12 More Years

My thoughts on the election are summed up in part in Doug Ireland’s “Why Kerry Lost” post.

My media consumption and conversations today keep reminding me that:

• For many voters, “moral values” topped Iraq, terrorism, and the economy as their number one motivating issue. Of those voters interested in moral values above all else, 80% voted for Bush.
• The New York Times reports that 1/3 of all voters exit-polled identified themselves as evangelicals.
• Every single state with a gay marriage ban on their ballot passed it.

I’ve had a number of conversations with people furious and bewildered that the least-educated, lowest-earning, most economically irrelevant part of this country is making decisions for the wealthy, industrious, and educated. It’s a crass, divisive, blue-state-coastal/red-state-everything-else way of viewing the situation, but not wholly statistically inaccurate. I don’t know if I’m in agreement.

The realist in me must concede that a country in which a swath of states would vote for denying people’s rights (the gay marriage ban, above) has indeed elected a President that represents it. Close race or not, the conservative voice in this nation is louder and more unified than the fractured and desparate cries of the opposition. I take Ireland’s scathing criticisms of the Democratic party to heart; they have failed, and failed miserably. As an independent I don’t feel any sort of sympathy for the home team loss. Rather, as an American not planning on leaving the country in the next several weeks, I feel afraid.

I’m not alone in that fear. Those I’ve spoken to today who aren’t smug over Bush’s victory are scared. They’re scared that they and their children will be burdened with a deficit the size of which we can barely conceive; scared that the culture of the country they love is rapidly transforming into something ugly and unrecognizable; scared that they may not live to see another election.

I hope it isn’t as dire as all that. I don’t want it to be. I have no investment in being part of a disaffected opposition. I would simply like to not die at the hands of terrorists on American soil and be able to afford to live for some time to come. It would have been great to actually move this country forward, but I’d settle for not dying. That’s about all the past four years under the Bush administration has inspired in me.

Take Ireland’s words to heart: if the Democrats don’t get their shit together and realize that running Hillary or yet another party clone in 2008 will fail it’s going to be 12 more years of this. I don’t know – indeed, I doubt – that the currently-forming coalitions of self-proclaimed “progressive Democrats” are what’s going to motivate the American people to make a change. But something’s got to.