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Failure's Reward
by Jonathan Shainin
November 2004
The past four years have not been an easy time to be an American. We have watched our fellow citizens murdered by the thousands in cold blood within miles of our homes, and we have watched our fellow citizens murder—with only the best of intentions, of course—on the far side of the globe. The twin tragedies of jihadist slaughter in New York and American war on Iraq have marked these years, and these years will rank, unquestionably, among the most difficult in the history of our young nation. Skeptics may counter that our comfortable era hardly bears comparison to the wild bloodshed of earlier wars, the widespread suffering of the Great Depression or the domestic unrest—racial and political—of the Vietnam years. But it is our studied complacency that is most pernicious: while many have mourned, worried and feared, few have suffered, and it has been all too easy for “normal” life to carry on. Absent the clatter and dueling recriminations of a very ugly contest for the presidency of our declining empire, you would be forgiven for waking up one morning in America and walking down the street without any idea that a war was raging six thousand miles away.
A great deal of hope was vested in this presidential election, and it is safe to say that hope has been disappointed. Too much hope, clearly, judging from the outcome. On the left, broadly speaking, the forced smile and uneasy manner of Senator Kerry represented a long hoped-for panacea, a pill that was not always easy to swallow but promised some respite from the wreckage of history piling rapidly at our feet. President Bush, for all his evident failings, is not the sole author of our current woes, but he has—and how!—so reliably, almost compulsively, led us deeper into ruin, confusing conviction and certainty for rectitude, and taken, at every turn, the worse route.
The failings of the Bush presidency will hardly need enumerating, and it would be easy for any objective observer to weigh the promises and intentions of Mr. Bush against his achievements and find them sorely lacking. The will of the people—ever so pliable in the hands of those with the right tools—has spoken, as Mr. Bush so modestly proclaimed with a sneer in his Thursday press conference. But what sense can we make today of the people's will? Some among us in despair are eager to condemn our rural brethren, who tremble so visibly in fear of terrorists unlikely to strike their towns and gays unlikely to marry in them. On the coasts, many are drowning their sorrows in resentment, confident, to borrow from Brecht, that the problem is not the leaders but the led: would it not be easier, as he wrote in jest, “To dissolve the people / And elect another?”
Already the consensus narrative of this election has formed, ratified by a questionable exit poll suggesting that “moral values” was the most important issue for a narrow plurality of voters, outpacing even “terrorism” and “Iraq.” Never mind the ambiguity of “moral values”—which means what, exactly?—and the fact that those concerned with “terrorism” or “Iraq” together dwarf this new Moral Minority. We are told that the god-fearing masses, in numbers heretofore unimagined, have spoken: the will of the people demands that sodomites shun monogamy and pregnant teenagers deliver their unwanted children into poverty; woe unto those Democrats unwilling in the future to walk with Jesus on the campaign trail.
The power of the culture wars, which have animated our broken politics since the Goldwater era, is their fatal hold on both sides: the right's false piety and preposterous sense of victimhood inflame the contempt and condescension of bien pensant elites imagined so vividly by the prophets of the populist backlash and their bitter flock. This cursed election, so clearly in hindsight an unforgivable distraction from our ongoing domestic and foreign troubles, has now writ in stone the conservative movement's chosen myth of its own rise, in which the hapless opposition is “out of touch” with the values of mainstream America, leaving them easy marks for the fast-talking revival-tent preachers of the new right. It is not a lonely few on the losing side who have vented their distaste this week for the denizens of “Jesusland,” as a popular cartographic joke circulating on Internet now has it. It is only a slight caricature of the postmortem analysis on our team to say that it offers two contrasting strategies: to loathe the yokels, or, to patronize them.
The hopeful among us are looking for ways—or for candidates—to talk the folksy, homespun moral language that might speak to today's Great Reawakened, while the angry—and they are many—vow some kind of war of wills with the red-states, or perhaps to exile themselves until such time as demographic shifts produce a secular coastal majority. If you are reading this right now, in fact, you surely know someone who stated in all seriousness on Wednesday morning that they must leave the country.
I say when they begin to haul the gays by train to the big gas ovens on the Great Plains, we can book our tickets to Paris. It may seem a rotten country, but it is ours too, at least for now, and besides, the very premise of these claims—that a Bush victory requires our exile—gives rather too much credit to the promise of a Kerry administration. If you must leave America because it is a barbaric, immoral empire that tortures its enemies and abuses its own poor—well, then what have you been waiting for?
What is most disturbing about this election is actually less its results than its implications: setting aside the obvious flaws and innumerable errors of the Kerry campaign and its candidate, what we witnessed was the victory of a man whose entire tenure was marked by unceasing failure. In the eyes of its detractors, of course, Bush's presidency was a failed one from the get-go, but after four years, the pall of incompetence that hung over the White House was not merely a partisan concoction. All of the advantages of incumbency not withstanding, it seems proper to call Bush's election a come-from-behind triumph worthy of Hollywood, one made all the more improbable by its unparalleled reliance on relentlessly dishonest attacks and its fervent refusal to countenance even the smallest shred of bad news. In the brilliantly played confidence game of the Bush campaign, every setback and misstep, every crippling blow—from the collapse of the World Trade Center to the victories of Iraqi insurgents—was another sign of strength, renewed evidence that Team America was on the march once again.
Our democracy will never be so pure as to penalize with swift justice the failed policies of lackluster incumbents, and our voters never so sharp as to bypass easily falsified vagaries like “character” and “values” as touchstones for electoral judgment. And yet, one cannot help but feel of late we have plumbed new depths: Can any president ever again be held responsible—for anything? If today pundits of all persuasions grovel at the feet of Karl Rove, and they do—some in fear, some in awe—it is because he has shaken from the executive branch the heavy chains of accountability, ruthlessly and without shame. Heaping credit at his feet is all the rage right now—with every tribute eager to forgive Rove his unimaginably vile debasement of our already foul politics—and this column will be no different. A select few have played, jostled, and coerced our rickety democratic pinball machine with equal skill, but Rove and Bush alone have discovered how to pound and shake it impossibly far without tilting. The rest of us? We are still stunned, waiting nervously for their next trick.
Jonathan Shainin is Books Editor at The Independent and Assistant Editor at The New York Review of Books.
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