Where now?

What Europeans must do
Richard Burge

This was not the result I personally wanted to see. But, in truth, it was inevitable. In the weeks before the election I travelled in New York, Washington DC, and northern California. The debate was hostile, and powered by real difference of opinion that drove deep into the philosophy of what it meant to be an American. The despair was, however, on the side of the coastal Democrats and the Rockefeller Republicans who feared another Bush presidency but could not understand why the decent people of middle America did not see the dangers.

As both Bush and Kerry pointed out in the aftermath, they have a desperately divided country to repair. The victors hold all the levers of power, but after a battle so closely and fiercely fought that the traditional American acceptance of and support for the presidential incumbent will probably not occur. The losers feel they have lost narrowly, but in a manner which will make the closeness of the vote irrelevant. The result? Every future policy announcement and executive order will meet the sullen suspicion, if not active opposition, of half the nation.

Yet before we in Europe get too pious about the processes of the American republic, we should look carefully at what we ourselves have managed to achieve during the first four years of the Bush presidency.

In France, an electoral system that (in 2002) gave people the presidential choice between Jacques Chirac (a right-of-centre elitist who like George W Bush cannot understand why the gifts his nation gives the world are not appreciated and respected) and the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen made the grudging warning sent to Bush on his victory by French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, sound even more hypocritical.

In Italy, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi owns a huge swathe of the broadcast media, presses the national parliament to pass laws protecting him from criminal prosecution, and proposes a candidate to the European Commission far more partisan than anyone likely to be sent by Bush to the Supreme Court.

In Britain, the people do not even directly elect the head of their government. His or her selection is the sole preserve of the 659 members of the lower house of parliament, of whom fewer than twenty have been elected by more than 30% of the popular vote in their individual constituencies. The general election expected in 2005 is likely to be followed within three years by the transfer of power to a new prime minister whom the people will not elect and whose name they barely know.

The Bush administration suspects foreign countries’ ability and will to address the threats they identify in a dark and dangerous world. In doing so, Bush reflects the views of the people who voted for him – people who feel that the world and the Democrats have lost their moral basis (wrong) and that the forces of darkness hate them collectively and given half a chance will kill them (right). Combine those two impressions with the fact that for the majority of Americans have no passport, and that “abroad” barely features in their lives or newspapers, then their approach to the rest of us seems less like arrogance and more like – reality.

What unites individual Americans is a deep resentment of superior-sounding people trying to tell them that they are wrong. But that is counterbalanced by a genuine engagement and interest in other people, when they are approached on equal terms.

So what should we, Europeans, do? The example of the French foreign minister, who obviously thinks that America is a new country that needs to understand its place in the world, is no guide; the German position (“we’re not looking back now – we are looking to the future”), which celebrates democracy wherever it is found, is far more sophisticated and likely to result in rapprochement.

Europeans’ duty, then, is to engage America and its re-elected president in world affairs. This means doing something subtle that matches the real sophistication of that rich and diverse country: exposing Americans more fully to the depth and diversity of our own countries, ensuring that “abroad” becomes neighbourhood not impossible distance, and making the differences between us better understood, valued, and tolerated - as they should be amongst friends.

The budget of the British Council, the Alliance Française and the Goethe Institut should be increased tenfold – but their offices in Washington DC and New York closed down and many more premises opened in places like Des Moines, Albuquerque and Little Rock. Their staff should shed the trappings of pseudo-cultural attachés talking to the political elites.

