Demagoguery trumps issues.
Recovering. I spent yesterday in a haze, hardly believing how the election had turned out, feeling disconnected from the world.
I believed, and still believe, that the current administration is both the most corrupt, and the most incompetent, of the 20th century. The damage they have already done to this country will take decades to repair, and the potential for more damage is real and appalling.
A Friend reminded me yesterday, though, that Nixon had been reelected also. We have survived bad administrations before (though Nixon, while bad, was nowhere near as bad as Bush) and we will survive them again.
What I think hurts most about this election is something CNN kept repeating during the day. Their exit polls asked both Bush and Kerry voters what their most important issues were. Kerry voters’ top priorities by a wide margin were the economy, and the Iraq war, in that order. Something of the order of 40% of the Kerry voters had had someone in their family lose a job in the current economy.
Bush voters, on the other hand, cited a different set of concerns: terrorism and “moral values.” Some 70% of them still believed that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. That despite all the evidence people still believe this is inconceivable.
On the issue of terrorism, I don’t see how the voters could believe that Bush had made this better. Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq prior to our invasion, but they certainly are now. The war has done nothing but make this situation worse. Every picture on the TV or in a newspaper is another recruiting poster for the terrorists. Meanwhile, the taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden is appearing on TV taunting the US, and terrorist attacks are a daily occurrence in Iraq, the country we supposedly liberated. Bush has somehow successfully played on the fears of the people to get them to ignore what their own eyes and ears tell them. This has been a successful strategy for every despot, tyrant, or demagogue in history. Bush is not (yet) a tyrant, but his and his campaign’s skill at demagoguery are unrivaled.
Perhaps what troubled me most the last few days, though, was the issue of “moral values.” How did an election which should have turned on the war, the economy, and the environment become a referendum on Gay Marriage and abortion? Getting gay marriage referendums on the ballot in 10 states was a masterful stroke, ensuring that supporters would come to the polls for that reason, if no other. In the issue of abortion, the two candidates are actually very close, but the fact that Kerry was not willing to force his religious beliefs on the nation was somehow turned into a radical pro-abortion stance.
That no president can actually change abortion laws, or that marriages are and always have been a state’s concerns, was ignored.
That “moral values” could become an issue in peoples minds is amazing, and evidence of the power to distract and persuade voters. It is frightening. That concern over whether someone might be able to have a legal abortion, or that two gay men might have the same property rights available to a straight couple, could somehow trump the issue of the war for many voters stuns me. That someone can argue against abortion, but ignore the unnecessary deaths of more than 100,000 innocent civilians, and consider this a “moral values” stance is staggering.
We are an easily led, and poorly educated populace on the whole. As Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” pointed out decades ago, we distrust anyone who appears to be concerned about facts, research, or critical thought. We don’t trust “thinkers”, and that was the fundamental perceived difference between Bush and Kerry.
This is the most damning indictment of american society and an invitation to rule by demagogues; an invitation that has been accepted.
