Among the half a million demonstrators peacefully thronging the streets of Manhattan last Sunday, the verdict against George W Bush was instantly familiar to any visiting European. He’s dumb, he’s dangerous, he’s divisive — and more: he’s a warmonger, a liar, a threat to liberty, a despoiler of the planet, an agent of the corporations.
Though the march was a quintessential New York event — extrovert, exhibitionist and earnest — it was also one that could have taken place in dozens of other cities across the world.
In the face of such anger, it is hard not to be awed yet anxious because it was another reminder of the ways in which this is becoming an ever more divided society.
I used to think angry certainty could not get any more intense than that which the American right levelled at Bill Clinton. But the angry certainty directed against Bush from the left now exceeds anything from the Clinton years. That’s one of the reasons this is such a vicious election.
We need, though, to be careful not to be transfixed by the polarisation and to see around it. I yield to no one in my belief that it will be for the good of the United States and of the world if John Kerry defeats Bush in November. I also think that it may happen.
At the same time, however, I think that we need to be careful not to luxuriate in an image of Bush so fixedly critical and inflexibly condescending that we cannot even ask ourselves why he might win again, let alone see why he might be a politician from whom others may also have something to learn.
The most obvious reason for taking Bush more seriously is a simple one: he may be president of the US for the next four years. But we also need to ask ourselves why that may happen, if it does. If it is so blindingly obvious to the world that Bush is dumb, dangerous and the rest of it, how is it that millions of intelligent and perfectly decent people in the US see it so differently? Is it simply that they have been brainwashed? Or that they are neither intelligent nor decent after all?
These hardly stand up as satisfactory explanations. The questions, though, remain. If Bush wins, maybe we need to be more attentive to the things that are different about the US.
If Bush wins, and perhaps even if he narrowly loses, we need to grasp why the centre of gravity in American political life is as far to the right as it now is. At the very least, if the US is now answering to its own individual drum, which has implications for us as well as them.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this whole phenomenon of US exceptionalism can be explained away by 9/11. Writers such as Seymour Martin Lipset have tried for years to prise out the truth about issues like why American men consistently vote to the right of American women, when the reverse gender gap applies in most other industrial democracies. Now, thanks in no small part to Bush’s successes, a new generation of writers is making a renewed attempt to understand why the US is different.
Two new books combine to illustrate this point. From the left, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with America? raises hell about US conservatism. While passing itself off as the foe of the elite, it has managed to enlist millions of average-income voters, mainly white and disproportionately male, as foot soldiers of a movement that consistently promotes the interests of the wealthy at the expense of those self-same average-income voters — who nevertheless continue to support it.
Meanwhile, from the other side of the tracks, in The Right Nation, Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge gaze with wonder at how American conservatism has moved from being an insurgent force under Barry Goldwater 40 years ago to become easily the most dominant and most dynamic political movement in modern America, rolling back the welfare state, entrenching the gun culture, assaulting the right to abortion and, under Bush’s leadership, doing all the rest of the things that so easily send a shiver down the European spine.
Yet, as the authors of The Right Nation point out, it is not good enough to dismiss Bush as an unthinking inheritor of the anti-government traditions embodied by Goldwater and, more recently, by Newt Gingrich. For, along with his revolution in foreign policy, his conservative social agenda and his tax cuts, Bush has also been doing something that few would have predicted in 2000. He has been reinventing big government.
That the collapse of the socialist era would mean big changes for left-wing parties is no longer disputed. That the collapse would necessitate a rethinking of the role of right-wing parties has been less obvious. Yet there are those who argue that Bush is inching towards a new ”big government conservative” political model. This apparently contradictory idea is not as daft as it seems.
No president since Lyndon Johnson has increased discretionary government spending as much. More people now work for the US government than at any other time in history.
Does this add up to a coherent new conservatism that could dominate US politics for the next generation? Not even Bush’s greatest apologists quite make that claim yet. But if he wins in November they surely will. It certainly all bears study and attention.
We ought at least to do the millions of Bush voters the courtesy of trying to understand why they see so many things so differently. And, at the same time, we ought to pay Bush the respect of trying to understand what he is doing right. Bush-bashing has its place. But this might be a good week for liberals and progressives to start raising their game a bit. — Â