American politics are still competitive
Robert V Daniels

1. The election is being over-explained in the media. With all the reasons now cited for Bush’s victory, ranging from evangelical turnout to Kerry’s personality, Bush should have won in a landslide. Considering the Bush administration’s deceptions and mistakes, Kerry should have won in a landslide. All factors more or less balanced out.
3. Kerry won almost the same states as Gore in 2000, except for exchanging New Mexico for New Hampshire, and losing Iowa by the same razor-thin margin that Gore won it by. Bush’s margin of victory in the electoral college was secure with the reapportionment after the 2000 census that gave his sunbelt states a net gain of seven additional electoral votes.
6. The margins for either side in the “battleground” states from Pennsylvania to Iowa were very small. Compared with Gore, Kerry slightly increased the winning Democratic edge in Wisconsin and Minnesota, as well as in northern New England. If Kerry had won Iowa and Ohio (which he lost by only 2%, a closer margin than in 2000), he would have won in the electoral college despite failing to win a majority of the popular vote. This potential irony would have led to a constitutional move to reform or abolish the electoral college system, for certain.
9. The increase of voter turnout was heaviest in the states that Bush had won in 2000, evidently including religious conservatives who had previously been inactive. Turnout among youth who would have favoured Kerry was only 17%, the same as in 2000. The strongest Republican states were generally more strongly so; that fact is what accounts for Bush’s advantage in the total popular vote.
12. The sharpest cleavage in American politics is between urban and rural/small town areas. This is brought out in maps that show the county-by-county vote and the strength of either side at that level. This cleavage is nothing new; it has defined the base of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, for at least a century, even if overall party strength may rise or fall. It was overridden this time only in Texas and in a few other southern cities that voted for Bush, and in the vote for Kerry in rural New England.
15. The realignment of the southern states into the Republican column has continued. This has not been a true loss for the Democrats, but rather a change of labels by southern conservatives (more akin to the Republicans ideologically and usually in coalition with them) driven initially by resistance to the national Democratic embrace of Black civil rights. The realignment started with the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and progressed down through congressional and local office with retirements or party switches of conservative Democrats. The replacement this time of five retiring southern Democratic senators by Republicans completes the realignment. Outside the south, the Democrats actually gained two Senate seats (Illinois and Colorado) while losing Senator Daschle in South Dakota.
18. This election was not a setback for liberalism in the Democratic party. The Democrats have been able to compensate largely (though not yet fully) for the loss of conservatives in the south by attracting more liberal support elsewhere, notably in New England. Until recently Democratic majorities for president and in Congress depended on southern support [except for the supermajorities at the height of the New Deal (1934-38) and the Great Society (1964-66)]. Now the liberalised Democratic Party is close to majority status without the South.
21. The media have made much of the issue of “moral values” in the Democratic defeat. Some 22% in exit polls (largely Bush voters) chose “moral values” among a list of issues as the primary one. Although moral values may mean many different things to different people, for most of these voters the phrase is code for anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. These issues seemed to play the strongest role in those states and rural areas where the Republicans were already dominant, so their effect was redundant.
24. It is true that the parties have become substantially realigned on the basis of cultural-social values, partially overriding economic interests. The Democrats are the beneficiaries of the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, pulling 90% or more of the Black vote and the gay vote, and enjoying the gender gap of politicised and especially unmarried women. Probably these elements together make up half the Democratic vote. At the same time the Democrats lose badly among straight white (and especially Protestant, southern, rural, and gun-owning) males. One might say that the Republicans have become the counterrevolutionaries against the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
27. The approach of chief Republican strategist Karl Rove, of appealing to the counterrevolutionary base, paid off, whereas the Democratic strategy of taking their base for granted and trying to win doubters fell short. The Republicans won the battle of voter turnout, though much of it was redundant.
30. American politics are still very competitive.

Read our Editor's Note , and global responses from the morning after the election results were tallied.

Waking from the nightmare
Ted Piccone

In the last month, I traveled to the Philadelphia area three times – to make phone calls to elderly registered Republicans, to protect voter rights in African American neighbourhoods with hundreds of other volunteers, and to attend my cousin’s wedding. It was this last event, which took place after the election, that was the most revealing about where we find ourselves today.

My cousin’s husband told me his pastor preached from the pulpit about why good Catholics should vote for the candidate who opposed abortion and homosexuality, then half-apologised for devoting his sermon to politicking, suggesting he had no choice. My brother-in-law, an avid Republican, told me he voted for Kerry because he supports choice for women and stem-cell research, then went home and rooted for Bush. My brother, a Catholic Republican, said the real issue is homelessness and wondered why we couldn’t remove homeless people from city streets to rural communes, where they could be properly cared for, of course. Another cousin, dismayed by Bush’s win, seriously wondered how to initiate a campaign for secession.

