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KEVIN CAREY says it will be a long hard road back for the Democrats who must resist the temptation to abandon their ethical stance.
SUSSEX, ENGLAND, UK - On Friday 29th November 2004, Osama Bin Laden handed George W. Bush the White House for a second term, an irony which will be almost completely lost on a nation largely insensitive to its charm. One would have thought, however, that a nation so given to personal analysts and therapists would have understood the basic psychology of the situation; the one figure a terrorist cannot handle is a peace-maker because it undermines his vocation. So Bin Laden wanted a crude, dirty, irrational fighter to keep him in self-justifying business for a few more years and that is what he has been handed. From the dawn of recorded time people have had to put up with crude and dirty politicians but at least the major protagonists in the Iliad possessed a degree of rationality which they deployed in appealing to their people. Bush, cunning rather than clever, was more in tune with America's irrationality than Kerry who could not resist evidence and its complexities.
Kevin Carey This is not to say that all Bush supporters were irrational -- keeping your tax cuts is very coherent -- nor that Kerry supporters were all rational but in general we can plot a steady decline, particularly on the political right, from dialogue into assertion, from complexity to simplicity, from thought to passion; to that extent, Stevenson was a harbinger not an aberration. Setting aside the special case of Johnson's victory over the hopeless Goldwater, during the last 50 years Democrats have needed charm -- in Kennedy, Carter and Clinton -- to gild their rationality whereas it would be difficult to argue that successful Republicans other than Reagan have possessed it to any degree. It could be, then, that a Democratic contender with rationality and charm might win next time but the flight from reason to passion is more often a ratchet than a pendulum; it takes a crisis which is not susceptible to solution by brute force to bring people, literally, to their senses. Such a crisis may occur in Bush's second term -- there is no shortage of obvious candidates -- but that is a high price to pay for a Democrat revival.
Bush irrationally formulated two axioms, that only he could competently conduct the supposed war against terrorism and that pluralism in private behaviour is unacceptable. The first is hubristic in the face of manifest incompetence, the second endangers the entire fabric of the country. He also concealed the impending economic crisis which Kerry never managed to articulate. The twin disasters of the budget and balance of payments deficits are unsustainable and, as usual, when the party is over it won't be the revellers who suffer but those who sweep the floors and wash the dishes. A self-induced economic downturn in the United States will damage the whole world economy.
Nonetheless it is the flight from rationalism that is most worrying because of its intractability. Even if eight years of a Republican administration supported by a Republican legislature fails to produce any noticeable successes, the Democrats will be tempted to coarsen their discourse and dilute their social conscience in an attempt to re-occupy the White House. If they succumb, the poor, the convicted, the ethnic, the ethical, the rational and the different will become ever more marginal. The Fox Network will be normative and the trade-off texture of politics which is indispensable for the survival of a progressive political party will disintegrate into slender, short strands of single-issue campaigning. The ineffectual decade of ecological lobbying will be joined by a host of other minority and altruistic concerns.
What must the Democrats do? First, they must recognise that political parties that represent the poorer part of society are almost always less well organised than their opponents; and this was definitely true in this election. Secondly, they must win under the old rules while promising to change them, reducing the power of money in elections, abolishing the Electoral College and instituting the popular vote as the only yardstick, making registration and voting compulsory but they must, above all, change the unwritten rule of discourse.
In resisting the temptation to coarsen and dilute, they must, as all pilgrims must, face a long and ethical journey in hostile territory. As in all such cases, many will not live to see the triumph; but I cannot believe that a country with such a hi gh level of education and such a rich diversity of peoples and cultures must be lost to the self serving cant of the far right, blasphemously assaulting the poor and weak with the Cross of Jesus Christ.
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