by the Metropolitan Police so that Muslim officers can wear religious head-dresses, but attacks are launched on those forces (and other public bodies) who use the Cross as part of their symbols. Islamist terrorism naturally sharpens people's resentments about such things.
My four "values voters" probably do not agree in their political views (my impression is that two are broadly on the Right, and two broadly on the Left), but they do all seem, rather desperately, to want something that no politician is offering them. In the United States, and therefore in an American idiom, George W Bush minutely studies the anxieties of such people and tries to attend to them. That is why he won. Here, the Tories don't, and that is why they lose, and lose, and lose.
Take the question of gay marriage. There will be people in America - too many of them - who believe that homosexuals will all go to Hell. If they voted at all, it would have been for Bush. But they will be outnumbered, perhaps 20:1 among Republican voters, by people who have no such virulence, but do believe that marriage is something that can only take place between a man and a woman.
In holding to this view, they are expressing a mixture of religious belief, universal moral tradition, a desire for social cohesion, a reflection of their own experience and a certain common sense. They do not hate homosexuals, but what they do hate is being told that they are primitive bigots. They know they are not, and they are finding their voice.
George W Bush did not promise a great deal to the religious constituency. I bet, for example, that abortion will remain legal during his presidency. But he did get alongside people who resent decadence, the trashing of our culture and the condescension of a rich media elite.
Some say that America has stepped back into the past. I don't think so. As so often with that country, what happens there, will start to happen here. I hope so.
Very astute description of the difference in values and religion.
Did you notice that he mentioned Bush "attends" to their needs, and, he "gets alongside" their views. They still do not understand at all. Bush is one of us. He is not "playing a game", he is moral, patriotic, honest, Christian and he knows and feels a part of the Texas plains where he developed those values. He is one of us as opposed to the snobbish, pompous, self identifying "intellectuals" of the east.
We sense that he is of us, of the heartland, and therefore we understand the man.
They just cannot get or see what we see in this president and they just cannot understand us.
Just pray for them.
Send condoms?
LOL
There still is a class mentality in Europe.
Of the many lessons of learned during my time on FR, one is certainly that the Telegraph is quite possibly the best newspaper in the world, even for an American audience.
What say you, gentlemen?
Most rational article I've seen in a London paper in quite a while. I'm sure there must be many over there who are tired of the "anything goes" philosophy being pushed on them. I sure am.
We could have started a values revolution - in time, everything else will fall into place.
Now I do too!
It speaks well to the state of conservative British news reporting, and the lack thereof here in the US, that two of my my three favorite news publications are the Economist and the Telegraph, with the other being the Wall Street Journal.
Ping!
There is no culture war in Europe. Virtually all Europeans are socialists and liberals. In Europe, the elections are usually a choice between liberal and more liberal. Ironically, most Europeans are more conservative on immigration than Republican politicians.
Pardon - I thought you were posting to my #7 comment.
It's early and the coffee hasn't kicked in.
fyi
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