A swirl of competing views and emotions, each pointing to the struggles we all face to make sense of very difficult problems. Kerry tried to talk to the complexity of our political choices, but got bogged down, and couldn’t connect to the average voter. Bush spoke in clear and direct language so that, in an environment stoked by fear, his leadership style came across as reassuring and comforting to many voters. In a time of enormous technological change and social and economic dislocation, of busy lives and mounting debt, people were looking for something solid and reliable, even if it went against their self-interest. In an era of moral confusion, voters wanted clarity, not second-guessing, from their candidates.

Well, we are about to see what simple “moral clarity” looks like to the rest of the world – more airstrikes, three-strikes-and- you’re-out laws, and assault weapons on our streets. I feel like I’m living in Jimmy Stewart’s nightmare of Pottersville. I can only pray that some guardian angel needs to earn his wings. He better come soon.

A new dialogue
Christine Loh

After George W Bush’s re-election for a second term of office as United States president, there is widespread concern in Asia over whether he will moderate his stance on how to conduct international relations, particularly over his military adventures, or whether he will see his victory as confirmation that his policies and how they were implemented were right.

Many of us fear the latter.

It is particularly sobering that Osama bin Laden wanted Bush to win. Bush’s strategy focused on igniting fear among Americans that they needed his toughness. His campaign sought to portray John Kerry, as “soft”. Just days before the election, the al-Qaida leader released a video statement lambasting Bush.

It was a blatantly well-timed effort to stir up American voters into supporting Bush – and it worked. After all, voters don’t like to be told by their perceived “enemy” what to do. Beijing leaders had the same experience in 2000 during the Taiwan presidential election. They genuinely did not want Chen Shui-bian to win when they made high-profile criticisms of him. However, Taiwanese electors were galvanised to support Chen even more fervently.

The terrorists want Bush to win because he is the perfect demon for their cause. An uncomfortable aspect of the Republican party’s very close affiliation with the religious right in America is that Bush’s campaign had a Christian fundamentalist touch to it at times that sought to give an impression that Bush has divine blessing, and that God spoke to and through him. This is highly dangerous stuff.

Many of us in Asia see ourselves as good friends of America and support many of the liberal, secular values it stands for. Seeing the rise of a fundamentalist religious right in the US makes us feel that our friend may be charting a course we cannot join them on. Perhaps the answer is to seek more opportunities to engage Americans even more often, and ever more deeply, in a necessary cross-cultural dialogue.

The passion of the progressives
Mark C. Medish

Last week the Democratic party suffered a narrow yet seemingly overwhelming defeat to a decidedly underwhelming incumbent.

The narrowness of the electoral college loss – Way to go, Ohio, as the Pretenders used to sing – means that there was nothing inevitable about defeat. But the popular vote gave George W Bush a wider majority and possibly suggests a rising tide of conservatism. Indeed, had Ohio gone the other way, John Kerry would have been a dubious if not illegitimate victor, as Bush was in 2000.

As a Democrat, my initial reaction was dazed and confused. This feeling was intensified by two factors. First, after the debates it seemed that John Kerry was closing in on the incumbent. He had developed a strong message and used cogent arguments. Second, Bush seemed to be such a dangerous mediocrity that no reasonable electorate could re-elect him.

Instead Bush and his handlers managed to turn a near-catastrophic presidency into an electoral success. Still, it was a far weaker endorsement than the re-elections of Eisenhower, Reagan or Clinton.

I believe that Bush got a gentleman’s pass for three reasons. First, national post-traumatic stress from 9/11. No matter how obvious the Iraq blunder grew, enough voters ignored it and listened instead to Bush’s sweeping Angst-Politik after the shocking attack on our nation.

Second, apart from debate preparations, Bush’s marketing team was – from its convention pyrotechnics to its sharper bumper stickers and systematic advertising spots – simply more effective. A money imbalance was not a factor, which was good news for the country and the Democrats. (Of course, there is too much money in US politics, but at least the progressives were sufficiently galvanised and united that there was no serious financial disadvantage.)

Third, the president used crude public piety and base appeals to social intolerance as trumps. Atavism is hard to fight, especially in a nation that feels viscerally threatened or insecure. A review of certain political deformities of the 20th century could be most instructive in this regard.

