POST-ELECTION REFLECTIONS

Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon Issues Analyst

[11-10-04]


So the voters, for a variety of reasons, have narrowly supported an agenda that includes an aggressive foreign and military policy, a self-reinforcing plutocracy fueled by tax cuts for the rich, a growing national debt, attempts to dismantle the Social Security system, termination of inheritance taxes, assaults on reproductive rights and domestic partnerships, a devil-may-care attitude in environmental and energy policies, and a Supreme Court dominated by ideological conservatives. They have voted for a corporate feudalism to which they will be increasingly beholden. They have voted, furthermore, to support a theocracy dictated by Catholic bishops and Protestant evangelicals, a Holy American Empire eager to assert its power at home and abroad. Voters may not have understood what the whole package amounts to; often they voted on symbolic grounds. But the package was made clear in many ways during the campaign.

The only consolation for those who feel like moving to Canada is that the Bush administration will have to deal with the mess it has created -- things like Iraq and the national debt -- and a Republican Congress must still face realities like widespread support for reproductive rights and internal division in their party over civil unions and domestic partnerships. The last Republican Revolution occurred ten years ago, and it turned off the voters. Moderate Republicans in Congress, especially from the Northeast, will play an important role in holding off extremist legislation. A Republican-appointed Supreme Court may chip away at Roe v. Wade but is not likely to reverse it; the Court may also find itself forced to find some middle ground on the civil unions issue. Arlen Specter as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee can be expected to resist the appointment of ideological conservatives, if only to minimize Democratic filibusters.

Democrats who wanted to do away with the electoral college after Al Gore's win of the popular vote in 2000 may feel more subdued after George Bush's three-and-a-half million "mandate." Who wants the country to be controlled by the red states in the South and the West without the "containment" achieved by the electoral college? On the other hand, they may want to give better expression to the blue voters in the red areas. Eventually we will probably come to some form of proportional voting, either by Congressional districts as in Maine and Nebraska, or (even better) by allocating the state's votes as in the Colorado referendum. Proportional voting, as Lani Guinier pointed out, enables people to say how they want to be represented rather than "be districted." Both parties, of course, will be turning to their computers to see how they would have fared under these various plans.

How Much of a Surprise?

Going into the 2004 presidential election we knew that the country was almost equally divided between red and blue, conservative and liberal, Fox News and CNN, church-goers and college graduates, those who want to reduce the role of government to punishing wrongdoers and those who see government as responsible for the general welfare. (Yes, that's how majorities of each of these groups voted according to the polls.) Pundits often spoke of a "divided America," both because of the 50-50 divide but because most issues were framed in ways that presented clear alternatives, often diametrical opposites. Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect has called the election a "cultural census."

We also knew that George W. Bush, who had campaigned as "a uniter, not a divider," and who was given the presidency by a Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court, immediately became a divider, on the principle that the victor deserves all the spoils. Al Gore was too quick to be a good sport, not only conceding the election for the sake of "national unity" and "the legitimacy of the presidency," but declining to lead a government in exile, a shadow cabinet, or even a loyal opposition.

Bush took advantage of national unity after 9/11 to impose Draconian new laws like the Patriot Act; his Congressional allies refused to develop legislation collaboratively and played fast and loose with voting procedures when it was to their advantage; and he dictated policy to the agencies of the federal government, creating dismay among professionals in the EPA, the Department of Energy, the Forest Service and the Park Service, the State Department, and the Pentagon.

We knew the general demographics, too.

The "blue" areas were on the west coast, the Northeast, the large industrial cities, African-American communities (both rural and urban), and university towns across the country. They included many who have been disadvantaged by corporate power (labor, African Americans, Hispanics, the poor), people who are often regarded as unworthy and unfit to vote; but they also included many who are not disadvantaged but want to find inclusive solutions that can be made effective through public policy, people who are often vilified as "elitists" out of touch with economic and cultural realities.

The "red" areas were in the South, in rural areas (both the Midwest and the "intermountain West"), in affluent suburbs, and among religious conservatives. In one way or another they buy into the language of individualism, self-reliance, personal salvation, and distrust of most forms of public assistance, sometimes even including public schools. All too frequently they convey the impression that they have an intrinsic right to rule the country, whether because of money, achievement, skin color, masculine assertiveness (no "girly men" allowed), or firmly held, uncompromising moral and religious values.

