tnr on the right forms of despair
The editors lay it down.
But there is a kind of despair, a glamorous pessimism, that liberals must at all costs avoid. The cartography of the electoral college may show a continent of red with some blue lesions at the extremities; but the popular vote in the election of 2004 was 51 percent for Bush and 48 for Kerry, and those are not the numbers of a political or philosophical rout. Fifty-one to forty-eight: Those are the numbers, rather, of a conspicuously unclear and unthrilling Democratic candidate, whose advantage in money did not offset a disadvantage in authenticity. But the important point is that, all the healing pieties of the morning after notwithstanding, this is a country divided against itself about many matters of first principle. The diversity of worldviews upon which we pride ourselves is haunting us. In such a welter of fundamental differences, the work of argument and organization becomes even more necessary. American liberalism did not die on November 2. It merely lost an election.
There is honor, moreover, in a certain kind of loss. In our distracted and accelerated and gamed society, with its religion of winning, we sometimes forget this. But the many millions of Americans who believe that the tax code should be more fair; and that one of the ends of government is to bother itself about its neediest and least fortunate citizens; and that the morality of the market is not all the morality that a society requires; and that the Bible is not the basis of a democratic political order, or of our political order; and that robust stem-cell research, and science more generally, is a primary social good; and that gay marriage is a question of equality and not the beginning of the end of civilization; and that American troops must not be sent to war ignorantly or dogmatically, or without the means to win; and that the good reputation of the United States in the world is one of its most powerful historical instruments–the many millions of Americans who believe these things are not wrong. They are merely not a majority. But they are a very large minority.
This is not to say that the wounding outcome of this election should fill liberals with a sense of their own purity. Not everybody to the left of Bush is like everybody else to the left of Bush; and it would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party to wallow now in the sort of Michael Moore leftishness that made many Americans worry whether John Kerry was sufficiently obsessed with American security, and sufficiently excited about American power, to protect them at home and to promote their purposes abroad. (On the question of American power, the American people are right and Ted Kennedy is wrong.) An internecine quarrel must now begin. But it cannot begin where there is only alienation, and the self-fulfilling confusion of the Bush administration with the United States of America. This country is bigger than its every president. This Constitution is not easy to destroy. This is not the apocalypse. But it is the most formidable challenge to American liberalism in our time.
Bienart is more precise:
In foreign policy, the work is even more urgent. Kerry found his voice in mid-September with effective critiques of Bush’s Iraq policy. But that is all they were: critiques. He devoted very little time to articulating his own vision of how to fight the war on terrorism. The belief that Kerry would match Bush on national security simply by citing his Vietnam service was a textbook case of Democratic incoherence and condescension. Kerry’s war record said nothing about how he would fight Al Qaeda, and, to the Democrats’ surprise, voters were smart enough to recognize that almost immediately.
Instead, voters took solace in Bush’s clear sense of direction–even when they felt he made mistakes–and Kerry never provided a competing framework. He rarely spoke about his vision for bringing freedom to the Muslim world, thus ceding this terrain to Bush, who has done little in office to back up his rhetoric. The only principle Kerry talked about consistently was multilateralism–more a method of achieving foreign policy goals than a goal itself. For all his vaunted intellectualism, Kerry tried to project strength in the war on terrorism without projecting ideas, and, as a result, he gave culturally conservative voters yet another reason to vote against him.
The Democratic Party has been in the wilderness before. And it has returned to transform the country. Today’s despair is so great it sometimes clouds out intelligent thought. And the fear of political oblivion can produce moral lapses. The challenge is to move from despair to strategy. And win the country back.