Acknowledgements to maff, but I think the piece just about sums it up for me. I
repeat it in its entirety.
Onward Christian soldiers
The hopefuls in the Democrat camp really believed victory in the US election was
within their grasp. How did they get it so wrong? They failed to appreciate,
says Simon Schama, that their country is now in fact two nations that loathe and
fear each other - Godly and Worldly America
Friday November 5, 2004
The Guardian
In the wee small hours of November 3 2004, a new country appeared on the map of
the modern world: the DSA, the Divided States of America. Oh yes, I know, the
obligatory pieties about "healing" have begun; not least from the lips of the
noble Loser. This is music to the ears of the Victor of course, who wants
nothing better than for us all to Come Together, a position otherwise known as
unconditional surrender. Please, fellow curmudgeons and last ditchers, can
someone on the losing side just for once not roll over and fall into a warm bath
of patriotic platitudes at such moments, but toot the flute of battle instead;
yell and holler and snarl just a wee bit? I don't want to heal the wound, I want
to scratch the damned thing until it hurts and bleeds - and then maybe we'll
have what it takes to get up from the mat. Do we think the far-right Republican
candidate Barry Goldwater, in the ashy dawn of his annihilation in 1964, wanted
to share? Don't think so. He wanted to win; sometime. And now, by God, he has.
"We are one nation," the newborn star of Democrats, Senator-elect Barack Obama,
exclaimed, even as every salient fact of political life belied him. Well might
he invoke Lincoln, for not since the Civil war has the fault line between its
two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so
starkly unbridgeable. Even territorially (with the exception of Florida, its
peninsular finger pointing expectantly at tottering Cuba), the two Americas are
topographically coherent and almost contiguous. One of those Americas is a
perimeter, lying on the oceans or athwart the fuzzy boundary with the Canadian
lakes, and is necessarily porous and outward-looking. The other America, whether
montagnard or prairie, is solidly continental and landlocked, its tap roots of
obstinate self-belief buried deep beneath the bluegrass and the high corn. It is
time we called those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat,
for their mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and
Shia, or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and
Worldly America?
Worldly America, which of course John Kerry won by a massive landslide, faces,
well, the world on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts and freely engages,
commercially and culturally, with Asia and Europe in the easy understanding that
those continents are a dynamic synthesis of ancient cultures and modern social
and economic practices. This truism is unthreatening to Worldly America, not
least because so many of its people, in the crowded cities, are themselves
products of the old-new ways of Korea, Japan, Ireland or Italy. In Worldly
America - in San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego, New York - the foreigner is not
an anxiety, but rather a necessity. Its America is polycultural, not Pollyanna.
Godly America, on the other hand, rock-ribbed in ***** Cheney's Wyoming,
stretched out just as far as it pleases in Dubya's deeply drilled Texas, turns
its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world and proclaims to high
heaven the indestructible endurance of the American Difference. If Worldly
America is, beyond anything else, a city, a street, and a port, Godly America
is, at its heart (the organ whose bidding invariably determines its votes over
the cooler instructions of the head), a church, a farm and a barracks; places
that are walled, fenced and consecrated. Worldly America is about finding civil
ways to share crowded space, from a metro-bus to the planet; Godly America is
about making over space in its image. One America makes room, the other America
muscles in.
Worldly America is pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical. In California
it passed Proposition 71, funding embryonic stem cell research beyond the
restrictions imposed by Bush's federal policy. Godly America is mythic,
messianic, conversionary, given to acts of public witness, hence the need - in
Utah and Montana and a handful of other states - to poll the voters on
amendments to their state constitution defining marriage as a union between the
opposite sexes. But then Worldly America is said to feed the carnal vanities;
Godly America banishes and punishes them. From time to time Godly America will
descend on the fleshpots of Worldly America, from Gotham (it had its
citadel-like Convention there after all) to Californication, will shop for
T-shirts, take a sniff at the local pagans and then return to base-camp more
convinced than ever that a time of Redemption and Repentance must be at hand.
But if the stiff-necked transgressors cannot be persuaded, they can be cowed and
conquered.
No wonder so many of us got the election so fabulously wrong even into the early
hours of Tuesday evening, when the exit polls were apparently giving John Kerry
a two- or three-point lead in both Florida and Ohio. For most of us purblind
writers spend our days in Worldly America and think that Godly America is some
sort of quaint anachronism, doomed to atrophy and disappear as the
hypermodernity of the cyber age overtakes it, in whatever fastness of Kentucky
or Montana it might still circle its wagons. The shock for the Worldlies is to
discover that Godly America is its modernity; that so far from it withering
before the advance of the blog and the zipdrive, it is actually empowered by
them. The tenacity with which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is
just that - a theory - with no more validity than Creationism, or that Iraqis
did, in fact, bring down the twin towers, is not in any way challenged by the
digital pathways of the information age. In fact, such articles of faith are
expedited and reinforced by them. Holy bloggers bloviate, Pentecostalists
ornament their website with a nimbus of trembling electronic radiance and, for
all I know, you can download Pastor John Ashcroft singing the Praises of the
Lord right to your Godpod.
