Thoughts on the US Elections

The most striking thing I felt after this election was the strange parallel between the USA and Israel. Over the past decade or so people have been talking more and more about how Israel has become divided into two major camps, in which each group represents a distinct bundle of political, cultural, and religious attitudes, socio-economic background, positions on the biggest question facing the society—in our case, the Palestinian problem—and even geographical concentration. On the one hand is the “Left”—middle- and upper-middle class, secular, educated, cosmopolitan, mostly Ashkenazic, favoring peace with the Palestinians and concentrated in greater Tel-Aviv and perhaps the old moshavim and kibbutzim, which provide the power base for Labor, the old-new Meretz-Yahad party, and the centrist-secular Shinui (which is in Sharon’s coalition, and is a bit of a wild card). On the other hand, the “Right”— mostly either Sephardic and/or religious and/or (somewhat surprisingly) new-immigrant Russian, mostly working class or small business people with a smattering of professionals, almost all either traditional or religious (except for the Russians), many of them living in the “periphery,” in Jerusalem, or in the West Bank settlements, fiercely nationalist and some even xenophobic about the Arabs, and voting Likud, the various religious and Haredi parties, or the nationalist ultra-Right.

This election made the US look very much the same way—as a sharply bifurcated country. (See the insightful articles by Ari Shavit and Nicholas Chritopf in ha-Aretz for Thursday, November 4. The two things that must struck me about this US election were: first, how almost the whole center of the country was marked in red, with the three West Coast states, the North East, and a phalanx going across the north to Illinois and Minnesota marked in blue. I don’t remember such clearcut geographical division between the parties at any time in my memory. Second, the exit polls showed a division in what they considered the important issues: 80% of the Democrats felt the most important issue was either the war in Iraq or the economy, taxes, etc.; while 80% of Republican seem to have voted either on the basis of terrorism or “moral values”—a rather vague concept.

This division seems to be symbolized in a very interesting way by two important films of the past year, which are considered unlikely to be even considered for the Oscars, because they are so controversial: Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of Christ. Both of them can really be viewed as cult films, viewing them almost acts of ritual identification with the respective camps—and these two films also reveal their diametrically opposed sensibilities (even if Michael Moore emerged from working class Detroit).

But the two groups differed, not only in the issues they considered important, but in the emotional tenor of those issues: the Democrats seemed more concerned with objective, concrete issues, while the Republicans seemed to vote more on the basis of emotional resonance (terrorism, while a real problem, has been presented, from what I understand, in a highly emotional way, playing to people’s fears about a vague, ill-defined enemy). This connects to another interesting fact: that, despite the fact that Kerry “won” all three debates, it didn’t help him much on Election Day, except in those states where he was already strong. Meaning, that among many Republicans intelligence is seen as something threatening, rather than as something positive and to admired and sought. KISS, “Keep it simple, stupid,” seems to be the implicit motto.

This past summer when I was in the US I picked up an issue of The Atlantic Magazine which had an article analyzing the two candidates’ speaking style. The author had analyzed tapes of Bush’s debates and speeches when running for governor of Texas in the mid-‘90s, and found that he was more articulate, had better thought-out positions, was quicker on the response and sounded better informed, than he is today or was in 2000. Three possible explanations: (a) something happened to affect his mind (unlikely); (b) he felt out of his league when he needed to address complex national issues (possible); and (c), that he made a conscious decision to create a dumb persona for himself, thinking it would be to his electoral advantage to play the role of a simple Texan who is not an egghead (to use a word from the 1950s when Adlai Stevenson was pounded by Eisenhower, inter alia because of his being an intellectual). He no doubt calculated (correctly) that the “liberal” elites on the two coasts wouldn’t vote for him anyway, but his new dumb, image would appeal to Middle America. Makes a certain sense.

