khaosworks | Whose God (again)?

Bush, God and the Democrats
This country isn't secular or rational. And if the Dems want to win, they can't be either.
By Edgar Rivera Colón
Nov. 4, 2004 | Any fourth grader who has paid attention to her math lessons knows that George W. Bush has won the election of 2004 decisively. In the coming days, Democrats and their liberal and left allies will mull over the ruins of the Kerry/Edwards campaign and wonder what particular tactic or strategy might have led to a better result for the majority of working people in the United States as well as the other beleaguered inhabitants of this ever shrinking and increasingly violent planet.

Four more years of the now "legitimately" elected Bush/Cheney administration will impoverish more Americans and lead to more tragedy and mayhem for, among others, the people of the Arab/Muslim world. If the American administration had a velvet glove phase, that particular tenderness is gone and crypto-fascism with an electoral mandate will be the order of the day. I will let more erudite minds decipher the economic, legal, military and political fare that will be served to the American people and an anxious world community as proper medicine for difficult times.

Of course, left analysts of various stripes will chant the stalwart hymns of yesteryear that the Democratic Party needs to stop acting as the ideological and policy waiting room for the Republican Party and pull up its New Deal stockings and act like "real" Democrats. This critique needs to be made.

Nonetheless, there is another critique that needs to go in the mix, as progressives engage in a period of reflection and retrenchment in preparation for the next wave of reaction packaged as homeland security and elite greed as social empowerment (the "ownership society" comes to mind). The odd truth is that the Kerry/Edwards campaign came to naught in part because the Democratic Party has no real language for the irrational kernel at the heart of the persistent problem of identity in America.

The white evangelical core of the Bush/Cheney electoral coalition has no problems with identity politics and has both a deep and rich religious and political language with which to narrate its own problems and aspirations. Whatever one may think of this feeling-laden ideology, Bush knows how to connect to this base precisely because he eschews a secular and rationalistic rhetoric in favor of a language rich with moralistic, eschatological, and even apocalyptic themes.
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