Democrats After the Election

The feeling of alienation and defeat among John Kerry's supporters would be hard to exaggerate. People are moving money out of the country, renewing or applying for foreign passports, and deliberating whether to buy property abroad. These actions, though, are not necessarily portents of an exodus. They may simply be symptoms of massive disappointment and frustration, expressions of how gravely Democrats regard their defeat. Confusion and ephemeral despair are the signal Democratic emotions this week. Those are transient sentiments, and it is impossible to tell from them where the country will be in one year or four years.

Those who say the country is "polarized" might better say "tribalized." Many of Bush's supporters feel an intense, personal identification with the president that overwhelms their views of the economy, tax policy, or the war in Iraq. They feel he represents their most basic values. With him in power, all is right in their world. While very few Democrats had this feeling about John Kerry, their revulsion at Bush is symmetrical to the Republicans' enthusiasm. They feel his presidency as a personal affront. This is not just a politics of personality: it is a politics of the fetish, in which a whole constellation of values and attitudes is embodied in the mediocre person of George W. Bush.

This is ironically fitting. Bush won by drawing political energy to symbolic issues with more emotional resonance than concrete impact: gay marriage, "strength" and "weakness," the language of religious faith. The large share of voters who said they cared most about "moral values" in this election meant that they voted on symbolic, not substantive issues.

No surprise there. Politics articulates a symbolic idea of the national community, in which citizens imagine and participate imaginatively. President Bush's image of America takes its energy from a tense interaction of fear and reassurance. On the one hand, his America is a country under threat from hate-filled terrorists abroad and weak, indecisive relativists at home. On the other hand, it is the world's greatest country, a global beacon of freedom and hope, and a nation of tolerant, fair-minded, generous, and courageous citizens. When the president sounds the note of fear, he promises that he alone can keep the country safe. When he sounds the note of reassurance, he unburdens his supporters of troubling self-doubt, anxiety about giant deficits, and questions about "why they hate us." Fear makes the appetite for reassurance greater, and thus makes reassurance more powerful -- even when it is implausible. Bush's presidency, then, is premised on crisis: perpetual but managed crisis, in which he can reap the benefits of being a "wartime president" without asking voters for the sacrifices of wartime.

If Democrats cannot reclaim American politics, the division within the United States will be matched by a deepening rift between the United States and Europe. The American social model under a successful second Bush administration will be increasingly privatized, libertarian, and religious. Since before World War Two, Americans and Europeans have both maintained strong welfare states. Americans, though, have always preferred to pretend that they had no such thing. They are now prepared to stand by as their welfare state is destroyed. If that happens, American solidarity will have to depend that much more strongly on the glue of national and religious sentiment, quickened by fear of an external enemy -- the same symbolic politics that Bush used so effectively in this election.

By then, it will not matter whether John Kerry's supporters stay, go abroad, or retreat into internal exile in liberal enclaves. The America Bush creates will have no use, no time, and little place for them -- or for the liberal heritage it shares with Europe.