But of course Bush and his utopian team confidently avoid history as a subject for “girly men” – after all, real men make their own reality and “write [their] will across the sky in stars,” as TE Lawrence said.

We progressives should ignore history too. Despite polling science, history teaches no laws of electoral politics. Nothing guaranteed Bush’s victory or Kerry’s defeat in 2004. The Zeitgeist may ebb and flow, but there is no inevitability in public opinion. The road is open in 2006 and 2008.

The challenge for the Democrats as an opposition is simply to continue to expose the untenable contradictions of Bushism. How long can the vanguard of big money and corporate welfare pretend to care about middle America? How long can the neocons who reject social engineering in this country pretend they know how to build other nations? How long can fiscal gigantism be passed off as responsible economic policy? How long can mediocrity and not-so-soft bigotry be sold as moral values?

Of course, Democrats must do a much better job than they done so far, and now from a weaker electoral position. We must narrow down candidates and programmes long before the primaries. We must redouble the get-out-the-vote efforts. We must resist compromise with Bush’s extremism and “triangulate” with progressive centrists.

The most encouraging thing these days is to hear publicly and privately from quite a few Republicans who say they voted for Kerry or expect Bush’s second term to go even further astray than the first.

What they are really saying is that American pragmatism and centrism are still alive. So while Bush spends his new political capital, as he has promised to do this term, progressives across party lines must unite and invest their capital to rebuild a majority.

The democracy we deserve
Miles Rapoport

One central theme about the United States’s democratic process emerges powerfully and repeatedly from the 2004 election: the struggle to make our democracy truly work for people has only just begun.

Advocates for democracy had one strong reason to cheer on election night, and that is the high voter turnout. Though votes are still being counted, it is clear that over 120 million will have voted in the election – an increase of 15 million voters from 2000, or more than 7% of the citizen adult population.

But fundamental to our democracy is having an election process that truly works for voters. When election night ended without a catastrophe on the order of the Florida debacle of 2000, the media and many in the political process emitted a sigh of relief that “the process worked”. It is critical not to let the volume of that sigh drown out the lengthy list of problems that cry out for reform.

The raft of problems exhibited in this election included:

• Shortages of ballots, both absentee and the new “provisional ballots” required by the Help America Vote Act (2002)
• Shortages of machines and trained poll workers for the new machines
• Differentially and sometimes discriminatorily applied identification requirements
• Problems with voters being purged off the rolls, often without notice
• Widely different standards for acceptance of voter registrations and provisional ballots
• Malfunctioning machines, machine counting errors, and machines that are suspect because they cannot conduct a fully transparent recount
• Long lines and frustrations for voters, many of whom went home.

As the results continue to come in and be examined, more issues will emerge. What is needed is a full-scale commitment to the process of election reform, one that looks at the problems forthrightly and exercises the commitment needed to solve them. In terms of administration, the nation needs a strong set of national standards whose fundamental principle is to encourage and count every vote, and a national agency with the resources and authority necessary to enforce these standards. We need a new generation of poll workers with the training and skills needed to conduct the computerised elections we will have, and a new generation of electronic machinery with open source codes, strict transparency, and public oversight and accountability.

In addition, we need to work on a series of reforms that go beyond administration and continue the historic struggle in the United States to open up the franchise and encourage everyone to vote. These include:

• Restoring the vote to the nearly five million people – disproportionately young, poor, and people of colour – who have lost it due to a felony conviction
• Allowing people to register and vote on election day. Election day registration states had a turnout rate 14% higher than the national average on 2 November
• Allowing people to vote much more accessibly, by expanding early voting, expanding mail-in voting, and making election day a holiday
• Fully implementing the National Voter Registration Act (1993), which requires public agencies to offer voter registration opportunities to people they serve.
• Change the campaign finance system to reduce the still-overwhelming influence of money in the political process
• Open up the process with wider choices for voters, by less partisan redistricting, more ballot access to candidates, and instant runoff voting that will allow people to rank the recipients of their vote.

