Morals, Money, Bush & The Counter-Revolution
as written for the Italian monthly Menabò

For all those European members of the same Enlightenment, cosseted in their universal health-care, their 35-hour work-weeks, their cosy perks in the European Union, I suggest nice, cheap package tours to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and the like. Observe, that ye may learn. For it is there that the ‘morons' live, and Bush is one of them. Not nuanced, not addicted to soufflés, hardly much concerned with Jacques Derrida or the common agricultural policy (more incomprehensible, even, than the late departed deconstructionist), but filled with the kind of people he is like, a man who, in James Bowman's utterly ‘straight' words, is ‘just an ordinary guy trying to do what is best for his country.' (A word of explanation. I am an European by birth and formation, I am an intellectual, I am not a Yahoo. This, lest you think me another moron. But I have lived in Iowa and Texas and Florida and, though I now live in Kerry's home-state of Massachusetts – where Bush actually increased his share of the vote – have trolled ‘out there' from north to south and east to west. I consider the northeastern states, the west coast and bits of the upper Midwest, to be the eccentric, unrepresentative shores of a country I have grown to love.)

This is not, however, the reason why John Kerry lost the election or why George W. Bush won it. It is perceptions that count, ‘gut feelings', intuitions, a sense of one's place in the world, what psephologists and the pitch-men of the monstrous advertising industry call one's ‘comfort level'. These inner convictions and (often) unstated feelings are rich, complex and almost impossible to fathom, and artists are far more likely to get them right (intuitively) than scientists armed with measuring sticks, surveys and charts.

Let me offer a single, invented example of what I mean: in brackets are the assumptions likely to be made by political ‘analysts'. Harold B. is black (therefore a Democrat) and lives and works in Tennessee (Republican) as a gang foreman for the electricity company, a lower-management job he's held for twelve years (Republican?). He is now thirty-eight (A swing-voter). Had he been college educated, he now knows, he would be on the management side; instead, he is unionized and on an hourly wage (Democrat). His take-home wage is roughly $35,000 a year (Democrat), but his company has recently been merged with another and he is insecure about his job (Democrat). He has been married twice, the first time to a black woman who works for the city government (Democrat) and has two children he sees only intermittently (Republican, because he is bitter about the treatment he received in the courts from an elected Democratic judge). Nor does he think much of the way his children are being educated by unionized teachers (Republican). He knows several co-workers who have been to Iraq and have told him that the war, which he considered unavoidable (Republican) is going badly (Democrat). His second wife is feisty, young, Hispanic amd hard-working (Democrat), but has liberal attitudes (Republican) and generally despises politics and politicians (Democrat). He is indifferent to religion (Democrat) but believes himself to be a responsible working-class citizen (Republican). He did not vote in the last election (swing vote) but if he had, he would not have voted for Al Gore (Republican) because he thinks Gore would have taken him for granted (Republican). In his eyes, the same applies to Kerry (Republican). He knows no homosexuals (Republican), and certainly can't quite understand why they should want to marry one another (Republican). His co-workers and buddies, many of whom do not vote, wouldn't dream of voting Republican, because that's the big money party (Democrat), but he himself thinks of himself as an ‘independent' (Republican).

I could go on about the intimate details that might influence his choice, but that is enough to show that there is no way a journalist, a social scientist, or a political activist can be sure which way Harold B., or anyone else, is going to vote. Indeed, he has no sure conviction himself. Those who seek his vote, therefore, must somehow wrest it from him. Now, if there is one thing I am sure about in the recent election, it is that this is something the millions of Harold B's, even in New York, do not like. Because he (and those other millions) thinks ‘independently', he doesn't like to be sold a bill of goods. In fact, over his whole adult life, he has become increasingly resistant to anyone who seeks to seduce him or sell him anything. For him (and them) journalists, ad-men, the CEO's of big companies (including his own), lawyers and politicians are all cut of the same cloth. They are not only useless and idle and to big for their boots, they represent a sort of insidious evil which he cannot identify rationally but understands is destructive of the often painful but idealistic America his mother and grandmother have told him about.

If it costs a billion dollars to win an election and those running for president have to be millionaires, or take money from millionaires, who gets those millions? Advertisers, TV, newspaper, lawyers, that's who. Why should an election cost billions when voting is such a simple matter? In other words, it is the very excess of politics and of the money it involves, the superfoetation of opinion and pundits and talking heads who think they know how he is going to vote, that actually revolts him. This does not make it any easier for the average American to choose who to vote for. In fact, it makes it a lot more difficult. What do most of us do when the messages we receive is hugely contradictory, divisive, murky, confused? I suggest that we move into some quiet, internal space in which we know, regardless of what others tell us, what the worth or non-worth of persons X, Y and Z really is. We would say to ourselves, ‘Do I want him sitting next to me at the bar? How would I react if I ran across him in the street? Would I tell him anything about how my life really is?'