We knew that both parties were mobilizing to register voters and get them out on election day. We also knew that the Republican Party was preparing to challenge voters wherever they could, especially those who had not voted recently, or whose addresses had changed, or who might otherwise look like welfare cheats or ex-cons. In some places there was a campaign of intimidation, designed to keep people from showing up at the polls if they could not show proper identification or had outstanding traffic tickets (yes, this one was bruited about in several places).

Wild Cards

We also had some notion of the "wild cards" that might prompt people to abandon their traditional voting patterns. These were in three areas.

1. Republican campaign strategists exploited the "social issues," most notably abortion rights and gay marriage, as wedges to separate voters -- especially Catholics and African Americans -- from their usual loyalties. This succeeded in some sectors despite the fact that many educated suburbanites who ordinarily vote Republican are tolerant in these areas and do not want to see prejudice enacted into law or inserted into the Constitution -- and despite the fact that many Catholics and evangelicals have a broad concern for social justice and refuse in conscience to make decisions on the basis of a few "litmus test" issues.

2. Democratic campaign strategists knew that "economic issues" ---- stagnant economy, unemployment, inadequate minimum wage, export of jobs, growing national debt, the need to strengthen Social Security ---- were their strongest suit. And yet there were many voters who did not make the connection between these issues and their own lives, or who were so grateful for the $500 rebate checks on their taxes that they abandoned the Democratic fold. In What's the Matter With Kansas, Thomas Frank has traced the ways working-class voters can be lured into voting against their own interests. (Suburbanites did not make the same error.) And then there was always the possibility that people who might be expected to be part of the "Democratic base" ---- those at the lower end of the income scale ---- might not see much of a difference between the two campaigns and therefore might not turn out to vote. They are grass-roots Naderites, we might say.

3. The "new fact" of the early twenty-first century is terrorism, made all the more unsettling because the most destructive actions on 9/11 were not government-sponsored but a privateering operation with no clear base and exempt from the many kinds of pressure that can be exerted on governments. Some of the women who had supported Democratic candidates became "security moms." George W. Bush depicted himself as the candidate who would respond to terror swiftly and surely, even though his behavior often suggested that he might be too quick on the draw and would stubbornly defend his decisions. People worried about Iraq voted for Kerry; those worried about terrorism voted for Bush. (Augustine commented that the Romans ought to have worshiped Alien Aggression as a deity, since that was always the excuse for their wars of expansion.)

4. There was also a major "perception" issue. Both Bush and Kerry graduated from Yale in the Sixties and were both members of Skull and Bones. But Kerry looked like a New England "liberal elitist," and he even spoke French, while Bush, despite his patrician Connecticut background, managed to look like an aw-shucks Texan. It is an old story that small-town and rural people do not like being condescended to; they may feel that any complicated presentation does that, but they certainly identified with George Bush when he was dissected with ironic humor by Michael Moore and Al Franken. Their reaction was expressed in the mode of direct vilification, without a touch of irony.

Political scientists will start analyzing the realignment of the parties that has been going on since Barry Goldwater and George Wallace and still may not be finished. John Kennedy was the last non-Southern Democrat to be elected President; LBJ, Carter, and Clinton were the only ones to make it. The Democrats continue to be pulled in opposing directions: some want them to give more emphasis to traditional Democratic constituencies and programs, while others think the road to success is to move closer to the middle. Although third parties have occasionally been the catalyst for lasting realignments -- the Republicans began as a third party, and much of the Progressive Party's agenda was taken over by both Democrats and Republicans -- it is clear that Ralph Nader will not play that role.

Commentators mention over and over the perception that Bush emanated "strong leadership" and was committed to "moral values." Many voters act on the basis of image, impulse, and one-liners. This year they may have been overwhelmed by the speed with which issues like prayer in schools, the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, and especially gay marriage, all became subjects for sloganeering rather than civil discourse and legislative creativity. Then it became easy to blame everything on "liberal elitists," the "gay agenda," and abortionists, as though everything would be all right except for these alien infections in the body politic.

And that brings us to the "religion gap," always mentioned by the pundits, although some of them have begun backtracking, pointing out possible flaws in the exit polls.

The Religion Gap

Democratic strategists never understood or engaged the religion question, although they could have drawn upon the advice of a host of legal scholars to gain orientation for the campaign and educate the public about a complex issue.