While there is cause for cheer in the numbers of people participating, there is no cause whatsoever for complacency about our system. Reform will need advocates that will continue to fight for real democracy, and elected and election officials willing to recognise that real and fundamental change is desperately needed if the American people are to get the democracy we deserve.

Learning from the conservatives
John Cavanagh

The fact that conservatives today have a clear and unified message and an expanding core base is the result of long-range planning that began with Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and achieved takeoff with Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and his landslide re-election in 1984. Within twenty years of careful long-term planning, the “free markets over government” ideology had taken hold and the conservative Christian base was expanding.

November 2004 can mark a similar starting–point for progressives. Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) youth organiser, Malia Lazu, put it this way in the Washington Times on 5 November: “We have to go to a marathon mindset from a sprint mindset. We can’t look at this (election) as a one–time win–lose, but as long–term movement building.”

Progressives need to learn from four aspects of the November 2004 election:

• What really happened. Yes, there was voter intimidation and suppression of votes. But the bigger story was that overall, 120 million Americans voted, 60% of eligible voters. This is an increase of 15 million voters over the 105 million who turned out in 2000. Thus, if the overall result shifted from Al Gore winning by 0.5 million votes in 2000 to Bush winning by 3.5 million this time, then of the 15 million new voters in 2004, roughly 9.5 million went to Bush and 5.5 million went to Kerry. That is a huge increase for both sides, but it is particularly stunning for Bush.

Conventional wisdom held that a high turnout would help Kerry; yet the opposite happened. So, it is worth figuring out who these 9.5 million Bush voters were. A number were “security moms” (and dads), who turned to Bush after 9/11. Quite a few were Latinos, where Bush increased his share of Latino votes from 34% in 2000 to 44% this time. But, it is clear that millions of Bush’s new voters were conservative or evangelical Christians. Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, had set a goal of bringing 4 million more evangelicals to the polls in 2004, and it appears he exceeded that goal. Bush also won white women overall this time, and he carried all age groups except youth. Kerry won African–Americans (90–10%), Latinos (54–44%), other minorities, women, and youth.

• The power of conservative or evangelical Christians. Their ranks have been growing in the United States (and in many other countries) for several decades. The IPS has done a great deal of social and economic justice work with mainline Protestant churches since the 1980s, all of whom have been losing members to evangelical churches since then. The growth of evangelical churches needs a great deal of study, but our observation from IPS is that they are grassroots organizations, and set up to meet both the spiritual needs of their members and, increasingly, the material needs of their poorer members.

The Republican party coordinated closely with the major networks of conservative and evangelical churches, and an explosion of new voter registration and turnout was one result. Indeed, it is probably the key to the Bush victory. According to exit polls, Bush won 79% of 26.5 million evangelical votes. This means that about 21 million of Bush’s 60 million votes, over 30%, were from evangelicals. This is the group of Republican voters that exhibits “fundamentalist” tendencies and that will be hardest to “win over.” What is perhaps most disturbing for progressives is that the number of people in this “grassroots” movement is growing steadily, yet it is still a small share of the public overall.

• The significance of youth and Latinos. Progressive youth organisers have a lot to be proud of. The number of young people voting jumped 4.6 million over these four years, and young people voted 54–44% for Kerry. It is amazing that 4.6 million new young people came into the political arena to vote this year; it will be crucial to keep them involved.

As for the growing Latino population, it has long been the political wisdom that first–generation Latinos are more progressive, and then they become more conservative in second and third generations. It has also been assumed that most Latinos are socially conservative, but more progressive on economic and immigration issues. Overall, only a third of Latino voters went for Bush in 2000; yet in 2004, Bush got 44% of the Latino 2004, Bush got 44% of the Latino vote. That certainly won New Mexico for Bush and was key to Bush’s sweep in the other southwest battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada.

• Thinking and organising long–term. The Republican party has a long–term, grassroots strategy of expanding its base and the base of the conservative movement in the United States. Progressives spent hundreds of millions of dollars in this race, only a portion of which built a parallel long–term progressive infrastructure (and we’ll need a lot of study to appreciate these gains). A core challenge for progressives is to build equally deep progressive infrastructures that are counterweights to the conservative networks.