Do I know any better than anyone else what happened on November 2? Probably not. The movement of opinion in any mass is fickle. Am I saying this is an irrational process? Yes. Democracy is. Money and morals simply make it more irrational.

Of one thing I am fairly sure, and that is that the whole Enlightenment project has been hi-jacked by the intolerant. I know that, whatever their personal merits (and they do belong to my ‘class') neither Al Gore, in 2000 nor John Kerry in 2004, are representative of anything particularly American. And if a president does not represent the whole people, how can he lead his people? Bill Clinton, whatever his faults, and they were many, was – perhaps more in his faults than his virtues. So were all the electable Democratic candidates in my lifetime. And I voted for them, though I did not for Clinton.

The historical compromises involved in the Electoral College guarantee that. The forefathers saw to that. That the differences between Americans would be mitigated by the several states, that the will of the Majority would not necessarily triumph over the individual rights and traditions of the Minority. That is, that a president could only be elected when a sufficient number of that minority felt comfortable with majority opinion.

Since the Second World War (I first voted for Harry Truman of Blessed Memory) and with the single exception of John Kennedy (by the narrowest of margins), the Democratic presidents in my time have been from what was once a broad party of Consensus. I grew up believing, like most Americans, that the Republicans represented Money, Business and the Booboisie. It was the party of the vast Middle West, of the Volk, of Progress and Optimism and the Rotary Club, of Boosters and Chambers of Commerce. In a profoundly and fortunately centrist nation, the Democratic party was our ‘left' and the Republicans our ‘right'. This, of course, was a misunderstanding on our part. We were right about the Republicans of the day (Eisenhower and Reagan were its icons) but wrong about the Democrats.

The Democratic party of Truman (from conservative border state), of Lyndon Johnson (South) and Jimmy Carter (South), was a party with two constituencies: the solid, conservative South and the heteroclite industrial belt, sustained ideologically by an immigrant intelligentsia. To put it at its simplest, the Democrats ceased to be the ‘natural' majority party when it threw away (or alienated) its southern, states' rights, base. The gurus of the cities, inflamed by issues of civil liberties, captured the party, thus losing the long-range war. The South, and a startling proportion of the newer immigrant vote, is now Republican. In terms of the Electoral College, that leaves the Democrats with population, but not votes.

Yet this is a total contradiction of the natural order of things. The great leap forward of the United States – of involvement with the world, of civil liberties, of economic prosperity, of educational equality – are products of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson who, to add to his luster, also extricated the nation from Kennedy's war in Viet Nam. They won because of their party's natural base in the southern states. Yet can anyone imagine the present Democratic party nominating either man? Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson all believed that the government should act for all the people; it was they who enfranchised the poor; yet they were part of and dependent on retaining that minority of states (and electoral votes) that wished none of the reforms that took place.

That the most recent Democratic candidates were not for all the people is, I think, self-evident. They were anthropophagously virulent about Bush and his kind of people. Like Hollywood darlings, Bruce Springsteen, or the Guardian of England, they weren't simply against Bush; they wanted him for lunch. They perfectly reflected the lady walking her dog on Central Park West: those who voted for Bush were ‘morons'. Since all political analysis is essentially personal, I will tell you why and when this life-long Democratic voter did not vote for Kerry. Quite apart from the issues of war or the environment my epiphany came with the arrival in my mail-box of The New Yorker, the East Coast middlebrow weekly to which a million people subscribe because if you don't, six or seven times a year (and ever more rarely) you may miss something really good. And half way through the magazine was a full page photographic portrait of Act Up, a homosexual activist group. Ten bodies are portrayed with stencils saying ‘STOP AIDS' across their pectorals and dugs, with trousers (yes, the women too) around their feet, and four of them in the front row with everything else, including pubes and genitals showing, dead center being a quiescent black penis. This, the magazine was saying, is what you should be voting for.

I chose not to and I think many Americans felt as I do. The portrait, the magazine, the harassment, liberal money, the Smart set, the failure to understand the nature of offensiveness, did not sit well in the America I prefer, the America of my inner space. If more of that was what Kerry had to offer America, I wanted no part of it. The tastes of the few have become the agenda of a party adrift in a sea of solipsism, hedonism and seething hatred. Thus does a self-styled intelligentsia commit public suicide. Unless it recovers its base, I see nothing to indicate that it will not repeat its own disembowelment in 2008.