I can stand the despair 

“It’s not the despair, Laura. I can stand the despair. It’s the hope.” From Clockwise.

For cheering up 

Apropos of nothing, I’ve recently read one book and thumbed through another that I can recommend.

The Rule of Four is a thoroughly enjoyable romp, called by someone “The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals”. More in the Umberto Eco line, I thought. Lots of fun (and particularly enjoyable for me since it’s set at Princeton). The great humanist Anthony Grafton’s review in The New York Review of Books was both very un-NYRB and lots of fun, too.

Lost Worlds by Michael Bywater is a compendium of amusing little essays about the things that have vanished from our world (clerks, melancholy, the British Warm, Canford Cliffs, etc). Some of it is too twee for me, and it predictably has a cover blurb from Stephen Fry. But more good moments than bad.

Alien nation  

When it looks like opposition to gay marriage was a crucial factor in the presidential race, I wonder if I can ever come to terms with what about half of America has become. In Europe, Rocco Buttiglione‘s abhorrent views are sufficient that a healthy majority of Euro MPs forced the abandonment of the entire European Commission. In Washington now, Buttiglione would be a shoe-in for a cabinet post.

Chris Bertram has a nice reflection on what he likes about America, somewhat reminiscent of Woody Allen’s famous list in his film Manhattan. But as Bertram points out:

The thirteen original states that brought us the Constitution voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.

The states that didn’t secede and which fought against slavery voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.

Black America which brought us in Martin Luther King, one of the greatest moral exemplars of modern times as well as the blues, jazz and soul voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.

California, home of the modern motion picture industry, voted for Kerry.

Tom Friedman picks up on this as well (maybe this is a welcome return to form for Tom, after a few years in the wilderness): “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.”

I don’t have any optimism about the likely course of the second Bush administration. Everything about the first four years and the Bush character suggests it will be relentless and divisive. It’s also virtually certain to continue to be thoroughly incompetent.

But I can find some optimism about the future course of America. I don’t find it in any way inevitable that “red” America has won for a generation. The US retains an enormous ability to reshape itself in good ways, as well as bad. There is a vast task ahead for everyone who wants to see a progressive future for America — and perforce for the world. We must not give up hope.

The best of the morning after the night before 

I’ve encountered a lot of excellent writing in the aftermath of Bush’s re-election. Here’s a quick run-down of the best.

Josh Marshall:

Yesterday evening I heard various commentators say that Kerry’s defeat would usher in a civil war among Democrats. Tucker Carlson said it would or should lead to a ‘Goldwater moment’ for the Democrats.

As I’ve noted above, I don’t want to diminish the scope of what’s happened. But a civil war over what exactly? Yes, some consultants will get a hard shake. And I’m certain there will be backbiting against Kerry (which I for one will very much disagree with.) But a civil war over what? The right and the left of the party were remarkably united in this cycle and managed to find points of compromise on key issues.

In some ways this would all be conceptually easier for Democrats to deal with if President Bush had managed a realignment of our politics in the post-9/11 world. But when I look at the results from last night what I see is that they are virtually identical to four years ago. Pretty much the same states going each way and a very close to even race — though of course the president’s 51% makes all the difference in the world.

As I said, if the Dems had been crushed, that would be one thing. If the American people were coalescing away from them, etc. But that’s not what has happened here. In 2000 the country was divided into two (increasingly hostile) camps. And it’s still exactly the same way. If anything it seems only more entrenched — perhaps symbolically and geographically captured by the flip between New Hampshire and New Mexico from 2000.

The country is bitterly divided. And as much as anyone President Bush has divided it. But president Bush got 51% and if there’s anything I’ve learned from watching him for the last four years-plus, it is that his team will take this as a popular mandate for an aggressive push for their agenda — notwithstanding the profound division in the country or what has happened over the previous four years.

For the Democrats, what I fear most (and what I’ve privately worried about for months) is this: Energy cools after an election. That’s inevitable. But organization and institutions can survive. And it is within institutions and organizational infrastructure that energy and power exist and persist.

Certainly it would have been more pleasant (and perhaps better) to nurture all the organization and infrastructure that has been built up over the last two years under a President Kerry. But my concern over the last few months has been that if Bush won, all of these groups and organizations and incipient infrastructure would simply be allowed to wither, as though it had been tried and found not to have worked.

That, as a factual judgment, I think is just plain wrong. And if that were allowed to happen it would truly be tragic. The truth is that what Democrats have begun to build over the last two years is tremendously important. It just wasn’t enough, not yet.

Kieran Healy:

Right now the Democrats don’t have a plausible spiel on morality. I don’t mean that they’re less likely to be moral people, just that they don’t have a coherent way of talking to their own base — let alone the electorate — about what they stand for in religious terms. The fact that it is just a spiel can be seen from the fact that… the upper reaches of the Bush Administration are not exactly staffed with devout Christians and the President, unlike Kerry, hasn’t been to Church in years.

Amy Sullivan:

I gotta say, it doesn’t help much when exit polls and sloppy reporting use terms like “moral values” and “moral issues” as shorthand for very narrow, divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage, feeding into twenty years of Republican rhetoric. Opposition to the war in Iraq is a moral issue. The alleviation of poverty is a moral issue. Concern about abortion is a moral value, yes, but you can stay at the level of empty rhetoric about a “culture of life” or you can talk about how to actually reduce abortion rates, which is what most people care about more. (Did you hear once during this election season that abortion rates have risen under W. after they fell dramatically during Clinton’s eight years in office?)

“Religious” does not mean Republican. And “moral” does not mean conservative. There’s going to be a lot of discussion about all of this over the coming weeks and months, and it’s incredibly important to make sure we’re neither sloppy about our terms nor overly broad in how we characterize “the faithful.”

Jim Moore:

During this campaign we hid what philosophy we had, pretended to be more conservative than we were, and as a result reeked of inauthenticity. Not surprisingly, voters chose the more authentic party, the bolder party, even if they disagreed with this party and its candidates on many specific issues.

We on the liberal side need to develop a political philosophy for the 21st century, a philosophy that provides principled guidance to action.

Dave Winer:

Arrived in Palo Alto. Listened to Kerry’s concession speech about a dozen times on the radio. It was great. Next time, be careful about nominating a guy who gives a great concession speech. The best concession speech is an overdose of sleeping pills, or a self-inflicted bullet wound in the head. You want a guy who can’t conceive of losing. The Democrats have had too many great losers. I want a great winner in 2008.