And the day after that

My last thoughts on Tuesday. Well, just stuff collated from daily newspapers. Good stuff.

In The Day the Enlightenment Went Out, Garry Wills calls it William Jennings Bryan's revenge for the Scopes Trial:

This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz collates a few more post-mortems (of democracy?) in Media Notes. Most of them aren't very insightful. Kurtz summarizes the New York Times editorialas saying that Bush is a uniter in "part of the country". That's like saying a someone is partly male. Either you're a uniter or a divider! Thwe LA Times reports that Democratic strategists and political analysts (quoting oneself, eh?) claimed that the Kerry campaign lacked one thing: "a boldly rendered portrayal of himself and his vision for the country." Well, for one thing, that's two things. And the first is not accurate. Kerry did have a boldly rendered portrayal of himself, as a man dedicated to service and country all his adult life, and committed to making American safer at home and respected in the world. The second part could have used more fleshing out. He needed to be more aggressive about the Bush administration's character flaws. Not personal flaws, though many they may be. But the administration's pathology, its refusal to listen to other voices (be they other countries or others in the administration itself), and connect that with the failures of intelligence. When you believe something ideologically, it's that much harder to consider the evidence impartially. Unfortunately, that's also a flaw of many Americans - "faith-based intelligence" is not an insult to them. Or at least not the same kind of insult. The Chicago Tribune notes that the war and poor economy made people cling even more to Bush. This sidestepping of reason I can understand better - fear is a evolutionary motivator. I just find it ironic that we are rewarding someone for putting us at risk both at home and abroad. What are we, scared yet dependent 16-year-old child brides in polygamous marriages? Such thinking does not become citizens in a democracy, only subjects in an authoritarian regime. I can be patient for regime change. Four years, or even forty - then all the militant fundamentalists whether in America or abroad will be dead. But global warming, nuclear proliferation, and imminent challenges of social justice require attention today.

Harold Meyerson writes in The American Prospect:

"The Democrats' America looks increasingly like a discontinuous ghetto -- the Northeast, the Pacific Coast, the industrial and upper Midwest, minus (it seems) Ohio. These states are home to the interesting, and promising, demographic changes in the U.S. They are the focus of much Latino immigration, and it's to these states that college-educated young professionals tend to move. Unfortunately, though these developments may make blue states bluer but they also make red states redder."

Aside from the terminology ("discontinous ghetto" is an oxymoron, and in fact ghetto better describes the red state folk, the half of America who live within 50 miles of their birthplace), I think Meyerson alludes to an important point. Many educated people are fleeing the red states, which only makes them less cultured and less amenable to change. But blue states are not inherently blue - "blueness" instead is the result of migration, immigration, the interaction, toleration, and education that is a glad consequence of such movement. And that is a climate change I'm proud of.