Posted on 11/04/2004 10:55:38 PM PST by thegreatbeast
This hurts. The convictions and the dreams of American liberalism have genuinely failed to carry the day; and so, for the sake of liberalism, but also for the sake of America, it is the hour for making discriminations among the varieties of despair.
There certainly are grounds for despair. In their first term, without a popular mandate, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney governed in a radically sectarian manner, in conformity with only the wishes of their hallowed base; and there is no reason to think that the popular mandate that they have now secured for a second term will provoke them to reconsider their virulence and their smallness and their indifference to the evidence of experience beyond their own. In the aftermath of this election, the president speaks about unifying the country, but he spoke that way in the aftermath of the last election, and he became the most spectacular disuniter of America in contemporary history. We must not expect the Bush administration to rise above its theology, its secrecy, its instrumental attitude toward the courts, its sympathy for the rich, its economicist approach to health care, its easy conscience about the exploitation of the environment, its belief in its own infallibility, its regular sensation of perfection. There is no sign that the Bush administration has any good idea about how to correct its course in Iraq or to put an end once and for all to Osama bin Laden; or that it regards anti-Americanism as a serious impediment to American values and American interests abroad. The Bush administration may now be expected to behave triumphally and (as the talking heads say) to move forward with its agenda. Hard times, brutish times, lie ahead.
But there is a kind of despair, a glamorous pessimism, that liberals must at all costs avoid. The cartography of the electoral college may show a continent of red with some blue lesions at the extremities; but the popular vote in the election of 2004 was 51 percent for Bush and 48 for Kerry, and those are not the numbers of a political or philosophical rout. Fifty-one to forty-eight: Those are the numbers, rather, of a conspicuously unclear and unthrilling Democratic candidate, whose advantage in money did not offset a disadvantage in authenticity. But the important point is that, all the healing pieties of the morning after notwithstanding, this is a country divided against itself about many matters of first principle. The diversity of worldviews upon which we pride ourselves is haunting us. In such a welter of fundamental differences, the work of argument and organization becomes even more necessary. American liberalism did not die on November 2. It merely lost an election.
There is honor, moreover, in a certain kind of loss. In our distracted and accelerated and gamed society, with its religion of winning, we sometimes forget this. But the many millions of Americans who believe that the tax code should be more fair; and that one of the ends of government is to bother itself about its neediest and least fortunate citizens; and that the morality of the market is not all the morality that a society requires; and that the Bible is not the basis of a democratic political order, or of our political order; and that robust stem-cell research, and science more generally, is a primary social good; and that gay marriage is a question of equality and not the beginning of the end of civilization; and that American troops must not be sent to war ignorantly or dogmatically, or without the means to win; and that the good reputation of the United States in the world is one of its most powerful historical instruments--the many millions of Americans who believe these things are not wrong. They are merely not a majority. But they are a very large minority.
This is not to say that the wounding outcome of this election should fill liberals with a sense of their own purity. Not everybody to the left of Bush is like everybody else to the left of Bush; and it would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party to wallow now in the sort of Michael Moore leftishness that made many Americans worry whether John Kerry was sufficiently obsessed with American security, and sufficiently excited about American power, to protect them at home and to promote their purposes abroad. (On the question of American power, the American people are right and Ted Kennedy is wrong.) An internecine quarrel must now begin. But it cannot begin where there is only alienation, and the self-fulfilling confusion of the Bush administration with the United States of America. This country is bigger than its every president. This Constitution is not easy to destroy. This is not the apocalypse. But it is the most formidable challenge to American liberalism in our time.
What a bunch of wankers. What a bunch of girlie men.
BTTT
Yes it is, flee for Canada, flee for Canada. They have socialize medicine, fly vacines...and medical pot!
Let them keep talking like that.
Losers talking like losers.
So??? So did Bill Clinton but the media didn't demand unity from a divided nation then.
Dem party sounds more and more like a doomsday cult waiting for the mothership to take them back to their home planet.
Let them go to Cuba
The New Republic is beginning to sound like the American Conservative...
I am seriously beginning to think we need to put these whackjobs in a mental hospital before they hurt themselves or someone else.
51% is something they haven't seen in over 20 yrs. We've seen it a number of times.
How about France?
Oh really. Bill Clinton got 43% in 1992 and 49% in 1996. Not what I'd call a mandate. After the close outcome in 2000, I'd say a president who gets elected with a majority of the popular vote for the first time in 16 and sees his party increase their majorities in both houses of Congress, is a president with a mandate from the people. And George W.Bush isn't gonna sit on his hands for the next 4 years either.
But the Left has tried its darnedest for decades!
France..... they would never recover... sounds good
Yep I hope they will enjoy it as they continue to loose
France, Denmark, Germany, any of those will do fine, thank you.
Amen. Ain't it grand?
By their definition, when has it NOT been "divided"?
Divided to them seems to mean when there is a diversity of opinion. Well, DUH! There is a diversity of opinion even among Bush voters. These people need to get out of the office more often, maybe mingle with people who don't think precisely as they do.
Where is the gag alert on this monumental piece of petulant drivel?
Sounds like we'd be breeding Germans.
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