The cynic in me is amused by it, but the normal person hidden inside finds it depressing. After every election, there is an outpouring of hysteria from the intellectuals, and it is embarrassing. This time is no exception.
Garry Wills declares that the Enlightenment is over, that religious liberty is at an end in America.
Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.
Maureen Dowd takes up the same jihad-in-America theme. And surely they are right. Why, just last week in Alabama, 87 gays were stoned to death, 87 athiest were beheaded, and 15 chemists had their hands chopped off for mixing paint without permission from their bishop.
Timothy Garton Ash declared the election akin to South Africa's first post-apartheid election.
Never in the course of human history has such an inspiring election produced such a depressing result. "It's South Africa!" was my first thought, when I saw the endless queues of voters lining up across the country first thing in the morning, as they did in South Africa's first democratic election.
. . .
Everywhere across the country, from sea to shining sea, they turned out in unprecendented numbers. For all the corrupting role of big money, the meddling by lawyers and the distorting effects of biased media, this was an overwhelming, heartlifting expression of the popular will. Here was one of those elemental moments, as in South Africa, as in Poland in 1989, as in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, when the great, tempestuous river of democracy breaks through all the barriers erected in its way.
Luckily, the 13th amendment was passed earlier this year, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed only last month.
Why did I wake up feeling deeply troubled yesterday?
Answer: whatever differences I felt with the elder Bush were over what was the right policy. There was much he ultimately did that I ended up admiring. And when George W. Bush was elected four years ago on a platform of compassionate conservatism, after running from the middle, I assumed the same would be true with him. (Wrong.) But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.
Is it a country that does not intrude into people's sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate?
Surely Friedman is right. Bush is the first president since James Polk to oppose gay marriage, a right Kerry swore to protect. And only last year, Bush and the Republican Congress overturned three centuries of legalized abortion, not to mention amending the Constitution so that the presidency was limited to Southern Baptists, Mormons, and Catholics who swore fealty to Cardinal Ratzinger.
Are these people serious? Wills, Garton Ash, and Friedman are anything but stupid. (I decline to bother commenting on Dowd.) So what generates this kind of hysteria?