Voters were left, then, with a misleading alternative: either religious beliefs ought to rule political discourse, and government ought to support one or more religious institutions; or religion ought to be excluded altogether from public discourse, making it what Stephen Carter calls a mere "private preference."

That is to ignore fifteen centuries of experience in the West. We learned, first of all, to differentiate between church and state as institutions, even while refusing to separate religion and politics, since we knew that religious concerns are relevant to the whole of life. More crucially, we learned the value of the secular state which has no official ties with any religious institutions but guarantees religious freedom, including the right to change religions or have no religion.

If religious commitments are relevant to politics but become dangerous when they invade and control politics, how are we to proceed? Recently there has been much use of the metaphor of translation for the move from religious to political discourse; it has been developed in a convincing way by legal theorist Kent Greenawalt and philosopher Robert Audi.

Religious convictions can best contribute to public debate, they say, when they are translated into "publicly accessible reasons." They do not question the right of citizens, and even candidates and legislators, to express their religious convictions in civic discussion. But they argue that coercive laws and policies, those that constrain the activities of others, must be based upon "secular" reasons (reasons shared with others, beyond particular religious groups) that will be both convincing and workable in the secular sphere. They go on to point out that those who hold office in the executive and judicial branches, with the task of carrying out or interpreting the law, have a special obligation to keep personal religious convictions out of their actions and rulings.

It is exactly in this area of "coercive" measures that the Religious Right has tried in recent years to change the rules, claiming that it is an offense to religious convictions to say that they should not be expressed in laws, court decisions, and government actions. Then we find ourselves in the midst of what James Davison Hunter calls "culture wars." Hunter suggests that culture wars have an intrinsic tendency toward Manichaean thinking: they are based in competing moral visions, with the result that those who disagree are placed beyond the bounds of legitimacy, and as a result there is an urge to "force political solutions" rather than trust continued dialogue.

In a First Amendment society, with courts protecting freedom of association and expression, it is easy for religious people to be persuaded that religion is the only thing that "gets no respect." Then any excesses on the part of the Religious Right are regarded as an understandable reaction to a relentlessly "secular" government. To prove their point they engage in provocative acts such as putting the Ten Commandments on stone in public places or passing out tracts in public schools, then cry persecution when objections are raised. Such actions are defended, furthermore, with the argument that religion is an "absolute commitment," as though this makes it exempt from the rules of political behavior and even confers the privilege of defining those rules. The problem, of course, is that many competing religious groups can claim the right to carry their "absolute commitments" into the public sphere; this leads inevitably to intolerance and eventually to open religious warfare. Thus the West has chosen to keep absolute claims out of the public square and develop a viable "secular state," while not denying that religious commitments are always relevant to issues of human good.

We have seen a stunning reversal of the position that John F. Kennedy took when he addressed a group of ministers, mostly Southern Baptists, in Dallas in 1960. His purpose then was to defuse a widespread suspicion about the Catholic church's relation to politics. Now Southern Baptists are more likely to be allied with Catholic bishops, both on specific issues and on the relation between church and state.

Christianity has tried a number of relationships between church and state. At times one of them claims, perhaps even succeeds, in controlling the other. More often they strike a modus vivendi, the state dealing with "temporalities" and the church dealing with "spiritualities." But even this arrangement can take different forms. Sometimes the state enforces religious uniformity for its own benefit, to reduce the likelihood of disagreement about the basic issues of life. At other times the church concerns itself with the moral transformation of public life, as we saw in the "social Christianity" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in England and America, or in the civil rights movement of the Sixties, both of them inspired by the prophets, the gospels, and a long tradition of Christian concern for society as a whole.

It is time to resume these old discussions in the light of challenging new questions at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when we must deal simultaneously with a global economy and with close encounters between diverse religious convictions. The most reasonable and workable response is more likely to be that of the Interfaith Alliance, the public counterpart to the Religious Right, which emphasizes the healing role that all religions can play in the society they share.

Now it's your turn!

As this analysis suggests, the election challenges progressives to engage in the national discussion (if that's not too polite a term) on religion and moral values. We're posting a number of other essays that deal with this from various perspectives, and we hope you'll join in the conversation!

Just send a note, and we'll post it here. As usual, we ask that you identify yourself, at least by name, plus anything else you'd care to tell us about yourself. And we ask that you not engage in sarcastic or demeaning depictions of "the other side," whatever that may be.