Wolfgang von Skeptik

POST-ELECTION ANALYSES: AN ANTHOLOGY

TAKING THE BUSY MAN’S way out, today’s entry in the galactic blogstakes is a succession of descriptive links to various commentaries on the election. These are each analyses I think are vitally revealing– and therefore exceptionally good contemplative reading for an early-winter weekend.

First is a causticWall Street Journal piece that argues – very compellingly I might add – that the election was a referendum on the near-revolution of the 1960s. The WSJ article, by Daniel Henninger, is available here. It concludes that blue-state America and red-state America are irreconcilable enemies – an assumption with which I emphatically disagree: I believe (and history bears me out) we are ultimately most of us still Americans – though that is a topic for another time.

Next is an essay from Slate entitled “The unteachable ignorance of the red states.” By the ironically named Jane Smiley, it says I voted for President Bush because I “prefer to be ignorant,” and it blames the Bush victory on a malevolent conspiracy:

...the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey—workers and consumers.

Smiley’s invective, linked here, is especially relevant because it is the perfect leftist complement to Henninger’s rightist analysis: contempt begetting contempt.

Anthology chapters Three, Four and Five come from The Asia Times, always useful for monitoring overseas opinion beyond the frenzies of Old Europe, and in this instance a source of important information our own American media – yes even the blogosphere – has overlooked entirely.

The first link, here, is to a piece by Ian Williams, who likens the election result to “Turkeys Voting for Thanksgiving.” But before you dismiss it in a xenophobic rage, read on. Williams makes one very good point I haven’t read anywhere else:

“The mismatch can be seen in the victory of the referendum in Florida to raise the minimum wage - a plank of the John Kerry campaign nationally, which George W Bush has resolutely opposed in Washington, but which, as he showed during the debates, he was totally evasive about during the campaign. More than 72% of Floridians voted for the raise, which means that at least 60% of Bush voters supported a measure that is socially and economically the antithesis of what their candidate stands for.”

Shame on the U.S. media for its failure to report that (and many other) glaring dichotomies – a failure no doubt motivated by the (feminist) need to cover the election results as if they heralded the advent of a Christofascist Fourth Reich.

Second is the always-provocative Spengler, who argues that the election results indicate a popular reaction to the threat of “social decay” – a conflict that has been going on in America for many years but which has been mightily inflamed by the Islamic assault and its attendant threat of a global caliphate. Spengler’s implication – a notion with which I heartily agree – is that the public has at last become aware how “social decay” is a defacto Islamic fifth column: the very force that could subvert America into another Old Europe and thereby hand Islam an ultimate (and undoubtedly terminal) victory over all the planet. Spengler is here.

Last in this AT segment is Mark Erikson’s optimistic analysis that the Bush victory marks the beginning of an economic revolution – a finalization of the transformations begun during the Reagan Era. It is available here.

Concluding the anthology are two more links from diverse sources.

The first, another Slate piece, is forthright criticism: what the Democrats need to do to make themselves more acceptable in Peoria – which of necessity means becoming less acceptable in Paris. By the formidably pragmatic William Saletan, it is available here.

Number two, a Beliefnet analysis, discusses the same topic from a more purely theological perspective, noting that bogus proclamations of faith will do nothing save further red-blue alienation:

...the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it has both marginalized those many people on the Left who actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge that many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of selfishness in American life.

The remainder of this thought-provoking work, by Michael Lerner, is available here.

Finally, as an afterword, click here (and scroll down to “Dog’s Life”) for a portrait of how the election has personally touched another blogger – a favorite near-daily read who is every bit as much a dog-lover as I am.

Have a good weekend!

Posted by Loren at November 5, 2004 03:45 AM