Nor, it transpires, is the exercise of the franchise a sure-fire way for the
Democrats to prevail. The received wisdom in these Worldly parts (subscribed to
by yours truly; mea culpa) was that a massively higher turn out would
necessarily favour Kerry. P Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign was credited with
getting out young voters en masse who ignored the polls in 2000. We saw a lot of
Springsteen and Bon Jovi and ecstatic upturned faces. Who could possibly match
their mobilisation, we thought? Answer: Jehovah and his Faithful Servant St Karl
the Rove. The biggest story of all in 2004 is the astounding success of the
Republicans in shipping millions of white evangelicals to the polls who had also
stayed at home four years earlier. We thought we were fired up with righteous
indignation - against the deceits of the propaganda campaign for the Iraq war,
against the gross inequities of the tax cuts - but our fire was just hot air
compared to the jihad launched by the Godlies against the infamy of a tax
rollback, of merely presuming to diss the Dear Leader in a time of war. And the
battalions of Christian soldiers made the telling difference in the few critical
places where Godly and Worldly America do actually rub shoulders (or at least
share a state), Ohio above all.
By the lights of the psephology manuals, Ohio ought to have been a natural for
the Democrats: ageing industrial cities such as Akron and Dayton, with big
concentrations of minorities, suffering prolonged economic pain from out sourced
industries. Cleveland and Cincinnati are classic cities of the Worldly plain:
half-decayed, incompletely revived; great art museums, a rock'n'roll hall of
fame, a terrific symphony orchestra. But drive a bit and you're in deep Zion,
where the Holsteins graze by billboards urging the sinful to return to the bosom
of the Almighty, the church of Friday night high school football shouts its
hosannas at the touchdowns, and Support Our Troops signs grow as thick as the
rutabaga. At first sight there's not much distance between this world and
western Pennsylvania, but were the state line to be marked in 20ft-high
electrified fences the frontier between the two Americas couldn't be sharper.
The voters of the "Buckeye State" cities did care about their jobs; they did
listen when Kerry told them the rich had done disproportionately nicely from
Bush's tax cut. But they were also listening when their preachers (both black
and white) fulminated against the uncleanliness of Sodom and the murder of the
unborn. In the end, those whose most serious anxieties were the state of the
economy and the Mess-o-potamia were outvoted by those who told exit pollers
their greatest concern in 2004 was "moral values".
Faith-driven politics may even have had a hand in delivering Florida to Bush by
a surprising margin, since it seems possible that Jewish voters there who voted
for "my son the vice-president" Joe Lieberman (not to mention Hadassah, oy what
nachas) in 2000, actually switched sides as a result of the president's support
for Ariel Sharon. It wasn't that the Kerry campaign didn't notice the
confessional effect. It was just that they didn't know what to do about it.
Making the candidate over as some sort of altar boy (notwithstanding directives
from Rome instructing the faithful on the abhorrence of his position on
abortion) would have been about as persuasive as kitting him out with gun,
camouflage and dead Canada geese; a laboriously transparent exercise in damning
insincerity.
In Godly America the politics of impassioned conviction inevitably trumped the
politics of logical argument. On CNN a fuming James Carville wondered out loud
how a candidate declared by the voting public to have decisively won at least
two of the three televised debates could have still been defeated. But the
"victory" in those debates was one of body language rather than reasoned
discourse. It registered more deeply with the public that the president looked
hunched and peevish than that he had been called by Kerry on the irrelevance of
the war in Iraq to the threat of terror. And since the insight was one of
appearance not essence, it could just as easily be replaced by countless
photo-ops of the president restored to soundbite affability. The charge that
Bush and his second war had actually made America less, not more safe, and had
created, not flushed out, nests of terror, simply failed to register with the
majority of those who put that issue at the top of their concerns.
Why? Because, the president had "acted", meaning he had killed at least some
Middle Eastern bad dudes in response to 9/11. That they might be the wrong ones,
in the wrong place - as Kerry said over and over - was simply too complicated a
truth to master. Forget the quiz in political geography, the electorate was
saying (for the popular commitment to altruistic democratic reconstruction on
the Tigris is, whatever the White House orthodoxy, less than Wolfowitzian), it's
all sand and towelheads anyway, right? Just smash "them" (as one ardent Bush
supporter put it on talk radio the other morning) "like a ripe cantaloupe". Who
them? Who gives a *****? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way to the
polls. Thus it was that the war veteran found himself demonised as vacillating
compromiser, the Osama Candidate, while a pair of draft-dodgers who had
sacrificed more than eleven hundred young men and women to a quixotic levantine
makeover, and one which I prophesy will be ignominiously wound up by next summer
(the isolationists in the administration having routed the neocons), got off
scot free, lionised as the Fathers of Our Troops.
Well, the autumn leaves have, just this week, fallen from the trees up here in
the Hudson Valley and the scales from the eyes of us deluded worldlies. If there
is to be any sort of serious political future for the Democrats, they have to do
far more than merely trade on the shortcomings of the incumbents - and there
will be opportunities galore in the witching years ahead (a military mire, a
fiscal China syndrome and, hullo, right before inauguration, a visit from
al-Qaida). The real challenge is to voice an alternative social gospel to the
political liturgy of the Godlies; one that redefines patriotism as an American
community, not just a collection of wealth-seeking individuals; one that refuses
to play a zero-sum game between freedom and justice; one in which, as the last
populist president put it just a week ago, thought and hope are not mutually
exclusive. You want moral values? So do we, but let them come from the street,
not the pulpit. And if a fresh beginning must be made - and it must - let it not
begin with a healing, but with a fight.
© Simon Schama
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