The re-election (or initial election) of George W. Bush last week has sent shock waves through the Madison left and liberals across the country. Bush's victory in the popular vote and the increased Republican majorities in both the House and Senate have left a wake of confusion, despair and anger.
Liberals are left with a whole series of questions ranging from \What are people thinking?"" to ""What is the future for progressives?"" Many believed this was the time that most Americans would not support a president who lied about and began a pre-emptive war, never found Osama bin Laden, created a massive deficit and presided over an economy with net job loss in a period when hundreds of thousands of Americans lost health insurance.
Yet in spite of the evidence that this administration has been bad for most Americans on concrete issues, if the polls are to be believed, many people voted based on ""moral values"" and ""honesty.""
There has always been a sense of confusion on the left and a lot of discussions in the last week about how killing people in an unnecessary war, the death penalty, a punitive criminal justice system and taking away civil liberties and rights from lesbians, gays, women and people of color can possibly fit into any religious or moral code.
While many people have been accurate in pointing out the hypocrisies of these positions, we have been too quick to brush off what they represent. It is too simple to label all of these voters as ignorant bigots. Granted, some of them are and their leaders most certainly are-look at the new senators in Oklahoma, South Carolina and Indiana if you have any doubts-but there has to be some need or chord that Bush and the conservative right are fulfilling or touching. Bigotry isn't formed in a vacuum; it is based on deeper issues of fear, insecurity, misinformation and power. The significance of moral values, the gay-marriage debate and women's rights are reflective of broad insecurities about the social order, insecurities that cross the ideological divide.
In the end, the conservative right did a better job of articulating a clear vision of social order. The left did not present a vision to its base that united economics and social justice. There is a major logical problem when the party of the super-rich-recall Bush's ""some call you the elite, I call you my base""-is also the party of the rural poor and of economically devastated parts of the country. The conservative right has pulled off a coup in getting ""moral values"" to trump practical economics. Wal-Mart workers with no health insurance and low pay should not be voting Republican because of the same-sex marriage issue.
The divide has shown that there must be connections drawn between labor rights and social rights. The labor movement and the women's rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements cannot afford to be divorced from one another. White liberals and the middle class have to get out of academia and engage with civil rights and class struggle. The black community has to deal with homophobic tendencies, and all parts with women's rights.
There are calls now for uniting the divided nation. This sounds suspiciously like settling for the status quo and accepting whatever mediocre platform the Democratic party has to offer in four years. Liberals have to get out and provide something for the rural working-class voter, engage with and expand the moral values debate and push the Democratic party to a new level. We need a revitalized and effective union movement that's going to win gains for workers again. We need to reach out to rural women and work on health care initiatives.
Instead of staying silent, we need to keep complaining and take action-maybe we need to go back to where we came from or go out to places we never thought we wanted to go. We need to discover what sort of chord the Republicans are striking and articulate a new vision of hopeful, transcendent change to counter the conservative religious movement.
Liberals from all walks have to get out and, by hell or high water, start helping to make positive change on the ground and stop believing that the country is doomed to bigotry. We need to engage the working class and fight for labor rights, simultaneously fighting against other forms of prejudice and oppression. This election has shown the divided nature of this nation and, among other things, revealed the fallacy of just waiting for ideas of social justice to trickle down rather than getting out and fighting for them.
opinion@dailycardinal.com.