So at this point one can pull out all the cliches “our type of people” feel about how scary the election results seem: that it revealed the face of an America which wants a more pious, conservative country; that the “silent majority” is a bunch of Bible-reading, gun-toting crackers, red-necks and hicks who don’t like to think hard about understanding the issues; how easy it is to appeal to a primitive type of nationalism, and to believe “my country right or wrong,” certainly in time of war. In brief, that we are on the verge of a fascist takeover.

But looking beneath the stereotypes, asking what brought us to this pass (and however scathing my antipathy for Bush and his people), I reach the conclusion that the liberal elites have in large measure bright this on themselves. The Democratic Party or, more generally, the “politically correct” intellectual elite, are imbued with a kind of snobbism, a sense of haughtiness and arrogance toward “Middle America,” and a sense of certainty of its own interpretation of the world, that is certain to be off-putting to anyone who is an outsider. Once again, it’s terribly reminiscent of the Israeli Left, the Labor Party and even more so Meretz, which have become parties of elites, and have lost both their socialist ideology and any connection with ordinary working people.

I want to say something about “moral values.” The impression I get from occasionally watching such shows as “Oprah Winfrey” or “Dr. Phil” on cable TV is that “moral values” is not only something vague and nebulous, but actually relates to something very specific. One sees there middle-American parents, black (sorry, African-American) and white, concerned about their children’s involvement in sexual activity, drugs, etc., at ever younger ages; people who have experienced the havoc divorce wreaks on their and their family’s lives; and the longing for a simpler, more wholesome era when these things didn’t seem to happen (Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine has written some interesting things on this). In brief, there is a probably-justifiable backlash to the “sexual revolution” of the past four decades and the cross-the-board change in sexual and family mores it has wrought. These changes scare and threaten ordinary people in concrete ways, and they associate these changes with the “liberals” and the system of values and ideas they represent. Of course, their solution—a constitutional amendment against homosexual marriage and a conservative Supreme Court which will force abortion underground (so that more young girls can die of backstreet abortions like in the bad old days)—won’t really solve anything, for young girls will still get pregnant so long as men and women are what they are. But firm talk about God and moral values makes people feel good and gives them a sense that there is “strong leadership” that they can trust.

And, I might add, the militant secularism of much of the liberal camp has also been a red-light to many ordinary people for whom religion is an important part of their life, who have come to feel alienated and somehow pushed out of the center because of their faith. Again, I’m not arguing whether or not their agenda is correct, or fair, or democratic, or even constitutional. Just that these are also widespread feelings out there, especially in the “hinterland” of America.

(By the way, in my book Bush is not really a religious person, since for me religious-moral values include such basic things as telling the truth, self-examination, the ability to admit mistakes, etc. A man who talks about having brought “freedom and democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq is either lying or is dangerously out of touch with reality. Ditto for his failure to provide a straight answer about his lies concerning the non-existent WMDs, or Saddam’s alleged ties to el-Qaeda.)

As for the “War on Terror” and Iraq and all the rest, I recently read an interesting article (really a review of recent books about World War I) in The New Yorker, whose first paragraph follows:

The last century, through its great cataclysms, offers two clear, ringing, and, unfortunately, contradictory lessons. The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an “honor-bound” allegiance of the great powers to small nations is a recipe for mass killing, and that it is crazy to let the blind mechanism of armies and alliances and trump common sense. The Second teaches that searching for an accommodation with tyranny by selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant, that refusing to fight now leads to a worse fight later on, and that only the steadfast rejection of compromise can prevent the natural tendency to rush to a bad peace with worse men. The First teaches us never to rush into a fight, the Second never to back down from a bully. (Adam Gopnik, “The Big One,” The New Yorker, August 23, 2004, p. 78)

