Bob Herbert: Ignorance, not "values"

Bob Herbert has long been my favorite Times Op-Ed columnist. In his Monday column, which I originally missed, Herbert makes the point that Bush supporters were simply not in touch with reality:

I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.

This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.

...[deletia]...

You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent. Does it make sense for the progressive elements in our society to undermine their own deeply held beliefs in tolerance, fairness and justice in an effort to embrace those who deliberately seek to divide?

My interpretation of the election results was basically the same. The victory of the Republicans was built on deception and ignorance, not on any policy stance or rhetorical device worthy of emulation. The Democratic Party should disregard calls to move to the right on social issues. Not only would this be asinine, cowardly, tactically ineffective, immoral, unprincipled, and inconsistent with the Constitution; it would also be a non sequitur: you don't cure ignorance by embracing bigotry.

Item #187273 on the "It would be funny, if it weren't so depressing" list

I'm somewhat late to the party on this one, but via Atrios comes Salon's "Down with the Kerry Haters". Many choice bits therein, but the one that bothered me the most was the following:

"I'm definitely gonna vote for him," [22-year-old Ohio resident Nick] Karnes said of Bush. "Because he's been the president for four years and nothing bad has happened since Sept. 11. He's kept me alive for four years." If Kerry becomes president, he said, "We'll be dead within a year."

Now, I was living in uptown Manhattan in September 2001. I have never viewed the threat of death from terrorism as an abstract fear. The fear is quite specific. I recall sleeping fitfully through the night of September 12, waking every so often to the boom of thunder --- from the lightning storm wrought by smoke and dust from the smoldering ruins --- and wondering whether this time, this time it was a bomb.

Most of my family lives in the New York metro area; my brother still lives in Manhattan itself. Al Qaeda has struck New York twice (1993 and 2001), and Washington, D.C. once. They clearly intend to hit America where it hurts most, which means the centers of American economic, political, and cultural power: New York, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago. Seattle, which is where I live now, might make the list only because it's a major port city.

Columbus, Ohio? Get real.

And this is not mere Northeastern regional snobbery (although I harbor no guilt about feeling snobbish towards the likes of Nick Karnes). The invocation of the terrorist menace since 9/11 has always bothered me, for a variety of reasons, and I have never been able to articulate them all completely. But when I read the paragraph above, one of those reasons became clearer: for most Americans, the fear of terrorism is an abstract and nebulous fear. 9/11 was something they watched on television.

I don't believe that residents of Columbus seriously think they will be hit next, rather than New York, L.A., or D.C. They feel afraid, and their fear is genuine, but at the same time, on some conscious or half-conscious level of awareness, they also feel safely insulated from the truest, keenest danger. And so when people like Karnes invoke the threat of terrorism, I can't believe they're really being honest, rather than using terrorism as a rhetorical club to beat their political enemies.

Furthermore, I can't help but think that the spectatorial abstractness of their fear is partly responsible for the ease with which they embrace abstract solutions: a distant war whose rationale bears only the most tenuous relationship to our national security; a President whose cheerleading and manly "resolve" supposedly strikes some vague, paralytic fear into the hearts of terrorists; the embrace of torture to extract unspecified information from unidentified persons for inscrutable objectives.

Who cares about the nuts and bolts of securing Russia's loose nuclear material, or training a new generation of intelligence operatives and analysts conversant in Arabic language and culture? Bruce Willis would never do any of that. He would go out there and kick ass. The terrorists might scoff at his humble everyman attitude, but pretty soon he would be impaling them on meat hooks and electrocuting their genitals (not that he would enjoy any of that, mind you, though he would have some punchy one-liners to mark the occasion). Who cares if rules get bent or even broken? Who cares whether all the death and cruelty even accomplishes a recognizable concrete policy objective, by any credible logic? It's enough that America kick swarthy heathen foreigner ass. The inexorable plot mechanics of action movies dictate that the toughest man inevitably wins. Since the War on Terror is an action movie, it is enough that we be "tough" (whatever that means) in order to prevail.

Is this a caricature of Bush supporters? Yes, but not by much.

And given the seriousness of the consequences, the laziness of this thinking borders on criminal negligence. It makes me furious. If the attack comes, will it be Nick Karnes who dies? No, it will be my brother. And yet I and my brother live at the mercy of Karnes, his fellow-idiots, and the bungling, dishonest President whom they elected.

Mass hysteria

The emerging buzz seems to be that the Democratic Party needs to re-examine itself. A lot of commentators think that the Democratic Party needs to figure out how to pitch its message in a more religious way. Some observers, including some whom I respect, even point approvingly to Amy Sullivan's nonsensical blathering about the Democratic Party's alleged hostility to religion.

The outcome of this election was determined by mass hysteria and insanity. People who cited "terror" as their top issue voted for the President who refused to testify before the 9/11 Commission under oath; and who, when he ultimately appeared before that commission, needed Papa Cheney to hold his hand. People who cited "moral values" as their top issue voted for the adminstration that winked at Abu Ghraib, and that commissioned memos defending torture as a matter of principle. I define insanity as belief incompatible with consensus reality. Bush voters acted from inside a collective hallucination.

Red America is Winston Smith, strapped to the table. Red America is seeing O'Brien hold up four fingers, which transmogrify on command into five. And as the music announcing our glorious military triumph plays from the telescreen, a bullet is entering Red America's brain, a tear is trickling beside its nose: Red America loves Big Brother.

The Democrats' job is not to pander to this insanity, but to help cure it. The way to cure it is not by figuring out how to walk and talk like the sanctimonious assholes on the other side of the aisle. It is to bring reality back to the voters --- at least, to those voters who are not so far gone as to be unreachable (I happen to think that much of the evangelical Christian population is, in fact, gone past the point of no return; we'll just have to wait a generation for them to die, and hope their children rebel).

Also, it is worth pointing out that when people talk about "religious" voters, they mean white rural and suburban Protestant voters. Black Christians vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Jews vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Muslims voted, in this election, overwhelmingly for Democrats. I don't know for sure, but I would venture a guess that Buddhists, Hindus, Rastafarians, etc., vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Even Catholics still vote Democratic more than Republican. So we are not talking about "religion", but about one particular religious bloc which doesn't even constitute a majority of the population anymore (the current CIA World Factbook says that 52% of Americans are Protestants; white rural and suburban Protestants must necessarily be a minority).

And in calling these voters the "religious" bloc, we reveal an underlying assumption that this minority demographic somehow has values that are more genuine, more worthy, more really religious, than anyone else's. Nonsense. Our message reaches every other religious demographic just fine. The question is not how to make our message more religious. The question is, why does this one demographic bloc have beliefs (about both reality and morality) that diverge from those of every other religious bloc? Which is a good question.

Though they go mad they shall be sane/Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again

It is at times like these, when all else fails, that poetry alone can speak. The second stanza of Dylan Thomas's "And Death Shall Have No Dominion":

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

Prediction: 284-254

It is time to nail one's colors to the mast, if only for the fun of gambling. Ex post, I will probably look dumb, but ex ante my decision procedure's no worse than anyone else's, given that nobody really knows how things are going to land.

I am, however, still hoping for a 311-227 blowout, which I think is not out of reach. Call it faith in the American people; or, anyway, the citizens of Iowa and Ohio.

On the third hand, there's always Jeb's Surprise.