Post-Mortem

First, the narcissistic: I'm not awfully embarrassed by my electoral college prediction. I got two states wrong, and it just so happened that those were the most important in the election. What does bug the hell out of me is that my popular vote estimate was 7 points off, 51-48 Bush instead of 52-48 Kerry.

There is only one reason we lost this election; it's a complicated one, but it can be understood simply. We lost because of the fusion of white Christianity and Republican politics. The basic mathematical point is here: Rove wanted 4 million evangelicals, he got them, and Bush was re(?)-elected as a consequence. This election was a cultural reaction, but contra some of my left-blogging colleagues, to call that reaction "homophobia" would be a category error. I'm of course not denying that hatred of gays had a great deal to do with Bush's victory. But the unsilent majority voted against gays not as a type, but as a token. Homosexuality, to a certain worldview, epitomizes and supervenes on everything they hate: secularism, atheism, coastal elitism, urbanity, multi-culturalism, and (let's-face-it) politically-correct moralism.

Casting a vote against gay marriage doesn't just mean disdain for gays (though it certainly means that); it's a symbolic outcry against what the red-state voters perceive as a cultural siege on the part of New York and California, an intangible war waged by the blue states on their values. This is why Kerry's avowed personal opposition to gay marriage was irrelevant (and why the same line of attack would have even destroyed Joe Lieberman); though Kerry might have publicly said whatever he wished to about gay marriage---and taken something like the same practical position as Mr. Bush---he was still from Massachusetts, still had a yacht, still was married to a rich foreign heiress, still went to elite schools (yes, I know), still spoke French, and therefore---follow the red-state induction---was still way too comfortable with homosexuality.

The after-effect of Bush's popular majority nearest to my mind is that the terrain of the culture war has decisively shifted, at least for the time being. The prospects of transforming the big red middle are downright grim. The next four years at least will be spent protecting ourselves from federal intrusion, from ramped up Justice Dept. attacks on our porn, on our drugs, on our freedom to fuck persons of the same gender, or unmarried persons, or more than one person at a time. That's not what frightens me---any tide of legislative authoritarianism can be (and will be) turned eventually. (And please, friends, a little bit of courage---we will get through this, I swear. Kristallnacht is not coming, nor a Nuremberg code for liberals.) What frightens me is the prospect of lifetime judicial appointees who either think that the Constitution is a suggestive template for the imposition of Thomist natural law doctrines, or else think that "strict constructionism" means interpreting the will of the founders as affirming one's own biases (which are, in this case, extraordinarily reactionary).

Things might have turned out differently if not for the Massachusetts SJC ruling legalizing gay marriage; and yet I can't regret that decision any more than I could regret Brown or the Civil Rights Act, even though they elected Nixon. I don't think many people appreciate just how close several outcomes in this election turned out to be. First, the Democrats' GOTV effort in Philadelphia was probably the best such campaign in modern US political history. If not for it, Bush would have carried Pennsylvania. (Sorry, it's true.) By the same token, if that operation had been replicated in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus---no small task, to be sure---Kerry would have carried the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by about 3 million.

Apropos of counterfactuals, there is an irony in the actual result of the election that very few commentators on either side fully grasped. Those of us who backed Kerry never thought that the culture clash would be so decisive---but the signs were there to read, if we had looked. Putting 11 anti-gay referenda on the ballots looks like a masterstroke in retrospect. The deeper irony, one whose consequences we are going to be living with for years to come, is how fundamentally wrong the single-issue ex-Democrat warbloggers were. Yes, they held an evident true belief, that Bush would win the election. But their belief was a Gettier case; they held it for the wrong reasons. They thought Bush would win despite his cultivation of anti-gay bigotry (which they, of course, were against, and to which the Democrats were morally equivalent). Bush won because of it. The "political capital" he claims to have earned is going to be spent rewarding the constituencies that sowed up his re-election.

Pity the fools, they should have known a Kerry presidency would have meant no significant departure on foreign policy (except in terms of competence) from Bush's---they don't know what they've unleashed.

Side note: I cannot believe the Senate Democrats were so stupid that they made Harry Reid their minority leader. He's just another scalp for the Republicans to claim. His first instinct is compromise; how can he possibly protect us from Borkish Supreme Court appointments? Here's the exhaustive list of better choices for the job than Harry Reid: Jack Reed (RI), Frank Lautenberg (NJ), Corzine (NJ), Biden (DE), Carper (DE), Sarbanes (MD), Mikulski (MD), Leahy (VT), Boxer (CA), Feinstein (CA), Feingold (WI), Durbin (IL), Obama (IL), Murray (WA), Cantwell (WA), Akaka (HI), Inouye (HI), Clinton (NY), Schumer (NY), Dodd (CT), Kennedy (MA), and Kerry (MA). What do all these senators have in common? They're from blue states, and with the exception of Feingold, they're all from comfortably blue states. Feingold makes the list by virtue of being by no small margin the best and most decent man in the senate, who handily won re-election despite having been the only senator to oppose the Patriot Act.