American Culture and the recent election.

The election went basically how I expected it to -- that is, Bush wins, by a substantial margin (I actually expected him to win by significantly more than he did; I was surprised by how close the election was), and most everyone I know expresses shock and bafflement that anyone supports Bush.

Most of the people expressing this shock and bafflement fall into one of two categories: a.) liberals, or b.) Europeans. Thus, this answer is aimed primarily at them. Particulary, I was inspired by a post by a European friend here.

Now, I don't support Bush (I certainly didn't vote for him), but as a Libertarian, I'm pretty well removed from the traditional left-right political spectrum (as I despise both major American parties equally, for different reasons), and thus I don't have the blinders that most of the Republican and Democratic partisans seem to have -- that is, I can see good and bad things about both candidates. And from what I see, I honestly am not at all surprised Bush won substantially -- and why he won is not necessarily why the Democrats think he won. Keep in mind I'm essentially playing Devil's Advocate here -- I'm not a Bush supporter, but I understand why people are. I'm reminded of a quotation I saw on LJ recently -- "The thing I hate most about the Left is that they cause me to defend Bush."

First of all, the election centered on the security issue. I don't think I'd go so far as to say America is the most hated country in the world now, at least among those actually motivated to do violence (i.e. from a purely security perspective, France or Germany hating the U.S. is nigh meaningless -- France and Germany are not going to attack us.) Generally, the violent insurgent populations have someone local they hate a lot more. This is why I'm generally for noninterventionalism -- if the U.S. weren't so militarily and politically involved in the Middle East, Osama bin Laden would be way too busy blowing up Saudi royals to be blowing up Americans. However, it's undeniable that Bush has significantly harmed the U.S. image abroad; reading any foreign newspaper proves that definitively (I like to read the London Times to get the overseas perspective on U.S. events; they're just as biased as U.S. papers, but they're biased in a different way. I go with a British paper over a French or German one simply because I can't read French or German, and I go with the London Times because it's one of the only two British papers I've heard of, and the Guardian annoys the snot out of me.) However, all of this is not really what makes people vote for Bush. The simple reason is that Bush is much more in line with how Americans think than Kerry is -- and I don't mean that as a judgement on how Americans think, merely an observation on how similar the candidates are to the populace.

Kerry comes across as a simplistic intellectual -- someone with a lot of formal education but a lack of common sense or "street smarts." He thinks that if he had gone to the U.N. about weapons inspections in Iraq again, France and Germany would have happily helped us out in Iraq. The problem is that this isn't really believable -- there were 17 other U.N. resolutions Saddam was violating, so an 18th would not have convinced him of anything. Nor would his violation of it convinced the U.N. of anything -- if the U.N. didn't care about Saddam violating the other 17, why would they intervene when he violates one more? In addition, France had significant financial interests in Iraq -- and France is just as capable of acting out of an interest in cheap oil as America is. For this particular issue, the fact that the motivation for the inspections turned out to be wrong (Saddam had no "weapons of mass destruction," which is itself a somewhat ludicrous term) isn't relevant -- the problem is that Kerry's solution is "more talk" when most Americans simply don't believe more talk would have accomplished anything. Sure, it might have made foreign nations happier with America -- but the decision would have eventually come down to one of two things: either we invade Iraq unilaterally, thus pissing off the rest of the world in precisely the way Bush did, or we don't, thus proving that the U.N. is both ineffective and dominant over us. If we'd gone with the latter, it would be yielding national sovereignty -- letting world opinion tell us what to do.

And there, I think, is what Europeans have a hard time understanding about Americans. American culture, though based on the European, is different in a fundamental way -- the entire foundation of our culture is based on a rebellion against Europe over fundamental issues. The rest of the world takes for granted certain ideas (like that the power of the state or the will of the majority takes precedence over individual rights) that are at least debatable here. As a result, Americans are extremely reluctant to have any other nation exercise any authority over us; after all, last time they did that, we had to fight a War of Revolution. When Kerry campaigns on a platform of U.N. obedience, that does not appeal to a lot of Americans. And it doesn't matter if the U.N. is right and we were wrong about the specific facts in this case -- what matters is that we did what we thought was right and not what the U.N. thought was right. We can accept that we were wrong this time, but we can't accept that we're wrong in general, and Americans fear that that's what Kerry would lead us to. We can accept that this time we should have gone with world opinion, but we will not accept a candidate that tells us we always should.