What has all this to do with Bush and Kerry? That, just as the almost automatic reaction of the Right is to be pro-war, jingoistic, war-mongering, saber-rattling. The Left tends to believe that almost all international problems can be solved by peaceful means, by consensus of the international community, moral suasion, social reform, and if need be a certain amount of judiciously applied economic pressure. The point made by the above paragraph is that the history of the last century (both of them within the lifetime of two of the addresses of this letter) teaches diametrically-opposed lessons: that sometimes, maybe most of the time, war is a dire evil, the final recourse to be avoided at virtually all costs, but that at other times there appear on the scene crazy fanatics who cannot be stopped in any other way then force. Do Osama bin-Laden and the radical Islamists belong to the latter category? Are they ideologically motivated fanatics, unwilling to listen to reason, with whom the humanist West has no common language, like the Nazis in the ‘40s? I strongly suspect so. Does Saddam Hussein? Somewhat less certain. Even in light of this fearsome and fanatical enemy, was Bush’s strategy of waging conventional warfare against first Afghanistan and then Iraq the best course of action? Also, in my opinion, open to debate.

By the way, in my view, the crux of the debate in Israel between the “Peace Camp” and the “National Camp” or pro-Settlement is not really about God-given right to the Land vs. rational, pragmatic approach to the problem of the “occupied territories,” Palestinians, but about precisely this question: what is the underlying world-view of our antagonists a/o enemies? Is the Palestinian Liberation movement a normal national liberation movement, like those of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, Colonel Houari Boumedienne in Algeria, or Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, who simply wanted their people to have their own “God’s little acre” and were then willing to make peace? Or do they believe that any non-Muslim presence in this part of the world is an affront to their deepest beliefs? The court is still out on this question. I have been living in Israel for 30 years, and I am still torn between the two interpretations.

(Of course, the truth is that the Palestinians are a nation consisting of several million individuals, some of whom doubtless think and feel one way and some the other. The real question is, which group is predominant and is likely to determine the future, and how do our own actions impact upon that dynamic situation? The coming post-Arafat months are likely to be crucial in shaping the answer to this question.)

To return to the US elections: Where did this division come from? Step One took place when the Southern Democrats became Republicans, almost overnight, after Strom Thurmond switched parties, I think the year of the Kennedy-Nixon election. Step Two was the emergence of fundamentalist Christianity as a formidable political and cultural force, under such names as the Moral Majority. Even though the events happened within my adult lifetime, I don’t quite know where this force came from. What was it that made people, who had been quietly practicing their religion within families and churches, suddenly enter the political arena with such a vengeance? I suppose it was a reaction to everything that happened over the past forty years: the anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the long-haired hippies and the sexual revolution and legalized abortion and gays coming out of the closet, all of which contradicted everything that millions of people had been accustomed to believe to be right and moral and normal, until the dam burst. I see this as an historical earthquake. Somehow, liberals believed that science and economic prosperity and political freedom and individual rights would fulfill human needs; that the culture of secular liberalism would reign triumphant and that religion belonged to a benighted past that was slowly but surely disappearing. The return to religion and traditional values is like a seismic movement that caught people by surprise.

I see some interesting parallels to things and attitudes here in Israel. One of the reasons many secularists were shocked by the teshuvah movement here among some of the intellectual and entertainment elite in the 1970s and ‘80’s was that, according to their theory, such things weren’t supposed to happen; the future belonged to them. Zionism was originally built upon a rebellion to the piety of the ghetto, so when the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the halutzim suddenly started wearing tzitzit and kippot and becoming interested in things like observing Shabbat or studying Talmud, it was simply a shock. (I had similar experiences in my own life. An old aunt of mine, recently deceased, a self-described “progressive” and “liberal,” used to refer to me as a “throwback” when I first became religiously observant in my late teens, and even recently, when I visited her as a middle-aged adult, she said “Your mother must be turning over in her grave” because of my being religious, and insisted on referring to my skull-cap as a “beanie.”)

By the way, I received a very interesting e-mail from some Jewish group I had never heard of, claiming that for many, voting for Bush was a kind of protest vote against “the liberal establishment of the East and West Coasts that showed utter contempt for faith in G-d—my faith and the faith of millions of others.” He then goes on to talk about… the anti-religious bias of liberal thought, going back to Voltaire and the Enlightenment.

I invite your comments.