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I keep on wondering why people think there's a single, trivially identifiable, reason why the election turned out as it did. Lessee: we've tried abortion, gay marriage, O'Neill's people, now it's War President.
$%#& it, it wasn't one reason. It wasn't two of them. Everything got chewed through ad nauseum, polled up the wazoo, never a final word on them except utter exhaustion on both sides. People voted on the package. Literally. I'm not making this up. Even if they claim otherwise.
Look, the real package is: Kerry represents The Future in its trends- despite his endless dwelling on the issues of the past in an attempt to compensate. Bush represents The Past- despite his endless and pointless dwelling on plans and aims and wishes to deal with in the future. All the talk about competence is beside the point. By voting Republican people voted for the Establishment that has dominated the country's political developments for the past 15-20 years and wants everything to return to the terms of ~1960.
All the rest of the chatter is inarticulate people grappling for a rationale- and parroting some of the ones out there most plausible to them- because no one supplied them the words for the comprehensive one.
We had a campaign that almost deliberately, almost on a schedule, chewed through every significant issue in American society and politics starting with Pearl Harbor. The 2004 American electorate's median age is ~55 and is 77% white. The 2004 American population's median age is ~38 and is ~64% white. It's very difficult to square the politics of the two groupings- the electorate will run more conservative and be politically defined by the way the society was 30 years ago (most people's basic political stance is set around age 25).
We have a collision between the trends/needs of the society in the present and a clinging to the way things were 'clear'/defined to mainstream people 30 years ago.
Don't forget that in the late '70s there was giving up on the politics that were set in 1965-68, defined by Vietnam and the Civil Rights Act, and serious work to adapt to the problems in international economics (e.g. Japanese cars) began. The bitterness remained but conservatives moved on/shifted positions- Reagan beat up on the Great Society and Civil Rights but not Roe v. Wade, ignored gay and womens' rights in general. Talked 1950's talk. Everything gets a second and third review in American politics, if not a second and third repeat, which coincides with generationality in the electorate.
If you look at the Big Picture of American politics since initial Settlement, it proceeds in roughly 75 year chunks defined by a part of the Constitution. (The 1st Amendment, the body, then successively the 13th and 15th Amendments.) The major fighting on the issue, often violence, tends usually/mostly to take place at the 55-65 year mark in them. The present such period begins ~1940, roughly coincident with Pearl Harbor, and the piece of the Constitution whose interpretation is at stake is the 14th Amendment.
Generally, in the fighting phase the reactionary side is nearly willing to toss out/undermine the whole of the Constitution realized to date in order that the one piece in question is prevented from being realized.
That's how it works. And right now being Christian, being white, and being male (and straight) -accessed by women by being married to one- is "in danger" of losing its government privileged status. It may not be the official, legally stated, kind of privilegedness. A lot of the privilegedness is pseudo-coerced, in that elected officials have to subject themselves to fealty tests. E.g. Kerry had to attend church services and take communion, was ridiculed for tanning or makeup that was a bit dark, and march Teresa around a lot before there was a kind of approval given him by a large centrist chunk of the electorate.
And that's how They voted. A few billion misspent, a few thousand blue collar workers killed in the sands of Arabia, tax cuts for the Old Establishment, earlier and more miserable deaths for old people after 30 years of marginal improvements...They don't really see the calamity to any of it. Gay marriage, abortion rights, a different Establishment in the forming, the Old Establishment being prosecuted for its gross corruptions, equal footing for Hispanics and blacks, women as bosses, scientists as more important than theocrats, treatment of Conservative Christianity as passe...that strikes Them as necessary to resist, and the utilitarian argument to the contrary doesn't cut deeply enough. In the end they need a crutch, and Divine Order will do as well as white privilege as well as 'free market' silliness to justify hanging onto the one there is.
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