Less than a week after the election, the word has come down from Liberal Media High Command that the left needs to stop having a condescending attitude toward the faith-based white folk living out in the vast exurban and rural hinterland that, along with the White House, the Congress, and the federal judiciary, is the last redoubt of this put-upon demographic.
Interestingly, I never actually saw John Kerry or any other Democratic elected official condescend to these people. Certainly, Kerry had no equivalent to Bush's sneering evocation of Massachusetts as a land of pure darkness and evil. And no one on the left has ever treated preachers and priests to the volumes of scorn the right regularly heaps on academics and the dread Hollywood elite. Kerry went so far in the debates to clarify that he "respects" the views of the pro-life, while Bush compared the pro-choice to slaveholders.
Nevertheless, the advice is surely sound -- even to those of us who think that national security voters, rather than the now-famous "moral values" 22 percent, should be the targets of future campaigns. It's not good for business to utterly write off any demographic group, and no one ever won a vote by condescending to potential supporters.
But the next election's a long way off, and one doubts that these paragons of humble American virtue spend a lot of time reading liberal Web magazines. So perhaps for a moment I can say what I mean rather than what would be tactically expedient: If ever there were a group of people deserving of scorn and condescension, we have been meeting them at the polls these past few elections.
A word on substance, and a bit of the old "moral clarity" we've grown to appreciate: The right-wing view on gay marriage -- not the view of a small band of religious fanatics but that of a clear majority of the American people -- is immoral and wrongheaded. Every bit as immoral and wrongheaded as the old view that the stability of the family required bans on interracial marriage. And in the future, I am confident, it will be regarded as such. My hope would be that today's politicians who try to gay-bash their way to victory will be discredited and regarded as repugnant in decades to come. The experience of the old segregationist politicians, men like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, suggests otherwise. They were allowed to retire in peace early in the 21st century, voted into office time and again by the morally upright electorate of Red America, who let them ditch race-baiting for gay-baiting without any genuine effort to rectify the evils they inflicted. Trent Lott is still with us today.
Gay and lesbian Americans are simply trying to live their lives in peace -- with the same rights as the rest of us. That the Democrats paid a price for the very mild form of advocacy for this position is a cause for regret but not for apology.
As for condescension, the point is not that "values voters" of modest means inexplicably support a party that fails to represent their economic interests. I know plenty of liberals who do the same. It's called voting on principle, and there's nothing wrong with it. But most of the principles in question are wrong, and the effort to instantiate them is massively ineffective. In 1994, when the Democrats controlled everything, there were no civil unions; gay marriage was a concept most people had never even considered; abortion was legal; and new policies allowed homosexuals to serve in the military only if they agreed to stay in the closet.
In the four years hence, Republicans captured the Congress and then the presidency. Abortion is still legal, and, under Bush's policies, the number of abortions has grown -- a consequence of rising poverty, declining availability of health care, and a faith-based campaign to make it harder to obtain contraceptives and scientifically accurate sex education.
Civil unions now exist in Vermont. More and more corporations and state governments allow gay and lesbian couples to enjoy similar joint benefits in health care and other areas. Laws are being implemented in Hawaii, California, and New Jersey to give gay couples most of the rights of heterosexual couples, albeit without the term "marriage." In Massachusetts, of course, the term itself may now be applied. Anti-sodomy laws were deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court -- and rightly so -- struck down mainly with the votes of Republican-appointed justices, while a mostly-Democratic court ruled the other way in the 1980s. Thanks to the proliferation of cable and the Internet, pornography is now more widely available than ever. The feminist movement, whose early "assaults" on traditional morality sparked the backlash in the first place, is now utterly victorious. Under George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice has become national security adviser, mismanaging the interagency process with more gusto than any man ever achieved; the word on the street is that she'll soon be promoted to secretary of state for her troubles.
This is what decades of voting for conservative politicians has wrought: nothing.
Or, rather, not nothing, in another sense it has wrought a great deal. Tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors to Republican-friendly corporations and campaign contributors have proliferated faster than gay pride parades and pornographic websites. Back in Washington for his victory lap, Bush claimed a mandate from the voters and proceeded to outline his agenda for his second term -- tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for energy companies, tax shelters for the wealthy, a massive giveaway to the insurance industry, and a larger giveaway to the financial services industry. The faith-based agenda of his most loyal flock was left on the cutting room floor. Just as it always has been, and just as it always will be. The powers that be in the Republican Party are, as in Andrew Sullivan's memorable phrase, "closet tolerants," uninterested in the values agenda except as a hateful prop to be deployed at campaign time.
A large bloc of their voters are, meanwhile, chumps. Not because they support a party whose economic agenda departs from their interests, but because they support a party that consistently refuses to take action on the issues that matter to them. It's the product of the same warped worldview that led most Bush voters in 2000 to tell exit pollsters that it's more important to have a president who provides "moral leadership" than one who can "manage the government." Their conception of the presidency -- of politics itself -- is detached from the reality of what can be achieved through political action. The president is not the preacher in chief; he's the chief executive. If you want to roll back the march of tolerance, you need to convince people in society to join your side. The polls show that while the majority is still with the forces of reaction, the trend is on the side of progress. The youth have already been lost to cosmopolitanism and decency. The electoral support for "tradition" is -- to put it bluntly -- dying off. But still the Republicans are returned again and again to Washington, where politics is still about money, and where time and again the moneymen are rewarded, and the little people of Red America get screwed.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
