I'm still wading out from under piles of distractions (ten speeches in two months!) hoping to get around to that longer post-election essay in which I'll offer a few suggestions how to deal with this new world we find ourselves in.
Meanwhile, there's this.
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My initial reactions to the election can be found at http://www.davidbrin.blogspot.com/
where I look at some reasons we were fooled into optimism before last Tuesday. Do go have a look.
There I comment on the trends that seemed so strong - e.g. that incredible wave of defections by the moderate and libertarian Conservative Intelligencia - plus signs of massive voter turnout. Both seemed cause for hope.
What we did not count on was Karl Rove actually finding the "4 million missing evangelicals" that he aimed to "go get". He got em, helped by America's protestant pastors, pulpit-thumping at levels that we haven't seen since... well, the Great Awakening or the Know Nothing era. (Take comfort in the cyclical pattern that these waves eventually ebb.)
The maps at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ show that this is, indeed, a war between rural and urban America. And I plan to further comment upon that. But even more so, it appears to represent a surge of resentment against intellectualism. (It might even be viewed as a memic immune response to surging education levels in urban America.)
Below (not part of http://www.davidbrin.blogspot.com/) is a statistical breakdown by CNN. In a year when voter turnout hugely increased, George W Bush seems not to have added even one percent to the number of post-graduates who voted for him, while those without high school came out for him in droves.
EDUCATION................Bush.....vs 2000
No High School (4%)......49%......+10
H.S. Graduate (22%)......52%.......+3
Some College (32%).......54%......+3
College Graduate (26%)..52%.....+1
Postgrad Study (16%).....44%......+0I would love to see these stats weighted and corrected for the increased voter turnout. Of course they would thus show a PLUMMET in support from well-educated Americans. Including, at the very top, conservative intellectuals like George Will and William F. Buckley.
Now of course it is tempting to take smug comfort from the fact that "smart America" wised up. But an apparent decay of Democratic support among the poor and resentful offers a lesson for liberalism that is more than sobering. Elsewhere I discuss why and how liberals brought this on themselves, by always emphasizing guilt and never joy. Never pride. (And clearly the masses deeply crave a sense of pride.)
http://www.davidbrin.com/progressparadoxarticle.html
One sobering mea culpa: essays like the one I offered at http://www.davidbrin.com/neoromantics.html - dissecting the neoconservative movement in its weird detail - turned out to be addressed at groups who were already persuaded. Alas.
There is one comforting aspect, of course. American society IS slowly becoming better educated. Shouldn't that feed a counter-trend as ever higher fractions of the population pass a critical threshold of education?
That's simplistic, though. We should recall that rural America is not solely populated by bucktooth bubbas (though they clearly made the crucial margin this time.) Rural America is filled with very smart people, many of them graduates of state or ag universities (that city taxpayers built for them). While it's true that many of their dynamic brothers and sisters fled to the city, where the media are much more diverse, those who stayed behind include many savvy people. They run their businesses and their politics with great perception and devotion to pragmatic self-interest. And nobody should mock their faith-based devotion to what they perceive as "moral values" .
They view this "culture war" as having been forced upon them, not the other way around.
They see themselves as defending a traditional America that liberals have all-too readily disdained. And while we know they were manipulated by a monstrously cynical clique, it does no harm to credit rural folk with some basically positive impulses that were twisted and manipulated by clever monsters.
Only when we do that will we have a chance of offering a truly competitive political product.
More on this later....
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Meanwhile, let me add the following lagniappes - some of them sublime and others satirical.
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Some of you recall I used a metaphor - "the Union has been conquered by the Confederacy". Some ridiculed this, pointing to the Plains and Mountain states, forgetting that those areas DID allow slavery before the Civil War.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/rundgren/FREESTATES.jpg
I do wish this metaphor had been used in Indiana and Ohio, reminding them of ancestors who died at Gettysberg.
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Send RICCOLA COUGH DROPS AND LOZENGES by the crateload to democratic senators to soothe the pain of filibusters?
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Join Canada? http://idisk.mac.com/glwebb-public/new_map.jpg
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I wish I could find the "red world - blue world" map that shows the USA and Saudi Arabia in red, vs the rest of Earth. --------
I recommend: Godly and Worldly America Simon Schama Friday November 05 2004 The Guardian
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I hope you have all seen Gary Wills' cogent post election analysis... and the toweringly bitter/sarcastic/hilarious rant that Adam Felber gave on NPR (about "culture war"). I have copies of both and will send them if folks want me to.....
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to Felber's delicious rant, add this piece of silliness:
"Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West Coast! Plus Hawaii. Ok, that's a start. We've got most of the fresh water, all of Broadway, nearly all the good beaches that aren't too humid to use, and Mt. St. Helens. We can dehydrate them or bury them in lava. And no more show tunes! "
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Seriously, is this guy onto something with the "humidity" reference? Nearly all the red states have lots of pesky, biting insects. Well, not Colorado, I guess.
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Finally there's this from the blog of Patrik Farley whose web-graphic novels are among the best things on the internet. (See especially http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/):
"Friends: don't despair. The Orcs who elected Bush their Savior from the Islamo-Fagg Menace crave your despair like a junky craves heroin. Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Coulter, and the yammering dipshits of Fox News are at this hour deep in their tribal gloatfest, pounding their drums and bellowing around the bonfire. Your despair is their sweet, sweet nectar -- don't give it to them. Deny the Neo-Medievalists the gift of your heartbreak. Yea verily, as the inevitable avalanche of shitt rumbles down upon us all these next 4 years, get in touch with your inner Hunter Thompson, surf the insanity, become the Buddhist warrior who leaps into battle with a laughing heart. The Neo-Medievalists are a grim lot, and we won't be doing ourselves or the world any favors by sinking to their joyless depths."
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