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The "Finkelstein Box" map of the 1980s and the "Bush Country" map of 2004 |
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THE PERPLEXITIES OF THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
John Q. Pridger
The American people dealt the Democrats and liberals a resounding
defeat in the presidential election. People like Michael Moore are
particularly perplexed. Moore really did a classic number on Bush and his
administration in his Fahrenheit 9/11 movie, but it wasn't nearly enough
to deliver the White House to Kerry and the Democrats.
There is only one thing that could have pushed Bush over the top after all
the damage he has caused the nation, and it's pretty ironic. It could have
been nothing other than his stance on "core values" and
steadfastness of purpose — even though many of his supporters must
certainly by now disagree with the Bush war policy.
Pridger, like Michael Moore, considers the Bush war policy an unmitigated disaster. The same goes for the Republican economic policy, and just about everything else that the party now stands for. Yet, in spite of all this, had Pridger been forced at gunpoint to vote for either Kerry or Bush, he'd probably have chosen Bush.
The reason is fairly simple. While neither party in this day and age protect or defend the Constitution, or represent the interests of the American people, at least Bush and many in the Republican party still pay lip service to mom and apple pie, and that still means a lot to a large majority of the American people, including Pridger. Of course, Pridger isn't really fooled by this lip service, but lip service is better than nothing at all — and certainly much better than the Democrat liberals' open warfare against core American values.
The major weakness of the Democratic party is that it has strayed so far into left field on the things that most Americans hold dear, that the American people (at least in this election), were willing to elect "anything but" a Democratic president, even if it means more war on the other side of the world, more American casualties, and less peace and security everywhere.
To many it may seem somewhat callused to consider withholding support from the "anti-war" party if the war is believed to be wrong, and stopping it would save lives. But the issue is much greater than a war and peace issue. Kerry, who voted for the war in the first place, didn't promise peace, though during the campaign said that it is "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time." He offered no solution. He ran on a war record, and vowed to continue to prosecute the war he voted for, wrong war, wrong place, and wrong time notwithstanding. He merely said he would do it better than Bush is doing. Few voters were reassured.
What does this say for the great mandate that Bush has proclaimed? It probably means that he read a lot more into it than real circumstances justify. Though there are still plenty of flag waving war supporters out there, what really got Bush re-elected, at least in Pridger's opinion, was the "core values" issue.
The gay marriage issue alone was enough to make a critical mass gather around the Republican ticket.
People like tax cuts too, of course. And most working people will vote for tax cuts even if the rich get them too — whereas the Democrats always seem to condemn tax cuts of almost any kind — even if working men and women get them too.
As Pridger has said more than once, the Democrats are Global Village people, and the Republicans are "new international economic order" people, and between them, they have just about wrecked a great nation. While the Democrats have openly begun to call the ways and means of the "new international economic order" into question, they are still Global Village people who would continue to sink the nation and world into a global plantation system, and further sacrifice national sovereignty on the various altars of nation-gutting internationalism.
Pridger was unwilling to support either candidate or either party. There is no longer an "American Party" that would recapture the high ground of enlightened American nationalism, thus our two party system has become a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" system.
MAKING SENSE OF "BUSH COUNTRY"
In the 1980's Arthur Finkelstein, a Republican consultant, defined the pattern defined by Republican triumphs of that era. The map at left describes two different political countries within the United States. The "box" roughly shows the new Republican strongholds—the South and the Mountains—the "non-cosmopolitan" heartland that encompass the Old Confederacy, the "border areas," the great plains, and mountains which reflect the remnants of the frontier and "cowboy" cultures considered anachronistic by modern liberals, progressives, and neo-conservatives.
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The "Finkelstein Box" map of the 1980s and the "Bush Country" map of 2004 |
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Obviously, the "cowboy culture" that Arthur Finkelstein described as making up the core region of Republican support in the 1980's appears to have expanded. Two things explain this expanded support for the Republican party and the reelection of president Bush. War and "traditional values." While the cowboy culture might be expected to rally vigorously to the patriotic banners of war — "my country, right or wrong!" — Pridger believes that it was the latter — traditional values — that actually tipped the scales so decisively in Bush's favor.
The blue areas that supported Kerry and the Democratic party apparently represent the "cosmopolitan" areas, populated with high percentages of "progressives," large scale pockets of immigrants, minorities, and institutionalized poverty, (i.e. areas of wide-spread dependence on the welfare state, which also includes some significant rural swaths).
As Thomas Jefferson said in his Notes on Virginia, "The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body." And it is essentially from the mobs of the great cities from which Kerry and the Democratic party draw their greatest strength.
Of course, all this is overly simplistic, but there are lessons to be learned from these demographic voting patterns. In the end, the numbers favor the mobs of the great cities and their sprawling metropolitan areas, because that's where 95% of the votes are. Like the Old Confederacy and the frontier, the cowboy culture is either dead or dying, or is strictly superficial and artificial, and what remains is merely the watered down remnants of the once staunchly independent and ruggedly individualistic culture of the "heartlands." But enough of the remnant remains in the hearts and minds of the population of the nation at large — in the form of a desire to retain or recover the core values of the "American ethic" — to make itself heard, as was the case in this year's election.
Lamentably, "pure government" is what we already have, for better or worse. Not pure in the sense of "purity," of course, but in the "unlimited power" sense — and the unlimited, all-powerful, government that we now have is very much a bi-partisan creation.
MORE JEFFERSON FOR TODAY'S WORLD
ON BIG CENTRALIZED GOVERNMENT: "When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." (Jefferson, 1821)
ON BUILDING A NEW WORLD ORDER AND SAVING IRAQ: "We see the wisdom of Solon's remark, that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear." (Notes on Virginia)
THE TIME TO STAVE OFF TYRANNY: "The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered."
ON AGGRESSIVE WAR AND CONQUEST: "If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest." (1791, to William Short)
John Q. Pridger