There's more to this, too -- American attitudes about self-defense enter into this. I think the best example of differing attitudes between America and Europe on this is the Tony Martin case in England. This was a case where two burglars (one with 62 prior convictions) broke into a man's house, and the homeowner shot them, one of them fatally. It was in a small town with no police force, and it was the second time the man's house had been burglarized in three months. Richard Dawkins, a brilliant British evolutionary biologist whom I very much respect, said of Bush's attack on Saddam that it was "the Tony Martin school of foreign policy. It's not how civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave." This makes it quite obvious that Dawkins thinks Martin's behavior was wrong, and that he takes for granted that everyone agrees with him -- that it was "uncivilized."

This is radically at odds with the American point of view. The right to defend yourself from attack is the most fundamental right of all; to claim that defending yourself or your home from an attack is unethical is seen by the vast majority of Americans as insane. More than that, it is an atrocity -- to deny a person the right to defend themselves is on about the same moral level as rape. Quite simply, if you do not have the right to defend yourself, you are not a person, you are property, and a government or people who claim that being "civilized" requires debasing people to this level proves, prima facie, that they are not civilized at all but rather barbarians of the first order. The mere idea that anyone could think a person should be imprisoned for defending himself from a criminal invading his home is revolting. We have more than the right to defend ourselves, we have the moral obligation to do so, and to rely on someone else to do it for us (the police in the case of Tony Martin, or the U.N. in the case of the Iraq invasion) is an abrogation of responsibility; it is an act of rank cowardice.

Now, for those of you for whom that attitude is utterly alien, consider for a moment... for a population that holds that opinion, is it any surprise that Kerry's "more talk, less action" plan didn't go over extremely well? Even those Americans who are isolationist, and want us to have no involvement in the Middle East whatsoever, tend to add the proviso, "Well, after Osama bin Laden and all his cronies are dead." This is not just for revenge -- it is the obligation of self-defense.

Of course, whether the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with retaliation against Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden is another story entirely. Kerry wasn't campaigning on the "We shouldn't have gone to war with Iraq" platform. He went beyond that, into "we should consult with the U.N. in our foreign policy decisions, and do that which is acceptable to the rest of the world." In time of war, this we cannot do. In wartime, we cannot subordinate our interests to the will of nations that think you should lock up a man who defends his home. To do so is not just suicidal, but honorless.

My point is that while I didn't want Bush to be re-elected, I also don't think the reason that he was re-elected is that Americans are stupid, or that we're being manipulated, or that we're misinformed, or that we're reckless hicks with no civilization and no culture. I think that Bush was re-elected precisely because of our culture, a culture with a code of behavior shaped by our history. What's more, it's a culture that persists despite government attempts to eradicate it -- the view of American history you get out of modern public school textbooks is quite different from the view you get if you pick up the original sources and read what the people living during the Revolutionary period were saying and thinking.

Kerry was an awful candidate. With all the vitriol against Bush, this was a golden opportunity for the Democratic party; the election was theirs to lose. Had they chosen Howard Dean or even John Edwards as their candidate, they probably would have won the election. Instead, they chose the second-worst candidate in the field (only Kucinich was less electable) -- the Senator with the most liberal voting record in Congress. This is a common problem with the primary system -- an election open only to partisans tends to appoint extremists as their candidate, so when the general election comes, the least viable candidate has been chosen. Kerry was oblivious to the fact that the attitudes he was espousing were at odds with the American political mainstream -- almost no one was strongly pro-Kerry; the vast majority of his supporters were merely voting against Bush. As a result, we get stuck with Bush again. This is one of the many reasons I hate the two-party system.