David Warren: Letter to USA, V & VI

No matter who wins Stateside on Tuesday (or next May, if the race is close enough for the lawyers to throw into the courts), I shall be disappointed. My regular readers will by now have guessed that I am hoping, nay praying, for a Bush victory. More than that: I am hoping for one that is so shockingly decisive, that it will bring the Democrat Party to its senses, and leave major figures in the mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere asking themselves serious questions about life. But this is really too much to hope.

I shall be disappointed because, even if Mr. Bush wins, I have seen the face of defeat. It is obvious to me, at the end of the most gruelling political campaign that I can remember, over the most extraordinary stakes, that the elites in the media, in the academy, in the legal and other public professions — the "intellectuals" considered together as a class; the "clerisy" as Coleridge called them; the people upon whom a society depends for its thinking — are, in America as much as elsewhere in the West, morally rotted through.

This has been most evident in the media, because the big newspapers, TV networks, and the repulsive entertainment industry of which they have become increasingly a part, are what we see from day to day. Yet the people in the media, whom polls have shown overwhelmingly support Kerry, seldom do any original thinking. They are more reflective of the conditions that made them; they represent the thinking of the larger class.

Letter to USA, VI

On Tuesday, Americans vote. And if the result is anything close, on Wednesday the matter is taken out of the hands of the people, and put, disastrously, in the hands of the lawyers. We wait to see.

The election result is not predictable: to begin with, the turnout will be far higher than in recent U.S. elections. The polls we have been reading are all adjusted to accord with models of voter behaviour that assume previous levels of participation, and much less at stake. They assume such things, as that the "core undecided" will break about two-to-one for the challenger, as has happened in the past. There are various other knobs and dials that must be adjusted to turn the raw material of a poll into a projection of how many will actually vote, and for whom.

Nothing dishonest about this: the pollsters' reputations, and therefore future income, depend on the accuracy of their predictions. Any bias in their models is thus more likely to be subliminal than overt: the legitimate ones aspire to raise their art to the conditions of a science. But they are helpless when all the premises upon which their models have been built, are changed.

And this is the case more broadly. All premises are shifting, and this election will prove a watershed in American, and therefore world history, no matter what the result. That, I believe, is the one predictable thing.

Another matter may be settled in advance. The American electorate is not voting blind. They are choosing between two men who are, in character, deeply representative of their respective constituencies. The manners, mores, and rhetoric of Mr. Bush resonate with conservative, rural and suburban "Middle America". This America is not indifferent to him; it loves him.

The manners, mores, and rhetoric of Mr. Kerry resonate with the more liberal and urban America of the edges. (You see these constituencies in a glance at the red/blue distribution on a map of the states; it becomes clearer still when the map is further subdivided into counties.) And this America does not love Kerry. It hates Bush.

-snip-

(David Warren in The Ottawa Citizen, October 31, 2004)
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David Warren Nailes It here!
Moral Clarity BUMP !

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