Values and the Election

For many years it was a common adage – believed equally by the Republicans and the Democrats – that high voter turnout was bad for the Republicans. Well, so much for that theory. This year’s election totals are among the highest in American history, and President Bush won re-election with well over 3 million votes. And he brought with him an increase in seats in both the House and the Senate, thus breaking another stereotype of the incumbent losing seats in their re-elections.
What will be the results of this? One hopes that there will be less interest by the Republicans in suppressing the vote (however much this is actually true, and not Democrat propaganda – a good possibility, since they are very good at propaganda, as one sees in their convincing African Americans to vote Democrat, even though it was a Republican President who sent the national guard into Little Rock to force integration, there was a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats who voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and it was Richard Nixon who instituted Affirmative Action). At the same time, we may begin to see Democrats trying to do what they can to suppress votes – especially in the South.
We might also see increased interest in both parties in social conservatism. It was ethical issues, after all, that led in exit polls among reasons why people voted for Bush. I doubt that the Republicans can get much more conservative for Americans, but certainly the Democrats can. And if they want to win in the South, West, and certain parts of the Midwest, they will have to. It seems very likely that both parties will become more communitarian – a trend libertarians will have to work hard to hold in check. If the Democrats become more socially conservative, and Bush continues to spend money like a Democrat, the slim differences between the parties will become slimmer.
Of course, in the near future, we can probably expect the Democrats to become more shrill – including on social issues. The citizens of the flyover states will likely be decried as backwards barbarians little better than the Taliban in their support for oppressing homosexuals’ rights. If they take that approach, we can expect some backlash against the Democrats in the midterm elections in two years. If the Democrats take another election hit, I have little doubt that they will indeed start trending toward social conservatism.
So what is a libertarian to do? I’m not sure we can do much in the near future. We may be entering into a new "ethical" cycle, as much in response to the postmoderns’ insistence that there are no values as anything else (and the problem with Kerry was precisely that – he did not represent civil libertarian values, because he did not represent any kind of values at all). With 9-11, we saw what happens when people do not value life. And this election was a response to that kind of lack of values. With 9-11, we saw what those who preach against values really meant. Between Bush and Kerry, it was Bush who represented values, and in a country who is slowly rediscovering the value of values, we should not be surprised at a Bush win.
If we want to protect libertarian ethics, we need to make the argument precisely from the position of ethics and values. Our arguments have to become more substantial and, at the same time, more impassioned. People support those who are passionate enough in something to express emotions – reason is hardly, and never has been, enough. And we cannot rely on the Democrats to articulate these values either, as they do not believe in them as values, but only as pragmatic positions to get them votes from certain segments of society, any more than we can rely on Republicans to support true free markets and the sciences (many of those who voted on values are also those who do not believe the universe began in a Big Bang, or that evolution is a fact – two dangerous positions for the advance of the sciences). If we want to protect our values, we have to do it ourselves – and we have to do it precisely by articulating them as values. That should be the lesson learned from this election.